2023 Threads
385 demonstrable authored self-threads.
To link two ideas. There’s a real movement towards a 4-day working week in some countries. Industrialised nations already produce way more than they need, so the ‘economy’ crowd…
Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privat…
The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flex…
Applying this to say Spanish Flu, in Australia during that pandemic. About 40% of the population was said to be infected. The herd immunity threshold for that pandemic influenza…
Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectoni…
All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group…
The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well…
I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics…
Worth remembering this government, like the one before, is still sitting on over $100 BILLION in unnecessary tax cuts. $32 million available for Covid mitigation, on a contested…
I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that t…
In NSW, if your job is listed below and you catch Covid, it’s assumed you caught it at work, if claiming workers’ compensation. The onus of proof is on the employer to prove oth…
Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or em…
We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth,…
The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much…
An increase of 42.4% is bad, when the metric is death? Am I misreading it? https://t.co/DHLv51nTeN
All societies are an equilibrium of forces or power, not rational designs. For example policy on home ownership will reflect those who have power in that area, like developers a…
If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else…
Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highligh…
Great change in politics comes because it’s forced. Not from politics itself. It took millions of men being killed in the great wars to advance women’s rights significantly, by…
Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a…
Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shif…
The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is m…
Our politics is hopeless technology, overlaid upon a socio-technical world of enormous complexity. The ISS as an example. Took the equivalent of 3 million people years to build,…
Referring to this again, why has fighting a pandemic with an economy led to mass infection, disease and death? We can see it here, just one more step towards stripping way every…
Populist politics, where we believe that politicians run countries (and not the thousands of expert officials they employ), has hit roadblocks in every direction. Faced with hug…
When you infect entire populations in ageing societies, there’s nobody left to do the work. If we’d used risk management instead of political ideology to manage a pandemic, this…
The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a grea…
Edmund Burke is considered a founder of political conservatism. John Howard speaks of him fondly. But to read Burke is to see how much modern conservatism has misunderstood ever…
Heart disease in the 20th century followed a pretty classic epidemic-type curve. Have Tweeted before that some believe the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic may have been responsible, that…
We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater his…
Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public hea…
We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying t…
The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the mod…
Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what pric…
People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in…
Australia’s top 10 natural disasters in history. In a clear first place and still streaking away from the field, Covid. It only took the lead AFTER we said the pandemic was done…
We’re at Yes Minister’s 4th stage of denial with energy as well as Covid. Where the deliberate blockers of essential public infrastructure and administration now use the results…
The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of soci…
The current drama over interest rates and inflation is another legacy of the neoliberal/libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s. The idea that the money supply is pivotal to econ…
Douglas Adams’ observations about technology are another way to see how the world we live in is 100% social, and 0% economic, capitalist, socialist or anything else. Nearly ever…
The most honest assessment from a politician I’ve seen in some time. Though a a cautionary tale to all expert advisers to government, notice the first thing the Minister does is…
The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happe…
James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reas…
As a member of the public, what to do when NSW Health recommends you wear a mask in healthcare settings, and medical professionals who work there say the opposite? https://t.co/…
My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can eve…
Tim Brooke-Taylor died right at the start of the pandemic. While quite old he was also in a tier of society that usually manages to avoid public health problems. He may be a goo…
Re-Tweeting this to a more general audience. Look at the calamitous trend in school attendance, driven by ongoing mass infection. This measure of attendance level is one designe…
Two things, here. Another article that manages to avoid mentioning Covid even once. Millions of kids and their teachers being infected, multiple times, doesn’t even come up as a…
Attendance rates dropped by over 4% in Australian schools in 2022. (Multiply by number of kids and that’s a lot of kids away.) Attendance level (who was there more than 90% of t…
2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depress…
To go back to this. The spin is that we restricted transmission of Covid while we got everybody vaccinated, to protect the vulnerable. But actually the vulnerable kept right on…
The thing that has struck me throughout this pandemic is just how invisible the cogs of public administration are to nearly everybody. SARS-1 highlights this (bear with me). /1…
Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple…
To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide ac…
If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say…
Hive mind question. I can get a Moderna bivalent 5th dose this week. But the pharmacist rang to say the Pfizer update bivalent (B.4/B.5?) will be arriving second week of March.…
Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else i…
The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a bad thing. During Covid flu and colds have been used by minimisers to…
Rather than mobilising and monetising trolls, could expert Covid minimisers : - show us where ‘immunity debt’ and ‘hybrid immunity’ are in the textbooks? - show us where the sam…
The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can ca…
In the blue corner we have the actuary. In the red we have the economist and economic politician. Actuary wins with a knock out seconds into Round 1. The economy is a political…
Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse…
From 22 minutes on, the brains trust over at the Guardian. Firstly not even aware we’re into year 4 of the pandemic. Then all sagely concluding the community ‘won’t support’ fur…
In a week where (astoundingly) leading health figures openly mocked action promoting clean air, it’s worth remembering that all Australian governments have been committed to tha…
Amazing that the current work plan under the National Clean Air Agreement was drawn up *during* the pandemic, and yet failed to mention it. Couple of actions I’ve circled in red…
There are 3 masks in this photo, that I spotted. Dr Ryan of course. But the other 2 tell a more interesting story. Parliamentary staff have been required to mask in this pandemi…
Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet of a modern democratic government, it’s enormously complex. What sp…
Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as…
Jazz is a bit of an enigma in some ways, it escapes easy definition. Which suggests there’s maybe something being missed. And maybe that something extends to a lot of the proble…
The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A…
The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways…
Meantime in the UK, we’re literally at the ‘let them eat cake’ stage of social collapse. But tomatoes, not cake. Grow ‘em yourself, the supermarkets are empty. https://t.co/Zgf0…
A common idea is that societies or groups are the sum of their parts. Like adding millions of identical points, to create a whole. Or instead we say ‘the whole is greater than t…
One of my favourite pages to refer vax-and-forget people to is the list of control guidelines for infectious diseases, in NSW. Many members of the public are not aware these con…
‘The poor’ don’t see themselves as the poor. They see themselves as the equal of the rich, but unlucky and obstructed. They don’t want pity or help, they want to not be thought…
In the UK, making the whole country sick forced record absences at work. The freedom-fighting libertarians are having none of it. Health checks at work to make sure you’re not m…
Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilen…
‘The economy’ caught red-handed. “The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it…
Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individual…
It’ll be no surprise that I think ‘the economy’ is hokum. If (as I believe) it’s just people, I’d predict that the countries who will flourish throughout this century and into t…
Great piece. My two cents, much of the resistance to further action is from the anti-government crowd. And from pollies worried about cost. But much (most?) of what needs doing…
This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph abo…
We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too…
Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and s…
Yes broken. In plain sight, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Only once in the entire history of most societies has it been any different. In the period between the end of WW…
It’s not the planet, Earth, that contains the only known life in the universe. It’s the atmosphere, itself created by living things. That tiny, thin blue line. Unique in our kno…
Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery pl…
Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden targe…
The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a co…
The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free…
I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a s…
The fact the government which spearheaded the deliberate infection of Australians, leading to thousands of deaths, is even still in the running in the NSW election, tells you th…
Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red an…
If concerts spread Covid? Simple, don’t go. Except the people who do go turn up in your schools and workplaces, the next day, to spread infection. ‘You do you’ assumes Australia…
The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, work…
The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should b…
Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips aw…
This is such an important topic. Are infections which cause significant and relatively long-lasting immunity actually rare as hen’s teeth? The two most evoked examples, cold and…
Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides comm…
The Ebers Papyrus, over 3500 years old, describes the common cold. Those who say Covid will become mild and seasonal through repeated infection often use cold-like illness as a…
The greatest violation in this pandemic was the driving of Covid into households. The privatisation of lockdowns, where we pretended lockdowns were over but really just forced p…
The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from pl…
The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t…
Speaking to families this week struggling with every variety of -itis. Conjunctivitis & tonsillitis are biggies. They say ‘lockdowns reduced our immunity’, to rationalise th…
Social media gives us a dangerous illusion of a public space that we (rightly) feel has been lost. But the public we lost wasn’t random people talking to each other. It was thos…
More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around wor…
Society is social, not political. What we call politics is hierarchical social status games, with different names for the different players. Just as Grease has its T-Birds, Scor…
This is the most recent WHO statement on hybrid immunity for Covid that I can find, from mid-2022. (Would be interested to know if there’s a later one.) What stands out is that…
The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it…
Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution e…
I’m almost completely disinterested in what any politician is doing or not doing, saying or not saying. Team sports politics is a distraction, the thinnest veneer of hot air ove…
From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: -…
Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They…
Insights into public health, 2023, from Tony Blakely. Two quotes, ABC news today. The first, where using vaccination to protect the wider community is described as a ‘philosophi…
If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of t…
I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s…
Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger…
The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges…
Probably the first time in decades that political decisions have followed the desires of the young. Politicians always follow the numbers. There's now more young than old voters…
In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first p…
Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a…
The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, tow…
“…the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of understanding the underlying mechanisms, both to reduce risks in adults with existing CVD or with acute viral infections,…
The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and…
When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic cla…
There's good stuff here, and just getting this process happening was an achievement, for which we owe people thanks. But we're also cycling back to the earliest days of this pan…
The ALP spent 10 years in the political wilderness not developing one obvious strategy to push through desperately needed public policy. Instead they waited 10 years for the LNP…
While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the econo…
If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters,…
One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the…
The Inflation Reduction Act in the US is a type of re-birth for industry policy. The idea that governments should shape productive capacity. I still remember the Button Plan, wh…
Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned…
30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘e…
This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that inven…
Everyday stories. From a local FB page. "Our daughter's teacher placed an Ad on a local FB page asking if any local teachers were able to fill shifts this week at our school. Tu…
Humans are built to notice and be concerned about contrasts, not absolutes. For example you perceive a change in temperature or smell, then become accustomed. This is where norm…
Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives ele…
The more societies are 'engineered', the less we need any political ideology at all. Political ideologies evolved at a time when life was much simpler, and less technical. The i…
The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of con…
I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you…
Church services were the original rock concerts. The lights (stained glass), the huge sound, particularly with full choir and a massive pipe organ. It shakes the ground. All del…
Time series charts of results show the true nature of elections. This one from the UK, for local government. Red and blue, Labour and Tory. Mirror images of each other, one is i…
The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the…
How much communities changed when we all became interchangeable cogs in globalised economic markets: the old practice of letters of introduction. A community was seen as having…
Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get…
The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or ca…
The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th centur…
The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look.…
Eurovision is appallingly bad. Mimed kitsch. The Anglo world pioneered modern popular music. Europe has no clue, with rare exceptions like Abba. I wonder if it’s the melting pot…
This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole…
Have tweeted before about the possible links between the 20th century epidemic of heart disease and infection. Another 20th century epidemic was obesity. Is there a possible lin…
A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nob…
A Part 2 on Get Back. This movie is very important, and it’s irrelevant what you think about Beatles music. The beliefs that are now destroying our societies were taking root at…
Astounding that many young people I talk to are active, almost rabid, followers of Gerard Rennick. This is young people without any history of conservative political (or any pol…
I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of so…
Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent…
I think I’m going backwards with followers. This is the best visual metaphor I can think of to describe social media. The liquid is the public. The bubbles are all the tiny indi…
My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT…
Go ‘tabloid’ and don’t just use aggregate, summary data of Covid damage. Tell the stories of individuals impacted, in short pithy Tweets. That’s how conservatives won the public…
Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. T…
Are we at safe commercialisation of far-UVC now? It really would be a phenomenal game-changer. What's the research saying? https://t.co/rvoSyQacpg
Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, du…
“I think we have the balance right”. If a politician says this, it means “this is as far as the focus group polling and party donors will allow us to go.” Two things will preven…
I like the idea. But it ignores status and hierarchy. People will wear a mask if those that have status in their eyes also wear a mask. It’s why business uses celebrities in its…
I’ve seen research that says humidity is a powerful weapon against Covid-19 spread. And research that says the exact opposite. This set of results was very interesting. https://…
Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school o…
Rock/pop music culture has been a dominant force in extending adolescent culture into the entire human lifespan. Live Aid for example was a failure, but even more showed how kid…
"...in all cases studied, adding random legislators improved the performance of the parliament. Specifically, there were more acts passed with social benefit." Get rid of popula…
The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with…
Another piece of rhetorical fluff that needs to be put to bed is the idea that our societies are 'divided'. That's deliberate conservative strategy, to create a sense of divisio…
A termitarium does something astonishing. It dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. It’s beautifully ventilated, but also protective from the elements, and mainta…
Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and…
I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact…
Genuine question for Covid experts. Is there even one example of an infectious disease where herd immunity has been achieved, without a vaccine that prevents or dramatically slo…
If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as w…
One of the things about adopting a reality-based politics, rather than a popularity-based politics, is that you see clearly how the hot air of all elected politicians and social…
Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relati…
Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsib…
Superb conversation with @CrabbBrendan and @c_s_wallace on the desperate need for a circuit-breaker at government level, to return sanity to public health in Australia, with Cov…
In so many ways the collapse of public health and other social problems stems from a lack of respect for teachers and education. For two fundamentally important reasons. Teacher…
Talking to a family yesterday where fighting has broken out over who made who else sick. Because they’ve had Covid multiple times, they’re not happy to now all be sick again, an…
In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948…
A story about gravity. A little bit of pure science, but with profound implications for everyday life I think. And joy, which true knowledge brings. Nothing restricts a person’s…
We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of d…
I track the UK news, because what happens there often follows here, as conservative strategists share IP. Australians will know ‘Stop the Boats’ only too well, nothing to do wit…
Riddle me this. Enormous demand for housing, no supply. But not because there’s no land available, lots of those houses are sitting unfinished, unable to find a builder. Builder…
Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're fo…
How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘tea…
Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That i…
Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point w…
This painting of Spinoza is a deeply profound entire worldview for those despairing of our current situation. Spinoza was excommunicated by his own community for heresy. It’s wh…
This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control…
We ignored the middle ground. Going straight from emergency public health orders and ‘lockdowns’, to doing nothing. It would have been EASY to sell transition measures like vent…
The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban env…
If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know…
Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small busines…
The black armband sportspeople wear now speak volumes to the culture we're living in. An adolescent culture. We can make a huge drama in the moment about bad things that happen,…
See how the daily teams identify themselves, across politics, the socials, and MSM. The whole thing is a pointless daily teenage game, for likes and votes. Meanwhile urgent nati…
History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the dea…
It's not hard to trace the team each person sees themselves as part of, on Twitter. Their followers, likes and replies to their threads will identify them. And sometimes they ev…
One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small thi…
Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most comm…
Fantastic to see this recognition. And Our World in Data also deserves some sort of Nobel Prize. The sting in the tail of this story though is that the data ended up having sadl…
I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build…
The more you understand the way societies materially operate, the more you also see politics as the tiniest veneer of pointless hot air getting in the way of things that actuall…
This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example…
Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage…
After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’…
Reality is always smarter and stranger than fiction. The tragic loss of the Titan echoes with another populist project from the 1980s. Another ultra-rich-funded mission to the T…
We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinkin…
Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at…
The frustration of genuine expertise in this pandemic is palpable. But expertise has never translated directly into political action. Even the collective of a university doesn’t…
Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippi…
Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s…
The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We…
Steve Price on The Project arguing that Gladys suffered no reputational damage as a result of ICAC, and would easily win a seat again if she wanted. He may be right. Just shows…
The most numerous occupants of Australia’s vast interior now are feral camels, feral goats, boomers towing caravans, and jocks in 4WDs ‘conquering’ it. When you can escape the b…
Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily tea…
Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledg…
“…it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them an…
Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even…
We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the place…
The reason I’m on Twitter was years of frustration with Facebook. Facebook doesn’t discuss, in my experience, you’re firing ideas into a void there mostly. But over time I’ve co…
In some ways Musk is actually correct about social media. Its worst characteristics come from anonymity, from the decoupling from real community life. That enables and excuses s…
It’s not meanness. It’s the actual political belief system of both major parties. Relaxing society with an economy, which makes ‘welfare’ a prime target, because it represents u…
If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of…
Until late-2021, community spread was well controlled in Australia. At about the red cross or just before, a handover should have taken place. To WHS, to maintain that control.…
There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear peop…
The most dangerous mythology of social media is that it’s an unalloyed good for all people to be allowed to express their views on all topics, in public spaces. Mythologies abou…
Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanic…
Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide…
I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to k…
This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. W…
The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an a…
We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and f…
Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People…
Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seein…
I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, soc…
I do a one-Tweet version of my threads. For today’s, do we tweet these facts to share the facts? Or are we really asking why nobody is paying attention to them? I think the latt…
When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a p…
State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions…
Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisio…
‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgam…
If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. J…
The genius of Gravity was to replace space, with place. The movie makes you feel the void at the heart of our culture. The absence of place. William Shatner when returning from…
How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the hou…
Can somebody explain what this means, precisely? From: https://t.co/ILRwsuGJCA https://t.co/BPFdYdqyEl
Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement.…
Everything we call 'politics' is the tiniest thin veneer of hot air, overlaid upon the actual material realities of life. A total waste of time and resources. Like the NBN, real…
People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how socie…
Cutting flights by only 2.5% per year would bring rapid neutralisation of the global warming contribution from aviation. Even maintaining current levels of flights (zero growth)…
Nobody originally thought glandular fever could lead to multiple sclerosis. It even had a cute name, the ‘kissing disease’. Imagine if minimisers are wrong about Covid, if its l…
Re-watched the Nuremberg Trials the other day, with newly discovered audio of the hearings. Echoes of present times, with populists (Trump, Robodebt pollies) in the dock for egr…
Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cult…
A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we…
Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to chal…
These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the…
The East Germans used almost these exact words. Pure populism. Hugely effective, populism is an electoral H-bomb. There was an unspoken agreement never to do this, because wise…
A total absence of talk of infection. Pandemics have always been defined by the number of INFECTIONS. Not by how sick people get, or by how immune they are. Endemicity the same.…
From the Australian government’s information sites. We need to continue to fight the spin that replaces our focus on infections, with hospitalisations, severe illness and death.…
If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get th…
Just as societies had flushed out remnant chronic impacts from an early-20th century pandemic, we decided to do it all again, for the 21st. https://t.co/oMvjGa3b9R
Isn’t it strange that people cry now when they lose in sport? As a kid playing sport, it was a disgrace to cry, if you lost. Bad sportsmanship. And winners the same, with their…
I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entire…
The housing and rental ‘crisis’ has a simple solution. Governments need to become property developers again, building, selling and renting a huge number of properties at signifi…
Musk seems to be one of the libertarians who actually believes the nonsense that society is a whole bunch of disconnected individuals, and any kind of collective action is oppre…
Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the…
“HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria shouldn’t be labeled as “just” epidemics or endemic. They are pandemics that have been beaten in rich countries. Allowing them to persis…
We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic,…
Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government.…
The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an…
Call me a plonker, but "Prevalence will rise and fall, influenced by seasons, school holidays and new subvariants, but it will always be pulled back towards the equilibrium leve…
About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot…
The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time t…
One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it…
Two years ago, 18 minutes and 10 seconds into this presentation by the Doherty modellers, the previous PM interrupted to reinforce that what they were presenting meant 80% vacci…
The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro…
One of the great things to learn from Rachel Perkins’ wonderful Australian Wars series, is how much the very existence of the States was just as a mechanism to manage the massiv…
Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The g…
RN, the Snowy 2.0 stuck tunnelling machine. A political brain fart project which hapless engineers now need to try to make work. Listen to the gotcha attack, like an opposition…
This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employ…
Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landsca…
There's a great lesson here in how dog-whistle politics works. Not every person who votes No will be like this, obviously. But every person like this will likely vote No. And th…
There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big s…
Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And h…
One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show ho…
The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way tha…
Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Househo…
The clawback of everything ‘public’ exploded from the 1970s. You can see how they got away with it. Debt kept everything running, while public mechanisms were pulled apart. Debt…
Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly…
Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production throu…
Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate incre…
I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do.…
I've seen no research that suggests a link apart from dysbiosis links, but as a what-if: what if obesity is caused by a pathogen?
The biggest lie and founding myth of the economy is that mobility = freedom. Whether it’s our obsession with roads and cars, or travel, the more mobile we’ve become the less fre…
You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a ye…
While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because…
It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political part…
Only a week until Daylight Stealing starts again in NSW. A very early example of us defining reality as what we want it to be, rather than what it actually is. It does great har…
If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are i…
Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it t…
If we stop talking about economies and go back to talking about societies and cultures, data takes on completely different meanings. In socio-cultural terms, A is ‘stay home’. T…
The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet…
Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from million…
I’m a fan of subscription. My TV viewing improved infinitely with paid streaming. You get what you pay for. It also does reduce anti-social behaviour, fewer are willing to pay j…
One of my favourite Tory UK slogans is ‘levelling up’. They mean ‘we’ll reduce inequality by making everybody else as rich as us.’ Like saying ‘you can all climb Everest now, we…
The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between p…
How about a show each day or week that focuses only on the reality of the issues debated? The actual progress against outcomes? A complete rejection of ‘he said, she said’ journ…
Richard Glover spoke last week with a guest about how generations now seem to occupy their own independent bubbles. That’s what high school culture does, each generation takes i…
Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some…
Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it…
What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiativ…
Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will…
Rory saying everything I say about elected politicians. The whole thing is a theatrical performance. A crafted image of being in charge, of something they have no actual underst…
Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. I…
So if it is once every 5 years on average, it's an interesting contrast with once per year on average being described as a good outcome, for Covid. I think it's fair to say Covi…
Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social pro…
4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the su…
Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occu…
Listened to an excellent discussion about clean air chaired by @dom_ma and including @c_s_wallace. A key topic for discussion was how to de-individualise public health again, to…
Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with bas…
It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away al…
The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’…
I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it…
We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and…
Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That numbe…
A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The pub…
Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in…
We’ve always ‘overbuilt’ power generation, to provide redundancy. Renewables, particularly solar, make this a vital strategy because they’re incredibly cheap. Combining lots of…
I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded human history that humans have deliberately chosen to ‘live with’. Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two…
I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use…
Albanese came to power trying to emulate Hawke, the consensus-builder. But Hawke was working with an older sort of opposition, still aiming for public policy outcomes. The LNP,…
While some debate this at the immune system level, the broader point is that seemingly mild acute infection can lead to catastrophic longer-term impact. Nothing about EBV (for e…
Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dict…
It’s frustrating that it’s not more obvious that ‘the economy’ is just ‘the market’. A social invention, a fiction, pretending humans live as isolated individuals. They never ha…
The proliferation of identity-based political grievances is no accident. Nothing is more plastic and manipulable than identity, and nothing more seductive in a world where all s…
An elected politician. Can we get rid of popularity as the door to ultimate power yet? https://t.co/38jBbj11NA
You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other fa…
Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s…
A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, al…
Striking to watch contrasts between different political cultures. People from the US for example much more likely to believe change will come from mobilising lots of ordinary pe…
I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to re…
One of the mysteries of motoring is why hybrids have been allowed to wallow in the Greenie/Granny car category in the public mind for so long. Yes they save you a lot of fuel. B…
Society is social groups. The anti-lockdown group is also often the anti-EV, anti-renewables group. One of the ways to really wind them up is to debunk the idea of the ‘grunt’ o…
Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact tha…
One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle…
Emergency Covid action which was said to be unsustainable really was only the slightest wealth redistribution, towards low and middle income earners. ‘The economy’ is code for t…
‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow see…
Many households can achieve the desired end state of lower (even zero) electricity prices, in 1-2 days. Just by having solar installed. I haven't paid a cent for electricity in…
Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of l…
All social evolution: 1) Catastrophe (natural or human made) 2) Institution invented to manage if it ever happens again 3) Institution governs human behaviour, sometimes for gen…
Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to…
There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging…
Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing in…
The Resolution Foundation in the UK has provided some fascinating data that show one thing very clearly. That 'politics' is always just social groups battling for different stat…
EBV alone should have alerted us to the potential dangers of chronic infection. Infecting up to 95% of the global adult population, asymptomatically. We’re ‘living with’ it. And…
Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or try…
This journalist got the slap-down they deserved. Albo, like Biden, misdiagnoses our political problems as ‘too much division’. Dutton is whipping the division horse every day an…
The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic d…
COP is showing again that real change will never come from people agreeing or disagreeing. It will come from reality intervening. In this case, the only thing genuinely shifting…
I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen.…
The income share of the top 0.1% of key (and representative) English-speaking societies. This history is usually written economically. But it’s much more interesting than that.…
That feeling that society is falling apart and there’s no hope is an adjustment. It’s the developed world coming back to the pack. It’s how the developing world has lived for ge…
Ask an anti-EV person why the fans in their home don’t use 2-stroke or 4-stroke petrol engines. The answers ram home how stupid these debates are. Combustion engines are expensi…
Progressives tend to assume change comes from 'bringing the crowd along' in endless discussions. But major change comes when things 'go viral'. Rapid imitative behaviour, where…
The ALP is trying to be successful by disproving all of the slogans the LNP have made up about them over the years. Strategic suicide. 'Don't think of a purple monkey' makes you…
Yes! This how mass change happens for everything. The change ‘goes viral’. (Viruses don’t go viral, human behaviour does.) Solar in particular is smashing existing fossil fuel i…
Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the…
The idea of ‘hybrid immunity’ seems to draw heavily upon human experience with influenza. A vague hand-waving idea that through living with it for centuries, we eventually reach…
@MChandlerMather this UK scheme, re-purposing carbon offsetting towards energy efficient and renewables-powered social housing. If we did the same here to not only retrofit but…
Progress was described as people now averaging about one Covid infection per year. That appears to put us still way behind flu in terms of lower frequency of infection. Covid is…
A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of peop…
If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. T…
If Covid was such a strain on the original National Cabinet, they should have resigned then to make way for fresh energy, rather than completely capitulate to the virus as a for…
A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunitio…
Christmas is actually a festival of materialism. The Christmas story not only has gifts, it’s the story of the material embodiment of the deity, in human form. I’ve never unders…
My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for…
I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession.…
Why are we allowing the EV narrative to be led by the tiny minority of people living in remote areas, and an even tinier number of 4WD enthusiasts? Remote people can already dri…
Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenge…
International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elit…
The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where…
Watching this series extension of the original movie it struck me how similar the narratives should be for possession and infection. Infection literally aspires to and often doe…
This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of Th…
I wonder if the era of the belief in ‘speaking truth to power’ is drawing to a close. Pilger was very much in that tradition. A problematic belief that power and truth are two s…