A reasonable and positive forecast

This will be my last post for 2019.

Today we drive up to the Hunter Valley for my daughter’s wedding. I have written a speech. I would love to be able to deliver it without reading it, but I doubt that will happen.

We won’t get back until January 1, it will be 2020, a new decade. I could, like when I turned fifty, express a reasonable and positive forecast for the years ahead. (When fifty I said to myself – there is no reason why the next twenty years can’t be the best years of my life. And, though I can’t fully explain why, this forecast is manifesting into reality.)

So what can I forecast for the 2020s? How about, there is no reason why the next decade can’t be the time in which humanity changes its current course and once again heads in a direction of true progress?

What do I mean by true progress? Good question. In this case it may be best to answer with what true progress is not. True progress is not economic growth or more jobs. It is not the destruction of the biosphere. It is not the increasing division between the genders, or races, or sexualities, or nationalities, or whatever identity (tribe) to which an individual may subscribe. It is not political extremism, and it is not blaming something or someone else for all the wrongs of this world. True progress is not a race, a competition or a game. True progress does not have winners and losers.

And why do I call true progress a reasonable forecast? Because the world is whimpering and more and more of us are hearing it. Deep down we know there is a better way, and I for one, believe that humans have the capacity to do better.

There are those who argue that humans are flawed and fated to fail. These voices want us to accept the collapse of civilisation, and extinction, as inevitable. On the other hand, there are those who continue to spruik that capitalism and technological advancement and consumer confidence will come to the rescue. These voices want us to ignore reality and submit to the status quo.

More and more of us are speaking out and taking to the streets. The lies of those who want the current system to continue (because of the individual benefit to themselves) are becoming more and more intolerable. The invented fears these voices engender to keep the masses in their place are evaporating, we are gaining courage as we have everything to lose.

I want to thank all my readers for their encouragement and support and look forward to the decade ahead, the new roaring twenties!

I heard the news today, oh boy!

Australia is burning and the POTUS has been impeached. It doesn’t matter what our PM says about reaching our Paris Commitments in a canter, or what the President says about witch hunts, Mother Nature has switched into pay-back mode.

We are being punished for listening to, or ignoring, the psychopaths. They’re mainly men, they’re mainly white, they’re mainly religious, and they’re all damaged. But, we the enablers, the ones who have let them get their way, are of all different genders, skin colours and beliefs. We are the frightened masses and we vote them in, and it’s hard not to feel at times that we deserve everything we get.

China did an experiment with population control, the one child policy. It was a failure, and now any talk of population control is taboo. And while we’re at it, because we here in the West can’t even begin to comprehend the mind of China, we rule out collectivism and thus any left leaning ideas and political policies. ‘It’s a slippery slope to communism,’ the psychopaths scream when any murmurs of equality manage to gain some traction among the normally compliant enablers. Individualism facilitated by capitalism rages out of control.

Have you heard this: ‘Climate change is an opportunity for jobs and growth.’ Did you bang your head against a wall when you heard it? Or, did you just shrug and think, yes, I guess it could be?

It’s predicted that the human population on Earth will hit 8 billion in the next decade: The Roaring Twenties? China won’t do another experiment with population control. And here in Australia, population growth is essential for economic growth and prosperity, unquestioned. As is foreign investment. So while we recoil at the dictatorial authoritarianism and the atrocities against human rights being committed by our communist neighbour to the north, we squabble about the tricky negotiations and balancing act required to maintain our trade with China and our unquestioned alliance with the USA where they just impeached their psychopath president.

But all of this is human noise, pointless chatter. We don’t need a human population control policy, or new emission targets to limit global warming to whatever number of degrees Celsius are agreed upon in Kyoto, Paris, or Madrid. Mother Nature is getting on with the job, restoring balance – we won’t have to lift a finger.

Pondering Paradigm Shifts

The stairs at Toowoon Bay

Here is the headline (https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-12-13/time-to-stop-lying-to-our-children-about-physics/11789858?fbclid=IwAR1NDZdUNulseRxG_hK_zdg375x6K39xxqdCPDQAn0lBxf5xFZhAMed-GR0 ) :

Putting Einstein first: It’s time to stop lying to our children about physics

Then, in the body:

Isaac Newton is a physics icon, but he was wrong.

Newton was wrong? Einstein was right?

Shifting one’s mindset from a Newtonian to an Einsteinium paradigm is no easy task.

Now, it’s pretty easy to get critical, thus the temptation call out Newton as ‘wrong’. In everyday human experience his laws work perfectly fine. The realities of general and special relativism only come into play in situations that do not affect me and you as we try to get by in the environment which is Earth.

Sure, Einstein’s discoveries and later quantum physics discoveries have help scientists and engineers create some lovely, and terrifying, technological applications, which we do use. But seriously, school is not the place to start with an understanding of the laws of nature by starting with the theories of relativity and quantum physics.

Einstein himself admitted he stood on the shoulders of giants. And, like any mere mortal mind, we need to climb the well established pathways leading to the higher realms of understanding.

I was once a teacher of high school Physics. In my opinion, Galileo is a good starting point for school-age learners of physics.

Now, I contemplate how our species might address the more pertinent issues such as, what is the human carrying capacity of this planet? And, how do we stop the psychopaths from being able to rise to such positions of power that they manage to fool us into blindly heading along a pathway that defies all known laws of nature?

Again, we must take the necessary steps upwards upon the path of knowledge set in stone by the giants of our ancestry.

We know who they are.

Shepherd’s Delight

We were told to stay indoors. That worked for a day or two and then the smoke inside was just as bad as outside. So we go outside now. The UV radiation levels are down, no need for sunscreen.

We’ve taken up smoking again, 34 cigarettes a day, we are told. No cost, no butts.

You can see the asbestos fibres rising off the super six roofing. We used to cut that stuff with angle grinders, no masks, no goggles, no ear muffs. The good old days.

Shrubs and trees are flowering magnificently. Best it’s been for years. And the mango trees are fruiting. Love mangoes in summer.

A new decade is about to begin. We will call it the twenties. We will see the population hit 8 billion. We will keep revising the number of degrees Celsius that the world has warmed. We will celebrate births. We will argue politics and religion until the cows come home.

The cows are coming.