Thursday 25th of April 2024
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walking on eggshells...

walking on eggshells

My cartoons are “lazy plonkt”.

I have been lucky. Very lucky. I count my weavings and duckings. I don’t believe in “blessings”... Understanding things has been my quest, though I still don’t understand much. One of my very good friend gave me a book. Lucky me. 


“The real impact of the book came from its example. Leonardo [Fibonacci] included a wealth of applications of mathematics to business and trade. These included conversions of money, weight, and content, method of barter, business partnerships, and allocation of profit, alloying of money, investment of money, and simple and compound interest.”


This emotional (for me) paragraph comes early in Keith Delvin’s book “Finding Fibonacci”. 


Contrary to Delvin who was lousy in maths early at primary school, I was reasonably gifted. In his quest to become a “space scientist” he became a fully fledge mathematician and loved it.


By age 16, I had a major crash. I discovered the limits of my learning ability. I could not understand maths (nor anything else for that matter) anymore. I lost cognition (quite traumatic really). Learning at speed to pass very difficult exams, I hit this massive wall. And I have been struggling with this ever since. This is where Groucho Marx comes handy. “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” We’ve all been there — I did add. Well I am assuming that at one stage or another we have been creative in our self-importance and activities. Being creative often involves bending the rules unless we like plodder. Plodder is my nemesis..., though I did a lot of it, with masochistic repetition.


But overall, over the years I have reclimbed the slope. It’s hard work. This is why my cartoons are deliberately “plonkt”. I mean unrefined, unfinished, unpolished, off-the-cuff, crass. lazy... call it whatever. I am more didactic than I’d like but that’s the only way I can salvage the furniture in my brains. I blame a game of school soccer, played in sub-zero temperature in Europe when I did a header to a fast-flying frozen leather ball that knocked me silly. I think I am missing quite a few million neurones. They do a lot of study of footballers these days on this very subject... So I fudge. So What? I think I fudge with an extraordinary clarity, using several identities, including this one, a bit like a Rain Man who invents his own calculus to by-pass the plodding and annoy the plodders.


So I think of, and hope for, a random future for humanity in which nature, peace and diversity can co-exist. That is my mission to myself. Presently, the scientific community is hell-bent on “understanding” and “re-creating” a human brain. Silly. As some people say having data is not knowledge. We know we need to structure this big data. This is where imagination comes in. We need to reduce the size of our armies and increase the size of our humanism. For this we need to invent a much better brain than the human brain. The human brain is designed by evolution to fudge. for milleniums, Religions represent a lot of fudging — but they have calcified. They have not invented anything since the early crap that does not make sense in our modern era. 


Thus we need more peaceful fudge, especially those that might make better usage of Fibonacci’s — the work of "this genius who changed the world" according to Keith Delvin.

 

Gus Leonisky

your local dummy in the field of life.

stay calm...

Malcolm Turnbull wants us to keep calm? When leaders say that, it usually means start worrying...

Nothing to see here. Keep calm. Everything's under control.

The trouble with such reassurances is they convey the opposite. There usually is something "to see", which leads us to feel anything but "calm", and realise things are not "under control" after all.

Read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/malcolm-turnbul...

turds under Abbott, now it's shite under trumble...

 

The Turnbull Government is in complete disarray and every day brings some revelation of further incompetence, says John Passant.

THE TURNBULL GOVERNMENT is in complete disarray. 

Good! Let’s send this anti-worker, pro-rich, incompetent Government to the dustbin of history now — not in 18 months' time. We can’t afford to wait that long.

Everything this Government touches turns to shite.

For example, it was not so long ago that Prime Minister Turnbull was defending the marriage equality survey as a great illustration of democracy at work. 

Democracy at work would have been passing marriage equality through the Parliament, rather than pandering to the reactionaries in the party room and concocting a delaying, divisive and destructive "survey" that reflected what we already knew but gave a megaphone to the purveyors of hate: the "No" side.

Malcolm Turnbull is addressing media, after the #MarriageEquality postal survey returned a “Yes” vote with a 61.6% majority. #AusPol #9Newspic.twitter.com/2t9IpHe6Nr

— Nine News Australia (@9NewsAUS) November 14, 2017

Young LGBTIQ people now have worsening mental health and a higher risk of suicide. A gay friend of mine will never forgive Malcolm Turnbull for this.

Democracy at work would have been the House of Representatives sitting in the week beginning 27 November. Instead, Turnbull postponed the sitting by a week,ostensibly to allow the Parliament to focus on both the marriage equality bill – which the Senate may by then have passed – and the citizenship declarations.

Everyone knows, of course, that Turnbull postponed Parliament in the week beginning 27 November to avoid debate on and possible passage of a bill for an inquiry into the banks. It is almost as if the Prime Minister thinks Parliament is his plaything — some democrat!

Turnbull’s fear was justified. Without Joyce or Alexander as members, the Government’s effective voting strength on the floor is 73, plus the speaker. The Labor Opposition currently has 69 votes, the Greens one, Nick Xenophon Team one, the Katter Party one, with Andrew Wilkie and Cathy McGowan as independents.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/malcolm-turnb...

 

Mind you we knew this:

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30824

 

elegance

 

white toilet paper...

 

There are moments in history that come to define the world changing. After years or even decades of doing things a certain way, suddenly, everything changes. We look back, often in bemusement, shame or anger, and wonder how people accepted a certain way of doing things.

Changes once fiercely resisted become archaic: corporal punishment in schools, slavery, women and Aboriginal people denied the right to vote, the death penalty, LGBTIQ people denied the right to marry, the institutionalisation of people with disabilities … the list goes on.

 

Smart leaders who are at the right place at the right time, sense the zeitgeist, capture a nation’s hopes and dreams and catapult themselves into the history books as the personification of that change. Visionary leaders look to the future, wonder what we’ll reflect back on in 30 to 50 years and take the first steps on an alternative path.

Our world is undergoing a once in a generation period of significant disruption to the status quo.

The “trickle down” neoliberal economy that replaced the welfare-state economy has the stench of decay. Wealth is not trickling down: the rich and powerful have structured our economy so that the fruits of our collective efforts are concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Extreme inequality is a major factor causing people to turn to the old gods of blood (race) and soil (nationalism). But a “wellbeing” state that puts people and planet at its heart could trump the nationalists.

Public concern about the environment and climate damage, combined with technological progress, means the writing is on the wall for coal and big polluters.

The US dominance as a superpower is waning as China is becoming more powerful (economically, diplomatically and militarily). Global tension is rising and economic power is shifting to three of the four most populous countries on earth: China, India and Indonesia as well as Japan.

These are just a few of the major global challenges and opportunities confronting us.

A smart government would grasp the future and get ahead of the curve. Yet on Thursday, the government released a foreign policy white paper that desperately clings to the past while the rest of the world moves on. Its primary focus is terrorism, trade and Trump (even if it doesn’t mention him by name).

Security gets 207 mentions, inequality gets 8.

Trade gets 182 mentions, poverty 29.

Terrorism gets 40 mentions, climate change 29.

It sidelines the almost 9,000 people who wrote individual submissions with consistent messages that climate change, inequality and poverty should be foreign policy priorities, and that Australian aid is a key tool to help deliver a fairer world.

The foreign policy white paper should encapsulate the kind of world we want to live in and the role Australia can play in helping to realise that vision. Instead, it paints a bleak picture for our future world and Australia’s part in it.

The Campaign for Australian Aid has released its own “People’s White Paper” report called One Humanity, which is a starting point for a conversation about our changing world.

A nation blessed with abundant sun, land, waves and wind and with Pacific neighbours facing raising oceans should be leading the world on renewables and action on climate damage.

 

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/24/the-governments-wh...

 

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