Kingston Biscuits

Changing Jobs

Yeah so thing thing happened and I'm going to go work over at UTS from tomorrow. Still a bit stunned that it happened, but that's the nature of life. Everything has a way of changing on you. 

It was a bit weird working in Chatswood. It made me feel like I hadn't really traveled far in my life since leaving High School. Being back in Chatswood for work took me back to when I had jobs there as a teenager. It's all a bit confronting when it's like that. So now I'm graduating Chatswood all over again and going to a university campus again. 

Maybe life is just cyclical. Maybe I'm getting a second chance. Maybe it's just all coincidence. 

Screw You, Arnott's

Back in the day, I knew this lovely girl (no irony, she really was lovely). She was from the lower North Shore, had gone to good schools, and had a good thinking head on her shoulders. She was an astute observer and had funny takes on things. One of them was that the Kingston biscuit was the North Shore Girl's ultimate biscuit. She reasoned, it's because it has a little bit of everything, and so it is like a good investment; it seems like it pays the biggest dividend. North Shore Girls being North Shore Girls, cannot resist this as a value proposition - according to her. 

First it had the chocolate cream, and anything chocolate is better value than vanilla. Then there were the actual biscuits that had the coconut flakes subtly mixed in with a rough rolled oat and butter - much like little Anzac biscuits. You couldn't fault it for all round flavour value. It's not over-invested in one direction or another. The fine sense of balance made it much better than say, the orange cream thing in the Arnott's assorted pack tray. (I myself am quite okay with the orange cream thing, but others it turns out loathe it).

Somehow this notion of a perfectly balanced biscuit as a metaphor for what North Shore Girls like, stuck in my mind for years and years. 

Come Join The Fun!

We All Want Heaven

... But Nobody Wants To Die

Sometimes you know what you want but you know it's going to be the death of you. Sometime you love somebody that in most ways would drive you around the bend. If you could just have that thing even if it costs you the earth - but are you really willing to go there? Do you want to go there? How deep is that desire? 

The weird thing I found out is that we actually run on desire most of our lives until the desire dries out and crumbles. Nietzsche said Desire desiccates into Will. It might if you have a lot of time in front of you at the height of your middle age. 

When you get a little older, it doesn't feel that way. Something goes missing in your body or brain, I don't know which. The engine of desire seems to shut off and you stop giving a shit. The thing that drove you for decades suddenly vacates the driver's seat of your mind. You're left with this shell of older yourself wondering how to keep everything going. You're doing something you never thought you wanted to do; or working in a place that gives you nothing but cognitive dissonance. The world changes on you and your mindset can't keep up. You're not conservative but people tell you you're old fashioned. 

And you think to yourself, "I am no bleeding cocktail." 

Maybe you reply with your best Don Draper impersonation: "really?"

So what do you do about it? You have yourself a nice little mid-life crisis and try and figure out ways to ward off the sense of mortality. Buy a red sports car, dump the wife for a younger blonde. Have a second family. Spend more time at the beach or a casino, or even a casino-by-the-beach if you could find one. At least that's the theory. My version of it is to embrace the cognitive dissonance and write a song about it. 

Come Join The Fun!

T01-700D

"What Did You Do During the Pandemic?" 

First of all I did a lot of remixing and re-mastering of stuff that happened during the late iComp era. That's basically stuff from 2012-2016 or so. But I also recorded  bunch of new songs and that's now out as an album 'Cosmic Orphans'. All in all I think I recorded or re-mixed and then re-mastered somewhere around 50 tracks. It's a lot to have swimming around in your head over 18-24 months. I've only recently started to divest my brain out of those 50 tracks. I really can't tell you what exactly I did during the lockdowns but I tell you what, I did a lot of these tracks, getting them ready for release. It was pretty gruelling in parts, and the time went flying by.

I guess it's good to keep yourself busy. You end up outputting a lot of work. It's not exactly the kind of luxury you expect, but it worked out quite alright.  

I also did a lot of Doom Scrolling during the various lockdowns in the last 24 months. If you are already a news junky, Doom Scrolling is just a natural extension of the thing you did when there was print newspapers and news channels worth watching. 

One of the news items was how astronomers had found this planet that seems habitable by human standards. The only problem is that it's so damn faraway. The great irony during lockdown was to know you couldn't really go anywhere and these scientists were worrying about how to get to this faraway planet. I guess that's life - irony abounds if you just look. 

Come Join the Fun!

Quick Shots 28/Mar/2022

When One Out of Three is Bad

We're into well over a month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A lot of it hasn't gone the way some people expected - namely that it has gone on this long. The fact that it has gone this long seems to indicate it has not gone as Putin and company had hoped, so in one sense it means Russia has already lost. At any point in time you can analyse that Russia strategically could be winning, be in a stalemate or losing. Of the three, only winning can lead to a political win. Losing is bad, obviously but it is this condition whereby they are in a stalemate which gives the most political view that Russia is losing. So out of the three, 2 out of 3 give rise to bad political outcomes for Russia. Only winning can lead to a better political outcome for the Kremlin. Because we are not there, or there yet, depending on who you ask, we have conclude that Russia is losing the politics as the war is beginning to harden into a stalemate. 

The hurdle for winning for Russia is as high as it is for Ukraine. Ukraine has to remove all the invaders to have resounding win - this is a flat out mathematical problem. Russia has to remove the current Ukrainian government, and then install another, and hope like hell the international community accepted the new government in Kyiv. This, looks unlikelier by the day. So a protracted stalemate is in essence the expression of the limits of Russia' power and ability to impose its will on Ukraine and the world. 

The question then is just how long is this reality going to take to sink into Vladimir Putin's thick skull? 

The problem for the West is that Putin is so set in his views that reality checks are just going to bounce off his pre-formed prejudices and preconceived notions (and I didn't mean that sentence to be so alliterative). The sanctions, as severe as they are alleged to be, may take weeks and months to make an impact on Russian political thought. The war grinds on every day, costing USD 20 billion a day for the Russians. We think something has got to break,  but so far Putin has resisted common sense reappraisals of just what his war has wrought, and how badly it is going. For the record, if it were me playing a strategy game on a computer and it was going this badly, I would quit the game, reboot the machine, go back to the last save and not invade. Of course Putin has no such options - he has to live with the consequences of his bad decisions just like everybody else on the planet. 

We kind of hope he puts up the white flag soon. 

Long Comic Book Movies

The trend for blockbuster movies is more length. I finally got to watch 'Spider-man: No Way Home' and was amazed at the 2 hour 28min opus. It felt quite long. Then I watched Zack Snyder's 'cut' (That cut could be a misnomer) of 'Justice League' and this thing runs for 4hours and change. It is a lo-o-ong motherfucker of a movie. Honestly, that was like 3 90minute movies crammed into one. 

It's not necessarily a good trend but you do feel like they delivered quantity if not quality. 

I've long complained about this barrage of movies based on comic books. I've also complained ab out the people who complain about movies based on comic books. At this point in history of cinema, it doesn't much matter. The world has changed, the demographics have changed, and there is no sensible discussion about cinema going on anywhere any more. In light of that, I kind of think I'm okay with more Spider-man movies, and less so with Batman. They'll make more of both but I do have the option to put the Batman movies to the back of the viewing queue. At the end of the day, one's own taste is everything in critical analyses.

Slap Seen Around The World

Even if we hate watching the Oscars and don't watch them, we got to see Will Smith slap Chris Rock. Chris Rock's joke did seem a little tasteless - but then Chris Rock is a guy who talks some serious rude language in his own shows so compared to that, it was tame. I don't think it warranted being slapped on stage by Will Smith live to the world. Props to the man he didn't even go to feel his cheek after the slap. He kept his show biz face going and kept it together without major recrimination. I gotta say Will Smith looked worse in that interaction. He might have won the Oscar but he sure lost me with that act. 

Question

If Russian soldiers sick of Vladimir Putin have a mutiny, would it be a Putiny?

 

Quick Shots - 14/Mar/2022

Dissatisfaction At The RBA

You read the news long enough, you do get educated into weird things. One of the things I've been taught over the years is that the RBA is independent of politics - that it operates apart from executive and legislature branches of government in order to be impartial. To that end it has a charter and it works to control inflation and work towards full employment. And now the RBA is getting reviewed because something really wonky has happened to our economy as result of the RBA doing its thing. 

The bank’s charter, which includes a commitment to full employment, is unchanged since it was formally established in 1959. Its inflation target of 2-3 per cent, which it failed to meet in the 7 years leading up to the COVID-19 recession, was established in the early 1990s.

Apart from failing to meet its inflation target, the RBA now holds $356 billion in state and federal government debt as part of its quantitative easing program and has official interest rates at 0.1 per cent while households are carrying record levels of property debt.

KPMG senior economist Sarah Hunter said given how many unconventional monetary policy tools were used to deal with the coronavirus recession, the time was right for a review.

One of the things I might offer up is how the RBA uses the Consumer Price Index instead of the Cost of Living index to make its decisions on interest rates. The thing is, it is well known that for 3 decades now CPI has under-reported the inflation figured compared to Cost of Living. This has led to an overall easing bias over the 30 years, and amazingly (or not) this has led to the current state of affairs where interest rates sit at 0.1% and there is record private sector debt locked up in housing. I mean who'd a thunk it, right?

If the RBA had not decided to calculate CPI differently to how it did it back in the early 1990s, maybe CPI would not have under-reported inflation and consequently interest rates would not have been as low as they are today. Are low interest rates a problem on of themselves? No, but the accumulated byproducts of this low inflation regime is startling. There is the record private sector debt in mortgages; there's the housing crisis in general that is so problematic, governments cannot devise policies of sufficient aces to combat them; then there is the general problem of people not being able to save enough for retirement. A whole generation of people's retirements have been compromised by the regime of low interest rates that have followed the Global Financial Crisis, which in turn has forced their money into riskier assets late in life. Equities are at a historic high in spite of negative sentiment in such areas as the pandemic, accelerating Global Warming and associated natural disasters and generally low growth across the developed world that dates back three decades as well.  

As well meaning as RBA Governor Philip Lowe is, we've seen a radical accumulation of paper wealth for the rich. Arguably, had the RBA followed the Cost of Living numbers over the CPI for the last 30 years, there might not have been the insane frenzy for real estate that suddenly seems to define the economy. So if nothing else, there's ample evidence the RBA needs to be reviewed. I'm certainly for doing it.  

The 4th Dose Is Coming

I got my booster shot back in early January. I actually managed to get my Moderna shot a day before proper eligibility - the chemist wasn't really going to argue the toss at a time when they wanted everybody to be getting the booster anyway. I figured on the law of averages we would likely be doing yet another booster around May to June, given that even when properly motivated my shots seemed to take place 4-5 months apart at a time. During those months the politics would gyrate and new variants would come and go but the net effect was this thing where we needed to get another shot. 

Now the chatter is that a fourth dose is inevitable. 

“The protection that you are getting from the third, it is good enough – actually quite good for hospitalisations and deaths. It’s not that good against infections, but doesn’t last very long.

“But we are just submitting those data [on fourth doses] to the [Food and Drug Administration] and then we will see what the experts also will say outside Pfizer.”

Dr Bourla said Pfizer needed to be well-coordinated with US regulators the Food and Drug Administration, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, and the wider industry, so “that we are all providing to the American people and to the world a cohesive picture rather than confusion” on whether four doses were necessary.

I am guessing that the Deltacron hybrid discovered in the UK and France recently is going to pose a problem. Basically, the mRNA vaccine Pfizer and Moderna have been making is based on the spike protein of the original. Omicron spikes are sufficiently different so render the vaccines much less effective. The Deltacron seems to have the spike of the Omicron but the pathogenic capability of Delta which means it's the worst of both worlds.  It was bad enough when Moderna's boss said current vaccines would not terribly useful against Omicron back in December. If we don't get vaccine against the Omicron spike, we're kind of sitting ducks all over again. Amazingly, just as when Omicron started to break, the government is carrying on like living with all variants of COVID is like living with the Flu. 

I'm also guessing that in roughly 2 months time we will find this current approach of relying mostly on the vaccine was way too loose. So I peg that we'll be doing our 4th boosters around May.

A Weird Take on Putin's Russia

So Big had this link wherein it is argued that Putin has won. It's a take based on the assumption that Putin is a psychopath and is acting accordingly (plausible) and therefore the outcomes he would be aiming for would be psychopathic outcomes. As such he is likely to get whatever it is because in all our sanity, we cannot fathom the depth of Putin's psychopathic goals. 

It's an interesting take except a lot of psychopaths that do terrible things in public at least tend to end up imprisoned and incarcerated. Serial killers tend to hide their tracks and do their dirty deeds in secret but the public psychopaths tend to meet the pointy end of law and order. If Hitler's psychopathic outcome of his dreams was the destruction of European Jewry, then he sure did accomplish that outcome but he also ended up in the bunker shooting himself (if officials versions of events are to be believed). The same applies to any number of Nazis, Fascist dictators and unhinged royals of many a family in history.

It is true Putin is sitting on a good supply of wood, oil, grains, fertiliser and aluminium. It is true cutting off those supplies would hurt the world economy. Yet it is also true none of those commodities are exclusive to Russia, so it remains to be seen if these sanctions really will hurt us more than it hurts Putin's Russia. I'm inclined to think that in the 21st century commodities market, it's impossible to corner anything to be able to wrest control of the markets. I still think Putin is holding a bunch of losing cards right now. 

PSA - New Album Coming

Just a quick note to let you know my new album 'Cosmic Orphans' is due out through digital only release on 17 March 2022. 

Pink Floyd pulled all their tracks from Russia on Spotify because of this Russia Ukraine thing. I thought I might do the same but I realise none of you listeners are from Russia so it would be redundant. 

Anyway, this one is my 'pandemic lockdown rock-down'. All of the songs were written and produced during this pandemic. Most of it was in fact recorded and mixed in the second half of 2020 and first half of 2021 - but lining stuff up for a release can be a bitch. I think just about everybody sent home to work from home worked on their album so the logjam must be intense. Some people wanna fill the world with digital audio information. And what's wrong with that? 

Anyways, do be good, stay tuned. Go to Spotify and keep an eye out for it this week. 

View From The Couch - 10/Mar/2022

The Unit Cost Is Too High

One of the stranger spectacles of the Russian invasion into Ukraine has been the armoured column stuck on the road to Kyiv. All those vehicles trying to advance and somehow they've managed to get themselves stuck on the road. A lot of it is probably the abysmal logistics from back home in Russia via Belarus, but also the horror of being attacked by modern anti-tank missiles. Even the forces trying to break into Kharkov and the other force pushing towards Odessa seem to have advanced rather slowly, and more to the point have failed to take their objectives. When it gets right down to it, it's been anything but a Blitzkrieg. 

When you see images of Russian tanks all smashed up on a road blocking the progress of tanks to follow, you start to get the picture that this whole World War II sort of image of an advancing armoured division thing is not working at all. The reason it is not working  is of course the modern anti-tank missiles provided by NATO. The UK NLAW for instance is all of $40,000 per unit, but it takes down a tank per missile at a 94% rate. That's roughly 19 out of 20. You take a batting average like that any day. 

A quick scour around Google says each of these T-90A tanks that are being blown up are worth USD 2-3 million to maybe 4.5million. It's hard to tell with any accuracy, but basically you have a multi-million dollar vehicle - kind of priced like a top-shelf Ferrari or Lamborghini - trundling down the road with 3 fully trained guys operating it. 2 Ukrainian soldiers pop up from the top of the building and fire an NLAW - and 19 times out of 20, the tank blows up with the 3 Russian dudes inside. 

The Russians have been putting their forces through this process for 17 days. Even without sanctions and frozen accounts and the rouble collapsing, I don't think Russia can afford to be fighting this war on the ground in this manner. This is possibly why they have resorted to indiscriminate bombings of civilian areas, but apart from being a war crime those bombings and missile strikes to civilian areas do not help get them closer to their objective of taking Ukraine and holding it. 

Too Many Lives Either Which Way

Just how many Russian troops have been killed since the invasion commenced on 22 February is up for debate:

Russia claims that the number of its soldiers killed and injured in the first six days of its invasion of Ukraine is a fraction of what Ukraine has said to be more than 5,000 dead and many more wounded. While neither side’s claims can be verified, even if we rely on official Russian figures, they are proportionally much higher than what the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan over a decade in the 1980s. This raises serious questions about the ability and efficacy of the Russian military under Vladimir Putin in comparison to the forces his Soviet predecessors commanded during the Afghan war.
            <edit>
Moscow has officially put the number of its soldiers killed and injured during the first week of fighting at about 500 and 1,600, respectively. These figures exceed the Soviet loss of about 28 troops on average during a comparable period in Afghanistan. If Russia continues to suffer troop casualties at this rate, and if the war drags on for weeks and months, Russia’s Ukraine performance will fall substantially short of the Soviet operations in Afghanistan.

The Ukrainians think they killed more like 11,000 so far, and that's from 4 days ago. That number is closing in on the 15,000 killed in Afghanistan during the Russian campaign there during the 1980s. 

If indeed the casualties are already at 10,000 out of a force of 190,000, they've lost over 5% in just 2 weeks. This is not some computer game where you can order your forces to keep going even with 50% casualties. At 10,000, somebody is reckoning with the loss of a division's worth of troops. 

Oh, and they lost a Major General in the field. 

Even if the Russian claims were accurate they're doing badly. If the Ukrainian claims are accurate, they're doing disastrously. There doesn't seem to be an interpretation of the casualty numbers that gives a sense that the Russians are doing well in any aspect of this war they started. 

How Long Will The Money Last?

All of this, apart from the simple costs of tanks being blown up by missiles and troops dying n droves, is costing money. It was calculated by some economist in Japan that Russia really only had 2 weeks' worth of money to be running a campaign of this size.  One way we looked at it was that the war was costing Russia $20 billion a day. Russia had $630 billion in sovereign wealth funds, saved from all that oil money and set aside for this very day. A back of the envelop calculation says that in isolation, the campaign can run 30.5 days with that money. This of course totally denies that Russia has other obligations such as running its various other state apparatus as well as the rest of its military. 

16th of March will bring up roughly the 3 week mark of the invasion, and it is also the day that Russia will default on its debts. Now that Russia is cut off from SWIFT, and all the international businesses have headed for the door, and in fact people are clamouring to get out of the country as their businesses are now in a shambles, maybe about now is when the army runs out of food and pay. 

So what will the army do when it finds out there's no pay and there's no food and their heads are getting blown off with these anti-tank missiles? Maybe they'll rewatch some 'Battleship Potemkin' and go topple their government? Am I being optimistic? Yeah maybe. But you tell me what you would do if you were the Russian general in the field getting your ass kicked in Ukraine, under-fed, under-supplied and then your pay stops? Would you politely take an IOU from Vladimir Putin and keep on going about your losing business of getting kicked in the pants?  

Meditations On A Market Gyration

A Note About The Ponziness of Things 

Ponzi schemes seem to be everywhere. Ever since Evergrande started running in to trouble late last year we have been hearing that the entire Chinese property development sector is effectively a gigantic state-sponsored Ponzi scheme. A closer inspection seems to reveal that yes, they take the money coming into pay the money that needs to go out and there's an intricate web of credit and debt that gets created around the developer and their suppliers and it's all very complicated with shadow-banking and political intrigue and local government interference and... yet there's a simple thing going on. The newer customers are paying to cash out the older customers and by any measure, that's how a Ponzi scheme works. 

That's the part that got me thinking about a few other things that are like that. Which ever way you look at it, the crypto market - as opposed to cryptocurrencies themselves is in most part, - is a Ponzi scheme. The next coin is being financed by the next investor coming in, and the earlier holder of the currency exits with cash. The only thing that keeps it from being an outright Ponzi scheme is that you could in practice, lose money in the transaction along the way. You might be inclined to cash out at a price below what you bought in at, for whatever reason. Plenty of people are in that position. And yet, over time the value of Bitcoin has gone up and most other major cryptocurrencies have found an upward trend so it's less than even chance that people are losing money as they cash out. It even begs the question, given how much Bitcoin has gained since its inception, why the hell would you risk getting out?

This is without getting to what a cryptocurrency actually is, which is a bunch of blockchain data without any dividends or payouts. The existence of the currency is as virtual as the off-the-plan apartment that people bought from Evergrande and the other Chinese developers. It's not physically there, and let's face it, can you really use that as collateral? In a way the piece of paper you get for putting your money down to Evergrande to build you an apartment seems a lot more prudentially secure than crypto - but it's still just a piece of paper. 

Faith in Pieces of Paper

That then got me to thinking about the equities market. There's a video out there on Youtube where Peter Lynch explains that the bourse tends to gain an average of 8% a year, so if you did nothing but sit on the index you would double your investment in 8 years or so. Overall, Peter Lynch is talking about a bias towards the inflation of asset value, much like the crypto market as a whole has behaved. And that asset inflation and the way traders buy in and out of it in turn, had me thinking that the equities market as an aggregate was a giant Ponzi scheme. That is to say, it is a kind of scam that depends on the next sucker coming along and putting down a great sum of money for the same bit of paper.  

The trick is what is on the paper. If the paper has no underlying value, it's fraudulent. But value is like what meaning is with Wittgenstein, and totally 'socially-determined'. Worse still, not only does it fluctuate, it is assumed to fluctuate and that is built into its existence. Therefore - as with porn - fraud has the quality of being understood to be what it is only when one sees it. Otherwise it's a slippery slope of ideas, valuations, projections, perceptions and public opinion. You might think bank shares are solid - but that's only because they pay dividends. When is the last time you felt you truly owned a piece of the business on the basis that you owned shares? How solid do you feel partial ownership over a company that doesn't deliver dividends? How confident do you feel about the valuations of a penny-dreadful lithium mining explorer that overnight becomes worth over a dollar a share on the back of a few announcements and estimates? Do you really believe in that valuation of that piece of paper? That is to say the fraudulence of any financial instrument might all be very relative. 

The reductio ad absurdum of this is paper currency. We are all putting trust into piece of paper. It is deeply ingrained. Even the biggest goldbug who fears and hates inflation thinks the paper bills in their bank accounts stand for something. The paper currency represents a divided up bit of our faith that a sovereign government will pay up on its debts. So when we buy financial instruments like shares and bonds and derivatives and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs, read 'contract-for-dickheads'), we're exchanging our faith in the sovereign government to pay up its debts with the fluctuating promise of a payout somewhere down the line, also in the same faith sovereign government promissory notes that we happen to think are money.

But money is important: that's why we call it money. 

The Risk Management Machine

All of the above is just to say we accept money. And because we accept money we accept banks. And because we accept banks we accept bonds. And because we accept bonds, we accept a bourse that transacts the bonds and equities. And because we accept all of those things, we accept the more arcane financial products. And by extension of all these things we accept cryptocurrencies. 

And yet this sits at odds with existence of Ponzi schemes that we accept for years and years and then the draconian sentences are handed out to Ponzi-schemers. Fraud is bad - it goes without saying - but it flies in the face of our acceptance of things like Evergrande and other Chinese developers or Bernie Madoff's amazing 8% returns year after year regardless of market fluctuations. Society seems to let these things go for years on end. 

I think the regulators' collective blindness comes down to a couple of things. One is that while Ponzi/Madoff/Evergande/Chinese Developers were completely unregulated scams, they produced seemingly credible outcomes for their investors over a very long time. If the market as an aggregate was already a Ponzi scheme, any quiet Ponzi scheme operating inside of it looks legit. Even if it is robbing the big game customers and disrupting the monopoly. 

Of course, Ponzi schemes collapse because eventually it runs out of investors with money. What the legal/legitimate market does, is spread out the buying and selling over time so it meets the demands of newcomers to the market. Just when mom-and-dad investors run out of steam, the next generation meme-stonks-bros come along and become new players. The equities markets depends on the new sucker being born every minute - it just can't be every second or every hour. What the aim of the bourse is, is to create an outcome where all participants in good faith have a shot at getting some kind of roughly okay outcome over a long duration. The effect Peter Lynch doesn't arise out of nowhere - it arises out of a collective need for stability that bolsters an abstract system supported by our faith in what money is and how it is valued by everybody else. 

Should we be worried? Probably. But how the hell are we going to unravel the layers and layers of faith in paper that forms the foundation capitalism? 

 

Once In A 1000 Years Rain

100 Years of Ingratitude

So right now as I type this, we've got this big wet thing hovering over Sydney. It flooded South East Queensland, submerged Lismore, traveled down the coast spreading its nurturing-but-destructive rain. The Premier Domicron Perrottet said it was a once in a thousand year rain and you have to ask yourself just what kind of luck puts you in such a meteorological miracle.... unless it's not miraculous but entirely man-made through the inconvenient truth of Global Warming? After all if all those ice sheets melted in Antarctica, where exactly was all that water going to go? 

If you have a long memory you might recall there were once-in-a-hundred-year flood in the 2000s. Some years later there were floods  exactly like it, and people started asking that maybe this was something else. And really that was 11 years ago and I'm writing the same old thing. No growth here - but partly, there's really been not enough movement on the discourse in comparison to the growing threat posed by Global Warming. 

Our politicians are largely garbage. Both sides are gormless skanks for ink and votes but hardly heroic or visionary. As such we have nothing to be thankful for when they some times do the right thing. Even the lauded on the left like Julia Gillard promised she wouldn't do anything about Global Warming as her one election campaign. The rightist government that replaced that Labor government has been busy nailing down the coffin that used to be our future. What have we as a people to be grateful for when our houses wash away or burn down in mega fires caused by Global Warming? What exactly should our gratitude look like ink light of our crappy politicians?

Anyway... It's been a weird summer of most entirely rainy days with a few sunny days spotted in-between ten day stretches of rain. The longest such stretch I could think of was back in 1985 when Sydney rained for 40 days straight but it's not like it rained like that for the rest of that year. Of course, this year's rain is the La Nina effect where we get the rain that normally falls in South America. As such, Chile correspondingly has a drought. I bet they're hating every minute of it. 

All of this reminds us of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' where the town of Macondo suffers a drought for decades, and then this is followed up with non-stop rain for decades. What was once magic realism and hyperbole in fiction is now a permanent state of reality.