August 2020

When I was younger I’d never have thought this. Every democracy yearns for hierarchy. It has to be so, I see now. All values are not equal; pluralism is an armistice, not an endpoint. HK right now, we see China as ‘authoritarian’, they see us as directionless and destroyers of tradition.

Thanks Alex.

Thanks to Stephanie Kelton. A government deficit isn’t debt, it’s a transfer of money to the community. A government surplus is the government pulling money out of the community. A government can have as big a deficit as it wants, it already owns all the money. It never has to be repaid, it wasn’t borrowed. Politicians use our lack of understanding of this to justify not providing things we need. Like free childcare, or shelter from a lethal virus, for example.

Diana Tamir from Harvard Uni led a study that showed that 80% of social media posts are people talking about themselves or their own lives. Even when offered money to post about something else, they reverted to talking about themselves. She said talking about ourselves is as addictive as chocolate or sex. Even something like 'we're all in this together' is individuals positioning themselves socially. Still about 'me'. As can be seen in Germany overnight, the most pragmatic of countries, in the big march opposing basic public health measures. The pandemic is stripping away the myths we live by.

Exactly the same script worldwide. Politicians outsourcing management of the pandemic to the public through long lists of complicated rules, and then lecturing the public when they don't follow them. Some sweet naive souls say 'keep the politics out of it'. It's all politics, this is what happens when politicians hijack public health measures.

This time, eliminate the mongrel. What we should have done last time. Meanwhile Gladys also introducing new measures, but no leadership - just 'encouraging' us all to do it. And all via press conference, which hardly anybody except people like me watch, for work. No widespread social media and media campaign, no targeted action with particular groups. No plan at all for this pandemic, except long lists of rules to get the economy open. But at least we're going for elimination now, it only took 6 months

One of the mottos I give my kids for life is, don’t be a dumbarse. Like the people who spend the whole pandemic looking for a fresh scapegoat for the whole misery - toilet paper hoarders, the Chinese, people not following stupid Covid Safe rules. What caused the pandemic is the Economy. John Hewson sees it. Beggars belief that some see the job ahead as saving the Economy, the cause of this misery.

One of those wide-open-mouth OMG tricks.

208 people have died of Covid in Australia so far. 139 of these have been in aged care. There are a further 500+ residents of aged care in Victoria currently infected. For those who like to point fingers, responsibility for aged care rests with the federal government. Why ScoMo flew back to Canberra to get the troops out. The army, in nursing homes. What happens when you're busy trying to save the economy rather than people.

What a difference 2 weeks makes. I hate pandemics, but I love that your opinion doesn't count in the end. Reality does.

"By means of the material, the aim of art is...to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensations...Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections...Sensations, percepts and affects are beings..." Gilles Deleuze

I mean, what can you say? Send 600 police to the borders to shiver in the cold to stop Victorians coming in, but then let 17 planes a day full of them fly right over their heads?

We chuckle in The Gods Must be Crazy when the tribe starts to worship a Coke bottle. But I think it’s what we do with money. A tool that has no intrinsic value at all, but we still think of it like gold. ‘How is the government going to find the money for that?’ It doesn’t need to, it can print it. People are horrified by that idea, like it’s cheating. They still think money has value as an object.

“The economy can describe how we eat, work, study, get sick, and die—like the cash nexus itself, we use the word for almost everything.”

Kids believe in the Tooth Fairy. Adults believe in the Economy. The virus believes in destroying lives and livelihoods. Of the 3, only the virus is real. Why is this mythical economy suffering? Because there's no cash flow. Print the cash, distribute it, shelter from and fight the virus. Simple.

If you lived somewhere where there was lots of virus around, would you go to the shops: A. as often as you always have, or B. as little as possible, buying a bit more so you could stay home?

Margulis’ legacy is growing. This entirely different way of seeing living things, as communities of microbes, has enormous implications, including for health and disease. Disease may just be a different equilibrium ‘state’ of microbes.

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers were racing each other just outside town doing at least 150 km/h. 43,000 people have already been caught by the new mobile phone cameras in Sydney too. Usual calls of revenue raising, but I think the bigger message is the same we’re seeing in Victoria. We’re all hyperindividuals now, we don’t understand or even see the collective side of things. Cars have been major agents in driving that change, as Monbiot describes beautifully here.

Is Gladys following the National Cabinet decision to go for elimination? Or is she and her cabinet of booze, gambling and real estate flunkeys still clinging to the useless suppression strategy? https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/health-safety/plea-to-gladys-berejiklian-please-shut-down-melbournes-flight-infection-highway/news-story/98d3cc9c8520b9d5c307b22c361a902e

This is the lengths the forces of the 'Economy' go to. The US election this year will likely be decided by postal votes, with the pandemic rampant there. The Trump administration has been systematically under-funding the US postal service in anticipation of this, in the hope many of the mail-in votes won't arrive in time to be counted. At the same time Trump has been outrageously bellowing about how mail-in voting is corrupt (absolute bullshit), creating a pressure cooker situation where if he does lose, his supporters may riot, or worse. And because postal votes come in later, it may be that he looks the winner on the day of the election, but then loses as the postal votes arrive, further increasing the rage of his supporters. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/us/politics/trump-usps-mail-delays.html

All through this pandemic Australians haven't engaged in the specific details. Instead they've played tabloid games, finding new scapegoats every day. Take the ridiculous hoo-ha about what's happened in Victoria. Blamed on quarantine breaches. They weren't the problem, NSW had a far bigger quarantine breach with Ruby Princess and was able to control it. Victoria exploded because National Cabinet 'opened up' the economy in mid-May, while Victoria still had community transmission happening. Clearly visible on the graph. This didn't happen with Ruby Princess in early March because there was no community transmission (virtually no Covid at all) in NSW prior to that date. So NSW was easily able to isolate and control that breach. The 2 bitter ironies for Victoria here are that its cases mostly came from Ruby Princess, and the community transmission it had still active in mid-May was them still controlling that. And secondly Victoria called for an elimination strategy at this same time, and National Cabinet refused. The lesson for Australia is, Victoria is what happens when you use a suppression strategy on Covid-19 while you have community transmission. It was only that other States had already eliminated (accidentally) that saved them.

So far nearly 600,000 poor Australians have completely cleaned out their super accounts under Covid, about $32 billion. This super money if left until retirement would have been worth maybe $200 billion. (JobKeeper by comparison might cost the government $85 billion.) Does incompetence get bigger than this, in public policy? Is anybody paying attention? Robbing the poor and young to pay for Covid?

Happy birthday!

75th anniversary of Hiroshima today. There's a link to the pandemic I think, both show that what we call the 'microscopic' level of reality is the most powerful. Big things are simple and weak, small things are complicated and powerful. The exact opposite to our usual way of seeing it.

Nobel Prize winners talking to the herd immunity people is fun.

Social distancing at its finest. Go Lithgow.

Hmm. If @[100039499001289:2048:Steve] is about, he may have a view. https://newatlas.com/energy/long-range-wireless-power-transmission-new-zealand-emrod/

Isn’t it the most bizarre idea, that taxpayers own money? That the government has to tax people to have money to spend? Doesn’t everybody just know that government prints and owns all the money? I used to believe in taxpayers’ money, but now it really seems crazy.

We gave out free condoms to control HIV 40 years ago. Time to hand out free masks for Covid-19. Just another example of the total absence of an actual disease strategy. But plenty of economic strategies. Those arrived in the 1980s too, when we changed societies into economies. In economies you pay for your own masks. You even pay for your own pandemic redundancy with your superannuation.

Jeans for Genes, one of those fundraising things that people give to, often without having the first idea where the money goes. I don’t like it for 3 reasons, one that genetic approaches to disease are nearly always a waste of time, a bottomless pit of funding without real smarts. Two that it’s a private research body that gets the money, which isn’t bad in itself but is anybody thinking about which research in Australia really needs the money most, not just the people with the best marketing strategy? And three that it shows that our society runs on brainless sentimentality, dress anything up as a cause and we swallow it without a moment’s thought. Like the bushfire fundraising debacle. Criticising stuff like this makes you look like a miserable bastard. That’s what it’s designed to do, make you feel bad for not coughing up your cash.

Happy Birthday to the Steve Glasson of Gladesville :)

Happy Birthday Dr Green :) Be safe!

Happy Birthday Robyn :)

Another expert who should be at the centre of our fight against Covid, rather than having to try to be heard around the fringes. Who knows what strategy NSW is currently following? ScoMo announced the nation would be going for elimination, but NSW ignored that and virus is continuing to spread through the community with very few restrictions in place. Australia 2020 is so much more American than Australia 1980s, when we fought HIV. https://twitter.com/i/status/1291348121583198208

And another expert. How did we let politicians run a pandemic strategy?

The 7-day rolling average of community transmission for NSW is the one to watch. Easy to look at daily figures and think they're OK, but then you miss the trend. Been trending up for nearly 2 weeks now. The virus is spreading.

I think Australia has 'Americanised' significantly in the last 40 years. Take our approach to the pandemic. 40 years ago a pandemic triggered a public health response, where large teams of experts were mobilised to fight the outbreak and bring it under control. Today a pandemic triggers a political response, with no coordinated public health planning, a long list of rules for people to follow, and the police and military to enforce the rules. Society disappeared, we're now a nation of individual customers living in an economy.

An example of how the body works as a single integrated system. You've probably seen pictures of people meditating like this. Notice how the palms of the hands face upwards. That might look like an incidental detail, but how we orient our hands orients the rest of us too - palms up is an opening out of the whole body, like we do if we're going to do something out in the world. Try sitting cross-legged like this on the floor, and notice the fundamental shift in how your whole body operates with palms down, and then up. Also a fantastic thing for those who work at computers and get stiff shoulders and necks etc. Spend some time each day just resting your arms palm upwards on your thighs at your desk. You should feel an opening and release of those hunched shoulders, and the rest of your body.

It’s in the data. This is Victoria’s rolling average community spread for the whole pandemic. The red arrow - 2 May - was the day that average started to climb above 1. The same day NSW went below 1. Also the time Australia ‘opened up’ with its 3-stage Covid Safe nonsense. Victoria opened up with community transmission, NSW without it. For the next 6 weeks, that community transmission spread the virus through ‘opened up’ Melbourne and Victoria, until about 15 June (green arrow), when there was a critical amount of it, and it exploded. Classic exponential growth behaviour. Beginning at the end of July, NSW got the community transmission pattern Victoria had on 2 May. And NSW has also opened up. We’ve seen this movie before. It took 6 weeks for the virus to build in Victoria. We’re 2.5 weeks into our community transmission. Experts pleading with Gladys to get more restrictions back on now, and fast. None of the rubbish about ‘Victorian failures’ is relevant. The failure was opening up with community transmission still happening, anywhere. People need to think rather than just stick with their usual political team.

This is why 'we're following the medical advice' has been political spin all along. When your Chief Medical Officers are employed by your politicians, they're not going to contradict the boss. Kerry Chant saying as much overnight, politicians are calling the shots here, not the experts. (In the UK, Boris started the pandemic saying 'we're following the medical advice'. Then he shifted to 'they only advise us, politicians make the decisions.') "Dr Chant said NSW Health has deemed restaurants, pubs and bars “high risk environments” for the spread of COVID-19 and the decision to introduce tougher restrictions was a matter for the government."

This reeaaaalllly irritates the modern sexist culture warrior. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025203?query=featured_home

A plan that turns a pandemic into a set of rules to follow and a daily blame-game is no plan. It's the absence of basic public health planning. If you're a parent or teacher and you're reduced to writing a list of rules for the kids to follow, you've already lost. Politicians shouldn't be at the steering wheel for a pandemic.

Seeing lots of standing desks in workplaces where after an initial thrill of change, they're never in standing position and the person is back slumping in their chair. While we see standing *and* sitting as a fight against gravity, it won't make the slightest difference whether you do either. Standing and sitting are just different body shapes, both entirely free of the 'weight' of gravity. It's not about your body, it's about your relationship to the planet.

This is why you don't let politicians run a pandemic strategy. In fact that flatters them - they have no strategy. Expect this distraction politics to ramp up the more the absence of strategy is translated into infections out on the ground.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1292240553111719936

Anybody who knows anything about Australian governance (that’s unfortunately a tiny number of people) knows this is true. The federal government has virtually zero role in a pandemic. The National Cabinet is a stunt, and a Trojan Horse to hijack the public health strategy with nonsensical ‘economic’ questions.

A few hundred years ago humans thought the universe revolved around the Earth. Today's version of that vanity is visible in the pandemic right now. We think it'll be defeated only by a vaccine or drug. Microbes live in communities, it's much more likely other microbes will shut the virus down than we will. That's what likely happened in other pandemics. The microbes are not paying any attention to us at all. https://theconversation.com/bacteria-and-viruses-are-travelling-the-world-on-highways-in-the-sky-142854

Here's the constantly updated list of 'hotspots' in NSW. It's overwhelmingly pubs, clubs and restaurants. Why are these still open in NSW? All big political donors. I'd advise everybody to avoid these 'like the plague'. If the government won't do the public health work, the public will have to do it for them. https://www.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/latest-news-and-updates

Happy birthday you :)

Read this, if you want to see what putting your experts in charge of a pandemic can do. They smashed the virus out of the park. Our National Cabinet's only virus strategy is 'quick lockdown to boost the amount of PPE and hospital beds, so everybody can get back to work and get sick'. When asked about fighting the virus, say 'it can't be beaten, we have to live alongside it'. https://theconversation.com/what-coronavirus-success-of-taiwan-and-iceland-has-in-common-140455

We can laugh at this stuff. But the social virus that produced Trump (populism - contempt for public institutions) is alive and well, stupid and lethally dangerous, and growing in Australia. https://twitter.com/i/status/1292694053046194179

Thanks Ian. God, or somebody, help us all.

Just dip into this video in a few spots, no need to watch the lot if you'd rather not. This is the sort of conversation going on out there, these views are mobilising. I can't even find it funny, when we turned society into an economy, this is what happened. Scary as hell.

Did you do maths at school? NSW Cabinet didn’t. There are close to 10 transmission chains of Covid in NSW right now that can’t be traced. Even one of those is enough to start an explosion of cases. Exponential growth, it’s how it works, we’re at about the red arrow now. Risk management demands more restrictions be put in place now. NSW Cabinet won’t allow it, it offends their political beliefs. Fuck their political beliefs, get out of the way you lethal morons.

Basic maths again. If you don't control community transmission, even the tiniest changes in behaviour cause an explosion of cases. Community transmission plus 'opening up' caused Victoria. NSW has opened up, and has community transmission. Duck. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/07/23/the-geometry-of-the-pandemic-in-america

Well now.

You get much better analysis from overseas.

Even the research group who said schools were safe, on a sample size of 18 students, now think NSW is in trouble.

We look back mystified that soldiers in the world wars were excited to be heading off to fight for a cause. But why don’t we relish a real existential challenge? Social media is swamped with happy diversion to supposedly offset the ‘negativity’ of the pandemic. A pandemic isn’t negativity, it’s a fight. The mental health crisis we hear about - isn’t it most likely that we don’t understand any more how to act together for a higher cause? Everything is about ‘me’ and how I feel. Another victory for the economy, which turned a society of fighters into a society of weak and cowardly individual consumers. We don’t even join unions, they fight too much. Mission accomplished.

Going back to this reality filter. Society is literally just ideas fighting each other. Not people - ideas use people to further their agendas. Ideas are living things, they're not stuck in books. Unless you train hard with ideas, they will turn you into a zombie. The growth of extreme ideas is our flabby minds (and ripped bodies) completely at the mercy of ideas.

Yesterday the taskforce for economic recovery in Australia suggested taxpayers fund new gas pipelines. The Chair is from the gas industry, other members are fossil fuel industry reps. There's a global glut of gas.

Just sayin'. https://www.mja.com.au/journal/2020/covid-19-children-and-schools-overlooked-and-risk

Listening to Hugh talk about this book. Saying that sociability is the core of humanity (agree), and that love and compassion is what creates sociability (fundamentally disagree). The usual idea that we have to be 'selfless' to cooperate with others. That idea puts society and the individual in permanent opposition. Individuals are sociable (I think) because it helps them to be freer, as individuals.

‘Desperate times call for desperate measures’, the Russians say. True, though as in the rest of the world, the desperate measures never include just giving everybody money to shelter from the virus, until it goes away.

There's some sort of delicious irony in the LNP complaining about closed borders, when its main election strategy for the past 25 years has been 'strong borders'.

Is anybody else sick of politicians lecturing people every day about rising infection numbers? They don't have a plan to beat the virus, and so when the virus inevitably bites back, why do ordinary people not just tell them to fuck off when they try to flick the blame to us, or even better try to get us to blame each other, to take attention off their lack of a plan? Watch the short video in this story, how Gladys is resisting the expert advice. It's on her head. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/live-coronavirus-nsw-sydney-covid19-updates/live-coverage/e93a9ccb146207a1dc37550dd33001fb

Democracy doesn't understand the deepest human desires for shared belief and hierarchy. It can only see that as 'authoritarianism'. It's why democracies are now infected with multiple loon fundamentalisms.

I haven't seen one other NSWelshperson on here flabbergasted at the Russian Roulette Gladys is playing with the lives of themselves and their families. Not one. Is Australia going to get through an entire pandemic not thinking about or discussing it at all? There's this lunatic bravado of 'just a flu' in peoples' behaviour still, like it's all just something to wait out. As Melbourne discovered, the endgame for that is 'holy fuck'.

What drama tarts we are. Now it's come out hotel guards didn't sleep with guests in the Melbourne hotels. And they also likely weren't who originally spread the virus from the hotels. Add to that the legal fact that quarantine is a federal government responsibility, but it seemingly wasn't breached anyway, and it's clear the whole thing was a tabloid invention. Guess what people - it's the virus. It's our enemy. Aided and abetted by the 'economy'.

Often people didn't see the man behind the enormous persona. Bit of a glimpse here.

I said this from day 1 of this pandemic, and was told I hated ScoMo. Australians don’t engage with the ideas, they just line up behind their ‘side’. The ‘balance’ of the economy (feds) and health (States) was exactly what I said would derail our pandemic response. Here we are. (Joe also doesn’t understand what an elimination strategy is, but otherwise I thought it was a good article.) “Canberra, which bears primary responsibility for the economy, was obviously most concerned with the economic impact. The states, which bear primary responsibility for healthcare, were obviously most concerned with the health impact.”

Happy birthday!!

Secret glimpses into the heart of the economy.

Crafty buggers.

That thing where you don't even pretend any more it's about saving lives.

Our ideas about tax are even more bizarre than our ideas about money. This video, Exhibit A. Rubbish from beginning to end, but it all sounds so plausible.

Um, wow. Mesmerising.

The paradigm is shifting. Just print money. And take it away from politicians with ridiculous ideologies. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-16/economic-rebuilding-after-coronavirus-modern-monetary-theory/12563664

A guy who fights pandemics, speaking right at the start of this one. Very few governments listened. "You have to go after the virus". You have to fight. So many smart and stupid people spending the last few months finding excuses not to.

New Zealander's should avoid the rallying cry: "All hands on deck".

The risk to NSW. NSW has low case numbers right now. Here's Victoria's graph of case numbers for the pandemic. They had months (the red line) of low case numbers before the cases exploded in late June. They had community transmission that whole time, spreading the virus. Where else do people think those 'unknown sources' go? NSW has had those for weeks too. The virus is spreading. No amount of testing and tracing will stop it once you have sustained community transmission, without movement and gathering restrictions.

I saw somebody describe AfterPay as a millennials thing. The boomers invented the idea in the 1960s, their kids and grandkids are funding their lifestyle retirements right now.

Another parasite, preaching no action on climate change or Covid, retreating to the safety of their country estate. https://www.smh.com.au/national/cbd-melbourne-andrew-bolt-leaving-the-madhouse-of-melbourne-20200817-p55mjc.html

Gladys saying exactly what my posts have been saying. I follow the public health data and thinking, I don’t improvise some random personal views of the pandemic. Ms Berejiklian said authorities were concerned the virus was continuing to spread in Western Sydney. "That is a big concern because if you look back to Melbourne, Melbourne didn't get worse because of the number of cases they had," she said. "They had undetected community transmission which then unknowingly got to a stage where it … formed a number of different clusters and we certainly don't want that to happen here in New South Wales," she said.

You can see the origins of Big Pharma in this pandemic I think. In the absence of basic, cheap public health systems, the US is always after the latest wonder drug, the latest snake oil to get them out of the hole that broken public institutions left them in. Just as big defence and big IT papers over the same cracks in other areas. Their mega corporates express their absence of a functioning public sphere, they monetise that void.

Yep. Hole in one. New restrictions from NSW, two lots, in the past day. More urgently needed on pubs, clubs, restaurants and regional travel. All big party donors, which is why they haven't done it yet.

More than 99% of Victoria's Covid cases can be traced back to 3 untraceable transmission chains. NSW currently has 16 untraceable transmission chains.

And remember, this from the man who's fleeing Melbourne to live on his country estate, safe from the virus.

Spelling still matters.

Good on Ross for taking on his own entitled generation.

Surveys in the US and UK say up to 50% of people there will refuse a Covid vaccine. The government here talking about making it 'mandatory'. To me this is just another example of the total absence of an actual virus strategy. Smart public health strategies would have factored this in from the start and have been working on it since then. Instead we had lots of work on economic plans, and then just threats and police and army if you don't do as you're told.

Great read if you get frustrated with passwords. https://towardsdatascience.com/why-password-validation-is-garbage-56e0d766c12e

More than 25% of Americans believe Bill Gates is using vaccines for mind control. When will we start taking seriously the destruction of our institutions (education, government, journalism etc.), creating this lunatic conspiracy culture we're living in? The Left/Right stuff is irrelevant babble, there's a battle for our actual civilisation going on here.

A lot of virus denialists (perfect term I think, like climate denilaists - people who deny international emergencies right in front of them) hanging their hats on this sort of research. It is interesting research, but as the article says, it's no substitute for public health action. All it may do is make that public health work easier and faster. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/health/coronavirus-herd-immunity.html?referringSource=articleShare

And we're away... https://twitter.com/i/status/1296225718628581377

National Cabinet is a PR stunt. Parliament was dissolved so there's been no opposition allowed to the government's decisions for months. Our knowledge of our own governance is so appalling that the corruption of that doesn't even occur to us.

No doubt much excitement in NSW today over its only one new Covid case. Community transmission is what caused Victoria's outbreak. Ignore all the other tabloid BS. Read what the experts say. NSW's community transmission still climbing, seeding Sydney and possibly other parts of the State. 'Test and trace' is a wish and a prayer strategy if done alone, risk management demands more restrictions now.

True.

Happy Birthday wifey! We love ya!

"A danger greater than war faces the State of NSW...". From 1918-19. People came out of 4 years of horrific war into 3 years of horrific pandemic. The pandemic killed far more than the war. They weren't strategic snowflakes then. Contrast with today where we have people outraged their game of golf and school graduations will be disrupted.

Got an entire continent now trialling the 'learning to live with the virus' strategy. It's not going well. I'm waiting for the learning to live with cancer, heart disease, malaria, TB, paedophilia and poverty strategies now too, since this seems to be the current trend.

Since late July this has actually been National Cabinet’s aim, their strategy. Many of their supporters appear unaware of it, still parroting the propaganda that ‘we can’t eliminate this virus’, and ‘we have to live with this virus’ from earlier in the pandemic.

A clear example of how the pandemic was politicised. Breaches of hotel quarantine (which it turns out may not have actually occurred) in Victoria were hammered day after day as 'Victorian mismanagement'. Now guards at Sydney hotels are infected, and the official line? "Mistakes happen". We desperately need to get the politicians out of the way and let the experts fix this pandemic. We've turned it into just another round of the Rugby League or AFL, with people backing their favourite sides.

Wow. Have to wonder if this is a pissing contest for territory between medicine and public health professionals. Doctors prescribe drugs that have risky side-effects in some people already, because benefits are thought to outweigh risks. But they're now putting in the public domain that a pandemic vaccine might be 'risky'. Have to wonder if this is another battle in the turf wars, public policy people will be scratching their heads, in polite terms.

One of Lennon’s best songs I think, done beautifully. Musos are a dime a dozen. But not great songwriters.

Nice example of how ‘lockdown’ is a political construct in this pandemic. In public health it’s just one specific strategy applied in various degrees. But listen to the Covid deniers like this one and it’s their code word for any action against the pandemic. Quite deliberately and strategically created by behavioural economists in conservative think tanks.

HIV is a nice example I think of how treating disease as a medical thing means losing control of it. Look at the HIV stats for Australia. Strong public health action from the 1980s through to the mid-1990s pushed HIV infection rates right down. Introduction of drugs to treat HIV in the mid-1990s pushed the infection numbers back up again, as the social approach was replaced with a medical approach. The same danger is happening with Covid-19, where we regularly hear 'only a vaccine will stop this virus'. Rubbish, we could have eliminated Covid-19 already if we'd actually tried, with basic public health thinking.

Brilliant example here of how to do public health in a pandemic. The traffic light system, like the fire danger system. Takes it completely out of the hands of politicians, and culture warrior alarmists, and it helps the public modulate their own behaviour without getting involved in tiresome 'debates'. https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/traffic-light-mask-restrictions-proposed-once-stage-four-lockdown-ends-20200821-p55o6s.html

Do we have an idea of ‘we’, or only ‘I’? Covid created a tidal wave of personal grievance. Pandemics do that I think, hold the mirror up to society.

Happy birthday :)

I'm so sick and tired of what passes for public debate. The bushfire enquiry recommendations published today. 76 recommendations. All the Neanderthals want to talk about is 'hazard reduction burning', the tabloid framing of the event last summer that allowed the culture warriors to attack 'Greenies' and their other enemies. Even at the time it was noted that areas that HAD been hazard reduction burned fared no better than any other area, the fires ran right over the top of all of them.

About 20 years ago the Commonwealth held a big enquiry into bushfires. A lot of what it found is repeated in the NSW enquiry on last Christmas' fires. Interestingly it also said Australia had shifted to a 'fire suppression' (i.e. putting fires out after they've already started) strategy from a 'land management' (stopping the fires even happening) strategy, and that was the main problem. Notice the exact same strategy choices for Covid-19? Where Australia again opted for a suppression strategy - trying to control the outbreaks once they've already started - rather than a strategy of stopping the virus before it breaks out? Our public institutions are being broken by the same people using the same strategies, over and over.

I have nothing against the defence forces, but a thought experiment...we would never expect the defence forces to make a profit or even break even. It’d be a ridiculous expectation, we know they’re performing a public service. So why do we expect public transport, libraries, universities or prisons (for example) to be cost neutral or even profitable? More BS from the Economy crowd, who hide their decisions and values behind pseudoscientific economic mumbo jumbo.

Happy Birthday!

The beliefs are scary, the fact millions sign up to them is even scarier. Conspiracies abound when you destroy the basic institutional infrastructure of society.

I've shifted more attention to Twitter now, FB is like reading the social pages and classifieds in an old local newspaper. Probably why those old local papers have all gone bankrupt. Twitter discusses things, though it can be a bit like kids arguing over the Tonka tip truck in the sandpit.

Virus denialists will say 'lockdowns' caused more harm than good, like suicides. Call them out on it, ask to see the numbers.

Vienna decided to take on the car lobby. Pics speak for themselves.

The 1.5m rule is simplistic ('economy-opening') tosh. Brilliant graphic giving a much more nuanced understanding of Covid transmission risk, from the British Medical Journal.

Another great piece, about how we need to move beyond the medical definitions, and away from the ridiculous idea of 'balancing' lives and livelihoods in this pandemic.

Pam Bondi spoke about how Joe Biden will apparently bring nepotism to the White House. At exactly the moment the stream looked like this. You can't make this stuff up.

Victorians when asked whether restrictions should be lifted. Why do the opponents of public health restrictions get any air time at all? Comes down to who owns the channels, obviously. The same platforms that give minority loons against climate change action oxygen.

Another flaw in democracy I think is - it has no effective way to judge good and evil, or even good and bad. I've posted here about how I think democracy is a holding pattern societies use when they don't have unified, widely shared beliefs. So they allow 'each to their own' while new beliefs form. This also means there is genuine evil to be fought out there, and 'each to their own opinion' lets that evil win.

Back to this brilliant research published in the BMJ. I've marked with an X now where schools, public transport, many workplaces, pubs, clubs, restaurants and shops would sit. All extremely high risk in NSW right now. The government is refusing to introduce new restrictions, or even masks. It's not 'Covid Safe' plans keeping people safe - 1.5m is a ridiculous safety measure. It's the fact there's not much virus in the community. It's spreading now. This is exactly what happened in Victoria.

Happy birthday Rob! I hope it's a wonderful day.

Happy birthday :)

Wanted to post this separately. Kenny is part of that anti-lockdown brigade who are trying to turn the pandemic into some ridiculous culture war. Now they've realised lockdowns are actually hugely popular, so the next step? Accuse people of having Stockholm Syndrome, like hostages who fall in love with terrorists. When will the community finally lose patience with this sort of nonsense? These people are undermining basic public health work.

Another anti-lockdown fan, with yet another fabulous idea.

Today's colouring-in exercise. Paint Sydney in Covid yellow and green. Still some empty spaces left, if you're quick. Those who went outside the lines to the Central Coast and Newcastle are very naughty.

Aww.

Is populism telling us that people are actually tired of the checks and balances of democracy? Maybe we're defending the wrong thing. The idea of democracy is to let every person have their own opinions and use checks and balances to balance all of those diverse opinions. Over and over though democracies get turned into monarchies again, hierarchies are re-established, the splendour and pomp of those hierarchies energise people. POTUS is more regal than any existing King or Queen. Should we be listening more carefully to what that might mean?

The anthropologist Wade Davis made a fantastic observation about America's obsession with the individual, how it almost completely rejects the notion of society or the group. He said it was the sociological equivalent of 'splitting the atom', with the same explosive outcome. Individuals are society's atoms. We're seeing it right now, with the US disintegrating.

There's something delicious about watching a man who weaponised Australia's borders to win elections being helpless before closed borders. Are people realising yet that the feds have no authority in a pandemic? ScoMo isn't leading us through this pandemic, he's a bystander.

NSW now has its highest rate of community transmission of the virus since 22 April. Danger.

If you're a fan of the modern LNP, fascinating piece by Gareth Hutchens today about how proud Menzies was of running large deficits over many years. Years where Australia boomed. Menzies knew deficits simply shifted the balance of money to the public, rather than to the government. My beef with modern conservatives is that they're not political parties now. Lobby groups bought them out.

Why we need to think? Society is made of ideas. Ideas aren't just 'about' things, they are what all things are made of. Like a car engine, what's it made of? You could say metal and oil etc. But that metal and oil exist without a car. The ideas of how to build an engine are what the engine is made of. And ideas are separate to people, they're not our ideas. Millions can share the same idea. Ideas are beings. The importance of thinking is to tame ideas, to not be a slave to them. Our world looks a mess right now because some ideas are being allowed free rein over us.

One of the debating tricks people who oppose strong public health action against the virus use is to say 'more people are being harmed by the restrictions than by the virus'. That's like saying 'we can't build new schools because our roads have potholes that haven't been fixed'. Just do both, fight the virus and deal with people impacted by restrictions. We're not doing both because governments have no pandemic plan, just economic plans. They want you to think we have to choose between our health and the economy. How do we not just laugh at that ridiculous choice?

History doesn't repeat. But it often sure does rhyme.

This is what we need for pandemics. Where the boundaries between each level and the actions that flow from them are determined by public health metrics, not by politicians trying to ram borders open or pander to business lobby groups. Apparently a system like this is in the works, it can't come too soon.

Listen to the experts. Fuck off, politicians and lobbyists. Unbelievable, this isn't the Australia I grew up in.

Yep.

Superannuation is the privatisation of the aged pension. Billions of it is creamed off in pointless fees and to create profits for financial services companies. The argument for it was that the government can't afford to pay for all of our retirements. But the government has limitless money, it prints it. Also the argument that pushed the pension age higher. The myth that government has to tax us to get money infects every part of our lives.

One for the deniers.