June 2020

The UK. Check the banner, why 'control' of Covid-19 is laughable. Here's a tickler - the people who argue 'we can't stay locked down forever', guarantee that we will, by opening up. Proper lockdown is the shortest, least deadly, and easily the cheapest, way out of a pandemic.

To go back again to my belief - the economy is just people with money. If they don't have much, the economy is in recession, if they have a lot, it isn't. Government creates money, therefore government creates wealth. Try making your own money and see how far it gets you. Business doesn't create wealth, it doesn't create jobs. It creates widgets, which we use some of our government money to buy. Without people with money, the business sells nothing, employs nobody and stops existing. Without tax, money stops circulating, and accumulates in only a few hands, creating recessions. Contrast that with the current fairy tale. Money is 'yours' (even though you clearly didn't make the notes and coins, and will go to jail if you try). Government then steals 'your' money, with tax. Business creates wealth, even though wealth is money. It creates jobs, even though without money there's nothing to pay employees with. It's amazing anybody ever believed this rubbish?

Money's real power is also I think its greatest danger. Invented as a tool, by governments, to make exchange of things easy for people. Hoarded by a few which leaves little for others to exchange with. Tax was invented to prevent this, to keep money circulating. The hoarders got everybody to believe this was the government stealing 'your' money. It was never your money, government owns all money. Let's not be stupid and believe the big fat hoarding dragons.

How to fix all the world economies? Simple. 1. Stop believing in economies. 2. Remember money was invented by government as a tool for people to exchange things with. 3. Redistribute the government's money to all people as equally and as regularly as possible, to allow exchange to happen. 4. Economy fixed, by disappearing entirely. The 'economy' was invented by people who hoard money, as pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, to rationalise them hoarding our collective tool of exchange - money.

Economics in pictures.

Well now. 122 cases linked to one school. (And people wore masks in this school.) Now 6 more schools with infections. I'm happy for history to show me as not on the side of people who say 'this respiratory infection won't spread in schools'. It'll be the only respiratory infection in the history of the world that doesn't, if true. https://www.timesofisrael.com/virus-cases-found-in-3-more-schools-as-ministers-decide-against-sweeping-closure/

The same people who call lockdown 'tyranny' in the US, are now imposing curfews, and attacking people who ignore curfews.

You read what these poor bastards are experiencing, and wonder at just how precious we are here, complaining over not being able to go to the gym or pub. And to think, this is OUR disease, which our travel created, killing whole families in poorer countries. It's hard not to feel disgust at the terrible inconvenience people feel this to be, to their lives, and to the boredom they experience in even talking about it.

"The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom." Edmund Burke, who shared my horror at a society run by economists.

If you believe the economy exists, can you explain why it'll take 19 years to pay off a few months of lockdown?

Parliament hasn't been allowed to sit in this crisis. Nev Power heads up the government's recovery group, which has no formal authority and no transparency. Their biggest announcement so far? A 'gas-led' recovery, in a world with a glut of gas. What's Nev do when he's not chairing this group? He's a Director of a major gas company. There won't be much money for you in this recovery. But buckets of it for 'industry', to fix the 'economy' - see how this works?

This is bloody fantastic news. Another week of those numbers and we could even start talking about elimination, like some of the other States. Note this isn't support for a 'control' strategy - control doesn't reduce numbers to zero. If it happens it means we eliminated, which should have been our strategy from the start - we might just have got there accidentally. On the downside, this is also the week with the biggest 'opening up' in NSW to date. That's an incredibly risky thing to do with the numbers so low, so close to elimination. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-03/nsw-coronavirus-major-pandemic-milestone-in-local-transmission/12312752

I still think the easiest way to get men to do more housework is to turn it into a gadget. These new Dysons are techno-porn. Beautiful, brilliant machines.

A recession is just people without money to spend. That's all it is. So give people the money. Recession over. Duh. https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/the-economic-recovery-is-doomed-before-it-even-begins-20200522-p54vfm.html

Who'd have thought. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden-tegnell-idUSKBN23A15O

There's another way to look at Chump's behaviour. The dangers of voluntary voting. Research shows that voluntary voting creates more extreme politics. Why does Chump do these things? Because the secret to winning elections in the US isn't winning hearts and minds, or bringing people together, or all that greeting card feel-good stuff. It's getting people to actually vote. Chump fires up the masses because he knows it will drive his supporters to the voting booths. It may backfire, he may drive his opponents to the booths as well, we'll see. We should focus more on strategy and less on personality, in politics, I think.

Bad people win because they're always strategising, to get an outcome. Good people too often just make symbolic gestures of outrage, grief, togetherness etc. As if the real problem is their feelings, and telling everybody about them will fix them. Like society is mummy and we graze our knee, and say 'my knee hurts mummy'. Good people need more smarts, and a lot more backbone.

Happy birthday :)

Think of this - this is an age of absolute abundance. And yet the vast majority of the world's population struggles to get by. There's a very simple explanation for that, and it's not 'they don't work hard enough'. And recessions? Just people without money. Give them some of their money back, and it's all fixed. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/why-not-give-people-money-nothing/

Gladys: "For us our stimulation will really be driven by infrastructure first and foremost because infrastructure means jobs". There's no evidence that infrastructure spending creates jobs. There's good evidence it wins votes, with high-vis photo opportunities, and puts money in party donors' pockets. A recession is people without money in their pockets. It's not rocket science, 'stimulate' the people. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/080816/can-infrastructure-spending-really-stimulate-economy.asp

New Zealand looks set to declare total Covid elimination, on 15 June. For the people who think you have to ‘balance’ the economy and public health, note the NZers only needed 7 weeks of lockdown to achieve this. Economically, socially - in every way - they’re now going to be as good as back to normal. ScoMo said here we should prepare for 6 months of hardship. He relaxed restrictions after only 5 weeks. We may still eliminate, we all hope that. If we don’t, the incredible impatience to end restrictions will be possibly our greatest ever political crime. Under a suppression strategy, you’re not really very ‘open’ at all. Right now it feels like it only because our infections are so low. If we haven’t eliminated, all this social activity will mean they won’t stay low for long. If that happens, your economy is toast too.

There’s no such thing as the private sector. Just as there’s no such thing as capitalism, socialism, communism or the economy. There’s just people, always just people. The private sector didn’t exist before we had government, just as you can’t go ‘off the grid’ without a grid. Government is the lynchpin of all societies, because it’s the only thing all of the people have a direct stake in. Business itself, like money, is just an offshoot of government. Government is us, all of us. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929310-200-state-of-innovation-busting-the-private-sector-myth/

There's some sort of macabre irony about holding a gathering for thousands in the middle of a pandemic, under the banner of 'lives matter'. Somewhere, we swapped righteousness for intelligence. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/coronavirus-australia-live-updates/live-coverage/0b629f5ce1006cd78a4586554952bc2cS

Ah, the economy.

Charlie helping people not to be stupid.

The traffic heading West tonight was like nothing I’ve seen. I know people probably get sick of hearing it, but unless that virus is gone, this weekend alone is going to potentially spread it State-wide. Anyone who says it won’t happen doesn’t actually know that, they’re just hoping. It’s an avoidable risk. But like property, pokies, pubs, clubs and NRL, the tourism industry has deep roots into the seat of NSW Government.

Want to know how deadly the economy virus is? There’s only one reason Mexico is re-opening on the same day it’s had its deadliest figures to date. The US is demanding it. Mexico is a major part of their supply chains.

Notice the fine print here. It’s not fans, it’s the sponsors. Big money is driving our re-opening, not science. Remember how we were going to relax a restriction, then wait 3 weeks to test how it goes? All gone. Corporate boxes are the least safe place in a sporting ground for an infectious virus.

Modern medicine is called a miracle. But actually its record against most acute and chronic disease is pretty hopeless. Here are the great heroes of modern medicine - sewage treatment, and chlorinated water. Penicillin introduced the false dawn of the antibiotic age, now coming to an end. When you look at the history, most disease has been about microbes. Even the diseases killing most people today are likely caused by microbes. It’s telling us something, but I don’t think we’re listening. Penicillin is produced by microbes, it comes from a fungus. A weapon from microbe wars, which we borrow.

“An emotion usually represents an amplified and energized thought pattern, and because of its often overpowering energetic charge, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds...” Eckhart Tolle

If you’re a shock jock you’re in a bit of a pickle today. For weeks you’ll have been saying how unnncessary all these lockdowns are. But today you’ll be itching to go after the sanctimonious protesters, for violating the lockdowns. Reality has a sense of humour.

The age of crowds. Even microbes - a pandemic is a crowd of microbes. Research on crowds suggests individuals hate to touch except in relationships. Why people walking along a busy footpath do a sophisticated ‘step and slide’ to avoid touching others, also how a flock of birds or school of fish works. And why an apology is needed if you do touch. But if you pack people close enough together, a ‘discharge’ happens where that hatred of touch dissolves. That’s what a crowd is. Right now we have the microbe crowd competing with the human crowd. The human crowd will lose that battle.

The protests yesterday made me very angry. To gather in the tens of thousands in a pandemic - I hated it when the anti-lockdown people did it, I hated it when people went to Bondi Beach. So disgustingly self-righteous and selfish. Aboriginal deaths in custody here in Oz are documented in the link below, if people want to understand the issue better.

If the protesters from yesterday have one shred of human decency, or half a brain (much less confident on that one), they’ll all self-isolate now for 14 days.

I can’t eat chocolate, it makes my heart race. But I love it. So a few years ago I decided to try carob again. As a kid it was always considered like the fake-meat version of chocolate. But wow, it’s fantastic. Much better for you than cocoa, naturally sweet, and grown right here in Oz too. I realised too that it’s the sugar and milk that is about 80% of what many love about chocolate. Give them plain cocoa and they’d spit it out.

This is what was on the line this long weekend. These are the number of days since a last case of COVID-19 was found in NSW, in the different categories. 11 days since any examples of community transition (the biggie). 22 days since a case transmitted from a known local source. Gladys’ opening of the State for tourism this weekend, and the righteous protesters, were both putting this at risk. Blood is on both of their hands if what they’ve done destroys the months of sacrifice it took to get to these numbers. We should know in about 2 weeks.

Chlamydia pneumoniae. Likely the bugs that cause the heart disease we usually blame on fats, smoking and lack of exercise. Also looking like being a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease and arthritis. This bacterium may be the deadliest in our history, but because it causes chronic disease, it flies underneath the radar. It’s likely we’ve been living permanent pandemics, without noticing.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday Rob :)

Public debates and protests are battles of ideas, using humans as troops. Ideas are beings, they’re alive. They enslave us. Education is supposed to free us from that slavery (it rarely does today). I don’t think ideas are ‘ours’, millions of people can share the same idea. They cross generations, they’re eternal. A ‘divided society’ is nothing to do with people, people are just caught in the crossfire of competing ideas. All ideas are dangerous, the most dangerous but also most important things in the world. They’re what society is built from, and so often we’re their puppets, across generations.

Seems J.K. agrees with Germaine. The Righteous Police are already onto her (they’re not very bright). Maybe they’ll organise another protest and kill more people with COVID-19, that should fix it.

I think one of the great triumphs of modern marketing is getting us to believe alcohol is a rite of passage in life. It was a deliberate strategy from brewers, and today we live it as if it was all our idea, rather than the targeting of a new ‘market segment’ - teens. You’d be hard pressed to find somebody now who doesn’t think drinking is a necessary adult skill.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell

I wonder if it’s common to think that modern medicine means we’re healthier today than ever? Looking at heart disease, including stroke, can be an eye-opener. This is data for the US. At the turn of the 20th century, heart disease was incredibly rare. Then look at what happened. We’ve all lived the explanations - too much fat, too much salt, mostly. We ate a lot more fat and salt in 1900 than we do now. My guess? As in my previous posts, heart disease is an infectious disease, caused by microbes. Research on microbes tended to lose funding after Pencillin was invented, in the 1930s.

Casinos in Australia put over 20,000 staff on the JobKeeper scheme. They still managed to pay full dividends to shareholders. They're good donors to the political parties. Just something to keep in mind when people talk about damaged economies, plenty of the big corporates got their snouts deep into the JobKeeper trough.

His rationale? The protests did it, why can't he? The damage from the righteous is still unfolding.

“Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people...". Yes Daniel, but transgender women, to my knowledge, don't menstruate. Which is what Rowling is saying. I think it's particularly galling to at least some women that, after society ignored the needs of women for so many years, suddenly biological men who identify as women get rapturous attention. It took men to want to be women, for people to pay attention to women? So now we have men mansplaining women, to women.

More fun with infectious diseases. It’s likely that a major cause of breast cancer is a virus carried by house mice.

Fantastic performance. All true, all urgent messages. There’s a but for me though - too often the progressive side of politics thinks a noble speech will bring about change. It loves noble speeches. To change you need to fight, strategically. The easiest way to do that? You know my answer. Join a union. If everyone sympathetic to these sorts of messages joined a union today, the country would change tomorrow. Why unions? Because they’re the industrial arm of progressive politics. Why do ultra-conservatives keep winning all the elections? Because people don’t join unions, and so they have no muscle in the fight.

This is smallpox, it killed 300- 500 million people worldwide. We eradicated it, it took 200 years. The economy survived.

For thousands of years, until the early 1900s, about half of all people born died before they turned 15, from infectious diseases. We think we've changed history, with vaccines and antibiotics. Both of those are beginning to fail. No amount of clever science can make the normal we know actually last. But there is another way...

Transgender. Gender identity. Non-binary. What’s interesting about these ideas is that it seems to me that the surest way to affirm a binary, is to make it the bookends of a continuum. That makes it not only real, but the foundation of the entire framework. A binary is a relative, not an absolute. Something is hotter or colder than something else. There’s no such thing as hot or cold, by themselves. There’s no such thing as a pure man or pure woman, biologically or psychologically. That’s actually the opposite of the idea of transgender, or gender fluid, which both rely upon absolutes as definitions of gender and sex, which then get mixed and matched in various combinations.

The simple things matter. Why don’t we notice that an ‘investment’ is really just receiving money for doing no work?

Refugee advocates want to protest this weekend too now. As well as a repeat by some of last week's protests. I've never been much for the terrorism hoo-ha, but if this isn't domestic terrorism, I'm not sure what is. Righteousness is a cancer.

Good on her. I think there's an epidemic of righteousness, from 'Left', 'Right' - wherever. Ideas have enslaved us, that's what righteousness is. You become just a mouthpiece for an idea, that is using you. If you don't think ideas can act on people, how does an idea get shared between millions?

I'm thinking of organising a protest against the economy. We all get to stay home for as long as we like.

Fantastic video. I think flirting is almost dead. It’s overwhelmingly seen as sleazy or creepy now. We have this bizarre model where all desire for people has to be channelled into a single person.

A pandemic is a small group of microbes protesting, among the community of microbes. (Actually is.)

The almost silent danger in the huge rise in oral sex in recent decades, is that it’s likely responsible for many or even most cancers of the head and neck. Lots of viruses involved in oral sex, and those viruses can cause cancer and linger in us for decades, as chronic infections. https://time.com/3703209/fifty-shades-of-grey-oral-history/

“As the Prime Minister said, our strategy across the nation has been one of suppression. It is fantastic that we have effectively achieved elimination at this time in many parts of the country, but that's not our goal.” (Chief Medical Officer) Why did we choose suppression? Because we thought our economy was separate to our health, and the two had to be balanced. Problem is, what is it you suppress? The economy. You’re trying to close and open the economy, at the same time. The US and UK tried that absurdity, it’s been a disaster. Now they’re opening with thousands dying. We may have eliminated by accident here - it’s our best hope.

Are we seeing the irony here? Rowling is being abused for defending HER identity, as a woman. The identity of women has been suppressed for thousands of years, and now in the final disrespecting of it, anybody can 'identify' as a woman. Like something out of an online catalogue.There's ageism too, Rowling, Greer and Paglia get called 'old bigots', as if they just haven't moved with the times. This debate won't be resolved by righteousness, it will be resolved by the bloody hard work of looking at the absurd ideas in play here.

Over 100 healthcare workers in the UK are now dead of Covid-19. Here in Oz we still feel this is an old person's disease, and are very casual about it all. When you read the details of these people, you see the danger, and the tragedy, often multiple people from the same family dead. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-birmingham-52675182

Happy birthday sir!

“Men will never establish any equality with which they will be contented...when inequality of condition is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

The terrible mistake (I think) in substituting equality for justice. Justice is represented by scales. It'd be a clearer metaphor if they put things on the scales. You can balance grapes and a tennis ball, or a book and a frog. Etc. At the balance point of justice, the things being 'weighed' are fundamentally different, and retain those differences. Justice mediates between differences. Equality tries (and fails) to erase differences.

Happy birthday :)

It's still a frustration for me that current public debate doesn't ask one simple question. Why did closing things for 5 weeks result in damage to the 'economy' that might take 20 years to repair? It's nonsense. Once we understand that nonsense, I think the whole fairy tale of 'the economy' falls apart.

So timely. Thanks @[1222290127:2048:Tobias]! https://youtu.be/HLNhPMQnWu4

Humans invented parliaments and courts, where two sides debate the merits of issues, to stop arguments infecting all of society. I think the reason our public debates have now become so polarised into two sides is because we don’t have a clue any more how the law or parliament works. (When people say parliament shouldn’t argue so much, you can see the problem.) So the arguments have gone back into the community. A backwards step.

If you were born in 1900. - when you were 14, the First World War began. - when you were 18, the First World War ended, leaving 20 million dead. - the same year, the Spanish Flu began. - when you were 20, the Spanish Flu ended, leaving 100 million dead. - when you were 39, the Second World War began. - when you were 45, the Second World War ended, leaving 85 million dead. - when you were 50, the Korean War began. - when you were 53, the Korean War ended, leaving 3 million dead. - when you were 55, the Vietnam war began. - when you were 75, the Vietnam war ended, leaving about 1.4 million people dead.

This crisis is shining a light for me on how people view society. Not often as a common good, more often as a set of personal grievances, to be aired online or in protests. I guess Margaret Thatcher won, she always dreamed of a day when society would be only a collection of separate individuals.

Happy birthday!

I think the key thing at any protest is the banners, not the people. 'Division' is the clash of ideas, not people. It's like a maths problem that you haven't solved, unresolved ideas mess up society. We tend to form teams of people around the ideas, to compete against other teams, and the ideas then use us as puppets.

The man in his 20s is lying. My guess.

On any social media platform, scan the first 50 posts. How many invite you to share something about you? That are actually ‘social’?

I suggest Tarde as a guide in these ‘economic’ times. The economy you have is nothing more than the social conversation you have. They’re not 2 things. An unequal society is a society not having conversations, it really is that simple. Find any public issue, and if it’s a problem, it’s because there isn’t a conversation happening there. “There is no economic relationship between men that is not first accompanied by an exchange of words, whether verbal, written, printed, telegraphed, or telephoned...how do these needs for production and consumption...arise? Most often, thanks again to conversations, which has spread the idea of a new product to buy or to produce from one interlocutor to another...If, just for one week, conversation ceased in Paris, it would show very quickly through the singular decrease in the number of sales in stores...There is no...factor more powerful...in production than the chatter of individuals in their idle hours."

I think the most disgusting reframing of the pandemic from the ‘open up’ crowd is the ‘you have to live your life’ bullshit. As if society has a collective case of man flu, and we all just need to grow a pair and get back out there. This is a disease that can be lethal, and can maim you for life even if you recover, as this guy found. The only sane approach is to avoid getting it, those who encourage us to think otherwise are sheltering somewhere safe, losing money. https://www.insider.com/nick-cordero-leg-amputated-after-serious-covid-19-complications-2020-4

Interviewer: Angus Young, what do you say to those who say all of your 11 albums sound the same? Angus: We have 12 albums.

Testify! US companies (many already bankrupt pre-Covid) borrowed over $750 billion extra in the last 3 months, due to government underwriting. This is what fixing the economy means, giving our money to cowboys to pay their bonuses. Not to me or you. In Oz we're fixing the economy by giving our money to big construction and energy companies, mostly owned offshore. The people sheltering from Covid-19, while you work.

A scientific age doesn’t believe in souls. But here’s a mystery - how does a picture ‘capture’ an object or person? This tap and pipe is really just a flow of electrons through a screen you’re staring at. But it IS also that tap and pipe. The only possible explanation is that something about that tap and pipe - their ‘soul’ - can be literally captured and embodied in other things, in this case electrons and a screen. How else would it work? Electrons and screens have no resemblance to a tap and pipe.

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they maybe had 2 defining things about their civilisation, that also led to it being far and away the most successful in human history: 1) they granted agency to all things, and 2) they seduced these things to create ongoing partnerships. Agency just means they recognised that all things, even ‘inanimate’ things, act in some way. We on the other hand grant agency only to humans. An example of their seduction - they had no fences. Instead they’d manipulate the landscape to make it into what they, animals and plants all desired. They engineered landscapes as a web of interacting agencies.

If you did a survey asking what instrument defined rock and roll, I’m sure the electric guitar would win. But that would be wrong, and unfair. The snare drum is the root of rock and roll. That syncopated backbeat, on 2 and 4, as my drummer friends tell me. That IS rock and roll. You want a drummer that hits that 2 and 4 hard and sharp, so that it becomes a rock solid groove.

Believers in the economy do actually think of society as a machine, with numbers that they tweak by turning the knobs. Nailed it.

Difficult to share ideas like this in the current environment, both sides jump all over them and use them as weapons. But difficult problems are difficult ideas, and without working hard on the ideas, they don't go away. We turn ideas into sport, each person has to have a 'side', and those sides rarely have anything interesting to say. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/16/opinion/racism-is-not-the-issue.html

School often seems like preparation for 'real life'. I think we need to flip that - society (real life) is just a collection of ideas. Working through a set of problems at school is not practice for real life - it is real life. At school kids have to be trained to do this - they'd rather be hanging out in social groups. Most of what we call adult society is grown ups hanging out in social groups. They're wagging class.

Bureau of Crime Statistics: “CRIME PLUMMETS DURING COVID-19 LOCKDOWN”. So, crime plummeted. Air quality improved. People spent more time with their families than ever before. People baked and got creative in their new non-busy time. People could stop and think. The ‘economy’ we’re rushing to save is the only thing that has suffered under lockdown, what does that say?

What if democracy is just confusion, the lack of widely shared beliefs? A temporary holding pattern, while those beliefs develop. Humans are very uncomfortable with confusion. When you look at history the great civilisations are never 'each to their own'. Not once.

Regular sufferers of my posts will know I've been advocating these for years. Could put them on every bus, in every classroom and hospital, for bugger-all money. I carry one with me all through winter, for work or public transport. https://www-tmp.thenational.scot/news/18351414.coronavirus-ionisers-may-key-fight-defeat-covid-19/?ref=rss

Prediction is a mug's game. But here's mine, for the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. We won't beat it with a vaccine or treatment. It'll just stop. Like every pandemic in history, the microbes suddenly pack up and go home. And it'll be almost overnight, taking everybody by surprise. History is a much better guide than medicine here. (As to why microbes just pack up and go home, that's another topic - fascinating too.)

It's incredibly hard to convince people that they float. Everything in the universe is floating. For some reason people think being at the surface of one of these planets, like Earth, means you're not in space, and not floating. That feeling under your feet is just you touching the ground, as you float. That Earth keeps coming up and pressing into you.

The anger and righteousness that drive people to protest, is the direct result of them losing actual power over the issues that make them angry. They've got no soldiers on the front line.

RIP Vera. One of those really special songs. I imagine the people who sang this song when it was their actual situation, separating from the people they loved, maybe never to see them again. More resilient times. Vera was so alive well into her last years.

In reality I don’t think football season ever ends. Noticing the passion people have for it now that it’s back. But then I think we deal with big issues like we do footy - we form teams, we barrack for our teams. Every public issue of the day is easily unpacked like that I think - you’ll easily find the two opposing positions or teams.

What if loners are actually the people who see reality most clearly? Who see that we are all alone, even in friendship and in love?

Linda Blair gave one of the all-time great performances here I think, and only 14. Still a genuinely chilling film.

This is the battleground for Australia’s future. The government thinks business will lead Australia forward. Business has never, anywhere, led a country in any direction. Business uses the innovations generated by research, mostly in universities. Universities are the engine room of every economy, because the engine room of every economy is ideas.

Sunday is God’s day. In my experience people who don’t believe in God just swap something else to be in charge - science, politicians, the market, truth, corporations, etc. I don’t think I’ve met another person who really believes nobody and nothing is in charge at all. That’s my belief though, if you want to join up.

Happy birthday :)

Did you know medieval peasants worked fewer hours and had more holidays than we do? A job is a stupid way to distribute our wealth. The unemployment 'crisis' is a crisis of the idiot idea of the economy, where society's collective wealth is hoarded by a few, who then hand it out as wages through jobs, making useless rubber ducks nobody needs.

Formality can have a lot more sexual tension than informality. Like old formal dances, which looked stiff and formal, but when you read how they were constructed, the entire dance was like flirtation in movement. The man and woman negotiating the space between themselves every moment, close and then distant, repeatedly, with constant eye contact, and even conversation. Dance as a framework for courting.

Remarkably there are still highly educated people who want to tell you that COVID-19 is not the serious problem that has been made out. Watch this. Exponential growth has a way of silencing idiots, eventually. https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2634167/?fbclid=IwAR1SK_PxfC9h1czU9u-OzXqWkrSlLzW7eUsP2EQA2f_YRzdfIfg437YJuc0

Grattan did a wonderful report a few months ago on the pandemic, where it drew the (obvious) conclusion that elimination of the virus was the best strategy. Now it’s back with an updated look, including the (again, obvious) recommendation that if a State has eliminated COVID-19, it should keep its borders closed to those that haven’t. And they explain (again) why the idea of a ‘balance’ between public health measures and the economy is a lethally stupid idea. The US, UK and Brazil have tried that, let’s not be them.

I see the Victorian government are sensibly recommending that Victorians don't travel interstate if they're going to be mixing with other people. This will be a test for 'open the borders' people. Why do we close international borders to prevent spread of Covid-19, but have such a problem with internal borders? I'm a broken record, but the single biggest threat to our Covid-19 strategy is the people who say we have to 'balance' public health with the economy. That's just incorrect, and dangerous.

Happy birthday Nurse Georgia.

The federal government has almost no role in management of a pandemic at all. The States do pretty much everything and have most of the authority, under constitutional law. The reason ScoMo wanted a National Cabinet was to get a seat at the table. He's mostly an observer. The feds' contribution to date has been largely to keep forcing the 'economy' into the conversation. That push will continually get in the way of public health measures managed by the States, as we've seen with debates about schools and border closures.

This is Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for pioneering the measurement of economic growth. He more or less invented the idea of GDP. What did he say about the economy? “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” Kuznets also pointed out that what we call economic growth is just a measurement of goods and services flowing through a community at a point in time, and ignores wealth and its distribution. Why have economies crashed with Covid-19? Because the stuff that usually flows has been hoarded by a minority, as wealth. The amount of money hasn’t changed, or goods and services. But most of it is in the hands of a tiny few in the community. So it’s not flowing, the government had to inject tens of billions in extra cash to get things flowing. What would fix the economy overnight? Giving money back to the vast majority, who don’t have any. Tax the hoarders, who got rich through the work of everybody else, and redistribute our common-wealth again.

We'll 'suppress' the virus (close it down), while 'opening up' the economy. So we're closing and opening, at the same time. How does that work? It doesn't. Ask the US and UK. https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/pm-says-reopening-the-economy-must-continue-despite-victorian-outbreak-20200622-p554u4

In April, compliance with social distancing in Australia was 80%. It's now 25%.

Genuinely funny. NSW people, tell Victorians to bugger off. Government-sanctioned. The game of Twister 'opening up the economy' forces people to play, priceless.

Every time I hear somebody call for ‘unity’, or say something like ‘we’re all in this together’, I wonder if it’s really true that people choose to agree or disagree with each other. As if we could all just suddenly choose to be ‘on the same page’. It’s ideas that clash, not people. People who agree share the same idea, people who don’t, share different ideas. What’s the trick to get wider agreement? Study the ideas. Don’t just disagree, or ‘agree to disagree’. Unpick where the ideas differ. Don’t be a puppet to an idea.

Was listening to talkback radio yesterday, and the question was - what’s something you learned at school that you actually used in later life? And it made me think about how education has failed, that this is such a common question. Not because education doesn’t teach you useful things, but because we think that’s its job. Education only has one purpose, and it’s not really doing it. To break the hold ideas have on us, to challenge how we think. To pay attention past the point of discomfort to our current ideas. Instead we have zombie robots filled to the brim with righteous certainties - their specialities and their opinions. The more ‘useful’ we make education, the more zombie-like people become.

It's always what people do, not what they say. What they say? "We're all in this together". What they do? $150 billion in tax cuts skewed heavily to the rich and foreign corporations. Can't find a measly $84 million to stop the ABC ditching 250 staff, or a single cent to enrol extra students at universities. Just the worst governments right now, for this point in history, for Australia, the UK and US. Zealots. They win elections because the Anglo societies are full of oldies, scared of boat people, and gorging themselves on franking credit refunds.

I wanted to repost this, because the idea of 'balancing' the economy with public health is an even deadlier virus than Covid-19. Even Chief Medical Officers parrot it now. Economists say? It's bullshit.

Without cheating, anybody know what’s famous about this photo?

I’ve worked in governance for a couple of decades, a job where you try to figure out how to get large groups of people to move in one direction. My main criticism of the COVID strategy we’re following is that it’s a laundry list of rules and restrictions. Anybody who works in governance knows that’s a recipe for disaster. The (extensive and complicated) rules and restrictions are the only thing that allows ‘opening up’. People don’t follow rules and restrictions for long.

Stonehenge is about 5000 years old. It's mysterious, it fills us with awe. Our own landscape was crafted over more than 100,000 years. It's not clear if how it was done is now lost to us, no other culture lasts more than a few thousand years at most. We're living inside the planet's most extraordinary mystery.

The UK is still getting about 1000 new cases of Covid a day. And it's opening right up. See the shift in responsibility for the ensuing carnage? The people are now to blame. The US, UK and Oz share political strategy, be prepared to see this here if we lose control of our numbers. With backs to the wall, something that doesn't exist (the economy - code for 'people with a lot of money') will be given priority over you.

We hear about the dangers of exponential growth with COVID. What i don’t think is talked about is how much worse again the exponential challenge is with contact tracing. While each infected person might infect 3 or 4 others (at the lower end of the scale), the number of contacts they have is many times greater than that. And each of those contacts the same, etc. etc. You only need a handful of cases to quickly overwhelm manual contact tracing. If it’s a competition between an exponentially infectious virus, and a shopping list of restrictions millions of people have to use to try to control it, every cent of my money is on the virus.

Another re-post, because it’s life-changing. What you feel as your body, and your weight, is neither. If somebody pushed up against you, you’d know that feeling was caused by them pressing on you. But when the Earth pushes up into you, for some reason we think the feelings are our ‘weight’. You can’t feel your weight. You can’t even feel your body. You are your body, you can’t step outside it to feel it. Try going about your life feeling those bodily feelings as the forces acting and changing, between you and the planet. It takes the attention outside your ‘body’, into its relationship with the planet, every second. Those forces will ‘work you out’ faster than any gym, if you get to know them. One amazing thing you’ll find is that you’re just floating at the surface of the Earth, you have no ‘weight’ at all, in the way we usually mean that.

This is Sweden's case numbers. Sweden is following the same strategy as us - 'balancing the economy with health'. People say we're different because we have such low numbers. We used a lockdown to get to Sweden's starting point - they had low numbers. They don't any more. Over 5000 dead now too, and climbing.

Superb. Latour uses the analogy of The Truman Show to talk about the 'economisation of society'. Where all the relations that make up social life are corralled into a handful of 'economic' relations, using millions of data processing bullshit jobs to do the conversion, becoming 'the economy', to replace society itself. Like the fake world Truman lived in. And Latour shows how the pandemic was what exposed this fake world, like Truman's boat that got him to the exit door. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/P-205-ECONOMISATION-AOC-GB_1.pdf

'Cutting red tape' is seen as the way to 'get the economy going'. What's hilariously perverse about this is - do people even know what all that bureaucracy is doing? It's people converting social life into data, to create the statistical model we call the economy. The economy is what produces the red tape.

If people spent half the time trying to understand the pandemic that they do getting outraged about toilet paper, maybe they’d notice that the ‘ridiculous’ thing is governments outsourcing their pandemic strategy to the public.

Age and baldness can improve a person.

The ‘living alongside the virus’ whack-a-mole strategy. Our strategy too, they’re whacking moles down in Victoria right now.

Surprising numbers of people feel assured knowing that their health and safety is reliant upon millions of others following strict rules.

Unemployment, the loss of ‘jobs’. We need to think harder, like Dave Graeber: “Well, you could also just replace them with no jobs. Great economic thinkers like John Maynard Keynes were predicting that technology would advance such that we would achieve a 15-hour workweek by century’s end, but that didn’t happen. Instead, we just kept inventing bullshit jobs. But what if we just accepted that technology can perform a lot of the essential tasks and just worked less? What if we just spent more time doing what we actually want rather than sitting in [an] office pretending to work for 40 hours a week?”

Animals teach us that if you have your attention wholly engaged in what you’re doing, everything else follows without effort or strain. This hawk’s attention doesn’t budge for a second, which is what frees its body completely along its length to respond. All our feelings of weight and effort in our own bodies are only lapses of attention, usually to try to ‘do’ our own movements. That tightens us right up, creating those feelings of strain and weight.

“South Korea’s story sounds disturbingly similar to Australia’s. Its Centers for Disease Control blames the relaxation of restrictions to give businesses a boost. Nightclubs, bars, clubs and other venues were reopened. After a long, intense period of restraint – people relaxed. Social distancing guidelines were forgotten.”

Happy birthday!

Right now we could ask both NSW and Vic to lockdown again until they've eliminated Covid-19, like the rest of Oz may have achieved. We don't because the Economy Nazis say it would be the end of life as we know it. Actually the Australian government could easily afford to keep the economy going, see the chart. Remember there are $300 BILLION in tax cuts budgeted for the next decade alone. We capitulate like a pack of dumb lemmings when they trot out the economic hocus pocus.

"Mr Morrison told 2GB's Ray Hadley he believed the JobSeeker payment was providing a disincentive for people to find work." Notice how too much government money for the poor is seen as a disincentive for them to work. But lots of government money to the well-off, through tax cuts, is seen as an incentive for them to work. It comes down to how dumb and naive you want to be.

The whack-a-mole strategy looks great on paper. Open up the 'economy', then just whack the virus locally if it appears somewhere. But nobody knows how. It's probably impossible. The non-medical experts who know this weren't asked, or were ignored. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/victoria-considers-local-lockdowns-as-coronavirus-hot-spots-identified/news-story/912a9de71d8e26bfc785182ec752e5de

Here’s another little trick the economy cult play on us. Government debt. Two simple graphs here. You can see government spending doesn't vary much from year to year, and in fact it’s trending down. What caused growing debt is cuts to revenue - tax. Overwhelmingly cuts to taxes for the wealthy. The economy cult want you to believe government debt is caused by too much spending, because they can then re-route that money to even more tax cuts for themselves. Meanwhile the government services you paid for, through your taxes, now have to be paid out of your own pocket, while your taxes flow into the pockets of the donors to the parties who cut spending.

Happy birthday leper man!

For me, people stockpiling toilet paper aren't our real problem. People who believe in a pandemic strategy of millions of people carefully following a long list of complicated rules for many months, are still our problem. Victoria didn't 'drop the ball', this IS the Strategy Cabinet adopted.

Close the border, Gladys. Don’t be ScoMo and outsource your job to the public. And people can still go to work, Victoria? Madness.

Very few people died of heart disease before the 20th century. And then quite suddenly, nearly everybody did. See the graph. Medicine has no idea why, it usually says fat and salt are to blame, even though we ate even more of both of those before the 20th century. There’s a possible simple explanation. Refrigerators. They became widespread from the 1930s, and that’s exactly when heart disease took off. Before fridges, we often preserved food using fermentation. We were eating shed loads of good microbes. Then we stopped, because of fridges. Suddenly our guts and bodies had this much more impoverished environment, with very few microbes, which allowed the nasty ones free reign. Heart disease is likely a chronic infection, that’s why it took off so fast and started to kill so many. Fridges were a big part of that, I’d wager.

The Economy Cult’s trick of the day. The GST. A loud cacophony of cultists have been desperate to raise it for years. Why do they love it? Because they gutted income and company tax, for their own benefit, so the budget is short, and what’s the best way to fix that? Slug the everyday working person with more indirect taxation on every single thing they buy. Again if we’re dumb enough to fall for it, we get the leaders we deserve.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday, have a great day

Normally a virus doesn't spread well if it's lethal, because the person dies before they can infect many others. 'Stealth' infections like Covid-19 are super smart, they allow the person to be healthy for weeks, happily infecting others, before they hit hard. My prediction of the virus suddenly just disappearing is not because it may become less virulent. It may just get out-competed by other microbes and go into dormancy. The even more sneaky lethal infections not mentioned here are chronic infections. Ones that live in you sometimes your entire life. They may be responsible for most of our chronic diseases, diseases we blame on things like diet, or genetics. STIs are often like this. https://aeon.co/essays/the-most-dangerous-pathogens-in-human-history-have-moved-by-stealth?fbclid=IwAR2zEDXgcslx_1ttCm7YutJD2moss3yAeGmlxEgRG6q-8_tAjRoxVCcBmCg