July 2020

Check this out, another powerful plea to go for elimination, like we should have from day 1. I've lost count of the number of people who say 'but it's not possible'. Who says? Not one public health expert says it, we eliminate diseases in Australia every year. The majority of Australia has likely already done it. https://www.smh.com.au/national/premier-close-the-border-with-victoria-now-20200630-p557nh.html

Apparently 500,000 people have cleaned out their super entirely with the allowed withdrawals for the pandemic. I can't decide if it's them or the government who are more stupid. Maybe we should entrust them both with implementing our pandemic response. O wait, we did that already.

How does a mind reader read minds? By understanding that while we think ‘me’ is in our heads, in fact most of the time we’re following pretty simple shared patterns of behaviour, that we don’t notice. Derren says here we’re all much more similar than we realise - I’d say we imitate one another much more than we realise. We’re open books to a thinking eye.

Good luck gperry. The Economy Cult is winning.

Gravity and weight. All these weigh the same. But if you lift them they’ll feel lighter the bigger they get. Researchers tie themselves in knots trying to explain this. I haven’t seen anyone make the important point, that when you lift something, what you feel as ‘weight’ is not weight at all. Just as you can’t feel your own weight, you can’t feel the weight of another thing either. You can only feel the forces of interaction, between you and that other thing, whether it’s just the Earth, or a set of weights.

Happy birthday! Life begins at (whispers age)

Just one of the modern conservatives worldwide who franchised conservative politics to the financial sector. None of them would know what a political conservative is, historically. These are the people who can twist global catastrophes like climate change and a pandemic, into problems with the ‘economy’. They even renamed our societies, as ‘economies’. Ordinary people will now tell you that we need to save ‘the economy’. Their victory is complete.

Our main reference point to the planet, an address, is defined by roads, pathways to other places. Our own ‘place’ is defined by movement to other places. We’re not grounded. Our torture in a global pandemic is to be forced to stay at home, at our address. The idea of ‘home’ itself is defined as isolation from this wider movement, our ‘personal’ space still has no connection to the Earth, but only to society. We refuse to ‘land’.

Watching one of the odious Tories in the UK blathering on about how they need to open up the economy, and people should man-up and accept that life is full of risks, we can’t hide forever etc. Imagine our HIV strategy in the 80s using that attitude - “get out there and fuck again people, life is full of risks, just rubber-up, and fuck for the economy”.

If you Google ‘subsistence’, you usually get pics like this, self-sufficiency stuff. It’s revealing for me, because it suggests that to subsist you have to withdraw from society. Society is about movement and economic growth. Some thinkers, even military thinkers, are now saying that’s why our economies had no resilience, and collapsed inside days when we started quarantines. Our economic ideas need to be reframed around subsistence, the capacity of individuals and business to subsist under stress. This is why countries all around the world right now feel torn between protecting peoples’ health, and their economies. Because their economic ideas don’t include basic subsistence. Instead of forcing people to get infected to save the old economy, we really need to invent a new one.

On a bloody cold day, a shout out to the magnificent public health staff and police, out there every day saving lives in this pandemic while we’re comfy at home. I wish they paid you like bankers.

I think Victoria should be (but isn't) waking us up to what the AMA said a month or so ago. Without eliminating Covid-19, you either have tiny amounts of virus in the community, through heavy restrictions, or it's out of control. There's no middle ground. This is the outcome of following a strategy where you try to close down the virus, while you open up the economy. Pulling in 2 opposite directions, at the same time.

Happy birthday!

Democracy is winning. What if that's why the world seems batshit crazy right now? I don't have my ceremonial jackboots on, there is a serious line of thought that says democracy is what you get when people lose a shared set of strong beliefs. So they have a crazy mixed up ideas period - democracy - until new strong and shared beliefs emerge. In the meantime populists win democratic elections with cartoon strong beliefs, like patriotism, and the 3Rs in education. People long for unifying, strong belief. Also why democracy won't beat populists.

Humans’ deepest passion is to copy or imitate. Baby names are a great example. Despite parents likely believing they’re choosing the name they personally love the best, in fact they’re often just copying everybody else without realising it. And those who think they’re bucking the trend by inventing new weird names, are even more obsessed with what everybody else is doing. These social patterns are society. Society is humans imitating one another.

Happy birthday! Quite a frost to celebrate it in.

Happy birthday!

It seems trying to open and close the economy at the same time isn't working. Who'd have thought.

Social distancing won't be enough. You need to eliminate community transmission of this virus. Nothing else will work. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/239-experts-with-one-big-claim-the-coronavirus-is-airborne.htm

The panic-buying has been debunked so many times. We're drama-tarts, only maximum outrage will do. There are very few 'panic buyers'. It's every shopper buying a bit more, to avoid having to come to the shops with a rapidly spreading lethal virus about (the only sane thing to do). And coming up against a just-in-time supply chain with no resilience, that shifts all stock away from where you live, to massive centralised and automated warehouses. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/melbourne-coronavirus-panic-buying-strips-supermarkets-again/news-story/dd5b97ca03323c7617c4f444cecec0ae

Pauline exhibiting her mastery of the English language. Like the people in the locked down tower blocks. A favourite of @[725606566:2048:Kell]'s.

This is a paper that may change the pandemic. A few hundred international experts pleading to change social distancing rules, because they're sure the virus is mostly transmitted through the air. (Astonishing that we didn't think this right from the start.) That would mean all the stuff about 1.5m distance and handwashing, while still important, will fall away compared to the need to get people out of shared indoor spaces wherever possible. That's 'opening up' well and truly stuffed, and is why this is being resisted so hard. (Click on 'pdf' to read it, it's not long.) https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa939/5867798

Why is it that during an international emergency, we suddenly decide the important thing is to escalate every other cause and grievance we have, and focus on those instead? I think I know why. The pandemic needs practical thought and action right now. We hate that. We love symbolic gestures, they don't require much thought or action, just posturing.

If 'gravity' is pulling us down, are we all 'holding ourselves up' all day, in everything we do? We're not. I bet these kids don't feel pulled down at all. I bet if we look at those situations where we think we do feel gravity, they're situations where we're not paying attention to the things we're doing. You can't fully pay attention to something and do that thing we call 'holding ourselves up', at the same time. Try it - I bet you'll find all feelings of 'weight' vanish when you pay full attention to what you're doing.

Lots of heat for Dan Andrews about Victoria. But Victoria is the strategy National Cabinet chose. To quote Mary-Louise McLaws, one of Australia's leading pandemic experts: "This is to be expected when we go for suppression and not eradication". Asked if it means Victoria eased restrictions too soon? "Yes, definitely". Remembering Andrews copped a truckload of abuse from Canberra for being slower than the rest of the country to open up, too. Just as we blamed people for shops running short of goods, we'll seemingly sail through this pandemic not bothering to understand it, finding somebody to blame every time normal life is interrupted. How this pandemic ends depends on all of us and what we understand. And that's scary as hell, on the evidence of that understanding so far.

Less reported. The second-largest source of Victoria's infections, after the meat-processing plant? A school. 90 cases, and climbing.

Bypass the pollies, go straight to the experts. If we don't eliminate this virus, Victoria will happen 'again, and again, and again'. Without elimination, this will happen in every state. Most of Australia may have already eliminated, which is why numbers have stayed low, not social distancing. Pollies, acting for lobby groups, said elimination was impossible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af40xCtMEn4

Society had 2 choices to try to get 'normal life' back. Staying at home, away from each other. Or going back to semi-normal, with a whole range of social distancing restrictions. It's proven incapable of option 2, I see pictures on FB every day of big social events with people right on top of each other. I've seen it in person, in bars and restaurants and shops. And it whinges about option 1. We're like the Paris Hiltons of the pandemic, it's how the poor majority of the world see us.

Remember that testing and tracing was our 'roadmap to a CovidSafe Australia'? Victoria did more of it than anybody, see the graph. It didn't help. Every country in the world who thought this was a way to be half-pregnant, to run the economy 'alongside' the virus, has failed. I'm not sure we're seeing the reality we're facing. NSW thinks it's working here, but that's because we have almost no virus. We effectively eliminated. If virus gets back into NSW, or any other State, we can expect more of Victoria, if we don't have strong restrictions. You can't 'open up' in a pandemic.

In friendship and love, we're not looking for somebody else. We're looking for another way of being 'me'.

Pessimist: the glass is half-empty. Optimist: the glass is half-full. Engineer: that glass could be half the size and do the same job.

People often try to lift themselves from one stair to the next when they’re going up stairs. (‘Climbing’ stairs.) And they drop or fall down from one stair to the next, with a loud thump, when they’re going down stairs. In both cases, they have a weird idea that there’s a separate ‘me’ that has to either lift the rest of me ‘up’, or drop the rest of me ‘down’. We’re a whole body, from head to foot. If you can feel that whole body as you move you’ll find that you don’t need to lift or let drop, each stair is just another support for all of you. It takes no more effort to go up stairs than it takes to go down, if you stop trying to split yourself in two and lift or drop the other half of you.

Israel. Another government who thought they'd 'open up' without eliminating the virus first, to save 'the economy'. They had all the social distancing. Kaboom. Unemployment now 20%, and rising, the health and economic consequences were equally disastrous. They're the same thing. Shutting down again now as fast as they can.

ScoMo reporting on National Cabinet today. Still this idea that what will get the 'economy' moving is removing 'regulation' which is apparently 'constraining' business and the economy. Baloney, that's vested interests using a crisis to try to remove due process. Regulation protects people and creates a consistency to help all business. What will fix the fictitious economy is giving people money, who don't have any. Deregulated businesses can't function without customers with money.

"The main strategy that doesn't seem to have worked is abandoning elimination of community spread (some called it eradication) and being content with suppression." "Some would argue that the pool of experts providing advice at a national level should be adjusted to include specialists with more experience of pandemic and public health control. The current expertise is skewed towards hospital-acquired infections and to some extent, influenza." Thank you Norman Swan and Tegan Taylor

Thanks to Jason for sharing some research that provides some further clues as to why fridges might have been our enemy in the eternal war against infectious diseases. The researchers studied the mortality rate from Covid-19 per country against the average quantity of fermented vegetables each country consumes. For every single gram increase in that average, mortality against Covid-19 dropped over 35%. Very suggestive of 'something to see here'.

Fantastic piece from Peter Hartcher today. This is the stuff I've been annoying people with for months. If you read the history of pandemics all of this was inevitable. But we don't want to hear it. He does leave out the obvious option - eliminate the friggin' virus. All pandemics have to be eliminated. "We got the idea into our heads that once we'd got through a couple of months of lockdown, we'd revert blissfully back to life as we'd known it...There is no zero-sum trade-off between health outcomes and economic ones as many politicians imply. You'll have heard many of them demand that health protections are removed to "reopen the economy". It's vacuous political puffery." https://www.smh.com.au/national/the-assassin-is-out-there-virus-calls-for-a-new-way-of-thinking-20200710-p55b1a.html

100 separate outbreaks in Victoria. Again, I think it shows clearly that if you don't eliminate the virus, you either have to suppress the crap out of it with very heavy restrictions, or it's out of control. There is no manageable amount of virus, no way to 'run the economy alongside' the virus.

The thing that most attracts you to a person will likely be the thing that also makes you break up, later. That makes sense because love is usually a projection onto another person of what we want to see. So we gorge on that projection, until it starts to sicken us. (P.S. Kell and I are just fine.)

The danger in having doctors instead of pandemic and public health experts providing advice to Cabinet. 'Preventing community transmission' IS elimination 🤔

A floating compression structure. No tricks here, there are no compressive (solid, rigid) bits between the top and bottom pieces. Gravity holds it up, its own weight suspends the whole structure in space. Your body is a floating compression structure, meaning gravity holds you up too, it doesn’t pull you down. But you have to use your body properly to feel that.

Happy birthday Tobe!

All living things when under threat seek shelter, if they can’t fight off the threat. If all of society had sheltered for even 6 weeks when this pandemic started, it would now be over. Why didn’t it? Because it can’t, the majority of society can’t survive a day without ‘work’. We call that the ‘economy’. We have material abundance beyond the imagination of the generations before us, and yet our societies are so lacking in resilience that we can’t do the one basic act of all living things - take shelter. This crisis is caused by ‘the economy’, not a virus. What does the economy call shelter? It calls it ‘lockdown’. As if shelter is a prison. We urgently need to fight the economy.

Most of Australia has already achieved elimination, despite the Economy Cult (established business and their sponsored puppets in parliament) saying it couldn’t be done. They even hold economic guns to the CMO’s heads and get them to sprout nonsense like ‘we can’t eliminate, there’s still Covid overseas’. We eliminate malaria, measles, HIV etc. etc. all the time while they’re still active overseas. Let’s finish the job, before the virus wins.

No links to Victoria so far, apparently. Meaning we’re seeing exactly the same thing in NSW now - failure to properly eliminate (National Cabinet decision), opening up, spreading the remaining virus around geographically, and then it forming new outbreaks. But much harder outbreaks to shut down, because of the spread into the community. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/coronavirus-australia-live-updates-two-pubs-in-bordertown-sa-locked-down-amid-coronavirus-fears/live-coverage/62af6ecc20d69760ccca46bc351ef1a2

“Australia’s national cabinet should explicitly pursue an elimination strategy similar to that of New Zealand. The current suppression strategy carries the certainty of repeated outbreaks and lockdowns, shattering business confidence, confusing the public, and prolonging the COVID-19 ordeal. It will cost the economy more than an elimination strategy. If we reassess and refocus, the benefits of elimination are within our reach.”

We already know what suppression leads to, look at the UK and US. It doesn’t suppress the virus, and then you lose total control, and just give up and send people out to get infected. And their economies crash much worse. Wake up Australia, turn the fucking football off and fight. Go hard, go fast, choke this mongrel in those 2 remaining States. New Zealand did it, let’s not have ScoMo’s petty macho crap about not wanting to follow Jacinda send the country down the toilet.

Is a funny t-shirt like telling the same joke to the same people 50 times a day?

I wouldn’t wait for the government to catch up. The virus is on the move. Don’t go out unless it’s necessary. Avoid public places, avoid pubs, clubs and restaurants more than anything. Don’t be too proud to wear a mask shopping. Don’t hug and kiss friends, don’t shake hands. Don’t take the blame for the virus being out of control, it’s the strategy to blame, not the people. Do your own strategy and stop worrying about the economy, it’s not real or alive. You are.

Ruby Princess docked on 19 March. It’s just about Australia’s entire pandemic. It kickstarted transmission in all modes, and from early May all NSW has really had is overseas (plane) arrivals driving numbers. The only line going up since then is the black one (that’s returning overseas travellers in hotel quarantine). It’s not suppression that has succeeded in NSW, it’s fixing the Ruby Princess mess, of our own making. We haven’t beaten Covid-19, it’s only just arriving. Victoria’s pandemic started at the same time - around 19 March. Some infected Ruby Princess passengers lived in Victoria. That one event likely is Australia’s entire pandemic to date, until more external virus leaked in through Victorian quarantine, into an opened up economy.

Happy birthday!

Pffft, experts, what do they know. Gladys had the head of the Australian Hotels Association speaking at her Covid news conference today. Running a pub obviously makes you an expert in beating a pandemic.

On the one hand we think time is this thing that flows like a river. Past, present, future. But on the other, it’s a different time everywhere in the world right ‘now’. Time can’t flow and be different everywhere at once.

The obvious evidence that conservative politics worldwide was simply bought out by the big end of town, is that these parties have the same 3 policies no matter what crisis or situation is in front of them. Cut taxes, cut regulation, reduce the size of government. Whether it’s the Earth incinerating under global warming or the entire globe in the grip of a pandemic, it’s always the same policies. It’s the only policies conservative parties have because they’re not political parties now, they’re old lobby groups where the lobbyists actually bypassed politics and put their own people directly into parliament. How do they get away with it? By convincing us that society is really an ‘economy’, and surprise surprise, the economy apparently needs? Taxes cut, regulation cut, government cut. It was superbly done, we’re just too lazy to see it.

Back to this fascinating question (for me). Is a river formed by the water, or by the ground it flows along? You could say both, but that just sidesteps the question.

Happy birthjday!

In recent days we've had the Prime Minister and Premier of NSW asked if they would support further quarantining, if outbreaks get out of hand. Both said the same thing - 'we can't keep turning the lights on and off'. We should be VERY AFRAID of this answer, because turning the lights on and off as required IS what a suppression strategy does, the strategy National Cabinet chose. So they're now saying they're not even going to bother following it, the economy has triumphed, as it has in the UK and US. We should be extra afraid because when pressed on this question, what did they answer? 'Our hospitals are ready'. It really annoys me that not even journalists are calling this stuff out, are we all asleep at the wheel?

I don't make this stuff up. This is the evil the economy people are about - note 'saving', in inverted commas! And the clear admission of what the strategy is all about. Save the economy, people are expendable.

More on time. Time doesn't go past-present-future. The present changes the past. For example, if you buy a winning lottery ticket, it wasn't the winning ticket when you bought it (in the 'past'). But it is the winning ticket when you win (the 'present'), and that win means it was now a winning ticket in the past too.

Let it sink in. At a time when a million Australians have lost their jobs, the government’s rescue package centres on big tax cuts to people with high incomes, with jobs.

All in the ideas. When we say ‘bend down’, why doesn’t it occur to us that we’re already on the ground? We can’t get any lower. Young kids don’t bend down, their whole body just changes shape, no strain or effort. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ are just different body shapes, both entirely without effort or strain. Or they can be. I think this is one of the origins of our strange ideas about gravity. An adult will feel like ‘getting up’ is hard because they’re fighting gravity. The child feels no effort getting up at all, it’s just a change of shape. The adult is trying to ‘lift’ one half of themselves with the other half of themselves.

Why can we suppress a virus to save an economy, but not suppress an economy to beat a virus?

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday! Celebrate in style.

The idea of time 'travel', of travelling 'in' time. How do you get 'in' time?

I’ve been talking about time, and how it doesn’t flow from past-present-future. Re-posting this Feynman diagram. That little e+? It’s moving backwards in time. This process is used in your mobile phone electronics. You have a time machine in your pocket.

You know in Star Trek they teleport people? TVs do that too. We'd assume that's just an analogy. It's literally, physically true. The electronics in a TV are quantum mechanical, they physically take events from 'real life' and allow us to make them independent of the time and space of real life. A TV is a time machine, and a teleport. That's why watching TV can make you laugh or cry, we're experiencing real events, not representations.

People know I've been saying this for months. This guy led our hugely successful HIV strategy. Many experts coming forward now saying the same thing. What we're getting back from ScoMo and Gladys is pure Trump, absolute nonsense about flicking lights on and off. Their Trump strategy could see us opening and closing potentially for years, destroying the economy and killing thousands. It's not theoretical, that's what's happened for every country that's used it.

Happy Birthday :)

About time we listened to the people on the front line, and not to industry lobbyists and conservative politicians safely sheltered from the virus, worried more about losing their investments. Just saw this guy interviewed, wonderfully articulate, completely destroyed all the 'living with the virus' BS.

Australia, here's your future. Boris today openly announced that he's now ignoring 'the science' completely. It's getting in the way of his opening up of the economy. Notice also that UK slogan he stands above each day - when it says 'control the virus', who is it referring to? Ordinary people, like you and me. Boris is taking no responsibility for doing that at all. That's already started here, the narrative has shifted to how the public isn't managing the virus properly. Wake up Australia, before it's too late.

ScoMo just cancelled the next sitting of parliament. The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) said it's unsafe with virus circulating. The same CMO who says a pub can have 300 people in it, more than twice as many as are in that enormous parliamentary chamber. Australia will probably yawn and go back to the footy, and swapping memes. Day by day we draw closer to our own Trump.

When this FB ad started I wasn’t 100% sure where it was going.

Glorious. Look at that head, it doesn’t move a millimetre. Complete separation of the attention from the body, releasing it to respond elastically. https://youtu.be/B4nd9GF1dRg

Aboriginal and other ‘primitive’ peoples often dislike and distrust film and video recordings. We think they’re just simple. What if we’re the simple ones? What if film and video images do actually ‘capture’ in some ways what they portray? Not represent, actually capture. How else do we explain that those images are so ‘life-like’, that celluloid and electronics can create something so obviously like the original, that make us feel almost everything the ‘real life’ situation does?

Is it more primitive to see agency in animals, objects and the landscape, or to see it only in humans? We think we’re the only sentient things on the planet, but sentience or agency is distributed across all things, including objects. They all act in some way. This to me is the key to reconciliation, us understanding this.

The people telling us all to get out there back to work are sheltering as far away from this virus as they can. Why isn’t there white-hot fury about this? True leaders would tell us all to go home, print money to keep the economy going and then together we’d all wait a few months until the virus is dead.

Happy birthday cuz! And a lovely day for it.

Looking forward to this one. I admire any Australian with the bravery to challenge our obsession with booze. Imagine an Australia more interested in ideas, and much less interested in their next drink. The First Fleeters drank themselves to oblivion to cope with a land they didn't understand. Nothing much has changed.

If you're one of those who thinks the current outbreak is Victorian mismanagement, I suggest looking overseas. This virus is not 'suppressible', as experts here have said too. You can't 'open up' AND control the virus, at the same time. Nobody has managed it, it can't be done. The only 'Covid Safe' is 'No Covid'.

Who would you rather guide us out of this crisis? A failed advertising hack (ScoMo), and a career politician who went straight from university into politics (Gladys), both desperate to protect their party donors in gambling, alcohol, construction, retail etc.? Or people who have 40 years of success in managing epidemics, like Bill Bowtell, who was a major architect of our superb HIV strategy, a disease for which we had no treatment and no vaccine? Have a listen to what Bill thinks.

Blue is Victoria, grey is NSW. Over that period where I’ve put the red line you can see Victoria still had community transmission, NSW mostly didn’t. Then you see Victoria take off, around the blue arrow. What was that date? ‘Opening up the economy’. Not hundreds of people escaping from hotel quarantine. Look through those late-June and July numbers and you can see community transmission beginning in NSW. Less than a month ago Victoria had the same numbers as us. Every day we don’t lock things down again, that virus is out there spreading. You can’t suppress the virus.

The figures over the past 100+ years. World Wars 1 & 2 were major international emergencies, like our pandemic, and governments spent HUGE amounts of money. And what followed that huge spending/debt? The 'Roaring Twenties', and the 'Post-War Boom'. Decades of phenomenal prosperity. That red line is the level of our current emergency Covid spending. We're told we can't afford to lock down. Our economic ideas are our biggest enemy.

How ‘The Economy’ was born. Margaret Thatcher was shrewd, she made generations of people believe that government budgets are like household budgets. Now most assume as common sense that governments need to tax and borrow to have money to spend (wrong, they actually ‘print’ money - they have an infinite amount); that government debt has to be repaid, by future generations if it’s large (wrong, it doesn’t need to repay itself); and that governments should have balanced budgets (wrong, a completely meaningless concept). These lies were invented by Thatcher to try to undermine the public sector. She succeeded.

What bothers me about the whole vaccine thing is that medical experts are poor guides for pandemics. We might get a vaccine that gets us through COVID-19, but there are plenty more pathogens just waiting to whack us. We’re desperate for a vaccine so we can go back to our old lives. Those lives are over. A pandemic is a problem with our economic ideas, not a health thing. We think governments budget like households. Our economies have no resilience against massive shocks, like climate change and pandemics. That’s the problem. They’re made up of hundreds of millions of working poor who can’t subsist, and a tiny elite of obscene wealth. Our cities are slaves to cars and dysfunctional. Our landscapes are terminally ill and our water situation is dire. Our air is toxic. Our education is dumber than a rock. Millions of people are mired in New Age lunatic philosophies, and vote for reality TV stars.

Victoria is actually doing best of all States at social distancing. Below that R line of 1 means good work. What we're seeing there is the strongest suppression in the country. We've been fooled by the suppression idea, because there's been no virus to actually suppress, so we've patted ourselves on the back for choosing the wrong strategy. As soon as virus arrives, suppression falls in a heap.

ScoMo said today JobKeeper and JobSeeker have to be scaled back, they're bleeding cash. SImple - print some more ScoMo, as much as you like. It will never need to be repaid, government doesn't need to repay itself. Money has no value, it's only the lubricant that keeps goods and services flowing. The goods and services are all still there, but nobody has the money to get them moving. So...print it. If you don't believe this can be done, look at the US (graphs). It printed trillions doing the same from 2008 until now.

Do people think? Like the ‘mutual obligation’ idea for people who get the dole. They should work to ‘earn’ their dole. But if the government wants to give away massive tax cuts to people who already have buckets of money, they say it’s ‘their’ money and they deserve it back. So government money belongs to the rich, but not to the poor? Watch also with masks, the big tax cut economy types will now discover a love for them. They’ll see it as a way to avoid locking down the economy if the virus spreads. Also they started the pandemic saying they were ‘following the science’. Now they say the science is ‘just advice’, when it stops the economy opening, and ‘it’s politicians who make the decisions’.

New Zealand (yellow) and Australia (the other graph). The ‘we’re doing just as well as NZ with even fewer restrictions!’ crowd have gone a bit quiet.

This work by Greer was criminally neglected I think. Like all of her stuff it didn’t slot neatly into the position of either warring side of the day, so it got ignored or completely misunderstood. Her main idea here is that much of what we call Australian identity is actually the outcome of our encounter with Aborignal people. She describes many of the ways she observes in which we’ve already hybridised with Aboriginal culture, without even realising. Also a devastating critique of our drinking culture, which she sees as the same issue. Our drinking tries to fill a void in us.

If they don't want people moving about, close the places down they go to. Don't ask people not to move about and then leave the places open. The economy Nazis thought letting Australians travel all over the country in the last school holidays was a good idea. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people from all over Australia, in regional areas too. Premiers will be sweating on the infection numbers in the next fortnight.

If you thought I was bonkers saying we should print money to fix the economic crisis...we're already doing it. I criticise the economics of the pandemic much more than the health side, because it's limited economic ideas that create the big health issues. We don't need to be torn between stopping the virus and saving the economy. We can print as much money as we like. Gladys won't close the State to prevent an outbreak here, because she's worried businesses will go broke. We could print any amount of money and just give it to them.

And the Financial Times, saying the same thing. I say don't be bullied by politicians who have weaponised basic economics for political purposes. ScoMo for example could afford to keep JobKeeper going for ages, and pay the unemployed much more. He doesn't want to, it's not the economics stopping him. It's politics, his values.

I think masks are important. But we should be wary I think, they’re the lowest rung of the public health ladder, a last resort. People needing masks is a public health response that’s hopeless or that has lost control. What worries me is that masks will be used as an excuse not to take the much more powerful public health measures, like lockdowns and fiscal stimulus. Governments are starting to shift responsibility for this pandemic to us, and encouraging us to blame each other when it goes wrong. It’s very deliberate.

Nobody knows why pandemics end. The explanation I haven’t seen suggested is that it’s other microbes that end them. We’re so focused on ourselves and the impact a virus has on our bodies that we forget that all microbes live in communities, just like us. A pandemic is when one microbe manages to persuade all the others to support it for some length of time. But there comes a point when the other microbes say yeh-nah, your time’s up. Just like a pop band might sell a lot of music for a year and then the community turns on them and suddenly they disappear. Exactly the same phenomenon.

The only challenge to my mental health in this pandemic is the steady stream of economic bullshit. The economy caused the pandemic, and it's also now stopping us getting out of it. Economic ideas were weaponised by politicians and have now lobotomised a large portion of the population.

Last time there was no virus circulating in the community, they got lucky. This time there is. Crises reveal how we see community. It appears we see it as a platform for personal grievance. Heaven forbid we all have a bit of passion for collectively beating the fucking virus. Where are the protests at the government reframing the whole thing as an economic emergency?

Yep, I can believe it. Early days in the research but it's conceptual leaps that create progress in science, and this one joins all the dots.

So we all sit here, watching the cases grow day-by-day, and what does Gladys have to offer? Stern lectures about how naughty we are because cases are going up. Do your fucking job Gladys, you're the idiot who opened the State up to tourism while the virus was spreading. Fix it, get restrictions back on, stop trying to please your donors in tourism, booze and business.

FINALLY. National Cabinet came out and said Australia’s strategy is elimination of community transmission. It also said ‘that’s what our strategy always was’ (it wasn’t), but they can have their bit of face-saving there, so they don’t have to eat humble pie in front of Jacinda. It only took 5 months, but we got there in the end.

Business people often assume they know how to do politics. There are no examples of this being true. They try to run a country’s budget like a company budget, which is a stupid thing to do. On top of that I think only rarely is a business person responsible for the success of their own business. It’s much more about luck than management, riding waves of consumer preference. And to top it all off, I don’t even think ‘business’ is a thing, it’s just a name we give to exchanging money with strangers.

It’s a bit surprising that we so often hear that the only way this pandemic will end is with a vaccine. There’s not a single example in history of a pandemic ending with a vaccine. Not one. Vaccines are fantastic, don’t get me wrong, but I’d be surprised if a vaccine will end this pandemic. Most likely it will just stop, like its cousin SARS, and nobody will know why. It’s important because not understanding why they stop is linked to not understanding why they start too, I’m sure, so it means we’re wide open for the next one.

I wasn’t aware that Android devices adopted Australian slang. Gold.

The economy is (apparently) made of businesses. A business is defined as 'the activity of buying and selling goods and services'. It's a meaningless definition, I can go next door and buy a lawn mower off my neighbour without using a business. I think we've taken a basic act - exchange - and created a mythical activity called 'business' that does it. A business as we know it is literally nothing more than somebody who has a lot of stuff to exchange. Which means there is no economy, there are just people, with more or less amounts of stuff to exchange.

Thanks to Jason. In case you haven’t seen the UK, this is parodying the Tories ‘clapping for the NHS’, their national healthcare. The Tories decided to save the economy instead of people. They haven’t even managed that.

Some philosophers see pandemics as the way societies reboot. The way they turn off and then on again, when they stop working. In a pandemic everybody returns to the same level, all social distinctions and all economic hierarchies collapse. It’s not just an analogy, it’s what plagues or pandemics have done throughout history.

The economic theory that runs the ‘economy’ uses unemployment deliberately as a way to keep inflation (wages) low. The unemployed are the stock of available workers that allow employers to say ‘if you don’t like the money and working conditions here, I can always hire somebody else’. This is, I kid you not, the centre of the actual theory. It’s called the ‘natural rate of unemployment’.

More economic BS. 'Balanced budgets'. The budget is just the income and expenditure for the government for a given year, not a measure of how well the 'economy' is doing. To add to the BS, the economic Nazis will tell you that tax - government taking 'our' money - is the main way government gets income. All rubbish, the government creates and owns all the money, it doesn't need to borrow or tax to have income.

Thanks to @[100005729913449:2048:Brett]. Why the idea of the 'economy' is stopping us from getting rid of this pandemic. Just print money.

We teach people subjects, like maths and science and English, but we don't teach them how society actually works. How all that knowledge works in everyday life. So there's this growing group of people who, without that big picture, jump on every lunatic bandwagon they can find, for comfort. Like Karen.

When Michel Serres died last year, the French President paid tribute. The French revere their scholars. I think society is literally made of ideas, and if you don't understand them they'll destroy you. Great scholars are more important than navies, armies and air forces in keeping us safe, they battle with ideas for us. Australia has almost no interest in scholarship or ideas at all?

Notice the real tragedy in Victoria isn't all the people dying and who may die, it's the 'blow to national economic recovery'. We're fighting a virus, and the economy cult. The latter are probably more dangerous.

Yes, we saw ScoMo's competence with emergencies during the bushfires *cough* Victoria is what Covid-19 does if you don't eliminate the spread of it. We can keep trying to find scapegoats for that basic fact all through the pandemic, and the virus will keep clobbering us until we learn.

NSW Cabinet apparently were trying to decide what number of infections in NSW would trigger more lockdowns. They apparently hit upon a figure of 250 per day, not because of any science or public health, but because they thought they couldn't justify stopping the economy for less. 250 per day is a virus Armageddon. Just watch, if it comes to a hard choice between your health and the economy, they won't pick you. Exactly what has happened in the US and UK.

Not had some Proust for a while! Amen to the reality bit, it's lonely, hardly anybody wants to know it.

There were and still are people who say we should just isolate and protect our vulnerable people, and then let the virus rip. Victoria shows what BS that is. 71 nursing homes with infections now, and with the State on Stage 3 lockdown and everything possible being done to try to stop the aged cares homes becoming infected. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jul/25/victorias-covid-19-aged-care-disaster-this-virus-is-like-a-fire-out-of-control?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Movement and travel talk about going from ‘here’ to ‘there’. But...everywhere is a ‘here’. There is no ‘there’. Just ask roadkill. Your there is somebody else’s here, and every point along your journey from here to there is somebody else’s here. Here is also already part of there, they’re connected. There’s no point where one begins and the other ends.

This is what an expert who has actually fought and beaten pandemics says. The history of infectious diseases is the history of governments and vested interests continually undermining basic public health work. Like the idiot sitting next to him.

Made my day.

When you look at the history of disease, most of it, including plagues, comes back to the most basic things. Clean water, clean air, healthy food, no crowding, no abject poverty, adequate shelter. All of these diseases could have been eradicated, but we chose not to, except for smallpox. All plagues are political, not medical, they mean your society is broken and needs fixing. There’s a simple measure you can use. If a person is for the eradication of disease, they’re good. If they’re not, they’re evil. Simple as that. Don’t let snake oil salesmen convince you these are ‘medical’ problems. Medicine is a band aid on social problems.

In the 1980s, Australia and NZ led the world in elimination of HIV. (No nonsense then of 'you can't eliminate'.) They let the pandemic experts lead, politicans got out of the way. NZ has done it again for Covid-19. What's held us back? ScoMo. He wanted to be sure the economy was the main focus. He never intended to fight the virus hard, just to make sure there was a hospital bed ready for you if needed. It's why he keeps referring to 'the medical advice'. Medicine isn't how you beat pandemics, it's how you treat the victims.

I use social media as a gauge of public thinking. For Australia it worries me every day. Still in denial of the danger we’re in, overwhelmingly posts are still about ourselves or some form of ‘happy’ distraction from the pandemic. As if somebody else will fix that, somewhere. My US and UK friends are discussing it constantly, that public discussion will determine the outcome of the pandemic. What we all do determines the outcomes, and that will be based on what we all think and discuss. For example, why isn’t it outrageous to people that with community transmission of this virus in Sydney, the whole State is still open for free travel? Potentially spreading it far and wide.

Toxic positivity. The mental stress of the continuous avalanche of fake positivity on social media. Curated personalities I guess, another term for it.

You can’t get a clearer picture of why ScoMo is an even more disastrous leader for Covid-19 than he was for the bushfires. In court with our own Trump-lite, Palmer, together trying to undermine basic public health measures. The economy a.k.a. people with a lot of wealth, would rather you die than they lose a single dollar.

Once you see toxic positivity, you see it everywhere. It’s maybe why we don’t discuss grown-up issues much (too much ‘negativity’, apparently), but instead focus obsessively on our curated online persona, which is an image and not an actual person. That fake veneer of happiness hides an almost total absence of real world resilience. Terrified of giving offence or discussing anything for fear of having to confront real feelings and problems. Those real things are the essence of being alive, not this airbrushed insane grinning version of ourselves.

Easy to be furious with these morons (far out, are they real lips?). But look at it this way - who is running a strategy of letting people travel all around the country while there's community transmission happening? National Cabinet. Blaming the public is part of that strategy. Whether it's toilet paper, breaching isolation - whatever. Divide and conquer, take attention off the total absence of a coordinated pandemic plan to actually fight the virus. Proper pandemic planning would have dedicated communication strategies for the young, who are now the biggest source of infection. The States now arguing with each other too. A shambles, led by the Shambles-in-Chief, who demonstrated his total lack of competence during the bushfires. And we went back for more. https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/coronavirus-queensland-teens-who-allegedly-failed-to-quarantine-identified/news-story/d671893867c3389f5f1c5007e3a77871

We see lots of detailed plans about getting the economy moving during a pandemic. Does it register with people that there is no plan to actually beat the virus? How do we not find that outrageous? It'd be like having a Nazi-safe plan in 1939, keep your 1.5m from every Nazi. Rather than a plan to defeat them. We have plans to beat chicken pox. But not to beat Covid-19.

As a household or business, a balanced budget is a good thing. As a country, it’s a disaster. Countries don’t need to balance budgets, they print their own money. They’re not households, running them like a household is a catastrophe. Here’s evidence. Every major economic depression in the US has followed an attempt by the government to balance the budget. Every one. It starves the country of money, creating a depression.

Please think about this. Australia doesn’t have a plan to defeat Covid-19. It literally doesn’t, there is no plan. We have all the Covid Safe nonsense, which isn’t about fighting the virus but about opening businesses (look on the signs if you don’t believe me). Being ‘Covid Safe’ is NOT fighting the virus. There is no safe amount of Covid, how did we fall for this shit?

Why did we accept the idea that 'the only thing that can end this pandemic is a vaccine'? That's absolutely not true, fast and strong public health action could have stopped it before it got started. When HIV started, if we'd said 'only a vaccine or treatment will fix this', millions more would have died. We stopped it in its tracks in Australia years before treatments became available. I'm sure people think I'm annoying, but this is a scandal of epic proportions. The Cabinet didn't even try to beat the virus. https://time.com/5820963/end-pandemic-free-vaccine-worldwide/

We've had anti-lockdown protests. Now anti-mask protests. Still no anti-Covid protests, unfortunately, we're 'living alongside' Covid. Must be a nice neighbour.

All of the people who argued for months that elimination of the virus was impossible. Now it's government policy, and the government 'experts' who said it was impossible are now saying it's our aim. There has to be a Royal Commission into this debacle when it's over.

Australia started with a Covid strategy corresponding with the red line, and is now finally shifting to one corresponding with the green line. Economy fanboys will be delighted to see it will also save them mucho dollars.

When I grew up in the 1970s, preserving food was still pretty widespread. I remember my mum doing it regularly. I still think all those techniques, where we used other microbes to fight against the microbes that spoiled food, were what helped protect us from most disease. We ate all those microbes, they lived in and on us. Refrigeration then removed those microbes, and left our bodies wide open for infection. Eating fermented food to me is easily the healthiest thing you can do, way more than exercise or any other dietary thing.

Happy birthday Carms! Have a wonderful day.