My long term goal is to set up a farm using Permaculture methods, in the process of getting a DA to build a low energy (low running cost) home. Aim to be food self sufficient by 2018.
Polyester has been about to replace wool since 1941, and every decade has announced the victory before finding the catch.
1941: Two chemists in a Lancashire calico works invent Terylene. The future of clothing, they say. It is a plastic bottle in the shape of a shirt.
1951: DuPont launches Dacron in America. Wash and wear, never needs ironing. It also never breathes, which America discovers in July.
1960s: Crimplene. A suit that never creases and can be heard approaching. Static electricity joins the British dance floor.
1973: Children’s polyester pyjamas go up like paper, so they are soaked in a flame retardant called Tris.
1977: Tris is banned for causing cancer. The treated pyjamas are shipped abroad and sold to other people’s children.
1979: A Manchester Woolworths burns. Ten dead. Foam and polyester furniture turns a room that used to take seventeen minutes to burn into one that takes three.
1982: HMS Sheffield. Sailors in synthetic uniforms are treated for the fabric melted into their skin. The Navy goes back to cotton and wool.
1993: Fleece is relaunched as the eco fabric, made from recycled bottles. The jumper is now proud of being a bottle.
2006: The US Marines ban polyester shirts in Iraq, because a burning man teaches faster than a brochure.
2016: Scientists put a fleece through a washing machine and count what comes out. Seven hundred thousand fibres, one wash, into the sea.
2020: Polyester fibres found in the human placenta.
2022: Found in human blood and deep in living lungs.
2024: Found in every testicle sampled, and in the plaque of arteries.
2025: Found in the brain. About a spoonful.
2026: Still “the future of clothing”. Still melting, still smelling after one wear, still shedding, still sold on the hanger next to a sheep that solved all of it before the pyramids.
Eighty-five years of upgrades, and the only fabric in the shop that has never needed a recall is the one standing in a field.
Every time the science has been settled, somebody paid for the settlement, and the bill has a name on it.
1747: James Lind cures scurvy with lemons. The Navy keeps it settled as a disease of damp air for forty-eight years and loses more sailors to it than to the French.
1799: Bleeding is settled. George Washington is drained of nearly half his blood for a sore throat and is dead by evening.
1847: Childbed fever is settled as bad air. Ignaz Semmelweis washes his hands and the deaths on his ward fall from one mother in ten to one in a hundred. He is sacked, committed, and beaten to death in an asylum.
1915: Pellagra is settled as an infection. Joseph Goldberger proves it is the corn diet of the poor by injecting himself with sufferers’ blood. The South keeps the corn, and 100,000 Americans die of it.
1941: The lobotomy is settled, and about to win a Nobel. Rosemary Kennedy, twenty-three, is left unable to walk or speak, one of 40,000 Americans put under the pick.
1956: The pregnancy X-ray is settled as harmless. Alice Stewart shows one scan doubles a child’s chance of cancer. She loses her funding and the scans run for another quarter century.
1961: Thalidomide is settled as safe for morning sickness. Ten thousand babies.
1971: DES is settled as a pregnancy protector. The daughters of the women who took it develop a cancer nobody has seen before.
1972: Sugar is settled as harmless. John Yudkin writes that it is not, and the fat men and the sugar men end his career between them.
1984: Fat is settled as the killer, and a generation of mothers swaps the butter for a tub of oil.
2004: Vioxx is settled as a safe painkiller. Up to 140,000 heart attacks before it is pulled.
The science was settled every single time. The only thing it ever settled was who took the blame afterwards.
Vitamins in wholebread flour compared to highly processed flour
Whole grain flour retains all parts of the wheat kernel (bran, germ, and endosperm), providing a significantly higher density of essential vitamins and minerals compared to highly processed refined flour, which strips away the bran and germ, removing the majority of natural nutrients.
Nutrient Retention in Whole Grain Flour
- B Vitamins: Whole grain flour is a natural source of thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), B6, and folate, which are concentrated in the bran and germ.
- Vitamin E: The germ contains vitamin E, a powerful antioxidant; refined flour loses nearly all of this during processing.
- Minerals: It provides higher levels of iron, magnesium, zinc, selenium, and manganese, which are largely absent in refined grains.
Losses in Highly Processed Flour
- Refining Impact: The milling process removes the bran and germ, stripping away 50–66% of key vitamins and minerals and nearly all dietary fiber.
- Enrichment Limits: While some processed flours are “enriched” with synthetic versions of thiamine, niacin, iron, and folic acid, they do not restore the full spectrum of nutrients, phytochemicals, or antioxidants found in whole grains.
- Processing Losses: Studies show that even whole wheat bread loses significant nutrients during milling and baking, but refined products start with far less due to the initial removal of the nutrient-dense outer layers.
Comparison Summary
Nutrient Category Whole Grain Flour Highly Processed (Refined) Flour B Vitamins High natural levels (B1, B2, B3, B6, Folate) Low natural levels; often synthetically enriched Vitamin E Present in the germ Nearly absent Fiber High (bran is retained) Very low (bran is removed) Minerals Rich in magnesium, zinc, selenium, manganese Low; some iron and B vitamins may be added back Phytochemicals Contains antioxidants (e.g., alkylresorcinols) Absent
5Choosing 100% whole wheat or sprouted grain flour ensures you consume these nutrients in their natural, bioavailable forms, whereas enriched refined flour offers a limited subset of added vitamins without the accompanying fiber and co-nutrients.
I think this is evidence of our government-owned energy generator, Snowy Hydro, unethically gouging consumers. It might be legal. Maybe. But I think it’s wrong. Electricity consumers and taxpayers should be furious.
I pulled this data with the help of AI. This would be days or weeks of work a few years ago. Now getting all the data in the ideal format to understand takes just minutes. Much harder is figuring out what it actually means.
I should hasten to say, I’m pro-market enough to hate it when people rail against ‘price-gouging’. Provided the market isn’t rigged, there’s nothing wrong with sellers charging what they can. Prices are important signals. If the market’s functioning properly, it will bring in new supply from competitors, and/or allocate limited supplies to those with greatest need.
But in this case, I think the actions taken by Snowy Hydro show absolutely masterful exploitation of failures in our energy market, in particular transmission constraints and poor system design, which competitors have no means of correcting through new supply. Because the supply is fixed by a badly designed transmission build-out, competition is held away.
The damning thing here is the change in the ramp-down rates. That’s what makes the whole thing go from smart, and brutally self-interested manipulation of the market, to something that seems to me to be dishonest. That, set in the context of the counterprice flows, and the market intervention by @AEMO_Energy to impose constraints that would affect other competitors ability to provide power in the market.
You see, the first thing you’d think of for re-bidding behaviour that’s potentially profit-maximising, and hurting consumers, is raising your bids to higher prices, when you know that there’s a shortage.
That’s child’s play compared to what’s going on here.
At rebid 6, Snowy drops their bid down to negative values for half their capacity. (See green block start on bottom panel) Ie, “I’ll pay people to take away my power”. Surely lower bids helps lower prices right?
Usually right, but here it’s wrong. And this is where Snowy Hydro’s market team shows they’re true ninjas. They know that there’s a bottle-neck so a bunch of power in Southern NSW can’t reach Sydney, and push down prices at the reference point. So they bid super-low. Negative $1000. The minimum. That guarantees they get dispatched. The plebs in the wind-farms trying to get every MW they can out at a positive price would never take that kind of risk. So they bid negative, massively, to ensure that their power is flowing to market ahead of any other generator in Southern NSW.
But that’s only the opening move, and Snowy Hydro are thinking many steps ahead already.
They would know the network well enough to know that turning their own pumps on in this part of the network will force power over the border into Victoria against price signals. Victoria has negative prices, NSW positive, at 13:40. Prior to this point, before Tumut 3 turns on, a bit of power is flowing from Vic to NSW, which is helpful. Their negative prices helps bid down NSW’s positive prices. Which is good. Until…
Tumut 3 turns on nearly 900MW in far-South NSW with their crazy-low bid. Then power starts flowing the wrong way, from positive prices to negative, over the Vic border. Promising generators they’d get paid to generate, then promising Victorian consumers they’d get paid to consumer NSW’s excess.
This “negative residue” starts to build up slowly at first. But as prices rise in NSW, as the afternoon heat builds, it speeds up a little. Then comes Snowy Hydro’s next big move. Rebid 7 in the table. They push their entire 1.78GW generation capacity down to the floor price, so it gets dispatched. And this pushes a mass of electricity across the border at a pretty big counter-price delta.
Snowy Hydro knows perfectly well what this does. It pushes the cumulative residues over a level where AEMO has a policy to intervene, imposing a constraint on the market to stop these negative residues building up too high, racking up bills for high priced generation in one state that no-one in the other state where the power landed agreed to pay for. Effectively the idea is to ‘clamp’ the interconnector to stop power flowing the wrong way across it. But you can’t actually stop electrons by clamping the interconnector. You have to adjust the pushes and pulls of generators and loads to prevent the electric fields pushing power the wrong way. That means directing generators to switch off.
And here’s the real cunning in Snowy Hydro’s plan. Because they had so obviously caused the mayhem by pushing nearly 2GW into the grid in a place where the power flowed over the border away from where it was really needed, surely AEMO’s new constraints to prevent that flow would switch that generator (Tumut 3) straight back off? It was dispatching nothing an hour earlier. Surely they get switched off?
Anticipating this, right back at rebid 6 Snowy had adjusted their ramp-down rates registered with the market operator. This is the step which crosses a line in my mind. Because I strongly suspect that nothing at all changed in the technical capability of Tumut 3 that meant that it couldn’t be ramped down as fast as they had told the market they could do minutes before, and would tell the market they could do again just a few hours later. The reasons given mention nothing about technical problems. So this is done as a market move. They know this can make them money, but the truth is that their machinery could ramp at the same (high) rate throughout this episode, I assume.
But by lowering their ramp rate down so far, to just 18MW/minute, they effectively meant that AEMO couldn’t turn them off. They can only be gradually ramped down. They should’ve been the first ones turned off to prevent the counterprice flows, but they’d manipulated their ramp so that they couldn’t be switched off.
Consequently, all the other generators in Southern NSW got switched off in preference. And this drove prices sky-high, because Sydney needed energy. Prices reached over $20,000/MW in a couple of increments soon after.
And, apparently, because the most badly positioned generator (Tumut 3) that was pumping out energy near the Victorian border couldn’t be ramped down quickly, enormous ‘negative residues’ accrued, with a couple million in the 5 mins after AEMO notified the market of the constraint to (attempt to) limit the counterprice flows. And, more than a million ten minutes later.
These ‘residues’ just get lumped onto network charges, and end up being paid by consumers. So it’s pretty clear that Snowy Hydro’s re-bid limiting the ramp rate caused those additional negative residues to arrive, hurting consumers directly.
But also very likely, though there are few more moving parts involved and hence just slightly harder to say with certainty, the bidding behaviour here, which triggered the market intervention to clamp the interconnector to Victoria, almost certainly contributed to the price volatility reaching such extreme peaks in NSW. That would be a much, much more significant cost to consumers, I’ve seen estimates from @EnergyWrapAU putting Snowy’s windfall at around $15 million in one hot hour.
So this I think crosses a line for me. Because the changed ramp-down rate is almost certainly made-up, reflecting nothing in their machinery at all, and because they knowingly caused bad outcomes for consumers on the way to getting paid that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred (the counter-price flows for sure, and the price spike almost certainly) I don’t think it’s ethical behaviour for any generator, and certainly not one owned by taxpayers.
I strongly suspect that if Snowy Hydro had left Tumut 3 with their bids as they were at 13:30, that the counterprice flows would have been far more moderate, possibly not triggering an intervention. And also NSW wind generators a little closer to Sydney would have done a better job meeting rising demand, and prices might have risen a bit, but to nothing like the extend that they actually did when they were forcibly switched off while Snowy Hydro was running Tumut 3 which was sending power the wrong way over the border into Victoria. Because they couldn’t be switched off because of the manipulated ramp-rates.
I note that a lot of people today are questioning Aboriginal history and culture.
So, here’s some modern ‘ancient’ ‘Truth-telling’, some you may know, some not:
– Dot paintings were invented in 1971 by Geoffrey Bardon who then taught the style and technique to Aborigines.
– The Welcome to Country Ceremony was invented in 1976 by Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley to welcome Maori performers.
– There is no Aboriginal word or phrase for Welcome to Country, unlike the Maoris’ welcome/wardance, the ‘haka’. As such, it cannot have been invented prior to colonisation and the introduction of English. How, in ancient times, would they have asked “Who’s doing the Welcome to Country Ceremony?” if there were no words in Aboriginal languages for it?
– The Acknowledgement of Country was invented in the 1990s
– There is no film or video evidence of any of these ceremonies existing at important events such as Royal Tours, the 1956 Olympics, etc. prior to the 70s.
– The not mentioning the name of deceased Aboriginal people or showing an image or providing a warning in an article is also modern. As recently as 2011 when boxer Lionel Rose died, not even the ABC did this.
– ‘Walkabout’ is now considered an offensive term, since it implies someone is late or lazy, despite it being an integral part of initiation ceremonies.
– ‘The oldest living culture’ is not just factually incorrect, it defies logic. The branch of the tree cannot be older than the tree itself. Humans evolved in Africa. There are African tribes that live almost exactly as they did 100,000+ years ago, without welfare, 4WDs, mobile phones, etc. Aborigines are descended from these tribes as humans moved out of Africa and around the world. As such, Aboriginal culture cannot possibly be older than the cultures from which they are derived. (See: diagram)
– Aborigines were never categorized or classified in Australia under the Flora and Fauna Act, despite Linda Burney and many others claiming this. This has been fact-checked and verified by the ABC as a complete and utter myth.
– The term ‘First Nations’ has been culturally appropriated from North American natives.
– The term ‘totem’ is used now widely. Many Aboriginal people adopt or are given a totem. But if this is, as claimed, an ancient tradition, what are the Aboriginal words, in any of the many languages, for ‘totem’ or ‘totems? ‘Totem’ is word from the Ojibwa tribe of North American natives. It is not an ancient Aboriginal word. It, too, is appropriated or ‘stolen’, ironically.
– ‘Deadly’ is not an Aboriginal word. It was a popular term in the 60s: ‘deadly good’. It was often used to describe a bicycle: ‘a deadly treadly’.
– Uluru (Ayers Rock) is, according to the area’s most senior elder, Paddy Uluru, of no cultural significance and is not sacred. Only recently has this been claimed to stop people climbing it.
– The Lake Bolac ‘eel’ rock arrangement required a machine to move the rocks. Which is more likely: that Aborigines arranged the 100+kg rocks 1,500 years ago or it was created more recently in the 20th Century to promote the Annual Eel Festival?
– Neologisms: ‘On country’; ‘Blak’; ‘First Nations’, ‘Blakfullah’, ‘Blak’, ‘First People’, ‘Welcome to Country Ceremony’, ‘Smoking Ceremony’, ‘Rainbow Serpent’ and ‘Dreamtime’ – all English-language-derived, not Aboriginal, such as ‘gangurru’ (kangaroo).
– Things that have fallen out of fashion: ‘Pointing the bone’; curses; photography stealing the soul.
– In almost every instance, the occurrence of a ‘massacre’ was settlers’ retribution for Aborigines stealing sheep, killing workers and/or raping wives and daughters. The notion that settlers or troops went out riding to kill Aborigines for ‘sport’ is a myth.
– The notion of a government-mandated, sanctioned or planned ‘genocide’ isn’t supported and the scale of Aboriginal deaths is widely disputed. Estimates vary so wildly that they cannot be replied upon: from over 1,000,000 to around 200,000 to 100,000 to just 10,000.
– Rainbow Serpent is not translated from any Aboriginal language. Similarly, ‘Dreamtime’ is not translated from any Aboriginal language. (See: diags)
So, what hasn’t been made up in the past 50 years?
You tell me.
In 2014 a trap came up from nearly seven kilometres down in the Mariana Trench carrying an animal no human had ever seen, and when the scientists cut it open they found a thread of polyester inside it, so they named the species after the plastic.
It is an amphipod, a scavenging crustacean a few centimetres long and a deep-water cousin of the sandhopper that jumps out of the seaweed on your beach. It lives in the hadal zone, the last and darkest layer of the ocean, under a weight of water that would flatten a submarine, eating whatever drifts down from the sunlit world above: dead fish, dead whales, and now the laundry. The traps that caught it were set between 6,010 and 6,949 metres, deeper than Everest is high, by a team from Newcastle University looking for life nobody had catalogued. They found it, and in the gut of one of the first specimens was a microfibre that matched the chemistry of PET. The plastic in a drinks bottle, a gym top and the fleece on the back of your chair.
In 2020 it went into the scientific record as Eurythenes plasticus. The man who led the work said they chose the name because the plastic was the most conspicuous thing about it, and Guinness lists it as the first species ever discovered already contaminated before it was named. The same team had already pulled amphipods from the bottom of six trenches across the Pacific and found fibres in the stomachs of nearly three quarters of them, and in every single animal from the Mariana.
So a creature can spend its whole existence at the deepest point on the planet, never within six miles of a human being, in a place no sunlight has reached since the ocean formed, and the polyester still arrives before the biologists do.
The route is your washing machine. One load of synthetic clothes sends up to seven hundred thousand fibres down the drain, too fine for the sewage works to catch, and the drain goes to the river and the river to the sea and the sea goes down a very long way. A wool fibre takes the same journey and is eaten and gone inside a year, because it is a protein and the bottom of the sea is full of things that eat protein. The polyester is eaten too. It just never leaves.
The first new species of the age of plastic was named for what it had swallowed. Somewhere in your laundry basket is the rest of its dinner.
The scan that finds cancer works by injecting radioactive sugar, because a tumour takes up more of it than the tissue around it.
Most cancer cells burn sugar the wasteful way, like yeast, so they need far more of it than healthy cells to keep growing.
The tracer is a fake sugar the cell swallows and cannot finish, so it gets trapped inside and glows.
On the screen, the cancer lights up from eating it.
The day before the scan, the patient is put on a low-carb, no-sugar diet.
If their blood sugar is still too high on the morning, the scan can be cancelled, because the sugar already in the blood would hide the tumour.
The hospital knows exactly what the tumour wants, and keeps it off the menu for one day.
Then Britain’s biggest cancer support charity raises its money with coffee mornings full of cake.
Channel 4 raises money for Stand Up To Cancer with a celebrity Bake Off.
America’s biggest breast cancer charity once sold pink buckets of fried chicken with KFC.
The tea trolley on the chemo ward comes round with biscuits.
Medicine finds the tumour with sugar, then holds a bake sale to fight it.
What the label on a wool jumper would say if labels told the truth:
– Grown on a hill nothing else can use.
– Raw material: grass and rain.
– Factory: a sheep.
– Energy source: sunlight, via the grass.
– Carbon: pulled from the air the summer it was grown.
– Harvest: a haircut the animal needs anyway.
– Warm wet, warm dry, warm in wind.
– Will not sustain a flame in the air you breathe.
– Takes a third of its weight in water and feels dry.
– Worn for four days without smelling, because bacteria cannot get a grip on it.
– Wears for thirty years, darns, passes down.
– End of life: rots back into the soil within months, and the worms eat it.
What the label on a fleece jacket would say:
– Grown in a refinery.
– Raw material: crude oil.
– Factory: a factory.
– Energy source: more crude oil.
– Carbon: pulled from under the ground, where it had been for 300 million years.
– Melts at 250 degrees and sticks to skin.
– Smells after one wear and is washed after every wear.
– Sheds 700,000 plastic fibres per wash into the sea.
– Found in human blood, lungs, placenta and brain.
– End of life: a hole in Chile, for the next thousand years.
One of these two is in the sustainability section.
It is the one with the oil in it, and the sheep is still being blamed.
Follow the mainstream advice to the letter and every food you remove takes a part of your body with it.
Take away cholesterol and you take away the raw material of testosterone, oestrogen, cortisol, bile and the hormone they call vitamin D.
Take away the egg yolk and you take away the choline the liver needs to ship fat out, so the fat stays in the liver and gets its own diagnosis.
Take away red meat and you take away the only iron a woman absorbs properly, and the B12, zinc, creatine and carnitine that came in the same slice.
Take away butter and you take away the K2 that sends calcium into bone instead of artery walls, which is the exact place they were trying to protect.
Take away whole milk and you take away the fat its vitamins travel in, which is why the skimmed version has to have them added back by law.
Take away saturated fat and you take away the half of every cell membrane that does not go rancid in sunlight.
Take away the fat on the chop and you take away the signal that tells you to stop, so you finish the bread instead.
Take away dripping from the chip pan and you fry in an oil that breaks down at frying temperature.
Take away the sun and you take away the hormone, and get sold a tablet made from sheep grease to replace it.
What remains on the plate is toast, a spread, skimmed milk and a banana.
What remains in the cupboard is a statin for what the butter raised, iron for what the steak carried, vitamin D for the sun, B12 for the beef, and a gel for the testosterone the cholesterol would have made.
Followed exactly, the advice turns a dinner into a pharmacy, and the pharmacy is the only part that was ever free of side effects for the people selling it.
