October 2020

Thanks to my super-talented brother for building me one of these! Out of red cedar too, smells divine.

White Cliff opal mines from the air. The more they learn about Covid, the more they realise this is how the virus sees us. Most of us if we catch it, won’t spread it. But a few of us will spread it to lots of others. Super-spreaders. Nobody knows why (the microbes do). The virus goes looking for these, like a miner looks for a seam of opal or gold. Mostly they won’t find any, but then occasionally they hit the jackpot. When the virus hits a super-spreader, it creates a cluster. If you can stamp out clusters, you win. If you let the virus rip you can’t track the clusters, why lockdowns are an important component of our public health response.

I think every day we move closer to seeing that nearly all disease is caused by infection. Cancer, heart disease, strokes, diabetes, even schizophrenia and other ‘mental’ illnesses. It’s a paradigm shift, to start seeing the body as an ecological community of microbes, rather than as an engine full of pipes, and all the other chemical/physical metaphors we’ve used for so long.

The world is suddenly grateful to the Germans for inventing a word for their shameful joy. Schadenfreude.

Karma-19 bites. https://twitter.com/brentterhune/status/1311921853263470594?s=21

Why NSW is playing with a can of petrol and fire, by lifting restrictions right now. There won’t be a time in this entire pandemic, unless we have a vaccine or the virus disappears by itself, that we can ‘live alongside the virus’. Elimination is constantly misunderstood as meaning elimination of the virus itself. Now that it’s clearer the virus spreads stochastically, it’s even easier to eliminate than previously thought. Most of Australia already did it, by accident.

I'm over the battle on this one. Heaven forbid society just work an hour LESS every day, fuck as if we could do that. Let's change the clocks instead, be good little wage slaves, and stuff up everybody's circadian rhythms, which makes us all sick. The counter-argument, always? 'I like that extra hour of daylight'. There is no extra hour of daylight. Stupid is winning.

Supporters of Trump and his ideas have said just let the old die, they were going to die anyway. He's 74. I wonder how many of the tens of thousands of other older Americans who have died under his incompetence got a helicopter ride to a presidential suite in hospital?

Forman: And by the way, there’s never been a real case of herd immunity through infection. Wells: For any disease ever? Forman: Correct.

There’s something glorious about this event being what probably spread the virus to Trump.

“Dr Ryan said developed countries had become “entirely complacent of infectious diseases” and associated them with poorer countries...”If you look at any metric of resilience, the industrial world has not demonstrated a lot of that...” That lack of resilience is accompanied by lunatic conspiracy theories. Inside those rich countries we don’t see quite how like the last days of Rome we are. Ryan also talks about how we try to medicalise pandemics, rather than look at how our own lifestyles create them.

Our technology would allow all of us to work a lot less. But we don’t, because workers have little power. In the US, workers are not entitled to *any* leave, at all, unless their employer wants them to have it. I’d like to reframe the idiot idea of Daylight Saving this way, the true way. Why is it popular? Because people like an extra hour of daylight after work. What would have been the simplest way to do that? Us all knocking off an hour earlier over Spring and Summer. Why didn’t that happen? Because workers have no power. Instead employers campaigned to put the clocks forward, so you could work the same number of hours and still get that extra hour of evening light. So all of our circadian rhythms now get smashed twice a year, which is extremely bad for our health, simply because workers don’t have the power to work an hour less. And in true style, these same wage slaves defend the clock fiddling, rather than see that they were royally screwed by their employers, again.

Thanks @[738682522:2048:Nicole] for this ripper. The herd immunity crowd include even quite educated people. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a political bastardisation of science. https://apple.news/A_kBEJSlMSZO0uRb1TKoErg

Widespread ignorance of how our own country works means the government plans to introduce a flat tax structure, and hardly anybody has blinked an eye. The populism virus continuing to eat our societies from the inside out. It’s a public policy disaster, taking us just another step closer to being the USA.

I will never understand this. It’s like Beatlemania, the appetite for kitsch is scary.

The virus is like an earthquake. A disaster for us only within our built environments. Without those it wouldn’t ever have happened, just as earthquakes are mostly completely harmless, unless you’re inside.

The October long weekend celebrates Labour Day. The achievement of the 8 hour work day, by unions. 8 hours rest, 8 hours work, 8 hours leisure. The bitter irony of introducing Daylight Savings on the same weekend? Workers get not one second of extra leisure time from it. Instead we put the clocks forward an hour to use some of our own 8 hours of leisure a bit more. That’s what DST is. Introduced by employers, to give the illusion of more leisure time for workers. We could have avoided the entire mess (look at the mess) by just finishing work one hour earlier in Spring and Summer. But most of us aren’t in unions, so we have to just do as we’re told.

The government’s actions during the pandemic? - university funding gutted, thousands of jobs lost - arts sector gutted - $50 billion of peoples’ superannuation gutted - environmental protection laws gutted - a Covid ‘recovery’ committee stacked with fossil fuel executives recommends billions in taxpayers’ dollars going to fossil fuel projects - enormous tax cuts to the wealthy. Not one tiny part of that has a single thing to do with fixing the pandemic. It’s a shopping list for the LNP and its big donors. They’re using the pandemic as cover to accelerate policies they’ve always dreamed of introducing in normal times. You just have to decide how dumb you are.

The big orange man-baby has just done a drive-past of his supporters outside his hospital. Think about this - his car has about a half-dozen secret service agents in it. Windows must be up for his safety. So a known Covid case forces those 6 people to occupy a tiny enclosed space with him, for his political campaigning. Says everything you need to know about the man.

ScoMo is building a chicken coop (illegally) at his Sydney PM home. But it’s the invincibility that’s important here. Populism makes a politician politically invincible. Every check and balance - institutions (the law, parliament, the press, expertise etc.) - is smashed. Called ‘fake’. ScoMo talks about the ‘Canberra bubble’, he knows exactly what he’s doing. He closed parliament completely when this pandemic started. He wants to be our own Trump.

Every tiny thing we think, feel and do is caused by an idea. They capture and enslave us. It’s really interesting to use that filter when dealing with other people. It’s not their ‘personality’ you’re dealing with, it’s their different degrees of slavery to certain ideas. Their beliefs. Their beliefs will determine what makes them happy, sad, angry, horny etc. Why I agree with Spinoza, that the only true meaning of life, the only path to true joy, is understanding. To free ourselves from slavery to ideas. I never wanted a career, I just want to understand. A career is just another idea/belief.

Just appalling in so many ways. Selfish man-baby who's been pampered his entire life and thinks only of himself.

Does this look like a well man to you? https://twitter.com/i/status/1313263278613827585

People who are more worried about businesses no longer able to make plastic Xmas cracker toys and porn videos than they are about the virus, suggest we should just isolate all our most vulnerable people (nobody knows who they are) and let the rest of us get infected. We have a test of how that would work, in the US. They couldn't even stop the most powerful office in the world from getting infected. https://medium.com/@gidmk/the-facts-about-herd-immunity-and-covid-19-3230616b70a3

Australia only needed 2 things in the Budget. 1. Free childcare. 2. Big cash handouts to ordinary people. Together those would make the 'economy' go gangbusters. Immediately.

The parties that say they value individual initiative more than anything else, never give anything to most individuals. The budget last night could have been targeted at individuals, by giving them money. Instead the only individuals to get much money are a tiny group of the wealthy. The rest of the money overwhelmingly goes to business, which is the least individual-friendly part of our whole society. The idea is they’ll now share it with us, through ‘investment’. Pigs might fly.

I didn’t know if this was real. For about 6 years from the late 70s to the mid-80s one of the most important and interesting musicians in the world. And then the booze and smokes took over, driven I’m sure by the pressure to be this rock god, EVH. Fuck I hate booze and smokes. A true legend, what a waste. RIP.

Happy Birthday Den!

You might think there’s no depths to which Fox News wouldn’t stoop. But look at the host’s face when our own Miranda Devine suggests old people are selfish for not dying of Covid. Even they were stunned. The anti-lockdown crowd are true human filth.

I’ve seen many many people say art is purely subjective. That it’s just a type of personal entertainment. That’s nonsense I think, art is a critical part of how we understand and live life. Take stories. In simpler times, when empires conquered the world, stories were great tales of conquest and glory. In our time, when life is much more complex, a new type of story emerged. The thriller, the whodunit. The ‘what happened?’ story. Perfectly reflecting the shift to a life that is more complex, where we genuinely don’t know what’s happening much of the time.

"Until the end of the pandemic, it's highly unlikely that NSW will ever get to 28 days of no community transmission, because that is not how a pandemic works." It's highly unlikely this will occur because the State isn't PLANNING for it to occur, despite it being National Cabinet policy. (NSW has more cases than Victoria today.) Gladys and ScoMo are the two obstacles to Australia being Covid-free. And yet they've convinced many that the 6 States who have been Covid-free for months are the problem. Any State with virus circulating will 'seed' every other State, if they open borders, as this idiot duo keep arguing for.

Action on this in the Budget. The National Audit Office, who found the rorts, had its funding cut by 10%. Who cares, hey? Be a good populist and cheer on ScoMo as he keeps sawing the branch we’re all sitting on.

Some say the budget had nothing for women. The biggest part of every Budget is the HouseKeeper program. Worth an estimated nearly 34% of the entire Economy. All unpaid of course. Includes childcare, for which there was NOT ONE EXTRA CENT in the Budget. I've lost all patience with the people who vote for these ideas, they're disgusting and destroying our societies.

All of the ways we say 2020 is horrendous - loss of social life, loss of income and jobs, people dying of infectious disease etc., are just descriptions of the lives other people live in the world all the time. In fact it’s still WAY better than their lives. Shouldn’t we stop seeing 2020 as a roadblock back to our normal lives, and instead see it as a peephole out of our privileged bubbles?

If I knew Andrea I'd be asking her to say her name over and over all day. That thing Spanish-speakers do with their tongues, *shiver* Damn fine guitar player.

Everything about Trump and his popularity is explained by people wanting a King instead of a President. That's populism. Kings were often barking mad, it was seen as their prerogative. We habitually think 'democracy' is a different system. Really it's just monarchy with the King/Queen removed, and 'due process' mechanisms introduced to give everybody their own say. People don't really like that, look at social media, they hate people disagreeing with them. Populism is the inevitable outcome, 'bring back our King who will rule us'.

If the God-bothering conservatives we seem to vote for have such a problem with women in work (why they won’t fund extra childcare), then pay people higher wages. Then they can afford to keep a parent at home, if they want to.

When you lock up a virus by locking down people, the virus becomes milder. (Why lockdowns not only stop virus spreading, they make it much less dangerous, very few scientists are noticing that yet.) If you’re not sure why that is, think of humans. Humans that have total freedom of movement destroy everything in their path, whether it’s tourism, or looting in war. Same mechanism. A pandemic is caused by the destruction of ‘home’, of our ability to occupy place in a meaningful way. The same for microbes, it’s microbes without homes.

Differences between how women’s and men’s sport are valued. The Australian women’s netball captain is going to play in NZ. She can’t get a game here. That’d be like the Australian cricket captain going to play in the NZ domestic competition instead of the Sheffield Shield. Has barely rated a mention in the press. https://wwos.nine.com.au/netball/caitlin-bassett-leaves-suncorp-super-netball-for-new-zealand/e0f8bf42-24bf-475e-b931-ff955479f4d5

An extremely important thing, I think. Let’s not become the US. https://www.aph.gov.au/petition_list?id=EN1938

This day, at the beginning of May, was a turning point for Australia. A large group of Australian experts from a huge range of fields advised the government to hold that first wave lockdown for a few more weeks, to stamp out Covid entirely across the country. ScoMo was having none of it. If NSW and Victoria had stayed closed just a few more weeks back then, the entire country would have been Covid-free 4 months go.

Look at that wave of oldies coming over the next 20 years, the yellow line. Nearly everything about our life and politics right now is explained by these lines. A politics of the cranky, conservative, backward-looking, protecting existing wealth held by the old instead of creating new wealth.

The Budget looks to the private sector for economic recovery. It won’t work. If we stopped looking at the labels for people - public/private, Left/Right - and instead just looked at people, all of our problems would be solved. An ‘economy’ is just people. People without money means the economy is stuffed. It’s that simple. Give people the money, don’t give it to a tiny subset of them and hope they share it.

Proof that the Economy is just people. We imported lots of young, healthy, smart people, it’s why the Oz economy hasn’t tanked in over 20 years. That’s about to stop. The government think building roads and gas plants will fix this. Utterly delusional.

The UK is in trouble, huge infection numbers, worse than their first wave. Attributed in large part to Boris’ ‘let’s save the economy’ subsidy of 10 pounds to people to go out and eat at restaurants. Anybody who thinks saving an economy is a different task to saving you, is trying to kill you.

“The best economy is not the biggest (or the smallest), but the most pleasing to the people who inhabit it. The first step towards this is the screamingly, obnoxiously obvious step of just giving people money.”

Look at that line I’ve highlighted with yellow. This is staggering. It shows that the productivity of the workforce has exploded during the pandemic. What that basically means is that the million or more jobs lost were not only doing pretty much nothing productive, they were like a handbrake on society. All in the private sector too, which the mythology always says is more productive.

Add this to your "Pandemic BS" list. Intelligent lockdowns, targeted lockdowns, ring-fencing, hotspots etc. All BS, none of them work. There's not one single way to 'live alongside the virus', as the Economy nuts keep arguing for. You have to eliminate community spread, and then manage outbreaks if any virus remains.

I never tire of gravity. Which, like the Economy, doesn’t exist. We know that things seem to ‘fall down’, including ourselves. But as Einstein realised, we’re not falling anywhere. The Earth is coming UP, into us. All those feelings of ‘weight’ you have are the Earth pushing up into you, through your bum, feet etc. And yet maybe the majority of us operate every day as if we need to hold ourselves up. It's an illusion, we're not falling.

Seeing the world. It's like porn, seeing sex. If we just wanted to see the world, we could use photos. But we have to modify the world, to make it able to be seen by us. We turn the world into geographical and cultural porn.

I think Gladys is likeable. A competent politician, those who would replace her from her side are mostly hopeless. I’d be surprised if she survives the latest scandal, she knew about the corruption, there’s no escape from that. But one thing that irritates me is the mythology about how wonderfully she’s managed the pandemic. Just evidence people pay no attention to actual detail. NSW like 95% of the rest of the country eliminated Covid in the first national lockdown. It’s not NSW’s contact tracing that has kept numbers low here, it’s that first lockdown. NSW could have been as virus-free as those 6 other States months ago, if she didn’t have that idiot belief about balancing the economy against the virus.

Nearly 70 years ago. But is this moment now gone, like we often think with time? That it ‘flows’ and what was in the past is now lost forever? Nope. That moment in 1954 is still happening right now as you look at the picture. The picture literally ‘captured’ it. You can’t have a chat with the lady there or hop in one of the cars. But you’re not looking into the past, that’s the past happening again right now. This is why indigenous people often deeply dislike photographs. An example of how this isn’t just abstract stuff. The oldest ever recorded sound wasn’t even meant to be a recorded sound. It was scribbles on a bit of paper, that engineers were able to digitise and recreate the original sound from. (You can hear it here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9a7x48/listen-to-the-eerie-warbles-of-the-oldest-sound-recording-in-history). Photos are the same, they’re carrying that past moment still within them, you do live that moment again as you see them. The past never leaves, it just becomes more or less active. I’m sure we’ll find ways to use them to re-live those past moments in even fuller ways, like with the scribble and sound. The sound of that street for example may be in that photo, and we just haven’t figured out yet how to extract it. That woman too.

If you saw a parent or teacher pleading with kids to ‘follow the rules’, you’d (rightly) assume they have no idea what they’re doing. Think about that the next time a politician says we all need to follow the Covid rules.

Exactly what I've been saying. (Gideon is a prominent Oz epidemiologist.) This pandemic is almost nothing to do with the virus, and nearly everything to do with what we call the 'Economy'. It's why I call it The Economy Virus.

About 1980 was when the world changed. Employers started trousering all the productivity gains, and not workers. When did union membership really start to slide? 1980.

Thiis is word-for-word what Donald Trump has been saying in America. And we’re not disgusted and worried that this is our federal government?

Heh, superb. Take everything the virus deniers say about the virus and make it about the economy instead, and you have exactly what’s going on.

The pandemic follows the same pattern worldwide. Rich folk bring the virus into a country through their extensive travelling. They then can afford to shelter at home from it. The poor catch it, can't afford to stay home (or lose their jobs), and then spread it exponentially. Western and SW Sydney is the danger zone for NSW, just as Western Melbourne and public housing towers were for Victoria.

Before we go all soft about Gladys' relationship 'mistakes', hands up if you remember this? The $46 million Royal Commission set up by the LNP to try to skewer Julia Gillard. Her offence? Having a boyfriend who turned out to be a bit dodgy. (She was completely exonerated.) As a postscript, the judge who headed up this farce, an LNP stooge, was later accused of sexual harassment by three of his associates. Want to know how a country ends up with somebody like Trump in charge? This is it.

What caused all this in Europe? The Economy crowd in their summer demanding everything open up. They're at Dan Andrews every day here saying the same thing. An *extra* 7000 people will die in the UK before Xmas because Boris says lockdown is 'misery', but 7000 deaths isn't. 7000 families will have a ripper Xmas, hey.

Professors, Institutes. Smart people. They think Victoria has done a spectacular job. They’d be spot on. The rest of the world would do anything to be Victoria right now.

Did you know that when you fall, you don’t actually fall down, the Earth comes up? Same if you throw a ball up - it doesn’t come down, you and the Earth move up to meet it. What this means is you have no weight, what you feel as weight is the Earth pushing UP into you. Any time you can free yourself from that Earth pushing up, as these astronauts are doing in a plane (by ‘falling’), you’ll enter your default state again - floating. But even in everyday stuff like sitting or standing, you’re floating but with the Earth just constantly pushing up under you. You don’t need to hold yourself up, you’re not ‘weighted’ at all.

Happy birthday!

BoJo doesn’t want big lockdowns because it might damage the Economy. Because that’s bullshit, the virus is now teaching him humility. He wanted local lockdowns instead. They don’t work, and on top of that he now has to try to negotiate individual lockdowns with every town and city in the UK. It’s a total shambles.

Can anybody figure out why our Fat Controller and his treasurer have been slamming Victoria for months?

This photo is 119 years old. The kids obviously have long finished their lives. But the longer you dwell on those faces, the more you physically feel their personality, their life. We’re so used to thinking images ‘represent’ things that I think we forget how miraculous that is, and what it means. Images capture eternity, just as language does. These little souls still live, through the image.

I’m wondering whether the ladies asked Arnie to show off the biceps, or he told them to look.

Left, Right - all irrelevant. The fastest way to win votes in just about every country is to smash your institutions. Society is eating itself. That’s what populism is, to want celebrities to lead you, bypassing centuries of accumulated tradition. Most people don’t even know what those traditions are or how they work.

Did you know 80% of all businesses fail? Instead of blaming the virus and public health action against it for the global emergency right now, let’s blame the idiot idea of trying to make business the basis of society. Businesses mostly collapsed within weeks of the pandemic starting, they have no resilience at all as a social model. Business is just one possible way of distributing common resources, and a very bad way of doing that.

The 1st Japanese Tuba Battalion. (If you know what these actually are without Googling, I’ll show you my biceps.)

The median age of somebody in Africa is 19. They’re poor, and smashing Covid so far. We rich, fat, old and entitled, anti-lockdown whining whiteys are getting infected in the hundreds of thousands per day. Too lazy and too stupid to use our vast wealth to shelter from a lethal virus.

Sweden, darling of the virus deniers, is being forced to introduce lockdowns due to an explosion of cases. Incidentally if you know somebody who believes the fastest way out of this pandemic is just to let everybody get infected, try this stat on for size. The US, where the policy in many States is pretty much that, would take about 15 years to infect everybody in the country, at their current rate of infection. https://www.euroweeklynews.com/2020/10/18/sweden-introduces-local-lockdowns-as-coronavirus-cases-rise/

If you reckon this fella is doing a good job with Covid...he cancelled National Cabinet last week. His reason? He couldn’t get a plane back from Queensland. The real reason? He was at a Liberal Party fundraising dinner, which he’d flown to using public money. A dinner he said he didn’t attend. The picture doesn’t lie; he does though. He’s spent the pandemic undermining public health action, like his heroes BoJo and Trump, and using the pandemic to try to attack Labor States. A grub.

Solar will be the world's greatest source of energy by 2025. 5 years. The cost of solar has dropped 90% in the past 10 years.

Fake or Fortune is one of my favourite shows. Where they investigate whether paintings people own are genuine or fakes. What’s most interesting for me goes back to imitation, or copying, copies or imitations are worth next to nothing. ‘Originals’ are worth a fortune. Copies can be so good it takes enormous scholarship, x-rays, chemical analysis etc. to tell them apart from the original. If they’re indistinguishable, why is one worth a fortune, the other nothing? That question will take you to the heart of our entire culture I think. Images, and what they mean.

Leslie carried a fart machine with him everywhere he went apparently. It’s a glorious, beautiful thing. https://twitter.com/goulcher/status/1318134542994198531?s=21

I’m not a grammar Nazi. But sometimes, just a small amount helps.

A beautiful example of how sophisticated spin works. ‘Lockdown’. Millions now believe that time off at home is tyranny, and getting back to their meaningless jobs (which they hate) will be freedom. Imagine that, people were actually made to believe that being in their own home was torture, and getting back to work will be liberation. Cue the Wiz, people.

Homes used to be like a folding of the landscape itself, with many paths for walking, plants, animals, and lanes to link different villages. Beautiful spaces, the sort that make people feel joy when they occupy them. Compare that with modern suburbs, when seen from the air homes are obviously mostly garaging points of an extended roads and transportation network. We no longer occupy space, we’re always just moving through it to somewhere else. It’s why lockdown is such a torture for so many people, we aren’t grounded.

Europe at the beginning of their summer. They started cautious. It went downhill from there. Now they’re neck-deep in serious, serious trouble. A warning tale for us, entering our summer and with people showing all the same signs of jubilation and ‘this is over’.

Another breakthrough in medicine by shifting the whole paradigm, to see the body as an ecosystem rather than as a bag of chemicals and pipes. Adaptive therapy in cancer doesn’t try to kill all the cancer cells, it recognises cells form an ecosystem and it’s about trying to manage that ecosystem. Incredible results. My dad had a terminal cancer diagnosis, was given 3 months, it was by stepping away from the aggressive treatment regimes that he survived 15 years.

This is the US. Notice the big jump in deaths for young people too.

Parasites are the most common form of life on Earth. Another thing we have backwards, they don’t feed off life, life is defined by them.

The anti-lockdown people plead with us all to ‘wake up’. Let me flip that. Wake up people, and ask one simple question. If stopping a lethal virus gets in the way of our economy, shouldn’t it be our economy that changes? How could we defend an economic system opposed to public health? https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-manchester-lockdown-pubs-bars-restaurants-cases-b990996.html

This is a statement from NSW Health yesterday: “The only way to find new cases and prevent further transmission is to increase testing." That’s just obviously wrong. There are all sorts of ways to prevent transmission of the virus, including masks, and restrictions on gatherings and movement. Why don’t they say that? Because the NSW Government believes we live in an economy, not a society, and those other restrictions would hurt the economy. From Day1, I say it ad nauseum I know, this set of beliefs was going to determine the outcome of the pandemic. In every country run by those beliefs, the virus is winning easily.

“Politically confected libertarian nonsense.” Inspiring when you see truly smart and experienced people at work.

It’s only when you watch people walking from above that I think you can see that walking is actually a rotational thing. Our bodies rotate alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise, for each gait cycle or stride. (It’s called nutation, how most living things move - in helixes.) To achieve this the muscles of your body are arranged in ascending and descending helixes which wind and unwind. Because we’re usually left or right-handed and footed, one of those directions gets favoured. That’s when things can go wrong, often in the lower back, and you end up preferentially twisted one way even when you stop moving. You then need to learn to literally ‘unwind’. More on that some other time.

Have you seen the airlines in recent days pushing to 'open up' more? This is the same trap Europe fell into. Tweet is from Australia. Qantas 'recommends' people wear masks. Its own staff don't, passengers don't. Gladys recommends people wear masks in NSW too, she won't mandate it. So people don't. Absence of leadership.

If you're an LNP person, I'm curious how you justify this behaviour. Corruption of the highest order. Destroyed the lot, hard copies & digital. 250% more money than the Sports Rorts affair federally, that cost a Minister her job.

This project is coming along in pretty exciting ways. My KHS friends, if you haven’t donated yet or want to donate a bit more, go for it. We need another $1500 to finish. Also check out the website for a few details.

We forget I think that stained glass windows pre-date most people having books, paintings, photographs, films - any sort of imagery. So we forget what they must have seemed to worshippers, a glowing radiance of colour, almost miraculous. They’re not just pictures, these images are stories. You read them. Worshippers spent lifetimes staring at and deciphering the story from the images, often instead of listening to sermons, particularly kids. Religion wasn’t about a God ‘up there’, an afterlife. It was about constantly re-creating the presence of religious messages in everyday life, right now. You left the church feeling and knowing more about how to live your life in good ways. These windows produced awe. A church was a hugely powerful theatre of God, where they went every week to feel directly the power of God. Now we have to put mesh on these windows to stop dipshits throwing beer bottles through them.

We’re so lucky we have superb public health systems in Australia. This story is horrifying, what catching Covid can do to you, even if you’re young. And yet there are still people in Australia today who will look you in the eye and tell you it’s all a media beat-up.

How much attention did people pay to Josh’s big pandemic budget? Remember the tax cuts for all? Have a look at how they almost completely evaporate for everybody except the wealthy, from next year. Apart from being disgustingly unfair, how will that stimulate the beloved Economy?

When we compare public transport with private transport, why don’t we ever question - why transport? Why is that the given? Why do we always have to be moving people around in large numbers? Why does everybody always need to be ‘somewhere else’? I think it’s in unquestioned assumptions that the habits which make up a culture hide.

I don’t make this stuff up. ‘Garbage’, from an expert. Our Premier and PM say ‘live with the virus’ regularly. It’s like saying ‘live with brown snakes in the bottom of your bed.’

Germany is a global economic superpower, producing some of the world’s most advanced and sexiest things. Many of the largest and most successful firms are still heavily tied to the regions and even families that set them up. Most of Germany’s financial institutions are community banks, so the money is also locally-focused. And the workforce is heavily unionised, and those unions are involved in the detailed management of the companies. It’s a 21st century craft economy, where craftsmanship rules. The rest of the world is seduced by get-rich-quick individualism, financed by cheap credit and producing almost nothing of any quality. Can you name 3 quality Australian innovations that are making serious money worldwide? Me either. Time to get back to actually building things, with craftsmanship and shared responsibility and profits.

It took generations to build cathedrals, started by fathers and finished by sons or even grandsons. We struggle to do anything that lasts longer than the 3 years between elections. So what’s to learn here? I think that the cathedral brought together things we now hold separately. A society based around a unifying set of strong beliefs, at the same time married to the idea of quality in work that will last forever, craftsmanship. To build a society that lasts you need to build things that last, using beliefs that last.

Glad they’re wearing helmets 😳

“The Prime Minister said the continued lockdown suggested the state government was not confident its health system was capable of suppressing transmission of the virus.” Our health systems don’t suppress the virus, that’s the GOVERNMENT’S job. But he ‘doesn’t hold a hose, mate’. He hasn’t contributed ONE thing to beating this virus, just as he was a lazy, useless dickhead during the bushfires.

Before we had alarm clocks, the poor were paid to spit dried peas at your window to wake you up in the morning.

Germans are often seen as efficient, orderly, logical etc. Actually I think that’s a misdiagnosis, you understand so much about Germany when you understand they’re a nation of craftsmen. That’s where their apparent obsession with doing things just right comes from. As in my other weekend posts, their 21st century technology companies are extensions of old craft hierarchies. One of the only countries to retain that link with the past, a superb way to organise society, around quality and expertise. https://www.dw.com/en/skilled-crafts-boom-stretches-capacities-in-germany/a-41902114

75% of all small businesses fail within 3 years. Lockdowns help clear out all those hopeless businesses faster.

Happy Birthday!

Unlike the other construction worker shot, no harness here. This was the Empire State Building construction. Reminds me of Camille Paglia’s point: “It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall. Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due..."

The science popularisers like Brian Cox, or Karl. Know what I’d like to see? A social science populariser, who can ask questions like ‘with all this gee whizbang new science and technology, why do people in the 21st century still only get 4 weeks holiday a year?’ Most of the questions we need answers to are in the social sciences and humanities.

Happy birthday!

This (further) blatant corruption by the Republicans leaves Biden few options except to significantly expand the membership of the Supreme Court to include more moderate judges, if he wins both houses. A stinking sewer under Trump, absolutely disgraceful.

ScoMo just finished his address to parliament with 'God Bless Australia'. Our very own Trump.

The role of education isn't to prepare you for life or a job. It's to prepare you to change lives and jobs.

The NCCC is the National Covid-19 Coordination Commission. The group planning our way out of the pandemic (really just looting the Treasury for the gas industry.) Jobs for the (gas) boys - Nev is a gas industry man. Maybe ScoMo and Gladys can share the same cell.

What the virus is doing now is showing that the health sciences, including epidemiology, aren’t capable of getting us through this pandemic. Notice that their advice can get our numbers very low, sometimes to zero, but if the virus flares up again they default to the standard ‘we have to live with this virus’ nonsense. Their cupboard is bare. We need expert thinking in a much wider range of areas, to do what all pandemics eventually force on us - defining the new normal. Politicians are using the health system as a way to try to save the old normal. Our lifestyles are incompatible with infectious disease, we won’t accept that. The virus doesn’t give a shit, it’ll keep mowing us down until we learn.

Contact tracing WON'T stop the virus. Ask the Germans. They have contact tracing nailed. It didn't help. Read this, it's not long, it says everything the authorities here are saying is our way to 'Covid normal'. Then remember the Germans are headed into national lockdown.

This image has become quite famous. It's not bad.

Why do we even sing the national anthem at games that aren’t national games? Nobody pays much attention to the pandemic, the biggest event of our lives that puts us all at risk, but this sort of bullshit gets them hot under the collar? Zero fucks, sorry, if you want all that patriotic claptrap, go and live in Trump’s America. https://thenewdaily.com.au/sport/rugby-league/2020/10/29/national-anthem-state-of-origin-clashes/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PM%20Extra%20-%2020201029

Guess who? Without cheating.

If you find modern life challenging, meditate on this photo a while.

Maurice Tillet, Russian-born French wrestler, 1945. Said to be the inspiration for Shrek.

Humans always have hierarchies, because humans value things, and those values create hierarchies - some things are better than other things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of democracy as being ‘rule by the people’, together with ‘freedom of speech’ for those people. Neither of those is true, democracy is as hierarchical as the systems it says aren’t. All the people do is elect the hierarchy, to represent them. So some input, but very tiny. And this is how it should be, because if you want wisdom and expertise to guide your society, you need hierarchies of wisdom and expertise. Populism promises people a way to avoid all that. Populism is a dangerous liar. Most of what runs democracies is bureaucracies, the accumulated wisdom of generations. The people who encourage you to hate bureaucracies just want to replace those generations of wisdom with their own hierarchy of personal whim. Like Trump.

Less than 2% of Australia's vast health spending goes to public health preventative measures. Barely a cent has been spent on that during Covid either. It's what I mean when I say the government has no plan to actually fight the virus, only to give you a bed in hospital if you get sick, and to save businesses.

Sweden never tried for herd immunity, as some have claimed. It also had restrictions, just like the rest of us. And like the rest of us, it's realised it now needs more restrictions.

Amazon has 1 million employees. If Bezos lived here, he'd qualify for the largest tax cut from ScoMo.

It’s heretical to say it I know, but I’ve always found Midnight Oil boring. All didactic art is. It reminds me of that Soviet art of women with shovels and tractors. More PR than art. No real nuance in the music, art is powerful when it reveals, not when it creates slogans. Great art changes the world by changing how people feel and think. By revealing something new to them, not by providing a soundtrack to a point of view. Has one person had their mind changed by the Oil’s songs? I seriously doubt it, they’re rallying cries for people who already believe the things they sing about.

People are amazed I think Australia is in real danger with Covid. Our numbers are so low! Much of Europe’s numbers were low, going into their summer. Much of it is now about to be locked down. Low numbers come from strong movement and gathering restrictions, and masks. Politicians can’t wait to relax the restrictions. And they won’t mandate masks. Pandemics are a marathon, not a sprint.

Genuinely curious what people think about this graph. Was chatting to people convinced overpopulation is one of the great disasters of our time. I find the overpopulation idea almost as offensive as daylight savings. The rate of population growth has been plummeting since the late 1960s. A *much* more serious problem is shown in this graph.

The battle between the virus and our idea of the ‘Economy’ is brutal and bloody. And the virus is winning, easily. Because the Economy doesn’t exist. How many more people need to die before we realise this? What are YOU doing to save those lives, are you bored with it all and hoping it’ll all be over soon? Will you cheer on ScoMo when he announces our summer of ‘Covid normal’ eased restrictions, like Europe? Then you’re the problem.

You’ll now see an orgy of pressure to ‘open borders’ in Australia. Just note that this is exactly the script Europe followed, before their summer. Their Christmas will be mostly about tens of thousands of families organising funerals.