Discussion with Lola after the school rang me to complain that she was AWOL.

What I’ve learned by reading the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is that Hitler was a master politician first, and a dictator second.

Also, a country really needs general support for it’s conservative party, as a counter to self serving insurgents such as Hitler.

Unfortunately for us in Australia, it seems that’s our conservatives have themselves been captured by insurgents. Therefore, Labor has to take on this role. After all, we are well past the era of humans as units of energy, so what else are they going to do?

Also in Germany the parliament of the day could change the constitution themselves without referring to the people. An oversight one might say!

The overwhelming impression I have is that “the people” are easily lead into a corner by devious insurgents. The status quo offers little resistance.

But then of course the devious insurgents get drunk with power and fuck it up. Lesson learned, the hard way.

What’s the half life of that lesson learned? 30-40 years I reckon, given the current state of world affairs.

Then it goes around, again. It seems that people have to die early and painfully so that others don’t have to.

What a wretched race we are!

How to use a dumb pole.

We at [insert name] acknowledge the First Nations people, the traditional owners of this land on which we work, and we pay our respects to the First Nations people of this country.

For what it’s worth, Nicola is anything but desultory.

The best laid plans … never work. The best plan is someone else’s. Attach yourself to it though, and you’ll fuck it up somehow. Therefore, wait for the winning plan to emerge before latching.

When the Reserve Bank drops interest rates, this stimulates home mortgage borrowing because loans are cheaper and everyone wants as much property as they can buy/service.

Because those borrowing are a form of quantitative easing (the banks make that money up out of nothing), this puts downwards pressure on the currency.

Even though the borrowings are spent on real estate, which is non productive, the sellers get to spend their proceeds. So the cash hits the market and devalues the currency.

Thus easing imports and favouring exports.

This helps the economy.

It’s taking me a while to join all those dots.

In business, when faced with an insoluble problem, don’t try to solve it.

Usually that would entail:

• You bring right about the future, which is unlikely, given your track record,
• Convincing others that you’re right about the future, which is a thankless task,
• The result being worth all the bother, which is also very unlikely

This blog; is it;

• Facetious?
• Sarcastic?
• Satirical?

I like to think the latter but I’ll let the reader judge. After I’m dead…

To some extent, it’s pride that’s stopping me from finding new work.

I don’t want to slum it with kids and novices, that think they’re hot shot when they’re not.

Also I don’t want to beg. Not even close.

I am enjoying my enforced furlough way too much for that. It takes a while, breaking the work addiction. But I’m getting there. It’s worth it.

This lack of work also matches my hard earned life philosophy. The one that only sees hypocrisy everywhere and devalues all life’s goals. Sort of like a nihilist laptop. Take it with you, and apply it when necessary.

Plus I’ve got legitimate home work, with a baby to bring up. And the other kids. And a house to renovate.

I’m doing it all backwards but that’s ok. My place remind me of the happy environment that was Nick Coates’ place in Newtown, before he karked it, that is.

He gave me a vision and I’ve finally fulfilled it, 30 years later in my fifties. You can’t fault me for perseverance.

For some reason, imminent death is strongly correlated to crap toenails. DNR.

Metabolic water refers to water created inside a living organism through the metabolism, by oxidising energy-containing substances (protein and fat) in their food.

Humans obtain only about 8-10% of their water needs through metabolic water production.

In humans, the water produced from metabolism of protein roughly equals the amount needed to excrete the urea which is a byproduct of the metabolism of protein.

So it’s a zero sum gain, unless you filter and drink your piss. Camels we ain’t.

In the last blog, I said ‘The decline of the West, and the rest”.

I say this because the culture that is in decline is the West, both culturally and environmentally. And possibly through conflict as well.

Spengler mapped us onto all other great historical civilizations, and showed we all go up, then strangle ourselves to death, a natural result of power and gluttony gone all haywire and useless. It’s like a cancer that can’t be avoided.

The difference with us is that we’re going to take the whole species with us, and many other species.

So in terms of the human species, we’re the last civilization.

The cockroaches and other surviving bugs might start all over again. Come back in a billion years, who knows, we may be back in some form.

After all, convergent evolution suggests that we can’t be avoided. Maybe we’ve been around before as well!

I’m good at many things, having mastered many activities in my working life.

And yet, these are the “only” things of excellence that I can point to with specific job experience:

• Physical Chemistry research
• R&D and product development
• R&D management
• IP management
• Venture Capital investment
• Startup founder
• Start up CEO
• Growth stage tech CEO

I was very good at all of these. But as soon it was clear to me that I could rise to the top of one pile, I pissed off to the next challenge. Call that a low threshold of boredom.

Hence, I am the master of many things and the king of none!

Which is why, in my early and unexpected retirement, I am not inundated with offers.

Oh, also because I’m a realist, a cynic, a critic, an iconoclast. In this social media, gushing good news era, I’m considered toxic.

And, anyone with half a brain can see that I despise our culture, both general and business. That counts against me.

In other words, I’m a self-confessed outsider. I’m not even an outsider’s outsider. If were to be in a party it’d be the unity party, of one.

The worm may turn and realism may come back into vogue. But I don’t think that will happen in my lifetime; Spengler suggests not. We are well down a downhill slope – The decline of the West, and the rest.

I’ll just have to cope doing whatever I cook up in my dotage.

Some Israeli psychologists claim to have shown that we people block out thoughts of death, by some unknown brain function mechanism.

That’s not surprising. We all think we’re going to live forever and we live in denial of our upcoming demise.

The evidence? You don’t need brain scan. All you need is to look at the choices people make, every day.

My 84 year old mother worries about the carcinogenic nature of most sun block creams.

I smoke daily. Moot point this one. I think the risks are massively overstated by a coalition of the shrill and self-serving.

People save up for their retirement when they are least able to enjoy their cash.

I had a baby at 54 and may be having another at 56.

Complete and utter denial….I guess it makes us less depressed and therefore more useful to the species, in a social sense.

It goes to my earlier point. Religions are around not because people are scared of death (they are; but we’re engineered not to worry about it). What they are actually doing is praying to gods of good luck, hence “god’.

Walking directions to the nearest Nando’s.

The subject of love came up again today, as in:

“I love you”

But what does that mean? Does it mean any of the following?

“I like life more when you are in it”

“I don’t like my life when you aren’t in it”

Is “love” just a correlated to “like” and “life”? It’s it all about me?

It’s probably a mistake to use reason to dig into this one.

After all, we are in the era of unreason anyway.

It had occurred to me that all these devices, big and little screens, they not only take is away from the here and now, they also take us away from our bodies. Maybe it’s the same thing, Maybe not.

Now that I have time on my hand, I’ve noticed that I’m putting a lot of effort into getting completely into my body. Riding, gym, and soon, a renovation.

I think this is a key message for modern mankind. It’s paradise lost.

The other night I had arranged for a couple to come and see the Citroen motor car, with a view to perhaps buying the beast.

I told Nic, 8pm. I then reminded her twice in fact, just before they arrived.When they did arrive I raced out into the dark to meet them. After a static review of the monster they asked for a test drive. Of course I said, and off we went.

Nic, at home and busy with the kids, hadn’t noticed me leaving, had no idea what I was up to, in fact. Let’s call it industrial deafness.

After a whole 15 minutes I arrived home to find her in a complete funk. She was fuming that I had left the house unannounced (in her mind). She even announced that the relationship was over. This was serious.

Whence came her anger? We may never know. I for one wouldn’t ask a counsellor; they would just start digging for some past event in her life and hang it on that. For example, she has abandonment issues from when her dad left the family home. That sort of rubbish.

They might be right. But they probably aren’t. There’s no way of finding out, so they’re on a complete winner with this sort of circus trick.

My view; it doesn’t matter. You have to take the person as they are, all of them. You can’t cherry pick the attributes you’d like to keep with the intent of weeding out the others.

If you’re not willing to take all of them, take none of them.

In the case of Nic, this was so out of character as to be of no consequence to me. If this lights up one day in 360, I’m still way ahead of the other poor bastards weeding each other to death on a daily basis.

And, to be fair, I’ll try to build in some filters into my behaviour so as to avoid a repeat. I’ll do my best, but experience tells me I’ll probably slip up.

Nic thought that my definition of “trust” was noteworthy.

She thought trust was consistency. That is, the ability to trust someone to act in a certain way, every time.

I said, no, it’s that person considering your best interests when they make a decision. That is, constraining themselves in the interests of another.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

I find that when the stakes are high, people conveniently lose their empathy and can’t even imagine what your best interests might be.

Odd that, eh?

As they say in the venture capital world, there’s never enough equity to go around. Someone’s gain is someone else’s loss.

We are mercantilist, emotionally, despite 200 years plus of enlightenment.

I’m not but. Lol.

I’ve decided not to look into the past in order to explain the present, as it pertains to me.

I’ve noticed that people use the past in many ways to explain themselves.

For example, “I grew up in a Christian family that was so boring” as an explanation for why “I’m attracted to extravagant risk takers”. Alternatively, “my mother was a con artist that lived with constant risk” so “I’m attracted to the same”.

There’s always a way to twist what was as an explanation for what is. So I don’t.

Also it’s lazy and doesn’t work.