It's in uncomfortable times we learn

It's in uncomfortable times, we poor have the opportunity to learn.  

Iran and the enemies of Israel are threatening war , but worse and more threatening is we in the West  are at war with ourselves. That reality makes us very weak indeed . 
The reality is that we don't know much
--and can't do much because the process of degradation within is in train .Cynicism , lazy thinking and guilt driven reactions make us retreat from the vigilance we need to be tough and effective .   

BUT We can get some benefit from truly understanding where we came from to here . Understanding that will help our children . 

Two suggestions on sources of some potential objectivity .

1--Widen your conversation because old media have power interests - they
Time for you to promote and listen to new media that HOLD conversations THAT  are not just into cancelling an author   

2 Listen to those who have come into the fold from outside   https://youtu.be/cL7_FfetOfk?si=hSNenwoR0VNTonLC

Reviewing 2023 in the light of what we don't know

Surely that is the point. We are so overloaded in 2024 with facts , that we don't know what we don't know .. 
I have only one example for today-- there are surely so many. let me know of your thoughts on this 

1. Reviewing 2023 in the light of what we don't know about THE MICROBIOLOGICAL WORLD 
My little contribution today comes from reading a great old book ( Yes they can be fantastic treasures because someone put a lifetime's thought and experience into integrating the contents)

The book is called "The Advance of the Fungi " by EC Large 1940   
In it you will learn how long it takes to really learn things, how we love to think we know, and then for yourself, have some idea of what we still don't know.  How we pretend we know the full story when we only know a portion of it - and an unbalanced portion of it  
Best of all you will learn that not all who speculate or experiment really know enough to even try ( and we must stop funding them!) Plus You will learn HOW to operate successfully as a scientist and get the satisfaction that only doing a job well can bring . 

I am tempted to go on to discuss COVID here but I have done that elsewhere. The full story on that will take some time to come out and, while I have done my piece, it's now up to others to show how poorly educated we are and continue to be on that subject. The arrogance, pride and ignorance of those who take leadership positions may be quite normal in history but its scarily stupid.
I think the dilemma I posted at the start here is making the likelihood of breeding more ignorant and arrogant deniers a high probability. It won't be just a few Premiers who will have to answer for the aforementioned. 

The madness of this moment is that so many of our current leaders think, like gods, that they can change the world (and its atmosphere) when they cannot touch base effectively with the real work on the ground that makes the world work as best as it does. Look for the glass half full version as well as the dark side.  
For those readers who listen, it is still true that the truth can set us free. 
 
Let's all make more use of the internet and treat with suspicion those would insist on telling us things - especially advice of what is supposedly good for us (remember the greatest evil is done in the name of the best intention) 

I'll finish this later .  Meanwhile let me encourage  you to study the incredible "conspiracy " of fungi,  bacteria and other microflora working together and how we can as human beings compete and act as custodians if we truly act with humility and true full science understanding . 

Set your children free from the cynical conspiracies of those who fail to speak with competence. 

Emotional outbursts at Meeting times and how we can learn from them .

 This is a note I published after most people in Australia rejected the ambition to do something they thought necessary for the Aboriginals of Australia.
It was a unexpected result. 
 The ambition shared by nearly all Australian's was that a proposed action might improve listening. 

One straight talking, clear thinking aboriginal named Jacinta Price became a national and world wide hero for reminding us that we should avoid trying to solve another's problems when we are not really where they are. She grew up where they are.  

The change sought was supposed to improve our listening ability?  What could be wrong with that ?
Nothing except, perhaps qualifying things like this.

1. The idea that we can make people listen is quite mad.
   
2. The goings on ,during and after in parliament  and any house you like to think of is   an example of the fact that hearing is not believing  .The amount of time spent listening in our version of Parliament is huge and we oldies  have learnt to trust ( at least still in parliament , if not in our homes ) that starting finishing and order are needed to prevent the house becoming a home for just noise ;  loud hailers, compliant children  and half asleep pigeons.  The Refoct23 proposal was going to interrupt that tenuous order, but by not knowing where and how it would do that, secured the ideas place in the fully asleep dustbin of history. 
3. The lack of discussion, let alone consensus, about how such an impossibly high ideal could clearly happen clearly could be expected to jettison any agreement with intelligent fair minded people to agree to same. The HOW didn't come close to becoming WHAT ,which makes the proponents campaign seem quite mad in itself. What if the HOW was clearly stated ? would that have made a difference ; we will never know   
   
   
4. The idea that a new method of getting people to listen had arrived and needed to put into tablets of stone  ( like those from Mt Sinai ) would have made God laugh , \
5. The idea that some group or individual can have special relevant knowledge is quite true but it s quite wrong to assume that person's opinion or understanding should always have special status is quite wrong .
6. Culture and science must know their proper place 
    This is the crux of the mistaken expectations of many on October 14. Bruce Pascoe had correctly reminded the audience that first Australians had ,in their many thousands of years of life here, learnt to adapt to this environment ( and should be properly heard for that).
   What Bruce and proponents of the Voice failed to say was why special status for that knowledge was justified above other sources, when it was like all knowledge, incomplete and quite inadequate.
   Westerners, whatever their faults and fancies ( a  lack of real experience of this place on earth)  are entitled to expect that objective scientific analysis of all facts knowledge and old practices of the past will reveal new and important and  more precise connections to the course calibration of actions by people in the past .
   In other words ,for our children's future,  we all believe that scientific evaluation of past practices should be objective thorough relevant and scientific first , A first filter,  if not the last 
   
7. Order is an absolute necessity for at least enabling efficient listening to happen. think response allowance and  timing.  
   No order was given for when the VOICE would be heard,:   to initiate a bill, after or before readings,
   
8.  All Culturally derived knowledge should be subject to objective evaluation by independent scientific process evaluators. This IMO doesn't mean that independent scientific process evaluation will tell us all we need to know, only that it will help eliminate some areas in inadequate and incomplete knowledge.
   Because science cannot establish or deny all relevant processes and the origin of all of them ( we create our own as well as accept created ones )  we best IMO leave the door open to ideas, visions and spooky things that pass by .Time use,
   We must allow the child to speak ,That will take time  Everyone saw that the emperor was wearing no clothes.  but it took the honest observer to resist denial and confront us with the truth that is necessary to move on , The objective of all parliaments is truth and moving on , just as the rhetoric says . The question of whether we agree or accept payback is one separate question of justice ( not truth ) that cannot become an insistence through a permanent and fixed hearing method. Questions of justice are, as Bryant says, so big they are often best not defined.  
   
   
9. The huge distance between the rhetoric and the path to achieving the fine ambition was a major reason Australians rejected it.  This is what mature adults often have to do when they address the right focus of children on justice matters . " yes it doesn't appear fair " son 
10. Cultural practices are not gods in themselves  
    The cultural practices that Europeans brought with them in the handling of sheep were not all wrong, but they were very inadequate for the very poor thin hard setting soils of this Savannah land.    Aborigines did know many Australians soils a lot better than Europeans , but its  not correct to say that either party knows how to evaluate soil use better than soil scientists do, 
    Pascoe's attempt to say Aboriginals use of fire and food production was more fully informed than those who had been using steel and furnaces for thousands of years was clearly overstating the aboriginals right to be always heard as a most experienced resource user.   
          
11. The whole principal of parliament is that we assume we don't know whose ideas when will move us closer to better working relationships, As Bryant say,  the early parliaments had no constitution, and the tradition still is to reject people who insist on their right to be heard. 
    
12. More quality time use is the key ingredient to make better listening and responding work - the proposal did not address HOW that would be possible; and the question of HOW more wasted time ( already a huge issue) would be avoided. 
13. You have to be very smart to know HOW to get people to listen ( ask your wife )
14. That not enough thought was given to the proponents on the HOW question above , 
15.  That too much confidence was given to a single quantitative solution ( based on volume ) cf qualitative integrated solutions 
16. That something as rigid as a constitution was no place to lodge an idea  ( listening)  so fluid 
17. Proponents and many idealists were quite mad and dangerous ( see A Bryants summary of parliament and constitutions) to insist the addition would work, when unexpected consequences were the bread-and-butter expectations of any scientist looking at the aim of the project. 
     
18. To give any one person or group more power is against the long tradition of the commonwealth where" hatred of power is an obsession "(  A Bryant  "The Search for Justice)

Towards an explanation

In my opinion a sound basic explanation was published in 1975 in a Telecom 2000 report on Social futures . 
The above study implicates the city and screen watchers in a predictable failure to really understand the needs of others.
Because this scientific prediction ( Science is best proven by being stated beforehand ) was clear and well established by three groups with Psychological expertise , there is a real risk of ongoing denial by those who don't now listen of accept it ,
A deep paradox since the ambition shared by nearly all Australian's was that a proposed action might improve listening. 

This risk of ongoing denial is heightened by our societies expectation that the majority knows best and additional progressive ideas that people educated at Universities are smarter.
This temptation to offer up prejudices has already happened with Waheed Aly - offering the last one as a false equivalence which developed a life of its own for a while because he is so popular.

The clear conclusions of the authors of Tel 2000 was predicted by a very capable and once famous scientist named Whitehead who left the world the word http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com  . Whitehead in the 1920's was quite deeply troubled to see that the use of scientific arguments in the West was most likely heading off the rails.

That use of the good name of Science is off the rails in popular use is evident by the number of people who ask a How question and accept the first available part of a possible much longer and more complex answer.
As  any good practicing scientist knows , correlation is not causation but  the former is a common quick finish closure clause  that doesn't work .    

An explanation I gave to a friend 
I don't think political alliance is very important in this unstable moment in Western history. see end
Maybe this is a mental illness moment when many suffer fanaticism and retreat to their cultural roots and call that wisdom ; when it was really little more than an emotional outburst -- that they want to last ; instead of listening and learning as such moments can lead to
. If we use our brains, by contrast to the above , we are always trying to escape the moribund set of rules that becomes set in concrete by the popular and the powerbrokers. We need to learn not to ignore history and other cultures but to move on to better and more concrete long term solutions; some of which are already conserved in some form.

As the famous philosopher come activist AC Grayling is saying, this mad grabbing at sky high solutions like referendums ( Brexit ) and anything that seems efficiently effective is appealing to the shallow shit and the presence of puppets , man pleasers and woke talkers is reminiscent of prewar times . Many are making the way out too simple.
As Bonhoeffer,Neibuhr and Orwell pointed out , there are times when reason and causation is actually hidden by denial guilt projection , failure frustration ( esp old cynics ) cultural imperialism by left and right and mum and dad , mere men and whatever .
See also the more recent AN Whiteheadwho coined the terms " mere description" to highlight that people were becoming more interested in naming their own solutions rather than waiting and working together for real ones ( particularly pointed was J Ellul) ; hence his phrase http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com

Real progress , not this shallow headed vanity of those who think themselves uniquely progressive is always about working together using the sound science of sustainability evaluation :
---listening to observers AND participants ( not just them as the City unwisely insisted with their blind support for an undiscussed entrenched constitutional ammendment !)

Progressive in the West clearly need to take heed from those who ARE CLOSER to sources of real CONFLICT / productive change and resilience under pressure ( COUNTRY ) than they themselves are ( say in cities , armchairs screens and via their favoured media links ).

The referendum result was quite predictable ,s the psychologists who wrote about the risks in impending Media blinkeredness in the Telecom 2000 futures report SAID in 1975 . Whether we learn from this billion dollar mistake ( all our time wasted ) is up to us . Good listening people !Our children will need the best we can give !  

Emotional outbursts and how we can learn from them .

 Before the West goes completely mad , let me remind you that anger and emotion is not wrong but the post modern west is all wrong . It tries to solve complex problems by making them far too simple . 
By not reading the signals and motions for sustainable change it creates its most notable products . Depression and Inertia . 

And its very clear that by hoping for a solution in pure reason, the depression can only get worse - unless we accept that we know oh so little and need much help ( not the adverts in the media ) and not from the media . 
 Anyway ,read about that and our mental illness over the shallow  ( we are after all born with adrnalin and nor adrenalin, testosterone etc eslewhere.>

Finding that place of rest

 While I still spend lots of time (as a risk planning ecologist )seeking to remind the worriers that the world is a resilient space where the real  comfort is seeing how it really works so well.    

I know that the really big thing that drives too many to distraction is a sense of restlessness . And however men want to cover this with a veneer of I'm Ok and I know, the denial of the place of spiritual rest  is the annoying huge  sore that stands out on everyone's feet .As  akey driver its not always painful but as JUNG said ,  its what annoys us that drives us . 
(I will cover why my comfort is enough for me later as all the talk of home, the boundaries , the chooks and the fireplace is very confusing because we are ALL born into a place of some distress and discomfort when we landed into our original family home ). Please start reading VACLAV SMIL's book for a start  ) 

You see,  we in Australia right now are the richest people on earth , but you wouldn't know it .We don't have everything we want , but we have everything we need . So what's bugging us ? Well according to the old prophet this restlessness is nothing new

 but YOU don't want to hear old
YOU like to think yourself PROGRESSIVE 
So let's go go to
This weeks promised trip to heaven.

Our reps have just voted to change the world by introducing a set of numbers into law 43%.They did this because they have  a vision of heaven on earth, somewhere we still have to go yet  before we die   (like between 2030 and  2050) 
Like the dystopian film Dominion  and Merrill Streep  remind us,  we are determined to go there and bugger the cost. 
 The driver is a mad mindset to move ; to try and move ourselves to a place of rest . where things will still work.  Maybe we just don't know how things work .    

Back to Earth  ( Canberra August 2022 ) The reality is that the people  elected to buy the tickets so we can all go on this space ship, have absolutely no idea to how to get there. They can't even picture the place,  let alone the fuel we will all use . as an eg The ignoramuses' talk of storing more ions without any idea of the very danger of ionization or the composition and decomposition  of them . 

Australian's are NOW set to live in empty mind spaceships of disrest .The departure lounge . Its very distressing to pretend  we have found a place of rest when we haven't.  To paint the walls with stats and put them into every sunday sermon . I much prefer my own church  and even better the intellectual truth than both science humility and faith can provide. .  

 

Suggestion 

Tell me why your rest isn't in accepting the truth  ;  ( and why others can't rest till they accept it )   
That you are a very small , but quite dangerously ignorant and arrogant  part of an an amazingly big universe .
A universes, for all its frightening siz e and complexity,  created your mind and gave you freedom and autonomy that only gods get.
 Tell me why you shouldn't at least try to find your rest by seeking to engage with the still small voice .I Kings 19.
Your Creators  work can be seen all around you . But for you , fellow noisemaker and complexity creator (Einstein said only 2 choices, as did Jung ) ,to really hear you have to stop and listen .
The paradox is that most of the world's worries would evaporate if people stopped moving and listened . 
LISTEN  just where you are right now . 

Cutting through the crap

  

Sometimes,  the only way a scientist , in talking about complex practical possibilities can cut through to politicians and the people  is by keeping it very simple 
 

" We must live with coronaviruses - not try to eliminate them" 

 Stop his long winded truth telling being cut to pieces by the self selects . 


Not sure who to trust ?    

So  lets start with who not to trust  

Emperor Dan and his ever reworked  elimination plans - whether its by
---testing for the presence or
-- block all doors of entry to the evil agent by using antigens . 

Remember Dan only keeps ahead of the game by upping the anti - a fanatic redoubling his efforts so he look like he's taking the thing on seriously . more here 

Ref " Snowballs in a blizzard "

not sure who to trust ?This is quite normal and reasonable.- everyone calls themselves a scientist and can sound like one citing google 
It gives us hope when they admmit they don'tknow and they also also admitthey dont know who to trust  , The wnnabes are in this internet afge being sorely tested as the internet provides not only a reason to ignore these noisemakers seeking attanetion  ut also provides noise to counter the towers of babel growing around us  

The Fabian dream

 The Webb's and the Fabian movement did a  lot of good in their early days . Let's face it, their commitment to thorough research would be welcomed by so many of us practical down to earth scientists now alienated by the  noisy quick fix ever changing agendas  of the huge scientism ( they think they love science but only love talking about it and its products - dilatants ) lobby today . 
I especially love those 2's advocacy of workers rights and the role of good government . Very Sadly( because the last century has seen so much perversion of democratic freedoms )  , many western governments have lost sight of how this delicately balanced ( ask ED Burke) idea works. .Robespierre showed  them ( in the way we mostly learn ?) where not to go, but no-one told them  to make sure they grew up in their understanding and sorted the wheat from the chaff of history; how in the world did the West get it right and set power plays in order   
The Webb's promoted the products of sound intellectual history -- great !, The Fabians faith is now in a future that ignores the teachings of history  ( stupid and lazy thinking)  . The tragic consequences of modern idealisms   are put in a dramatic study of the recent history   "How to become a tyrant "..   one hopes that that story is only the beginning of unravelling the tragically flawed ideas  of an ideal society that were so common since the movement began.  

so where is it now ?  Picture :frogs in hot water and a thick fog  

1. Locked into  faith in automatic progress ( as it started )? 
2. Effectiveness obtained by doing nothing but niggle, complain and wait ;
3. No need to act or if pressured to be responsible. for just moving on ?
4. No brakes or throttle control on real evil and the people who will hide behind your excuses and doing nothing but let things happen philosophy ?  
   
5. Women bemoaning the sexual freedom they gave to males . What would Beatrice say to the Fabian group of girls ? Bettina Ardnt  might have sound advice 
   but oh no we must endure the nightly barrage on ABC TV  ,The drum ,and RN evenings about how bad the oppression from men is.   
6. Women projecting their unhappiness onto other minority groups allowing them to do the same thing ---wallow in their so called oppressions on public TV or hours and hours . Its not doing them or any of them any good .I accept that oppression  occurs and can be very serious BUT  Facing the truth about how OUR  perspective  limits us ---would set them free ,,, surely
7. Too rigidly accepting of solutions arriving like uninvited salesmen at our doorsteps in a crisis?  oh great ! the real observers don't respect you . they say "U don't respect people who just sit there and spout crap" . Here's a bomb 2 wake U up???
8. Too ideological to be of any earthly use?
9.  Unwilling to accept your world view is simple and  highly reactionary and therefore responses are no more often than over reactionary  response to the idea of revolution and deaths and disasters you have let happen . ???
10. Where is your push back philosophy?  The resilient always have one 
11. Too willing to trust the mere machinery of government rather than trust in the mind fulness required to make good decisions involving those scary people called men , at any time in history. 
    
    
12. Dangerous because its agendas are not obvious - just gradual like cancer?

Bill Shorten with his faith in batteries and Julia Gillard with her faith in taxes show the randomness of the ideas and limits of this still popular idealism are in practical faith politics; an idealism that  forces irrationality on the people .Sleepy stuff that allows nudging by the more determined 
just as the tyrants of our own century  show the force of an idea  "How to become a tyrant "

CONCLUSION 
Watch out --
A-for adherents
as Bertrand Russell noted and Chamberlain proved ., a mere faith in gradualism can lead to a false sense of comfort .   Evolution is a process that works in natural selection ; its not the only law even amongst animals who have no language we understand . 

B- For others . If your agenda is  hidden in the shadows , Watch OUT -some other dark forces may join you .
 
 The West is only the best when it teaches and encourages the open test .  
If you don't test it in the real world why would it work once developed .

\You have always to understand how things work  ( the ecosystem)  if you are to prevent disaster and breed something deeper --improved resilience . 
 

Soil sequestration - another ideal that hasn't been grounded

 As a practical  soil scientist  who has worked across the arid and wettest areas of Australia, I specified to my old University ( Melbourne ) why soil sequestration would not work as a carbon sink in any areas of productive agricultural production in Australia ( it could be used in really moist ecosystems possibly )( over 10 years ago) 
An incentive for retaining organic matter in soils has appeal but not just for carbon compound storage . 
Without the people in the bush (that used to be there) to mediate,   the use of numbers and figures to offer incentives ( also questionable in cost benefit )  would be very wrong. 
The idea  does not recognize the complexity  of determining  sound organic matter levels in a great variety of soils and seasons and crops and the greater need and benefit  for sound ecological partnerships between farmers and scientists in the bush. . . 

The idea and the desperation for sequestration methods has been so great that other countries have fallen for this unsustainable ambition ,;
 so the pressure grows again back here , from people like former PM John Anderson and Professor Batterham   (Feature in The Australian July 2021)

Until i find my original post I will not explain why  the soil biome and the practical incentive expectation's are unsustainable as listed in those notes  

 here is a more recent response
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/46/11652