abroblog

Radio National reports children protesting about ‘climate inaction’.  I posted on their facebook page:

It’s a  bit ridiculous and reprehensible the way you report about these agitated children protesting about ‘inaction on climate change’ isn’t it?

One of them complaining about bushfires and droughts and ‘sick of inaction’.

What, exactly do these uneducated children think anyone might do to stop these bushfires and droughts?

Does anyone anywhere really think there’s anything related to climate change that Australia can do to slow, stop or reverse the change?

If they do they’re deluded.

There’s in fact nothing the whole world can do. Nothing. Change will continue much at its present rate no matter what anyone does.

That change will inexorably bring certain particular effects – temp change to a certain level, sea level raises to at least a certain level and so on.

Certain effects are coming without a doubt.

And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

To stop it.

BUT: mitigate the consequences. YES. Prepare. YES. Much could be done in that direction.

Much. If they protested that nothing was being done to prepare then they’d have a reasonable stance.

But at the moment they’re misguided, delusion and useless. Being used by media such as yourselves simply to agitate the public against things like mines and such in the interests of fomenting news worthy upsets, arguments, quarrels, disputes, even physical confrontations.

All of which is totally deplorable. Totally. Totally. Absolutely deplorable and shabby.

The nation – any nation – needs to get busy preparing for inevitable changes and stop this delusional obsession with putting out your backyard fire and expecting to see the planet suddenly cool.

This was a Quora question :

https://www.quora.com/What-dont-people-tell-you-about-being-ultra-wealthy

I was moved to provide an answer for it.  There were already many good answers.  Mine wasn’t needed and is possibly tripe.  But here it is:

I don’t know any of them and I’m not one of them. So perhaps I’m 100% wrong but here’s my guess:

They don’t know any more about how to get rich than you or I do.

That’d be why, as some of these answers state, they’re frightened of losing their money.

And it’d often be because, as some of these answers state, they inherited their money.

And that’d be why they, as some of these answers state, sometimes slowly lose all their wealth until they’re worse off than you or I.

And that’d be why they often try to hide the fact that they’re wealthy.

And that’d be why they often live beneath their means and even sometimes quite mean little lives.

And that’d be why they’re not known for enlightening us all, showing the way, telling us how to do it, why there’s not a shelf full of books – ‘how I did it’, ‘do it my way’.

That’d be why all the books, tapes, seminars, etc. that we do see about how to get rich are so obviously their idea of their best chance of getting rich off of us.
That’d be why with chambers full of usually fairly wealthy and often really wealthy politicians ‘leading’ their nations the populace remains largely insolvent and bound to economic slavery.

Because the truth is they don’t have a clue any more than anyone else does.

What they don’t tell you is that.

And history shows it was always either luck or theft and oft times a mixture of the two.

Even those times when wealth can be shown to have been acquired by diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work then opportunity and good fortune can be shown to have played a senior role simply from observation of the many times greater number of examples where diligence, intelligence, application, sheer hard work unto even death failed to meet with success.

Any hard working successful person has the sense to give thanks to their god for the good fortune they enjoyed during their careers – regardless of how little it was, for they are well aware it could easily have been less as for many others it was.

It is the conceit of many a ‘successful’ entrepreneurs that only they know what hard work is when in fact they’d probably know the least.

And theft and war. They don’t tell you what they know of how fortunes that persist for generations were acquired by theft in war and in peace.

How to get rich. It is the great question isn’t it? Has occupied philosophers and economists since the dawn.

No one knows. Various theories. No certainties.

How to lift the millions of humans out of abject poverty? How to lift our own selves out of perhaps the relative poverty of unemployment in a modern state?

We don’t know. We’re trying to find out.

And the rich don’t know the answer any more than we do.

Just like us the find the obvious staring them in the face when they look at the facts, the history:

You get rich by either inheriting it or stealing it or just blind luck.

And there’s only one of the three we’ve normally got any control over.

Just listening to this Shadow Treasurer. I think I’m convinced.

I’m going to join the Liberals.

Disarray or not. I don’t care. They’re in disarray because they’re all thinking. They’re arguing amongst themselves.

They’re in disarray the way America is in disarray. Because everyone is taking an interest and thinking hard.
And the same as the USA they’ll come good and be the leaders, the first to do it, the first to handle such an event, such a challenge.

You know what convinced me?

“We’ll pay for it.” Something like that he said. “We’ll pay for it.”

Mate. They’ll pay for nothing. They’re not even pretending to ‘pay’ for anything they say outright they’re going to raise taxes.

We pay. WE PAY. ‘They’ just think they are something, someone else. ‘They’ think they are not ‘US’.

They are not us. ‘They’ will ‘pay’ for things by raising taxes on US. And then they’ll say ‘they’ve’ ‘paid’ for things.

A joke. A crime. The hub of all the problems in the world. Overlords and ‘leaders’ and pundits and know-alls and power brokers who are not us. Who don’t want to be us. Who see themselves as not us, as separate from us, as different; as better, greater, smarter, in a position to ‘lead’ us and instruct us, with a god-given mandate to tell us what to do, to extract money from our pockets, to waste it and then come back for me.

You could just give a little and understand perhaps where they are coming from if they find the money within the existing tax scheme, with the funds they have. But they don’t even pretend to do that. They clearly say they will raise taxes. Fran Kelly put it to him. It is a fact.

What he means and is totally incapable of saying is that like it or not WE WILL PAY for their plans.

And he totally overlooks, ignores, derides the fact that this government has and is paying for things and saying money too! Has put the budget in surplus. THAT’s ‘Paying for things’. That’s what that is.

This government is paying for things. As near as governments ever do.

I won’t be conned and especially by people as far off the planet as that. He really and truly and honestly believes the ‘they’ are paying for things. Not us, them.

And with that party the closer it gets to its core the more it is ‘them’ and not us, because they toe the line of an ideology, don’t they? Enough said. I’ll go with the battlers that are working on things and are currently doing alright.

Just heard that Noel Pearson – again – venting his anger.

What a thoroughly unpleasant man. At least on that performance.

Reminds me of the man who went into Parliament with is hat on.

Frankly I’m a bit sick of it all.

Overall I believe the problem is that aboriginal people are being used by whole scads of people to further their own ends.

To build lucrative careers for themselves. Give themselves cushy jobs, sinecures.

All on the basis of building something that has never ever existed: an aboriginal nation as we understand ‘nation’ – with all the trappings of such, bureaucracy etc.

If it were ever built we’d simply have two nations in Australia and conflict would be the inevitable result.

But mainly it is obviously a totally artificial construct, nothing whatever to do with aboriginal ‘heritage’, aboriginal culture.

Meanwhile the true heritage, the true culture of theirs is ignored. The basic human culture that had and represent.

And the other plank is that they are disadvantaged. This is nonsense. They are in fact advantaged. They are provided for to a greater extent than any other Australian.

They create disadvantage by insisting upon seperation on the one hand and failing entirely to help each other on the other.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t hundreds, maybe thousands, of aboriginal people trying hard to help other aborigines. But there’s an overall push to maintain and create bad situations so’s the agenda can be furthered.

The people who are trying are not helped by the ‘leaders’ of the ‘aboriginal nation’ and that’s because ‘leaders’ of ‘aboriginal nation’ are both artificially created fictions.

You want to help them get off their backs, make their ‘leaders’ help them, tell the truth about what their cultural heritage could be, stop marginalising them, splitting them off from the populace and let the be part of our world.

It does them no good in the first place to tell them they’re different.
It does them no good to feed them a diet of grudges and encourage them to embrace them.
It does them no good to tell them they’re disadvantaged – and it’s someone else’s fault.
It does them no good to have bad mannered nasty people representing them.
It does them no good to have ‘leaders’ that don’t lead or help them.
It does them no good to have their own ‘tribal lands’ and live in isolated ethnic communities out there trying to mimic contemporary civilisation without any contemporary civilisation reason for being there.
It does them no good to duplicate all essential services with an ‘aboriginal’ version.
It does them no good to throw millions of dollars at them via their ‘representatives’ and ‘leaders’ for the money never gets to them.
It does them no good for them to be seen and be defined as ‘a problem’.

I’ve lived and worked with them, amongst them, in their bush communities and I have nothing but the best wishes for them. I’d do all I could to help them go well.

I’ve seen quite clearly that all of the above does them no good.

And I’ve seen quite clearly that the essential first mistake is to segregate them off. In all respects, physically in where they live and notionally as requiring all kinds of different and special administrations in everything from health to employment via legal services etc.

A small abo child is a wonderfully happy being perfectly joyous and all embracing willing to share and accept and it is somewhat saddening to see the remorseless inexorable differentiating and separating that is brought to bear on them.

And a pox on the houses of all those that encourage it.

And the first fix? Shatter the invisible wall around them by allowing them full freehold of their land – or at least a hefty chunk of it.

So’s they can begin to build communities after our model by buying and selling properties from each other and from and to anyone else and can begin working on building everything from houses to roads and bridges in those communities.

This is how our world was built.

This is the method. This is the road.

They are supposedly on this road but not allowed to move down it. Frozen into enforced inaction.

Yep. The first step is quite clear to me. Give them freehold.

Then they’ll begin to grow up.

And disenfranchise all these ‘leaders’ with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

I get superstitious.  I get paranoid.  I get frustrated and hassled and unhappy and even desperate.

Because there’s always something more breaking.

Things break quicker than I can fix things.  So the list gets longer.  All the time.

And I feel it is because of this place we’ve moved to.  That’s the superstition.

Like just a couple of days ago the electronic piano broke.  makes a continuous horrible white noise sound and nothing else.

And there were disturbing things happening with one of our computers.

Then this morning my child complains about his smartphone.   The screen switches off in a second if you take your finger off it.

And it reports there’s no space where there’s gigabytes of SD card unused.

And I can find nowhere in it to do anything about it.

Nor can I find any help on the web.  That’s a kinda ‘broken’, too – like the web is broken, when it doesn’t help.

Then I investigate the doubtful computer and do a disk check.  It fails.  I put Seatools onto it – it is a Seagate drive – and it fails and tells me to use Seatools for DOS.  Means downloading an ISO and burning it.

Means finding a burner…   see? Things multiplying  in order to service the breakdowns….

When I find a burner it probably won’t work…..

That’s this week, so far…….

 

 

 

 

Indonesia should shut up about our possible move to Jerusalem.

I think.

But then again: why?  They just spoke their mind.

Probably not honestly but cleverly.  Making an ambit claim, testing the water, seeing just how much effect they can have on Australia.

Just how frightened of them are we?

Just how snivelling  greedy and easy to push around are we?

This tiny little country of 25millions – one tenth their size?

It doesn’t really matter to them, does it?

But it matters to us.  What sort of posture we adopt, how we behave, who we are, what we do.  It matters to our self perception. It matters to what we become.

And I think we’ll turn soft and yellow and rotten.

Let’s see…

 

 

 

I just realised today that when you practice music you’ve got all the time in the world, haven’t you?

You must have.  Because you can’t hurry it.

It must be practiced at the right speed.  So you can’t be in a hurry.  You have to calm down to that speed.  You have to be ‘in’ or ‘at’ that speed.

That’s how you’ve got to be going.  That’s how you’ve got to be thinking about things, about your current state, about the time available….

Sort of a first step into escaping into your world of music is simply that:  escaping into the time of your music.

So there’s no such thing as a ‘quick practice’.  I’ve only got a few minutes, I’ll just have a quick practice, race through a couple of numbers…

I mean, even if you did ‘race through’ a couple of numbers that’s simply setting the time faster and you still have to adhere to it.

You wouldn’t think of yourself as short of time when playing a number that required great speed, would you?

Similarly you’re not short of time when playing a number at a speed greater than its normal speed.

Or to put it the other way round:  hurried practice is not practice.  It is some kind of an abortion, an aborted,  crippled practice.

 

They’re hysterical about Putin again.

Some people were murdered in England with a nerve agent and it is all supposed to be Putin’s doing.

The same as the Syrian stuff:  no proof and an absence of apparent benefit of any kind to Putin – together with demonstrable harm to him.

Why this hysterical hatred of Russia and Putin?  Why?  I just don’t understand it.

He has 150 million people.  And he’s stuck up there at the top of the globe, effectively an island and surrounded, isolated, alone.

In fact he is militarily surrounded by NATO apparently.  Contrary to promises and agreements I think.

What does anyone think he is going to do?  Invade the world?  Take over the world?

China is going to take over the world.  And/or India. They are doing it now.

And the ‘barbarians’, i.e. the untutored, poor – the Africans, they’ve invaded Europe.

What is the point of demonising and hating Russia?

It couldn’t be that International Affairs and Politics are so fundamentally rubbish that it is all in the interests of distracting the public, giving them something to worry about and by inference needing politicians?

Not something as poor, limited, senseless, base as that, surely?

 

 

 

One year since my last post.

That’s how fast time flies by, how much I keep myself busy doing – what?  Damned if I know.

None of the  things I’m always swearing I want to do, must do, will do, etc…

Just had a fine time getting in here. It wouldn’t accept my log in.

Then I wanted to go to WordPress and ask them why and I couldn’t get in there, either….

Then I wanted to go to my host and look at the files and I couldn’t get  in there, either….

You get days like that.

I do.

I’ve been thinking about children’s education again.  I mean young children – primary school.

I discovered this week that some children just walk out of the class whenever they feel  like it.

That some children never do any work in the class at all.

There seems to be a lot of freedom given children these days.  I don’t remember things being like that.

My memory is that we worked all the time and would never have dreamt of walking out of a class.

But maybe my memory is at fault.

The spell checker didn’t like ‘dreamt’.  I think I’m right and it’s wrong.

I talk to the teachers and I notice that I usually can’t get a word in edgeways.

I have to really try.  There’s no way they’re clever psychologists drawing you out and discovering your deepest thoughts.

No.  They are just delivering themselves of theirs.

This may be all to the good.

Perhaps we have – I have – nothing to contribute of any value.

Could well be.

But that’s not quite the whole point, is it?

 

 

I’ve been thinking tradition maths questions are not couched the right way.

What is the volume of a stack of bricks 3m x 2m x 1m  might be a sample question.

I’m thinking the question would be better if it were:  What is the volume of a stack of bricks?

And the child then has to elicit the information they need in order to answer it.  Which is important. Very important.  To be able to identify what you need to know to answer a question.

So the child will ask how long?  how wide? how deep?

Why not have the child ask these questions rather than give the answers?

Or even have the child permitted to put up his own sample question/answer, make his own assumption?

How about if we asked how heavy?  Volume and weight?

Then the child has to inquire about S.G.

and so on.