I have wanted to say something about science for ages but the words have escaped me.

For many people that I know, science is this mysterious world of complexity and rigour which they can only but admire from a distance. But with a certain disdain as well, based on the constant media feed of false negatives and positives from the scientific world. Think; margarine, no, butter, no, margarine, no, butter,…

I love it when eager Gen-Y’s start posting science-based information on their FB pages (see ‘I love Fucking Science’ for example). Its a case of not knowing what they don’t know, in that they have no wherewithal to distinguish the good stuff from the bad stuff. And no awareness of this lack of wherewithal either. And since their audience doesn’t either, whadya?

It might surprise them that science only teaches us to ask the questions, to catalog information, to make and test hypotheses, and to agree on useful generalizations. When science is used to draw definitive conclusions or to make things, it has become engineering. Or, alternatively, it has become abused.

At this week’s event, the ‘Woman in Engineering’ awards for the UNSW I managed to annoy more than one academic.

The stated goal of the event is to help get their female numbers up above 20%, where they have been stuck for some time, and preferably to 50%.

I suggested that they could achieve this goal overnight by cutting their student intake by 60% but also by keeping all their females.

Apparently that is absurd even though less than 50% of their graduates go on to practice engineering. Maybe, I suggested, that their real problem, like much of our tertiary sector, is that they train way too many graduates for the given job market.

I will be voting for Wikileaks in the Senate. I think Julian Assange is a dick head, but just think of the entertainment factor if he gets in.

I also wonder if an Australian member of parliament has some sort of protection against prosecution or extradition in the UK? For example, in Australia, parliamentary privilege extends to members not being compelled to attend a court case whilst parliament is sitting. Since we have the same head of state, this right might stand up in the privy council.

An experiment. We take the four banks and convert two of their boards to groups representing the Australian population mix.

That is, a mix of men, women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, children, dwarfs, handicapped and gay people and the like.

My guess is the two banks with the odd boards would out-perform the other two, primarily because these boards would be less successful at annoying the management teams.

I tell you what though, if your replaced a bank’s senior management team with a mixed nut team, then that bank would be out of business within a week.

More on the vote compass….

‘Social liberal’ means that one is less likely to want to tell someone else what what they must do with regards to social and moral issues. That is the opposite of moral arrogance, say non-judgemental.

‘Economic left’ means one is less likely to vote for ‘what’s in it for me’, money-wise. That is the opposite of greedy, say generous.

So why then are our political parties called green, labor, liberal and national?

They should be (in order) the liberal left, central left, mid right and far right. Or soft’n’cuddly, union-confused, greedy arrogant shits and fucking nutters.

One of the vote compass questions was “The commonwealth should pass laws requiring more women in senior positions”.

The social liberal in me agrees, but my experience suggests that passing laws on such matters can be quite ineffective or even counter productive. Simply stated, equal opportunities are not created by mandating the outcomes; just the opposite in fact.

In any case which senior positions do we refer to? I am guessing business and the public service? Boards or management?

For the public service it probably doesn’t matter who is in charge; you could put a dog in charge of Ausindustry and no one would notice.

It’s a pretty slippery slope telling a business that there are constraints on who they can employ. But again for the larger businesses with local markets (think Coles, Woolies, the banks,etc) it doesn’t matter; they are cartels and could make profits with a computer in charge.

So it only really matters for exporters competing in global markets. If you start telling them they have to employ women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, and handicapped people into their senior management teams, then Australia has really lost the plot.

My editor and I just had a mutual whinge about the encroachment of the tertiary education sector into vocations that used to be informal apprenticeships.

In her case she says there are lots of kids with great qualifications but they can’t edit. In my case I see corporate types getting MBA’s with a major in ‘entrepreneurship’ that simply couldn’t and can’t.

For the unis it’s a case of convincing government to step up regulatory and licensing controls of the employment sector so they (the unis) can grow bigger and have more revenues. But whose role is it to push back on them if it doesn’t make sense?

Getup Australia has around 600,000 members and around the same number of people have used the ABC’s Vote Compass.

What chance they are the same 600,000? That is, social liberals that are economically left leaning, and all living in half a dozen inner city seats just to ensure they have the minimum electoral impact.

Interestingly, today I have tried to eat my way out of a hangover. Sorta worked.

Last night I went to a ‘Females in Engineering’ awards night primarily to meet up with some old friends for drinks afterwards. One was organising the affair because that is the sort of thing you do if you are stuck in academia.

The night was a wonderful flashback on times past. I recall myself, the young student, going to these types of affairs and wanting to get the medal, or get noticed, or even just to be part of the club.

How things have changed. Nowadays, to be part of that club would be my version of hell. Fortunately we had some good drinks later and this morning I resembled a slow motion version of a Parkinson’s sufferer. I have just come good at 4pm and just now I am remembering these details. All good.

A friend on FB let us all know that yesterday was International Female Orgasm Day. And it was World Cat Day too.

Its hard to know where to start with this one.

In order to explain away my rude behaviour to an academic stranger last night my two ‘mates’ suggested to him I have a touch of Asperges syndrome. Fuckers.

In fact I was deliberately rude to the bugger because he represented a distilled version of a whole bunch of things I don’t like. I was having fun at everyone’s expense, so i suppose I will have to cop it sweet.

I have just been drinking with mates, yakking in code on the subject of prostate cancer. One has had it for two years, been right through some agonizing choices on treatments (simply no complete data sets and lots of conflicting advice and side effects), and only told us after it was all done.

Fuck me, bring on the females.

The treatment, by the way, was a bunch of radioactive titanium rice grain sized iotas that stay with him for life – the alternative is the knife with all sorts of subsequent issues related to men’s business.

What to do when your brain has too many thoughts swimming around in it, and these are getting in the way of things you want to achieve?

Well if thinking is your problem then think a little less. But, you say, the thoughts are subconscious and you have no control over them.

Well that’s a little trickier. The female approach is to: 1.Meditate (and other related activities). These act as a sort of dampener that are meant to slow down and calm the mind by attenuating the thoughts, or offering some level of ‘control’ over them. 2. Women also love to read books on the subject – I think the rationale here is that by feeding the conscious mind with information and structure, that some control over the sub-conscious can be achieved. 3. Talk endlessly about their problems and get useless advice off their friends as to what to do about it all.

The male approach is to do one or more of the following: 1. Exercise a lot (helps empty the mind). 2. Drink a lot (further helps empty the mind but also strips away the conscious mind’s gate-keeping role so you can peek directly underneath). 3. Yak to mates in strict code (easier and more fun than reading books but it does depend on the quality of your mates). 4. Categorize one’s thoughts and excise one or more of the troublesome categories once they are described, e.g. lose the girlfriend. 5. Never meditate. 6. Never read a book on the subject because that just introduces more thoughts.

Each to their own, but I wonder if both parties could a learn a little from the other, or whether the brain function is different enough to warrant the totally different approaches?

I have a cousin whose wife writes for the Daily Telegraph. Nice girl but functionality illiterate.

If ASIS is having trouble hiring spies then maybe they oughta employ the asylum seekers. A clutch of birds with one fucking rock, in a great big glass house.

I wonder what is going around the minds of our political head nutters?

Is it the job at any cost? Or is there some genuine social or economic belief structure driving them?

My guess is that years of cartoon-like existence has left them with some vestige of a political philosophy from their youth, a veneer of rationality but with an over-stewed morass of fried white matter underneath which serves no purpose and never could.

My flight today was delayed by a whole hour. The captain announced over the Tannoy that there was a screw loose. Indeed.

But wait there’s more. The Australian Financial Review today says it’s not the NBN, rather it’s (parsing) just Rupert being a grumpy old prick with no imagination and no wife. The myth is waning.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness: yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, by breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him.

The HR ad for Australia’s spy agency went “iQ + eQ = ASIS”.

Do you reckon they are after liars or fools?

Its just freakin’ embarrassing to see Lycra-clad fat-bellied corporate types ride their bicycles around in groups pretending they are team jockeys. But apparently not to them. In their mind’s eye (love that expression) they are magically transformed into sylph-like leprechauns, all covered in corporate tattoos. If only that marketing power could push those bikes along a little faster than the walking pace they generally puff along at…

If you don’t care and you don’t want to know then you deserve whatever is coming.

If you do care and you sort of want to know but don’t have the wherewithal to figure it out, then I suppose that is just bad luck.

If you care and you can figure it out then get the fuck out of there before its too late.

There are two types of people that buy a house across the road from a pub.Those that think it’s very handy and those that shouldn’t.

Upon leaving my parents ‘farm’ for the last time (they have sold it) Lola was pretending to be sad. It was the order of the day apparently.

I said “Lola, really, are you sad?”

She smiled cheekily and said “not really”

Chip off the old block.

I just rode past the lovely new government flats that have just been built on the site of an older block of government flats.

Its odd, but no matter whatever the era, a government block of flats is instantly distinguishable from any other sort.

It must be key differences in the selection of architects and their work, as well as a different process of monitoring and controlling budgets.

Somewhere in this is a lesson that might provide the key to better government processes me-thinks.

On the surface, I don’t always ‘know’ what I mean but if I dig a bit then I find out there’s some thoughts sculling around on the ocean floor of my mind like some poor angler fish in the dark depths with nowt but a small luminescent light on the end of a stick to keep it amused.

The desire for commitment in a relationship is clear – it’s a support mechanisms for the tough things in life, like having kids. That might be the justification, but I would also argue that for many people the desire to be in a committed relationship is in fact ’emotional’, not rational.

Evolution is a sneaky beast – it takes a whole bunch of environmental factors, parses them in the context of how to best propagate the species, and the distils them down into ’emotions’. Its no mystery that there a hundreds of psychological conditions that end up in ‘abnormal’ sexual behaviour; nature is having us on!

Observations. I observe carefully and catalogue trends. In relationships I have observed that probably more than 90% fail despite an initial sense of commitment. The number might be lower for married couple, but so? Of the couples that survive forever, I see one single correlation; they keep their world ‘constant’. That is, by minimising change they remove the forces that challenge their commitment to each other.

And if individuals in a committed relationships want to actively explore exciting ‘change’ then its illogical for them to think that their committed relationship will survive. And I see the idea of living in a constant world as quite irrational. But I always liked a challenge.

“I just really live in pain I just don’t even know it”

What matters most, the absence of logic, emotion or clarifiers?

The SMH today reveals that Rupert’s reason for attacking Labor is because of the NBN. Open access to it by all service providers, say Netflix, with on-demand content threatens his revenues from Fox cable. He wants Malcolm Turnbull’s cut-back version which won’t properly allow on-demand content.

A universal truth: retards see the problem and not the opportunity.

Maybe Malcolm, if he gets in, should re-neg on the deal and build the full-scale NBN anyway. I sense that Rupert is pretty close to the end of his influence (and life) and all it will take is one push by an enterprising politician to destroy the myth forever.

Jealousy and commitment are, at best, first cousins. One is irrational and the other is just illogical.

Staying at the folk’s place…

My dad farts in the shower. It sounds like the distress call of a beached dolphin.

Some things never change.

I have just been given a copy of ‘Things Bogans Like’, probably on the basis that I would find it amusing. I did.

The book fails to define a bogan, preferring to define the beast by all the things they like.

What is clear though is that well over 90% of Australia’s population sneaks into the category.

My personal definition is that a bogan is anyone that likes watching morning TV.

On the subject of dumb bogan trends, when did a selfie become a photo and not a solo erotic event?

Apparently a onesie outfit refers to the number of articles of clothing required to fully clad a person and not the inferred mental age of the wearer.

However I am not so sure whether the same can be said of the retarded mother that instigates a onesie party for their ten-year old.

I pulled over in the no stopping zone outside my daughter’s school. I was just about to leave the car to go and get her when a copper tapped on the window.

He said I couldn’t stop there and I had to move on or he would book me. I told him I wasn’t stopped and that because I was in the car it was more of a pause.

I pointed out to him that all music players have separate stop and pause buttons, and that parking was just the same.

He looked a little confused, decided I was an idiot and told me to move or else. Geez it was fun.

My daughter’s school is having a trivia night fund-raiser, combining two of my most hated events.

I told them ‘Not a chance. Why don’t you try a barbie down the pub for all the normal people?’

The coven of mothers smote me in their minds and with their eyes. I smiled back.

The further my thinking drifts from mainstream, the more I feel like I am looking at a movie screen and not real-life humanity.

I have been trying to get the Gen-Y-Fish to stop just blurting out his random thoughts as they come into his head. He has a bad habit of voicing these very annoying non sequiturs.

The best I can do in such a short period of stewardship is to suggest that this is ineffective; hoping that this works away in his sub conscious and eventually he becomes aware of the issue and does something about it.

I also gave him a summary of how effective communication works, namely to think carefully before talking, and to ensure whatever is coming out is useful. I note to him that people who randomly ramble also suffer a similar problem to the boy that cried wolf, namely that people only vaguely listen to them on the basis that whatever is coming out at any particular moment is probably rubbish.

Remember this – kids don’t work it out for themselves very quickly, and we can offer them years of short-cuts if we just observe them and open our mouths. Too many people think they are being nice to kids by not ‘criticising’ them because they think such activity would destroy their ‘self-confidence’.

Well why then does the Gen-Y-Fish have such low self-confidence? I smell a rat and that rat is the modern parent’s false justification of the avoidance of conflict and parental hard-work, as well an over-indulgence in re-living and repairing their own childhoods. To put it bluntly – it is weak, lazy and self-centred behaviour.

Would you believe there are still people in this world who think that a steady job equates to job security?

In the modern era any steady job is just one dip in cashflow away from disintegrating.

I explained to the Gen-Y-Fish that any business, be it government, private or loopy, has customers who represent the source of revenue.

The only modern means of maximizing ‘job security’ is to reduce the number of people between yourself and the customers.

Ultimately, by this definition, being the boss or, better still, owning your own company represents the best job security.

Of course your financial security can still be threatened by circumstances, but less so than otherwise.

Personally I think financial security is over-rated; it becomes an excuse to just consume more of the same. However, many of those with inherent job insecurity (even if they don’t know it) simply consume less of the same, so they are no better off.

How about we start ‘anti-months” before all the fools in the Finance sector find themselves in a yearly rotation of mindless fads. I am being nice here.

For Dry-July we can promote Binge-July.

For Movember we can start Smoothember (sounds good that one).

There’s a Febfast. I would do Fat-Feb.

There’s a few competing Octobers but they haven’t caught on yet.

Lent; we can forget about it since they don’t have a marketing budget.

As I rode past the building site a worker scowled at me “Can’t you read the bloody sign”

(the sign says “Dismount Your Bicycle in Work Area.” As if.)

I said “What fucking sign?”

He says “The fucking sign that says you can’t ride through here.”

I say “Mate I can’t read every fucking sign in the world, there’s millions of them. I wouldn’t do anything else if I did.”

What is is about Australia that every time someone or some government department wants to control the world around them, they feel justified enough to annoy others with yet another bloody sign.

Yay, our currency just went through the 90 cent barrier. As an exporter I want the Pacific Peso back. Self-interest rules. Besides I hate travelling OS for holidays; I get on enough planes as it is.

A few of my friends have had a Dry July. Both women and men. I really should consume more idiotic media content so I know about this shit ahead of time. There is nothing worse that trying to enjoy a schooner and a durry while the miserable sod on the other side of the table is nursing a soda water and a false sense of well-being.

Two thoughts come to mind…

1. Why do people need a heavily-marketed mandated period to do anything? Whether it’s Moustachio-March, Liver-April or Anal-September, all of this can be done without the approval of others and without wearing the fucking thing on your sleeve.

2. On the specific topic of drinking, if you feel like you are drinking too much, then drink a little less. Going cold-turkey for a month and then going back to the binge doesn’t really achieve anything other than to annoy people like me.

ps Dave is drinking and smoking below so I don’t wish to infer he is silly enough to fall for Dry July. But he did FB us all on a pretty weak attempt to pack in the durries 🙂

For some reason I woke up with ‘The Ballard of Lucy Jordan’ in my head.

Better than ‘Here’s to you Mrs Robinson’, I suppose.

I also took the gen-y-fish through the entire dark history of the families.I thought I might offer him a short cut of a few years.

Because, as I explained, when his current 2-D take-it-as-you-see-it world starts getting a little complex and multi-dimensional, and his wheels start to wobble, he will want to go all over this stuff.

I explained to the gen-y-fish that counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists all exist because, no matter how good we are at understanding others, we are shit at understanding ourselves.

They are a mirror, the inferred specialists, on ourselves. And a pretty bloody crazed and cracked one at that.

Is it just me or are the prams getting bigger?

The salesman said to me “no deposit, no interest, no repayments”.

I said “so it’s a gift then?”

He looked confused.

I like to think that when I disappear down a rabbit hole that the light at the end of tunnel is a rainbow that leads to a pot of gold.

Electronic and communications technology is a wonder. It enables us to be so much more productive especially when that productivity is all about the tasks of organization and information creation and sharing.

Which is the case in my case.

In fact my own ‘time and motion’ study shows that I have the following activities only.

1. Laptop
2. Phone
3. Talking to people
4. Fluffing off at a cafe, or squash or something. I claim I am always ‘working’ during this category, but its subconscious…
5. Transport – cycling mostly. The odd cab.

Query to self. Is this what I really want to do? [pondering]

Back to IT and related technologies. There is a trap in becoming very efficient at their use, namely the temptation to overload yourself with activities, simply because you can. It’s all good when things are going well but just occasionally the wheels wobble and then you find out that you have taken on far too much. I suspect it is best to leave a 30% headroom for spare capacity just so there is a safety margin.

The closed captions on the TV said ‘calorie cap’. I think they meant salary cap, but they could be onto something…

School sports carnival; I have just watched the sixth class boys go around the 800m. Only three boys ran the whole distance – the rest either pulled out or walked part of the way.

My daughter ran the whole 800m because I was watching. The furthest she has run by a factor of 8.

Bourke St Bakery….Gen Y central. The goldfish behind the counter asked me three times if she could help me while I was waiting for my sausage roll – the one that I had ordered off her the first time. She also got both my name and my order wrong.

The next time you call something “quintessential” you may need to consider that it’s equivalent to saying that it’s too good to be true.

It refers to the fifth element, ether, which doesn’t actually exist. But neither do the other four, at least as the alchemists intended them to.

It’s all quite boronic.

Machiato. Sunday rag. Breakfast. Latte. Tip run. Daughter haggling. Machiato. Ferrari Minimus. Tip run. Schooner. Dog walk. Survived a foreign dog attack. Kicked a labrador. Weed run. Stinging nettle nurse. Stubbie. Soup. TV. Drive home. Maccas hit and run coffee. Home. Bed please.

A tip these days is not the random pile of rubbish of my younger days. All the incoming is sorted into goods of various categories for on-sale, and a small fraction of genuine rubbish that goes to some hidden landfill.

At the Berry tip you pay for the privilege unless your load is deemed to have enough commercial value, whereupon you are let in, in the best case scenario, for free.

The local council and their employees are profiting from an asymmetry of information and resources, and all paid for by the very people they are ripping off.

I sincerely hope Freecycle destroys their business model.

How useless is a border collie-x-kelpie that can’t jump onto the back of a ute without assistance?

Lola just called to give me a bollocking for not being in attendance at the school band performance. I told her way in advance that I had to help my mum and dad prepare for their house-move instead.

But she decided to ignore all of that and practice the female cycle of heartbreak, love, sadness and ambition. I am doing my best to get her to attenuate it (for her own sake), but it’s so hard with the influences that abound.

I just spent three hours on the Ferrari Minimus. Apparently I am now the Charles Manson of the edible weed world. Given that some of the survivors will end up in the pot, I’d say I’m more like Hannibal Lecter.

Newspaper columnist; no matter how good they are, they will let you down. Especially when they run out of something to write about, and opine on a subject of which they only have a passing knowledge. Deadly.

I have a purchasing rule. For everything I buy one of my previous acquisitions must go (roughly of equal value or importance). By such means I avoid the accumulation of goods, fear and loathing.

If I ever need to transition to a caravan park all I have to do is change the ratio to ten-to-one.

Berry. Dad. Ute. Machiato. Long conversation with my daughter.Transport run. Machiato. Squash. Lunch. Tip. Machiato.Tip. Pub. 6 schooners. First D&M with dad ever. Shower. Dinner. TV. Sleep.

n.b. they were doubles so that’s six shots and six schooners. Nice symmetry

If you ever want to see the ‘poverty of the mind’ inherent in Australia’s underclass then just catch the Friday night train to Nowra.

Mostly it’s a bunch of nice people, but just enough absolute arseholes to make everyone very nervous.

What has changed over the last few decades is that this latter mob have got off the leash; an unexpected and unwelcome side product of social liberalization.

The government is running a series of TV ads in Australia warning would-be boat people that they will be settled offshore.

How stupid is the average Australian, do you reckon?

The editor of the Australian Financial Review believes that all government policy and political debate should defer entirely to material living standards and national security.

It has never occurred to him or his readers that continued growth in the former will ultimately threaten the latter.

Limbo lounge; sitting around, waiting for my wings to flap, I noted two flights arriving. Endless lines of people de-planed. A veritable catwalk of attitude, insecurity and relief: all for my enjoyment. One from Byron was full of feral chic. The other from the Alice was full of cheeky ferals.

Virtually nothing is gained without effort. Which makes the prophets look remarkable when they soar effortlessly. Ducks, the lot of  ’em. Duck.

Behind every great advertising agency there’s a great cliche.

Behind every great cliche there’s a great advertising agency.

I always prefer the most efficient straight line journey between two points. Unless of course there is a more attractive curvy option.

Melbourne University, 25th July 2013, 206 pm.

Large billboard….”visit Australia’s world standard university”.

It confused me for a millisecond, wondering why they would advertise themselves as “standard”. And then of course I realised that they had forgotten the hyphen.

They should have gone the whole hog and advertised “universe-standard”; that’s seems more appropriate.

Even so, “standard” implies the median to me. D’oh. They probably need to say “world leading”. Or “top ten southern hemisphere”.

Or they could just stop telling lies.

Short of a newspaper I just spent the whole flight perving on some poor fool’s laptop.

He is the CEO of an Australian listed company, and was preparing a speech to staff. Full off chestnuts, condescending, and morale crunching; I just wanted to intervene on behalf of sanity…but did not.

And then the poor bastard stares at a letter from his medical specialist wherein he finds out he has cancer. I kid you not.

No bad deed goes unpunished.

I am edging towards understanding and away from orthodoxy. My methods are unusual and prisoners will not be taken lightly.

To cut a long story short,  I think I finally understand why Heinlein entitled his classic book “Time Enough for Love”.

I don’t have much, and therefore efficacy is paramount. So, here’s to you Mrs Robinson!

I had a dream last night. I was wandering around a large Easter show which was like bedlam. At some stage I left my companions to find a supermarket and then ran into an old friend. She was with a bunch of suits that looked like the political aides in Canberra. They were all drinking in a corner bar. We started chatting and then two of her colleagues started fighting. It turns out that this old bloke was laying into my poet friend Gerard, who was (very unlikely this) one of the suits. He just took the punches and smiled. The fight was broken up and I stepped in to calm the crowd by orating a short poem in Gerard’s honour. Dream ends.

As I wrote this I figured out what the dream meant. I had no idea before hand. There’s a lesson…

The Thai government just failed in an attempt to control the world’s rice market. Dear o’ dear, we gave that a shot with wool in the sixties.

Commodity price fixing, via government reserve buying, never works when there are alternatives. The folks you are trying to rip off just switch to, say, wheat for example.

What a great photo. Not mine.

At the movies last night I caught an Australian government advertisement entitled “A Plan for Australian Jobs”. I have just Googled the thing and have now read the precis which is available in 11 languages.

This is a work of distilled bullshit that quite tidily summarises all that is wrong in Australia.

In a nutshell here is the plan;

(1) Introduce trade barriers for government purchasing to ensure that our local suppliers get lazy and never export anything,

(2) Invest in ten innovation precincts to simultaneously (a) keep the Labor Party’s developers mates happy and (b) to keep the middle class welfare piling into the non-functioning high-tech sector, and (c) make a splash in some marginal electorates,

(3) Further bloat the public service by providing some new government services to small businesses rather than just giving them a tax break so they can decide what to do with their own money.

I also wonder what fraction of the expenditure associated with this plan has previously been committed under other plans, and has simply just been re-badged into this new plan as a means of election advertising?

Oh, and the part on Australian Innovation is supported by two of my favourite chestnuts, the Hills Hoist and WiFi.

Don’t you think its time we stopped talking about the Hills Hoist as if it was an invention we should be proud of? Its a 70 year-old clothes line for god’s sake and not a particularly smart one at that.

And CSIRO has propagated a myth that they invented WiFi, which is a factual lie. In fact they sneakily got some patents for some enabling technology that combined a number of existing ideas and then later made a lot of money by handing these over to the Texan patent trolls who sued the pants off everyone for a quick settlement. Not exactly an effort in creating jobs now is it?

We really need to take policy and planning off the politicians since they are too wedded to their political process to either have the time to think straight or even care about the outcomes.

The true irony is that the generation brought up in utopia made a movie about the end of the world where they ended up in heaven, which looked like the party world they had just came from. Only white.

When irony lacks any semblance of wit and becomes a formula, then it isn’t irony any more.

The true irony is that, after sitting through a candidate for the worst movie of all time, I couldn’t get the Gen Y to understand a single word of this.

Would you trust the wiki on Wikipedia?

One steps into a boat and onto a ship.
Women fall pregnant, and the boys light up.
But why o’ why do the retards ‘enter’ politics rather than ‘join’?
‘Sequester’ would be more like it. As in, the game of politics seems to sequester all of society’s retarded sociopaths.

Since our brains interpret energy and matter and parse it all into our version of “reality” it’s fair to say we are already living in a virtual reality.

The evidence is in; that each human’s version of this parsing is different, sometimes subtly and sometimes not.

The real question is whether we believe that the other humans in our own matrix are just other versions of ourselves, or not.

A small fraction of flora and fauna symbiotically thrive in the destructive presence of humans; sparrows, rats, seagulls, possums, weeds etc.

And we pretty much despise them all. It just shows how selfish and stupid humans are. We are the out-of-control species.

I just had a sausage roll for breakfast. Now that is hard to justify by any use of reasoning. Time to enter politics maybe?

The dog, the child, the parent, the weed picker and the pensioner on the electric golf cart just just missed each other, by a whisker.

I can’t stand talking to affluent strangers.

So we pay New Guinea, through the nose, to take our asylum seekers. Then they take our money and eat the goods?

It has become apparent to me that parents these days do not give their kids enough free space for self determination.

As a result the kids not only lack the ability to act on their own behalf, they rarely even know what they want.

This lack of self awareness then comes back to haunt us when we accuse them of being, in a sort of negligent way, “self centered”, i.e. unaware of their surroundings and the impact they have on others.

Ironic.

One of the odd paradoxes in life; the broader your participation the less you belong anywhere in particular.

In the start-up world there are no brownie points for identifying problems, just for fixing them.

I am really worried now.

The seventeen year old, when interrogated by yours truly, admitted that he wasn’t day dreaming at all, but that he was gold fishing.

That is his head was empty of thoughts. And, he said, that this is the case most of the time.

Viewed negatively he may be devoid of anime. However, on the positive, I suggested to him that he has a future as a guru if he can teach others to empty their minds too.

It is very hard to sin if you live in a virtual world. Maybe living in a virtual world is the ultimate sin.

I would love to hear a Gen Y at confession.

“Turn off that phone. What do you have to confess my son?”

“I don’t know, you tell me”

“Only you and god know my son. You need to look into your heart and reflect on your sins.”

“I don’t understand; it’s your church. Geez this seat is uncomfortable. Can I go now? I have only ten minutes to log on before I lose my points.”

In the interests of equal everything I think we should get rid of state mandated marriages. Boys, why push for the expansion of the evil franchise?

It is odd don’t you think that people need a executed legal contract to feel properly married? It smacks of insecurity.

We need to get the government out of our lives and not further into them.

I have spent a week with the Gen Y late-teenager now and I have managed to put my finger on one of the missing elements.

Shame: at least on the outside he doesn’t appear to have any. God knows what’s going on under the bonnet.

I never imagined that it would be a shame not to have a sense of shame, but it turns out shame is a useful motivating force. Shame on someone, not me.

I discovered today that the major Chinese trade show for solar energy, which my company attends, charges foreign companies twice as much for show booths as the locals. Fuckers.

We all have the same Chinese customers and revenues, but our costs of business are already higher because these are Western.

I took the time to explain this to the conference organisers who suddenly lost their ability to understand English. Fucking fuckers.

Today the Daily Telegraph is a must-read.

Now that Kevin Rudd has been restored as the Labor prime minister and is leading the polls against the retard that is encumbering the Liberals, the Daily Telegraph has started to panic.

What was a previously an exercise in leisurely pulling wings off a fly when Gillard was the PM, has now become a desperate diatribe against all things Rudd. And they are anti-Rudd, not anti-Labor. The era of the LEADER is with us.

From the editorial, to the columnists, the opinion pieces, letters, reviews, special features and especially on the front page: it’s an over-the-top ravaging of all things Rudd.

I wonder if it is the editors or the owners, or both, who are driving this approach? Whoever it is, they have lost touch. By being so one-sided they will lose the opportunity to influence the swinging voters. They will simply appeal to the votes they already have. It doesn’t make much sense.

I wonder what is driving this. What are they all about to lose? Are they expecting some very nice handout from Abbott if he gets in? Like some loosening of the media ownership rules? Or is it simply an idealistic pogrom; if so, it makes no sense because to identify the practical differences between the parties requires the dexterity of a train spotter.

Here is one of the worst FB postings of all time….

The bank ad, as seen in the gym this morning, said ‘You have to be interested to be interesting’. I agree.

But the images that accompanied this message were composed of good looking couples ogling a lot of potential (and supposedly interesting) purchases.

The only interest in this scenario is what the bank is going to earn from their debt.