Blundell Philosophy of Science Human Health New Neuroscience Economy
@karli_moon_ writes: “Last night I was abused by a racist lady at a science week event. She was yelling at me that nothing was ever written down about Aboriginal people so they aren’t scientists & also ‘always was always will be’ can’t be proven. I’m still in shock.”
Mental Health Services in Australia are what again ?
Now who’s upset, some Post Fact lunatic in the Australian Government or Mr Musk, Sir??
Here I went again. The first time was for suggesting really politely but admittedly with malice aforethought that Senator Rand Paul – a mining on Alpha Centauri chap – Sweet Jesus do some of these tree-biting loonies know how to get up John Blundell’s nose⁉️ – should do away with himself. Don’t ask me what the second suspension was for (February 2022) – it’s just too mindlessly TS Eliot HOLLOW MEN b-o-r-i-n-g ok? ..this time my offence was to state that Gina Hancock should be ignored and dismissed out of hand for her gravely ill-advised free advertising for Westinghouse Nuclear (also their utterly useless and totally redundant 1980s era $1.5 million Spinning Reserve Gas-burner Machines (replaced by GRID-FORMING inverters and the array of new Alternating Current system maintenance protection diversion instantaneous-restoration and supplementation from now 2-4 hour industry-scale batteries and other electronic services..
Life is now desperately too short for public relations crap and tittle-tattle and we’ve ALL got to get on with the grown-ups’ stuff as you good people know only too well.
Oh Elon. oh Bilbo !
… As he came into the window It was the sound of a crescendo He came into her apartment He left the bloodstains on the carpet She ran underneath the table He could see she was unable So she ran into the bedroom She was struck down It was her doom
… Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
… Annie, are you okay? Will you tell us that you’re okay? There’s a sign in the window That he struck you – a crescendo, Annie He came into your apartment He left the bloodstains on the carpet Then you ran into the bedroom You were struck down It was your doom
… Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
… You’ve been hit by You’ve been hit by a smooth criminal Ow!
… Ow!
… Aw! Annie, are you okay? (I don’t know) Will you tell us that you’re okay? (I don’t know) There’s a sound at the window (I don’t know) Then he struck you, a crescendo Annie? (I don’t know) He came into your apartment (I don’t know) Left bloodstains on the carpet (I don’t know why, baby) And then you ran into the bedroom (help me) You were struck down It was your doom Annie (dag gone it)
… Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
… You’ve been hit by You’ve been hit by a smooth criminal
Charlemagne – extraordinarily useful Mastermind Quiz entrant’s Google Alphabet note appears below (1)Ghislane Maxwell, Media Magnate’s daughter, Rock Spider & a President Good Old Pastor Shouty (2)
John Blundell
Economy Health New Neurolinguistics Philosophy of Science
(2) I just thought people might have forgotten this stalwart for federation demolition (as evidently gleefully and ALARMINGLY imitated under the dead hands and tin ears of the Anthony Albanese Government) and getting stuck into those Squinty 👀s, Mozzlemms and stuff, for old God
Thanks to Ketan Joshi whose graph outing the BS of big #oil’s #CCS ploy got me and the whole Climate & Capital Media team thinking about the dangers of the many false shiny objects posing as #climate solutions. Here’s our “Ten climate ‘solutions’ that don’t help – Many shiny new “green” ideas do more to preserve fossil fuels than to replace it.” We start off with the mother of all distractions Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and wrap with the endlessly distracting, Traditional fission nuclear power.
See what you think? And what did we miss?
Project Drawdown Tim Buckley International Energy Agency (IEA) Fortescue Future Industries ExxonMobil Shell
My thanks to the preparers of this authoritative presentation.
It’s collaboration – economists will immediately realise the absolute antithesis of what was actually unabashedly called Competition Policy in the Milton Friedman 1990s – or a ‘hell-on-earth’ neoliberalism collapse and meltdown of human society now.
John BLUNDELL Neurolinguistics Health and Philosophy of Science South Australia’s thanks are conveyed to all contributors in climate education and this Ten “Solutions” article from Climate & Capital Team..
Professor Dame Angela McLean DBE FRS Government Chief Scientific Adviser ( GCSA ).
Many shiny new “green” ideas do more to preserve fossil fuels than to replace it
The world continues to face a major obstacle to addressing the climate crisis: deliberate distraction with a proliferation of new whiz-bang technologies and ideas. Some are well-intentioned, some are strategic, some delusional, but most are outright greenwash to justify the continued use of fossil fuels and to distract from the inevitable move to less expensive renewable energy.
Historically, this innovation and testing would have been carried out at research universities funded by government grants with a commitment to finding the best and most useful solutions. Today, much of this work is sponsored by individual businesses or sectors — notably, by coal, oil and gas companies.
An entire suite of bad ideas is being pushed by a fossil fuel industry determined to slow global efforts to decarbonize. This week the Climate & Capital team looks at some of these “shiny objects” distracting the world from forming effective climate solutions.
Chevron’s Gorgon Project. Source: Chevron
1. The mother of all distractions: Carbon Capture and Storage
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has long been touted by the fossil fuel sector as THE answer to their enormous greenhouse gas emissions problem. CCS (not to be confused with direct air capture of carbon) involves collecting CO2 from power plants and then injecting it underground, or using it for some other industrial purpose.
Sources like Saudi Arabian negotiatorsand former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson argue for developing carbon capture technology while pushing back against efforts by the G20 industrialized nations to phase out fossil fuels.
An entire suite of bad ideas is being pushed by a fossil fuel industry determined to slow global efforts to decarbonize.
Forget the hype. This is the reality of the contribution of CCS to reduce emissions today: virtually nil.
Consider this simple chart created by energy researcher Ketan Joshi comparing emissions generated by gas and oil giants (black bars) to those avoided by relying on CCS technology (green) and another questionable solution, “carbon offsets” (purple).
Not convinced? Consider there are 196 CCS projects globally “in the pipeline,” with 30 in operation, 11 under construction, 153 in development and two suspended. The carbon capture capacity of all of these projects is estimated to be only around 242 million tons per year. The International Energy Agency (IEA) sayscapacity needs to reach 1.6 billion tons per year for the technology to be effective.
Attempts to build power plants using CCS are also numbingly expensive and, so far, have all but failed. Oil giant Chevron recently acknowledged its flagship CCS project built in 2017 off the northwest coast of Australia is operating at just one-third of its capacity because of problems at the facility.
Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance and contributor to Climate & Capital, says Chevron’s admissions are an indictment of the technology: “Dismal operating performance since [the plant] opened six years ago shows the technology has little future.” Buckley notes that most carbon sequestration worldwide is “aimed at extracting more oil and gas from reservoirs.”
Iron ore magnate and passionate climate solution technology investor Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest lashed out at CCS recently, saying it’s a failed technology and a ploy created by oil and gas companies so they can continue extracting fossil fuels, In short, an industry “just waiting for the next idiot to come along.”
Bottom line: CCS is an expensive, ineffective technology being used to extend the useful life of fossil fuels, and masquerading as a climate change solution.
Time to move on.
Denbury Inc. pipeline. Source: Denbury
2. Deceptively distracting: Dirty hydrogen branded as “clean” by its proponents
Hydrogen, when used in a fuel cell, is clean, producing only water as a byproduct. But don’t be fooled. The so-called “clean hydrogen” – we will call it by its true name ‘dirty hydrogen’ — is being promoted by the oil industry to keep burning toxic methane gas.
According to the IEA, 6% of global natural gas and 2% of global coal now goes to hydrogen production, a threefold increase since 1975. And that is expected to keep rising. Dirty hydrogen is an anti-climate solution. Production of hydrogen, the IAE says, is responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of CO2 emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined.
Carbon capture and dirty hydrogen forms the bedrock of ExxonMobil’s strategy to extend the lifespan of fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel industry would have you believe that the solution to this is also, you guessed it, CCS! The world’s largest non-government oil producer, ExxonMobil, has said it needs carbon capture in order to develop methane-fueled hydrogen.
Carbon capture and dirty hydrogen forms the bedrock of ExxonMobil’s strategy to extend the lifespan of fossil fuels. Last month it paid $4 billion to acquire Denbury Inc., which uses the largest carbon dioxide pipeline network in the U.S. to extract more petroleum from existing oil fields.
And surprise, surprise, Exxon’s purchase could not have happened without new carbon dioxide tax subsidies from the U.S Inflation Reduction Act.
“CCS is an enabler of hydrogen until such time as we’re able to cost-effectively produce green hydrogen,” according to the company.
Source: Shutterstock
3. Net nothing: 2050 Net Zero targets
If there is one blindingly obvious conclusion from this summer’s disastrous weather, it is that we are running out of time. This calls into question conventional wisdom to rely on squishy climate targets to create a “net zero” balance of releasing new carbon in the atmosphere with “sequestering,” or taking other carbon out of the atmosphere.
Net zero was always a compromise idea hashed out at the last minute at COP21 in Paris in 2015. It represented progress, yes, because it got nations to agree to a roadmap to reduce carbon emissions and send a signal that fossil fuels were over.
Sure it is impressive that almost two thirds of the 2,000 largest publicly traded companies in the world have now made corporate commitments, according to Net Zero Tracker. But so what? So far the result seems to have a perverse effect of delaying climate action by creating targets so far in the future that present corporate leadership cannot be held accountable for ever meeting those targets. A recent white paper “Avoid greenwashing and get the claims right” by the Finnish start-up Compensate – Getting the Claims Right — says corporate climate claims such as carbon neutrality, climate neutrality, and net zero structure “while useful” offer little transparency in how these terms are defined.
Source: Unsplash
4. BS: Chevron’s “renewable” cow dung
Chevron has a great idea and is pumping millions of dollars of advertising (in Semafor, The New York Times, etc.) to promote “renewable natural gas” (RNG). It is “renewable” because it uses cow manure. Seriously. They call the process “anaerobic digestion.”
Not only is it not really “renewable” in the same sense as wind, solar or hydroelectric power, it will have no real impact on global warming. Why? It is wildly expensive to make. RNG is five times as expensive as traditional fossil-produced gas.
Chevron markets it as a means of reducing “life cycle carbon intensity” (another meaningless concept made up by the oil and gas marketers) “while meeting the world’s growing energy needs.” The company says it’s all “part of Chevron’s portfolio of technologies and solutions.”
Bottom line: “Renewable natural gas” is Chevron PR — an effort to give their business a green veneer while staving off regulations that would curtail gas consumption.
Source: INDYCAR
5. Silly: Renewable race fuel
Shell is currently working with INDYCAR to develop “100% renewable” fuel for race cars on the track at the Indianapolis 500. The fuel is largely ethanol derived from sugarcane waste in Brazil, resulting in a 60% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions for the event (compared to 2005), according to Shell.
If it’s true that this fuel “is going to be used by all the cars on the grid” in the future, as the company’s promotional videosuggests, that would mean Shell could phase out most of its gasoline-based fossil fuel business, right?
Racing fuels like RNG are just one of many promotional gimmicks used by fossil fuel producers to distract consumers from the problems of continued oil and gas production.
But imagine scaling sugarcane production to meet global demand for 100% ethanol “for all cars” – an effort that would most certainly accelerate deforestation in places like the Amazon, worsening global warming.
Racing fuels like RNG are just one of many promotional gimmicks used by fossil fuel producers to distract consumers from the problems of continued oil and gas production.
Source: Exxon
6. Embarrassing: Exxon’s Ill-fated green algae gas
Here’s another one. You may have seen the Exxon ad featuring earnest looking scientists as “energy farmers” with the company claiming it is harvesting algae to produce “renewable biofuels.”
After more than a decade, and an investment of $350 million on the project and another $60 million on advertising, Exxon dropped the initiative late last year saying, “We need to get on the deployment curve for carbon capture for hydrogen [and] biofuels. Algae still needs some more work,” Exxon told Bloomberg. Coincidently, a few months later, Exxon spent $4 billion for a carbon capture pipeline (see above).
Why did Exxon and other oil companies drop the algae solution? It’s a no brainer. Spending billions on a “renewable” project like Denbury prolongs the use of fossil fuels while cooking up an algae alternative does the opposite. An algae-based biofuels, Exxon says, had not been able to generate enough energy to compete with highly subsidized fossil fuels — and has no carbon capture subsidy benefits.
ADNOC Ruwais refinery. Source: ADNOC
7. Most intense distraction: “Least carbon intensive” oil and gas from Saudi Arabia and the UAE
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are competing to be known as the “least carbon intensive” producers of fossil fuel. The goal? Help solve the climate crisis? Of course not. It’s to monopolize oil production and eliminate “dirtier” competitors like pesky Texan natural gas frackers or tar sands oil producers from Oman and Canada.
First they paid for a dubious study that “proved” the world’s second-largest oil producer had the most climate-friendly oil and gas because it emitted less methane, and required less energy to extract and process. Such hair splitting is also being used by the UAE to justify increasing annual oil and gas production to 7 billion barrels by 2030 from 5 billion barrels now.
It’s why, says UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE is a “responsible supplier of energy,” and is needed to “continue playing this role for as long as the world is in need of oil and gas.”
We’d suggest that that time is rapidly running out.
Source: Saudi Middle East Green Initiatives
9. Mostannoying: A 50 billion tree planting project
In 2021, Saudi Arabia unveiled plans to plant 10 billion trees at home and another 40 billion across the Middle East. Yes, 50 billion! Planting trees is good — they provide shade, habitat, erosion control, water retention, carbon capture and more. But massive tree planting projects have often fallen short of their promises. Failure to keep trees alive is one major problem. Massive, single species tree planting projects have messed with biodiversity and died off from insect infestations, fires and drought.
Big tree projects tend to be a cover for doing business as usual. Accounting and reporting on the success of tree planting projects has proven dubious. A report by Oxfam says using land for tree planting to achieve carbon neutrality is “almost impossible” and would require all the farmland on earth to be forested.
Also a challenge, Saudi Arabia doesn’t have the labor force to plant trees with millions of migrant workers from poorer countries filling its much needed blue collar ranks. Nor does it have the water: more than half of the kingdom’s drinking water already comes from desalination plants.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, has announced plans to increase crude oil production and export through 2025. We don’t know whether the Saudis’ planned 50 billion trees might offer shade across the region one day decades from now. But the plan sure does provide PR cover for ramping up oil production.
Source: Georgia Power
10. Endlessly distracting: Traditional fission nuclear power
If you have seen the film Oppenheimer, you can understand that nuclear energy has challenges. The only thing that is more terrifying than going extinct from the climate crisis is going extinct by nuclear annihilation.
When it comes to cost and speed to market there is no competition between solar and nuclear. Unless subsidized, nuclear always loses on both counts.
No matter how hard the nuclear industry tries, it is impossible to separate nuclear fission and nuclear bombs. Nuclear energy from uranium or plutonium have always been “atoms for peace” and the core fuel for thermonuclear bonds.
That means as long as fission nuclear plants are built, there will be concerns about nuclear proliferation, how to store highly radioactive waste, and the potential for nuclear meltdown. To wit: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and now, the wartime threat to Ukraine’s nuclear reactors.
Ok, let’s say you waved that all away with your magical wand. Now there is the ugly economics of nuclear power. When it comes to cost and speed to market there is no competition between solar and nuclear. Unless subsidized, nuclear always loses on both counts.
This week, for example, the first new nuclear power plant in decades in the U.S. is now at full power at Georgia Power Co. after years of delays and billions in cost overruns. Total cost for the plant is $25 billion — 75% more than the original estimated pricetag of $14.3 billion. Compare that to new solar development of a similar size: The Phoebe Solar Project in Texas, now under construction, is projected to cost $397 million and to take less than one year to bring online.
Unless you are a government with no profit incentive, don’t bet on nuclear.
Our team aims to lead in the vibrant conversation taking place among entrepreneurs, climate scientists, investors, NGOs, policymakers and corporate leaders around climate change. What’s driving that discussion is a shared realization that building a sustainable future is both a moral imperative and an economic opportunity with potentially exponential returns for our portfolios and most importantly, our planet.
With our thanks to Adam Tooze the new-era sub stack activist ≈ Dedicated World History Person awake and not in the death-grip of psychotic headbanging Pollyanna-ism.
Monolithic academic NEOCLASSICAL folkloric conversational #Science… “how freshwater from the ice sheet might impact the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its marine ecosystems is one of Antarctica’s best kept secrets. Because the continent’s subglacial hydrology plays a key role in moving that water, Siegfried also emphasized the ice sheet’s connection to the rest of the planet. “It’s not just the ice sheet we’re talking about,” Siegfried said. “We’re really talking about a water system that is connected to the whole Earth system” …is your enemy, your children’s enemy, your grandchildren’s enemyand will with even 10 bn. tonnes of fossil fuel 🔥-ing per yearguarantee you have NO great grandchildren(1)
That’s “what ever you want in the future is a commercial space industry not a government space industry,” goes this fat shiny Donald Trump fuck.
Please GRASP dear Australian reader that the Anthony Albanese government granted $4m to Seppo shysters to survey for minerals way up in the sky, another $1.2mn. to some mob called Space Agency to oversee this whole bloody Apocalypse Now Donald Trump/ Narrendra Modi moonshots charade and that the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) is a thing (2)
Here was X-Twitter’s @greeneconomyact this morning 3/8/2023: ‘UH-OH here we go, Southern Australians. Severe winter weather approaching WA – note this @weatherzone report out of the @MonashUni Climate Studies group is 20 hours old weatherzone.com.au/news/severe-wi… Getting complacent huh? MMGH a Northern Hemis thang huh. Dear goodness have we got news for you‼️’
“In a new paper titled “Systematic review of the actual emissions reductions of carbon offset projects across all major sectors” carried out in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, we estimate that only 12% of the offset certificates purchased lead to actual reductions in emissions.” From the hard-working-for-humanity Ketan Joshi1 in the last week of July 2023 – do Weather Systems and Global Heating you will know of Ketan ✅ – do life-on-earth in any personal capacity but the interior of some hermetically-sealed (whoops) plastic bubble and you will have known the last week of July 2023 ✅ – On a quick past-work review last night I was reminded – three days I think I recall short of the 29th anniversary of the worst early Spring excessive solar radiation assault – two years after the Montreal Protocol – an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion – on the bare skin of my arms in since my birth – that three months ago here (on Billionaire Monkeys with Typewriters ) I referred to “sulphurous dust storms and boiling seas” as where we were headed in the finance world’s Long Term (that is the mid-to late 2030s and not last week for Christ’s Sake. I wrote about the BS faux pas on @greeneconomyact/ GREEN ECONOMISTProgressives.. I’ve also written appealing to Australian liberal centrist MPs Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall to never just read stuff & always reflect on the undesirability of coming across to largely disconsolate and certainly unhappy feeling-cheated audience or public as a goose.
And please don’t address the ubiquitous idiot insapient head-banger tree-biting rich as though they need childish or fantastic imagery to prick their consciences – it’s a false impression you may have picked up from the ACCPA & Hillsong that these guys actually purr & coo when you patronise the shitter out of them with baby talk – they’re actually grinding their teeth and working out how to kill you like blessed Clare Nowland of Yallambee Lodge in Cooma NSW on the 24th of May..
..in the Northern Hemisphere by Internet communications sure – as remote from us as can be (chortle/ guffaw/ fart loudly) but wait, pause and listen, because with Australian newsmedia at the mercy of oil, gas,☢️ and Flying Motorcars-🚀-✈️-🤠 neokeynesian econometrics ghouls, tools and madmen, with journalists under pain of instant dismissal, demotion, or being put in charge of some ludicrous ‘Come on Down’ show, or a Books & Writing show in a post-fact era of conversational masculinist vaguely coercive romance, subtle overtones of menace, grunty bits, adventure, exploration, bushcraft, discovery, domestic vegan recycling/ re-using/ refusing/ refurbishing million-dollar homes plus f…tons of functionally useless & ecologically hostile Science Technology Engineering & Maths (3) or a “Big Ideas” show for Public Intellectuals (it means podcasters, pop psychologists, advertising copy-writers, business grifters, evangelical spinouts & wtf Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point bad mechanomorphic metaphors that actually refer to the awesome process of gathering Mark Zuckerberg Likes and Love Hearts in a BIGLY RUSH OOOWH Influenced/ ers) or overnight talkback radio..
Most would have heard nothingof alarming 18-19°C maxima across Tasmania (+ NZ + southern South America + Namibia) in the second week of July or of an apparently disrupted ski season at Perisher (eastern Australia Great Dividing Range) last week.
Go easy on the mathematics, it’s very good fun if you do the right kind – not particularly letter-conjunctor-number coding but what might well be called the Small or 2 – 5 part Language Model – or more accurately & usefully (as we shall have to remind ourselves daily in our futures of the micro-macro dialectic of conscious meaning in the new world of deliberative ideation-empowered action that may enable the realisation of any @UN sustainable development goals) the Micro LM – valid interlocked read-in-any-order sequentia – no time travel, black holes, sub-atomic particles, no Adenosine 5′-tetrahydrogen triphosphate (4), not even the Einstein theorem about light, velocity, mass and energy, or any mental meanderings in the particular or the general (macro) – more mental agility and coherence than plodding calculation; by computer with what is now McLuhan’s virtual Gutenberg Galaxy in as much as it’s an inexplicably vast, unbelievably energy-profligate galaxy-scale accumulation of letter-conjunctor-number or nucleoside triphosphates and stuff – or indeed any gross accumulation of objects – or money – you got that: we need to talk about the macro..
Yes, me advertising my neurocognitive wares again. Unabashed. Bent on worldwide re-imagination. This is it, the mental crash-tackle on academic neoclassicism with a special note of thanks to Professor Alfred Tarski of the State University of New York Buffalo not 🦬 1908. – inspired by the interdependent inextricably intertwined un-particularisable quantum relations 2 – 5 set dynamism that I think Niels Bohr grasped. at least intuitively.
Here a famous study in ripe high-sugar apple stem tissue breakdown senescence – it figures, of course One of Southern Europe’s Mathematicians: Just look at those stressed-out eyes kids….What is succinct and apposite? ..SOUGHT TO INTERPRET THE ENTIRE PHYSICAL WORLD IN TERMS OF NUMBERS
The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of souls”, which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have also devised the doctrine of musica universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematicalequations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. Scholars debate whether Pythagoras developed the numerological and musical teachings attributed to him, or if those teachings were developed by his later followers, particularly Philolaus of Croton. Following Croton’s decisive victory over Sybaris in around 510 BC, Pythagoras’s followers came into conflict with supporters of democracy, and Pythagorean meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras may have been killed during this persecution, or he may have escaped to Metapontum and died there.
Our readers will forgive me for relaying and parlaying text about Pythagoras (he 2.5k years ago on the other side of the world) from @Wilkipedia in the context of their striving to understand philosophy and crazy-arsed enlightenment/ romance/ industrial era metaphysics – every idea humans conceive or dream at the rate of arguably 10 per second – much slower when asleep – because we’re really being driven to oblivion by neoliberal no-government free criminal enterprise lunatics and need the ammunition & rational argument to eradicate these arseholes and dreaming is of course a divine recharging of the human fighting spirit. – Healing takes it’s time. Every night. Nice.
In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher (“lover of wisdom”)[c] and that he was the first to divide the globe into five climatic zones. Classical historians debate whether Pythagoras made these discoveries, and many of the accomplishments credited to him likely originated earlier or were made by his colleagues or successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras was related to mathematics and that numbers were important, but it is debated to what extent, if at all, he actually contributed to mathematics or natural philosophy.
Pythagoras influenced Plato, whose dialogues, especially his Timaeus, exhibit Pythagorean teachings. Pythagorean ideas on mathematical perfection also impacted ancient Greek art. His teachings underwent a major revival in the first century BC among Middle Platonists, coinciding with the rise of Neopythagoreanism. Pythagoras continued to be regarded as a great philosopher throughout the Middle Ages and his philosophy had a major impact on scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Pythagorean symbolism was used throughout early modern European esotericism, and his teachings as portrayed in Ovid‘s Metamorphoses influenced the modern vegetarian movement.
Wha.. Next stop the Vatican Secrets of Numerology, GPS, Mercatorial Navigation, radio tags on small animals, counting everything 4,230 times… Eeeeyyaaaahhgggg
JOHN BLUNDELL
Economy\ Health\ Philosophy of Science
On GREEN ECONOMIST Eradicate - & Newsmedia -Junk Time/ @greeneconomyact
2 Regarding CCZ you may see some terse acid observations on @greeneconomyact 08082023
3
4 Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the source of energy for use and storage at the cellular level. The structure of ATP is a nucleoside triphosphate, consisting of a nitrogenous base (adenine), a ribose sugar, and three serially bonded phosphate groups./ 13 Feb 2023
“Henny Penny“, more commonly known in the United States as “Chicken Little” and sometimes as “Chicken Licken“, is a European folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes that the world is coming to an end. The phrase “The sky is falling!” features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent. Similar stories go back more than 25 centuries[1]and “Henny Penny” continues to be referred to in a variety of media.
[Fades/ exit stage..]
Have we got a CONSUMER VANITY PROJECT for you?
As another longer essay has been in production for the best part of 18wks and my @greeneconomyact material has touched and built upon it conceptually for all that time I had better whizz this much out for my readers as useful or perhaps merely historical conceptual clutter lest it all however essentially frivolous or grave it may or may not be be swirled and swished away in the mists of time like some ephemeral and instantly forgettable stereotypical Australian story about the predictable stuff that happens to young white people raised in the neoclassical liberal materially acquisitive not to say completely grubby mental frame.. You quickly gather that our main target for virtual actual cultural demolition here is the mad reliance of neo-classical educational and entertainment media upon audio-visual and textual narratives (yarn-spinning, story-telling, variously glamorous or stern-looking television news-readings1, $200,000 government funded 20-minute videos on Play School kiddie pleasures or sexual consent or any of the stellar array of vanities conversational, geopolitical, global or outer spatial assembled on historical lines, as though life, art and history itself had nothing to say – or c’est – about where the bizarre insapient existentially challenged species Homo-sapiens is at in 2023, let alone ANY futures read-outs that are not the delusional money markets carbon offsets, “Fly Buys,” discounts, elite membership privileges, #cryptocurrency and #Econometric Post Keynesian mental splatter of “jobs,” inflation, banking-industry cash-rates and “Growth” – investment in blowing stuff up and destroying riverine environs PLUS pizzas, clothing, electricity accounts & rich people’s holidays or any of the myriad public-money bonfires of the vanities for pale, stale, urinally incontinent and increasingly mentally wobbly but robustly self-obsessed life denialists attending ludicrous imperial Gyro Gearloose New Global Technocracy conferences about “Adaption” in Adelaide, South Australia and being really nice to each other.
This is Margaret Atwood Doing a Joke YehGoodness Only Knows What This Is Gulp
GARGANTUAN ELECTRO-MECHANICAL COMPLEXITY FOR JUNK SCREEN DISPLAY NOW STANDS BY DEFAULT & NEGLECT of LIVED EXPERIENCE or REALITY to DESTROY ALL
We learn at snail’s pace and now despairingly belatedly that life, not even human life alone (if there ever were such a psychotic that is to write literally reality-denying hell on Earth: the Inferno2 this time with real fire and boiling seas) is not some galaxy-scale stewpot of letters, glyphs and numbers.
While most chatter, say ooh or ahh a lot, and worry about those proverbial Jobs being Taken Over by Machines – as though they were agricultural labourers and it was say 1850 in England (and, er, the lord was in his manor and all was well with the world
It’s how we codify one fragment of cultural detritus and in so doing learn utterly NOTHING about it’s social, economic or ecological purpose.
Spiritual and ideological purpose, oeuvre-genre-milieu??
But oh we’ve got it typed. You get me. Ich down I think Royals would aver. Essay on the uses of literacy and a global revival of intelligent non narcissistic fiction.
Philosophy of Science, Neurolinguistics, Sociology, Health, Economy
South Australia 26/7/2023
1 who are these people, how when, where, why and by whom was this activity encouraged and what is it actually for but goods & services marketing and tourism for the Devil-may-care Rich and their tragic middle-income imitators? ..we are just asking ..we are asking alright.
2The Inferno is a fourteenth-century epic poem by Dante Alighieri in which the poet and pilgrim Dante embarks on a spiritual journey..
At the poem’s beginning, Dante is lost in a dark wood, both literally and spiritually. He meets the soul of his poetic idol, the Roman poet Virgil, who agrees to guide him through hell..
Dante and Virgil enter hell and explore its nine circles, observing the punishments suffered by the various categories of sinners..
At the bottom of the Ninth Circle, Dante and Virgil encounter Lucifer. They climb the devil’s back in order to ascend to Mount Purgatory.
Sharp readers will note that the only ecolocically and socially viable model of economy available to humanity, “CCEc” Blundell 1995, posits or rather identifies nine concentric circles of global economy, a notional but again existent and decisive C10 – Earth’s lower to mid to upper that is tiered atmosphere – and within the sustainable perpetual domain the notional circles individual-adult through geographical-community (a notional 10km x 10km) C1 to C5
Oeuvre, genre, milieu – critical thought on the individual, societal & ecological condition from a 1996 Green Economist newsletter out of the sole-proprietor business Blundell Orchards, headquartered at Lindner Avenue Ashton South Australia..
Far be it from me a 35-year #Weather #systems and Atmospheric #Science student to make a fuss, but the world has a heating problem. This is not “climate change,” or any other kind of Christian Evangelical anthropocentrist tribal Disney-Biden-Take-a-Dump bullshit, OK?
So I beg of you all to please try to understand the nature, function and nefarious purpose of Oil Economy financiers’ and “alpha” (biggest risk & biggest returns..) investors’ PROPAGANDA to totally snowblind and bamboozle the working men and women of this world – not politicians, not gangsters, not @Instagram narcissists or money-grubbing #influencers, NOT near-completely deskilled programmed-by-rich-reward, free-real- estate and rides-in-big✈️✈️s @Harvard/ BF Skinner mid 20th 🥕&🪄operant conditioning US Information Service & Central Exploding-cigars Intelligence Agency losers, but ordinary people – the one’s who like worker-bees make the whole global circus economically possible.
That’s us, yeah? Not a professional Talking Head or self-obsessed podcaster amongst us and we’ve got the numbers.. no societal parasites or sundry political class performing baboons or career meme- & tweet-writers us: not one of.
There follows but one of an array of hard public policy stories I could only load onto my screen by copying the thing.. clearly to the Cabal soft, social, manipulable, non mainstream, non economic trashable activist-bait. subjective, affective, opinion-driven and experiential, so-o-o-o not STEMMIE and I mean, they mean, they ASK YOU, dear reader: what mischieve-ious sloppy “Socials”-style delinquent flamboyant discursive Chaser Boys scientobabble is this, they go, they just go, @JoanBloggs/ MFR Rest in peace Sept ‘22..
The following article represents in the micro a danger nobody properly understands or is prepared to mention for fear of attack by Elon Musk1 and other Public Square tits, cookers and patently bad neofascist electoral-autocracy actors: whither goest humanity?
– If life-on-earth, human society and the troposphere were/ was an earnest conversation, a soft Non-economic (!) social issue, a tv chat show, or a retail politics bidding war for white-skinned upper middle class HG Wells Ernest Hemingway Orson Welles social parasites, flaneurs and roues from somewhere in first half of the 20th century, a psychotically (reality-unlinked) excessively artificially compartmentalised wildly orgiastically riotously over-codified neofascist 1939-45 Nazi or 1970 Stasi style record-keeping archives-trawling relentlessly chomping on B-movies, embarrassing soap-opera and frankly creepy turgid undergraduate comedy to make the existential angst go away who – not that, for goodness’ sake – had figured out depersonalising marshalling regimenting everyone not “Elect of God”4 but primarily primary kids to make the best they can of growing up in various performative public presentation social mileux in constant fear of correction by powerful and violent adults there would you’d most certainly agree be “issues.”
“COVID-19 case numbers have been on the rise since March, and the number of positive tests reported in Australia increased by 19.7 per cent in the week from 16 May. And Dr Brendan Crabb, professional director and CEO of Melbourne’s Burnet Institute, expressed concern about the slowing pace of research and development for the tools and interventions required to meet the ongoing challenge”
Brendan Crabb, Burnet Melbourne
“Burnet Institute Director and CEO Professor Brendan Crabb AC has renewed his call for ‘straight talking’ from Australia’s political, health and scientific leadership as the nation confronts a looming fifth wave of COVID-19…
“And he’s expressed concern about the slowing pace of research and development for the tools and interventions required to meet the ongoing challenge.
“COVID-19 case numbers have been on the rise since March, and the number of positive tests reported in Australia increased by 19.7 per cent in the week from 16 May.
“COVID is the third leading cause of death in Australia, but it’s also driving a significant increase in cardiovascular deaths, which is the number one cause, so an extraordinary impact, ” Professor Crabb told the Australian National University’s Democracy Sausage podcast.
“To avoid the spread of infection … we need straight talking and honesty – there’s a need to be frank, even if it is, ‘look, here’s the scale of the problem’.
“We could also acknowledge … to community members that you do need to know the extent of the issue so here’s what you can do about it, and we’ll work with you as best we can, given that context.
“That would be vastly better than a misinformation campaign by ignorance, by ignoring it.”
“Professor Crabb nominated the well-established pillars of clean air, the use of effective masks, ongoing testing and vaccination as the most effective means to reduce transmission.
“It’s almost impossible to get tested now, especially with a PCR based test, and you can’t protect those around you if you don’t know you’re positive,” Professor Crabb said.
“And vaccines are still crucially important.
“The reason we have 20,000 deaths a year and not 200,000 deaths a year is because of the power of those the vaccines – they’re incredibly effective, even as the virus continues to evolve.”
“In the absence of effective public health interventions, Professor Crabb said there’s a need to step up the pace of research and development.
“We’ve gone into slow mode, research, slow mode,” he said.
“We need tools that are next generation, so a vaccine you take once that protects you forever, like measles; a vaccine that you perhaps spray up your nose rather than gets injected.
“Drugs that are much better, a more effective range of drugs, drugs for long COVID, this is all going to happen if we go at the pace we’re at, but it’ll happen in five to 10 years.
“We need warp speed now because we are still in a really desperate and needy situation given no one is willing to take any public health interventions effectively globally.
“Ignoring it is at the heart of all of these problems, and if we were were to face it with some straight-talking honesty, we’d be halfway there.”
“Click here to listen to the full podcast, Democracy Sausage: Does Australia need a new COVID-19 Strategy? hosted by Professor Mark Kenny, ANU Australian Studies Institute, and including Professor Chris Wallace, School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra.”
“Burnet Institute (Australia) is located on the traditional land of the Boon Wurrung people and we offer our respects to their Elders past and present. We recognise and respect the continuation of cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this land.“
The foregoing was a short essay re-presenting in full a Burnet Institute article I could not upload, with my attendant fears about the manipulation and blocking of public information in areas not considered favourable to neoliberal donor-, lobbyist- and advertiser-influenced government by the frenetic & fevered use of machine learning, trolling and website junking algorythms including #ChatGPT42– in the maliciously false name of quicker access to more information as celebrated in socially and educationally worthless anodyne information technology commentary along the utilitarian lines of ‘How does it work’ and ‘How can we learn to use it.’
Hjalmar Schacht was a German economist, banker, centre-right politician, and co-founder in 1918 of the German Democratic Party.
Whoopsie, you post 1509 Romance Era ex British-, Dutch, Belgian, German et-set-era totalit-Aryan mock-tribal misogyne environment-hating f…ing🐕🐕🐕🐕s at Alphabet-Google (& @Wikipedia? – uh-oh I’m about to burn my subscription with you – and I’ll not be the only one): it’s the National Socialist Party, most often referred to as the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP),
Appreciate what is going down on liberal democracy itself, worldwide and you’ll no longer be puzzled – or even bewildered as billions are – by the breathtaking ignorance, arrogance, frankly psychotic belligerence and hubris on full public display by ‘robotic,’ wooden tin-eared talents like Albanese and Dutton, Sunak and Starmer, Biden and Who-the-Fu..-ever..
So What’s Going Down in Old Hjalmar’s Broken-down World Then?
This danger nobody properly understands or is prepared to mention for fear of attack by frankly misanthropic and dementing tits. cookers and political dilettantes on 24 Hour troll-bot activated Alert from Rekjavik Iceland to Santiago Chile..
Please people, please journalists of the non Jimmy Olsen (the peace jah-stice and the Ah-merry-can way of life thing 1970 circa) non Cornflakes packet cut-out-your-certificate qualified type, some discussion of the macro effects. The consumer-eye view of new toys and their tech-specs on a socio-economic AND political issue as significant, pervasive and insidious as machine-generated educational, literary and technical text is so foolish as to be disordered if not neurocognitively dire. It is a danger to society by its undergraduate or Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Triple J Radio style disingenuous analysis and consequently fatuous conversations and news reports.
If you’d say to me the major party apparatchiks, podcasters, jet-setters, meme-writers and tweet-crafters don’t believe in misogyne The Big Bang Theory tribal identity sub-culture garbage or the pseudoscience heroically identified in public by Carl Sagan in his and Ann Druyan’s 1995 ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,’ then on the valid double-blind, triple-blind evidence I have gathered as an ex social sciences McLuhanite scholar and educator for FIFTY-FOUR years it is proven that these people are play-acting at being kuckle dragging bottom sniffing social darwinists to schmooze their political owners. Not good. Nice country you’ve got here – is it for sale? Nah, sorry mate, gone.
I will no longer even listen to news bulletins making references like ‘scientists say’ or ‘an expert advised..’ Phoney, broken, beyond diseducational psychopathology. Dame Clara Butt, Phillip Adams, pastor Margaret Court, spunky hunky Israel Folau, Brendan Nelson, and all those archivists where are you? No. Don’t worry about it. Could you just, say.. never mind.
I am..
18 years public servant in family support services, integrated health services, community development and government enquiries secretary, in the early 1990’s sole proprietor of the largest vertically-integrated genuine-organic production ‘fresh & dry’ foods business in the Southern Hemisphere, Australian mafia-busted candidate for State political office and for the 31 years since an independent journalist.
I worked for Ngeringa Vineyards at Mount Barker South Australia (market garden organic produce and value-adding) from 10 April 2018 to 20 March 2023 when I was sacked and no reason was given. My only clue is that my ex supervisor had said a fews weeks earlier that he “did not like the way (I) talk to people” This man, an Australian & NZ organic/ biodynamic grower ‘legend,’ 36, suffered an MI not unrelated to Pfizer vaccine SARSCoV2 myocarditis3, has had to move on.
Australians all let us rejoice, for we are full of it.
Loyal to the company, did my job, kicked in the head, what a silly tit I am..
Rejoin the @CPSUnion (..we are people working in the C’wealth public sector, ACT & NT Govt, @CSIRO, @ABCaustralia, telecommunications service-providers and (the doddering, twitching mouth-frothing array of @TwitterAU-hating radio & television) broadcasters. Autho by M. Donnelly, CPSU National Secretary, Sydney?
Nah.
Try the @MEAA, @pen_int, @PENamerican @ScottMorrisonMP, @billshortenmp, @PeterGreste and say, @NickMcKim, @DavidShoebridge or any of the helplessly hopelessy polarised numpties of post #Coldwar polemical fragmentary siloed and psychotically over-codified, gibberisched, formulaic neoclassical academic Soft Social versus Hard Big Boys’ #Economic theory6.. Yay and Yeehah inflation & unemployment, duck curves, hockey-sticks and the NINE MILLION DOLLAR @KPMG contract for the sole purpose of #greenwashing the general public and getting the political heat off Bill Gates/ Tony Abbott 2014 COAL burners and exporters immediately prior to the Committee of Parties5 @IPCC_CH Glasgow conference 31/10 -12/11/2021 at the Scottish Event Campus?
Are you feeling well or what? – The answer is quadruple Nah: nobody under the age of 25 in Australia even knows what any of that dinosaur’s and old rich people’s political-class garbage is for.
..but the PhD’s, the Merde-Ockers, the ‘chuteless @SkyNewsBreak jumpers all three major political parties in Australia – most EGREGIOUSLY the party of federal political power and authority – keep telling you this is THE economy stupored. Darn right.
“Shut Up, Kevin!’/ Ooawhh Sorry, Mum/ “I said shut up!” [gloomph] – Blundell ngayagu 2004 Thevenard Rd Chihduna – Ceduna Wihrangu/ the 253-year Cap’n Cook colonial era Far West Frontier of SA
I’m missing the $150 a week (my savings are static) but my studies and public education work have stepped up with some excellent economic overhaul and reform material nowadays ‘gobbled up’ by thousands of readers and indirectly-linked people..
Revolutionary English Language Neurolinguistics 1997 Booker Prize TGoST
John Blundell
South Australia 22/6/2023
1 USA advertising industry guy still in the throes of trying to turn the world’s best and effectively in terms of distribution by news category or subset and public technical, professional and general interest-area reach only reliable news and current affairs medium into a marketplace and talking shop for deracinated – society? Margaret Thatcher said there wasn’t one and she like Angela Merkel was a sighin’-test – ecology? what even is that, an oowh wet juicy hippie #ClimateScam thing? – environment? 1) something to do with world government and Satan raved about by podcasters you would’nt want to meet in a dark alley? 2) Al Gore, John Kerry and @AOC @GretaThunberg razed in quiz shows – and, er, Canada atm 3) @NASA cartoon stuff for schoolkids and discyused on egghead tv panel shows for bored, affluent (at least cashed up or crypto’d in the short term) b-o-r-i-n-g Donald J Trump ‘Art of the Deal’ people?
2 I am not suggesting that the problems touched on in this essay are particularly or only due to the #ChatGPT ‘artificial intelligence’ chatbot developed by OpenAI (market valuation US$29 billion with 100m users by January 2023 @Wikipedia) and at least 5 other LLMs (large language models including Bing chat (it’s actually OpenAI’s GPT-4) triumphantly launched in Australia only May 22nd (see Wired, ZDNET for discussion). Examining the whole field in its functional micro compartments and in its macro inextricably interwined quantum-dynamic structure as future STEAM academic and technical enquiry will flatly and non-negotiably be statutorilly required to do, we take a holistic read because all users including those who like myself will not knowingly use Bing/ Edge for searches are not tangling with chatbot literary and technical textual & audio-visual meat-mincers alone but well know we are negotiating (no, not ‘navigating,’ please!)(Lego-world and Alan Greenspan’s 1955 Manhattan Island Objectivists)(eeyaaaghh) the array of user Curb, Control Censor & Crash algorythmic electro-mechanisms that apps like @TwittterSupport have developed over the years.
4 meaning the member of a household with a total net income of less than $110k AUD per year Open
5 Kids don’t allow political class “left-wing progressive” (you what? publications like @guardian) to persuade you that the intergovernmental panel of peer-reviewing or basically random if not haptic freelance/ ‘play us a catchy tune and we may choose to take YOUR product off the phantasmagorical supply-side-only #ClimateChange (there is no actual Twitter hashtag available here because the topic has been found to be too controversial and divisive for people in neurocognitive decline whose lives are passing them by as in a blur at present, the poor darlings, and the government has a bounden duty to help these folk cope mentally or at least steer them towards grosssly unskilled counsellors with the general knowledge of cookers and Catholic Right or other #ToryCorruption jer.offs who will ask them sh.. about How they feel, and say Then what happened, and Oawhh a lot) researchers’ Global Supermarket shelf or even renew your charmingly pointless deracinated no-connect-with-immanent-realities-just-vast-new-masses-of-energy-burning data so cleverly greenwashed & packaged for the voters, and especially you deskilled manipulable children, what!, as knowledge neoabsurdist studies and extravagant field project $100m-plus grants, to persuade you that a CoP is a cop, or worse, that the NACC is a knack for the Kerry Stokes’es, ex Major General Linda Reynolds’es, et alia, of this comprehensively battered, lost and cracking-as-we-write & read-country
6 The Market is the Market: you not only cant argue with the market but in the post John Kenneth Glbraith unhinged no-government dysregulated neoliberal Wealth of Nations-built-on-slavery, human trafficking and extractive industry now exponentially accelerating after some 290 years of a reasonably – and of course in the terms of both the haute-couture literary- and the post “Enlightenment’ neoclassical academic technoindustrial -elites comfortable upper middle class cum 1729 Birmingham Northern England model – on say 1,000-year historical time scales or periods the destruction of both both the human and the ecological ‘milieux’ or grounds of being – doing, becoming
Well, enormous thanks, your marvellous links included..
South Australia: we were billed by Douglas Pike in 1958 as “Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829 – 1957.” This writer and presenter of Kathryn Hughes’ article was during the prime ministerships of John Winston Howard and Kevin Michael Rudd placed in police cells 7 times – on one occasion for 2 1/2 days to put the fear of a vengeful Christian Old Testament Lord of Hosts into the dumb fu..
South Australia: we were billed by Douglas Pike in 1958 as “Paradise of Dissent: South Australia 1829 – 1957.” but, goodness, that was no more than a pretentious Edward Gibbon Wakefield ruling caste boast that we had no British civil & criminal prisoners – “..that you shall be hanged by the neck until dead.. no dammit, wait, transported to..”
Just between you and me and the gatepost, the State’s history with respect to protest or dissent has until this day some 190 years after it was first colonised by American sealers – I personally had a great-great-grandmother who was a little bruised in that encounter – readers who can’t even emotionally cope with not, say, a 1963 Hannah Arendt neoclassically-framed Fact & Value-affect “banality of evil” tag but shy and baulk at the most prudish, oblique, watered-down euphemistic references to brutalisation, rape, slaughter and crimes against humanity should call an ABC-approved counsellor – or let’s face it get the f… out of government, governance and public life in general immediately.
This writer and the presenter of the below Kathryn Hughes article was during the prime ministerships of John Winston Howard and Kevin Michael Rudd placed in police cells seven times with no valid charges against him {only the say-so of flatly lying thugs and a notorious, frankly infamous, former Assistant Police Prosecutor, a trades union and independent newspaper employee Hendrick Gout, and his own brother, who (in conjunction with the Australian Taxation Office on the advice of a State political candidate against whom he’d won a 46% Two Party Preferred vote in the Kavel by-election of 20/5/1992, John Wayne Olsen) had a plan – by 1999 successful – to defraud me of approximately $0.5 million, my entire assets – and my second marriage – and my home – and all of my family relationships}, on one occasion for 2 1/2 days to put the fear of a vengeful Christian Old Testament Lord of Hosts into him, with two attempts by the SA Police on the advice of Health Minister, and on the second occasion, in 2008, by the particular Health Minister who was former State Secretary of the Australian Labor Party John David Hill, whose frankly bizarre threats to his publication of newsletters Green Economist and Community Economist dated back to the moment of his first appearance in the electoral political commentary public domain, to “Loony Bin” him, the first on 4/2/2002 when he was punched in the head so hard by a cop it knocked him out, woke briefly on a gurney in Ceduna District Health Services, which as a District Officer for the SA Government and with the aid of Whitlam government money he had actually helped found and establish in 1974 – federal minister Douglas Nixon Everingham – was injected in the bum with Haloperidol and had a cannula needle inserted in his arm for a Chlorpromazine drip and twenty hours later woke up 900 kilometres away.
..contracted – paid for in cash – Labor Party home invasions, smashing their way in via door- and window frames, frenzied peddo-baiting.. well why not, these fu..ing dogs would say, he was the bastard who brought neo-nazi government and church child stealing to a dead-stop on the very day he set up office for the SA Government thirty-five years earlier,
You might question anyone tangled up with Elliott Johnston Chambers or its ludicrous “We’re-going-to-get-you” class-warrior predecessor firm Johnston Withers in Adelaide. But its historicising ABC archivists’ pfaff and secret Australian Security Intelligence Organisation ballocks now as we none of us at this epochal moment in human history as no less than five exitential crisies bear down on all – atmospheric, ecological, immunologic, educational and economic – may in good non-whacko, non depressive, non historicist conscience waste time on it or its like.
Like where’s the narrative drive, the cultural learnings, the Doing Being Becoming political sense in pawing over video of Mr Blundell showily displaying an outwardly raised middle finger to a bulky cluncky branded Channel Nine news camera 54yrs ago in Currie St Adelaide as he co-led a march to the offices of the Commonwealth department of Labour and National Service? Are you crackers? Compost this crap. And get help – you’ve lost the very plot of human decency & good graces.
On historical lines.. we are death the destroyer of present immanent worlds intent on raising our children to lives of febrile unproductive absurdity, then shuffling them into early graves.
William Cooper, a classical leader of his people, Kahmeragahnja British Empire shame & global ignominy 1938
John Blundell
Economic Sociology, Neurolinguistics, Health, Philosophy of Science
Work to do. Fish to fry. Crooks and bloody misanthropes in their tens of thousands to be remove from public office, corporations and courts; critical socio-cultural input you would all agree.
“Sizzle, spice and not very nice: 100 years of the tell-all biography”
Lytton Strachey’s explosive biographies demolished reputations – not even Florence Nightingale escaped his wrath. But what is his impact on life writing?
A hundred years ago, Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians, a sequence of four biographical essays whose elegance belied their punkish intent. Strachey’s subjects, although “targets” might be more accurate, were Florence Nightingale, General Gordon, Thomas Arnold and Cardinal Manning. These four eminences – the founder of modern nursing, the British empire’s most honoured military man, the reforming headmaster of Rugby School and Protestant England’s most prominent Catholic churchman – were simultaneously knocked down, duffed up and left looking slightly ridiculous. With language sharpened to a scalpel, Strachey cut away the fatty layers of celebratory bluster to reveal these heroes of Victorian Britain as deluded narcissists whose achievements depended on the ruthless exploitation of those around them. Gordon drank, “was particularly fond of boys” and slapped his servants; Manning had gone over to Rome from the C of E because it offered better job prospects; Nightingale was a psychotic bully who ran her saintly helpers ragged; while Arnold, in a wonderfully allegorical description, had legs that were slightly too short for his body. And all of them knew for a fact that God was on their side.
Biography, for good and for ill, would never be quite the same again. Over the previous 100 years, roughly the span of the 19th century, biography valued reticence over revelation. Prominent men (and the very occasional woman) were memorialised on paper in much the same way as they were materialised in stone. While every market town and London square had a giant statue of Nelson or Gladstone caught at their most flattering angle, every bookshelf sagged under the weight of a two-volume life that conveyed the most admirable aspects of its subject’s public career and stayed silent on the rest. These lacunae included but were not limited to homosexuality, bankruptcy, illegitimacy, alcoholism and telling whopping fibs. The Great, it went without saying, were also always Good.
From the first page of Eminent Victorians it is clear that something is up. The tyro author – Strachey’s only previous book had been a volume of academic criticism – proclaims that the old ways of writing about past lives will no longer do. “Our fathers and grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information,” he explains, that any 20th-century historian or biographer would struggle to find patterns, make connections or even come up with a serviceable summary. What was needed instead was a “subtler strategy”. The biographer “will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined”. Such pre-meditated violence could not be more different than the approach of the previous generation in which the biographer resembled nothing so much as a loyal family retainer, one who knew all his master’s funny little foibles but would rather die than expose them to the world’s impertinent gaze.
‘A terrible woman’ … Florence Nightingale. Photograph: Florence Nighingale Museum/BBC
In that same two-page preface Strachey also airily dismisses the old biographical habit of throwing in everything in the hope that some of it would stick. In fact, he suggests, all it really does is bore people silly with its “ill-digested masses of material”, “slipshod style”, “tone of tedious panegyric”, “lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design”. What was needed instead was a “becoming brevity – a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant – that, surely, is the first duty of the biographer”.
What Strachey is talking about here is “significant form”, the guiding principle of literary modernism that was so important to his Bloomsbury peers Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. How something was written mattered just as much, maybe more, than the information it conveyed. Biography, like a painting or a novel, should be regarded not as objective but autonomous, a work of art with its own logical coherence and only a glancing relation to what lay beyond its frame. And it has turned out to be a thrilling legacy. For what is Alexander Masters’s brilliant trilogy of forgotten lives, starting with Stuart: A Life Backwards (2005), but an exploration of and challenge to biographical – for which read biological – form? Even those modern biographers who work within the cradle-to-grave tradition have been liberated by Strachey’s suggestion that what one leaves out is just as important as what goes in. No longer is it expected or even desirable to include chapter and verse on what the biographical subject had for breakfast or where their great-grandparents came from. Hilary Spurling’s exemplary two‑volume Matisse or Robert Caro’s multi-decker masterwork on Lyndon Johnson may be tethered firmly to the archive, but in voice and form they soar far above the clunky chronological dirge that used to pass as the only way of getting a life down on paper.
Unless a biography boasts a revelation, preferably of a sexual nature, then it’s as if the book has no reason to exist
It’s no coincidence that Strachey’s radical new proposal about how to write the lives of others appeared in the closing months of the first world war. Yet what Strachey didn’t acknowledge, but we surely must, is the mixture of desire, envy and Oedipal rage that is in play every time a biographer picks their subject. When he unleashed his silky contempt on high-minded and ostensibly public spirited Victorians he was, in a sense, attacking his own family. He had been born in 1880 to a highly distinguished clan of colonial administrators and soldiers and it is hardly an accident that two of the eminences he set about cutting down to size, Nightingale and Gordon, were likewise leading figures of the great imperial enterprise. Nightingale dedicated her post-Crimean life to the health of the British army in India while Gordon was the governor general of the Sudan. In addition Strachey had endured a miserable time at boarding school. Here, perhaps, are the origins of his particular loathing of Arnold, who, thanks to the boosterism of the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), was now regarded as the man who had set the blueprint for what a proper young Englishman should be: pious, sporty, manly and not especially clever. For Strachey, who was gay, wheezy, atheist and a member of the intellectually elite Cambridge Apostles, it was hard to think of a less appetising model.
By marking the end of biographical deference Eminent Victorians bestowed an exhilarating freedom on the entire form. From now on life writers felt able to include the dark as well as the light. Sexual scandals, financial disgrace and general moral turpitude would be admitted to the public record rather than being left to languish in the margins as insider gossip and smirking innuendo. And yet, it sometimes seems as if this permission to be candid has degraded into a requirement to be rude. These days, unless a biography can boast a revelation, preferably of a sexual nature, then there is a feeling of flatness, as if the book has no particular reason to exist. And if, in the course of research, a biographer does happen to unearth something scandalous, then there’s a high risk that it will come to dominate the reviews, blotting out quieter but nonetheless crucial material. It happened 9 years ago when the coverage of John Carey’s judicious and scholarly biography of William Golding was dominated by news stories that trumpeted Carey’s discovery that, as an Oxford undergraduate, Golding had attempted to rape his 15 year old girlfriend. In the process Carey’s masterly analysis of Lord of the Flies, The Spire and Darkness Visible got temporarily drowned out.
Tell-alls and takedowns … Lytton Strachey. Photograph: Dora Carrington/Getty Images
There are other ways too in which Eminent Victorians, for all its sizzle and spice, set up potentially damaging precedents. Strachey did not believe in research, at least not the kind that biographers and historians do. Instead of looking at primary sources, spending dusty hours sorting through diary entries about bad plumbing (Nightingale) or The Real Presence (Manning) he culled what he needed from extant biographies and histories. Indeed, when working on his Manning chapter Strachey ordered so many books on the history of religion that his landlady assumed he must be studying for the church. Likewise Strachey’s essay on Nightingale draws mostly on the two-decker biography by Sir Edward Cook (1913), a book that Strachey himself had once considered writing but rejected on the grounds that Miss Nightingale “was a terrible woman”. How much more fun to cherry-pick information from Cook’s foot-slogging effort and work it up into a sprightly, “cynical” (Strachey’s word) takedown of the Lady with the Lamp.
As Strachey triumphantly demonstrates, there is nothing wrong with being the second or 20th person to come to a particular biographical subject. Released from the requirement to tell a now familiar story from scratch, you are left free to write the book you actually want. This principle is on spectacular display in Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 tour de force on DH Lawrence. Instead of adding to the heap of biographical and literary studies already in existence, Dyer produced an idiosyncratic account of his experience of failing to write the seminal work on his long-time literary hero. Just like Strachey, Dyer steered clear of dusty archives, limiting himself to the kind of printed sources that can be read in bed or packed into a suitcase.
In the 21 years since Out of Sheer Rage, biography has continued to be shaped by the legacy of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. What used to be called “experimentation” as late as 1997 is now the new normal. Think of Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk which nested a partial biography of the troubled mid- 20th‑century author TH White inside an excavation of the author’s personal experience of bereavement and birds. Or Craig Brown’s simply brilliant Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret which evinces a Stracheyan glee when dealing with “Her Royal Awfulness”, and throws chronology and chapter breaks into beautiful disarray. Even a more straightforward biography such as Jenny Uglow’s cradle-to-grave life of Edward Lear is able, in a way that no previous biographer quite has been, to speak candidly about the nonsense writer’s internal anguish in dealing with his homosexuality. These biographies are all Strachey’s children. We have so much to thank him for.
Dostoevsky’s Iconic Grand Inquisitor1?/ Just Another Lost-sheep Romantic Modernist?/ Or in their common neoclassical terms both ?Mother of All F…Ed Keeps Bobbing Up – Jingoes Dingos
As a bit of a sleuth I suspect Mr Gates has been ravaged by the zany threesome of Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Stephen Bannon and Representative McCarthy… Cwoaoarh that 1950s Yankee Doodle Dandy name..
Or he’s neurodegeneratively indisposed like all the mates Branson, Bezos, the remaining Koch brother, Jerome Powell and the world’s fave Renaissance Warrior-prince2. To get a steely grip on the ideological basis of this post 1509 ‘Hernan Cortes on a Peak in Darien’ Romance Era bulls… see our Footnote, courtesy Wikepedia & the Global Commons
Here a Celebration of Human Vanity Deranged Deracinated Unhinged Unrooted in neighbourhood-communal-regional, octospheric, quadrispheric, hemispheric or international reality
+ a special thank you to to the very special Masha Gessen, a Russian-American journalist, author, translator and [“]activist[“] who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia… Gessen is the author of eleven books, including “Surviving Autocracy” and “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”
John Blundell
Philosophy of Science, Australian
1
2Peter I (Russian: Пётр I Алексеевич, romanized: Pyotr I Alekseyevich, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ]; 9 June [O.S. 30 May] 1672 – 8 February [O.S. 28 January] 1725), commonly known as Peter the Great,[pron 1]was Tsar of all Russia from 1682, and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He jointly ruled with his elder half-brother, Ivan V, until 1696. He is primarily credited with the modernisation of the country, transforming it into a major European power.
Bloke Gives John Stern Conversational/ Lonely ❤️s Club Twitter Talking ToJohn Rallies a Little From This Virtual Body Blow OhEdward Snowden Thinks It’s Hilarious
Billionaire-🙈🙊🙉🐒s with Olivettis 
