If you say so Don and if that's your narrow focus and priorities.

My earliest memories go back to around eight months, around the time I also learned to walk.

As for your day after day recollection of day after day 33C?

I'd suggest you drive to parramatta and spend a weekend strolling around their pavements, if only to understand how ordinary, less privileged folk live in the real world, and completely foreign to ivory tower dwelling academics surviving on coal company grants/consultation fees?

Suggest you dump the suit and tie in favour of shorts and loose fitting cotton shirt. Remember to stay hydrated!

And as you turn your gaze skyward, try and finally to understand a sun in a waning phase may well produce an ice age of indeterminate length, but not heat waves and record breaking heat records on record breaking heat records. And given Sunday is heading for hitherto uncharted territory, A good day for a (fair dinkum) scientist to be out there with his measuring instruments!

As opposed to sitting in some plush air conditioned ivory tower, trying to convince the great unwashed, this record breaking, almost endless heatwave pling on record breaking heatwaves, is just a figment of your collective and overwrought imaginations?

Or failing that, find something of little or no consequence whatsoever to prattle on about, to divert attention from what we should be attending.

I hope you're not too old or too overweight to take up the challenge, as elderly folk in their "dotage" frequently succumb to strokes or heart attacks due to heat exhaustion.

And a park bench in the shade during the pm, for a couple of reality check hours, ought to be a big enough reality check challenge! Because you more than most seem to need one?
Alan B.

“Most of us find a significant other, and mate: we are hard-wired to do so.”

There are many people whose wiring has gone astray then because they do not feel the necessity to find a significant other or mate. If this is the basic hypothesis of your second part then you should go back to the drawing board.

A society based on the structure of a family is a very restrictive society. The basic building block of any society is the individual. You cannot have a family without individuals but you do not need families to have societies. Nowadays you can have individuals who are born outside of a family and can be raised outside of a family. So long as you have donor women prepared to give birth then your society can continue on. Structuring your society around families and giving families benefits over individuals is a bad way to structure society. It creates social ‘classes’ where those who adopt the family paradigm are valued more so than those who do not. This is fundamentally unjust and injustice will lead to dysfunctional societies.

These kinds of articles which have a hidden agenda to promote ‘family values’ are anti-justice and justice is a fundamental value to all human beings. In terms of numbers families may dominate the society at present but they should not dominate in terms of human rights. Every human being has a right to justice however they came into the world or however they were nurtured.

Very nice. I look for to reading Don's next essay.

The definition of pregnancy, Something seriously that was only poked in fun. Why can't we get more ladies to realise this?

I think perhaps, that in much of the pair couplings it is only half of the pair interested in procreation.

Mating is NOT the core of all - The core of all is God.

Any feature that supports our return to God, to that extant is good, be it the human body/mind that we wear, its family, its society, its justice, etc.

Mating is a weakness that human bodies inherit from their animal ancestors. Identifying with this biological feature can badly distract us and consume our energies so we have no time left for seeking God.

On occasion, however, mating can build a family which creates little human bodies for advanced souls to wear and complete their spiritual journey therein. A supportive religious family can then direct the minds of their young towards God. Unfortunately, this cannot be said for all families in general, some of which instead direct their children away from God and towards all manners of distracting indulgences.

Equality, justice and fairness are our birthright, part and parcel of our true divine original nature, but are unnatural and never possible for our flesh-and-blood human bodies and the desire-contaminated brains that come with them, including the above-mentioned mating instincts.

I will be looking forward, Don, to read in your next article how you propose to build such societies that will lead us closer to the ideal = God.

Yes Yuyustu: We should ask your God to completely remove the mating instinct, sometimes stronger than the survival instinct; and part of our compelling instinct driven behavior right up to the day before we die, and replace it with a stop mating neute button that limits replacement procreation with just two successful matings per couple; and ensures that the youngsters stand alone as soon as they're old enough to fend for themselves? Like all other rutting animals?

And in one fowl swoop we could destroy the counter productive concept of family and the flawed societal values that this highly flawed custom generates. And with that change, reintroduce the survival of the fittest, most able, so we eliminate the weak from your new master race? As well as massively reduce our total numbers? Is that what you're saying?

Me, having lived the last 31 years on my own, with thirty of them celibate, the last twenty as the only occupant of this abode, surrounded by memories of happier times, warm embraces and communication.

Sadly, I can't say singularity and soul destroying loneliness has anything watsoever going for it.

That's why I'm resetting my, final days, goals. I'd much rather end my days in the loving arms of a truly compatible mate, who is also served by the (destined) contentment/ecstasy, arrangement; and surrounded by an adopted foster family.

Than aspire to your "highly autocratic", absolutist, absolutely asinine, perfect world scenario. Like say, the way we manage cattle numbers, with those not suitable breeders culled from the herd? Yes?
Alan B.