November 2020

Hmm.

The major difference between us and the UK? Our federal structure. It’s our Premiers who have saved us from the UK’s fate. Idiots say ‘oh I wish the States and the feds would stop arguing’. That’s what a federal structure is *supposed* to do. Checks and balances. It’s saved our bacon, prevented ScoMo, who’s indistinguishable from Boris (look - same slogans), from implementing the same idiot strategies here.

I think the virus hasn’t been our real enemy in the past year. It’s a population trained for the past 5 decades to see themselves as individual, ‘free’ consumers. Many responded to the pandemic, and still do, just by exercising their own personal grievance, it’s a tremendous platform for it. Without that we’d have beaten this virus maybe 9 months ago, worldwide.

Can you imagine any other democratic country where the incumbent tries to make mail-in votes illegal, after they've been cast? It's breathtaking corruption. A bit like closing parliament entirely during a national emergency, can we all name somebody who did that? https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/us-news/us-election/2020/11/02/donald-trump-victory-plan/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020201102

The ‘leader of the free world’.

Because in my experience people have very little knowledge of how politics actually works, ScoMo the professional marketing man continually pulls the wool over our eyes. Take the masterful spin of ‘Covid normal by Christmas’. That’s just a re-write of his ‘Covid safe’ spin from May. I’ve not seen ONE journalist or scientist ask him what he actually means. There is no Covid normal, there is no Covid safe, they’re both oxymorons, like ‘lovely wife-beater’. I know what he means, he means ‘open up’. It’s beautiful strategy, and we fall for it hook, line and sinker. This whole pandemic his sole contribution has been to try to smash open the public health restrictions, like Boris does in the UK. They both keep re-spinning that smashing as lovely, gentle sounding things like ‘being with our families at Christmas’. Yes Australia is doing extremely well. That’s not his doing, people forget that. The Premiers who’ve kept us safe have had to fight this fucker every step of the way. ‘God Bless Australia’ Morrison is dangerous, many countries fell for this same trap, thinking low numbers meant we had the virus ‘under control’. Then they opened up to ‘normal life’, now hundreds of thousands of them will be dead by Christmas.

I suspect quite a lot of people in Oz actually like Trump and what he stands for, and are just a bit shy to say it. They hate bureaucracy, they hate politicians, they think mainstream media is trying to fool them etc. You win elections all over the world attacking these things. It should really, really scare us. But we seem to be asleep at the wheel.

If you're smart, you'll read this chart as 'Victoria is leading the world in public health'. If you're somebody who doesn't think much, you'll say 'Dan Andrews mismanaged the virus'.

3 cases per day. We had that many in NSW today alone. The Swiss are highly organised people. They also all wear masks. Did you know we're following an 'aggressive suppression' strategy here? Except we aren't, it's more spin. - we have no mandated use of masks - our testing rates are falling - the virus spreads mostly through the air, but that's not built into any of our 'Covidsafe' guidelines for businesses, schools and everyday life - there's a 3-step plan to relax a big chunk of the only restrictions we have in place, by Xmas.

Reserve Bank dropped interest rates to 0.1% today. To me it’s a great example of how ideas are everything, they’ve been forced to do this because of the government’s fanatical belief that government spending is bad, and only individual private spending is good. So they’re making money incredibly cheap in the hope people will borrow and spend. It won’t work, people have no employment, and huge debts.

Superb, amazing. Captures exactly my ongoing passionate interest in this pandemic, in case you think I’m just obsessive. Pandemics are the key to understanding everything. If you’re prepared to do the hard work. The marriage of eternity (Aion) and the finite (Chronos), that’s exactly it. https://aeon.co/essays/viruses-are-not-just-threats-but-actors-in-evolutions-long-story

NSW may shortly be the only place in Australia with any Covid. If it’s the ‘gold standard’, ask ‘gold standard of what?’

I think we can safely gauge the quality of the anti-lockdown crowd, that they haven’t noticed that the lockdown is over. Not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Happy birthday Julia!

Americans have voted in a QAnon person. Pay attention people, get away from all the Left and Right rubbish. Populism is a lethal social virus, it will destroy every society that catches it. Starting with the Left and the Right people. Trump is the President for people for whom reality is just a big TV show. ScoMo is their PM.

People scratch their heads about why polls now don't reflect election results. It's populism again, populists see pollsters as part of the same elite 'Establishment' they hate. So they lie to them. And vote for reality TV stars and other celebrities, who they can relate to. Between an ordinary person's understanding of how their country works, and how it does work, is a growing, lethal chasm.

My photo for every modern election. The Simpsons know. It’s not Left vs Right, that stuff is long over. People are at war with their own institutions. Populism. They’ll vote for anybody who promises to stick it to the man. As Homer’s brother discovered with the populist car Homer designed for him, it ends in disaster. Society is eating itself.

I’ve always been a fan of the possibility of social media. But the reality is destroying our societies. I always talk about populism, and it’s social media that makes populism powerful. Every lunatic can mobilise thousands of like-minded lunatics from around the world. No expertise needed in anything, no checks and balances, just matching opinions. We’ve just seen the leader of the free world, who operates almost entirely via Twitter, try to steal an election, violating multiple laws in the process. His followers love it. Without social media there’d be no way to coordinate them into a group.

Everything is ideas. Right now with Trump we’re seeing the endgame of our ridiculous ideas about democracy. That it’s just about the ‘people’. It isn’t, the people have only a tiny role to play in democracy. Most of the work is done by their representatives and the institutions that service them (that’s where all the knowledge and expertise is). That’s the part of democracy that’s been under attack for decades, there’s no faster way to win an election than to attack officials. Politicians used to not go there, they knew it was hugely destructive. The ultra conservative church types though don’t care, they want the State destroyed. They’re the ones who devised these strategies 50 years ago. Church vs State has never gone away, but we’re not seeing it.

Gladys yesterday said 'if our businesses are Covidsafe, we can open the economy even more'. She was talking about QR codes. 3 important things here: 1) QR codes do nothing to make any business safe. They let NSW Health track anybody who gets sick there, that's all. 2) Gladys and National Cabinet say they're following an 'aggressive suppression' strategy. Opening up further is the exact opposite of aggressive suppression, it's aggressive *relaxation* of control on the virus. 3) It's clear politicians have convinced people contact tracing can control the virus. It can't. It's their deluded way of saying 'the economy can go back to normal, provided we have good contact tracing'. That's a dangerous lie.

I love elections. But maybe not this much.

If I had to give relationship advice to anybody, it would be find the person different to who you are in all the right ways. That person is Kell, for me. Her music is rubbish, she watches rom coms, she hates windows and doors open and is always cold, she’s terrified of spiders and sharks, she doesn’t like car racing, I’m in trouble about 100 times every day. And I love her. Happy anniversary. I’ll be on the way to work when you see this, so will escape that withering stare over the glasses :)

If you’re an LNP voter, maybe check that you really know who’s taking over your parties. This has been building for 25 years.

As we open up for summer here, in an orgy of border opening, relaxation of restrictions and excitement, I offer people a rewind button to the beginning of Europe's summer. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans who took these 'Covid safe' holidays in their summer will now be dead before Christmas.

Larry is a Republican Governor. The Republican Party is learning the very hard way that populism is a false God. You win for a while, and then it destroys you. Ditch the Left and Right people, populism is consuming all of it, Left, Right and Centre. A lethal death cult.

The major US networks cut off Trump's speech today inside one minute, saying he was misleading the public. Let that sink in.

And this is the commissioner of the American Federal Election Commission.

The power of institutions. Both Donald and Clive hammered today. By institutions. They keep us safe, nothing else can.

Governance is my profession. This is a fascinating graphic doing the rounds. It’s slightly misleading, there aren’t far fewer Republicans (red), they’re just spread out a lot more. And their Congress (peoples’ house) is apportioned according to population. Where it become anomalous is their Senate. Like ours, a States house. Each State gets 2 Senators, regardless of population. This leads to a curiosity. The 38 million people who live in the 22 least populous states of the US get 44 Senators. The 38 million people who live in California get 2. The Republicans will likely retain control of the Senate, for this reason, and block everything Biden most wants to do. This is why the Democrats always struggle to win the Senate, the same way for years Labor struggled to win Queensland, because of Joh’s rigging of their system to favour rural seats. Note that Australia has a similar system, the smaller States like Tassie get hugely disproportional influence in our Senate. These are the challenges of a federalist system, there are no black and white answers here. Federalism saved us from Covid 19 so far, by blocking a populist ‘open up’ federal government with State premiers.

From the guy who brought you “the reason there are so many cases is because we are doing too many tests”, comes the new hit single, “I’m only losing because they’re counting all the votes against me”. Rodger Sherman

Universities are also a type of federal system. Schools and Faculties are like the States, and a central administration is like the federal government. Nearly every senior manager of a university doesn’t understand this today. They get paid outrageous sums of money to try to replace that incredibly complex federalist system with bone-numbingly stupid, consultant-driven management jargon. It’s destroying universities. The people who understand the incredible complexity, with origins going back more than 1000 years, are either all fired, or leave in disgust. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6980029/charles-sturt-university-denies-allegations-of-fraud-and-systemic-financial-issues/

Good on Dennis Atkins for pointing out ScoMo is trying to introduce Trumpism to Australia. Alarming numbers of people even in the town I live in are supporters of Trump’s populism.

From the last US election :)

My parents own this place, funded all of the renovations and even did some of the design. Thought I’d post this because you wouldn’t know that from the publican’s post. It’s a fantastic place now.

RIP Geoffrey. One of life’s greatest gentlemen.

All the ‘division’ stuff again. Societies are *always* divided. People disagree all the time, don’t we notice? We go into fits of anxiety over disagreement, it’s ridiculous. We even argue for diversity, but diversity means differences of view, which means disagreement and division. The anxiety is because we’re privileged I think, we don’t need to fight for a good life, those fights were done for us, in the past. We have little experience with disagreement.

All year idiots, led by our Prime Idiot ScoMo, have said this is impossible. Despite 95% of the country having achieved it and staring at them the whole time. Experts said the same thing at the end of the first wave, and what did we do? We opened up. Let’s see if Gladys and ScoMo can resist making the same mistake this time, and we can be rid of this virus entirely. I’m not holding my breath, the economy people are fanatics.

For years politicians and farmers have argued that farmers employ backpackers because locals are too lazy to take the jobs. The truth is more brutal. They don’t employ locals because they can get away with shitty pay and working conditions when they employ backpackers.

One of Rupert’s rags. Rupert did a lot to put Trump there, but he sniffs the wind quickly.

I’ve said pandemics reboot societies. It’s not really Joe Biden who ultimately beat Donald Trump. It was the virus. Trump was cruising to another victory until Covid. Pandemics do this because they force every belief we have to be tested against reality in real-time. The belief that there’s an ‘Economy’ separate to our society is nonsense, and has been smashed multiple times this year.

Exactly the way we should be looking at this. The (few) countries whose political systems prioritised public health have escaped most of the pandemic.

Time is the world’s way of stopping everything happening at once. Colour is produced by time. It doesn’t belong to objects. The yellow of a yellow taxi could also be the yellow of a flower, or of a shirt. Colours are windows to eternity, from within time. They don’t age, they can be shared across any object.

Finally NSW is exposed as the outlier in our national fight against the virus, rather than as the ‘gold standard’. Because Gladys shares ScoMo’s views, which are Boris Johnson’s and Trump’s views. The ‘balance the economy against the virus’ people. The first national lockdown eliminated the virus in NSW, but ScoMo and Gladys skilfully spun that as NSW having ‘gold standard’ contact tracing. It’s BS, and dangerous BS. This stuff matters, it’s all of our lives. Populism must be defeated worldwide.

This is velcro under a microscope. We have a prejudiced misunderstanding about big and small things. The smaller you go, the *more* complex things become, not less. The microbes and cells in our own bodies are infinitely more complex than even our brains. Why do we think bigger things are more complex? The dynamics in a staff tea room are more complex than the movements of the entire national economy.

Ideas are everything. For the past few decades (starting with John Howard), governments have embraced 'monetary policy' as the way to keep our 'economies' moving. All it really means is they've tried to make money really cheap, so we'll all go out and borrow and invest. It's cost the Reserve Bank a fortune to do this (see graph - units are millions), and it's climbing hugely over time. What's the alternative? Government actually spending money - fiscal policy. And that money going into the pockets of ordinary working people, so they can spend it. Their wages haven't budged, but their debts have skyrocketed (second graph - ratio of private debt to GDP, now at over 200%) just to make ends meet. What we call economics is just a conjuring trick to hide political decisions.

Have a look here at how Victoria has SMASHED Covid. There's not a case of any type in nearly a fortnight. Same for every other State and Territory in the country, except NSW (it's *very* close). The entire country could be free of Covid if NSW would commit to it. Did people know NSW committed to do this in July, more than 3 months ago, and still isn't doing it? You wouldn't know that from all the 'gold standard' rubbish in the media, from politicians.

A nice sister post to my one earlier about how Australia's economy is really just a debt bubble. A giant casino, centred on houses.

The power of federalism again. Brilliant politicians at the State level can act without approval from their idiot federal colleagues.

Watching 4Corners about the blokey, sexist culture amongst federal LNP ministers last night, made me think again that we’re maybe looking at the relations between the sexes in the wrong way. The deeper problem to me isn’t that people desire one another or flirt or even have affairs, it’s that this behaviour has spilled over into the practical everyday world of work. And it’s done that because we no longer have a sphere of social life dedicated to courting, to flirtation, where the sexes can explore the desires they feel in controlled ways. Animals have it, humans used to have it. While those old Regency dances look a bit quaint to us, they were highly sophisticated negotiations between the sexes, there were implicit and explicit rules to courting. Humans have always had dedicated rituals to control desire and flirtation and courting. We don’t now. Flirtation was seen as exploring the dimensions of another person, without necessarily meaning anything about breaking existing bonds (what we call ‘cheating’). If we keep ignoring that humans are essentially desiring creatures, like all creatures, and try to regulate all this through bland contractual arrangements of prohibition, we’ll keep ignoring our most essential natures. Humans desire one another, they don’t stop desiring other people when they’re in relationships, though our modern mores seem to suggest they should. We must recognise this again, as we used to, and stop seeing it as a violation. These desires just lack structure and controls, that’s what we’re seeing.

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a paradise, not a ‘natural’ environment. And it was the most sophisticated culture in human history. 100,000 years maybe. Second place is maybe 5000, the Chinese. We stupidly think, oh they didn’t have cars and planes and computers - we see our technology as indication of our superiority. But notice today that we can’t manage landscapes, ours are disasters. Landscapes are infinitely more complex than technologies. They did it for 100,000 years, nobody else has even come close. We may never know how they did it, we’re living inside humankind’s greatest mystery. If that isn’t a way to spark desire for reconciliation, I dunno what is.

Here's an IQ test Australia. This is Covid numbers (unknown source infections) for the past 2 weeks in Australia. If you were the boss, would you: 1) tell all those zero States that NSW is the 'gold standard' and they should all be like NSW, or 2) tell NSW to get its act in order and get to zero?

Many are saying Trump still got 70 million votes, those people need to be looked after. It's no different to any other election, it's even quite common for half of an entire country to not get the person they voted for. Hilary Clinton got 66 million votes, Trump spent the next 4 years not only doing nothing for those people, but actively trying to screw them at every opportunity. Bullies are also sooks. They'll rationalise losing in every way imaginable.

That beautiful moment when a female federal cabinet minister is asked if Canberra's blokey culture is still bad. And the bloke-PM just talks right over the top of her. She then says my PM is terrific. Good girl, know your place.

The virus deniers will be very disappointed in this, they were banking on thousands of people topping themselves, to justify hindering public health efforts against the virus.

Ideas get weaponised. Like ‘freedom’. Wealthy people encourage us to think of freedom as freedom of speech. In the meantime we’re often slaves to huge personal debt and in meaningless bullshit jobs. ‘Talk is cheap’ - free, actually. It’s a substitute for actual freedom.

Remembrance Day was a public distraction invented to hide the disgusting slaughter of millions of innocent young men. Like ‘Lest We Forget’, the meaning has been distorted over time and turned into ‘noble sacrifice’. There wasn’t anything noble about it. Remember the poor buggers who died, but don't disrespect them by forgetting the bastards who sent them to be slaughtered.

Happy birthday Di :)

People have been told that a vaccine will end the pandemic. That's because basic public health practice has been hijacked by stupid politicians, who want a quick medicine they can give you so they can minimise disruption to the 'Economy'. It's a dangerous myth, even a working vaccine may not end the pandemic for several years (read the article).

Takes a true leader to pass blame to officials for their own corruption. ScoMo is a master, never responsible for anything. "I don't hold a hose, mate". His words in the bushfires. Yesterday he didn't hold a dick either, with his horny Ministers. Blaming officials is the beginning of Trump-land.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see the truth. Thanks Dr Fauci. We can stop slapping ourselves on the back over contact tracing and instead congratulate ourselves for our successful lockdowns.

Sweden’s pandemic, from its own public health authority. Smash the virus, or it will smash you. Don't try to 'live with it'. Kill it. See that they were still lifting restrictions as recently as 22 October? Never, ever, let politicians run a pandemic.

Happy Birthday! Also my Alice's birthday today.

Happy birthday old friend :)

This looks a bit dry. But it means something important. NSW never had significant Covid-19, tiny amounts at most (0.04-0.32% of the State infected). That's important, because right now we're encouraged to believe they're the gold standard at controlling Covid. They've had no Covid to control. You can't control this virus, you can only eliminate it, or it's out of control. The only 2 options. The rest of the world proves it, there is not one exception.

Today Angus Taylor said ‘the only way to slash emissions is to slash economic activity’. Replace ‘emissions’ with ‘Covid’ and you can see how the same strategies are used across both issues. In both cases they say we have to learn to ‘balance’ emissions/Covid with the Economy. By which they really mean, do nothing.

Birds in lockdown. No doubt other birds somewhere nearby getting soaked, saying ‘get out from under that leaf’, ‘build your natural water resistance’, ‘think of all the education your chicks are missing while you hide in fear from the rain’. Sheltering is one of our most powerful and humble acts. To defeat a great enemy, shelter is often your most powerful weapon. The Vietnamese used it to defeat the West in the Vietnam War.

Victoria's 14-day average is now zero. The anti-lockdown/pro-economy people are all piss and wind. Traitors to our communities.

"The Prime Minister said states that were reopening could learn lessons from NSW, which he dubbed as "battle hardened" from recent months." Sorry, bullshit. NSW has looked great because it has close to ZERO virus. It NEVER DID. Millions of Australians have this picture of NSW valiantly battling the virus and winning. It's a complete fiction, and a dangerous one (ScoMo wants it to be true, because then he can open everything up.) The coloured 'opening up' spreadsheet is back, the same one that created Victoria's disaster. Sigh.

Monet. It’s so often the light that makes a great painter I think. The painting is luminous, painters allow us to see that light doesn’t shine on things, but emerges from them. Objects as containers for light.

My first degree was in materials engineering. I’m not sure how well known it is how the window glass we use today is made. Molten glass is poured onto a pool of molten tin, where it settles into a beautifully flat and smooth sheet without any need for grinding or polishing.

“We’re following the science on Covid”, our pollies say. Ask the scientists, nearly half of them disagree. Or put another way, I’d say we followed the science just over 50% of the time, and not the rest of the time. Which you won’t know, if you only get the ‘science’ from the pollies.

Lol, he left out “tell everybody for months that elimination is impossible in Australia, then change to an elimination strategy and hide it by renaming it ‘aggressive suppression’.”

The first 2 waves have killed nearly 250,000 Americans. A tragedy unfolding. There are still people who compare it to flu. It’s already killed more than 4 times as many people as a bad flu year, *with* public health action. And that was over their summer.

TANZANC = Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Atlantic & Northern Canada. ‘Hammer and Dance’ = using contact tracing to ‘manage’ the virus. TANZANC is now famous as a *zero Covid* strategy, the only successful strategy in the world. Lockdowns create it. And yet we still have our PM and one Premier talking about ‘living with the virus’, and following the hammer and dance. In direct opposition to the zero Covid strategy THEY announced for Australia in July. Nobody seems to notice or care.

Suits of armor. Adolph Menzel, 1866.

My American friends, what the hell happened in 1964’s election?

Happy birthday Shaz!

Happy birthday Soph :)

I’m surprised how many people never saw The Name of the Rose. Based on Eco’s superb book, a medieval whodunit set in a monastery but with meanings across so many levels, it’s up to you how deep you dive in. Dark and gripping. Sean Connery’s best-ever performance, by a mile.

Yaneer is a scientist working on the pandemic. Don’t be a lazy bystander to this most important event of our lifetimes, understand what’s going on. We’re not out of the woods yet. You *must* eliminate the virus, it’s the only way out. We’re within weeks of doing that in Australia, like we were in lockdown 1 in May. The forces of ‘opening up’ are as rabid now as they were then.

One of Australia’s leading public health doctors on what it takes to beat Covid. - contact tracing is only useful with very low case numbers - “it is impossible to lock down too early or too hard” - the business community will resist the fight.

Surely this must be Dan Andrews’ fault? Somehow. Only Victorian hotels have quarantine lapses, I’m sure people have told me that. ‘Incompetence’ and ‘mismanagement’, something like that. P.S. quarantine is a federal responsibility, in law. Has been for years. ScoMo and Josh only had one job in this pandemic, and they’re not even doing that.

Education isn’t about subjects, it’s about learning to pay attention. And keeping at it past the point where others get bored (Einstein’s advice). Without training your attention, everything in the world will just be a confirmation of what you already think. When you master attention you’ll notice something - it’s not you paying attention. Training your attention is the process of removing you from the process. It’s you that gets in the way of paying attention to how things are. I return to the pandemic each day like a dog to its vomit, because the greatest issue of our lives is happening right now. We need to pay attention to it, past the point of boredom.

Have you noticed this too, all the claims about the apparent disaster of lockdown, that aren’t matched by any actual facts? Lockdowns are our greatest weapon against this virus. Against most infectious disease. This was well known, until this pandemic, when vested interests decided to attack public health ideas. Mostly by calling ‘quarantine’ - thousands of years old - ‘lockdown’, to change a positive weapon against viruses into a ‘ooh I’m being locked up to destroy my freedom!’.

If you observe groups like this (very similar to sporting change rooms and a lot of male ‘bonding’) you don’t see strength. You see fear, and weakness. The desperate weak personalities using the group to shed their own feelings of weakness and inferiority. Strong people don’t need a group to feel strong. This behaviour starts in schools and for many never ends. It dominates social media too. Continuous negotiation of who’s in and out of the ‘in’ group. Click to see the short vid.

What your health care workers look like when you try to replace your society with an economy.

We await the Treasurer's wrath against (Liberal) South Australia in the same way we await winning the lottery. Delighted to see it, not expecting it.

My criticisms of ScoMo and Gladys are about these exact words. Words which are completely *opposite* to the national Covid elimination strategy. A strategy THEY announced in July, the exact same month. The rest of the world is in awe of our elimination strategy, but this pair are undermining it with the European and US strategy, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Nobody cares?

This voucher idea is what the UK tried in its summer, to ‘stimulate their economy’ and ‘live alongside the virus’. It killed thousands. We’re in a tug-of-war, trying to crush this bastard virus (the national strategy), while at the same time trying to ‘open’ everything (Gladys and ScoMo trying to import the disastrous UK and US strategies). If you want to save dining and movies, just give those businesses the money, directly.

Abstract portraits show much better I think that our division of a ‘material’ world and a ‘spiritual’ world is nonsense. Just a few simple smears of paint can ‘capture’ the essence of a person, and it will last as long as the paint lasts, far longer than the person. There is an eternal part of us that can be captured by art, and made to live independently of us.

“We want to get the economy back on track by getting the virus under control.” Joe Biden gets that you don’t ‘balance’ health and the economy.

Turner is sublime.

You can’t look at this for any length of time and still think images just ‘represent’ things. (Click to see it in greater detail.) That paint is alive, a being of sensation. A sensation doesn’t belong to the person or object, it’s their taking part in an eternal world. Why you can actually feel Rembrandt by looking at this, hundreds of years after his death. Paint is just one ‘body’ of sensation. Stone is another. Music another.

I wonder if we understand or even see our obsession with images. Old aristocratic homes were saturated with paintings. Today our favourite thing to share on social media is pictures. I think it’s usually the most taken for granted, habitual things that are the least understood. I’m sure the appeal is that images give a permanence or eternity to things that we don’t find in the things themselves. They’re our way to access eternity in everyday life. More proof is that fundamentalists are usually iconoclasts - they despise and destroy images. They see them as a direct threat to access to the eternal, which they see as restricted to God.

It’s quite remarkable Connery’s reputation survived these views. Giving a woman a good slap when she needs it, for example. If you look a bit beneath that though you get a glimpse of a time when male and female were seen as 2 quite different universes. And I wonder if we’ve lost something in forgetting that, in our gender-fluid world. Have we tried to address particular historical obnoxious manifestations of the clash of those 2 universes - slapping, for example - by diluting gender entirely, rather than understanding it?

Han Van Meegeren was the most famous forger of the 20th century. His fakes made between $100 million and $200 million. This is him painting a fake during his trial, to prove he’d created them. The much more interesting question for me is, if even experts struggled to tell the difference between his works and those of old Masters, why would a ‘real’ Vermeer for example get you $20 million, but a Van Meegeren maybe a few thousand? Why do we place such astronomical value on the ‘authentic’ or the original, if it’s indistinguishable from a fake? Understand that and I think we start to understand something very important about images.

Nazi looting. One of the stores for loot found in a church after the war. A pile of eyeglasses from victims at Auschwtiz. Gold rings from Auschwitz victims. It’s estimated there are billions of dollars worth of looted artworks that still haven’t been recovered.

For those who wondered about the full-house crowd at the footy, this is what ‘balancing’ the economy with public health looks like. We shouldn’t be surprised.

It usually takes a decade or so to develop a new vaccine. With funding it’s now been done inside a year. You could make a list of things we’ve been told society can’t afford - free childcare, free dentistry, affordable houses, fewer hours of work, healthier cities, beautiful landscapes, less debt and higher wages, great schools, access to great health care etc. We could easily afford all of those things. So ask yourself every day - where is the money going instead?

The new 'LNP' strain of the virus. It's the same virus, behaving in exactly the same way it always has. This is just political spin. SA is experiencing exactly what Victoria experienced. It's also borrowed Boris' 'circuit breaker' spin for its lockdown. It's just a lockdown, good on them for doing it.

This from the SA (Labor) opposition leader is worth comparing with the LNP pile-on, on Victoria. Kind of tells you that the modern LNP is really just an ex-party, captured by lobby groups. Who else would argue against public health basics? People losing money, that's who.

Around 50% of the art in the world’s galleries is estimated to be fake. Nobody even notices. Art in our time, including music, is obsessed with originality, with ‘authenticity’. The worst sin is to do ‘cover’ versions. Without even thinking that’s all most symphony orchestras do, for example, and jazz bands. Authenticity is the secret key to understanding our culture, I think. Our obsession with the authentic. Do we realise we share that obsession with fundamentalists? That’s their obsession too.

Have posted before about how domestication of animals is one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. Nobody knows how it was done. Increasingly it’s thought the animals did it, not us. Like cats, if you study their biology and genes, it hasn’t changed in thousands of years, and is the same as in wild cats. Cats domesticated themselves, they decided to live with us.

Follow up from yesterday. Another clear example of how politicians distort public health measures. They made up this 'new strain' rubbish to justify going into lockdown, because they knew it was embarrassing to have to admit Victoria wasn't the result of mismanagement.

Today they'll persecute this poor lying sod (everybody lies, first rule of governance) to escape their lie that this is some new strain of virus. Here's a little governance quiz, which strategy will work? 1) A long and changing list of 'Covid safe' rules for millions to each individually follow. 2) One rule that everybody has to follow, because they have no choice - stay home. Lockdown. About 95% of the world is following 1), and being smashed by Covid. The tiny number of countries following 2) are winning.

The revelations this week about Australian soldiers allegedly murdering civilians in Afghanistan. Do we remember that ScMo sent the federal police to raid the ABC’s offices when it first broke this story? And yet he’s more popular than ever. Our own Trump-in-waiting.

Pray for the Americans.

Nearly 2 billion people in the world have no functioning place to call home. To them the idea of having a home at all would be the ultimate freedom. How disgusting are people who say sheltering from illness and death in our own homes is a restriction on our freedom? Do we even see what rich spoiled brats we look like to the rest of the world?

Listen to this. The genius of slogans is that they make you feel like they’re saying something, when they really aren’t. ‘Living alongside the virus’. Sounds obvious, common sense? I bet you can’t actually explain what it means.

We should have eliminated the virus completely at point 1 in May, at the end of lockdown 1. Just needed 3-4 more weeks (see the small bumps at 1, which we didn’t stamp out and which then created 2.) Instead we opened up, and then needed another 6 months and one more lockdown. The people who say we should live with the virus might soon struggle to do that. There might not be any. No thanks to them.

Master and slave caught in the eruption at Pompeii. 79 AD. I’m suspicious what their final act might have been.

Let’s play being an editor. Pick the redundant words in this sentence. My vote goes to ‘and unexpected’.

I’m happy to be on JK Rowling’s side in the tedious gender wars. The other side are some quality human beings.

With tens of thousands already to die over Christmas in Europe, the same ‘open up’ crowd like Boris are lifting restrictions, seeding another new wave of death in the New Year. I started this pandemic saying the idea we need to ‘balance’ our economy against public health would compromise the entire pandemic response. And here it is. Ideas and what you believe matter, it’s life and death.

If you think our politicians are doing an amazing job with this pandemic, it means you're not paying attention. And it's mostly the LNP who are emulating their heroes in the UK and US here. I have no time for anybody's petty party political games, it bores me. I defend our institutions, and attack idiots who attack them.

Meanwhile in the UK, Boris negotiates a deal with Covid to stop infecting people over Christmas. "Happy Christmas, look what I got you - a lethal infection!" will reverberate around the land. Funeral directors looking to a bumper New Year, already run off their feet with 20,000 new infections a day. Like our own Fat Controller, won an election with increased popularity. We're getting collectively dumber as time goes on.

Many vaccine-deniers, with 'natural wellness' philosophies, are also pumped full of silicone and fillers, and have serious surgery, to look young, firm up the boobs and pecs etc. But no toxic vaccine in their bodies, oh no.

It seems like common sense, hey? Those publicly-funded leeches pulled back into line with the private sector. That’s what they’re counting on, that we don’t have a clue. Under cover of the pandemic, yet again, a toxic policy gets rolled out. This is designed to suppress all wages, at a time in our history when wage growth is the lowest it’s ever been. Public sector wages not only keep the economy moving, they also historically generate growth in private sector wages. Linking them will flatten wage growth indefinitely, across the board.

People think the LNP Premiers and PM are doing a good job in the pandemic, and the Labor Premiers are dreadful, keeping borders closed. That's because people prefer mindless slogans to actually understanding anything. Our lockdowns, including closed borders, beat the virus here. The LNP pollies fought those things every step of the way, and have tried to introduce the UK and US model instead. That model has so far killed over 300,000 people.

Well done Victoria. And well done Dan Andrews, superb leadership under intense daily pressure from a huge variety of morons.

Good on him. Domestic flights should have the same rule. This is one way to identify and hammer the pockets of populist lunacy in society. Make their beliefs have consequences. If they want to enjoy society's freedoms, they have to stop freeloading off it with their tin foil hats on.

Greg Norman's Matt Shirvington moment has caused a stir today. I'm always curious how many women actually rate this sort of thing, or whether it's more a male obsession. Or how many do rate it but would never admit it.

Pauline. She and any other vaccine-refusers won't get travel insurance even if the airlines did let them fly. Know how morons like this get a say in how things work? When smart people don't engage in the issues of the day. If you don't engage, the dumb people win.

Have a look, Boris’ 3 ‘tiers’ of restrictions to replace their (ridiculously short) national lockdown. With infections still at 20,000 a day. Rule after complicated rule after complicated rule. Lockdown is one rule - stay home. Everybody can understand it, and it also actually works. This won’t work, because it leaves out that people in their daily lives move between all the different tiered areas. And there’s so much virus circulating even Tier 3 will spread it. Boris is also relaxing quarantine for international arrivals to appease the tourist industry, from 14 days to 5 based on fast testing. I think this may end up one of the greatest catastrophes of this pandemic to date. It could be like the atomic bomb of superspreader events.

Gladys copying Boris to the letter. Relaxing restrictions because numbers are low is like not wearing sunscreen, because you didn’t get sunburn with it on. Restrictions are what MAKE the numbers low. All that can save us is elimination of the virus. Let’s hope those zeroes stay zero.

If you create a ‘likeness’ in an image - it ‘looks like’ what it’s an image of - how does that work? Habitually we say it creates a representation of the thing. That doesn’t actually explain anything, it’s just a word. An image re-presents the person or thing. There’s something in every object and person that is detachable from them, that is identifiably them. It’s eternal, it’ll last as long as the image lasts. Some people call it a soul. Whatever you call it, it’s a miracle, which I don’t think we notice.

Happy birthday!

Sharing this to highlight that eliminating diseases, even very tricky ones like HIV, is standard public health practice. Remember politicians saying from Day 1 of this pandemic Covid couldn't be eliminated? That was a political strategy to prioritise business over public health, not 'the science'. Nobody seems to care. Without that first lockdown where we accidentally smashed most of the Covid, right now we'd look like the US and UK.

George Orwell coined the term Doublethink in 1984, to mean people persuaded through propaganda language to believe two mutually contradictory things at once. Classic examples are 'Covid Safe' and 'Covid Normal'. Orwell wrote brilliantly about how language shapes beliefs. Try this beauty from the UK government, reducing quarantine for new arrivals to only 5 days to 'balance' the economy and peoples' safety. It won't do anything for peoples' safety - at least 50% of people with Covid won't test positive after only 5 days. Also notice that peoples' safety gets one mention, and then the rest is entirely about helping business. That's what 'balancing' public health and the economy means - doing all the economy things, at the expense of all the health things.

After water, sand is the second most used resource on Earth. And it’s running out. It won’t be long until private companies and criminals target our beaches.

Replace ‘the virus’ in this sentence with ‘domestic violence’, and try reading it again. How does it go?

ScoMo thought he’d play the role of Trump’s deputy, in a bit of China bashing. China is the only thing that keeps the Australian economy afloat, now they’re closing down all of our export industries one by one. Nobody seems to notice, and ScoMo’s popularity has gone up. He’s already our Trump, utterly incompetent, loved by unthinking millions. The Make Australia Great Again merch is just around the corner.

I don’t make stuff up. The Australian government chose the UK and US as guides for our pandemic response. You know, those countries where people are dying all over the place. Luckily most of our Premiers decided to follow places like New Zealand. The feds take credit for the superb outcome.

I’m sure that much of what we call mental health problems is really dysfunctional organisations. Ordinary people coming up against impassable roadblocks to doing a basic day’s work set up by dysfunctional institutions. Ditto for kids, in dysfunctional situations. Nothing wrong with peoples’ brains, but everything wrong with the bullshit environments they’re forced to live and work in. People are suggestible though and love the attention an apparent affliction gives them, so this movement is gathering momentum.

One of the glorious things about Covid. It's destroyed group work in corporate training.

Lil's birthday today? Happy birthday if so, from all of us!

Countries that tried to 'balance' action against Covid with the economy were all hammered by Covid, in deaths and economically. My argument from the beginning of this pandemic. I criticise ScoMo and Gladys so often because to this day, this balancing idea is still what they believe. Many people repeat that slogan like parrots. It's a dangerous and wrong idea.

And yet, Gladys and ScoMo are *still* using this nonsense 'balance' idea today. People say 'but look, it's worked'. No it hasn't, our lockdowns beat Covid here, we never at any time 'balanced' the virus against the economy. https://theconversation.com/data-from-45-countries-show-containing-covid-vs-saving-the-economy-is-a-false-dichotomy-150533

Many people argue water shortages would be fixed by building more dams. (Like saying you'll have more money if you get a bigger wallet.) One of the many side-effects of dams is the disappearance of beaches. The sand that ends up on beaches is flushed into the ocean by rivers. When you build big dams, all the sand that would normally wash into the ocean to form beaches, ends up behind the dam wall. The whole fascinating process (and some staggering numbers) in this article.

Anti-vaxxers are threatening to boycott Qantas. For refusing to carry unvaccinated passengers 🤔

“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has repeatedly maintained that eliminating the virus locally was "unrealistic”. But Australia’s largest State is also on track to get there, EVEN IF IT WASN’T BY DESIGN...” (emphasis mine). As many including me have said, eliminating the virus is the only way forward. And NSW got to elimination by lucky accident, through the big lockdown. Since then it’s just been mopping up.

Alison is a senior economist. I highlighted bargaining power, because it links back to unions. All of the political problems we see today, across every issue, stem from the decline of unions. The majority of people have no bargaining power in any political decision. Even senior business people agree on this now.

A thought experiment. If a prominent media commentator in last summer’s bushfires had told people in the path of the fires that ‘there’s no fire here, it’s all a beat-up’, I suspect they’d have been charged under some form of obstruction of emergency response law. Why shouldn’t dipshits like Jones be actually charged for statements like this?

Have a look how similar a circuit board looks to an aerial shot of a city or town. You could call it an analogy, but actually it’s not. It’s the movement and interaction of things, just at different scales. People, and sub-atomic particles. Patterns are the key to understanding how all things are connected.

Just juxtaposing these 2 things here.

Ah rock stars. Remember Clapton telling “black wogs and coons and Arabs and fucking Jamaicans” to leave England? Him and the Van showing here you can produce beautiful music, and still be as dumb as a fresh pile of dog shit.

Democracy isn’t the people running the country. The country wouldn’t run if the people ran it.

“Nobody has ever tried to control a pandemic or an epidemic by inducing herd immunity.” "It astonishes me. I think they were caught up in their own bullshit." There has to be a reckoning that people were allowed to openly advocate against basic public health measures in this pandemic, even highly educated people. Many of them seem to have gone a bit quiet.

Black Plague bacteria on the body of a flea.

In the 1980s my honours research was on superconductivity (materials that show no electrical resistance). It was an exciting time, they’d just discovered superconductors that could work at liquid nitrogen temperatures, before that you needed liquid helium, which is very cold and very expensive. And now this year they finally found a room temperature one, though only at extremely high pressures. These materials have dropped from the public spotlight a bit, probably due to slow progress. They need a conceptual leap I think, more than just experimentation.

The virus deniers remind me of the climate deniers (they’re often the same people). Have a look at the graph, alongside these numbers: - between 1751 and 1987 burning fossil fuels put 737 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere - between 1987 and 2014 we added another 743 billion tonnes of CO2. That’s nearly 1500 billion tonnes of CO2. To release that amount is the equivalent of burning 1.5 billion acres of forest EVERY YEAR for the past 263 years.

I worked with an academic who studied hyperhidrosis. It’s real. I see people out exercising with their water bottles, and I think - why? The hydration message is like the fat message in our diet - deeply habituated and wrong. All that 8 glasses a day stuff, bollocks. Drink when you’re thirsty.

It took decades for Australian businesses to build profitable trade with 700 million Chinese customers. It took 10 minutes for the Trump-loving buffoons in the federal LNP to bring it all crashing down. One of the delicious ironies will be if these climate change denying cretins destroy Australia’s coal market in the process. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55097100

A NSW Liberal. A champion. Compare and contrast with the knuckle-dragging LNP disgrace in Canberra. Our federal system may save us from climate change just as it did from Covid, by States bypassing the idiots in Canberra altogether.

In the past 250+ years, fire domesticated us. We became its slave. The staggering volumes of combustion gases we’ve spewed into the atmosphere should have alarmed us because of the astronomical amount of fire that produced it. It was more than 100 times larger than our last summer bushfires, every year for the past 263 years. Why didn’t we notice? Because the fire was inside. Internal combustion engines.

When zero and even negative interest rates don’t help with the ‘economy’, zealots still don’t shift their views. People don’t have money, it’s as simple as that. Making it cheap to borrow won’t help, because they already have astronomical debts, caused again by them not having enough money. People with money is a healthy economy. Just as people with virus is an unhealthy economy.

The real reason the feds are so interested in super is in that first line, industry super is set to control half of Australia’s economic output within 5 years. Industry super is the 21st century version of unions in a way. It’s working peoples’ money. And that money is starting to talk, forcing massive changes to things like climate change policy. It also regularly outperforms private super, administered by banks and other private providers. It’s not-for-profit, so nobody needs to take a big cut of your money. Also why the federal LNP was delighted to let people raid their super in the pandemic, they’ll encourage anything that undermines it.

So much of what I've posted here in recent years is covered by this article. How trolls are attacking our actual reality, our beliefs and how we test them, and why that's the issue of our day, not Left and Right. And why institutions are our only hope.

Certain leaders did everything they could to stop Australia going for elimination. They and their followers probably pine for the 'economic freedom' of Europe and the US, where businesses are in the toilet and hundreds of thousands of new infections are happening every day.

How many years have most workplaces had air con now? Not schools. None of the people wailing about lost education during the pandemic actually give a shit about schools, they just wanted them open as childcare so parents could go to work. Why are we giving away over $150 billion in tax cuts when schools don’t even have basics like this? And don’t get me started on the heating or toilets. NSW schools don’t even have the AC units in many cases, let alone the network capacity.

Look at what China has done with poverty in only 20 years. Of course it still has holes in it, but the intent and much of the outcome is something we pay only lip service to in the West. Is it more ‘authoritarian’ to live under a one-party State, like the Chinese, or to have more than 50% of your ‘free’ and rich country having less than $1000 in savings, like the US, and having to ingratiate yourself with customers to have enough tips to put food on the table? Not arguing for or against either country here, just saying that ‘freedom’ is one of those glib words we use in the West to paper over stagnant wages and working conditions, no representation in political decisions, people with 2 weeks’ leave a year and unable to afford basic health care, enormous personal debt etc. People are free, but to do what? Just say what they like? That’s a pretty anaemic freedom.

Happy birthday Eva! Have a wonderful day.