What You've Got

When The Love Gets Too Old

Johnny Depp is back in the courts fighting his ex-wife Amber Heard. I don't really keep track of it but the headlines have a way of dancing into view. Based on what I'm reading Amber seems like a real piece of work but also, Johnny was a fool to believe this nut job woman was the right woman for him. On one level, I sort of sympathise because if you're a guy, you kind of let things just happen and trust in yourself to make things right. It's only natural - the extent you can believe in a natural with this kind of thing. 

One of my friends Quincy is getting a divorce. It's suddenly blown up this past week and his wife is talking lawyers and getting papers drawn up. It doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun. Maybe there was a fundamental difference in not just outlook but beliefs as well. It's been crazy with the pandemic and maybe they spent too much time in each other's company and they're both sick of one another. That's not exactly surprising. Fortunately they don't have kids so it's not like they've got that to fight over.

His ex-wife-to-be Rhonda seems pretty relaxed about it all, now that she's getting a divorce. Maybe she's been feeling like this was a long time coming. It's hard to say. Quincy is complaining that she's making him out to be the bad person and that's why they're getting a divorce. Knowing the arguments they've had in the last few years, I can't say that Quincy is without some modicum of guilt in the way things have transpired. They're being mean to one another because they're unhappy with the way things are. What can they do if counselling hasn't worked?

Oh yes, the counselling. Quincy has described it as an opportunity for Rhonda and the counsellor to gang up on him every session. 

"Every session! Like I'm some kind of abusive psycho villain!"

The thing is, Quincy will be out in the wide world in no time, probably looking to hook up with somebody. It's probably for the best anyway because he'd always grumble about how they missed their boat for having kids and all they had to look forward to was old age with cats. Maybe he'll manage to find a woman who can give him kids, even at this stage of his life. I myself would not want to do that, but he actually sounds game. 

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Dinosaur Remains On The Moon

Speaking Of Dinosaurs...

I've had COVID-19. No it wasn't my very own personal extinction event because here I am typing this stuff. 

Anyway, as I started to recover bit by bit, I had this hazy bit of time where I could sit upright but do not much more than watch stuff. And I would be like that only because after 3 days of laying flat on my back in bed, my whole back got sore. So it was better to sit up at the computer and watch something - and that is how I came to watch the entire 3 episodes of 'The Beatles: Get Back'. 

I'll try and write more about it in the coming days but the short version is it's like wading through unedited footage in parts, even though Peter Jackson cut it down from something like 60 hours of raw footage. Because it was Peter Jackson, it could only come down to 8 hours something, which seems to be the duration to which Jackson makes his magnum opuses. 

Do I love it? Parts of it, yes. Do I hate it? Maybe the parts where they interminably work out material and then go in disjointed jams on covers. It's clearly about the extending and exploring the process The Beatles had in creating their material, but at the same time it could've been a punchy 3 hours and we'd be no less enlightened to the vibe. The most moving bit is the rooftop concert because suddenly they come into focus under the glare of the public, and they play really tight after spending 8 hours of the documentary not really getting it together. 

Anyway, I'll write more on it in another entry. For now, I just feel like I've seen the very dinosaur remains on the moon as postulated. 

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Cosmic Orphans

Sunken Dreams In The Black Sea 

The amazing news of the last day or two is how the Russians had to concede they lost their flagship, the Moskva. At first they said they had a fire near the armoury and the ammunition blew up. Then it came up that the Ukrainians managed to successfully launch a missile at the ship and this had caused major damage. The Russians flatly denied it had been attacked, but conceded it had been sunk later on. Which is to say, they were happy to admit they were incompetent over admitting that they had in fact lost their flagship to a country with no significant navy. Their flagship went down without exchanging fire with any other ship, its demise resembling more of a gangland hit than say, Battle of Trafalgar. 

And now the Black Sea Fleet is down to 10 ships. For some reason I thought of Admiral Nikoai Nebogatov. The Russians really suck at this war thing. 

Panspermia

We are all cosmic orphans, if you believe the theory of panspermia. 

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Social Media Turned Us Into Rats

Hungry Rats At That

It's true. Social media turns us into hungry rats. Especially if you pay attention to who is disliking what or how a post is getting responses. Influencers might be the worst variety of social media junky one could become. 

The fractious nature of public discourse following the events of 2016 sort of paints a picture where a whole bunch of us who are on social media are in turn incredibly vulnerable to being manipulated by bad faith actors. When you look at the fact that Facebook essentially allowed itself to be the implement of choice for an outfit like Cambridge Analytica (special emphasis on the Anal there), who were in turn paid by Vladimir Putin to fuck with the UK vote on Brexit and the US Presidential election which led to the Trump Administration, tells you enough about how little social media companies think of the average punter. In some ways they don't even care about the politics or how they look in light of all this as long as Congress can be talked out of regulating social media as a media industry. 

So that's on one side, and here we are tapping on our bloody mobile phone apps liking and laughing and whatever else responses they give, and handing over gobs and gobs of data - and all the while our brains are impoverished by the cumulative experience of just being on social media. It really isn't a fair exchange. They sort of have you over a barrel in the sense that, with some people, social media is the only way with which to keep in touch. It's a frightening world that we've allowed ourselves to build. The conscious architect really balls-ed up that one. 

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Grieving Stages

When My Friend Went Wonky

You don't really notice your friends sliding down into alcoholism. You notice them drinking heavier than at other times, or you might notice them drinking at odd hours that most people would not. Sometimes you might notice they're mixing their alcohol with meds and that might be disturbing. 

By the time my friend was identified with having full-on alcoholism and alcohol dependency, he was well and truly too deep into it. The diagnosis as such came years and years too late. I blamed myself for not saying earlier that their drinking was a problem - but then it would have fallen on deaf ears. Once somebody is deep into that vortex, the last thing they listen to is their friend saying maybe they should lay off the turps. And so you tend to lose your friends to their addiction, even if you want to lend them a hand. I imagine people who lose their friends and family to other things like opioids would be much worse. Interventions don't help because they're addicted to opium and that's the toughest thing out there. 

In the end you lose them and you go through the grieving stages to come to terms with the loss - even if they didn't exactly die. They might still be alive, but you nonetheless journey through the grieving stages. I can be disconcerting as you negotiate your anger and resentment as well as attempts to negotiate with the reality. It really is no fun at all. 

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Is Our Galaxy In A Bubble?

We're Most Certainly In A Housing Bubble, Though 

Well, everything looks to be in a bubble on some level. One of the more encouraging things during all the lockdowns was how science kept progressing. One had to be surprised at how quickly they put together effective vaccines against the original strain. It's a shame the Omicron variant sort of watered down the effectiveness of the vaccines, but it was pretty amazing all the same. If this whole thing had happened a decade earlier, I doubt we would have been able to work fro him so effectively, and we sure wouldn't have been able to come out of the lockdowns with a modicum of confidence without the vaccines. 

In light of that, you take note that maybe the very galaxy we live in, is inside some kind of bubble. The information seems to be a metaphor for our state of being in lockdown. 

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20th Century Rocket Boy

Getting Away With Mass Murder

The news out of Ukraine regarding the reclaimed township of Bucha is beyond the pale.  

In response Russia has claimed is that it's all fake news and we should be examining our own conscience. That one's pretty laughable because I living in country that tears itself apart over whether one its great war heroes might in fact be a psychopathic war criminal. Next to what Russia has been doing in Ukraine, it's arguable our conscience is white as bleached toilet paper before use compared to the shit they're carrying around in their lives in the Russian leadership.

So Joe Biden has since again labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal - and by modern definitions, he would most certainly fit the accusation. The thing is, he's also hiding behind a wall of nukes in one of the most paranoid dictatorships on par with the one in Pyongyang. 

The thing is, we can accuse Putin of war criminality all we like. If we can't bring him to justice, it's all kind of pointless. There are clear signs we still have to negotiate with this sociopath if we want to get to peace, and he's going to push every lever and button to get what he wants to let us get to that peace. Even when we get the peace we want, we would not be able to bring him to justice as things stand. 

So what good is any of it? It just goes to prove that the notion of war criminality is the justice of victors. If you can do it and win, you will get away with it as surely as Vladimir Putin will. 

It's a sucky kind of world, but them's the breaks. 

When The Lights Go Out

Somewhere in the pandemic, Chuck Yeager passed away. He was 97 and its wasn't from COVID-19 so it's not like he was cut down before his time. It was a full and eventful life with plenty of achievements. Frankly, I was a little surprised he was still around even for most of 2020. 

There's still the weird romanticism for the early pioneers of space. It is kind of cool to be a test pilot that straps into a rocket plane and breaks the sound barrier. It's a weirdly optimistic moment in history, even as the Cold War hangs nuclear weapons over everybody's heads. If you want nihilism, there was plenty of that to go around in the 1980s, but a generation before that, there was still this buzz for the technological achievements and accomplishments of these figures. Chuck Yeager was somebody you learned about in books, if nothing else to get to put a name and a face on the Bell X-1.

And just like that with his passing another piece of 20th century sort of fades out of view. We're already 1/5th of the way into the 21st Century, and in several years' time it would be a quarter of the way in. The 20th Century fades from the rear view every day, but it seems worthwhile to remember the old excitement of that glistening age of early rocketry. It was a very different kind of ball game to Elon Musk and Space X. 

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Running With Scissors

Once Upon A Time in Sydney... 

Back in the 1980s when we didn't have anything like the internet, we really had to make our own entertainment. This is why we formed bands or formed up in groups to go watch movies together or played Dungeons and Dragons. It's what we did in those days and it wasn't even particularly cool.  

We were probably an earnest, callow bunch in most respects, and we seemed to do a lot of driving around at night.  Looking back on it, it seems incredibly dumb but also quite energetic. We were full of beans and we'd drive around, just cruising and talking about things - deep and meaningful things as we used to call them - and generally kill time waiting to be entertained in some way. I think about it now and most of my memories of those times are night time jams and conversations and games and pizza parlours. 

Phil, who is a respected doctor now, used to have this Alfa Sud. He knew how to drive it too because he grew up in one of those wealthy families that let their kids race go-karts so he had this racer's instinct for taking corners hard. I remember sitting in the passenger seat as he drove me home in the middle of the night with nobody else on the road, the Alfa Sud engine roaring through the leafy 'burbs. It was pretty anti-social when I think about it now; but also a kind of quintessential Gen-X experience.  

Phil looks after dying people now in palliative care. He sure doesn't drive like that today. 

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Making Meat On Mars

Perils Of Space Colonisation

The lockdown thing was very much like living in your very own Biosphere 2 experiment. And pretty much true to form we mostly stayed in with the occasional 'cheat' moment where we gave ourselves excuses to go to the shops. Otherwise, there was a lot of Doomscrolling headlines. Put it down to the pandemic and watching markets go haywire. 

I think I also watched a lot of 'The Expanse'. That's a show that really makes you reconsider whether you really want to go outing deep space just to make a mundane living. I mean, being an astronaut's only great if you get the celebrity, as amply demonstrated by the Mercury Seven in 'The Right Stuff'. By the time everybody is in space doing that space suit EVA thing and living on microwaved meal packs, there's not going to be anywhere near the glamour going around - but the food is likely going to really suck. 

In light of that you have to feel for the future space explorers eating stuff that tastes totally disconnected from what food is on their native planet. Meat, would be an absolute luxury unless you had the technology to weave it out of simple carbon compounds. Sure enough if you Doom Scroll long enough you can find this story about an Israeli outfit trying to synthesis meat, in preparation for the day colonists will be on Mars. They've even done early tests in space. 

It's amazing what can be done when people put their minds to it.  

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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Justice For Lewis

A Year Later I'm Still Upset

Some things are just too awful to let pass. That's how I feel about the mega-fires that visited our land in the summer of 2019-2020. Combined with the unpreparedness, the wilful ignorance of the Federal Government, runaway heatwaves, under-investment in infrastructure for dealing with mega-fires, and you had a catastrophic failure of leadership that manifested as a total, unmitigated disaster. 

And it's one thing if idiot Queenslanders voted for Clive Palmer's mob as a 'hedge' and found themselves with this terrifyingly incompetent government were the ones getting burned out of their houses. Instead it was innocent wildlife was getting hurt and killed in these fires. You can blame the idiot humans who voted for the idiot government, but the wildlife is blame-free - and yet they bore the burnt of the consequence.

I'm not some Animal Liberationist nut job - but even I can see how disproportionately the piling up of bad decisions and their horrible consequences are falling upon those without the power to withstand it, or change it, move away from it, or voice their concerns. 

When you see footage of people rescuing wildlife amid the chaos and turmoil of the fires, you have to ask yourself, how exactly did we get to this point? When will the comeuppance visit themselves upon those who are ostensibly responsible for this land, the idiot politicians? Why do the animals have to lose their dwellings for the idiot politicians' bad decisions? Why can't the idiot politicians lose their houses and family and habitat? 

There's really no justice on that account. There ought to be. I'll leave it at that. 

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Screams of Burning Koalas

 Can't Express Fully How Angry I Still Am

Suffice to say the accounts of what happened last summer in Australia were harrowing as they were bewildering. Harrowing because so many lives were lost, not just humans but much wildlife as well. Some put th e figures at 1 billion. It might have been conservative. It was also bewildering because the Australian government's preparation and response to the Firesign general were all too slow, inadequate and mostly laughable if the tragedy unfolding weren't so dire. 

Mallacoota on New Years Eve sounded like Hell had landed and started dancing on everybody's heads. 

People spent the night in the waters off the pier, up to their necks in the waves as they watched the sky glow red and black embers fell and they could hear screams of burning koalas from the burning tree tops. It's not way to bring in the new year. People talk about how bad 2020 was in relation to the COVID-19 but make no mistake, from Day 1, it was a crap year. 

So yeah, I guess I had to write a song about that. One year on, I'm still livid at the Global Warming Denialism of this Federal Government. I mean yes if we changed out of fossil fuels, it would be a hit the GDP and the wallet of people like Gina and Twiggy Forrest. But honestly, they can wear that pay cut - and they won't exactly starve or lose their houses. Seriously, what price our planet? 

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Gladys The Koala Killer

Amongst Other Terrible Things She Does

Our Premier, the Hon. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is an odd duck, even in the ranks of female politicians who toil in the ranks of conservatives. She must be good at whatever it is politicians do to get ahead of the pack because let's face it, she's got the weird woggy surname, and a visage that is most unlike that of say a TV breakfast host intros country. She seems to be nice on some level, compassionate, even. You wouldn't want to be the guy wagging a finger at her telling her her policies stink, lest people think you're the bully. 

And yet her policies make you want to turn to eco-terrorism. She would countenance the building of these terrible tollways, and chopping down native forests, or putting a coal mine in the middle of a water catchment. Above all, she would name a policy that seems friendly towards the preservation of Koalas but is in fact incentivises for more environmental destruction, not less. It's crazy stuff. And somehow the voting public does not bat a mascara-ed eyelash. We keep going with this insane party in charge, with Gladys at the helm. 

Because of all that, she has earned the moniker, Gladys the Koala Killer. Is it fair? More than plenty! We live in terrible times. She is contributing her part to that terror. 

Thus it seemed appropriate to at least discuss this by writing a song about her being Gladys, the Koala Killer, destroyer of trees, water tables, and the pristine environment of our bushland, amongst other horrible deeds.  

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Lucky Country

Also, The Dumb-Luck Country

I don't want to badmouth my own country but a year on from the massive bushfires, there are days where you just draw a deep sigh.  

When one reflects on everything that happened in Australian politics in the last decade, you're left with a profound sense of lost time. It's all time that could have been spent on doing things better - certainly better than the internecine party-politic-infighting that was a feature of the decade. If the ALP burnt itself out on the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd imbroglio, the Liberal Party regaled with no less than a Turnbull-Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison turn of leadership spills. 6 Prime Minsters in the decade shows the country was in political strife, most over the issue of Climate Change. 

Needless to say the decade was punctuated by an exclamation mark in the massive bushfires last summer and still there is no indication the culture wars over Global Warming has come to an end. There were many villains in the story, but if there was one traitor to this country that deserves special mention, it must be Andrew Robb who sold out this country from his position in government and now receives a fat salary from our burgeoning enemy China. 

All that said, our country lurches on without a policy or apology. just bumbling around trying to find a fig leaf to put over the glaringly obvious absence of a credible climate policy. Again, I won't go into the idiocy of the situation we find ourselves, but it has to beside that making the future precarious through the misapplication of partisan politics is the height of stupidity. As such, it is inescapable to understand that the government we have is a execrable mess. 

So, what exactly is this luckiness we credit ourselves when we must live with such stupidity that undercuts that luck? 

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This Is The Shit You Voted For

I Hope You're Pleased As Punch

It's weird that this comes out the week after the US elections but, it wasn't planned that way. It's a happy coincidence - and honestly, I'm okay with Biden winning. If anything the shit referred to in the song is more in line with the 4 year misrule of the Trump Administration which ignored all the warnings about Climate Change. Indeed, I'm really talking about the 2019 Australian election where the Morrison Government was returned, only to promptly ignore expert warnings about the drought and the catastrophic summer weather that led to the massive fires up and down the east coast. 

I mean, what were people thinking really? In the olden days I would've come on tooth's blog and vented but of course nobody is persuaded by some blog telling them they are fuckheads for voting in a conservative government that doesn't believe in Global Warming. Instead, they pretty much need to lose their farms and houses to 40m tall walls of fire roaming the landscape, burning everything to the ground. 

As such the only thing left for me is to write a song about it and stick it out there, commemorating the abject stupidity of the electorate that opted to return this miserable, intellectually stunted, execrable government to office. For indeed they are shit and this is what they voted for. It's a sobering feeling every election to find that at least 48% of your fellow countrymen are willing to burn the planet to make a buck and think that is the most important thing, followed by cutting deficits (or some other piece of economic nonsense). It's amazing how they win more often than not and give us the shit we need not ought to have had.

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Fuck You Adani

 We're Not Kidding, Fuck You Adani

There's really no need explain this one. 

The planet's headed deeper into climate crisis and there's the Adani mine going ahead in Queensland. They're doing all kinds of shady things and they will stoop to anything to silence those who are opposed to this catastrophic mine going ahead. 

Honestly, there's really no symptom of the evil of crony capitalism in this world than the people who make excuses for this mine to go ahead. It makes no economic sense, the company gets subsidies it doesn't deserve and there's no discernible good in digging up more coal to be burnt. The best form of carbon sequestration is not to dig up the stuff to be burnt at all. 

Hence the need for this song. Seriously, fuck these people.

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Annastacia's Coal Mine

A Quick RIP Eddie Note

I feel I ought to write something briefly about the passing of Eddie Van Halen. The outpouring of grief is palpable around the world. Unlikely people have come forward to offer up their condolences - like the Cabinet Secretary of the Government of Japan who says he is the same age as Eddie and feels the loss deeply. We're all devastated by the loss, but I've felt for a long while now that this day would come, sooner or later.

Maybe it was the photo he shared from his treatment in Switzerland where he looked like a shrivelled gnome. It was sad and a horrible indicator that he was losing that battle. After all, who goes to expensive specialists in Switzerland except those in desperate straits or the incurably crazy? 

As such I find myself feeling a weird blank sorrow more than a mordant grief or gargantuan attack of sadness. He wasn't well for a long while now - we should have known it was bad. 

May he rest in peace.  

I'll try and post something a bit more detailed later in the week. 

Bad Decisions Writ Large

This is a song about the stupid decision to proceed with the Adani Mine. In times like this where forests around the world are going up in flames, it seems cavalier-stupid to want to continue digging up ever more fossil fuels to satisfy an imaginary need that won't be of use even in 5years' time. 

There's not much more to it than that. 

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Pay Your Fucking Taxes, Stupid Billionaires

Absconded Capital in the 21st Century 

When I was a kid I asked my economist father if they put all the money in the world in one place and divided it up with everybody on the planet (I must have been a nascent communist), whether would all be reasonably well off or not. My father replied there wasn't such wealth in the world to make everybody well off, let alone wealthy. We would all get about a month's pay and then the money would be spent. 

Of course, that's a long time ago and  since then we've learned through such things as the Panama Papers that global wealth locked up and hidden away from the prying eyes of tax offices of various governments is such that it would make us all rather well off, if not wealthy, if redistributed globally. Thomas Piketty's big book essentially underlined how this terrible state came to be.  

The drain of wealth out of nations via Tax Haven has got to be one of the worst injustices going around. The fact that that capital largely does not work - i.e. put to good use in building factories and towards production and instead sits around on government bonds and debt structures around the world exacerbates the various injustices threefold: once for the tax not paid, once for the misapplication of capital, and once again for the lack of debt forgiveness that condemns the third world to its third world existence. You know, those world vision starving kids and all that, is a side effect of this money sitting on all those bonds.  You gotta laugh when the charities come knocking on your door, that they expect piling up your $5 will somehow counteract the mountain of bonds.  

While I don't believe in a radical redistribution wealth like I did when I was 5, I do sort of think the least the billionaire classes can do is pay their fucking fair share of taxes. 

...and so, to this song! 

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