December 2020

Elect a third-rate marketing hack as PM, and destroy most of your export industries with your largest trading partner in a matter of weeks. Straya. No slogan will fix this one, Scotty.

Reality has a sense of humour. Big tough Scotty now destroying the coal industry he loves. I live in a coal town, collateral damage.

More *young* people have died of Covid in the US now than the total number of people killed in the 911 attacks.

If somebody is born a girl, but says they feel like a boy, isn't that saying that your sex is something you can feel? Which is exactly the point trans-activists argue against. It's circular thinking. I'm male, and I have no clue what it means to 'feel' male. I just feel like me. I know what society *expects* a male to be like, absolutely. I don't follow a lot of those norms. But that's not a mismatch between my sex and my gender - how do you feel your sex?

Getting rid of the virus fixes the economy. Go figure.

NSW Health today said NSW has likely eliminated the virus, remember that 'impossible' thing? Does nobody notice that the 'freedom' here isn't being described as freedom from the virus, but freedom from the public health actions that eliminated it? As if those were the pandemic. Note that this means you're 'free' to go back to work. We're scarily dumb.

Not a coincidence.

Watching the Brits and others getting excited about this as some sort of ‘end of the pandemic’ shows yet again how completely out of touch with basic public health practice the public discussion is. Politicians are to blame for that, they sold vaccines to us as a cure for the pandemic. A vaccine won’t end the pandemic. It will take 4-5 years just to make enough of it to get to the entire world for starters. And that’s just one problem.

Another thing I didn’t just make up 🙂 One of modern science’s greatest weaknesses is its very poor knowledge of its own history. Economics the same. I found the vitamin C link when researching my own whooping cough, in old scientific journals from over 100 years ago. A research program that should be pursued further, glad that’s happening.

The danger of identity politics, which is neither a Left or Right thing, just as populism isn’t, is that it takes a fragile social commons, and splinters it into a million subjective grievances. It happened with the pandemic, it triggered a vast range of personal grievances completely unrelated to the virus and the challenges of beating it. Society is eating itself.

Would be amusing if it wasn’t tragic. The Economy lovers never left the old normal, that’s the reason so many are now dead. The vaccines won’t end the pandemic, they’re mostly not even targeted at immunity but at making you less sick, so the virus will likely continue to spread. The vaccines are a wonderful tool, but alone they won’t end this. We need to not listen to these modern snake oil salesmen, who are only mouthpieces for vested interests. It took over 30 years for polio vaccines to really crush that disease, as an example, and most of that work was associated public health work, not just the vaccines.

You get beautiful blue shadows at sunset if you have a secondary source of light to the sun. Not sure if this is related.

In a profound way, the world really is flat. Zooming shows it. When you zoom out like this, you’re not seeing more (our phrase ‘vantage point’ betrays we live that illusion). You go from seeing lots of details of one thing, to how that one thing relates to things around it which you couldn’t see before. You see connections and relationships. It’s a qualitative shift, not a quantitative one.

ScoMo spent over $5000 of your money to go to the Murdoch Christmas party last year with his minister mates, in a government 737. Looks like they got a good return on investment.

The developed world should be ashamed and disgusted that they’re so infected with the Economy Virus, they need to use vaccines as emergency measures. It’s a measure of our stupidity and ignorance that we don’t even see how criminally pathetic this is.

Does this mean (using modern gender theory) that many men are actually repressed homosexuals or bisexuals, and are masking it by having anal sex with women? https://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5489/rise-in-anal-sex-statistics/

See the ‘vanishing point’ in this image, where the streets seem to converge to into the distance? Normally we call that ‘perspective’. Nobody lives in perspective space. And yet those 3 dimensions of perspective space are considered the basis of our whole reality. We don’t live inside those 3 dimensions, they’re an artefact of a very specialised point of view.

Across the world, humans turn off their brains when summer holidays are involved. For so many thousands in Europe, it was the last mistake they ever made. Here in Australia we’re following exactly the same script. All that can save us is if we truly have eliminated the virus.

Most of the vaccines aren’t even designed to give you immunity, so re-infections are highly possible. I’m sure many of my friends on FB stopped reading what I say about the pandemic months ago. I’m actually quite disgusted with Australians in general, for not engaging with the details of this crisis. Our institutions have saved us to date. We look like spoiled, bored brats, seeing the whole thing as just a dreadful inconvenience to our fake-tan boozing lifestyles.

One person dies of Covid every 30 seconds in the USA.

When we got rid of slaves, who did the work they were doing instead? We did, there was nobody else. Abolition of slavery was the distribution of work to more people. Instead of masters and slaves, everybody became a slave to everybody else. That mutual reliance upon each other to do all of the work is freedom. How could it not be? All pitching in. The opposite to what the libertarians say, who live a fantasy of completely separate individuals. They’re the new masters, dreaming of standing by why the rest of us do all the work.

Keyboard warriors. We make fun of them, but actually they’re a a sign of real human progress I think. Society is built from ideas. Ideas cause all disagreement, violence and war. When we don’t fight ideas, they turn us into their slaves and we fight each other on their behalf. We should celebrate that at last humans are fighting back against ideas.

For those who think vaccines are a quick off-switch for the pandemic.

Even if we accept his numbers (which are wrong), it would still make Covid deadlier than most other diseases we have vaccines for already. A tidal wave of stupid is overtaking our societies, what are you doing about it?

Nearly everybody I see is more or less acting as if normal life has returned. Politicians are to blame, they’ve encouraged it. For some reason we let them get away with bringing the virus under control being an excuse for relaxing the controls on the virus 🙄 I’ll be continuing with the public health control measures in my own life. Not because of fear, but because that’s what you’re supposed to do in a pandemic. Unless you listen to politicians.

Pascoe does some great analysis here of the stripping of ordinary people of their wages and working conditions. This isn’t just about fairness either. A healthy ‘economy’ is cashed-up customers. You can give as many tax cuts and incentives to business as you like, if their customers have no money, businesses will make no money.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday twinnie :)

The pandemic flushes out another beauty. A lot of these farmers receive enormous taxpayer subsidies as well. This is why your fruit and much of your veg will go up by up to 25% this year, no slave labour available. And they have the hide every year to blame the unemployed for not doing this work. They won't hire them, they can't pay them $3 an hour and rape the pretty ones.

This was the hope of Economy zealots the world over. We can avoid restrictions on the economy if we do great contact tracing. Nobody did it better than the South Koreans, way more intensive than ours even. And - they've just lost control of the virus. It can't be controlled, you have to eliminate it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-25/these-elite-contact-tracers-show-the-world-how-to-beat-covid-19

Particularly like the section in this where they link US hyperindividualism to poverty. Nothing makes people more toxically individual than the fight for individual survival. Many might not be aware just how poor huge numbers of Americans are.

The Gold Standard has plenty of work to do here in the home straight.

This might change your view of America, extraordinary facts, have a look. And it explains their obsession with individualism. When people are fighting each other for basic services, it’s each person for themselves. I’ve also noticed this with women, centuries of being disempowered often creates the most venomous and toxic relationships between women themselves. Divide and conquer, it’s how men conquered women, and captains of industry conquered Americans.

Happy birthday Pen :)

This government can't believe how easily it gets away with spin. As Michael says, we just need to 'think about it'. Good luck with that, we're off getting fake tans, wasted, and booking holidays.

These Nobel Prize winners, why can't they just post pictures of themselves and their families doing banal things, like everybody else?

For grammar Nazis, a couple of missing apostrophes here.

If these vaccines protect against serious disease, rather than provide immunity (which the trials suggest is the case), rolling them out gradually like this could mean the virus will spread to the entire population.

I’m surprised that more fuss hasn’t been made about the fact that it’s now quite easy to produce ‘3D’ photos that you don’t need glasses to view. Like this one. I used to post about 3D here a lot, because I think the glasses theory of it is wrong. These new images prove it’s wrong. Why aren’t they building this into TVs right now?

How’s that democracy going Straya? Where the government writes all the news. Anybody notice? Put the beer down for a sec and have a look, lots to see. Oh and the government also currently approving legislation to replace police with the army, in the streets, as required.

Happy birthday Inez! Have a wonderful day.

Happy birthday Inez! Have a wonderful day.

"Employer groups have welcomed “emergency” provisions that will allow businesses to cut workers’ pay and conditions for at least the next two years." Nothing to see here. Back to the beers, botox and fake tans.

“The important thing is, we have to accept that human error and mistakes are going happen,” Ms Berejiklian said. There's the Gold Standard, must remember that line for my next performance review.

It is actually what has just occurred. People accuse me of being anti-LNP. I’m quite fine with Liberals and Nationals. I despise populists, who took over both of those parties in the past 25 years, and are trying to fast-track us to becoming the USA. Pay attention to what’s happening Australia. For once in your life get off the grog and pay attention, please.

Far out, this is Germany. Germany! Most organised nation on Earth. That European summer was a total disaster. Fingers crossed every day we’ve killed off Covid here, if we haven’t, this will be us in the New Year. Especially with everything opening up for a mindless, drunken, travelling summer, spreading the virus around. Contact tracing won’t stop it, the Germans are better at that than we are.

Happy Birthday :)

The populist takeover of Australia continues at pace. The word 'sovereignty' is a red flag - for example it's how the populist Tories sold Brexit, and Trump sold himself to the US. Notice the flag too, a giveaway. Local and State governments ARE our sovereignty! What else could they be?

Swap 'Thanksgiving' for 'Christmas' and you'll have a story told tens of millions of times around the world within the next month. Hey, what did you get for Christmas? A lethal virus.

Hey, remember those tax cuts? Look how those pan out by 2030. Tax *increases* for everybody except high income earners, who get a cut. People are mistakenly seeing the LNP as a Liberal National Party. They're not, they're wealthy lobby groups taking over political parties, as the Republicans and Tories are in the US and UK too.

How we going with this one, Straya? Yes to botox, MDMA, Ice, alcohol poisoning, no to vaccine?

And you'll still hear people say the whole thing is just a flu, a total beat up. In the US many of those people are now dead. 3000 more a day (nearly at 290,000 now).

Do you know how much money Live Aid raised? $127 million. Almost funny, it was such a failure in reality. Like our big bushfire fundraiser, which raised more but also achieved almost nothing. This is populism, which I talk about a lot I know, when the public sees reality like a big TV show, with emotional ‘solutions’ to complex problems.

So apparently next cab off the rank of ‘shit we can get away with under cover of the pandemic’ that the LNP are onto, is compulsory voting. The envy of the world, but of course they want us to be the USA, so it has to go. When people looked at Brexit and Trump and wondered why that shit doesn’t happen here, compulsory voting was the clear thing protecting us.

Happy birthday holidaying bludger!

Iris Murdoch used to press people to explain how they decided between right and wrong. I heard a chat on the radio about it this week, about the choice between 'objective' and 'subjective' ethics. That's a dead-end I think. As is this meme. How do you decide what's right and wrong?

Professor Crabb has been saying this for some time. As have I, because I follow his work and that of many other researchers. Covid is binary - you either have zero, or you have lots. There is no 'low' amount of virus, no 'living with it'. Thank you to most of our Premiers for understanding this, in the face of huge pressure from the federal government. NSW still hasn't committed to this understanding.

"While testing numbers have increased during the week, there are still too few people coming forward for testing. With restrictions eased and borders having reopened, now is not the time to be complacent." (NSW Health report, 11 December) All in the words, as Orwell said. Notice who's being accused of complacency? Me and you. Complacency is actually the easing of restrictions and borders.

The argument that people working from home damages ‘workplace culture’? You go to work to work, not to have a culture. Workplace culture is just all the petty interpersonal squabbling you have to deal with when you force people to inhabit the same space to do work they could easily do from somewhere else. Even where they do have to be together to get the work done, they’re there to work, not to have an interpersonal culture. I haven’t seen a single business that understands this.

Ask anybody who works directly with the public, and I reckon you’ll find they all experience the same thing. Huge amounts of personal abuse, endless complaints. This is pretty interesting, because what actually happened was that we got rid of kings, whose arbitrary behaviour was like this, and turned each individual into a ‘sovereign’. What we call freedom is really this delegation of sovereignty to each person. It’s why people act like they’re royalty and you’re their servant. And why millions vote for somebody promising them sovereignty.

In the UK as here there was much theatre early in the pandemic from pollies saying they were ‘following the science’. Conservatives never were, it was spin. They don’t on climate change, why would they on a pandemic? Here’s the proof. Science is now openly coming out and telling people to ignore the government.

Staff training is so important, even in bookstores.

Imagine trying to fix America.

What if it’s not loners who have a problem, but people in groups? What if people in groups are those who aren’t mature or strong enough to discover and strengthen their own individuality, trapped inside an endless game of social imitation?

Do people even notice that every day of this pandemic, offices have been exempt from most Covid Safe requirements? It’s all been about the economy, not the virus or your health. Will we ever realise the beliefs we have about freedom are really the philosophy of slaves? Millions in this pandemic applauding politicians who tell us freedom is the ability to go back to work. We’ve been so well trained, like battery hens.

Let’s replace the opposition with this crew. (Really, really worth watching.) Oh and if you’re a climate change denier, get your head out of your arse. An iceberg the size of a State is about to collide with an island. The country was on fire last summer. Take the tin foil hat off.

Hendrix was otherworldly. Like nothing before or after really, one of those rare forces of nature. Was watching interviews with him this weekend, and he was always described as so gentle, and that’s how he seems in interviews. But now I see rage and violence in that quietness. He was a very violent man, and often violent people are the most softly spoken, until they explode with rage. Hendrix was one of those.

South Korea was held up as the example of how lockdowns (a stupid term by the way) are unnecessary. They’ve just discovered the hard way they’re the only way to beat the virus. Just like everybody else eventually does.

No clearer evidence that the core human activity is imitation than what we’re seeing with young women and men, in this increasing imitation of appearance. If you look hard I think you’ll find that nearly 99% of human activity is people copying other people, even in adulthood.

Remember how some people got in a lather over the pink batts scheme? Wait until the full details of JobKeeper are revealed. Imagine giving $70 billion away and not even keeping a public record of who you gave it to.

Maybe this is all part of ScoMo’s cunning plan to phase out coal.

Lol.

Same spin, different country. Fast-spreading, horseshit. Incompetence in conservative government. At the same time this same government is threatening to take schools to court if they close to control the virus. We’re not angry enough at these fuckers, worldwide, trying to protect peoples’ money instead of people.

Something I don’t think many Australians have really registered yet. You’d think the whole thing was over.

Happy birthday :)

Yaneer Bar-Yam is a scientist who has been working on pandemics for 15 years. He's a huge fan of NZ and Australia's approach. Here's his summary of what works (green) versus what doesn't (red). Notice that what we did in Australia is nearly all green. And that our Prime Minister, Premier and some of our media consistently pushed for the corresponding red action.

Many people argued schools were immune to Covid earlier in the pandemic. They are when you have no virus, they’re superspreaders when you do. What’s particularly disgusting about this is the reason they argued it. They needed childcare for working parents. And pretended they were concerned about the education of kids. Luckily social media has recorded some of this disgusting behaviour, so they can feel the shame for years to come.

On the same topic, let’s remember how cavalier people were with our children’s health in this pandemic. It was considered more important to keep millions of small and large businesses running, that only had a lifespan of 3-5 years without the pandemic anyway, than to act with precaution with children’s health and virus spread. I’ve lost permanent respect for people who argued this, I need a stronger word than disgust to describe my feelings about it.

In the UK, millions of children will potentially contract Covid in the next week, take it home to extended families over Christmas and kill some of those family members. In both Germany and the Netherlands, they’re closing schools and wider society down now already, to try to prevent this. Not in the UK. The Economy had to come first. I’m sorry if I bore people, it astonishes me so few seem to care enough to even talk about it.

When you boil an egg, the water is a heat transfer medium. It takes a point source of strong heat - the hot plate - and distributes it gradually and evenly around the whole egg. This to me is also the function of conversation, to dissipate strong points of difference between people gradually and evenly throughout society. When you don’t have conversations, it’s like trying to boil an egg without water. Extreme heat in selected spots, everywhere else cracks and breaks.

How's this for the 'free market', government interrogation of banks for their market-based decisions? And we think China is 'authoritarian'. All red meat for the lunatic backbench, these decisions are only about stopping the LNP from falling apart. The LNP climate change policy has nothing to do with climate, it's there to stop them falling apart. The States luckily are bypassing all of this bullshit and going it alone, as they did for Covid.

A public service announcement, because I doubt they'll spend much telling people this. NSW Health advises that if you're in crowded shops this Christmas, please wear a mask. Notice, no rule saying you should, which means nobody will. This is how politicians do public health. How hard is it to mandate people wearing a cheap mask?

"Polling shows that 62% of people “believe Australia is a victim in the trade war rather than making itself a target by the government publicly criticising the Chinese regime (38%)". A.k.a. 62% of Australians couldn't distinguish between their arse and their elbow. Only 43% of Australians now support immediately getting the vaccine when it becomes available. The Donald could run here and win in a landslide.

Many took cheap shots at Victoria rather than focusing on the fact that quarantine in Australia is the FEDERAL government's responsibility, by law. This is now the 3rd 'leak' from Sydney airport quarantine in the past few weeks. Thoughts? Comments? About time ScoMo stopped spending his days having promotional photos of himself taken by his taxpayer-funded personal photographer and implemented a quarantine system? Do his job, that sort of thing? Mr 66% popularity?

Straya, this gets easier with practice. Is the thing to be nervous about: A. Christmas plans could be ruined, or B. The virus might spread again, killing more people? (P.S. I’d put a moderate wager on that border being closed by tomorrow.)

The two biggies in virus mitigation - ‘living with the virus’ - biting the dust. Will we suffer long enough to understand that it’s our way of life that is the cause of this pandemic, not the virus? Insecure work and unshared wealth means people can’t do the basic act that protects us - shelter. In fact we’re so insane we recast basic shelter as ‘lockdown’. Pandemics throughout history have tried to teach us this, we never listen for long.

Al Capone (yes, the gangster) ran a free soup kitchen for the unemployed in the 1930s (in the pic). It fed several thousand unemployed people 3 times a day. When people can't eat or shelter without a job, you have the hijacking of society by the Economy. They also can't shelter from a virus, and you therefore get pandemics. A resilient society should be able to shut down for an extended period, if needed, without dramatic damage. This can all be planned for, in fact the military do it all the time for their operations. Instead we have individuals and businesses who collapse inside weeks, and the obscenity of people being forced to work with a lethal virus in circulation, just to keep food on the table. It's the whole idea of the Economy that needs to be weeded out of our collective minds.

An extraordinary piece, looking at the breakdown of another of our institutions, the family. For the same reason all of our other institutions are under assault, the recasting of everything as individual freedom and self-realisation, trying to live in an eternal present. Explaining also the explosive growth of new forms of anxiety and neurosis, boy aren’t we seeing that.

The great myth of this pandemic is that NSW has been ‘managing’ Covid, and that you can have virus and keep everything open at the same time. That’s the myth that has crippled the US and Europe and has killed hundreds of thousands, thousands more each day. I started this pandemic saying the same thing I’ve said ever since - our belief in the ‘Economy’ not only stops us beating the virus, it’s the actual cause of the pandemic.

The Tories’ idiot tiered system, where instead of just shutting things down to smash the virus, they close each place down by a different amount (to ‘save the economy’). It’s failed, miserably, as it was always going to. The federal LNP here have been keen on a tiered system. Watch what’s happening overseas people, it might save your life.

NSW Health Minister currently lecturing us all on an ‘avalanche of complacency’. Notice the political strategy here, copied from Boris and the Don? Government outsources its responsibility for the pandemic to the public, by removing public health restrictions, then blames the public for the inevitable outbreaks. The public laps it up, sharing tabloid stories of people they’ve seen not following the rules. Divide and conquer, pollies sit back and watch us fight amongst ourselves. How did we get to be so dumb.

Professors, so often smart. I highly recommend them over opinionated windbags on radio and TV. And politicians in a pandemic.

If you needed a plumber, would you hire a politician? No? So for a pandemic, let’s listen to pandemic experts. Just for once.

One of the best profs. Funny, they nearly all agree with each other. ‘The science’ - this is them. Meanwhile I see people already blaming other people for the outbreak, as the pollies want you to do. Lemmings.

In case you don’t see these. See how they’re now warning the whole State? Because they (Gladys, not NSW Health) relaxed most of the Covid restrictions. Don’t blame the people. The government have no idea how far this has spread. That’s how you lose control of a pandemic. You don’t relax restrictions when you get low numbers, because it’s restrictions that create the low numbers.

If you’ve found the transgender debates meaningless, righteous waffle, Rebecca agrees with you. Fantastic analysis.

The number of infected people that breaks a contact tracing system is only about 50. NSW now has 28, with a big spike on that due tomorrow. And at this stage the contact tracers haven’t even been able to find the origin of these outbreaks. Now spreading everywhere. I heard the PM and Treasurer say this morning that NSW’s great contact tracing system will beat this. They’re idiots, contact tracing can’t beat a pandemic. It’s one tool.

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for every expertise that isn’t a trade, is populism. We use education for status mostly, we have no real interest in ideas. A huge tidal wave of ignorant yobdom is too arrogant and stupid to acknowledge that it’s not just tradies who know what they’re doing.

We began the pandemic blaming each other for supermarkets’ hopelessly fragile supply chains. (We’re still doing that.) And now we blame each other when governments don’t do their jobs with public health restrictions. We’ve been superbly outplayed by the people responsible for 2020, at every turn.

In 2020, airlines have been parking their planes in the desert, because of the pandemic. You might think this has destroyed the tourism industry, and it is doing that. But as an indication of just how obscene the amount of travel has become, the tiny level of travel still happening in 2020 is the same as the world experienced in *total* in 1990. In those past 30 years, travel has literally exploded.

One of Australia’s leading pandemic experts. I’ve been critical of NSW all year, for all of these reasons. It’s one of the most perverse nonsenses of this whole pandemic that NSW is seen as handling this pandemic brilliantly.

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, come invariably from people who are not fighting.” George Orwell

Every time we tell people that their study at school doesn’t really matter in the longer term, we undermine education just that little bit more. Nothing really matters in the longer term, taken in isolation. In the longer term we’re all dead, as Keynes said. I’m sorry, school does bloody well matter, and doing well at school matters. Why do we reward achievement in every other area of life, but bend over backwards to contextualise away the achievement of people who excel in their education?

William Topley. In the 1930s one of the first researchers on the idea of herd immunity. The idea that if enough of us are immune to a disease, it will prevent it spreading at epidemic levels. This is why it pays to do the history when you’re doing the science. Because something Topley discovered hasn’t survived to discussions of herd immunity today. Herd immunity, he said, is achieved not just by people becoming ill or vaccinated, but also by organising your society in a way that prevents infections. Public health, we call it. Nobody needs to become infected at all, and the disease is defeated. Exactly how the world should approach Covid, and all infectious disease. We will always need to deal with infectious disease, and there won’t always be treatments or vaccines to save us.

Exactly. As McGowan says, the only way to defeat this bastard virus is to whack all the moles at once. People who believe the Economy is an actual thing will not get that into their thick skulls. Boris has been whacking moles like crazy in the UK, now being dragged to full lockdown. A year into this thing, and we STILL don’t get this.

Scroll down this list of Covid hotspots in NSW (it will take you some time). Is it dawning on us yet, all the BS about contact tracing? Notice that this has spread far and wide before anybody even noticed. Exactly what happened in Melbourne, and entirely predictable when you’ve relaxed all the public health restrictions. While this virus is out there and virulent, there will be NO TIME IN THIS ENTIRE PANDEMIC WHEN WE CAN OPEN EVERYTHING UP. The restrictions are what control the virus, not contact tracing. They are our new normal, for several years possibly yet. https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/Infectious/covid-19/Pages/case-locations-and-alerts.aspx

Some simple maths here. Northern beaches locked down for 5 days. Many who may be infected won’t show any symptoms in that short time. It’s a political timeline, not a public health one. To try to save Christmas. It hasn’t worked in the UK. Today’s new restrictions, for example, half the number of people on a dance floor? I mean seriously, is this a joke? You go hard and you go early. Otherwise you lose.

It only took a year.

“Every city that has laboured under the misapprehension that they can carry on with a bit of community transmission has been forced into lockdown when the health system collapsed.” Been saying it for months. You play with the exponential curve, it will bury you. It’s been as simple as that from day one.

I often think about the world wars, when I hear people talk about the inconveniences of the pandemic. 6 years of this. I imagine somebody at that time saying the fight against the enemy was a restriction on their freedoms. What a contrast, what precious, self-absorbed snowflakes we are today by comparison. People and society about as resilient as a crystal champagne glass in the running of the bulls.

Those who don't want to fight the virus have weaponised contact tracing as the silver bullet that can keep everything open. It won't work, it hasn't worked anywhere, exponential growth quickly swamps the tracers. Sydney's outbreak may be working right now, but because it's a wealthy, geographically isolated community where residents can easily work from home, if they work at all. Melbourne's outbreak was in dense, poor areas of the city where everybody had to work and travel, just to be able to eat. Context is everything.

The toilet paper ‘panic buying’ idea to me shows something entirely different to what people say. There’s very little panic, and most people aren’t buying truckloads of toilet paper. Just a bit more, they’re stockpiling. Last time they did that, the nation had to lockdown within weeks. People knew, collectively, it’s called the wisdom of the crowd. A crowd is smarter than any individual within it, with the right conditions, it knows things no individual in the crowd knows. We’re populists, we don’t understand collective things. We should see toilet paper disappearing as a sign something is possibly coming.

I can’t remember a single major astronomical event in the last 20 years where it wasn’t bloody cloudy here.

A key (and unreported) finding of the review into Victorian quarantine? ScoMo had prepared no pandemic plan, with no quarantine arrangements. All commonwealth responsibilities. Premiers were stunned, and were left with no choice but to offer to do it themselves. 12 months on, there’s still no pandemic plan, and no commonwealth quarantine arrangements. He’s spent the past 12 months doing nothing but rush through key toxic policies for party donors, like tax cuts for the wealthy, big taxpayer subsidies for gas companies, and union busting. This man’s popularity is growing in complete separation from the facts of his contribution. Populism, he knows how to play the game.

This should really anger us. The key voices opposing public health action in this pandemic, including this pair of senior US politicians and Rupert Murdoch, pushing to the front of the queue to be vaccinated. These people are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

Current list of places with Covid contact in Sydney (the venue list is MUCH longer again). This is for a small number of cases. It's why contact tracing quickly falls over once you get even a small number of infections, the number of contacts and locations quickly becomes exponential. Right now they're doing this to try to keep the place open for Christmas. Any other time they'd have already closed the place down. Danger (P.S. contact reported in Orange this week now.)

The question for us all.

Master rewards disciple.

Imagine if Dan Andrews had said this. The double standard is disgusting, not one word from the attack dogs in Canberra or the Murdoch press about this. But I don’t expect the people who attacked Andrews to show the tiniest hint of finally understanding this pandemic.

I feel that our ‘mental health’ (whatever that is) would be stronger if we stopped automatically assuming 2021 will be better than 2020. As if disasters are neatly wrapped in calendar years. This pandemic will be over when we understand it and fight it. Rather than keep clinging to our old lives and trying to get them back in the middle of a plague. We’ll get them back when we beat the plague. Our mental health problems are largely our refusal to accept the situation we’re in.

Gladys still peddling the 'living with the virus' bullshit. 'Proportionate' responses. Proportionate to what? If the virus gets loose, EVERYTHING else gets shut down. Thousands die. She doesn't get it, or she refuses to. Like all the Economy people.

This teacher observed that his teams of girls nearly always win this challenge, over teams of boys. The conclusion was that girls cooperate better. But another teacher came back with an interesting observation. They said girls have established hierarchies in their social lives already, which boys often don't. So given a task like this, they don't need to build a hierarchy for the team first, no 'battle for power' needed.

Professor Marylouise McLaws on radio this afternoon, an international expert on disease outbreaks, asked to summarise the Premier’s decisions about Christmas in NSW. “Dangerous”. Disease outbreak specialists use the 14-day average. For NSW there have been 102 cases in the past 14 days. That puts it in the red, danger zone. That’s the number Victoria had before their huge outbreak. And we’re about to mix the whole population for Christmas. It’s Russian Roulette, not based on health or science.

Rather than seeing 2020 as some horrible year, at Christmas we could maybe see the similarities with what Christmas is actually about? The incarnation of the eternal in the body of a man. A reminder to humans of everything that transcends their knowledge, their powers and their lives. That’s what a pandemic virus does. Transcends everything, no human power or knowledge can master it. The best we can do is be humble before it. Merry Christmas everybody, it’s my least favourite time on social media, so I’ll say it now :)

NSW keeps spinning the chambers, hoping that it doesn't land on the one with the bullet in it. And every time it gets lucky, people say what wonderful leadership it is.

It’s been difficult all year to get many to take this virus seriously. So I’m not confident a day of booze, family and friends will be Covid best practice. Merry Christmas everybody, I hope Santa doesn’t bring you Covid.

Go shopping, don’t go shopping. Celebrate New Years, don’t celebrate New Years. Mix with your family, don’t mix with your family. Facing a toxic situation by just giving everybody what they want, even though all of those wants are completely contradictory. The government is applauded for it, when in fact it’s them refusing to do their job, unlike the other States. That’s why they closed their borders, because NSW can’t be trusted.

I grew up surrounded by farms, and this is something I saw every day.

Greg has been saying for years what a great job Donald is doing.

There’s nothing accidental about how Freddie positioned himself for photos.

And again, what happens when you make the health system the front line of attack in a pandemic, rather than (as it should be) the last line of defence. A pandemic is not a medical event, it’s a political creation.

Just wow. Read this to see how the pandemic, unaffordable housing, toilet paper disappearing, economic booms and busts and nearly everything else in society is due to the drive towards ‘efficiency’. A lack of social ‘friction’ - resilience. Efficiency is a spin word used by vested interests to remove resilience, to enrich themselves.

Nobody much questions why ‘finding people who are infected’ is the main virus strategy across the world, and not ‘stopping people getting infected.’ Just let that difference sit in your mind for a while? It explains the whole pandemic.

One of the most sinister things about this pandemic is that victims have been almost invisible in the news. In a disaster or with crime, victims become the central narrative. You have to wonder if this is a deliberate strategy to prevent strong action against the virus.

Nice illustration of why ‘6-pack abs’ are almost nothing to do with working out that area. Sit-ups, whatever, none of it gives you 6-pack abs. Everybody already has 6-pack abs. What makes them visible is very low body fat. Unhealthily low levels of body fat.

Imagine if in the world wars somebody had said: ‘we have to balance our fight against the enemy with protecting our economy’. Substitute ‘virus’ for enemy, and you have what most people say in 2020.

This 2000-year-old snack bar from Pompeii was the news story of the day.

A game-changer if true. Australia is already producing this one in readiness. And it only needs fridge temperature.

I noticed that using different colours next to each other can cause a profound sense of depth. Like this image, be interested if it does this for others too. It’s called chromostereopsis, took me a few years to find the connection (most 3D people have never heard of it).

A very common loon statement, the 99% thing. 1% of the population of Australia is 250,000 people. Of the world, 75 million people. That’s a lot of people dead so that Ben can have his elephant discussion. On top of that, the idea of ‘innate’ immunity is nonsensical, the immune system is the body’s most connected part to the *outside* world.

This is the UK. Unsurprisingly a government who sacrificed over 70,000 Brits, and climbing, to save a fictitious economy, also can’t organise their magic beans pandemic solution either.

That picture of you two in masks really brings out the best in Peter’s looks.

Howie and Warnie were quite taken with the cat.

Johnson’s incompetence is on track to kill over 100,000 people by early 2021. Anybody in this pandemic who argued for softer public health action to save ‘the economy’ is worse than a war criminal. It’s genocide, no other word for it. That’s the beauty of ‘the economy’, it excuses monstrous crimes against humanity. That’s why it was invented.

Many, many experienced experts have been saying this for months. Around the world conservative governments have been trying to use contact tracing as an excuse to not do public health work, to keep everything open. It’s failed spectacularly everywhere, with no exceptions. They got away with it for a while. They’re all now back in lockdown.

Video refereeing is destroying the work of umpires. And it’s all a delusion, the idea you can see ‘what really happened’ in a replay. Jason puts it beautifully, it doesn’t matter how much you zoom in or slow something down, you’ll get the same amount of uncertainty.

Telling individuals to ‘stay safe’ with Covid is like telling homeless people to ‘be warm’ in winter.

Happy birthday :)

This British hospital has the largest intensive care facility in the world. These ambulances contain Covid patients, waiting to get in.

NSW and the federal government don’t listen, they just lecture.

This is the core belief system of governments being smashed by Covid. Ideas kill. It’s why Gladys is watching the virus spread through NSW and is doing almost nothing about it. You know whose ‘choices’ she’s protecting? Not yours. Breweries, property developers, tourism companies, gambling companies etc. Money.

The ‘hotspot’ Tier 1-4 strategy in the UK, which ScoMo wanted here and which Gladys is now implementing in NSW (what she calls ‘proportionate response’), has completely collapsed. Tens of thousands more will now die, unless they lockdown completely.

‘Covid only kills sick and old people’. Says idiots, the world over.

I didn’t hate 2020. I hated so many lives lost and being at risk, but I enjoyed lifestyles being openly challenged by actual life. Life isn’t endless holidays, shopping, partying, travelling and good times. Life isn’t a lifestyle. Since the Second Word War we’ve had peace and prosperity mostly, and I think our lives have become more shallow and superficial, hedonistic even. No appetite for the big questions that built our civilisations, just the search for entertainment, distraction and eternal youth. We treat the world like a series of travel destinations. The pandemic stopped all of that. And I’m grateful to it for that. I won’t even say Happy New Year, because we seem kinda addicted to happy. I hope for lives that are more complex and make us wonder more, as a result of 2020, not just happiness.

This is how most dictionaries define ‘home’. ‘2020 was a year people have described as the worst of their lives, mostly because they had to stay home. I think we need to take a long, hard look at that. As well as at the definition below, which is embarrassing.