SOME HOLIDAYS ARE ABOUT taking one's ease. Some holidays aren't, and I have just had one of the latter. To go and see the 2025 Women's Ashes I decided to travel the hard way to the MCG from Sydney, all in all 2,495km in a scenic loop, on a motorbike a bit too small for touring. Why? Why not?

One way to describe it is the legs: Sydney to Gundagai, an unpleasant struggle in the heat down the Hume Highway, then Gundagai to Cooma over the mountains via the Snowy Mountains Highway. A completely spectacular ride and a (doubly-significant) high point of the trip, though one that tested the engine of my motorbike, struggling for air in the altitude. Cooma overnight and into Victoria to Cann River, through forests, and the long road west into Melbourne, squinting into the late evening sun, finishing the day exhausted, with city roadworks, and an enforced hook turn. An easy afternoon of Melbourne to stay at Echuca. Echuca through the Riverina, flat wheat fields and isolation, emus and whirlwinds, Narrandera and the central west, the plane museum at Temora, and a final night in Cooma. From Cooma, through Bathurst where the endurance race was on, and the motorway back to Sydney.

Another way to describe it would be the physical experience. Yamaha's SR400 is nobody's idea of a touring motorbike (though some make even worse choices than me). It's a very light, upright-stance, single-cylinder bike ideal for city riding, but that struggles up to 100km/h and will do 110km/h only with a bit of encouragement. I had a backpack full of water, warm clothes, and spent a lot of time hunched like a jockey. The very best riding was in isolation, in the rural roads of the Central West and the Snowy Mountains, where I could choose my speed and pick my line through curves, the worst was the Hume Highway where mere violence rules and the law is a figleaf over vehicle mass. 10 litres of fuel tank (with another 2 reserve) and a range of ~200km means a lot of mental arithmetic, careful route planning, and a lot of stopping for fuel.

Or yet another, way, in terms of consequences. I didn't expect the trip to be painless. Still, in Adaminaby I stopped by the side of the road to adjust my bag, hit a piece of gravel, and went down at walking speed. A truck driver who was stopped helped me up, checked me over, and bade me on my way towards Cooma, where I discovered I couldn't weight bear on my leg; so a trip to the Cooma Hospital emergency to be x-rayed, and an unplanned overnight stay above a pub in town. I have no broken bones but a gigantic bruise, and a lump the size and colour of an avocado.

And finally another way, in terms of metaphysics. Don't read Robert Pirsig: Zen is not the kind of book that has dated well outside the 1970s, and it was culty back then, but do consider longish, demanding, focus-requiring tasks to have some value in their own right. To go riding is to reduce the number of things you can actively think about to a very very few, largely what is in front of you, or immediately behind. It was a much needed few days of focus.

Mob Rule, by John Ganz

The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.

What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.

THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.

The firefighting in Los Angeles seems to involve extensive use of firefighting aircraft, for spotting and for dropping water; by comparison the RFS in NSW has less than a dozen aircraft, and there is a combined Australian 'fleet' of suitable aircraft of somewhere around a hundred. It's curious how different societies and different cultures approach disasters.

The basic economics problem is that it's impossible to retain, all the time, enough people to respond to a disaster. The Americans approach fires, characteristically, both with high technology and also through the use of inmate labour. Other countries, such as China, which have access to large numbers of conscripted people in the PLA, simply accept the opportunity cost of not having large numbers of people in the workforce, and can throw troops at any problem. The Australian approach depends instead on the time of very large numbers of volunteers, who undertake their own training and respond unpaid---and we accept the risk that those volunteers may, if they feel the social bargain isn't a good one, or the local management of the units poor, walk away.

It's characteristic of all disasters that they expose real faultlines in societies, such as lack of preparation, but especially inequality. They can also shift societies, even if temporarily, into new and extraordinary configurations of help and care, as Rebecca Solnit has written. It's characteristic also of those disasters that they reveal the real strengths of societies.

Los Angeles must be one of the most air-minded places in the world, so it's no surprise that the Californian response would involve such concentrated use of aircraft. It is something no other society could realistically achieve, and in the sense of the cliche, it's shocking, and awing---for good! I prefer my own society's approach that builds communities of disaster-mindedness in the everyday; but of course that's just a reflection that I happen to like the society of which I'm a member.

WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.

The President-elect of the United State is posting about prospective military action against both Mexico and Greenland. Is it serious? Should this be taken seriously? Everything is serious and nothing is.

But that’s sort of the game of it. If you take it seriously and react to the statement of the incoming President as though it were the statement of any other President—you’re being overly shrill and can’t take a joke. It sets the expectation that he can just go on stage and say whatever he wants and there’s no actual consequence to it.

But this is not a behaviour that is unique to Donald Trump. It's the fundamental quality of microblog format 'posting' that anything can be said and nothing has to be defended, something that wasn't true of older forms of journalism, or of radio, which were both regulated both at the formal level by real rules, and by an informal culture where there were limits to simply lying, or to insincerity. When posting, on the other hand, there's no obligation whatsoever to the truth or consistency, or anything. ‘Posting through it’ is the characteristic behaviour of the format, which is because it is so postmodern and unmoored from any binding chain to text, allows anything to signify anything. No obligations arise.

Academia: You've Got AI. Is It Terminal? Thursday's Child Sees A Lot of Threats on the Board, Timothy Burke

So then, where’s the fire? What’s the crisis? Where is generative AI potentially going to lay waste to the world we live in?

The problem is that it is not being used as a prosthesis to work beyond the frontiers of human capacity. It is being deployed in service to an anti-human ideology by a small class of oligarchs who loathe mass society, who hate democracy, who fear constraint.