Upside Down and Inside Out

 


The crux of our difficulty is both profound and banal — to understand nature through degrees of complexity rather than levels of hierarchy scaffolded with self-reference is to find ourselves no longer the pinnacle of creation. We are only just beginning to comprehending non-human minds, only just beginning to concede that there are infinitely many other ways of seeing and other ways of being within the same reality; we would sooner grant consciousness to AI, modeled on our own minds arising from nervous systems crowned with brains, than consider different forms of intelligence as portals to a wider conception of consciousness.

Maria Popova

Upside down and inside out and on all eights like a funnel web, like a black fly on the ceiling, skinny white haunches high and skyward and her black oily gash, crawling backwards across the carpet to smash all over everything her wet, black fur against the sun going down over the shops and the cars and the crowds and the town.

And this is the moment this is exactly what she is born to be
This is what she does and this is what she is.
And this is the moment this is exactly what she is born to be
This is what she does and this is what she is.

Nick Cave. Rings of Saturn.


The finches were flirting with each other on the bridal path. A cormorant aired its wings. A duck with its clutch of ducklings came into view, one of the great, well most poignant sights in all of nature, for whatever reason. 

"You think about things differently at this age," he said, but the whole world was in uproar, at the dawn of AI, at history funnelling already into a past, at wars and the rumours of wars, as the Biblical saying went. The old girl methodically read the Bible once a year. But did not go rushing to meet her maker. Ukraine, Israel. Now a car driving through a Christmas market at high speed, and the left wing commentators turning themselves into pretzels not to make it an Islamic attack, because, well, who knew the motive. Yeah, right. 

And we collapsed in upon ourselves, and no one knew the motive for that either. He had been up to see Old Billie Rough, who was in a hospice, and he was going to pay homage to the person he once was, not the person he was now. Over-serviced, for 86 percent of all new jobs, if he read or recalled it rightly, were in the public service, and what might have once been called over-servicing, it took him aback, this pale, quivering shell. 

Sober, without alcohol, for the first time in years, probably decades, because he was on antibiotics after a fall, he was stuck with his own terrible thoughts. Old men and their regrets. It was a shock to see, sad, but the thing that infuriated him the most was that he didn't, wouldn't, turn the TV off the whole time he was there. They stare at the square of light, these zombies, these living corpses, waiting out their time in a soup of medications, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medication, God knows what else. 

Whole tranches, or segments of life disappeared. And it happened to him, too, remember that castle in Kent where we went, and there was all these people explaining the pagan rituals. And to begin with it just drew a blank. Then he remembered bits and pieces. But how they got there, why they were there, what the pagan ceremonies consisted of, none of it came to mind. 

Disembodied wings. The circling motion of circling entities, or spirits, or whatever they were, be brave, be strong, be courageous, and the fate of the nation, the fate of Australia, the appalling state of our politics, the absolutely hopeless, hapless nature of our political class, all of it a destiny, the country flooded with strangers, the rare edifice, the frail cages that took us into the future, the strange remarks, the whispering in the wind and amongst the humans, all of it curling and dying and rising again, as they reached out, you are loved, be strong, be brave, don't drink, all of it curled in defeat and glory. And around the globe, wars.

And elsewhere, the beginnings of entirely new kingdoms.


MAINSTREAM NEWS

MACRO BUSINESS

Australian Treasury guarantees permanent housing crises

Leith van Onselen
Monday 23 December 2024

The Australian Treasury’s Orwellian Centre for Population released its 2024 Population Statement, which forecast that ongoing high immigration will add 4.1 million residents over the next 10 years—most of whom will live in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth.

“Australia’s population is projected to grow from 27.1 million people in March 2024 to 31.3 million people by 2034–35. This is slightly higher than projected in last year’s Population Statement”.

Over the decade to 2034, Melbourne’s population is projected to balloon by one million people to 6.5 million, whereas Sydney’s is projected to swell by 900,000 people to 6.5 million.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyIm2bb4MaU


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