No aerosols, liquids or gels. And you may get sniffed by a beagle.

I am staying in a bogan villa eh.

And large white pointers that eat people.

Bitsas make the best people.

Just showing off.

A verse is a single metrical line in a poetic composition.

A multiverse is a poem for literary litotes.

The very best lies are told at wakes.

There are three types of fisherman. Those that fish and those that catch fish. And me.

Personally I’d like to see a fishing licence include a scratchie. Three fish gets a free fish from the local fish shop.

The rarest selfie includes polaroid sunnies taken in landscape mode.

In a Western cartel-democracy, when in government a party must:

1. Extract money off taxpayers while pretending not to
2. Spend in excess of those tax receipts on all sorts of things like defence, social welfare, health and random shit
3. Pretend no. 1 is in excess of no. 2 and blame the other guys or the global economy when it’s obvious that it’s not
4. Use most of that expenditure to keep the right fraction of voters happy so they can get re-elected
5. Also some of the expenditure is for mates and monied types that support and control them directly through donations and brown paper bags
6. Pretend no. 5 is no. 4
7. Where possible appeal to voters in ways that do not cost much money, e.g. xenophobia, sports, lies and more lies
8. Be prepared to bail when the irrationality of all this catches up with them and let the other lot have their chance at madness
9. Work hard to make sure the other lot’s chance at madness is as short as possible by lying – specifically by saying the opposite of no. 1-7 above

And that is it. 101.

Which is why it still amazes me that some of these fuckwits have personal agendas that they care about. Like monarchies, abortion, human rights, free speech, industry development, fish, guns, trees, global warming etc. The good politician would simply ignore these issues entirely and never, ever mention the words.

Lola doesn’t want to grow up because she knows how good she has it as a millennial kid. All sugar and no responsibilities.

I cannot ever remember wishing I wouldn’t grow up. For most of my childhood I was sort of looking forward to a less banal existence.

My dad tells me this was his first motorized transport – he owned one in the early fifties. Looking carefully I see no real suspension. Must have been fun.

I imagine there wasn’t an Australian motorbike company called ‘Aborigine’.

With Lola, I just watched the Life of Brian.

I haven’t seen it since it was first release in 1979. My dad took me to see it as a kid.

I recall that he was in stitches during the movie whereas I, who had been denied a religious upbringing, was mildly amused at best.

It has stood up well to the test of time. I found it quite funny this time. Especially the Latin lesson for Brian as the graffiti artist; having personally suffered through years of latin grammar.

It occurs to me that this movie really marked the point where mainstream Western society threw off the hegemony of the church(es).

It had been developing for decades but in 1979 a large chunk of society collectively laughed at the church(es). There is nothing more demoralising to power mongers than being laughed at by the masses.

Revolutionaries should remember this.

Selfies to infinity. Actually down to one pixel. Zeno’s paradox in the twenty first century. How to confuse a hipster. Huh?

The top five oldest torrents on The Pirate Bay are, Top Secret Recipes E-books (uploaded on 2004-03-29), Italian Teens Home Video (uploaded on 2004-03-30), Revolution OS (uploaded on 2004-03-31), LoTR – War of the Ring (uploaded on 2004-03-31), Complete Idiots Guide to Amazing Sex (uploaded on 2004-04-03).

I wonder if our wonderfully confident millennial kids will want for motivating forces?

Often one needs insecurities to drive achievements. Maybe they will figure out another way.

As a result of an unexplained fainting session last weekend Lola has to do a stool sample.

She says she is not. Never. Ever.

I offered to dig a nugget out with a spoon while she sleeps. This has not improved the mood around here.

To end the subject, just let me say that affluence is pernicious.

The antidote is awareness.

These guys have been at it for half an hour now.

Imagine not being able to blog such inspirational info!

A day of blogging left.

The key question is whether to keep going or to stop as planned on the first anniversary of incipience.

I have derived a number of benefits from blogging:

1. It gets those thoughts out of my head
2. It has helped me structure my thoughts
3. It has helped me structure my wisdom
4. It has entertained me, but few others. On average I have had only 4-5 viewers per blog but that has been in purpose. It’s really a private journal.
5. It has entertained me
6. It has helped me linearise my thoughts – that is, make them more easily understood by others
7. It has forced me to practice my writing, daily
8. It has enabled me to post daily photos, which gives these an outlet without being the focus. They are totally abstract and derived from an abstract part of my brain. I can’t tell you anything about them.
9. It might be good for my daughter one day, when she is ready.
10. It’s been great for practicing not splitting my infinitives.

On the negative it is time consuming and sometimes repetitive. And worse still, sometimes whiny and banal.

Whadaya?

There’s an old expression that ‘you can’t bullshit a bullshitter’.

I always agree.

I remember a time as a young person when one of my daydreams was recognition by the elites of the mainstream.

Business, technology, science. It didn’t matter what.

Now I know it’s much better being outside of the mainstream. In order to seek admission into their clubs you have to be like them.

But all they have is their memberships. The rest is hot air and fluff.

The best bit is that they are all panicking. The Internet is making them redundant because there are so many divergent paths to ‘success’.

Also, elitism fundamentally relies on, amongst other things, asymmetrical access to information and the Internet has killed that.

It’s hard to feel elite when the younger generations don’t even know you exist. No one is clamoring to get in, at least not anyone that they fear might be genuine talent.

Lola is decoding Taylor Swift.

In the CD cover slip certain random letters are capitalized.

When you put these together you get secret messages.

Such as “whenstppedcrntouhougt”

I suspect that once you have sold your integrity there’s no buying it back at any price. You can’t license it or borrow it either.

Query whether integrity is one big unit or whether it can be sliced and diced and traded in parcels.

For some reason anthropomorphism in the sea eschews soft and cuddly.

The prime suspect is the elephant of the oceans, the whale. And number two is the shark. Next we have dugongs and groupers. None is pretty and one is downright dangerous.

No wonder the Japanese, who love the koala bears, are confused.

Most people worry about money when they have none.

But I have watched many people go from subsistence (the Western version where they really want for little) to affluence.

I have observed two types; those that care less about money as they get more affluent and those that care more.

The people that go onto to be wealthy and unhappy tend to be in the latter category.

Who would be a judge?

It can’t be fun enforcing inconsistent laws made up by functionally corrupt politicians, randomly enforced by illiterate police and rabidly defended by amoral legal pirates.

A sense of justice would make the job intolerable.

And you would hate yourself on your bad days.

If you believed in god you would be dreading the pearly gates.

Unless of course you cross-referenced Somalia and emotionally divorced yourself from responsibility for the outcomes. Which would require psychological brain surgery.

You can’t change destiny so you may as well believe in it.

About five years ago I bought this great bike bag in San Francisco.

A bike courier that I used to drink with contemptuously told me that it would be lucky to last a couple of months.

I have used it every day since. It is still going strong and a not hint of wearing out.

Beware the opinions of the professional amateurs!

My neighbor is sending toxic corpses my way. Whyfor the chemical warfare?

Should I put up with this? Note, I didn’t say ‘should he be able to do this?’

We finally had a good lecturer at the traffic offenders intervention course. And of course, of course the horse was a lawyer.

Isn’t it odd that we Australians treat our chooks, or at least some of them, better than our asylum seekers.

And chooks can’t even drive cabs.

New business concept…

Sponsor an organic chook. Sorta like sponsoring a Nigerian child.

Input. Weekly cash withdrawals from your bank account.

Benefits. Weekly organic eggs from very your own chook delivered to your door.

It comes complete with a smart phone app with “chook-cam” (attached to the head of each chook) so you can log on and see what your chook is seeing.

And you can cross reference the veracity of the organic sea side nature of your chook’s environment.

[scene] About Life, Rozelle. Upmarket and expensive organic food supermarket.

Great organic free-range eggs from happy hens fed with organic hand-milled grains and living on the Fraser coast seaside. It’s a surprise they haven’t hand painted the hen’s names on the eggs.

There are also many unhappy women in leotards; hard not to notice. I had to dodge the negative radiation. The organic eggs aren’t helping.

What they need is an in-house tantric shaman. Bugger the chook eggs; we need to work on the homo sapien eggs.

They probably also need to lose the jobs, husbands, private school mother mates, BMW X5’s (or similar) and mortgages. But keep the kids, although they need reprogramming.

Craig Thomson gets a 12 month sentence for ‘stealing’ $24k off his union. Actually he abused his expenses. His crime? Firstly he held a seat for labor in the last minority government and he spent the money on prostitutes instead of food, hotels and travel for his wife.

I have seen CEO’s of public companies (that I have reported to) blow this amount on a first class air ticket to London. And then double that amount when they got there on hotels and entertainment. And then they would have one meeting of very dubious value.

Our politicians can simply pay the money back if they get caught abusing their expenses. As Tony Abbot was forced to do.

Craig is the victim of hypocritical and moral witch hunt … after listening to the magistrate rabbit on with moral BS when sentencing, if I were Craig I would have immediately hired a PI to ferret out the magistrate’s abuses of his own expenses for subsequent publication on the web.

A Facebook missive from a former friend that has retreated to the suburbs and motherhood, and who is now well over forty.

Is she wants to be like Quentin then she is twenty years too late hitting the government committees for a living.

Boys night out last night. Half straight and half gay, so admittedly probably not a representative cross section.

All totally bemused by knights and dames. It seemed to have lodged the weirdo hat on Tony Abbott just that much firmer.

It was pointed out that Dame Quentin managed to fuck up her legacy right at the last hurdle. Wonderment as to whether Bill was asked for his opinion.

Scratch a pensioner and you will find a monarchist.

There was a debate as to which would come first, Gay marriage or a republic. General consensus that Gay marriage will win.

Gen Y’s were discussed as a near permanent barrier to the republic since it appears they simply don’t care and would not vote for any changes they don’t understand. It was pointed out they wouldn’t vote at all if they had the choice.

Then we moved onto more important issues such as which was the best HBO series ever.

I read in the micro broadsheet that a statistician once mused, nay even proposed, that the quality of a marriage could be measured by the number of roots in a period of time minus the number of arguments in that same time period.

The trick to avoiding divorce is to keep the measurement greater than zero at all times.

And there was no specific mention of where the roots were attained.

Tiger Air and a hangover do not mix well.

Our federal government wants to sell off a bunch of assets.

One rationale is to plug a budget hole.

Another is more philosophical; the argument runs that governments shouldn’t regulate a market and also compete in that market because it would be unfair (when did that ever stop them?). This argument might work for Medibank Private which has competition but not so well for Australia Post, a virtual monopoly.

Lobbyists also push hard for selling assets since they tend to enrich the buyers. This is a primary motivator!

A counter argument is that public monopolies are by definition break even or cash flow positive. Why sell something that has no risk of not generating profits forever? When valuing these assets there is no need to discount the cash flow.

Also the benefit to the public can be simplicity. When Australia Post is sold our postage options are going to get as complex as our phone bills. As are our energy bills.

What value can we place on the simplicity that government monopolies provide?

At a recent event held for the wealthy family investors in our lovely country I found myself chatting to some weirdo from the Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy.

I suggested to him that I would fully agree with his and their position but only if we had an Australian monarch.

Apparently that is an abhorrent suggestion. No argument why though.

Ever heard of the eight hour movement?

A nineteenth century labor movement that promoted a daily work day routine of:

8 hours work
8 hours sleep, and
8 hours recreation

What happened to that win eh? Now it’s more like:

16 hours of LCD display
6 hours sleep
2 hours commuting

I reckon an argument goes like this…

happy
less happy
blame someone else
blame someone close
argue
maybe apologize
wait
repeat

The only way to break this cycle is if both parties agree to a resolution after each argument where they both concede or agree to do something new or some such.

If one party insists the other does the changing/resolving it doesn’t work, even if the insisting party is convinced he/she is in the right. 

That is, mutual resolution must be a pre-agreed principle and not discussed on a case by case basis.

Instinct mostly comes from the Id but also from the abstract part of the super-ego.

Which means when you are trusting your instinct you should not act immediately if you have a choice.

Wait at least a day to let the abstract part of the super-ego run its calculations.

I tried to explain to Dave that a yacht club that advertises itself as prestigious probably isn’t. Just unrealistically expensive.

I just gave a young nephew some advice at his request on the subject of women. Specifically how does one pick a partner?

I suggested that at his young age it’s best to trust your instinct. But before committing check the specific model using an elder that he trusts. Which will be me .

The paradox here is that by the time one has the skills to do this cogently one is possibly too old.

The opportunities to bond and grow together, while the personalities are still developing, would be lost.

What odds Johnny Howard gets a knighthood?

Postscript…. Johnny Howard reckons he doesn’t want one…. but if Quentin accepts then Johnny oughta be a pushover.

[Subject] traffic offenders intervention program… Pseudo compulsory remedial courses for serious driving offences…..

Given the costs to society of, eg drink driving, I don’t think the reactive TOIP courses are what is really needed.

Preventative courses are needed where all drivers are required to attend at license renewal time. Cars need annual rego checks but not drivers? WTF? Drivers are more dangerous than their cars these days. Cars have got pretty safe and reliable.

And PowerPoint doesn’t cut it. There needs to be drink driving and speeding simulators (otherwise known as PlayStation 4) and graphic 3-D movies etc.

I wonder how the legal Industry that has sprung up around all this lucrative activity would respond to that?

And while they are at it they could, on an annual basis, assess technical skills which we can all admit are getting appalling out there.

There’s a bridge coming up in the nanny state.

Possibly the best Chinese ad I have ever seen.

China just keeps giving.

Don’t fall in love with the barista
The barista loves the machine

The machine belongs to Ollie
But Ollie just loves money

Useful info from the herald which I am saving for a future pub debate. I can’t see any trend here.

Well fuck me, at 79 years of age my dad has finally uttered an opinion betraying deep thought.

He suggested that in the old days the reason why elders were revered for their wisdom is that they weren’t very old. He told me that 50 was old in the pre-industrial societies and at 50 you still have all your mental faculties (implying that this isn’t the case at 79).

I added the thought that in a society, sans change, age equated to increased accumulation of current knowledge. Whereas in our society of constant change getting old signals redundancy for old knowledge. And it also gets harder to adapt to change as one gets older. Double whammy.

Agreement all around. And then we retired for his half-full skim-milk extra-hot half-sugar latte and my double mac.

I find it sad that many people I meet, in this fair country of ours, desire in life exactly what they have always been entitled to.

Maybe they climb a little up the greasy pole or earn a sinecure, but the outcome is much the same.

Imagine desiring entrapment in a glass pyramid of corporate entitlement.

Maybe the mass of people in there is obscuring the view of the surrounding country side.

The sales brigade for Jesus turned up on my doorstep this morning.

This time it took an interesting twist.

I don’t know why but I told them that I thought I might be the next prophet but not yet revealed to the masses.

You’d have thought they’d be interested in another product line. But nuh, just a general retreat towards the street.

I yelled after them that they should be wearing hats. It is a hot day after all, and ‘sin’ was actually a mistranslation of ‘skin’.

Lola hates me right now.

I explained to them that a selfie can’t have two people in it.

Right before I took the phone off them.

Dots reinterpreted.

I have been labeled as cynical… let’s see…

cynical. ˈsɪnɪk(ə)l/
adjective
1. believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest;
2. distrustful of human sincerity or integrity;
3. concerned only with one’s own interests and typically disregarding accepted standards in order to achieve them.

I think not for 1 but I am always wary.

Re no. 2, not at all. In most cases people fool themselves and not others.

Finally, on no. 3 I am concerned with the interests of all and much less so my own, but typically disregard accepted standards in order to achieve my goals.

I suspect that I am a realistic idealist with a touch of egomania chucked in.

There are over 1,000 geo-tracking and spy satellites up in space and yet we can still manage to lose a commercial aircraft with almost 300 people on-board.

Every ocean going yachtie and extreme adventurer has an EPIRB, many which auto activate, but not an airplane nor anyone on it. Really?

Misplacing your keys is one thing…. but a plane?

Bugger liquid, aerosols or gels. They are so reactive and stupid that it hurts to read this stuff.

It’s a failure of will and not an absence of means. Or a total pack of lies.

Who wouldn’t want to live in China?

‘I hate flying’.

Well there’s a statement…

Is he scared of flying or just disgusted with the process?

In this context it’s the same word for the emotion from the id and the belief from the super ego.

I struck the jackpot, again.

My current Shanghai taxi driver is Fangio reincarnated.

At low speeds in traffic he makes holes where they can’t be.

He is ambidextrous when it comes to driving on the left or right.

On the freeway he is happy at 200 k’s in a 15 year old Toyota shitbox without seatbelts, dodging all the fade outs.

My solution? To spend the whole trip with my knees braced against the front seat waiting for the inevitable.

Which as you know didn’t happen.

Define sanity! No one can because we are all insane to some degree and that degree might change from observer to observer.

Imagine trying to treat people with psychological issues with other people (e.g. therapists)? Since they are both imperfect and slightly insane the whole process is definitely insane. No wonder it hardly works.

A much better approach would be to get a machine to ask questions and a massive friggin’ computer to parse and process the answers. That is, we should pass the problem over to Google and some large evolutionary algorithms.

This would have two benefits. First people are far more likely to be honest when talking to a machine, and, second, by combining all the results of all the people we could start coming up with genuine definitions of psychological issues.

Of course these definitions would be contextual so the solution to a genuine issue might be therapy, drugs or a simple change of environment.

Even the treatments themselves could be tested by the same algorithms for efficacy and a process of continuous improvement instigated.

There are some problems that are simply too complex for people and their simple models – we should hand them over to the computers now that we have them.

Hypothesis; these days not many scientific PhD theses strongly focus on testing concepts or developing new solutions to unexplained data.

If true, the majority of theses have not earned the conjoined adjective, ‘hypo’. Whence shall our theories arise?

One of my favourite subjects in undergrad chemistry was Symmetry. Chemistry has a whole maths and nomenclature focused on the the symmetry of molecules. In order to get into this subject you have to have Asperges syndrome. Which I don’t and therefore my surprise (to this day) at my enjoyment of the subject.

That last paragraph was an attempt to enforce my credentials on what I am about to posit. Which is to say the lady is protesting before she even starts.

Here goes; have you ever noticed that we humans are supposed to be symmetrical on the outside but inside we are far less symmetrical? For example various organs are placed to one side or the other; the heart is on the left side, the right lung has more lobes than the left, the stomach and spleen lie to the left, and the liver has a single right lobe

As an aside, there are rare people who are ‘flipped’ and have these organs on the opposite side. A surgeon’s nightmare.

My suspicion is that the benefits of social cohesion have enforced external symmetry – it is easier/quicker to recognise a symmetrical friend or family member, and throughout history this benefit must have been enforced through the usual evolutionary processes.

No such benefit applies to internal organs so they have been free-er to wander about the body looking for the most efficient arrangement, but somewhat constrained by the external symmetry requirements.

Many people get a yearly check-up from their GP.

But do you know anyone who gets an annual check-up from a psychologist?

No, we all either avoid them assiduously or wait until we have a problem that we can’t live with.

Possibly this is because one person’s issue is another’s pet.

And the science of the brain is really an art; for example, there aren’t any clinical tests for partial insanity of any sort.

However this must represent a great commercial opportunity. All that has to be developed is some non-threatening set of tests for a rego check-up for the brain. The trick will be to remove the subjectivity out of the interpretation of the results.

My daughter marched in March with her mother and her mother’s friends.

I chatted to them (the adults, afterwards) and, this is being nice, they have a  desperately weak grasp of the grab bag of issues that they were protesting. It’s seemed like more of a social occasion with falsetto anger.

I asked my daughter what issue caught her eye. She said ‘save the sharks’. Being a surfer I told her that I’d prefer it if they nuked the sharks. I said this to open the door to her mind; I would like to see her think and not just follow.

The march in March people had many issues, most of them centered on the policies of our federal government. In particular they dislike Tony Abbott. I am not much of a fan myself.

And yet, their rather uneducated playing of the man, and not the ball, makes me quite uncomfortable. It’s not a crowd that I would like to be in.

I guess it was always thus on both sides of our political cartel. The anger and intent is real amongst all colors of the rent-seeking cargo cults of club Australia.

They literally don’t have the imagination, intelligence nor motivation to be truly constructive. And they won’t be until they are forced by circumstances beyond their comprehension.

I am sitting here wondering how the concepts of linear and abstract thinking come into the brain model.

It looks like there are two sides to the super ego, left and right sides, logical and artistic, or whatever you want to call them.

The linear part must really be driven by logical processes and work only in conscious mode.

The abstract part is I suspect massively parallel processing with lots of little hooks into the id. It’s probably running zillions of complex scenarios and simply can’t be run in conscious mode.

Nix all the car projects. The truth is that I hate driving. So now that I am car free I intend to stay that way.

City driving I hate due to the congestion, cameras, agro and hypocrisy. Freeways I hate because they drive me to narcolepsy.

The only driving I like is on the old school country roads.

I’m thinking that the coalition government decided not to continue supporting the local car industry because they were sick of being driven around in stretch conformadores.

Bring on the black Audi’s, BMWs and Mercs.

And you thought they were being economically dry!

Quote of the day.

“What part of I don’t understand don’t you understand?’

[Scene] Toxteth Hotel Glebe

Pub dude: “Want to buy a ticket for the meat raffle?”

Me: “Is it organic?”

Cabbie having a smoko.

Pensioner hogging the bike line and having a smoko.

This is the Sydney spoon.

There is a lot of hostility to cyclists out there on the roads.

An example; the fuckwits who keep putting cycle lanes right next to parked cars and then make the cycle lanes exactly one car door-width’s wide.

Regret is what Johnny Howard said he felt for the stolen generations and other crimes against aborigines by the white fellas.

Except he didn’t feel it. Regret is a belief not an emotion. The only emotion Johnny felt was anger at being forced to say he had regret. And happiness that he wasn’t forced into offering an apology.

An ‘apology’ is a belief emanating from the super ego whereas a ‘sorry’ is an emotion coming from the id.

Kevin Rudd said sorry to the aborigines on behalf of all Australians but that too was false. ‘Sorry’ is a personal emotion and you can only say sorry on your own behalf. You don’t know how others truly feel.

Empathy is an emotion as well; it’s feeling how another is feeling. Whereas sympathy is the ‘belief’ analogue of this.

You could argue that Kevin was displaying empathy when he said sorry on behalf of all Australian. Wrong answer. He could only have sympathy when he apologised on behalf of all Australians.

And here’s why. Firstly, on this subject, empathy would be reserved for the victims. Secondly, empathy requires one-on-one interactions and Kevin hasn’t met all Australians. Thirdly, a good slab of Australians didn’t feel the need for an apology or a sorry. Fourthly, Kevin is so egocentric that he likely incapable of empathy.

Footnote: it’s just possible that the ‘sorry’ should come from the head of state rather than the PM since she supposedly represents us all, as well as the poms that did all the original damage. She could say sorry on her own behalf and apologize on everyone else’s.

Disappointment is an emotion that emanates from the id.

It’s an attempt by the id to get the ego to atone for failure.

The super ego will either agree or disagree, and the subject will either withdraw or go another round.

In an argument if one party points out that the other party is in the wrong then even if they are right, especially if they are right, they might have won the argument but lost any chance of resolution.

Your local GP is informed and not educated.

They are also fantastic dogs, in the Pavlovian sense.

They know that their income is directly related to short appointments and the random prescription of drugs.

Misdiagnoses simply increase their income due to repeat appointments.

Someone must have once suggested that if there are ten possible causes of a set of symptoms it might be more efficient to treat all of them in a linear fashion until one works. Or not.

Still, I generally bail them up and ask for their chain of deduction. Whereupon it all degrades into a pissing competition with no prize.

Looks like I was thirty years too early with the hipster look.

A science degree is an odd beast.

An undergraduate degree simply provides one with a lot of information but it does not make one a scientist.

For that a research degree is needed.

Even with a research degree there are many that can only call themselves scientist in a small silo of activity.

The better scientists can apply themselves in many fields.

Unlike undergraduate degrees, post graduate degrees aren’t graded. You either get one or you don’t.

They badly need grading.

This is me just before the war. I had just come back from traveling after my third year of Uni.

I had been talked into doing an honors year of research in my science degree and I was reading my very first academic paper as prep work.

I did not understand a single word of it. And yet I wasn’t worried in my usual ‘she’ll be right’ approach. I should have been.

Here’s a sample of my homework quiz from the TOIP course.

Now I have seen it all: plain clothes coppers on bicycles without helmets, making an arrest (the girl) just outside the projects.

Age shall weary them and the years shall condemn.

Rod at twenty and forty seven…

Time to think unimpeded: it’s so rare. No work. No phones. No anything.

I once spent a whole winter camping on a beach in Rhodes.

Together with these blokes we built a shack out of beach debris and scrounged a living.

A lot of time doing nothing but thinking and talking shit.

Just recently I have had a spate of weird coincidences.

I write, say or think something and then I have been seeing or hearing the same.

Just then I wrote ‘Tuscon’ and the guy next to me in the cafe started taking about buying a house there.

One of these I can handle but about 5 in a month is weird.

This is me with a senior CIA operative in a small pub in the middle of Death Valley.

They were doing something dodgy out there. Lots of trucks and satellite dishes etc.

We, me and my brother, just wandered in.

I have had good luck with this mob. I have partied with them in Tucson and San Jose as well. No photos those times.

In the US I tend to attract spy agencies and trust funders. Go figure.

During my student days I had a bad habit of painting the walls of the terrace houses that I variably lived in.

It meant I had to skip out before there was a general exodus and the return of the bond became an issue.

Ah the herald again…

Let me point out the ways:

1. Nothing astounding about 12%. it will drop a lot more than that as China cools down and their efforts to get alternative supplies kick in
2. ‘Could’ isn’t ‘will’
3. By ‘budget’ they mean federal government tax income. The govt doesn’t pay tax so income and revenue mean the same thing to them. The ‘budget’ is what they intend to spend and is mostly unrelated to what they earn.
4. It’s possible that ‘experts said’ but they tend to lack that sort of harmony. Nuh, I reckon it was just one and it wasn’t an expert
5. ‘As much as’… that’s zero to $4b. A bit of wriggle room there.
6. I am sure the $4b was pulled out of someone’s arse.

And that’s just the first sentence. And it took two of them to fuck it up so much.