Like any addiction, affluence eventually makes one nauseous.

The practical idealist is a benevolent realist. Most of our prophets have been in this category.

Most people I know can’t stand spending time with their own minds, undistracted.

The first victim of a little red dress is Philosophy.

When food replaces religion we know the empire is starting to crumble.

A collection of owls is not a pod nor a coven, but a parliament.

Which begs the question, which came first?  The birds or the boys?

Love, an acceptance of reality is required to deal with it properly.

Affluence comes in two forms; an excess of free time and an excess of pointless activities designed to occupy that free time. Genuine innovation, of thought or deed, requires one of these and not the other.

An intellectual denial of the ‘here and now’ reality is very much a part of numerous philosophies. Just occasionally this approach has everyday functionality, normally when things look very bleak.

So we can draw a link between survival in the extreme, over-emphasised intellectualism and out of this world philosophies, in all their varieties. Then we can analyze the same with real world psychology (pick a flavour, any flavour) and disappear right up our own arseholes.

I have a friend who is practised in the art of negativity, mostly focused on the lives of others known to us. It’s packaged in a suave and intelligent wrapping and is very engaging. But therein lies a trap which I refuse to partake and I must stay very alert so as not to be sucked into the Eddy current.

For myself it has been a good lesson in how not be to be. For my friend I think its part habit and partly a reflection of his own brain chemistry and unsatisfied dreams. I do wonder to what degree this state of mind has participated in ensuring the latter.

Apparently Sartre was the first to label himself a existentialist. He probably did it in the fifth person. Wanker.

(Sartre says “I know a bloke who has a mate who thinks Sartre might be an existentialist, you know”. In the original French version that sentence was in fact a half hour interview.)

What to do when you have too much to do? Simply do the stuff which has the nearest term deadlines. And keep doing it until the crisis has passed.

If this doesn’t work you have to let some of your bishops know that their outcomes can’t be achieved and that their deadlines need to be renegotiated.

Which ones? Either the least important or the most time consuming; it’s a judgement call on your part. And do not discuss the other work you have; keep it simple and focused and avoid getting into debates about the relative merits of the importance of their work versus the rest.

The point of this is to learn not to freeze or throw your hands off the wheel and crash. It’s hard work sometimes but rarely is it as impossible as it looks.

In my dream last night a large pelican swallowed another smaller pelican. The little one was still alive and I could see it moving around, outlined within the big one. Maybe it was an ibis. That would make more sense for reasons I don’t understand. Exxy.

They have passed me by, all of my life. The noun that is.

Existentialism is a left-overs odd-bin for those philosophical egomaniacs who can’t be otherwise binned. I can’t be an existentialist since I have a Groucho-like aversion to clubs. Hang on, I am arguing against myself here. Beer time…

On more than one occasion I have judged people too quickly and in the negative. Only to find out later, much later, there was much more to them. Note to self; stop it.

Unusually I am watching tv. I just watched two ads in a row which I didn’t understand. I think they were some sort of urban mum jokes; no idea. This makes me very happy.

Helpfully, my cafe this morning had signs letting us know how many people are allowed per table. Weirdos.

I have better things to do with my life than to cop shit for trying to do the right thing.

Today, the financial paper is full of chatter on the subject of ‘productivity’. Business wants an increase in profits via gains in productivity, which has apparently been going backwards in Australia for sometime (as measured by who exactly?). This can’t happen unless government allows either a decrease in real wages or reduced regulatory costs, allowing the use of less labour. And of course our corporates couldn’t simply seek growth into foreign markets, now could they?

The high regulatory burden is how we keep people employed in Australia, so that won’t change. The only politically acceptable way to decrease wages is to increase inflation, which would be achieved by printing money and lowering our dollar, which would also enhance exports directly.

My novel answer to the political issue of reduced wages, and therefore also consumption and corporate revenues, is to pay people the lost income via shares, so they claw back their wage losses via gains in share prices. Otherwise this is all just an exercise in wealth transfer in Club Australia. Duh.

Whatever happens, taxes have to go up in the short-term to pay off the higher foreign debt burden.

Lurking behind all this is a desire for the ready availability of low-cost servants. I found this out by accident one drunken night in talking to a bunch of lawyers, after I had reduced their arguments to the core. Stripping away all the BS they simply want two distinct classes of people no matter what the cost to the economy.

“Measures to move women into topless roles”. The heading to the article was in fact “…top roles”; what a misread!

Some smart people have focused on the issue of gender imbalance in our boardrooms and decided that the best solution is quotas for women.

Since most Australian corporations thrive in a closed market with government mandated anti-competitive protections, why not?

Considerations of which of the current or new regime would be more effective simply aren’t debated because everyone knows, deep in their hearts, that these people don’t matter much. These roles are sinecures.

To be honest I feel more passionate about the class inequities than the gender inequities. A pox on the North Shore I say; woman and all.

I just met the Chief Scientist of NSW. Who woulda guessed?

The RBA is promoting its prudent actions that “saved” Australia during the GFC, along with strong prudential control of the banks by related organizations.

Total bullshit. Australia is simply too small to warrant the large Wall Street investment banks being parked here and controlling government.

Otherwise known as a master of corporate advancement. Useless otherwise.

When placed in a difficult environment in order to execute a tough job the good man has two moral challenges of note.

Firstly, any role has the functional goals set by an immediate superior which the good man constantly measures against the stated goals of the organization. This reconciliation often presents a paradox that tortures the good man.

Corruption, the second issue, exists as ‘direct-in-your-face’ corruption but then there are also many more subtle forms that do not even break any rules. In a difficult working environment often some corruption is more effective than no corruption. This presents the moral man with another challenge.

Pity the good man because he does not hide from these challenges.

I have known a few artists in my time. Normally these are very right brain people with little or no left brain training. And herein lays the trap for some.

Some artists know not what they are trying to express, at least not in words. To do so would be to attempt to explain a right brain activity with left brain methodology, which they aren’t very good at. So they have right brain issues being expressed with right brain communication channels. This is all good until the critics and academics start wading in with their left brain waffle; the artists rarely agree.

Contrast this to the odd artist who uses their art to comment on, say, a current social issue. The approach of using art as a medium at first disguises the fact that, when pressed to discuss the issue in words it becomes apparent they are absolute dilettantes. The art may have technical merit, but it is communicating absolute rubbish.

“We will help your child be the best person they can be; to be independent, empathetic, balanced, aware and resilient. These things are not promoted by a focus on final exams; so we don’t. If a child’s parent(s) do not match our ideals then we don’t take the child; we can’t beat what happens at home. Our school is free; we run entirely on alumni contributions.”

Ok, so I made it up. Sounds good though, doesn’t it?

I really, really struggle buying reading material for a flight these days. The kindle doesn’t suffice since it has to be turned off for takeoff and landing. Which leaves me with newspapers and magazines, or the tinnitus of my mind.

I think it’s a sign of having read and assimilated so much knowledge that I cannot get interested in much of what the newsstand offers.

Which makes me realize that I have not just been absorbing information, but also systematically modeling the underlying human systems. Once the model is complete and tested to be working I lose interest, somewhat, in further details. Surprising.

I find faded beauty quite fascinating, especially where there is a little self-denial about the ‘faded’ bit.  Its very subtle, this stuff, but most of us immediately know when anothers’ rubber band has been over-stretched. It’s just our own that is harder to monitor, for some.

According to Phil, and confirmed by wiki, an acronym is where the abbreviated letters are spoken as a word, as in NATO.

Alternatively, where the letters are pronounced individually, we have an initialism, as in IBM.

WTF! (?)

Quite wisely most people ignore all this and just call them all acronyms. If they call them anything at all.

I can’t quite explain why Sydney’s roads annoy me so much. Let me workshop this…

Cars are supposed to be the most comfortable and effortless way to get from here to there. They have allowed the suburbs to exist. Here in Australia their use is controlled to ridiculous extremes to prevent accidents. Cars are cheap and getting cheaper in real terms as our economy grows and productivity improves. The density of cars is also increasing due to urban infill, ironically driven by traffic congestion issues. There is now a car for everything and everyone; about half the kids even get lifts to school. There had been no serious investment in public transport to alleviate the issue; everyone wants public transport but so that others can travel on it and thus the roads will be less congested for them.

It’s a perfect storm of self-centeredness. And everyone is slowly going mad in it.

They reveal a lot about a society, do newspapers. Our local rags are very local for one. In the best of the locals, the SMH, the quality journalism is reserved for the sports section. The rest is a collage of commentary on recent happenings in the circus politics, business, daily life and reality tv arts. There is a world section buried inside which is pulled off the news service without thought or conviction.

Thankfully we have the internet. And I hear the Guardian has spotted a gap and will soon produce a local version. Hopefully they will attract opinion writers and commentators who know what they are doing. It’s all just enough to keep the candle alight.

I prey for a very big mute button. Dear Lord I know you have one, you big omniscient and omnipotent lump. But not omnideranged, eh? Lend me the fucker and I promise not to hold it against you later on.

There is nothing more satisfying than a lazy shortcut that works out.

I must remember to have my knuckles pointed to the ceiling on my backhand and to test all my opinions with evidence.

Me thinks this one(s) protests too much.And in chalk. Really?

It’s hard to know them if they hardly know themselves.

For some of us the thought is more acute than the gurgitation. To the rescue, Google really is the thesaurus & dictionary, combined, for the mind. I will happily let them profit from the effort.

Weeds are now a food source and not a scourge. They are being pampered and and watered. Different varieties are being brought in from Sydney’s backlanes. The hunt for the complete set of football cards has started. Salads are getting more acrid and bitter. The worm turns and the world dips. Orthodoxy, once again, cannot be relied upon. I must, I must, I must reconsider all that is true.

Hysteresis, for those of you not versed in the arts scientific, can be understood to be a system where something starts here and ends there, and then returns to here via another route.

A lovely metaphor for a life well-lived.

I can be fed lentils and not complain. A rarity apparently.

Knowing who Ilonka is would destroy the pleasure of chewing the fat; wondering who she is and how she is connected.

The current pet hypothesis is that it’s an older cousin of granny who was happy to give up her Sunday school hymn book to an eight year old.

One of my rules is never to mix the animal and vegetable kingdoms in a single metaphor.

‘Rent-seeking’ is the manipulation of a social or political environment in order to create personal wealth, as opposed to creating new wealth. Basically its people wanting more of the pie rather than just growing the pie so their piece is bigger.

In old economic theory the opposite to rent-seeking was ‘profit-seeking’, which is a focus on growing the pie.

I think we need to split ‘profit-seeking’ into sustainable and unsustainable categories. Profit-seeking via an unsustainable use of our diminishing and finite resources must now also considered to be a form of rent-seeking.

The trouble that Facebook has is that we judge any social network or web service by its lowest common denominator.

In the case of Facebook this would be the “what I had for breakfast” post, or the current scourge of posting the famous quotes of others so as to bask in the reflected glory.

The fact that people read and reply to this inane rubbish seals the deal.

The question is not why she doesn’t like them but why I can’t remember that.

We can make all the excuses we want for racism, mild or otherwise, but at its’ core is a complete lack of common sense.

An entry a day keeps the psychologist away…

You would think that driving a taxi all day and every day would sharpen the skills. Sadly this is rarely the case.

The top five issues:
1. Random and unnecessary braking and acceleration
2. Twitching
3. Engaging ‘park’ at every stop (peculiar to mainland Chinese)
4. Falling asleep
5. “Can you direct me to the airport?”

(Honorable mention, but not a driving skill, goes to the credit card machine that doesn’t work)

There is a thought for every picture and a picture for every thought. Sometimes they have a child, called a conversation.

Thrice recently I have been surprised by Racism. The first was from Mark Twain and I suppose we have to give him the benefit of 150 years of separation. The other cases were from older folk who are otherwise lovely people. Now the question is whether they are carrying over old values from 50 years ago (plus), or, being old, are less capable of questioning their own prejudices and more capable or being influenced by shock-jocks.

At the core of the issue though is some dissatisfaction with their lives, or how society has changed since they were younger. They have not been brought along with the world’s changes and they feel somewhat alienated and very confused. Quietly blaming groups of strangers is a first-order ‘no-brainer’ response. Similarly they have fixed views on various political parties and the like.

I wonder what damage their racism proffers? I suppose only the general support which helps builds momentum amongst others that care more and actually may act. The old folk simply sit on their prejudices. It is very hard to reason them out of their stance I find; it’s almost not worth trying. 

I know its been trashed to death before but really has anyone noticed how Facebook has been devalued over the last couple of years? Its gone from a general ‘keep in touch’ model to a few avid posters protesting way too much about how good their life is, or how smart they are.  All this whilst the owners of the business figure out more complex and sneaky ways to extract personal information from the users and sell that information. 

In the tech world, this year’s star can very quickly become next years’ footnote in history. Some fail outright, like Wang Computer, Compaq, Napster and DEC etc. Others just fade into single digit obscurity like MySpace, AOL, Geocities & Netscape. My bet is on Facebook to join them – they just don’t have the mojo to get this right.

I am always relieved when I get out of a Sydney taxi. There is only so many many routless jerky rides in dirty old falcons with no shocks that one can take. The price of corruption.

Listening to Mark Twain rage against the Mormons, it struck me as silly. If people want to believe, they will, no matter how preposterous the story. And so it came to pass…

For some reason the milk crate hasn’t made it to China. It’s a great opportunity for some enterprising entrepreneur. They would build whole cities out of them.

My emotions are organic. And the bullets are homeopathic.

The first victim of a flu is personal hygiene.

Listening to a book is at least ten times slower than reading. However comprehension is higher. Filtering is lower. But thought ‘moments’ require me to reach for the pause button.  I am amazed at how quickly time has gone by.

This is my third day in bed with the flu. My eyes are too sore to read. Fortunately I have discovered some great podcasts of books written by Mark Twain describing his travels. Great stuff, the enjoyment of which makes me realize I may be a tad old fashion.

Dissembling is slightly more honorable than deceiving. Only because it sounds better. This blog is an heroic effort at self-dissemblement. And yet imagine it as a sketch in 3-D (flat in time), revealing the truths, hidden as dark and murky shapes therein.

Reading over my old blogs, I am starting to pick up inconsistencies. I think this is OK. To be human is to be variable. A robot has one truth; we have many and they are very circumstantial.

The ‘truth’ is just like a blurred photo blancmange…you find it!

I should worry more about what I have done. That would be more consistent with the orbit of the dangle.

I don’t really worry too much about what I haven’t done. Which implies, knowing myself, that I have done what I needed to. Instinct rules.

Laid down sick. Bloody viruses. Still it’s the price we pay for evolution.

Woolhara village, Saturday morning coffee. You can see the fear in their faces and the yearning to belong. Gluttony has its price.

Or, as the Irish say, happiness is when the pain stops.

My favorite moments are when I am free of everything and everyone. However this only works in contrast to the everyday. If I had it everyday I would be bored to death within a week.

One good thing about aging; these days I do not worry about missing out. It used to drive me crazy. Now I know that most experiences are not worth having since they are driven by the fear of missing out!

It’s very bloody tempting to go and live on the other side of the planet.

I don’t know what I was thinking by coming back.

Yes I do. It was unfinished business. Now it’s almost finished.

Time to review. But I have this constraint of the females.

I heard her get up and have a discussion with dad at 3 am. Her mind just can’t be stopped. And she worries. Fortunately, my mind can be stopped but only with drugs. However I can sleep whenever just like dad. But I can’t be woken up for a midnight discussion. No way.

Loopy night, with fever. I had hundreds of great thoughts for you blog. But they have all flittered off with the breeze.

I had a fever yesterday. I was totally loopy with a flu. I sort of knew it at the time but not really. Altered reality. It makes you think that reality is pretty much our imagination.

They ain’t no sanity clause. And there ain’t no closet sanctity. Doodah.

Apparently whinging is hereditary.

The best thing about the Kindle is that you can read porn on public transport.

Self delusion is universal. It’s just so much harder to objectively view yourself than it is to review others.

Part of your flight to freedom is the building of an effective mirror so you can look into your own soul. You may as well check out your arse while you are at it.

You have a choice; stay organized or embrace madness. In between there be monsters.

The fruits of your labour are the seeds of your resurrection.

Where do you go when your home country becomes unlikable? Personal freedom here is a mirage; it has been constrained by the collective good to such a degree that people live with contempt. Of themselves.

Those boys are too young to know the Groucho Clause. Any club that would have them is not worth joining.

I should start keeping a list of mis-deeds for ammunition, but it’s not me.

Beware of midnight and her hormones. The list of possible crimes is endless.

Any religion that has a specific bloke at the instigation has a problem.

We can be so much more productive with IT. I still remember how little we did before smartphones and computers. Less was expected and less achieved, but everyone was just as happy, if not more so.

You also have to wonder how much of the extra productivity is just extra bureaucracy.

Getting text into phones is still an unsolved problem. Voice recognition isn’t there yet, really. Keyboards are slow even with Swype. Mind reading might be the go.

Whatever the future brings I like to see my thoughts in writing before sending them. It’s the best way to edit them.

And reading is so much faster than listening, even if talking is quicker than data entry.

Today I focused on work. As a result I had nothing to say to my blog. It just goes to show that we have limited mental horse power and we need to choose what to use it on. Work can be fun or just an evil necessity. Today it was better than ok.

Today I hit emotional detox. Nice experience. Not

In the Herald today there was a report of a structural deficit for the next decade. The only course of action is significant tax increases. All the easy expenditure cuts have been made. A good time to be in opposition.

Cyclists dread the onset of winter. But it does filter out the fair weather pretenders.

It’s not dead and it’s still appreciated.

One of the keys to contentment is learning to enjoy the present.

It is related to enjoying what you have and not always fretting about what you haven’t.

Related also is the balance between living in they past, the present and the future.

Old Roger suggested that I have to keep going on one of my deals for my “reputation’s sake”. I was confused for a while and then realized he was being literal. He really cares about the opinions of people he barely knows.

I hate being micro-managed, even when I need to be.

Both sides of my brain have always been pretty functional. I have strived throughout my life, first subconsciously, and then more consciously, to connect the two sides. I get the point, but just about no one else I know does; they all have contempt to the ‘other side’, the side away from their own hemispherical strength. Or they simply don’t give a rat’s.

The cafe downstairs has a jazzy elevator musak version of YMCA going in a continuous loop. It’s so bad it’s good.

The bloke next door that married the tiger mum; he has the mother in law living there too. They shout at each other, the wife and the mother in law, in Cantonese, from one end of the house to the other, in their normal conversation. What was he thinking? Or more likely, which parts of his brain never worked? Hell is here in on earth.

The tiger mum next door has her child paying piano for hours a day. She has technical proficiency, finally, but has absolutely no touch. Never will have.

A flute has recently been added to the poor girl’s misery.