How Bruce Lehman enshittified the planet. Yes, he has a similar, but differently spelled (and pronounced) name. And he’s worse. pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/d...

The Christmas Season is about to start… our tree and decorations are going up this weekend. For those of us who are able, let’s do the season of giving right by donating gifts for kids in families facing tough times, and helping your local food bank. Thanks, and Happy Holidays.

If you see this, quote post with your own beach photo. Vitamin sea.

Winter Badger.... Happy Thursday x #watercolour #badger #winter #watercolor #woodland #art #watercolourpainting #snow #Britishwildlife #snow #Devon #inspiration #painting #trees #art #cold

This article is worth reading. Much of it applies equally to Australia, and it's brewing an ugly crisis here too. What and how we measure economic performance really matters, and our current models are based on lies.

Every day this government is more of a disappointment thepoint.com.au/opinions/251...

It is devastating to watch folks I previously considered clever or reliable or both abdicate progressively more of their critical thinking to LLMs. Our ability to reason, be wrong, correct ourselves and grow is so precious. I wish I understood why they're so happy to give it away?

xkcd.com/3172 I was fine until the last panel. Now I'm crying into my lunch at work.

What sheep know about the benefits of wind turbines that Australia's National Party doesn't

I think we need to stop putting so much emphasis on federal governments and international negotiations. Yes, they could help. But they've failed us badly during the last 30+ years. Maybe we can put a bit more attention on community-based solutions, affordable decarbinization tools, and markets?

The soaking begins...

Today I'm wondering how much of a line we can draw from the promotion of "hustle culture" to today's shameless grifting. If doing what you can to make a buck is good, it's easy to self-justify exploiting others to "make it".

Today I'm wondering how much of a line we can draw from the promotion of "hustle culture" to today's shameless grifting. If doing what you can to make a buck is good, it's easy to self-justify exploiting others to "make it".

Flower of the day. #Flowers #BloomScrolling #DailyFlowers

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?

Great news!! We're now offering free shipping Australia-wide on orders of prints & cards over $99 and a flat-rate of just $8.95 🤩 rachelhollis.com #prints #wildlifeart #australianart

This thread is both very YIKES! and very sad. Our brains cannot safeguard against this unethical nightmare we're being sold as essential to use to guarantee our future employability.

Getting some culture again.

When someone's in distress, don't go straight to something 'positive' or trying to make it better. Hear where someone's at, take the time, 'be with'. Be willing to stay with the real discomfort- what a difference this makes, rather than reaching for the temporary relief of a superficial solution.

too real lol

I found out about the glass flowers not long ago. There are also glass sea creatures! It's enough to make an eco-nerd almost consider visiting the US.

“Housing shortage – Jews to blame," letter sticker, German Reich, 1938 zwangsraeume.berlin/en/context

One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. This Spanish Moon Moth (Graellsia isabellae) caught in the lamplight outside a hostel where we were staying in a dark pine forest in the Catalan Pre-Pyrenees. Moons before, as a caterpillar it would have somehow found substance in miserly pine needles

The state of being three

A beloved conservative trope is "queer degeneracy". Here, nations fall to transgressive permissiveness. Men are effete, women are macho. Children are victims of orgiastic liberality. Epstein's emails are a reminder of the sad truth: a reliable predictor of abuse is just men with unchecked power.

So, Palantir isn’t for “the people”. It’s not an emancipatory company. Its technologies are used by the powerful to maintain (and increase) their power. All this guff about AI and leisure is advertising. That is to say: bullshit.

Peter Thiel continues to terrify me. He has extreme power over international politics due to widespread government dependence on his products. The tech oligarchs are using our dependence to extort governments in their favour. The political fear is real. Tech dependency is choosing us dearly.

Being good at making money doesn’t mean you’re good at anything else. It definitely doesn’t mean your opinions on anything else are important. It most likely just means you’re ruthless, which is the primary trait of most rich people.

NO WAYYYY! 🤯🤯🤯 Is this the COOLEST stick insect ever?? 💚 This mossy girl (Taraxippus sp.) from Peru was the most incredible phasmid I have ever seen, I could not get over how perfectly camouflaged it was on the mossy trees! 🌳 So in awe of our natural world! 🌿

my new AI powered lamp is trained on millions of lamp interactions so it understands that 50% of chain pulls are to turn it on and the other 50% are to turn it off. and honestly, it's a little spooky how it knows exactly what i want almost half of the time

OK, I already posted tiny terrestrial snails, let's do a GIANT AQUATIC SNAIL. This is one of the largest marine snails in the world, a Horned helmet shell (C. cornuta). Helmet is right, that shell is THICK. #Snailposting #Invertebrates 🌿📷🐙

Reading After Australia: phenomenal. So many voices i know and cherish: Karen Wyld, Claire Coleman, Omar Sakr, Michelle Law... Then an unknown voice - Kaya Ortiz - utterly destroys me, in the way only poetry can, and I'm seen and adrift and homesick for my lutruwita and the Mountain, sobbing.

Annie Soudain is a contemporary UK artist and printmaker inspired by nature #WomensArt

The expanding shrimp army says hello, plus some danio cameos.

Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

No, self-regulation. It's not suppressing & denying the emotion, as control and discipline suggest. It's learning to feel the emotion without responding FROM the emotion. Knowing how you feel and why you feel it, holding yourself steady through it, then choosing how to respond to it.

Further, we need urgent regulation that protects our institutions: truth in advertising, curtailing the tech oligarchs, untangling govt dependence on a small set of corporations (for tech, for consultancy, for messaging), protecting independence. This work is vital and urgent.

Amy makes me feel less alone. The cowardice of our political class and the "progressive" failure to learn the right lessons and prepare for the filthiness of modern campaigning, have us going nowhere. We need boldness. Hope. Spine.

Here's feed refresher: teaching an octopus to play piano... youtu.be/PcWnQ7fYzwI?...

This is what activism does in politics. It moves the Overton window. Unless public pressure outweighs corporate pressure and public opposition, action is politically dangerous and readily repealed. Our struggle now is the massive weight of invisible corporate pressure: the tech oligarchs.

Have you heard of “The Populist Playbook?” A few years ago, I posted what I still consider one of my most important messages. It was about “The Populist Playbook” that I’ve watched play out often over my 33+ years of city planning. Since then, it’s only gotten worse. Do the steps sound familiar?

About damn time

A million seconds is 11.6 days A billion seconds is nearly 32 years A trillion seconds is nearly 32,000 years

I'm on a mission to store my files back out of the cloud, and man, it's a lot of work now. Everything automatically saves to mandatory Cloud accounts. Time to rebuild old e-filing habits.

Doing battle with the patch of bush iris "garden" outside my rental, which forms an effective trap for debris from the local pink pepper and plane trees, plus a bit of litter. I found a whole spatula today!

Sometimes I believe that we will get through this for something better because we are yearning to take care of each other.

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Happy Wrensday Wednesday! A purple-backed fairywren at the dam. Southern Flinders Ranges. #wrensday

As a social/psychological experiment, giving a bunch of emotionally unintelligent narcissists an ungodly amount of money, power, and unfettered access to gaslighting AI flattery machines is producing some quite fascinating results. But yeah, the practical consequences are...not good.