There isn't much bitterness left in me now, at 66. There was quite a lot, or at least some, for about a decade in my fifties and early 60s...things that had gone wrong, the various unfairnesses, the being foolish, the people who did, actually, do me great harm and wrong...etc...and the denying of the harm I did to other people etc...but that all seems to be gone now. I think it is what happens to most people. Not all, not everything happens to everyone, but I think most of the things that happen, unless we are in war, are pretty common to us as generic human stock. What would coffee be without a hint of bitterness? Just a plain sweet drink that makes your teeth fall out. I think I've mentioned the studies on Human Happiness and that, in general, life is pretty happy when one is young, a child etc, and then as maturity and responsibility arrive most folk experience unhappiness for a long time in various forms, though not all the time, and then, in late life, without those responsibilities etc, then life becomes kind of happy again. It's got nothing to do with who we are or what we've done, or whether we have been bad or good, etc, it's just the Wheel of Human Life, not for everyone, but for most. I've never been against the notion of self killing, suicide, etc, at all as I believe this is quite normal also. Death, does, indeed, acquit us of all responsibility. But I have suggested to folk who wish to do so, that, for their own enjoyment possible, to consider the Wheel, and how, in general, things don't get much worse and sometimes, do get a lot better...not forever etc...but for enough of the time we are alive. If you wish to kill yourself at 60, well, fair enough. But remember that no matter how you die, the folk who love you will grieve for you and, really, after a year, no matter how you die, they won't miss you so much anyway...so, don't do it for them. We are a passing parade.

Eventually all the various discriminations that people have, their colour, their gender, their race, their culture, their intelligence, their religions, their fetishes, their beliefs, their jobs, their philosophies etc...everything that separates us will fade and pass. What we will be left with, the great division, will between those with wealth and those with poverty...and this will be the only human discrimination and the only human bias. I expect that it will be a long and bloody and very nasty time for all who remain. I wish us well.

I think our family, staunchly Catholic and Irish at the outset, apart from Mum, who had intelligence AND humour, were all basically indentured as iron-collar slaves into the Irish Roman Catholic Realm...which is pretty much exactly like the Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist realm, if you study these things....and, really, in no way differs at all...except there's probably a lot more, a lot more child sex abuse in the Tibetan Buddhist realm... but, anyway, it does, and perhaps should, take at least a lifetime, or two, to escape from the clever and various notions of a Really Big Faith. It's not all bad, of course, either Catholicism or Tibetan Buddhism, it's just, well, mostly bad. You can still have fun with the good notions in it...but, like having dinner, there's no need to swallow everything on the plate. Both are fundamentally about money and control, and, well, yes, money and control have their uses, to be sure...but there are other things of interest as you go along and find things out for yourself.

Thai Royal Anthem

Junior Brown - Apache plus another instrumental (guitar pyrotechnics!).MOV

Pete Seeger: Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

I see the Hong Kong protest folks are getting more destructive and violent hoping/demanding to get a savage response from Beijing so then they can Cry Freedom! Help Us! Independence! Democracy! But that isn't going to happen. The island is just going into a very deep economic recession, that's all. They brought it on themselves. They'll just have to work their way out of that as these years go sailing by.

Johnny Cash - Hurt

I do like this Turkish fable: "The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the Axe, for the Axe was clever and convinced the Trees that because his handle as made of wood, he was one of them"

Men At Work - Down Under (Official Video)

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire (Historic Montage)

Billy Joel - We Didn't Start the Fire (Official Video)

Prince - Sign O' The Times (Official Music Video)

Milli Vanilli - Girl I'm Gonna Miss You (Official Video)

Jimmy Cliff - I Can See Clearly Now (Official Video)

Bob Marley - Redemption Song (from the legend album, with lyrics)

Guantanamera | Playing For Change | Song Around The World

Nina Simone - Sinnerman

The Stranglers "Golden Brown" 1981

Squeeze - Cool For Cats (Official Video)

On Hong Kong: If some Hong Kong Chinese folk have a real problem with being Chinese, then they have a real problem. This is not a problem the Government of China can actually help you with, and no one else will help you. This is your problem. It doesn't matter what you destroy or who you kill, or who you beg to help you to see yourselves as something far cleaner and better and more important and more intrinsically worthy. None of that will help. This is your problem. You have brought yourself to...yourself. It is not the world's fault that you hate yourself and seek to destroy yourself. Being so special and exceptional, that is your business.

Daylight Saving is a funny thing. I was in favour of it for decades until I bought a fantastic Casio GShock watch 3 years ago and suffered far too many hours trying to change the hour hand. And this may make you think I am an idiot, true, but I handed it over to 5 other people, not idiots, actual watch aficionados, watch shop keepers etc, and they couldn't change the time on it either, without access to the 70 page instruction booklet. I posted it back to Casio in Japan, I sent it back saying that I don't want it anymore...and that they should try harder...but instead of keeping it, they fixed it, and sent it back to me. That's true. They returned it, fixed up for that season. Nice of them. So, instead of doing that again this year, I bought a $25 replica of it that is much easier to change. The remarkable Casio G Force, a watch you can wear underwater on Jupiter, as one needs to do, is in the desk drawer until the times change back again in a few months. I doubt the real usefulness of Daylight Saving. It is a complication, a complexity, and we are getting much simpler now, and for the future, and we can't do fascinating complexity anymore.

Perfect Marriage: my view: a perfect marriage, well, this is not an easy thing. it should start with a couple who fundamentally mostly like each other, and at a time when neither is actually rooting someone else, or rooting themselves too much. In some peoples lives, this may be a very rare anomaly and an important and quizzical time. with the necessary arguments, it is important that neither resorts to psychological or physical violence, or indeed, actively hiring assassins, or when running away, one doesn't run very far. Half way motels are for shadey sex and shadey remorse...& its important that they are nearby. It is probably best that your loved one doesn't hold a sharp knife to your throat more than once. I'm not judging, I'm just noticing. eventually you both have a child, i guess, or not, and then usually the dad/husband wants to have sex with someone else to stave off the existential angst of realising that life has no inherent meaning at all. this is part of growing up. it takes the whole of life to understand this fact. yes, life has no meaning. any meaning is a shonky construction over the Void, but it works for, hopefully, a long time. Build that bridge...and after a decade or two, meet the one you love. the same one. thats a perfect marriage. How long does that last? well, back to the issue of existential angst and the meaninglessness of reality and of truth...i dont know. no one knows. if anyone says they know, they are advertisers for some crap notion that is worse than yours, and more expensive than yours. On we go. It's a messy, imperfect ...mess, most of it and with great beauty and wonder in it all, and that's pretty well how we guess we are still actively alive rather than being in the process of actively dying. Now, yes, there is a difference between actively living and actively dying, but we'll get to the dying part well enough without any advice or help at all. Dying knows us much better and more intimately than we will ever know dying...but that's, for a lot of us, a bit further down the road. I think you should marry someone who you are prepared to put in the ground, and they should marry you with the same serious resolve, because that's one of the things that marriage does really mean. I'm very happy with my choice and my marriage. I'd much rather she put me in the ground than I put her there. Too much paperwork and too much sadness for me.

I don't know why Australians worry so much about China, apart from, of course, being rote-educated to do so by our American owners.

John Fitzpatrick News on Hong Kong. Hong Kong was colonised by the UK on the basis of a 'Lease', meaning: they took it by force and torture from China because China was weak. As China got strong and the UK got weak, the UK gave it back at the end of the "Lease". Hong Kong has had a great time compared to China because it is small, clever, and a big trading port, and is supported financially by China...well, til now. Hong Kong protestors are upset that now China is too rich, so HK wants to be something else. They complain China is far too Communist and far too Capitalist. They don't actually have any options. Hong Kong is China. They are lost souls of change, although reasonably well off. If Hong Kong caves in, financially, Singapore, as always, will be happy to takeover being the most important trading hub in Asia again...and Hong Kongers can be poor, as poor as they choose to be. China, the government, will not intrude, because they keep their treaties and they keep their promises...unlike everyone else. Protestors: We have to destroy things and kill someone, or many people, many important important people so that China invades us, and we can cry "Liberty! Freedom! Democracy!" ...but China is not a bait-taker. It is not like other countries. The people of Hong Kong, by choice, simply don't understand their own country, and they probably will destroy their part of it, for and by themselves. Fortunately, China has made very good trade connections with Singapore to future-proof the One Belt One Road Project for the people of ...China.

Rave on John Donne - Van Morrison (studio)

Van Morrison - CONEY ISLAND

It amazes me, really. This anti-China thing that Australia has going at the moment. Why is China so bad right now? Because Donald Trump doesn't like them...that's the only reason...and the whole free media machine is instantly on the case. Pathetic. Australia is formulating ideas about how to deal with China etc...goodness me, for fuck's sake, we don't have a voice in any of that. America tells us when to trade, who to trade with, tells us our moralities and who we must support etc...and, for the size that Australia is, China doesn't care anyway. Tiny countries don't tell huge countries what to do, never have, never will. we are so full of ourselves to the exception of all others, and to the exception of reality itself. We'll be ok as long as we have stuff to dig up and sell them...that's how Australia has been for 25 years. That's why we have a reasonable, if falling, first world economy...thats why we still have pensions, an education system, a health system etc...because of China...no other reason. Nothing we've done for ourselves.... We still have stuff to sell. The rest is wanky rubbish-thinking.

Spring Sunset in a plain north-western suburb in deep southern Australia. Crows grow quiet. Various chirpy be-speckled small birds wonder whether to fly back to the new spring nests now or eat a few more seeds. They discuss this point. They note that it is safe to stay awhile. The big sky, mostly blue, is instantly cold with the slow departure of the yellowy unbuttered still wintry sun. House bricks absorb the last of the warmth for the trailing day. The TV news is telling people who they should dislike and fear today. Oh, it's China again. No surprises there, as we only get our opinions from America these days, and America is always afraid of someone. The radio babbles away with songs about girls just wanting to have fun. The world is moving into economic recession. In an hour, or so, the late, tired, low paid commuters will come home here to the gentle quiet.

On Hong Kong: I would expect the protestations will last about 6 more months or a year. The economy will fall. The Chinese Government will not interfere, and the squabble will become between the protestors and those who are happy as they are, basically the parents of the protestors, and the happy have the numbers...but the families will not break. After all, Hong Kong IS China. Families don't break. Chinese women hold it all together.

I guess some folk think that China could collapse, and give freedom to the narcissistic well off young Honk Kongers, the incestuous pederast Tibetans, the Mad Manchurians, the terrorist Uighurs, etc, and I guess it could, but it would be centuries after Hawaii achieves separate nation hood, by direct war with the USA, and long after the Dharug Mob own Sydney again, and sets up borders in Neutral Bay, and the Tasmanian Aborigines re-take Tasmania by Force. There will be One China for many, many hundreds of years to come and the impact of New China will be more influential in all the forms, money, art, science, technology, than the Romans ever were, and all without War. A new type of Human Civilisation. We will, over the decades, having been bred on the USA and the UKs multiple horrid wars, just have to get used to that, to get used to world peace. it won't be easy for us to do that, but we won't have a choice. Peace is good. Peace is better. Peace works. War is hell, and we can't win that war...we can't depend on Hell anymore to make things better for us. China will make things a lot better for China. What we does up to us, but I'd suggest we look after each other rather than to pre-figure or prescribe some enemy...to make an enemy of people who only want to buy and sell stuff with us anyway.