September 2020

Remember during the big fires, the culture warriors telling us arsonists were to blame, not climate change? Guess how many were found to be caused by arsonists? Zero. Not a single one.

"It was a mistake when the state moved from stage three to stage two during the first wave of infections under pressure from the National Cabinet. Lifting the number of people allowed in a household from five to 20 overnight probably contributed to the rapid spread of the virus through north-western Melbourne in the early stages of the second wave."

Bad people keep winning elections because good people are so often politically stupid. They think protest and noble speeches win elections and change the world. (They don't.) They want to feel good, to exude righteousness, but winning? They have no idea. Right now the destruction from the protests in the US is playing right into Trump's 'law and order' strategy's hands. And many of these protestors won't even vote, so politically they're pissing into the wind.

Very revealing in this pic that they couldn't think of an example for the 'centre'. It doesn't exist. You're either for or against something in politics. That's why we have two-sided parliaments (and courts), to represent the for and against. People who say they're in the centre are literally nowhere.

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline industries. In their luxury shelters also hurrying toxic decisions through government that in normal times they wouldn't get away with. Australian content in TV and film slashed, universities gutted of funding, big tax cuts back on the table, ridiculous gas pipelines from WA to the East, ripped up environmental and planning laws for developer mates, actions from the Royal Commission into banks put to one side, support to childcare stripped while support to CEO bonus payments from JobKeeper continue, etc. How dumb are we?

Wanted to go back to this graph. Right now politicians are telling you that we need to get the economy open, we're facing an economic emergency. Bullshit, look at the 2 world wars here. The huge government spending in those caused Australia to boom. The toxic debt and deficit ideas have to go, they're destroying our societies.

Notice the same people who argue through Right to Life that every life is precious and must be protected at all costs, are quite happy to say 'let people die of Covid to protect our economy'. The Economy Crowd. If you're one of them, take a good hard look at yourself.

Happy birthday!!

I'm gobsmacked that even educated people have swallowed the political 'herd immunity' strategy from the Economy Crowd. It was invented by a small dirty tricks unit in Boris Johnson's office.

This data today in the national accounts shows that ordinary people are taking home the same sized slice of the national pie as they did in 1959. Business profits though have been climbing for 50 years. Join a union, people. And stop voting for any idiot who talks about the 'economy'.

Maybe a million Australians have lost their jobs under Covid. Do you think Josh's $158 billion in tax cuts will cheer them up, now that they have no income and are paying no tax? Shows pretty clearly who's getting most of those tax cuts. People who don't need them. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/income-tax-cuts-worth-158b-could-be-brought-forward-due-to-recession-20200902-p55rqu.html

When a pollie talks about debt and deficit, does it scare you? It shouldn't, it's a steaming pile of horseshit. We have Scrooges in charge, who need to open the country's fucking wallet and start investing in society again. Not give it away to corporations and rich foreigners in tax cuts. That huge debt in WW2? It gave us 50 years of prosperity. A government surplus is them stealing your money.

Deloitte, one of the big business consulting firms: "The underlying equation is simple. The greater the success against the virus, the greater the success in protecting economies against the pandemic." Anybody who tells us we need to 'balance' the economy against our health is society's enemy, simple as that. What I call the Economy Crowd. A death cult. https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/media-releases/articles/deloitte-access-economics-australian-economy-experiences-largest-ever-three-month-fall-020920.html#

You run out of words. Scandalous. Corruption. Cronyism. Our Covid recovery commission is stacked with the gas industry. There's a global GLUT of gas. See those pollies in grey suits with solemn faces every day talking about our road to economic recovery? They're what we call liars. https://www.michaelwest.com.au/gas-lies-santos-tries-to-ram-through-coal-seam-gas-at-narrabri-with-fake-claims/

McDonalds has a bloody cheek even calling a Big Mac big. Those things have shrunk about 40% in my lifetime, they're smaller than the old cheeseburgers.

Some people say lockdowns cause more deaths than the pandemic. I might buy them a calculator.

Yep, the same mistake, time and again. You can't appeal to the centre, because it doesn't exist. https://www.salon.com/2019/08/14/why-the-political-center-is-a-dangerous-myth-and-how-it-could-cost-democrats-the-2020-election/

Gladys today saying that NSW knows how to control the virus while keeping its economy running. The fact not one other place in the world has managed it should make us suspicious. As should the data. Here's Victoria. It went into Stage 3 lockdown beginning of July, Stage 4 beginning of August. For weeks after both of those dates, enormous numbers of infections with an unknown source kept popping up, every day. How could that be, with people locked down? Easy - it was in that small numbers stage in the months leading up to the big surge that the damage was being done, seeding the community more each day. NSW has had those low numbers of transmissions for weeks now. 28 cases now that can't be traced.

We should send ScoMo, Gladys and Josh to South Korea, so they might learn that if you don't control the virus, the virus controls you. They do contact tracing even better than us. They opened up. The virus is now smashing them, they're now Victoria.

Pictures really do tell stories. Australia's 30 years of economic 'boom' were a fantasy. Workers went backwards fast, and survived with enormous amounts of private debt. Debt they needed because governments sucked money out of the country to try to achieve pointless surpluses.

Sad to hear of Dave Graeber's death. The anthropologist who pointed out most people are stuck in 'bullshit' (meaningless) jobs. That all those people sitting in front of computer screens at work are mostly 'processing' everyday life into KPIs and other metrics that create the 'Economy', that great oppressive fiction. RIP.

Is anybody else getting this message ALL the time with the new FB?

Go for zero. https://grattan.edu.au/report/how-australia-can-get-to-zero-covid-19-cases/

My fear as well. Progressive voters make the same mistake over and over, Trump knows the secret to politics is in energising two-way battles over ideas, good and evil. Firing people up, seducing them, not focus group fiddling to try to reach some mythical centre.

Did you know these sorts of cartons pour better this way around? Air can get in much easier to equalise the fluid loss.

Good on 'em. This is the power of federalism, checks and balances. No fat Pentescostal incompetent gets to call all the shots.

Our passion for travel is matched by our passion for borders. Doesn't that strike us as bizarre? Those are OPPOSITE desires. It makes sense when you realise it's only *other* peoples' borders, the places we travel to, that we don't care about. We want free access to other peoples' homes, but we're feral about protecting our own from strangers. The main reason they don't stop us visiting is they need our money, that's all. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/09/05/dennis-atkins-the-border-battle-pits-scott-morrison-against-his-quiet-australians/

Burn.

Check this out. Spanish Flu in NSW, 1919 - January 25, pandemic arrives in NSW (same day as COVID 101 years later) - NSW quickly put public health restrictions in place - only about 15 died in NSW during this first wave - the opposition of the day argued that it had all been an overreaction - the second wave arrived in April - the NSW government refused to impose restrictions again - 6000 people died in the next 2.5 months.

Imagine how different the world would be if, instead of making education into training for work, we made work into a project for our education.

Conservative politicians were very critical of BLM protests in a pandemic. One of the few times I've agreed with them. It's very revealing that, as yet, not one word of criticism from the same politicians on the anti-lockdown protests? The same politicians trying to ram borders open.

Michael Cohen’s book says Trump hired an actor to pretend to be Barack Obama, who he would then ritualistically humiliate and then fire. There’s even a picture of it. (P.S. check out the trophy on the desk. Probably awarded it to himself.)

A disgrace. "...where we can reopen our economy and reasonably restore the liberties of all Australians." When will more thinking Australians speak out and say they're quite happy to have 'liberty' from the fucking virus? Why do we tolerate a government making out that public health restrictions are an attack on our liberty? Notice they still haven't criticised the anti-lockdown protesters. They're on the same side, have been from Day 1. Our States are working with public health professionals to try to defeat a pandemic, our feds are lined up with QAnon trying to sabotage the whole thing.

Happy Birthday! Enjoy it with some quizzes!

SKY 'News' making the case for strong lockdowns, without even realising. Not the sharpest tools in the shed.

You can train a Chief Medical Officer to do tricks. Like this one, appearing as an attack dog for the government as head of the Federal Department of Health. Obscenely inappropriate, Department Heads NEVER do press conferences with the government, it violates their entire reason to exist. This is the man who gave Cabinet 'objective medical advice' throughout the pandemic. A trained poodle. This is how countries head down the road to Trump.

Robert Coombes I found this pic. Made me think immediately of you. I wonder if this was your game with them? Anything look familiar?

We're not seeing the politics. National Cabinet (the LNP end of it) desperately want contact tracing to be all we need, because that way they can keep their beloved 'Economy' open. The level of community transmission is THE important thing, not contact tracing or hotel quarantine. What keeps that low? Restrictions on movement and gathering. Masks. "She said NSW had kept up with contact tracing because it had a small daily number of cases for the past few months. But if that number spiked, the system wouldn't hold up."

Happy birthday Rach :)

Amazing what goes on in universities. https://theconversation.com/aussie-invention-could-save-old-coal-stations-by-running-them-on-zero-emissions-lego-blocks-144864?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton

"Specialist referrals from GPs, and indeed GP workload, have fallen dramatically". Society is apparently coming to an end because the work (and income) of one professional group has been interrupted. Everybody has been interrupted.

Gotta say, Twitter has about 200% more active thought than FB.

When you listen to the real experts, it doesn't resemble much of what comes out of politician's mouths.

Which do you think is better, the original? Or one of the 2 cover bands?

6 of our 8 States and territories are sitting there as good as free of Covid, while the remaining 2 are held hostage to a culture war, led by the PM, about scoring cheap political points and undermining the public health work in favour of business lobbies. Contact tracing, for example, an absolute mountain of bullshit every day. Without Scott Morrison the entire country would have been free of Covid transmission months ago.

"The big difference between Victoria and NSW now is that one state has a plan to get to zero, and one doesn’t. Premier Gladys Berejiklian is asking the good citizens of NSW to please do the right thing. It’s a plea, not a plan." Stephen Duckett

Selfies fascinate me. Here's an old pic of me, when I had hair. Is the pic me, or is the word next to it me? I reckon the word is much more me than the pic. None of us live the me we see in a selfie, that's how other people perceive us. The me we live ourselves doesn't look at ourselves, it thinks and feels and perceives outwards. Why this fascinates me is that the selfie-world we live in seems to be increasingly swapping that 'interior' life for that exterior, social me. Why we seem so much more fragile, and less resilient.

It's not clear if ScoMo has QAnon leanings. But he still hasn't criticised their protests?

Probably 9 out of 10 days I think yeh, women are superior to men. And then on the 10th day, you think, 'whoa, that's some crazy shit right there.'

Wow on every level. How we think determines what happens with everything, including the pandemic. I'm not seeing much thought going on, but I'm seeing every single one of these 9 'traps' happening, in truckloads. Please read, say what you think?

“...we don’t understand that things look fine until right before they’re very not fine...Pandemic data are like the light of distant stars, recording past events instead of present ones...Policy makers end up acting only when it’s too late. Predictable surges get falsely cast as unexpected surprises." Beth Redbird, sociologist.

Thought I'd re-post this, after NSW politics today and koalas. It's not about koalas.

Ken seemed a lovely guy. To me as an educator and researcher, he was one end of a destructive see-saw. On one end sits the 3Rs people, on the other the 'creativity' people, like Ken. Both leading education astray for decades. The problem with education isn't that it's not creative, or that it's too rigid. It's that it focuses either on content (the 3 Rs people) or on children (the creativity people). Neither approach focuses on actual teaching. Teaching is a practical activity with known techniques that work. Education doesn't focus on that.

To illustrate the nonsense of debt and deficit scaremongering. Yesterday the NZ government borrowed money at an interest rate of -0.103%. Fund managers *paid* the NZ government to take their money. This is the time for government to spend like drunken sailors. Just like during and after the wars.

Holy Moly.

Victorian England. Massive building programs, creation of the sewers, the railways, roads. The time of empire. Do we stop to think about what made all of that possible? Today we flog all this stuff off, to give away in tax cuts to buy imported flat screen TVs. In a pandemic the dominant thing we hear is complaint at people being inconvenienced. We've lost the strong, unifying beliefs at the heart of our societies. Only that could drive people to take on such enormous challenges. Awkwardly for atheists and republicans, the core of those unifying beliefs was God and Queen.

Happy birthday cuz, hope you’re well

Happy birthday jean barn man!

Goodhart's Law says if you use a measure as a target, it stops working. Organisations do this all the time. We're seeing it in the pandemic too. In Iowa, 'exposure' to the virus is taken to be at least 15 minutes within the famous 1.5m of somebody with the virus. Iowa school authorities are trying to prevent shutting schools by making students stand up and move every 14 minutes.

We're at that point where it's clear people won't think. Reality will be forced to kill many of us instead.

Mass persuasion genius. People in shit, underpaid jobs arguing that stopping them going to work restricts their freedom.

Have mentioned before that nobody knows how humans domesticated animals or plants. It's the greatest mystery of all time. I think this is much more important than just farming. We once knew how to create eternity in life (rather than after it). Those domestic animals and plants continue down the generations, that's why we did it. We do a similar thing when we raise kids, in some ways our only true work. But we're losing our understanding of how to do that well too.

My number one pandemic tip. When a politician or somebody on YouTube speaks, turn it off. Then read something like this instead. https://www.policyforum.net/australias-pandemic-policy-made-a-second-wave-inevitable/

Brilliant story about how power is shifting away from governance and senior management of corporations towards shareholders, usually superannuation funds (i.e. you and me). The excesses of the corporate world have been a disgrace for many years. One of the last tough nuts to crack here will be universities, whose governance and senior management layers are obscenely incompetent and greedy. Disgusting what's happening in universities, some of it is being aired but it's not clear where the pressure will come from to make real change. Not government, who put that useless, venal dead wood there in the first place.

We wouldn't 'live with' paedophilia, DV, racism or heart disease. Why do people suggest we should live with the virus?

Did you know there have been about 1000 *fewer* deaths in aged care homes so far this year? Every time somebody tells you this public health action is creating more harm than it prevents, ask them to quantify it. You want to see the numbers, please.

Democracy. Where everybody is free to not do the most basic things. Like public health work.

I’ve been so proud to be an Australian in this pandemic. Our magnificent public institutions stuffed full of expertise have been allowed to flex their muscles. We’re the envy of much of the world. At the same time though the depressing thing the pandemic has shown is how much the American model of politics has now infected us, and is undermining what we have. Populism is rampant, ScoMo closed the entire parliament for months and nobody even whimpered. And he’s spent most of the pandemic trying to undermine the work of those magnificent public institutions, leading the anti-lockdown QAnon-type charge, slashing funding for universities, replacing parliament with a committee of fossil fuel executives, and now this - a new gas plant. This is American politics, lobbying groups buying decisions. All in the name of God too, pure US politics.

Be mindful of this phrase? It's conspiracy theory folk suggesting you go and watch loon videos on YouTube about loon conspiracies, rather than follow official sources. Populism is spreading, much more lethal than Covid too.

Pueyo has been superb in this pandemic. Now he's talking about borders and lockdowns (quarantine) - internal, and external. And how without them, the virus wins.

It's pointless discussing trans-theory with its supporters. They're the most ferocious zealots on the planet. JK Rowling copping it again. Is it the ultimate victory of misogyny that women are not even allowed to define their own identities now?

Did you know there's 30 million cubic kilometres of ice at Antarctica? If it all melts, sea levels rise by about 70 metres. All of our coastal cities gone. Lapstone will be the new Double Bay, but with malarial mosquitoes everywhere.

NSW's great contact tracing has been unable to trace 22 cases. It's not enough on its own. We can't 'live with the virus.'

Fewer people seem to be dying of Covid. (Always a critical sign a pandemic may be waning.) There's a theory that wearing masks is giving people immunisation against Covid, by restricting the dose of virus they inhale. Called variolation (giving somebody a 'small' dose of live virus, it was a technique used before vaccination). So they only get mild illness and become immune. There's another possibility though, that nobody will talk about. Pathogens drop in virulence when people isolate from one another. Like in lockdowns. Where there are large gatherings, historically not only do more people get infected, but they also get much sicker - the pathogen grows in virulence. This makes sense, because a pathogen that has easy access to a new host doesn't have to worry about making the one they're in very sick.

Paul Ewald, one of my favourite thinkers on microbes, on why public health measures don't just stop people getting sick, they actually change the virulence (danger) of the virus itself. The virus evolves in real time towards mildness when you prevent people gathering in large groups. This will explain I'm almost certain why the virus is killing fewer people now (as well as fewer people getting it), and why relaxing restrictions would do the opposite. https://www.courier-journal.com/story/opinion/2020/05/01/coronavirus-kentucky-dont-relax-measures-curb-spread/3051140001/

Economists agree with the public health people. Restrictions save our economy and health at the same time, they're the same thing. Next time somebody says we need to relax restrictions to save our economy, just remember it's nothing about the economy. It's about certain big industry lobbies, like tourism and gas, wanting to start making money again, and fuck the rest of us. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/road-to-recovery-hinges-on-controlling-covid-19-rba-and-economists-20200915-p55vv1.html

Conservatives protected every life, even the unborn, with ferocious conviction. Until Covid, when suddenly the economy was under threat. Guess what got priority? (Hint: not your life.) To be fair, modern conservatives aren't conservatives, they're employees of major industry lobby groups. Why conservative parties now only ever have 2 policies, which they use for all issues: cut taxes, cut regulations. That's what the industry lobbies want.

Delicious! The health experts back Queensland. Is there anybody left who thinks the federal government has the first interest in the pandemic? Or just the economy?

I've pasted the deaths in 4 countries here. The US, Brazil, France and the UK. US and Brazil are the graphs where the deaths are continuing to be super high right now. France and the UK still getting high cases, but deaths dropping away. This supports the idea that countries who use lockdowns and other public health restrictions drive the virus towards a mild form. A locked down virus becomes more mild, as otherwise it doesn't survive long enough to infect other people.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday :)

We need this to really hurt, to kick us in the economic balls, to force the idiot economic ideas we live under to change. Nothing else will work, this is what pandemics do, force you to throw away idiot ideas that have infected you badly. The ideas that cause pandemics.

It'd be amusing to see how many Australians would pass the Australian citizenship test.

Prediction is a mug's game. (I would add I predicted just this here only yesterday.) Every pandemic almost without exception ends when 'no one is quite sure why'. All of the reasons given in this article are the most popular right now, none of them make a lot of sense. Not one person I've seen suggests virulence is the reason. But it's why all pandemics end, usually because lockdowns drive the pathogen to lower virulence. In countries without or with poor lockdowns, the death toll is still high.

Happy birthday :)

I enjoy talking to physiotherapists. One thing they and others say is that fixed postures are bad, movement is good. So get up and move around a bit etc. What always seems to get forgotten in this binary between being still and movement, is balance. Balance, or poise, removes the binary entirely. Being balanced is an active state, you don't have to move around to be active. Sitting on a chair or standing up are acts of balance, not static postures.

The best managers I've worked with are like the best teachers and best parents. They build routines. Habits. The hardest thing in the world to do. The worst managers now dominate workplaces, constantly changing everything and sending everybody into spirals of confusion and anger. Can you remember a new manager where you work who wasn't focused on disrupting everything you've ever done? Usually to add another line to a CV, which they then use to move somewhere else within 5 years.

Is the growing size of man caves a sign that Western life is moving back towards a model native people sometimes use, where men and women have separate living spaces? Effectively now we're ending up with 2 gendered dwellings on each property.

Happy Birthday!

Couple of things here. First, the 'disaster' here is (of course) apparently 'financial'. Bugger people's health. Second, we hear the same bluster from idiot politicians all over the world, including here. The virus ignores all of it and just keeps smashing them. UK planning for second national lockdown right now, only 2 days later. How many times can people not learn?

Babies have beautiful upright, effortless 'posture'. For them there's no need to 'hold yourself up', no feeling of 'gravity' pulling them down. That's an adult myth. For a baby standing and walking are acts of balancing, not of holding yourself up. As they are for adults, but their crazy ideas about gravity get in the way. All that 'weight' you think you feel is you being unbalanced, not gravity.

All that sitting at home retired with no kids to raise or mortgage to pay is expensive going. Meanwhile the unemployed are ignored again, with about 12-25 of them for each job available.

What if our worries about 'division' are actually just our fear of disagreement? We're so terrified of argument, debate, fighting. Of difference. We're rich countries, we're not used to having to fight for things.

Happy birthday cuz!

I saw people singing 'Imagine' outside the White House at the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. And I thought, Trump is going to win again. I give up with how utterly useless progressively-minded people are at politics. They won't fight, they want noble speeches, marches, protests - all that righteous crap. So convinced they're right (noun) that they think righteousness (verb) will win them elections. If you want to win, strategise, fight, persuade, stop feeling entitled to win by default.

A qualification for leading a university today is rank stupidity. Exhibit A. https://www.smh.com.au/national/melbourne-uni-chief-says-victoria-must-address-difficult-ethical-questions-20200919-p55x82.html

Musicians solved the riddle of peace centuries ago. We’re stuck between agreement and disagreement as options, or agreeing to disagree. Bach knew there was another way. Each voice in continuous counterpoint with every other, not one leader with others in harmony, but a harmony born of the constant play of each voice against other voices. That’s also the definition of good conversation. Nothing is harder, nothing more beautiful when you achieve it.

What's happening to JK Rowling is disgusting. Think, people, only the dimwitted are righteous, certain and pure. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/20/making-a-demon-of-jk-rowling-is-a-wretched-sport-born-of-misogyny-and-resentment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

A major business consulting firm explaining that lockdowns didn't damage the economy. The virus did. Economists almost universally say the same. When you see a politician demanding restrictions be relaxed to save the economy, just remember they're not acting for the economy, they're acting for lobby groups. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/covid-19-saving-thousands-of-lives-and-trillions-in-livelihoods

This is modern conservative politics. The technical term is 'regulatory capture'. The people they're regulating now own them. The gas industry, for example.

Lots of prominent Australians signing this one. This is a tipping point for Australian society, I think. Do we want to head down the American road? https://nb.tai.org.au/tax_investment_price?recruiter_id=854569

The real battle of our time isn't Left versus Right. It's Church vs State. The battle waging for a few thousand years.

"Comello, like Edgar, had ‘done his own research’, where by research we mean that he’d spent way too much time clicking link after link after link until he was no longer in direct contact with reality. He was about a thousand fucking miles away from it, having transitioned to what Salvador Dalí once called the “paranoid-critical mode,” a way of seeing the world anew, with a “rich harvest of unexpected correspondences, analogies, and patterns.” All of them dark." John Birmingham, talking about conspiracies

One of my side projects at the moment is working as part of a small team to reconstruct my old high school, virtually. It burned to the ground a few years ago, a tragedy, it was one of Australia's most stunning schools architecturally. The cheap-arses wouldn't rebuild it as it was. So we're doing it virtually. And it's looking superb.

The UK was a leader in 'balancing' the virus against its economy (which really means - do nothing against the virus, keep business open). The virus forced them to lockdown, which drove numbers down for a while. Then they opened up again. Now at 4000 cases a day, projected to hit 50,000 per day within a month. Lockdowns aren't an intellectual argument or even a choice. You either control the virus, or it controls you.

Happy birthday :)

People who worry about the impact of public spending on future generations never seem to worry about the impact of tax cuts on future generations (Richard Denniss).

Angus Taylor today, talking about energy policy and climate change. "We shouldn't damage our economy to reduce emissions". Sound familiar? Replace 'emissions' with Covid-19 and you have their pandemic strategy too. He even talked about 'suppressing' emissions. No accident, modern conservative governments are just industry lobby groups masquerading as pollies.

How disgusted he'd be with us right now.

Happy birthday!

We live in Asia. Asia has been mostly superb in this pandemic. Vietnam nails it again. As have we, In Oz. But growing numbers of Strayans look to the US as a guide, becoming whingy, whiney libertarians attacking the public mechanisms that make this a great place to live. I think we always need to remember that may of our fellow Strayans actually argued to not fight a virus, and that staying at home for a few weeks was insufferable torture. Lest We Forget that bullshit. A disgrace to the Anzac tradition. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-23/how-did-vietnam-get-on-top-of-coronavirus-yet-again/12683008

We live in Asia. Asia has been mostly superb in this pandemic. Vietnam nails it again. As have we, In Oz. But growing numbers of Strayans look to the US as a guide, becoming whingy, whiney libertarians attacking the public mechanisms that make this a great place to live. I think we always need to remember that may of our fellow Strayans actually argued to not fight a virus, and that staying at home for a few weeks was insufferable torture. Lest We Forget that growing bullshit. It's destroying our way of life.

What do people think of the idea of becoming a Republic? I think history is often a good guide (as it was for the pandemic). Look at the Romans, the most famous Republic. They began as a monarchy, and then became a Republic motivated by hatred of Kings, which produced centuries of warfare and bloodshed. Then they became a monarchy again, at Pax Romana, with the Emperors. That produced centuries of peace and the Roman Empire as we mostly know it. My feeling is Republicanism's real weak spot is its lack of an international dimension - it's very provincial and 'national'. What the Romans discovered.

Happy birthday Miss Thompson *sitting up straight to get early mark*

AEMO's step change to renewables for Australia, 96% by 2042. If you squint hard you can just make out the contribution from gas.

After spending more than twice what they promised, and running years behind their 'faster' rollout, the government is finally being forced to fix its white elephant. Staggering incompetence on every measure, don't play your Labor/LNP games with me, this is just a clusterfuck of boneheads.

Control it, or it’ll control you.

No need for conspiracy theories. Governments are victims of regulatory capture. Lobby groups bought them out, they stopped trying to influence politics and instead bought the parties. Then they funded mass persuasion campaigns to convince people that politicians, tax and regulation are the problem. Every time you pile-on your local pollie or bureaucrats, you're following the script.

Paul Keating savaged the Reserve Bank yesterday. And rightly. The country has more than a million people without a job, and businesses sitting idle. The government should be pumping billions into the country right now, big handouts to ordinary working people, to get things moving. It doesn't ever have to pay it back, it OWNS THE MONEY. Simpletons think money is gold, that it has some intrinsic value. It's only a tool of exchange. Normally customers would have money and spend it in businesses. That's what circulates the money. When that can't happen, like right now, just give each of them the money directly. It's not rocket science.

Judith Butler's interview about trans issues has been getting a lot of attention. I criticise a lot of transgender thinking, and wanted to say why a bit more over time. Transgender is defined as a person who feels that their gender identity is different to their sex assigned at birth. This is where it becomes spaghetti for me. A big part of transgender thinking is about denying that your sex is your gender, but the root definition *of* transgender is somebody not 'feeling' their birth sex. So the whole idea links sex and gender. And do any of us feel our sex anyway? I don't know what being male feels like. Is it even a thing to feel? https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

Do you reckon John is out there fighting the fight against diarrhoea? No, I don't think so either. Do you reckon John is saying we should let Covid rip so it's a genuinely serious thing? Do you reckon John has a brain injury of some kind?

Think longer-term. (The Chinese do.) In the next 40 years working-age people in the developing world (Africa and Asia mostly) will expand by about 1.5 billion people. In the same period working-age people in the developed world (us) will decline by more than 100 million. China and India will be the world economic superpowers. Already now and more then, most of the work of the world will be done in developing countries, while old rich countries like us will struggle to remain relevant, and will be desperate for workers. Even now countries like us will see fruit and vegetables rot without migrant labour, because of Covid.

This is a thing every year. I think all ideas are dangerous. They're the eternal beings in our midst, ideas cross generations. That seems less noticed? What we sometimes call gods is actually ideas. They can enslave us and even kill us.

We call the Chinese authoritarian. But maybe their more unified collective system is what they actually want. And what we actually want too, we just won't admit it. "The absence of vandalism is a very appealing aspect of life here in Shanghai. But the idea that someone would purposely destroy something that is meant to benefit society is so perplexing to the Chinese that it's almost impossible to explain to them how and why vandalism is such a major problem in the urban West."

This budget in October will be generation-defining. The government can either spend up hugely, investing in society for decades to come. Thankfully it at least seems to understand now that the 'debt for future generations' stuff is nonsense. Or...it'll piss the lot away in tax cuts to the well-off, who don't need them, and to major lobbies like the gas industry, starving society of the investment it badly needs. And the RBA could work a bit harder and just print the bloody money, rather than telling the government to borrow it.

For some reason only one of these is seen as a mental illness.

I started the day hopeful this government would do the right thing for Australia. And ended it as flabbergasted as all the financial experts at how appalling this government is. Rather than dump their ideology about spending government money (our public money) to invest in the country, what are these bozos doing? Slashing the laws that regulate lending so that ordinary people, already in debt up to their eyeballs, can fund the recovery with even more personal debt. They're using the pandemic as an excuse to ditch key outcomes of the Royal Commission into banking. More favours for mates at the Big End of Town.

This could be a Tweet about Trump's America. And not many seem to much care.

We say China is 'authoritarian'. That's because we say we're 'free', and they're not. But unpack that a bit - is a decision by government *not* to act authoritarian, as much as a decision to act? Here are the percentages of people living below the poverty line here, in the USA and in China. Surely the decision to allow people to live in poverty, when it can be fixed, is an authoritarian decision? It's not one those people would ever vote for, and it destroys their freedom. (Note that China plans to eliminate poverty entirely, this year.) Australia - 13.2% USA - 14.5% China - 0.7%

Nearly all societies are built around the idea of a father as head of the family. Here's an idea. 'Authoritarian' societies use a stern father model. But 'free' societies do as well. Authoritarian fathers refuse to act, as much as they act. They deny support, love, assistance. 'Free market' societies aren't free, they're authoritarian societies where daddy refuses things. The 'invisible hand'. When we know millions live in poverty and don't act, that's an authoritarian decision. When we don't build new public things, that's an authoritarian decision. When we moralise about people on welfare, that's stern daddy again.

'Social distancing' is literally an oxymoron. It matters because words capture ideas, ideas create our reality.

Excellent handful of lessons from the pandemic, to avoid us ever losing control. Note it includes swift & hard lockdowns as needed, and not 'opening up' unless the situation warrants it. Not advice you'll hear from our leader or any of the anti-lockdown people. They should emigrate to Europe, the US or Brazil immediately, where they can have as much lovely virus as they like.

Boris wants to test 10 million people a day to avoid lockdowns. Operation Moonshot. It won't work, in fact it will do terrible damage. You know what works? Lockdowns, basic public health. The anti-lockdown people are like that crack suicide squad Monty Python invented. If you want to save people and business, print money. The real disease is the Economy, a set of lunatic ideas designed to protect the interests of the very rich.

Trump just nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the US. Mother of 7, reads the Constitution as an 'originalist' (i.e. as if Moses had brought it down from the mountain), loves guns, hates abortion, hates pubic health systems. I wonder when people will recognise that the politics we're seeing across the world isn't Left vs Right. It's Church vs State, that centuries-old battle. The Church is winning. I don't judge whether that's a good or bad thing, it is what it is. I see the church as the original inventor of our society. It certainly ran society for far longer than any democracies have managed to date. Secularism has never understood belief or desire, that people want shared, strong beliefs and desires. This is its failure as much as the church's victory.

Happy Birthday Dan!

Billy Graham is pivotal in understanding our world right now. One of the leading figures from the 1950s onwards mixing religion and politics. Read this, you’ll see how just about everything we describe as Left vs Right in politics, is really Church vs State. A battle as old as our history. It is our history. If you think the world is like the Apocalypse right now, that’s not actually an analogy. We’re re-living the Old Testament, evangelical leaders, plagues, pestilence, natural disasters. Our problems are much older than we’re seeing.

When you sit or stand anywhere for long periods, stop trying to hold or fix yourself in any way - up, forward, back - whatever. Feel everything that happens in your body as it learning to effortlessly balance without you interfering. Like learning to ride a bike. It doesn't take long to start to feel every tension and pressure in your body as it subtly adjusting and learning to keep you effortlessly upright. Just as we do when learning to ride, we don't try to adjust anything in our body, we just have the intent to ride, have our attention on where to go and the body does the rest, by itself. We fight those tensions and feelings every day when sitting and standing, not realising we're getting in the way of our own body trying to balance for us.

Somebody just told me that the idiom'falling on deaf ears' is discriminatory against deaf people. It's 'ableist'. This is true?

Victoria is what this virus does if you open up with the virus still spreading. You'd need to have your head pretty firmly inserted up your own backside not to see that pattern repeated all over the world. Why do we tolerate an American (Murdoch) spending the entire pandemic actively trying to undermine Australian public health efforts?

George Monbiot makes the good point that the Lake District in the UK, in the picture, often held up as natural beauty, is actually a seriously degraded temperate rainforest. The other picture is what that countryside used to look like.

Wanted to re-post this because I think it's so important. Good and evil are only degrees of ignorance. We're evil to the extent we're slave to ideas, unable to escape their tricks.

"Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them...They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences." Albert Camus, The Plague

Overthinking. Most of us live in our thoughts, that's true. But true thinking is noticing that those thoughts are not us at all, they're ideas that have infected us and won't go away. You don't escape overthinking by 'living', because that's just another idea that infects us. It's quite common, to say 'just live your life, don't overthink it'. Which is asking you to be a cork bobbing along, driven every which way by the current, with no control. Why our culture spends 48 weeks a year wishing it was on holiday, and its workplaces are full of bullshit unthinking jobs. 'Just living' is a surrender to ideas, which will then enslave you.

It's not an analogy for me that pandemics are the rebooting of societies. It's their job, throughout history. To force us to throw out everything we think we know and question everything we do. They can do that because we're all made of microbes, and they're the only thing that force us to break every bond and connection we've built, even between each other. Other natural disasters drive us closer together, because you can't catch a volcano from the person next to you. We need profound humility to ever defeat pandemics. We have to accept them as a message, as even the Bible does. But we're not there yet, we have vain roosters crowing about managing the virus and getting economies going, or telling everybody else that they're too afraid (the macho chest-beating virus deniers and their 'wellness' mumbo jumbo), or whining about lockdowns interfering with their freedom, or telling us that people will top themselves en masse if ordinary life is interrupted. There is no 'normal life' free of infection, even outside pandemics. Infection is what clobbers us when we forget our link to wider ecosystems. 10 million of us a year could die from basic infections by 2050. We still have some way to go to discover our humility. I'm not holding my breath.

Monash has surveyed for both waves of Covid in Australia, to test what Australians know, feel and how they behave, with Covid. Testing and tracing won't save any country, including us. Up to half of men and a third of women don't even bother getting tested. You need other restrictions and enforcement, including lockdowns. The key finding says it all: "COVID-19 waves are inevitable in Australia because not enough Australians adhere to the behaviours needed. A suppression strategy may only become effective if adherence increases to more than 9-in-10."

Happy birthday sir!

Happy birthday :)

There are many here in Australia who still seriously argue for us to do as Boris has done. Not lock things down, let more people get infected so we'll hopefully get 'herd immunity', save the economy etc. It's beyond belief that people still argue for these things, when they have the overwhelming evidence from overseas of what it does. The UK, US and most of Europe is in serious trouble. Hundreds of thousands dead. And our own Fat Controller still gets up there every day and has a tantrum about borders being closed. He'd so love to be Boris or Donald. These 3 morons won't learn the humility to defeat a pandemic, and so the virus just keeps smashing them to the floor.

If you have friends who say Sweden is what we should have done, it's getting some 'herd immunity', talk about this graph. That big blip was old peoples' homes, which they then worked on. The underlying infections in the rest of the community haven't changed at all. There's no herd immunity.

Very important people understand this I think. A pandemic is not a medical problem to solve. What's interesting is that as communications technologies and data analysis improve, the distinction between individual and public health will start to dissolve. It's very artificial.

Scotty from Marketing is a real piece of work. He wants to send in the troops. They'll be impressed when they arrive and realise there are no ships waiting to dock.

Australia rhymes with failure. The country is now too stupid to even care about this irreparable vandalism. It can find money to give to multinational gas companies, but not its own universities. Our own Trump is coming.

This is average number of sexual partners for some countries. It’s a perfect example for me of how we don’t take infection seriously. Having multiple sexual partners supercharges the virulence of STIs. HIV became lethal in highly promiscuous communities. Humans are not free, because of infection. We’re in a pandemic, which makes it more visible, acute infections get attention. But add chronic infections, like STIs and heart disease/stroke, and you can see pretty quickly that we’re in a permanent pandemic.

The exact same - word for word - message that Helen Reddy had in her most famous song, is the message J.K. Rowling is currently being flayed for.

Their best yet.

It's been great to see people standing up to the absolute lunacy and bullying of the transgender juggernaut.

So many have wanted a plug-and-play solution to this pandemic - lockdown, no lockdown, just test and trace etc. But it's never going to be about that. It's about getting to know your enemy intimately, and modulating what you do every day if necessary to beat it. Getting to know the microbe. I left my old job because I was sick of the bullying simplifiers, the pandemic shows they're everywhere. Like people who think Melbourne was incompetence. These are stochastic processes.

The Budget is so often mistaken for the actual economy (which in itself is just a set of numbers in a spreadsheet). That debt and deficit stuff? That's budget, not economy. I can spend $200 more than I earned his week (budget), but have $10,000 in the bank so be in good shape (economy). It's SO simple. Right now businesses don't have money, because customers don't have money. So...give the customers money. Lots of it.

When you read this, remember many are arguing that several million of us in each country should deliberately catch this disease, as a way to beat it. They're still arguing it.