So  in the USA ... land of the free, black women apparently aren't allowed to drive BMWs in New York, and 14 year old Muslim kids aren't allowed to build clocks.

How many billions have been spent on stupid shit like this vs how many actual real terrrrist attacks have been prevented?

I'm sick of saying this shit.  I've been calling it out since before George W. Bush even got voted in.  His election was probably pretty much the moment my faith in humanity started to fade.  Then his predictable, but still equally terrifying response to the WTC attacks. I could live with Afghanistan given there was apparently an actual link, but come 2002/3 and the bullshit of Iraq/Saddam, it was obvious the whole thing was a load of shit and loads of people were about to die to prop up the US military industrial complex, and thus their economy when the were spending millions every day on a stupid, pointless, unnecessary war.... not a whole lot different to Vietnam.

Then Tony Bliar was the next big nail in the coffin of my hope.

Rudd did a good job of taking some kind of faint hope and pounding it into a mound of self composting turds, but the end result of his shit was the unrelenting pile of shit that was Tony Abbott.

So you Australians will excuse me for my brief moment of jubilation that we managed to get our version of GWB gone in just under 2 years after he only managed to send 6 RAAF jets to bomb Syria.  That feels like an improvement to me.  God knows what else that demented twit would have done to save his job if Turnbull hadn't have finally stepped up and put an end to it.

Turnbull is no Messiah, but "the dude who stopped Tony Abbott" is more than enough for me.

The Turnbull leadership challenge

Well I think the Guardian starting a live feed on the leadership this morning was a clue, but it's now clear why I've been feeling particularly restless today.

[from a FaceBook post]:

I have strange, mixed feelings about the LNP leadership situation. I have been increasingly embarrassed and appalled at the complete and utter bollocks the Abbottses comes out with on a daily basis, but it's also become my daily entertainment. I actually look forward to logging on at the start of the day to see what the latest insanity the lunatic has said or done today. From a purely comedic perspective he was the gift that never stopped giving.

But at the same time it was obviously absolutely humiliating having his as our leader, and I shuddered every time I heard his name. I've become almost obsessed with him, morbidly fascinated by the fact that we somehow let this Gollum like creature, the Abbottses, run our country at all.

So despite the entertainment value, and the risk that Turnbull could actually give the LNP another term (or more) I still instinctively feel a desperate relief, even kidding myself that I might actually be glad to have Turnbull as PM.

I have no love for Bill Shorten at all, I kind of see him as Abbott lite. He only seems to know how to react to things, with nothing to offer.

But I'm a Green voter who won't vote LNP or ALP anyway, my hope is there could be another Labor Green coalition with loads of independents, because that is always more democratic, but I still get to have an opinion on who leads the country while the rest of you keep supporting these old timey parties.

To Blog or not to Blog... that's not any kind of question, just a half-arsed attempt at a title.

There is a niggling voice in the back of my head that's usually effectively inaudible above the noise, and it's telling me to write, frequently, or ideally daily as a routine.  So far I've failed.  But now that I'm doing a PhD, and the advice is essentially the same for that, maybe it will be the catalyst that finally spurs me to action.

I'm tempted to start a fresh, new Blog that can be associated with my professional identity, so that I can share posts freely without any concern that the content of previous posts might damage any kind of academic reputation I might develop, or the frank, sometimes brutal and ugly posts on mental health issues, but I think for now I will just carry on here.  I can always un-publish certain posts if it comes to it.

Usually a good indicator that it's time to think about Blogging again is when I start to get carried away on Facebook.  And at the moment I'm kind of obsessed with Tony Abbott and his parcel of fools.  A lot of it is Schadenfreude, and a sense of "Told you" to all the people who subjected us to the endless humiliation he subjects us to collectively on the world stage.  But I wake up each day and eagerly check the news just to see what the latest bout of lunacy might be, and whether the LNP are sufficiently embarrassed enough to have their next leadership spill yet.  The chatter seems to be increasing, and as I type the Guardian has started a Live updates page on the leadership question.  That's a good sign I think.

But as twisted as it sounds, I think I will actually be a little disappointed if he goes now and isn't booted out by the people at the next election.  Even more concerning though is the worry that by some terrible combined lapse of reason and massive Murdoch funded bombardment he might actually get voted back in.  I mean, he got in once, and I thought at one point the idea was too ludicrous to even contemplate.  George W. Bush got voted in a second time.  And Shorten is almost a kind of Abbott lite, with the same ethos of reacting to what everyone else does without offering any kind of direction of his own.

Ultimately, I am now a Green voter, and likely to stay that way.  I watch Australian politics with a kind of morbid fascination and find it kind strangely entertaining, but I suppose what I'm most interested in is witnessing the decay of a system that is becoming less functional by the day.  It makes me think of Michio Kaku's civilisation types — he says we are a Type  Zero Civilisation, but we now have a Type One Communication system, which will hopefully help other aspects of our society progress to Type One, eventually even energy, which is by his definition when we become a Type One Civilisation.

I hate everything. Why not.

Yeah I think 'why not' can be a statement.

Some days I do.  I hate everything.  Far too many days.

Okay, not really everything.  I can't justify that.  There's a lot of human things worth preserving.

I'm watching Larry David's 'Curb your enthusiasm'.  It's a funny show, I'm enjoying it a lot.  I just wrote a Facebook post and then instantly set it to "only me" because I felt I shouldn't share it.  Maybe until after I'm dead and my son curates all the crazy shit I've written online for anyone who cares.  Maybe I'll be some kind of Samuel Pepys.  Just some boring nobody who happened to be really useful for historians in a couple of centuries because I wrote shit down.

Let me just paste it before I carry on:

"Facebook is like torture sometimes, especially to the ethnically Catholic ... a pit of shame and guilt and misery and regret... and ethnic Catholics don't even get the catharsis of practicing Catholics because we don't go to church and have confession, we just have all the culturally induced self loathing. I think Jewish people have the same problem.. I'm watching Curb Your Enthusiasm at the moment and it's so familiar...I guess it must be an old testament thing.
In one episode Larry David was at the cinema talking about Wagner and a guy started attacking him saying "Are you Jewish? You must be a self-loathing Jew to be whistling Wagner!” and Larry David said “Yes I do hate myself, but it has nothing to do with being Jewish!!”.
I think it's good in a lot of ways, it means you've been raised to have a conscience, but it kind of makes your life a misery in a lot of ways, and Facebook seems to be like a cesspit of it. I guess it makes sense it was invented by someone Jewish, but I bet Zuckerberg has a few Catholics on his staff. This place is surely designed to propagate this crazy shit." 

I have a lot of positive things to say about us before the intergalactic anti-viral is administered.  A lot.  Maybe not now, I'm not in the right kind of mood.

toddler explains why we are arseholes for eating meat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NX4O6smZrLE

When your mantra is "You're a dickhead"

When I wake up in the morning, sometimes debatably 'morning', I usally go for a piss and at some point in the bathroom I usually say out loud "you're a dickhead".  Sometimes I say even worse swears.  Sometimes I use the F-ing-C word.  More recently I've been following it with a comic musing out loud for the benefit of any neighbours with super hearing: "Well, that was my pep-talk for the day."

I think some people look at themselves in the mirror and say "go get 'em tiger!" or something like that.  I look at myself and yell "YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNT! YOU'RE A PATHETIC PIECE OF SHIT!!"

I'm not sure this counts as an affirmation.  I think you're supposed to tell your reflection that you love it or something like that.  If that "What the bleep do we know" stuff is true then I'm well and truly fucked.

I'm probably a realist, or even a slightly begrudging existentialist.  I'd like to believe in something beyond, and I kind of do seem to believe in reincarnation, but ultimately I mainly think about the savage realism of reality most of all, and ultimately what forms the core of my beliefs about the world is a pretty cynical outlook that the more fluffy inclined might not feel comfortable with.  I see incredible potential in Humanity.  I see amazing creativity and genius.  But there's a lot of shit that goes with it.

But I decided today that I like Earth.  I think we're privileged to have this opportunity.  There's heaps of good stuff here, and a lot we might miss in generations to come if it fades away.  

I think we'll actually look back on this period and see it as a cultural pinnacle.  It will be a great moment in our history which might struggle to be reproduced in the future.  As we advance technologically there will be tremendous potential to want to improve ourselves in any way possible.  We will jump at the chance to upgrade.  But ultimately I think this will take us further and further away from the soul that drives our creativity.  The more "super human" we get, the more shit we will get at art. I bet you anything.  That's what will happen.  It's maybe like the UFO lore that exists around the idea of "Greys" and "Nordics". They're probably actually time travellers.  There could well be two streams of future timelines of us coming back in time in their saucers to visit us representing our two possible futures.  We either become really evolved Angelic and spiritual beings who look like Viking supermodels, or we wither up into wrinkly grey old hags who live underground and experiment on things.  Maybe society will split in two and they will co-exist.  Like in HG Wells' "Time machine".  In fact maybe that's what he was on about.  Maybe the reason "the greys" are abducting people is because they're trying to figure out how to get their souls back after they tweaked with their biology in every way possible and somehow squeezed them out.  Probably because they wouldn't listen to people like Rupert Sheldrake.

Those TED fuckers will end up Greys, for sure.  Sheldrake will be a Nordic.

Innocence and guilt

I just had an interesting realisation when I discovered that my son left Skype on when he came to have dinner then forgot about it.  I heard the hanging up sound a couple of hours later while he was on the phone to my mum.  I guess at that point they heard him on the other end then realised it was still connected.  At first I felt a moment of paranoia: "What did they hear? What did I say? Anything embarrassing?"  But then I realised the conversations would have all involved my 11 year old son so they would have had the innocence of a child to them and they would have been fine.

So what is this saying?  Children talk about innocent things, and whatever they say it is acceptable.  It might not all be rational, or of great intellectual significance, but whatever it is it will be safe.  At least that's how I saw myself react completely automatically.

This is also saying that it's entirely possible that if it was me talking then there could be a lot to be embarrassed, or even ashamed of.  Could I have said something people would laugh at?  Something revealing?  Something offensive or unacceptable?  What was it that I was afraid I might have said?

It seems I have an inherent disposition of guilt, and children have one of innocence.  What did I lose that lead me from that pure state to the twisted, shame ridden position of self loathing I seem to default to now?  What has really changed?  Aren't I the same person?  When did it all change?