April 2020

After the pandemic is over, we could readjust peoples’ pay based on need instead of power. Those who had to work all through it are obviously the most essential people in society and should be paid the most into the future. Others could then receive less depending on how long their job kept going during the emergency.

Happy 50th Kirst! At least you can say it was a year nobody will forget

A disaster in the making. These handful of ships could undo all the weeks of hard slog in controlling the virus. And hard for Australia to be too precious about it either, because there are thousands of Australian travellers in other often poor countries who will overload their health systems too if they get sick. The selfishness and stupidity of travellers is the real problem here, most of these thousands of people went on these trips knowing there's a global pandemic on. Let's see if city folk can stay out of the regions over Easter, not holding my breath, travellers and brains don't often mix. https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/coronavirus-cruise-ships-military-mission-to-end-sydney-standoff-c-947706

It looks almost certain HSC exams will be cancelled this year, and kids given a mark based on in-school assessment instead. The Class of 2020 will be unique.

Sometimes remembering what people had to endure in earlier epidemics helps. All those people who ended up in iron lungs to help them breathe in the polio epidemic, including little kids. Some spent the rest of their lives in them. I don't understand the expression 'couldn't work in an iron lung' - who could? I'm also interested, with the shortage of ventilators at the moment (which use positive pressure to force air into you), whether negative pressure devices like iron lungs could be used as well. Doubt there are many iron lungs left though.

It says something about modern business that so many of them can go belly up inside a week without income?

If you're at home looking for something to do, play this game designed by one of the world's top labs, to help design a drug against Covid-19. It may lead to a drug within a month.This is serious science, crowdsourcing this stuff in the past has led to solutions in days that supercomputers had been unable to come up with in months. I once helped a researcher designing a game to solve impossibly complex dynamics problems in minutes, it floored me. Some context here: https://www.smh.com.au/national/this-game-helps-scientists-design-covid-drugs-they-want-you-to-play-20200330-p54fby.html https://fold.it/

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates. And people are seeing what bureaucrats do too, they run countries with amazing knowledge and expertise. Inspirational what's going on at the front line in labs, schools, hospitals, power stations, mines, public agencies etc. right now. Australia is bloody well governed, I dream that coming out of this we'll stop listening to multi-millionaire 'opinion leaders' who make their money constantly attacking our own society.

I’m interested why in old buildings the bricks are often of varying sizes, anybody know? Here they’ve alternated long and short between rows, not sure if the short ones are actually bricks laid at 90 degrees to the others, or are smaller bricks.

The anti-social forces in our societies are extremely clever at political strategy. No matter what major issue comes along, their think tanks quickly find ways to turn them to their advantage. For example, for over 100 years now they've promoted the idea that money comes from hard work and merit. Which means if you have it, it must be because you worked hard and were smart, and no political action is needed to distribute wealth. Even many of the poor swallow that one hook, line and sinker. Now look at climate change, and Covid-19. Both of those deeply threaten established interests. What's been their quick strategic response? 'Alarmism'. People who want urgent action on these things are 'alarmists'. Again, people swallow it, because it's extremely cleverly done, they target deep psychology. People who say these things will swear to you it's their idea.

For every rich celebrity imploring us to stay home, there's 100 people still at work making it possible for other people to stay home.

Latour brilliantly explores connections between Covid-19 and climate change, and how both result from us excluding non-humans from our definitions of society. And what that means about where we go from here. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/

It's struck me that the idea of being alone and doing nothing has scared many people - there's a sort of frenzy of in-home entertainment being invented, that and increased booze, a frenzy of stimulation. It feels fake to me, like a sort of false bravado. Entertainment is one distraction in the face of difficulties, it's how we can avoid thinking, and our recreational 'lifestyles' are the reason we sleepwalk into crises like this. The Romans in the decline of their culture experienced the same, which Gladiator picked up on. The pandemic may bite harder and force us to actually confront ourselves, free from the distraction of entertainment. That could change the world, if we start to think rather than be constantly stimulated.

Ivermectin, is there anything it can't do? ;) https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/anti-parasitic-drug-kills-covid-19-in-lab-c-955457

Viruses are literally like rock stars - moving beyond the 'germs' idea. They begin looking like a threat to society, and they really are in those early times, upsetting ways of life. Like early Elvis. Then society/our bodies adapt, and the provocation from the early infection changes society/the body. Viruses drive evolution. Society/the body is changed forever, the virus gets its own Graceland, our bodies are changed. (Some of the science is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1879625713001077)

Dr Nick's stay at home gym #3. Just to recap: - your body is unlike other structures because it gets stronger under loads, not weaker - everything you do 'shapes' your body; it's *how* you use it that's important, not whether you use it (the usual exercise idea). Look at this happy old lady having a cup of tea. What 'parts' of her body is she using to do that? You could say her arm, hand, her mouth obviously, etc. But really, she's using all of her body. You're always using all of your body, in every single thing you do, how could you not? You need to breathe and be supported in your chair, and so on. Try for starters just being aware what all of you is doing, in anything you do, rather than be only focused on the cup (if it's drinking a cup of tea for example). That awareness, simple effortless observation, is the key to getting 'fit' by just doing ordinary everyday things. You don't need to do a thing, the awareness will automatically correct bad patterns of use in your body. And your body will become shaped entirely differently, you can become 'ripped' doing nothing more than sipping tea every day.

This is a known method, and might be what we need. Amazing thinking going on, an orgy of thinking. I'd love for it to continue after the pandemic! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00927-3

Brilliant! V8 racing will go on, but virtually, and broadcast live in HD. Thinking happening everywhere you look. https://www.supercars.com/allstars/

Always was a dipshit, one of the 'this is alarmism' crowd. Now at 65,000 deaths, only 3 weeks later.

Re-watching Smokey and the Bandit (Kell's idea). Bit of fun, Jackie Gleason steals the show. The same theme runs so deep in America, over and over again. The man against the establishment. Got me looking at road fatalities in the US today, and how they lag the world badly on every measure, for all the same reasons they can't deal with Covid-19 effectively. The desire to be 'free', of themselves, collectively. There ain't no squaring that circle. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/13/why-the-u-s-trails-the-developed-world-on-traffic-deaths/

One of Australia’s leading financial analysts, not a Leftie of any kind, has been saying for a long time that communism is the only answer for the world. I don’t think communism is necessarily the answer, but what he’s getting at is that without coordination of what we do as societies, by something, we end up in the same place every time. Drowned in debt. Debt is how you make things happen individually if you’re not able to work collectively. You borrow the effort of others, rather than work together. We’ve always fixed our problems with debt, even now we think ‘re-paying’ the debt to fix Covid-19 is the real issue. I think it’s much bigger than that, it should force a re-think on how we coordinate society as a whole.

People laugh at this scene because nothing turns us on more than thinking groups of people are stupid. But look at this pandemic, caused mostly by? Individuals, travelling. Individuals, each making their stupid individual choice to travel in a pandemic. Add that all up and it looks like a dumb ‘group’, but really it’s always just individuals. I’ve never met a person who surrenders their individuality to any group, they always act for their own individual reasons.

Right now, people who sell rubber ducks are covered by JobKeeper payments, but people who maintain the water and sewerage and garbage collection for your town aren't. Clever, hey?

Footballers. Dumb pricks, the world over. These grossly overpaid princesses watch as staff of their clubs get fired, while they earn as much in a week as some of those staff make in a year, and refuse pay cuts.

One of the tragicomic things about this time. The companies who until now avoided tax by trading in cash, now can't get JobSeeker payments for their staff because they have no demonstrated taxable income to justify having that many staff on the books. The cash/black economy's biggest nightmare.

Have posted a few times about how it's likely not the virus that is killing the poor victims of Covid-19, but rather their over-active immune systems. Cytokine storms, as the researchers call it. And yet treatment of that has come a long way. This article describes the current thinking, and that 27% mortality is a HUGE improvement, this condition used to have a much, much higher mortality rate. @[728961585:2048:Angela], would be very interested to hear whether this is part of the conversation in intensive care medicine, if you're aware? https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176783/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-china-treatment-cytokine-storm-syndrome

This person died 4 days ago from Covid-19. What happens when you put your faith in lunatic conspiracy theories. Who knows how many others she infected. Thanks to Alex.

At the end of this pandemic, the whole world will be in debt. So who will it owe all that money to? We might finally understand the fantasy of modern economics.

What my hands are going to look like the day the pandemic is over.

This will drive the kangaroo court people absolutely nuts. I thought right from the start that this case would fall over, due to lack of due process. Not because I believe Pell is guilty or not - I have no idea, none of us do. The accused has rights, just as victims have rights, and the legal process looks at the details (what kangaroo court people never do, they're too lazy and righteous) and makes a judgement. Forget that and you may as well be living in Eastern Europe in the 1970s. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-07/george-pell-wins-high-court-appeal-child-sex-abuse-convictions/12048726

It astounds me that we've only been isolating for a few weeks and already some people are saying it's too hard. Ffs, our ancestors lived through nearly 10 YEARS of food rationing in the last world war, and 4-5 years of war as part of that, sending thousands of young loved ones off to their deaths at the same time. What sort of snowflake can't survive for even a year without their bloody social life?

Juries. Some countries, such as much of Europe, don't use them. They have a sort of democratic feel to them, but do they actually work? The George Pell case for example, where some very basic and clear rules of evidence were simply ignored by the jury and even some Victorian judges. I used to support the idea of juries, now I'm not so sure. They're valuable when your judiciary is compromised, as in the US where they're political appointments. But if you have an independent judiciary, I'd be more likely to ditch a jury if it were me on trial.

Will the anti-vaxxers refuse a Covid-19 vaccine?

Here's why I think the idea of staying at home in social isolation is such a drama for many people. It goes to the deep roots of our culture. We are compulsive travellers. Being at home - being grounded, being present - is not us. We gotta be 'doing' stuff, to be happy. At the moment many are squealing like stuck pigs, to use an old expression, at their compulsory confinement, way beyond what should be reasonable. I think this is why. This might be something we actually need, to cure our own travel virus, to force us to be grounded in ourselves again. To reflect for once, rather than just to do. To finally exterminate that last remnant of empire in us, that makes us want to accumulate things and 'sights'. To stop living in a map.

There are quite a few people saying we should relax social restrictions and let 'herd immunity' (i.e 60-70% of us getting infected) do the work of a vaccine. If only life were that simple. "Until we have a vaccine, anyone talking about herd immunity as a preventative strategy for COVID-19 is simply wrong." https://www.sciencealert.com/why-herd-immunity-will-not-save-us-from-the-covid-19-pandemic

They did it 100 years ago. They didn't even have many communications technologies to stay in contact with one another or be entertained. They were resilient. And they went hard, and early, and in multiple layers, and sustained it. Tonight's headlines show retailers and banks pushing to re-open trade, the NRL wants to start again in May. Again, it's only been a few weeks and already people are acting like the real problem here is loss of business. The Spanish Flu crippled society for 3 years. They survived and led to us. We need some backbone. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/24/21188121/coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-1918-spanish-flu

Elimination. In as little as a month. Go hard, go early, tell vested interests in business to shut their gob. It's not rocket science. Thankfully we did a quick U-turn and followed a similar path. But we wasted weeks gradually shutting the country town and letting infections grow, in a misguided idea about protecting business. The best way to protect business is to have no virus. We're still in a good place, but imagine being virus-free inside a month. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/coronavirus/new-zealand-isnt-just-flattening-the-curve-its-squashing-it/ar-BB12hgdZ?ocid=spartandhp

How did Australia and other countries get to the impossible point where they now have to choose between peoples' health, and their 'economies'? We got there because we started there. From day one of the pandemic leaders talked about protecting the economy while fighting the virus. That split was lethal stupidity, the economy doesn't exist, it's just the people. They could have gone for Stage 4 lockdown immediately and tried to eliminate the virus before it could spread. Instead they prioritised business making money and people going to the footy. NZ is an exception, and it may now be free to trade again, virus-free, while the rest of us sit nervously in our homes for up to 2 years, in crippled fictitious economies. To me if the lunatic idea of the 'economy' survives this pandemic, people have died for nothing.

I'm watching the V8 e-series, and it's fascinating. Unable to race because of the pandemic, they're doing it virtually. They even went from an Oz track to Monza, in the space of a few minutes. Easy to chuckle at it as 'not real', but it is real, the drivers feel it, the commentators are into it. Virtual is not not-real. Another distinction the pandemic may help to get rid of, as we live largely virtual lives for a year or more.

If you are somebody who believes the economy exists, a simple question. How can an economy and peoples' health end up opposed? I think what we call the economy is just a set of transactions between people. What people actually mean when they say 'the economy' is a particular set of dominant, established transactions that favour certain people, and which can be disrupted by an event like Covid-19. They're not opposed things, you can choose to ignore peoples' health in favour of those dominant transactions, or you change the way the transactions are done and you protect both.

The conversation around schools and childcare coming from ScoMo is overwhelmingly about child-minding. Pandemics have this way of flushing out what people really think and feel.

Nice summary of mitigation, suppression and elimination strategies for Covid-19. Australia is actually not trying to flatten the curve right now, it's moving to suppression rather than mitigation. It still toys with the idea of elimination but probably left that too late. NZ is trying elimination because it acted early. Countries with big fatalities would love to be able to suppress but are stuck with mitigation for now. https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal-articles/new-zealands-elimination-strategy-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-and-what-is-required-to-make-it-work

When you're faced with an impossible situation, it usually means you're looking at it wrong I think. Going back to bats, they show us that viruses are not the problem. How our bodies react to them is the problem. Bats carry lethal viruses, but they don't make them sick, and they live long lives. Their immune systems don't panic and cause inflammation, like ours do, and that inflammation is what makes us 'sick' (it also makes us age). Ironically the solution to not just infectious disease but also disease in general, may be immune suppression - getting our immune systems to calm down. And training them to act in more nuanced ways, which is what immunotherapy is now doing for diseases like cancer. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190226112401.htm

A wise epidemiologist asked recently why we aren't asking the humanities about the best way to deal with a pandemic. Pandemics are social phenomena, not just medical, you can't separate the two. The social challenges they bring are reflected right down to the level of the microbes, where the pathogen upsets the community balance of other microbes. Camus wrote probably the definitive book on all pandemics, capturing the social and the medical at the same time (he didn't see them as separate). "Authorities are liable to minimize the threat of an epidemic, Camus suggests, until the evidence becomes undeniable that UNDERREACTION IS MORE DANGEROUS THAN OVERREACTION. Most people share that tendency, he writes, it’s a universal human frailty." https://lithub.com/what-we-can-learn-and-should-unlearn-from-albert-camuss-the-plague/

So nice that we have a Gold Logie winner with real intelligence. Isolation is a privilege. Some real perspective here.

On the same day the Deputy Chief Medical Officer announces Australia is on the cusp of slowing the infection to the point the epidemic dies out, these dipshits announce the NRL will restart. As Australians we can choose between no more epidemic, or corrupt sporting codes. https://www.news.com.au/sport/nrl/nrl-2020-season-start-date-confirmed-in-dramatic-announcement/news-story/51954e6211bb894a953723925873885f

I think most people are doing brilliantly with what we're all being asked to do. My biggest fear is that people get casual about this and we lose the chance to eliminate the virus within months. We're not used to major wars or plagues, they haven't happened much in our lifetimes. I think we need to remember that even being able to isolate is an immense privilege, this is a rich person's disease caused by our recreational travel, that will kill thousands or even millions of people who don't even have homes to isolate in. The least we can do is have some inconvenience in our privileged isolation for a few months.

Camus' wonderful novel is the bible on pandemics. Nearly a century old now but reading it is like reading the paper here in 2020, and novelists go way beyond the medical angle to the deep human psychology. How authorities initially respond by thinking the most important thing is to encourage people to be 'calm', and to introduce only minor restrictions so that peoples' way of life isn't too badly affected. Camus points out that's human vanity at its finest, assuming the world revolves around humans and their needs. And how the virus continues on its exponential way underneath all that stupidity, eventually forcing lockdowns that should have happened on day 1. The same stupid patterns recur for every plague.

Been a lot of talk of exponential curves lately. What doesn't get mentioned a lot is that this is also the reason our financial systems always crash. The interest we earn on our investments, even in basic bank accounts, grows exponentially. Obviously that's impossible to make work in reality, so our 'economy' crashes regularly. Ignorance of basic maths kills people in pandemics and destroys peoples' livelihoods, over and over again through all human history. Notice the Bible talks about both plagues and usury? History teaches us nothing.

Why is it so hard to understand that unless you eliminate the virus, and you don't have a vaccine, it will win? Why is it so hard to understand that if at the end of the 6 months ScoMo has costed his control and suppression to last, if the virus is still there (which it likely will be, because he's not trying to eliminate it), it will come back and clobber us? Why is it so hard to understand that if people think complete lockdown is 'too expensive', that a couple of years of half-lockdown is 4 times more expensive? https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-indicates-eliminating-covid-19-would-come-at-too-high-a-cost-135857

I can't eat chocolate so instead I'm baking bread. Happy Easter. The festival of eternal renewal, with lashings of blood and death. What a perfect time for it.

Naturally acquired herd immunity. The idea that if you spread your Easter Egg eating over a week, it won't make you fat or rot your teeth.

Thanks to @[562037124:2048:Jason] for this. It's happening right now in Australia *waves to the NRL* https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0

The problem of seeing our current situation as only a medical thing. Have you noticed that as time goes on, a disease caused by the richest parts of the world is being dealt with by cocooning that most privileged part of the world from the rest of the world? And all roads seem to be leading to infecting the young in those rich societies to protect the richest parts of those societies - the old. The boomer's last hurrah.

Oz numbers plummeting. Elimination has to be tried, any other option means maybe 2 years of what we have now, which will cripple society. All pandemic strategies are actually elimination strategies - you have to eliminate the virus somehow - the only thing that differs is the timeframe. My two cents, and those of many experts - now is the time to put our foot right on the throat of this thing, and stamp it out. I'd bet most members of the public actually feel the same, it's vested interests in business who are the main forces that resist the idea. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/elimination-what-new-zealands-coronavirus-response-can-teach-the-world

"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue." Albert Camus. The Plague

In the Covid-19 stats, the most infected group by far is women in their 20s. What's going on with the psychology there?

All knowledge is observation All thought is observation. All action is observation. All evil is ignorance. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. Lack of knowledge is lack of observation. Lack of right action is lack of observation. All evil is lack of observation.

In the public discussions, I'm noticing confusion between two concepts of public health - elimination, and eradication. All pandemic strategies right now are elimination strategies, all that changes is how long you allow to do the eliminating. Some feel the social restrictions are too harsh, but the more you ease up on those, the longer they have to stay on. I still think we have to reframe these not as restrictions, but as privileges - we are able to shelter from the virus. Billions aren't. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su48a7.htm

I don't think there's a clearer way to show the consequences of America's disastrous collapse into populism under Trump. We've seen the catastrophes in Italy and Spain. They look like Winnie the Pooh next to that line for the USA.

I know, more pandemic stuff (knowledge is the only thing that wins a war). A mistake I believe we make in fighting pandemics is using medicine as the main set of tools in understanding them. Ecology is a much more powerful set of tools. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/coronavirus-pandemics.html

Yep. I can't think of one sensible reason not to do this. The danger in every pandemic is people wanting 'normal' life back and thinking they can just manage the virus. Like Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler. Not an analogy. People need to understand this is a war, not by analogy - literally. We don't eliminate this bastard, then you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of wreckage. https://www.smh.com.au/national/it-s-worth-a-shot-australia-s-endgame-must-be-total-elimination-of-the-virus-20200412-p54j71.html

The government is about to release an app that people will be asked to use to allow their location to be tracked, to vastly speed up contact tracing for Covid-19. Brilliant idea, phones are maybe our most powerful weapons against pandemics. But no doubt ‘privacy’ will concern some. My two cents. This is data about your social interactions, not your private life. These privacy views are legacies of our bizarre ideas about how power and control work, the ‘Big Brother’ nonsense. There is no Big Brother, that’s a grown up version of the boogey man. Orwell made it clear in his novel it was a fiction created by the people themselves. (He was dying of another plague - TB - as he wrote it.)

This cracked me up (thanks Alex). This is our pause to think time, in lockdown. Why does Covid-19 destroy the economy? Because we're too mobile in how we live. I say what we call the economy is actually our culture of mobility. It's incompatible with infectious disease. A culture constantly on the move breaks ecological connections between microbes and their environment. It has no 'environment' of its own. A pandemic is an ecological problem, not a medical one. There are many ways to run an economy without it having to mean extreme mobility of people, we're discovering that right now. StayAtHome? We need to rediscover what our 'home' is, when we stop bloody moving about everywhere.

How are people feeling during this time? When you read the history of previous pandemics, this is the rough succession of emotions people go through (not a joke). See if they sound familiar, social restrictions kick in between 3 and 4. 1) Denial - this is nothing to worry about. 2) Slight fear, suppressed with exaggerated confidence. 3) Fear - don't come near me you germ-carrying freak. 4) Freedom, holiday at home. 5) Boredom and snappiness. 6) Hope that this will be over soon. 7) Indifference to usual sources of pleasure. 8) Indifference to everything.

Schools are not childcare centres. There's no doubt keeping as many kids out of them as possible will quicken elimination of Covid-19. Even the best models suggest that they contribute significantly to spreading a virus like this, and that's in the best possible conditions of excellent social distancing and hygiene in schools. if you've worked in one, that's laughable. I hope NSW goes with the other States and asks parents to keep kids at home if they can.

An experiment, psychological immunisation. Our pandemic is horrible, but read about what the people who lived during the Black Death endured. The greatest catastrophe in human history. It lasted 3 years, killed about 60% of the entire population, and they died horrific, painful deaths, with no palliative care. Pandemics have happened throughout history, I think learning about them actually helps to build our resilience. On the plus side, obviously Covid-19 is mostly a mild disease, for most people, and the greatest hardship to most of us will be loss of everyday life, including our jobs. Interestingly people lived longer after the Black Death was over, and also they got paid more - pandemics are not just destructive, they actually are correctives in some ways to societies, even if painful ones. https://www.history.com/topics/middle-ages/black-death

Happy birthday!

I post about the pandemic a lot because to my mind, it's a true existential threat, not just to some people but to our societies as a whole. We can distract ourselves from it for a while with entertainment, but that won't last. Eventually there comes a day when you have to reckon with it, not just in your actions, but in your thoughts and feelings. Better to start now than wait until it hits you like a garbage truck; pandemics eventually suck away everything else in society, there's no escape. Unfortunately ignoring it also doesn't work as a long-term strategy, or 'being positive' (a pandemic doesn't care one bit how we feel, and how we feel has zero impact on it or us, you can't make feelings happen). Another insight from Camus - humans are never free, because of pandemics. They have the illusion of freedom between pandemics, sometimes that goes on a few decades. It never lasts. We have to get a whole lot better at understanding microbes, one of my passions. WE are microbes, they built us. Our societies need to reflect that.

People desperate for 'normal life' to return cling to the herd immunity idea like dog shit stuck on your shoe. And they don't seem to understand it. Basically they mean, this is all too hard, let people get infected, protect 'high risk' groups and everyone else will build up immunity through getting sick. Herd immunity is usually achieved with vaccines, not by letting people get sick. How it seems to be misunderstood: - there's no guarantee people getting Covid-19 will be immune afterwards - many will die even if they're not in a high-risk group - there is no disease (that I know of) that has ever been managed by naturally-acquired herd immunity - it's impossible to really isolate any group entirely from a pandemic microbe, so you're just leaving your highest-risk people as sitting ducks to millions of infected people.

Come on Australia. "It’s the allure of life as normal," Professor McVernon said. "Because we’re all susceptible to this, the virus will come back from somewhere. We cannot return to life as normal. We need to get that in our consciousness."

My biggest frustration with conservative governments in this crisis has been the continuing insistence on 'balancing' the 'economy' and peoples' health. As if those were two separate things. Like this obsession worldwide to 'get kids back to school', all the conservatives are rallying behind it. We've been here before, with water, where the 'economic' needs of farmers had to be 'balanced' against environmental flows. It's bullshit, they're THE SAME NEEDS. An economy is healthy people. A healthy river is the only river useful for farmers. Schools are gatherings of hundreds of people that violate social distancing requirements. There's nothing to balance here, a conservative talking about balance is a lobbyist spruiking for some existing vested interest. (In political strategy terms, they're partly using a technique called 'false balance'), Remember that the people who want to cripple action on climate change use the same 'balance' metaphor. That's not accidental, it's strategy. If I spent 80% of my family's weekly income on a personal hobby, like fishing, and my wife objected, she wouldn't be happier if I said "ok, we need to balance the family's needs against my fishing needs". She'd tell me to stop being such a selfish arsehole.

If you're at home with time on your hands, Google Paul Ewald, one of the most important researchers on microbes. Ewald shows that maybe all of our chronic diseases are caused by microbes, by infections. Including cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc. This changing way of looking at disease is also a revolutionary way of looking at the body and health. Not as a system of mechanical and chemical pipes and chemicals, but as an ecosystem of microbes.

Virgin is just one example of something some have observed in this lockdown. How few businesses of any size had any reserves to buffer them through difficult times. Our business models are too often rape the business for every last dollar, for shareholders, or for private use for smaller businesses, and highly leverage with debt to keep the whole thing running. As a whole society no longer saves much, except through super, which is compromised though by being heavily financialised i.e. dependent upon the markets to realise its value. How many people and businesses came into this crisis with no savings, and heavily in debt? Astonishing how many can't survive a week in a lockdown, all going cap in hand to government now for help. Privatise the gains, socialise the losses, in plain view right now.

Coming to a public place near you soon, including hospitals I hope. You can even buy portable far-UVC sanitiser lights now, to disinfect anything you like. https://www.genengnews.com/topics/translational-medicine/uv-light-that-is-safe-for-humans-but-bad-for-bacteria-and-viruses/

Sat through Pru Goward spouting dangerous drivel on The Project about herd immunity last night. Another conservative politician who thinks it's a way to get 'the economy' going again faster, spare me. Listen to an expert explain why it's a stupid and dangerous idea as a tool to combat pandemics (very worth just over 2 minutes of your time). Also why there isn't a single government in the world actually doing it, because their experts all told them the same thing. https://www.science.org.au/curious/people-medicine/covid-19-facts#c19vaccinewait

Speaking to a 20-something this week about why they weren't following the social restrictions. "My age group doesn't die of this". It all comes back to this graph. People overwhelmingly read it as individuals - what is 'my' chance of dying here? The secret to beating a pandemic is to get people to read it from the perspective of the *group* - society. That's tough, our most common understanding of acting together is all based on emotion - shared feelings. Why we do symbolic stuff like all clap for emergency services, or bushfire appeals, or post "I'm with [insert cause]" memes. We have very limited understanding of groups beyond that.

For years we've had to endure zealots tell us society isn't real, only individuals are real. Free market, libertarian hocus pocus. Then suddenly, they get their wish in lockdown, because everybody is just an individual again! And what happens? Their precious 'economy' evaporates. Now they're begging to 'open up' things again. The 'economy' IS society, or just a small subset of it. Reality is the ultimate test of bullshit ideas.

I wanted to put down some thoughts about joy, and how to get it (imo), at a time plenty probably aren't feeling it. Takes a minute or two to read, I know that's not popular on FB! What inspired me is the number of social media posts I see asking people for 'positivity' instead of 'negativity'. It's not always clear what people mean by that. It seems most often to mean that talking about things that are difficult is negative, and if we talk about things that are easy and fun, we're being positive. We seem to see the world we live in increasingly through the lens of emotion - how it makes us feel is the most important thing. I'd like to suggest that's a recipe for getting the opposite of what people are after. Our feelings and emotions are effects, created by the reality we're living. We have it backwards, you can't make reality positive or negative - reality just is. So often positivity and negativity mean ignoring the reality altogether and focusing only on your own feelings. Shit is happening, so I'll ignore it and do something else that makes me happy. It's an avoidance strategy. The problem with living your life using avoidance strategies is - reality eventually catches up with you. You can't avoid it forever. It's like living beyond your means using debt; feels fantastic for a while, and then the bank comes calling. There is only one true source of joy in life, which transcends any negative or positive, any individual 'perspective' on things. That source is understanding. Knowledge. You might think it's love, or friendship, or lovely experiences of some kind. But all of those ultimately are about understanding, without understanding none of them last. If you don't understand love, for example, it will destroy you, make you absolutely miserable. If you don't understand why some activity makes you happy, eventually it will stop making you happy. There's no way around it, the only true joy in life is understanding. The joy of this too is that it means it doesn't matter what shit life throws at you, including pandemics. You will find joy in all of it, by understanding it. You won't have to try to avoid it and control your life so that you only have 'happy' experiences. Life will catch up with you if you do that, and it will bitch-slap you hard. Joy is a state of reality, not a perspective on it, like positive and negative are. It accepts reality for what it is, the only true grown up way to live, and by understanding that reality as it presents to you, you will have only joy in life.

Happy Birthday Aunty Bev! I hope you have a wonderful day.

One of the guides we need I think. By 2050 10 million of us will die of superbug infections each year, at current rates of growth. Ewald is sure most of our chronic diseases, like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimers, MS, even schizophrenia, are actually caused my microbes. If we stop thinking of them as just 'germs', it starts to get much more interesting.

I keep coming back to one insight from Camus. Humans are not free, because there are pestilences. The thing that annoys me most is the choice we're being asked to make between 'normal life' and lockdowns. Normal life is delusional, it's the life Camus talked about, where we pretend we're 'free' and pestilences don't exist. We do mass travel, mass gatherings, mass commuting, mass shopping, mass health care, and come to think this is normal life. It isn't, it's flirting with disaster. (And remembering that many chronic diseases like heart diseases, cancer, Alzheimers are likely also pestilences - microbial.) Imo people should stop trying to paint this as a battle between two ways forward, 'opening up' society again or locking it down. There is only one sensible way forward; to change the way we live to recognise pestilences, permanently. We're inventing some of that right now, in work, education etc. And at every point the 'normal life' people keep trying to tear that down. We can't wait to get back to living like the world is our playground, and nothing will be learned or changed. (P.S. the corner store was smart, anti-pestilence urban design.)

Daniel Andrews was on telly this morning, speaking how a leader should. Saying schools generate significant human traffic, within them and outside them (drop offs etc.) Makes the bone obvious point that if you open schools 'as normal', you're adding millions of additional people movements to the community every day. At a time when we're down to single-digit new Covid-19 cases, the idea is insane. Also when pressed about golf, he said a line I think we can use for every whinging community member who wants their old life back less than 2 months into a pandemic: "Do you NEED to do it? No? So don't do it." (Incidentally, the actual headline for the attached article is: "Chief health officer: Keeping kids home key to beating coronavirus".) https://www.heraldsun.com.au/coronavirus/young-victorians-copping-the-most-fines-for-flouting-the-rules/news-story/388a6e0c4afda4dc832005129a14394d

Happy Birthday Cam! Beautiful day for it.

Cancer may actually be an infectious disease. Not because you can catch cancer (though that may happen at times too), but because you can catch the pathogens that possibly cause it. Number of sexual partners is one measure of that. Another hypothesis is that nearly all head and neck cancers are caused by pathogens acquired during oral sex. And yet another - hypochondriacs actually often have lower levels of chronic disease - a suggested explanation is their greater use of antibiotics.

It’s not public speaking, death or spiders. I wonder if the thing many people fear the most is telling people what they think? Nobody really cares how you feel or what you’re doing every day, they say they do but that’s because you give them an opportunity to talk about themselves, what they’re feeling and doing. And you don’t really care about that either. Let people know the real you. If we are going to flood FB with anything, how about making it our thoughts? A world that thinks, a very low-risk strategy for the future.

Ideas matter. They can kill.

I think we should continue to ask, every time somebody says we need to open up the economy again because businesses and people are going broke, why so many businesses and people have no savings at all. There are times when reality provides a necessary and hard corrective to how we live.

New infections for NSW over the weekend. Saturday - 8. Sunday - 6. If somebody you know wants to remove or ignore the restrictions, please beat them around the head with a bit of 4x2. Look at the graph here, we've only had stronger restrictions since March 26. That's not even a month. And we're well on the way to eliminating this bastard. Not the time to 'open up' a single bloody thing.

On the one hand, you had an economist saying that the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefits, and causes more human suffering than it relieves through loss of social life, livelihood, health etc. Valid argument. On the other you had people saying we don't just let tens or hundreds of thousands of people die in Australia, when we can prevent it, and that lockdowns actually make for a faster economic recovery too. My two cents a bit at 90 degrees to both these positions. I ask why we don't tend to hear those who use an economic model of society argue for the terrible effects of poverty and loss of livelihood when we *don't* have a pandemic i.e. during 'normal' times. Why they consistently argue against things like a living wage, better working conditions, unions, affordable education and health care etc. I think it highlights that modern economics was actually invented as an attack dog in defence of the status quo. https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/2020-20-04/12141184

Related to my previous post, I'd be interested how people would answer this question. Is it better to not disrupt society so comprehensively, as we're doing now, and let more people die of Covid-19 to minimise the damage to other people? Or is it better to throw the kitchen sink at Covid-19, as we have, to save lives directly impacted by it? And why?

The economy believers are licking their lips at the thought of all this 'aggressive deregulation' and lower taxes. Business does not create jobs, people with money create jobs. The concern for peoples' 'livelihood' predictably will last as long as the lockdown, the second that's over the concern will be back on keeping business happy. "We need to have a deliberate pro-business growth strategy to ensure that we maximise the strength of the economy on the other side [of the coronavirus crisis]," Senator Cormann told Radio National this morning. It would feature "lower taxes" and "aggressive deregulation to really ensure businesses have the best possible opportunity".

Sigh, another half-pregnant scheme. This will be like the laundry list of lockdown rules, imagine the poor schools trying to administer this farce, and teachers now being forced to teach the students in classrooms and online, at the same time. Just make it clean and simple, follow Victoria, everybody learns from home if they're able to. The things we do to appease the conservatives in our midst, for whom 'getting kids back where they belong' is apparently some emergency need. I skipped year 9 entirely at school and never even noticed the difference, a few months without the usual classrooms isn't going to hurt anybody - many kids would likely learn more without social distractions.

Even the economists saying don't ease lockdowns. Except for this one, check her out on Q&A, feral. Who's left that's driving the 'open up' pressure? Mostly businesses losing money. Watch Gigi also get a slapdown with the 'herd immunity' idea, right at the end of the Q&A recording.

This is the first time that a modern, democratic country has made killing its own citizens an election strategy. (If you don't follow US politics, this is Trump's last desperate attempt to get his poll numbers up again, with an election in November. He's trailing badly.) Some call the current Republicans a death cult, I think we're seeing now that this is literally true. https://theintercept.com/2020/04/18/trump-urges-followers-risk-lives-rallies-wont-attend/

What I sense isn't sinking in yet is that our 'lifestyle' is not compatible with infectious disease. Far too much mobility and mixing of people, within and between countries. The feeling I still get is that people see this as a temporary interruption to lifestyle-as-usual. It's way bigger than that, as I posted the other day unless we change, 10 million of us will die *every year* of superbugs alone, due to this lifestyle. This is a warning, not a one-off event, antibiotics and vaccines have bought us the illusion of freedom, but it's coming to an end. And the really silent danger here I think is chronic infections, the invisible ones, causing most of our chronic illnesses like heart disease and cancer, created by the same too-mobile lifestyle. Infectious disease is an ecological state, not an interruption to health.

Because "let's just get back to normal" seems to appeal to many people who want their lives back, I think it’s worth reading why it’s a really, really bad idea. I'm still seeing many people openly ignore the social restrictions, particularly younger people, often in full knowledge of their parents for the minors (this sort of thing: https://twitter.com/i/status/1240371160078000128). If we miss the chance to eliminate this virus quickly, we may live to deeply regret that casual attitude.

Only 8 new cases found today, across the ENTIRE country. The theory goes that infections stop when a virus runs out of people to infect. But I reckon it's not that clean and mathematical. For example, in human wars there are usually plenty of still active soldiers and victims left when a truce is called, or a defeat. The war stops anyway. I wonder the same about pandemics, microbes aren't mindless automatons, we don't know their reasons. But I'm sure they have them, and that it's not a simple mathematical thing about bodies available to infect. They have more reasons for doing things than just humping every leg that walks past.

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt for professional staff, who are treated like servants. These senior staff are nearly all academics themselves, and academics almost universally blame the professional (non-academic) staff at every opportunity for problems in universities. Universities are run by failed academics who treat the whole thing as an assignment to be marked, endless re-writing of documents and meetings about the same documents. Aided and abetted by senior admin staff and consultants who add graphs and professional formatting to the endlessly-edited documents. An idiot culture, glad to be free of it. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/overpaid-university-bosses-cry-poor-as-their-foreign-student-riches-evaporate/?fbclid=IwAR0M6EbhJFlNAGyfF3K0wV2G2BvVpMyV8zuiN17kB7P7pCSQwtYN15rlujo

Curious, based on what i hear in conversations: a) how many will refuse to download the tracing app? b) how many will refuse a vaccine if it becomes available? And why?

Have a look at this. Notice Covid-19 is attacking the rich parts of the world first. It's not hard to understand why, this pandemic wasn't caused by the Chinese. It was caused by one thing - travel. It's a travel pandemic. The poor bastards in the poorer parts of the world are about to be hammered by this, our gift to them. All to satisfy our never-ending desperate obsession to 'see the world'.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday Tim! I'm sitting next door to your daughter listening to her work hard, I'll try to use it as inspiration to do something :)

I think history can teach us more than medicine can, about pandemics, because the lessons learned are forgotten. This is a headline dated November 1, 1918, in the US. The 'open up' push. Triggering the most deadly phase of that pandemic. Every pandemic has its 'open up' people. Every pandemic pathogen licks its lips and thanks them.

Lots of businesses experiencing supply chain issues, as people buy more of things they normally wouldn't, because of lockdowns. If it's in a supermarket, for some reason it gets called 'panic buying'. No (or very little) panic, just disrupted supply chains. I find people will often default to a tabloid version of events which has somebody to blame, rather than the practical explanation.

If you missed the details of NSW's back to school arrangements, this is a good visual summary.

Tick tick tick...

"Pandemics don’t change us, at least in the short term. They reveal us. We come to them as we’ve been formed over decades, and we respond accordingly." I notice ScoMo's early hints of his plans post-pandemic are worryingly to take us even further down the path that led the UK and US to the mess they're in now, as Waleed describes. Modern conservatives are zealots, and I should add - I AM a conservative. These people aren't conservatives, they're lobbyists for vested interests, disguised as conservative politicians.

Australia's pandemic response is being guided by a Nobel Prize winner. America's is being guided by a reality TV star suggesting we inject people with disinfectant and irradiate them with UV light. Just over 70 dead in Australia. Nearly 50,000 dead in the US. And yet plenty would still vote for the reality TV star. Populism, the social cancer of our time. https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1253451487415619586?s=20

New Delhi is an example of why we're maybe not learning from our current experience. Look at the difference in air quality, then and now. That means more surely than just a temporary interruption to business as usual. It means business as usual was broken. Why the 'open up' forces bother me, desperate to get their old lives back. Those lives were broken in many ways, and we're not going to learn how if they win.

"Australians and our governments have been so careful to balance the needs to get our economy back to a COVID-safe level so it can support people's incomes and we can return to higher rates of growth into the future." ScoMo, today. Was always about the economy. These words will come back to haunt him if the pandemic breaks out again: a "Covid-safe level". There are no safe levels of pandemic virus. The exponential curve always wins if you think that, it's like pulling out halfway through ejaculating as a method of contraception.

Yeh. Philosophers at last.

How many times do we honestly think people will tolerate having a swab shoved right to the back of their nasal cavity, and down their throat? It's already clear significant numbers won't tolerate electronic contact tracing. Do we really think we can have 'normal' life back, with just a bit of testing and tracing added? Testing and tracing many of us won't have the appetite for anyway?

Lest we forget what we forget, every year. 'Lest We Forget' isn't to remember those who 'sacrificed' themselves for our freedom. It's to remember that we sacrificed them, and should never do it again. It's about us, more than them. Kipling's Recessional, the poem the phrase comes from, about the evils of jingoism. Remembrance Day is when we remember the young lives lost, 'Lest We Forget' is when we remember never to do it again.

Well stone the crows, I agree with the economists. ScoMo is dangerous, from day one this belief of his has put us all in danger. This has a long way to run. "Some commentators have expressed the view that there is a trade-off between the public health and economic aspects of the crisis. We, as economists, believe THIS IS A FALSE DISTINCTION. We cannot have a functioning economy unless we first comprehensively address the public health crisis." (Over 100 leading Oz economists, in a letter to National Cabinet on 19 April.) "We have always been fighting this battle on two fronts. We always have been fighting it on the health front and on the economic front." (ScoMo, 23 April.)

I don't have shares in the new contact tracing app. But I wonder if people have realised that the same 'data' they worry about sharing with government, through the app (which only happens if there's an infection near them or in them), is collected anyway and stored in a database, with the manual contact tracing public health officials are *already* doing? All the app does is dramatically speed up and strengthen that process. Refusing to use the app just makes public health officials' jobs slower and harder; the same data will be collected either way, and stored in a government database.

Happy birthday!

Let's call it sheltering, rather than isolating. We don't 'isolate' from the rain.

Tick tick tick.

On Health vs Economy again. 'Economy' just means the way we do things now. The obvious answer is - do them differently. We don't have to shut down society, we can reshape it to work differently. It's already happening. You can have lockdowns AND economic activity, you don't have to choose. Our old economy is the reason we got Covid-19 in the first place, and will continue to get more pandemics, unless we change it.

Oscar Wilde defined sentimentality as "the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it". Disasters seem to prompt waves of sentimentality, where we try to emote our way out of the problem. 'Positivity' will fix it. Stirring memes, 'relief' concerts, clapping in driveways. Takes a bit of thought to unpack disasters, if we can interrupt our emotions for even a moment. "I think the way we escape the endless cycle of just back-patting ourselves for our own deep feelings is by being willing to be critical of what those feelings are and being willing to question whether those feelings are doing any good." (Leslie Jamison)

I'm so happy alarmism about privacy apps could mean we're locked down for longer, which is what we should have been doing anyway. Life has a way of working out.

These lockdowns are crippling society, hey? https://time.com/5819507/crime-drop-coronavirus/

This is the report that will be used from today to 'prove' to people that 'schools are safe'. It's embarrassingly bad, all 4 pages of it, with 2 vague references. The data size? 18 infections in schools before the lockdown. 18! In any serious study that would be laughable. They don't even publish the numbers of close contacts who actually agreed to get tested. There is not one sensible reason to get kids back to school at this stage of our fight against Covid-19. When that fight started ScoMo said we had to be prepared for at least 6 months of hardship. 1-2 months in, it's now too hard? The only reason it's being suggested is to protect 'the economy'. Fuck the economy, it's a myth. Don't even take my word for it, read the letter over 100 of Australia's top economists wrote to the National Cabinet. And look at NZ, one their greatest internal sources of Covid-19 infections? A school. (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120895239/coronavirus-everything-we-know-about-new-zealands-marist-college-covid19-cluster) http://ncirs.org.au/sites/default/files/2020-04/NCIRS%20NSW%20Schools%20COVID_Summary_FINAL%20public_26%20April%202020.pdf

See how the same strategies cross the globe? Do we know anybody here who makes frequent reference to 'the science'? "The claim that government would be “led by the science” was reassuring many weeks ago, at the start of all this. But now, through suspicious overuse to the exclusion of all other considerations, it has become troubling." (Marina Hyde) https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-scientists-human-shields

If stopping people from moving around cures the pandemic, what was the disease? Worth pondering I reckon. Pandemics are not medical problems to solve, medicine just helps fix the wounded. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/23/world/coronavirus-great-empty.html?auth=login-email&login=email&fbclid=IwAR3kA0tFoSZuVjg0kCr5rIai8xylKWEAK96FUB8zUMFBTCb60PIY16MD1Xc

The schools debate, should kids go back? Never mind that people say 'the science is in' (it absolutely isn't, that's a lie). Look at it this way. If your teens hung out like in the pic here, in a public park, they could be fined over $1000 each. But now they can go to school and do exactly the same thing, and it's apparently totally fine. Smelling a rat here? This is a PM desperate to get schools back so workers have somewhere to dump their kids, so he can fix his 'economy' (that doesn't exist). If some kids can't school from home, let's deal with that. Sending everybody back to school when all States are down to single-digit new infections each day, with a chance at elimination, is criminally stupid.

Love Polkas! Happy tunes.

John Hattie is probably the world's leading expert on evidence-based education. Like 'economies', student results actually tend to improve after a crisis like this, even if they miss months of school with no online learning. Time for the 'get the kids back in school' alarmists to butt out I think. Socially it's very disruptive, for sure, but that's not an education issue. There are temporary solutions for those social problems. Christchurch and others survived, and actually thrived.

It seems there may be community transmission of Covid-19 in Lithgow, of unknown size (likely small, but these things can grow super fast). So - bloody stay home, if you have the choice. Tell the boyfriends and girlfriends and friends you'll see them when this is all over.

The main evidence we have of ancient cultures is overwhelmingly about their ways of dealing with death. Death was the centre of their cultures, it gave everything meaning. For us death has become a disaster to be avoided at all costs, its one meaning has become the threat to our life and lifestyles. Ironically, the cultures who put death at the centre of their lives are the cultures who are the most living. Right now we're trying to 'manage' a pandemic as a temporary interruption to our lifestyles. That interruption is the true meaning of all pandemics. We fight the interruption much harder than we fight the virus, that's what I think we need to see here.

Why do viruses arrive in a community? Why do they leave? Why do they arrive and leave often everywhere at once, and not just one place at a time? The truth is - nobody really knows. About the only agency we give a virus is some desire to 'infect' as many people as possible. But the reality is very different, and I reckon we'd understand it all a lot better if we accepted microbes think - they have way more agency than we assume. Even if we don't develop a vaccine or any herd immunity, Covid-19 will eventually just disappear. And we won't know why. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-we-get-the-flu-mos/

“The general death rate rises during business booms, and falls during depressions.” (Joseph Eyer, Prosperity as a Cause of Death.) We're having a depression right now. It'll be good for us, just got to hold our nerve and not listen to the alarmists. Great economies = poorer health, there's one for the people who want to 'balance' one against the other.

Seeing the same arguments here, that we need to 'balance' the apparently horrendous impact of lockdowns on the economy against public health. As if those economic impacts are just as bad for our health as a pandemic. As the experts in the article say, that's complete bullshit, they're not even in the same ballpark. (And in fact, it's been conclusively proven that our health actually *improves* in economic downturns.) It's part of the hugely powerful and sophisticated spin of modern conservative governments, governments now using their medical experts as human shields. It's the same strategy these governments use against climate change, saying that we need to 'balance' lunatic fringe views against the mainstream science. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-recession.html

I'm sure it's pretty anti-social to say that I'm not the slightest bit interested in what 10 albums shaped 7 billion peoples' lives. This stuff is viral spamming. Tell us the albums you like, sure, just don't turn it into some Tupperware party where 10 others have to do it.

Covid-19 school closures around the world as of today, from UNESCO. Blue means open. 186 countries have closed all schools. About 74% of all school children in the world currently not at school.

I like the honesty right at the end here: "Reopening schools is considered key to getting the economy moving again. Without a safe place for kids, many parents would have difficulty returning to work." This is nothing about education, there or here, which is why they haven't asked education professionals to be involved. They don't want to hear what they might say. https://time.com/5828333/donald-trump-reopen-schools-coronavirus/

We should thank Australian universities for this, they assembled over 100 experts from diverse fields to assess where Australia should go from here with Covid-19. You'll see they suggest either elimination (my preference, and theirs), or controlled adaptation (what governments have chosen). With the pros and cons of each strategy. A much wider set of expertise than the largely medical group currently advising government. Elimination would need about another month of what we're doing now, which is why it frustrates me that we're bailing out now and going for earlier relaxation of restrictions. I think the pollies are out of step here, polls show a majority of Australians would prefer to hold restrictions until the end of May. Like they want strong action on climate change. In both cases defeated by a government fascinated with the economy, which doesn't exist. And sadly, I suspect ScoMo wants to differentiate himself from Jacinda Ardern; it's as petty as that. https://go8.edu.au/research/roadmap-to-recovery

I'd really encourage everybody to look at the 2 strategies National Cabinet considered for where we go from here. Snapshot in the link, full report is online. The 'Controlled Adaptation' strategy they've opted for I think is dangerous - it assumes a degree of 'control' (in the title) that we have no idea if we can achieve. And it means potentially 18 more months or more of confusing lockdowns and opening ups, and variability between communities that is even greater than what we've seen to date. The elimination strategy would have taken about 4 more weeks, was cheaper, lower risk (kills and injures fewer people and requires much less 'control'), less socially disruptive in the longer term and much better for economic recovery too, and had the added bonus of being able to be switched to the adaptation strategy if required. The adaptation strategy can't be switched to elimination. https://go8.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Go8_Road-to-Recovery_Snapshot.pdf

Choreographed wedding party dances. A wank?

The ten favourite albums thing - what if the question was 'what are the BEST 10 albums of all time?' That's a can of worms in my experience, because it nearly always degenerates into some version of 'it's just a matter of opinion'. It isn't though, for example just for starters albums sell vastly different amounts, reflecting that people value them differently. If you argue that's not a measure of a 'good' album, it means you have another value system that opposes that as a measure. You can't avoid values, or quality, in your judgement. Opinion is our way of trying to avoid discussing our values. We are always valuing, individually and as a group.

"The precautionary principle suggests that we should be very careful when the consequences of getting the calculation wrong on one side are worse than getting the calculation wrong on the other side. The potential medical and economic losses associated with easing social restrictions prematurely are much larger than the economic losses associated with not easing them soon enough."

Our federal (LNP) member saying yesterday that it's great we're getting our 'liberties' back, and that we're 'opening up the economy' again. Like the disease was us being locked up against our will, and damage to LNP budgets, rather than a virus. After one month! What hardship! Community fight is apparently exhausted after a few weeks, and our businesses couldn't survive a day without assistance. God knows how we ever won a world war.

'The economy' is about 100 years old. It was invented from a single number. Today it's common to replace the idea of society with the economy. We've seen that clearly all through the pandemic, where the economy was even seen as needing to be 'balanced' against our health, and much anxiety about needing to 'open up the economy again'. You can't open a set of numbers, madness. It's a measure of national income, nothing more, and if we prioritise it it means we're prioritising income and those who have the most of it. Which is why the well-heeled were so keen to replace 'society' with the 'economy'. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the-invention-of-the-economy