April 2021

Australians spend $60 billion a year on overseas travel. That's 10 times what the country spends on infrastructure, and about equal to what it spends on education. And nearly every cent of that money ends up overseas. Convincing anybody yet that our 'culture' is not much more than being parasites on other peoples' cultures?

Australia's vaccine rollout, said to be 'glacially' slow. Actually when you do the numbers we're rolling out as fast if not even faster than the UK and US did in their early stages, considered world leaders. Look at the US press from that time, describing *exactly* what we're hearing now in Oz. Any massive logistical exercise (like supermarkets and what we stupidly callled 'panic buying') is hard. Really bloody hard. It'll stutter at first, then take off. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/02/12/us/vaccine-doses-distribution.html

"I now wonder if constantly frolicking off to far off lands is really the best advice. Is it making us happy? Is it a recipe for self-improvement and enlightenment, or just one for sleep deprivation and self righteousness? Does constant traveling make it harder to connect with and enjoy our moments at home? Perhaps it even causes adult onset ADD, fostering an insatiable appetite for something new, preventing us from ever being content with that and those “which we already have.”

After a 25-year obsession with keeping borders closed, we've flipped to an obsession with getting them open. Do we even see that old DNA of empire in ourselves? The world is our oyster. Borders are for keeping all those filthy foreigners out of our home, but their homes should be ours to 'see' and pillage whenever the whim takes us.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-01/wa-tourism-anger-boils-over-after-another-hard-border-closure/100042530

There are very few towns, no matter how small or remote, that didn't make their first priority the building of a church. I want to understand why it was so important to us once to do this. Were we just silly 'believers' back then? Nope. I think that church was a foundational act in establishing our places. A sacred centre to our towns, that grounded us by making something eternal the lynchpin of our daily life. What's replaced this? Nothing. Homes are now 'locations' to be traded for capital gains. Towns are now individuals pursuing an eternal present, an individual 'lifestyle'. Nothing draws that town together any more in a sacred way, to partake of something eternal. We have 'events', temporary fun where we gather as a group to enrich our individual lifestyles. It's not the same. Want to understand aboriginal people? We need to learn again what 'sacred' might mean, as a description of a place.

Add ‘lockdowns’ to the right.

On a holy day, I think we need to understand why, once a week, entire communities would gather for the Sunday church service. Modern thinking describes these people as credulous, believing in fairytales. I think there’s something much more important going on here, whether you believe in a God or not. Once a week, entire communities would spend the whole morning discussing and thinking about eternal things. In beautiful surroundings, they would take their everyday lives and think about them through the lens of eternal themes. And then take what they had learned back out into those everyday lives, to weave eternal themes into them in all sorts of ways. Church and religion was the practical, weekly way communities ensured that what they did the other 6 days created a society focused on the long-term. Eternity. We need that back, in some way.

Superb graphic.

Wanna use this simple guitar chord as an example, to talk philosophy. We’re all taught that the world is made up of atoms, as simple building blocks that then get combined to make ever more complex things. But that’s wrong. Atoms are the most complex thing we know, and everything made from them is simple, and simpler the bigger they get. Atoms are potentials, they can become all sorts of things. A chord is a good example. Looks simple, but can be used in an infinite number of songs. It has almost infinite potential. A song, which seems more complex than a single chord, can only be that one song, nothing else. It’s much simpler than a single chord, it has no real potential. Potentiality is the soil in which the whole universe grows.

The Ever Given weighs about 200,000 tonnes. And yet it floats effortlessly on water. Why do things float? Because water pushes UP on objects. Buoyancy. This is where it gets interesting. Because the solid ground underneath you all day does *exactly* the same thing. Pushes UP, into you. And yet maybe the majority of people go about their business every day feeling like gravity is pulling them DOWN. It's an illusion created by a (wrong) idea. You float on the ground as a ship floats on water.

Humans are ultimately desiring creatures. Everything we think, feel and do is I think caused by either a desire, or a belief. A belief is a temporarily fixed desire. It's for this reason that the current debates about sexual harassment and assault to me are sailing in the wrong direction. For example, two-thirds of women when surveyed have regular fantasies about being forced to have sex. NOT because they want to be raped, but (research shows) because the desire of these women is to be forced into sex, at least in their fantasies, for one or more of the following reasons: 1) women are often taught to feel shame about having sexual desires, and so fantasising about being forced to do it removes the guilt of being sexual 2) being overwhelmingly desired by a dominant man paradoxically gives a woman power over that man, it gives her agency in their interaction 3) sometimes women confident in their sexuality just love the roleplay of these fantasies. We already know men's fantasies are often about the same dominant behaviour, often reinforced through porn. But statistics show women also watch a lot of porn, and prefer watching women being dominated too. So there's peculiar shared territory here. The tricky thing with desire is that it constantly escapes all attempts to classify and control it. 'Consent' can as well be consent to test the waters, to flirt and to be flirted with. To leave a lot of that wide open, that's always been part of the thrill of life. I suspect sexual harassment and assault isn't really about consent - the people who commit that sort of violence are likely to, even if they're asked not to. It's about power, and how that power gets abused.

How distraught, @[100053272952667:2048:Nell] and @[100011365024408:2048:Amy]? https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/streaming/bridgerton-fans-distraught-after-regejean-page-confirms-he-wont-return-for-season-two/news-story/10331c1ba10c2ecf9cdf1c515c762bae

ScoMo wanted to run the vaccine program as a lead-in to an early election, riding triumphantly to victory. Of course he completely stuffed it up. His only interest in the entire pandemic is how he can use it for his own gain, and that of his donors, like the gas and banking industries. Good on Gladys for offering to take over much of the NSW vaccination, we might get accelerated rollout now.

Passing the pub test says a lot about thinking. One of the great fallacies about thought for me is that ordinary life is somehow practical and grounded, and 'intellectual' things are abstract and removed from ordinary life. I think it's the other way around. Ordinary life deals in flabby generalities, prejudices, cliched opinions. Get in a debate in a pub and 9.5 times out of 10 you'll get a turgid half-hour rehearsed lecture from somebody on some opinion they picked up on talk radio, or from another drunk at the pub. Scholars and artists on the other hand try to return to the specific details of what's actually happening in our ordinary lives. They strip away the bloated opinions, forcing us to confront the actual realities we're living.

"Somebody said to me very early on, you can get away with anything in a group except for a bad drummer. It's true. You can get a way with playing bad guitar or being a bad singer, but if the drummer's crap, forget it..." Brian May

The reason I post about ideas and less about my self and my life is that I think our lives really are just ideas. It doesn't look like it for 'ordinary' life, but it is. Every tiny thing we do, every little day trip with our family, comes from a belief of some form, a belief based on some idea. For example the people who say 'don't overthink it, just live', are slaves to an idea, of living. Keynes saw it. All society, and all the people in it, is circulating ideas. Ideas are eternal things, they're not 'our' ideas, they can be shared by millions, across generations. They're actual beings. What Aristotle called the 'unexamined life' is a life enslaved to unnoticed ideas, we become animated puppets to the ideas that create us.

Being woken by glorious sunshine, bliss. Got my sunshine back from the clock-fiddlers. I hope it woke them early and put them in a bad mood, and that their evening BBQ might be a bit dark. Cry me a river.

Those who say we need to learn to 'live with the virus'. We should be suspicious that the first wild organism they've decided to live together with, and not exterminate for the 'Economy', is a lethal pathogen.

Play this on repeat, breathtaking. (Maximise the image to get the full glory of it, right-click on it and select 'loop', and set the quality to 1080p HD at the bottom right.) Look at the overwhelming diversity of forms and colours and sounds going on here. Beats me how we see something like this and can still believe that the world itself is inert and dead, and only humans give it meaning, purpose and beauty.

The great Australian dream is to live on the coast. The ultimate lifestyle location. When I say Australians are basically still tourists in their own country, this is what I mean. This vast land with its spectacular variety of landscapes; the majority of Australians have no interest in it at all, except in mythical stories about the 'bush'. They want to live in suburbs that are like seaside holiday resorts. They hug the tiniest strip of land on every coast, and from there spend $60 billion a year flying to overseas holidays, when their seaside holiday lifestyle needs refreshing. Meanwhile those interior landscapes are being destroyed at alarming speed.

The modern suburb is really nothing more than millions of garages. Roads and transport are the central thing. Try this thought experiment. How would our towns and cities look if the number 1 planning requirement for all residential developments was that no resident would need to regularly use a car? OR public transport? Seriously, imagine the transformation.

A good question. Which did they give you Nell?

You can find clues to the loss of the connection between us and the landscape, in interesting places. Like in this excerpt from Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced. Pre-world wars, a location was tightly tied to the people living there, in turn tightly connected to each other. 'Roots'. "The English village has changed since before the war. It's really because the whole world has changed...It may look the same - simple, and peaceful, and eternal. But it isn't. You see in the old days, everyone knew each other. If someone new came to the village, then they brought letters of introduction. They'd either been in the same regiment, or the same colony as some already living in the village, you see. Gone forever, I suspect...the big houses are sold, the cottages converted, and people simply come in from anywhere...made a little money and able to retire. No letters of introduction, no roots. You have to believe their stories and take them at their face value."

Why is the idea of a 4-day working week so slow to move forward? We're all well-trained hamsters. Look at Daylight Savings as an example. We all wanted an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day for social activity. We could have collectively decided to knock-off an hour early to do that. Instead we all fawn over the ridiculous business-generated alternative. We fiddle with the clocks to steal an hour of daylight from the morning, so us hamsters can still work the same long day.

Cars give you the freedom to go pretty much anywhere in a country. But that freedom bites back much harder against you than for you. Once people can use vehicles to go anywhere, there's nothing any more that makes their home - where they live - important. Nobody needs to make work or schools or shopping available there, you can always drive to access them. In reality cars increasingly move slower and slower in traffic congestion, meaning the little freedom they did give you is also being stripped away. Cars are the number one way we enslave ourselves, in our suburbs devoid of any social or civic life, whose main function is to garage our cars.

Ordinary people with money to spend 'threatens economic recovery'. Shows you who the 'economy' really is. It ain't you and me.

Despite outrage in the recent protests, voting intentions for women have barely shifted. Despite demonstrated complete incompetence throughout the pandemic, ScoMo continues to lead in the polls, strongly. The only thing that really changes a country? Unions. https://theconversation.com/morrison-still-enjoys-strong-ratings-in-separate-polls-indicating-labors-gains-may-be-short-lived-157129

Worried about the Covid vaccine and blood clots? If it helps, you're 2-3 times more likely to die having your tonsils out.

This is Nordlingen, in southern Germany. Over 1100 years old. (Trivia - also the city shown from the air at the end of Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.) Look how beautifully self-contained cities were before vehicles came along. Everything within walking distance, church right in the middle as the sacred heart of life, structuring everything else around it. Contrast with the sprawl around its circular walls, newer urban development with cars. No centre, no foundation. Viral, disconnected spread.

Germany is probably the only country that figured out a way to turn integrated small-town life into global economic superstardom. Read this if you want to understand some of how it does it. Almost impossible to copy because Germany still sees work as a vocation, as an integral part of community life. The world's best craftsmanship, its passion is to build things, the best things in the world. Craftspeople who live close together and share a stake in the family-driven, globally-focused small businesses.

I discuss things here which the real world decides the outcome of. They're not 'intellectual' debates, they're real-world problems. Like travel, ultimately reality is going to win this debate for me. Look at those numbers. All exponential growth collapses, it's unsustainable across every dimension. Better to be prepared for it by understanding why 'home' is such a dissatisfying place for us to be, to lessen the shock when it comes. Also as we see with traffic, a world where everybody moves is a world where nobody moves. Already seeing this in all tourist destinations.

NSW will need to vaccinate at least 250,000 people *per week* to meet the October timeline for people to get even one dose. 60,000 per week at this hub will be added to jabs at GPs, pharmacies etc. A long way short of 250,000, I'd wager. But won't be ready for 2 months anyway! And even then nobody's sure if they'll have access to vaccines. Remind me, those who did, why you voted for ScoMo?

Latour and Tarde Thursday! The world isn't made of stuff. 'Matter'. It's made of agencies, actors. It's alive. Even atoms aren't stuff, their properties change in every interaction. A simple nail is an agent too, not matter. It behaves differently depending on how we interact with it. We came to believe in matter because some interactions are longer-lasting than others, creating the illusion of something unchanging. But everything is interaction between agents. To define anything, human or non-human, alive or inert, you have to list its properties. Those properties come from interactions (e.g. me banging the nail), and change with the interactions. Heating a nail creates entirely different properties. Listing the properties gradually defines who (everything is a who) you're dealing with. Each agent has infinite potential to be other things, in interaction with other agents.

The US projecting a surplus of up to 600 million vaccine doses in the second half of 2021. New Zealand just announced Pfizer vaccine for its entire population. Time for ScoMo to get on the blower. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/us-is-set-to-have-a-vaccine-surplus-how-should-it-use-the-doses

I had a friend who was convinced the world should run on facts. Even though 'fake news' shows facts don't speak for themselves and can be easily not believed by millions. His favourite example was this one: 2+2=4. I can think of a million ways that most simple 'fact' is wrong. 2 cups + 2 cats = what? Not 4 of anything. Etc.

In 2020 international air travel was smashed by Covid (it's said). Only 1.8 billion passengers. That's the same number who flew in 2004. What seemed like a shut down only returned us to what was normal just over 15 years ago. Our own cultures are usually invisible to us.

The gun debates are about agency. One side says the gun has no agency, it's all people pulling the trigger. The other side says guns kill people. I suspect there are ultimately so many gun deaths in the US because it's a violent society. It's violent because of its extreme individualism, it sees nearly all collective or group activity as a restriction of freedom. That libertarianism is the agency driving it all.

Burn :)

Is there a stronger force in the universe than gossip? I think it's a really fascinating thing, why it is that we can't resist gossip. We all do it, but do we know why we do it? Gonna ponder that one.

This is Grant King, ex-CEO of Origin Energy. A gas industry executive. Guess which job ScoMo just gave him? Chairman of the Climate Change Authority. Come on Scotty fans, defend this. Find a way, a challenge for you.

I spent some time with Prince Philip, over a few days in the 1970s. It was fascinating to get that time with a Royal outside their formal, public duties. His death makes me think again about service and duty, and how little those things count in modern leadership. Those formal social events we mostly hate going to? That was his life, for 7 decades. That's what I think we've lost, the idea that custom, tradition and duty - our past - needs to constantly shape our present.

What if 'real life' is actually school, and everything after we finish school is an imitation of life? What I mean is that all of life is, literally, made of ideas. There isn't a single thing you think, feel or do that isn't an idea, a belief. In your personal and work life. At school we're taught to work with ideas, and then we often stop. Seeing adult life as some sort of gritty 'real life', when in fact it's just a whole collection of habitual, tired ideas and opinions that gradually grind us into submission. Ideas enslave us, because we stop seeing them and interrogating them.

Next time you see people arguing, kissing, giving a speech, or whatever, try reframing it like this, I find it changes everything about how we see life. It's not them speaking and acting, it's ideas. Ideas about politics, about love, etc. The people are mouthpieces for ideas. Ideas are exactly like viruses, always looking for new hosts. You can see the cold, dead eyes people get when they're possessed by an idea, in anger or love or happiness or sadness etc.

For those who think our consciousness or mind is in our brain, consider the octopus. It has 9 brains, including one for each arm/tentacle. It has more neurons in its arms than in its head, and the arms can independently touch, taste and move.

More than 20 billion tonnes of microbes live beneath the Earth's surface. All life is microbes, who combine in various ways to create other living things we recognise. Also, microbes are immortal, they don't age or die, unless they run out of food and water. Many found underground have dramatically scaled back the speed of their metabolism, to be able to survive tens of millions of years without adequate food and water. If you're tempted to see them as simple life forms, remember they built you. They are you.

There's a lot of vaccine triumphalism in the US and UK right now, drunk on their speed of rolling out the shots. Both nations unwilling to do basic public health work, to eliminate the virus. Despite the media stories of great success, only 20% of the US is now fully vaccinated, and only 11% of the UK. This is the low-hanging fruit, the people willing to come forward to be vaccinated. Sizeable numbers of people will refuse entirely, those are still to come. Both nations already gushing about 'opening up'. A pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. Bears repeating over and over.

The most muscular Strayanism is taking your 4WD and going bush. Alongside a sort of stamp collecting, where the number of places you've been is a measure of how Strayan you are. As if furiously collecting 'sights' brings you closer to whatever 'Australia' is. Are we closer to the 'real' Australia, if we camp in it? It just makes us tourists, in our own land. Like saying I'm a pilot, because I've flown in a plane.

Bushmen like the fictional Dundee I think are Australia's way of romanticising the chasm they all feel but rarely admit to, between themselves and the country they're living in. The Dundee archetype plays on that deeply uncomfortable chasm we've felt since the day we landed here. Finally, a whitefella who understands the country! In reality the overwhelming majority of Strayans live in holiday resorts masquerading as cities along the coasts, and those who do live inland usually bulldoze the landscape, to grow wheat and sheep and cattle, and dig mines. And bushmen have usually just watched too many old Western movies.

Doesn't seem a coincidence that most superheroes were invented in America. When you worship individualism, and don't even see collective things as real, the only solution (even imaginary) to the inevitable problems you get, is individuals with powers proportional to the scale of the problems.

The film, Gravity. Landscape, and travel. The battle of our era. Begins with humankind's desire to be free of connections to the Earth, to fly to the stars. Travel. Then as the film progresses, the lack of those connections becomes ever more life-threateningly real. The film ends with the main character embracing the surface of the planet.

'Home'. We don't understand how *where* we live defines who 'I' am. We don't understand 'place'. That's my apparent obsession with travel, and landscape. The keystone of our entire culture. "Most Westerners believe that "your psychology, and your consciousness and your subjectivity don't really depend on the place where you live," Sax says. "They come from inside -- from inside your brain, or inside your soul or inside your personality." But for many South Asian communities, a home isn't just where you are, it's who you are." https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-psychology-of-home-why-where-you-live-means-so-much/249800/

My dear friend Ben has released this extraordinary book. Looking at Darwin's ideas on psychology, but much more than that, also examining the ways Darwin's thought has been perverted since his death, most often because people are simply too lazy to read him, and deal with (false) stereotypes of his ideas. Ben shows how the idea of 'agency' was central to Darwin's thinking, and not just human agency (I mention agency a lot, it's a hot topic, a totally different way of seeing the world). Ben and I discussed the ideas in this book over many great lunches, over several years, and I recommend it to anybody. It reads like a novel, Ben is a fabulous writer, so don't be concerned it might be dry.

Please read this fabulous very short essay and let me know what you think? About how most of our work is non-essential bullshit, how there was nothing 'normal' about life pre-pandemic, and how the 'Economy' is the way actually essential work is debased, humiliated and underpaid. And how the pandemic shows how this should change, but it probably won't.

This is our second YEAR of pandemic. Imagine a leader saying in the middle of a bushfire crisis, 'we need to learn to live with these bushfires, we're not going to try to put them out.' It'd be the end of their career, they'd be a laughing stock. Yet a pandemic, which kills VASTLY more people than any other natural disaster, is still seen as something to 'live with'. Why, are we really that stupid? A year in, I'm still not getting it.

Same story, the world over. When indigenous peoples are displaced, they don't say 'hey, that's my piece of harbourside property, I'm negatively gearing it'. They say 'we are the land'. The land is an integrated part of their identity. They understand 'place'. This book traces what always happens next. Colonisers come along, draw MAPS of the land, and apportion it as 'property'. We are the map people, who destroy landscapes because to us they're just real estate, or 'the environment'. Our agency and identity has no component of the landscapes we live in included within it. They're just places to 'see', sightseeing. Tourists in our own countries, and everybody else's.

Imagine this astronaut slowly descending to the ground. What would he feel when his feet touch the planet? He'd feel a pushing, up into his feet. He wouldn't stop floating like this, it'd just be a floating mixed with that planet pushing up into him, with every step. He's not weightless in this photo, he has the same amount of gravity on him that we do, here on the ground. Curious if people can reboot their experience, to feel themselves literally floating in space (we're in space too, as much as he is, the atmosphere adds no gravity). Floating every moment, but with that Earth under us constantly pushing up into us. Imagine yourself every moment as being lowered onto the Earth like this. Not as someone on the ground with 'weight', having to hold yourself up.

The famous Australian 'Bell Bird'. The Bell Miner, technically. The greatest bully in the Australian bush. Birds sing to create territory, and Bell Birds sing without a pause, all day. A forest where you can hear bell birds is a forest soon to be dead, because the miners have destroyed most of the ecology by driving other species away. Humans do the same, their music and noise creates territories. Each person's favourite bands are their personal territory. Cars and trucks and planes etc. clearly drive animals and people away (nobody wants to live near a road). Another dimension of place we don't understand.

Very difficult to talk about vaccines without triggering the anti-vaxxers or New Age wellness "just strengthen your immune system" fruit loops. But I'm wavering on this AZ vaccine, for a variety of reasons. A longish post but to me the public conversation on this seems wrong. 1) People are being told that the risk is tiny, statistically. That's true, most other medicine has a *much* higher risk. But...normally you get medicine for illnesses you HAVE. Nobody really has Covid in Australia right now, nor are they likely to catch it any time soon. 2) Risk at an individual level becomes a certainty at the population level. If the AZ vaccine were used exclusively in Australia, roughly 25 people would die because of it, on current data. Those 25 people would likely not have contracted Covid either, so they're preventable deaths. First do no harm, first rule of medicine. There are safer medicines available. 3) The great push to get AZ into people is mostly the rush to get the country open. However the assumptions there are flaky, assuming the rest of the world will be open soon and we'll be left behind. The rest of the world is mostly a Covid train wreck, there's no evidence the great global travel orgasm will be happening again any time soon. 4) Australia already has enough Pfizer (zero risk of clots and death) under contract to vaccinate every adult in the country. It could also buy Moderna, and has orders of Novavax. The argument against using these is that it might take longer, but as above - there's no evidence the world will be opening safely soon. 5) Ultimately the big rush to vaccinate is the same Economy-driven bullshit that got the world into the mess it's in now in the first place. The rush to save the Economy, which doesn't even exist. 6) New Zealand did what Australia has now half-done. Said OK, we'll use Pfizer for everybody. I suspect the feds will need to say that here too, if they want to save this vaccine rollout. Not just under-50s - everybody. 7) Don't call the public stupid for wanting to avoid an avoidable risk. Use already available alternative vaccines. Make our economic worshippers do some actual hard work for the public good, for once.

The problem with maps I think, is that they're designed to help you navigate, but we see them as pictures of the world. We think they look like the landscape, without noticing that nobody actually lives in the viewpoint of a map. That viewpoint is thousands of feet off the ground. All of our culture is in that misunderstanding. Our properties are fenced boundaries, extracted from these maps. That's how we understand the landscape. This use of a navigation tool as a perceptual instrument creates a culture of movement. Of travel. Our greatest passion is to get from one part of a map to another, and we don't understand why. This is why. How we see the world is generated by a tool focused entirely on movement. When you look at a map, your eye moves over it, to find always more features and trace their connection to each other. Internalise that, and that's how your entire culture will think and feel.

The Australian 'bush'. What does that even mean? Somewhere we don't have a town or city, usually. Sometimes we create a national park out of it. A piece of 'bush' like in this picture, is usually a landscape falling apart. As all of our national parks are. We do nothing with it except maybe bushwalk or camp in it, the eucalypts dominate, we destroy the water courses and kill most of the species that live there, etc. We're not plugged into the landscape, we don't tend it, shape it, act in it. It's scrub, land we haven't turned into housing developments yet. Zoned 'green space' or 'rural' on our maps. One genius of Gammage's book on pre-European Australia is that it includes depictions of what 'bush' looked like when we arrived. An intricately constructed landscape, like a botanic garden, constantly shaped by humans and animals and plants, for mutual benefit. People and the 'land' mutually defined each other. They didn't just live 'in' it or on it. Hardly any of that breathtaking complexity survives, taken over by scrub, or bulldozed to feed cows and sheep.

All through the pandemic people have whinged about National Cabinet arguing and fighting, saying 'can't they all work together'. We find disagreement and argument distasteful. But notice what it produced - one of the best pandemic responses in the world. There's a lesson there about how debate and argument is what we need a LOT more of, and not just in politics. If we don't argue the ideas we live by, one or two of them (usually nasty ones) gradually enslave us.

Yes, all true, ScoMo is useless. But let's flip this. Australia already defeated Covid. The worldwide chest beating about speed of vaccination now is driven by the framework of the idiot countries who *didn't* control the virus. Who let hundreds of thousands of their citizens die, rather than do basic public health work. If they'd controlled the virus like we have, THE WORLD WOULDN'T NEED THE VACCINES. Caps for emphasis there. We should say 'life will go back to normal when you economic idiots do some basic public health work, and eliminate the virus'.

The Blue Mountains looks like a 'natural' wonder. But actually it's a landscape in serious trouble, once again because we either trash it, or treat it with kid gloves (make it into a national park). The Madonna-whore complex translated across to landscapes. We don't have any meaningful agency in this landscape. This would matter less if no humans had ever had such a role, but the entire area was shaped over tens of thousands of years, by human hands. They were a critical part of how the landscape actually worked.

"Up until about 1880, he said, cities functioned more like networked villages. A person likely worked, relaxed, and shopped all within about 20 minutes of their home. Cities of that era of course had plenty of their own challenges, but they functioned as cohesive units. Residents were more likely to interact and function together. But the modern era, and the introduction of the car, changed that." https://www.businessinsider.com.au/cars-ruined-cities-20th-century-2016-9?r=US&IR=T

Have been driving a lot more during the pandemic. Nobody follows speed limits, almost without exception. We have average speed cameras in place for trucks, turn them on for cars. Our hyper-individualism doesn't even see that a regulated system improves traffic flow. Imagine aeroplanes being able to choose whatever speed they wanted. Cars transport VASTLY more people than aeroplanes, and yet our whole road system is barely regulated. It destroys our towns and cities, and kills thousands. Cars are our most anti-social, anti-democratic invention.

If 10 people get sick amongst a million, that doesn't mean an individual has a 0.001% chance of getting something. You can't extrapolate from the group back to the individual. Some individuals will have a 100% chance of being the one who gets sick, some zero. People instinctively know this, these 'tiny' risks they're told about are NOT the chance each of us has, individually, of getting a clot. Even most experts are making this mistake, and calling the public stupid.

The flipside way of looking at how the vaccine 'risk' is being (badly) described. Your chances of winning the lottery are described as about 1 in 50 million. Or 0.000002%. However that's not true. Your chances of winning the lottery are either zero, a non-winning ticket, or 100%, a winning ticket. Nobody has a chance of 0.00002% of winning. 0.000002% of the *population* will win. A population measure, not individual. Your chances of getting a blood clot from the vaccines is either zero, if you don't get one, or 100%, if you do. How do you know if you're the zero or 100? You don't. Nobody does, until they figure out the specific reason it happens. But nobody's chance of getting a clot is the 0.000125% that is being quoted in the media.

Happy birthday Mel :)

Know that fairy tale, about how efficient the private sector is? Here it is in a picture. In a booming economy, Australian business investment has plummeted for over a decade. Sucking profits off to enrich (often foreign) shareholders and senior managers, and producing almost nothing of value.

NSW the only State not to do this. What possible justification can people provide for not monitoring average speed? Been in place for trucks for years. The car lobby will suggest ‘driving to the conditions’ (i.e. using public roads as race tracks) and more driver training. Pilots are trained much more than drivers, and have to follow a lot more rules.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars for 15 years, tens of thousands of orbits. Some of the pictures it sends back are breathtaking. These are blue sand dunes.

Nothing fires up a redneck more than telling them some new pointless property development or road is blocked by an endangered species. Some tiny little frog or insect, how ridiculous! But that thin blue line of life on the surface, which also stops meteors pounding us to smithereens, was created by species, interacting. Species don’t live ‘on’ Earth, that habitable bit where we all live. They created it. They made the atmosphere. If we keep wiping out species, that thin blue line will evaporate into space, the planet will freeze over and meteors will smash us every day. Except we won't survive long enough to see it.

Chile an advanced showing of what happens when you think vaccines will end the pandemic. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-56731801

Service industries are now almost 80% of the Australian Economy. Do people remember that 'service' is the old word used to describe the work of servants? A person was 'in service' i.e. a servant, or slave. We've jazzed up services to make them trendy, but these are some of the worst paid jobs in the country, with the worst conditions. They're still the old service/slave jobs. And people love it, they fall over themselves to go into service. Proving that you can teach new slaves old tricks.

I find you have to take the vitamin C research out of the whole 'natural' wellness movements, and away from other vitamin stuff, to appreciate it. It's not part of that world. Vitamin C is not really a vitamin in the way we usually mean that word. It keeps surprising in multiple ways, maybe Linus Pauling was right all along. They didn't give him 2 Nobel Prizes for nothing. https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/media-releases/articles/humble-vitamin-c-tablet-key-to-deakin-diabetes-breakthrough#:~:text=A%20new%20study%20from%20Deakin,in%20blood%20sugar%20after%20meals.

Another beautiful photo of the surface of Mars. Patterns appear everywhere in the universe (obviously one of my passions). When physics de-animated the universe, made it full of dead and inert 'matter', it had no way to then explain why this inert matter behaved in ordered or patterned ways. So it invented laws, that supposedly create the patterns. A law is just a pattern that repeats over and over. That's a big mistake. There are no laws, just as there is no matter. There are just actors, agencies. Humans interact in ways that produce patterns, without realising it. Statistics can show them, for example. The same for everything else in the universe, it all *acts*, every tiny atom or grain of it. The interaction of all of these agencies is what produces the patterns.

It's definitely true that ScoMo treated Christine Holgate disgracefully. But not because of her gender. Because she opposed his secret plan to privatise Australia Post, flushed out this week, in a report from Boston Consulting. So she had to go. The watches gave him an excuse. Regulatory capture, modern conservative parties ignore everything that gets us wound up, and just continue on their way dismantling the public sphere, removing all regulation and taxes. Not for their donors, the parties are now the donors. That's what regulatory capture means, the donors captured our regulatory system.

Yes, best to leave the catheters at home.

Happy Birthday Aunty Bev, have a wonderful day :)

This makes about as much sense as saying that if 5 out of every million people play croquet, the rest of us have a 0.0005% chance of playing croquet. Actually the vast majority of us have a zero chance of playing, because we're not interested. There does appear to be a tiny group of people who will get blood clots from this vaccine. But you, individually, don't have a tiny chance of getting a clot. You either have no chance at all, or a 100% chance, if you're part of that tiny group. Right now we have no idea who is in that group, or why. So this sort of graphic suggesting people are silly, is in itself silly.

I watched most of the funeral on replay this morning. What strikes me about royal ceremonies is how little they're about the individuals occupying the roles. Almost nothing about Philip the man in today's funeral. This is a good thing. Custom and tradition are the way people and wisdom from across centuries act still in the present. Even watching the event you could feel how no individual was really running things, it was centuries of traditions and knowledge guiding present-day individuals.

One of the wonders of studying philosophy for me was discovering that time as we call it actually moves from the future, to the present, to the past. The exact opposite to 'common sense' shown in the picture. Common sense just being the meaning (sense) that is most common. Which is nearly always wrong.

The Chinese understand better how the landscape is us. The people are woven into it.

Brits outraged by this, football about the only thing a post-Thatcher Britain is united on. I wonder if they see the parallels, with themselves and the US creating a Covid Super League, hoovering up most of the world's best vaccines, doing next to no meaningful public health work, at home or abroad. Replace your society with an Economy, and billionaire puppet-masters will call all the shots. Billionaires own the top Brit soccer teams, and also the companies funding the big anti-lockdown push in the pandemic. Regulatory capture.

To be blunt about the vaccines, and risk. - right now governments and experts alike are saying the risks are tiny. This is true, for nearly all of us (in fact the risks are zero for most). - but it's absolutely not true for a small number of us. Those people will die from the AZ vaccine. They likely wouldn't have died of Covid (or even contracted it, in Australia), so this is preventable death. - nobody can say yet what makes a person at risk of the clots. Instead they count up how many get clots, divide it by the total number who got that vaccine, and say that's your individual risk of getting a clot. Rubbish. If you have the biological thing that makes the vaccine give you a clot, you'll get a clot. If you don't, you won't. Until somebody figures out what that 'thing' is, it's literally a game of Russian Roulette, not each person a 'tiny risk'. - Australia has enough Pfizer already on order to vaccinate every adult in the country. That's what it should do. Politicians find that a bit slow, but that's because they have the Economy virus, and should be quarantined from the rest of us, for our safety. - the push to have fast vaccination is mostly about 'my dick is bigger than yours' in world politics. The rest of the world is a Covid basket case, worse than it's been at any stage of the pandemic. We won't be opening borders any time soon, there's no rush. The people who most need the vaccines in poorer countries can't even get any. The idiot US and UK think they can somehow end the pandemic by rushing to vaccinate their own people. Delusional and destructive half-wits, who caused most of the pandemic in the first place. - I doubt I'd accept an AZ vaccine right now. Pfizer will be available, and I don't play Russian Roulette. Appalled that medical and other experts are badgering the public to play Russian Roulette, when there are other options available.

Makes me almost physically ill listening to Australians planning their next OS holidays. Reminder: a pandemic isn't a minor inconvenience to your recreational lifestyle. It's an international tsunami of death.

Maybe the most spectacular and important show on TV right now. Jaw-dropping. (Really is, I promise, like 'omg' wow.) Humans and landscape and geology make patterns, which you can only see from orbit. Those patterns show you the connections between things. It's the opposite of a God's-eye view, it makes connections visible.

The Betsiboka Estuary, in Madagascar. On the ground people noticed the river running blood red almost, full of mud. From the sky you can see it's caused by the almost total removal of Madagascar's rainforests and other vegetation, creating enormous erosion. Aerial shots don't show you the 'top' view of what we see on the ground. They show you how what's on the ground links to everything else on the ground. It's a qualitatively different viewpoint. On-ground photos show individuals (people, trees, rocks etc.), aerial shots show societies. It's that social view of things that will become critical to solving our problems, I think.

Who remembers the strawberries and sewing needles incident? Notice how tonnes of strawberries were destroyed, because of the risk some may contain needles. It's a good example of how (I think) risk is being misrepresented with the AZ vaccine. There wasn't a tiny risk every strawberry had a needle in it. There was no chance most strawberries had a needle, and 100% chance a few did. There was nearly a 100% chance somebody was going to swallow a needle. That's very different to each strawberry being a tiny risk. They destroyed the strawberries, but they're pushing ahead with the vaccines. People weren't even going to likely die from eating a needle.

Surely all those protestors can't be wrong? "...a new survey by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age with research company Resolve Strategic, show that issues such as sexual harassment, assault and gender equity are named as important by only 5 per cent of voters."

This is the case for most schools. With peanuts, we don't add up the number of kids who have a reaction, divide that by the total number of kids and say that tiny number is each kid's risk. That would be nonsense, most kids have zero risk, a small number carry all the risk. And they need to be protected. The same principle should apply to vaccines.

No individual makes traffic. Lots of individuals driving together make traffic. There's no separate 'we' making that traffic. To even make sense of traffic, they need to send somebody into the air to report on it, to look at its patterns. Societies are only visible from the air, or in statistics and data. And they're not a 'we', they're just lots of 'I's', interacting in patterned ways. No one of us makes those patterns. There's a deep mystery there for us to chew on, that these patterns emerge, but none of us are making them.

ATAGI is the official scientific body that provides the vaccine advice to government. They've come out to make exactly the points I've been making in recent days, about the illegitimate use of risk in describing any dangers from the vaccines. There are no known *individual* risk factors for clots right now, including age (contrary to what the government has said), and so you can't just take the population risk and extrapolate it to individual risk.

If you need to go overseas this badly, that you'll try to find every tiny loophole to do it, it's time to get some therapy. Seriously, it's a sickness. Take a hard look at what unhappiness is in your life that you're trying to escape, that is so bad you can't bear your own company in your own home.

I use FB as a personal diary of ideas, which probably bores many. Sorry. Back to 'we'. Averages are one way we can be made to believe a group is an actual thing, with agency. But groups don't exist. Societies don't actually exist. They're constructed from a whole set of averages, but each of those is just what a lot of individuals are doing. But individuals don't exist either. Every one of us is made from the same stuff (including ideas) as all the rest of us. No individuals, no groups. Where that leads...another post!

The Premier on radio this morning, saying there's no need to report daily Covid case numbers, hospitalisations is enough. That we should be prepared to let the Covid flow through the community, as we open up, safe with our vaccines. Same old 'let the virus rip to save our economy' shit, one year on.

I often think about the damage the gym junkies have done to our collective mental health, with their skinny ripped ideas. So successfully that 10 out of 10 people will probably describe a healthy body as ripped and lean. The billions of people who are in true mental anguish because that's not them - think about it, the suffering is real, at all ages now.

Isn't it kind of strange that the idea of the 'individual' ever took off? I can't actually think of something a person does that is unique to them. Their language is shared, their biology is shared, their ideas are shared, their food and shelter and work is organised socially. What's left? Their thoughts? All images and language that are drawn from a social reservoir.

An actual photo (not drawing) of Saturn, taken by NASA's Cassini probe.

One of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, drifting in front of Saturn's rings. Another actual photo, from Cassini.

One last astro photo. Jupiter's moons Io and Europa, orbiting Jupiter above its Great Red Spot. Again a photo taken by Cassini, the NASA probe.

Curious that something many attribute to a universal gender trait - toxic masculinity - at the same time as they argue gender is infinitely fluid - has such specific geographical outcomes? Similarly in NSW, DV up over 70% in Wagga, not at all in many other places. Maybe the masculinity is extra toxic there? Or maybe toxic masculinity is a load of hooey, produced by marginal university gender studies departments desperate for relevance and funding. (By the way, I think DV is very real and very serious. But I think we'd get a helluva lot further understanding it focusing on our ideas about domesticity, than hitching it to a gender war bandwagon. It's in the friggin' name, DOMESTIC violence.)

The PM refuses to build a national quarantine centre. So virus keeps leaking out of hotels not built for quarantine. Very happy to do it for the past 25 years for refugees, tens of billions on that one, because it wins elections. Today he was an international laughing stock in the meeting of world leaders on climate change. But I'm not having a go at him, I'm asking Australians - how dumb do we have to be before it registers? How much more stupidity, corruption and just bloody incompetence would it take to swing those polls around?

Another amazing Cassini shot of Saturn. Here's a stat. The distance from the inside of the rings to the outside of them is over 300,000km. That means Australia for example could be laid end-to-end at least 10 times across the rings. The rings are made of trillions of pieces of ice, thought to be one of Saturn's many moons, obliterated about the time of the dinosaurs by Saturn's enormous gravity. The debris then formed those beautiful circular rings, caused again by Saturn's enormous gravity. Oh, and it rains diamonds on Saturn.

I like Brian Cox. And he's a Professor of Physics. But he's made me come back to gravity again. He said, while riding the vomit comet: "by simply falling at the same rate as the plane, for a few, fleeting moments, we are all free of gravity's grip". Sorry Brian, there's as much gravity 'gripping' you there as there is on me, sitting in my chair. Otherwise you wouldn't be falling. I find even highly trained scientists and engineers often don't understand weightlessness. It has nothing to do with weight at all.

In countries who thought the 'Economy' was real, deaths are mounting so fast that you see drivel like this, 'the vaccine is less risky than Covid!' So now the public is forced into a fake double-bind, choosing between 2 risks for death. Choose life people, as Wham said. Fuck the Economy. It doesn't even exist. Make them spend money to control Covid, while they fix vaccines.

The word 'cat' is a virtual or potential version of a cat. A cat sitting next to me is an actual cat. The word can be used to describe all possible cats. This idea (potential/virtual) is I think the key to understanding life and death. Death is not nothingness - there is no such thing as nothing, you can't describe it, picture it or even imagine it. It can't exist. Death is a virtual or potential state. Look at this amazing old (1848) photo. The people all long dead. But still virtually, potentially here. If they'd become 'nothing', we wouldn't remember them. Elvis is dead, but he still makes people cry. He's still potentially/virtually here. We're all eternal beings, existing in various combinations of virtual and actual.

It's quite striking that domestic violence is much more likely in poor households. Poor women have to use police to solve these problems, the wealthy hire lawyers. Another dimension to why this is poorly understood as a gender problem. Households have taken on both the financial and emotional burden of societies increasingly stripped of community resources by modern conservative politicians, who flog off community assets to fund massive tax cuts to wealthy donors and themselves. Households are pressure cookers, we're cramming problems that communities used to solve into every individual relationship and home. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-19/domestic-violence-and-poverty-statistics/10108140

Love the bit in here about how ‘traffic’ is not some homogeneous thing, like water coming out a hose. It’s a decision by thousands or millions of individuals, based on many factors. Getting rid of roads actually makes traffic evaporate. The crowd adjusts. Adding roads makes everything much worse. https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/reducing-roads-can-cause-traffic-to-evaporate/

Look at these people, going to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. A nice orderly pattern, what we call a crowd. I think we see crowds and individuals as 2 distinct things. But look at every face in that crowd. Each totally individual, paying attention to different things, having different thoughts, with different emotions. To me it shows that a group of people, no matter how small or big, right up to a society, is really nothing more than individuals. Going along with others each for their own very personal reasons.

Anzac. A day with a theme of remembering and death. Those two are actually intimately related, I think. To 'live', as we think of that word, is to remember. Remembering is what makes us think time 'flows'. What makes us think our lives are mortal, with a past, a present and a future. Memory I think is the key to understanding that we are actually immortal. My Anzac Day posts will be thoughts about mortality, immortality, time and memory.

If you say (as I do) that we're actually immortal, the obvious question is - why don't I remember life before the one I'm living now? Well, of the 365 days you were 5 years old, I bet you'd struggle to remember 5 minutes of it. Do you remember all of the times you went to the toilet or put your shoes on, in 2018? Etc. We remember only the tiniest parts of the lives we live. Not remembering having lived forever isn't in itself an argument against immortality. And in fact this tiny amount we actually remember is also the reason we (mistakenly) think we're mortal, that time 'passes'. It's what makes us think there's a before, now, and after. Memory is what creates what we call 'time'. Memory is key, more on that later.

Memory. This is Henri Bergson, long dead. Nobel Prize winner. Bergson realised that memories aren't in our heads. He showed that when we have a memory, we're not going into our heads, we're re-entering the past itself, which never left. The past isn't 'in the past', time doesn't flow along like a river, leaving the past behind. It's right here, now, at every moment, in potential form, ready to be reactivated again. About the same time Marcel Proust wrote about this in his novel, how eating a piece of cake literally transported him momentarily to a time in his childhood - he felt it and smelled it as if he was there again. He WAS there again, for that moment, it never left. We've all had those moments of being plunged 'back in time', often from tastes or smells. Eternity is the potential or virtual that coexists with our actual (what we call 'physical') lives. These words are virtual, eternal things, that I'm using right now.

Happy birthday :) A notable one!

This one looks a bit dry, but is important. Indications are immunity created by vaccines might last a year. That would mean the massive rollouts in places like the US and UK, that are attracting admiration, will possibly have to start again before the current rollout is even finished. And even before much of the world has even had one jab. As the authors say, vaccination will not end this pandemic. The same message applies today as it did a year ago, you MUST eliminate the virus, mostly by restricting social and 'economic' (same thing) activity, including with lockdowns. Anything else is a steaming pile of BS.

Dementia shows that memory is an entirely practical faculty. We need to remember to be able to do things. Memory is what makes us think that time passes, that we are mortal, because it makes our lives seem to have a sequence of before, now, and after. But actually its real function is just to let us do things. Look at this dementia home, designed to prompt memories to help dementia patients function. Dementia patients seem sick to us, but actually they're living a bit of time in its pure state - eternity. A dream, literally, dreams are where all of us visit eternity every day. They have hallucinations and delusions, but that's their lives decoupled from practical activity, which plunges them into a world where things don't follow neat cause and effect, where things don't pass, there's no sense of a 'flow' of time. That flow is an illusion created by our need to act in the world, you can't act without a logical sense of before and after.

This is the earliest ever recorded sound. It wasn't intended to even be a sound recording, but engineers were able to extract it from nothing more than scribbles of ink on a piece of paper. Posting this as an example of how time doesn't pass, that everything sits there, virtually/potentially, ready to be re-activated again at any time. The singing didn't pass away, it became potential. Eternity is potentiality. We can't recreate the singer in actual form (what we call 'physical'), with current technology. But in principle there's nothing to stop that eventually being possible, for any 'dead' person.

Hands up who's for privatising Australian beaches?

A shout-out to the people who told me last year that India was showing the way to deal with the pandemic, through herd immunity i.e. just letting people get infected.

Straya worships tradies. Tradies are in my family. But there's a reason you can mostly DIY your own plumbing, carpentry, painting etc., but that you can't DIY your own MRI, or commercial airliner, mobile phone or hip replacement. Those things are bloody hard, they need people with years of education to understand. And we have very little respect for those people. The country has sat by during this pandemic and watched as universities have been gutted. Nobody cared, I doubt many even know it happened. The government engineered it because smart people call them out on their bullshit. About time we restored respect to smarts too.

For me the most important and under-appreciated role in a big organisation is middle management. Expected to make unworkable fantasies of senior management happen, and to do all the tough interpersonal work with employees to bring those fantasies to some sort of life. Often despised by those both above and below them, as a result, and working harder than either of them.

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for students, because governments make them, like trained poodles. Their management see themselves as 'competing' for students, like they're selling washing powder. Students are not actually important to the mission of a university. Scholarship is the only reason universities really exist, society's way of creating and taming ideas. If you look at the lunatic ideas currently in circulation in society, you'll get a good idea of how much universities have been damaged.

Good old NSW, second last still on 'economic' performance, lagging well behind those dreadful lockdown States. It's almost like eliminating the virus fixes your Economy, hey, and 'living with the virus' screws it.

But you have just a tiny risk of dying from a blood clot! Doesn't seem to be working as a public health message, go figure. Going to need to offer over-50s Pfizer at a minimum, we've bought enough of it. Won't get them all back, but it'd get me.

Often they regret it because we don't live in strong communities any more, so the burden falls hugely on parents. Raising the next generation is the only really important work anybody does, there are no substitutes. Only by doing that, day after day over many years, do you understand the arduous work of keeping civilisation going. The only work aimed at eternity and not today or tomorrow.

The word 'scientist' was invented in 1833. Before that time there were just scholars, who studied across the whole curriculum. The closest thing to what we see as 'science' today was natural philosophy. It's been alarming to me to see how narrowly experts are now trained, how 'scholarship' has come to just mean 'reading the literature'. That's not scholarship.

As a kid I still remember shops being closed both Saturday afternoons and Sundays. You needed to get cash out on a Friday to get you through the weekend. Partly this was the religious Sabbath still shaping society, partly action by unions. Saturday afternoon trading in NSW began only in 1984. Sunday trading began only in 1992. Are we better for it? The hysteria over 'lockdowns' suggests to me that we're now so well domesticated by work that we can't tolerate even the smallest break to our busy routines. Heathen wage slaves. Religion is much smarter than we realise. Know what would be great for our mental health? Compulsory rest days built back into our weeks. 3 of them would be a good start, let's have a 4-day working week.

The moon weighs about 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg. It floats in the sky, effortlessly. Everything floats. But for some reason a REALLY tiny human being thinks gravity is 'weighing' them down. Imagine yourself as the moon, lightly coming into contact with the Earth. That feeling under your feet or bum isn't your weight, it's you floating in space, just like the moon, and then gently touching the Earth as it comes up underneath you. Every second of every day, it comes up underneath you, while you float.

See, 'in a million' kinda works, until what you're doing involves millions of people. Then you should really say "19 of you are going to die". (In fact it's now 32 dead, in the UK.) With vaccines available that don't cause deaths, how is this excusable? With public health measures available that stop Covid, how is knowingly killing some people excusable? A moral question for people. "...by the end of March 79 people had suffered rare blood clots after having the AstraZeneca vaccination in the UK - 19 of whom had died. This was out of 20 million administered doses - giving a risk of about four in one million of developing a blood clot, and one in a million of dying."

https://www.newstatesman.com/2019/02/bruno-latour-philosopher-fighting-save-science-itself

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of thing without it sounding elitist, but in fact we need some elitism back I think, toxic ideas are crushing our societies and aren't being challenged. Universities have given up, tamed into thinking their job is to market themselves to students. "Just enjoying life" isn't an antidote, that's an idea too, and tripe really, only people in a privileged society would have that as a philosophy of life.

Happy birthday to you :)

This is nice for nurses. Lusted, and now trusted, more than any other profession.

As a kid I asked my dad once what his favourite food was. He said 'soup'. I thought he was mad. Now I find myself actually agreeing with him (a bit late to tell him, but if you're reading somewhere...). The Japanese have a theory that the more liquid worked into a meal, the healthier and less fattening that meal will be. I think there's even research backing that up, the liquid really does great things to digestion. Thus the love of soup, in many Asian cultures. And it feels true as well, you hardly ever get that bleh feeling after eating soup, it sits really well inside you.

The press here full of patronising expert advice to people about the total safety of being vaccinated with AZ. This is the clot data for the UK. 41 now dead. Look at the peak at that 50+ year age cut-off, said in Australia to be the safer age to take it. (Europe says it's 60, you can see why in this data.) Our 50+ an arbitrary number based on our desire to get Phase 2a of our rollout going, which is people 50+. The enormous haste being forced on us is driven by one thing only - the tourism industry.

Traffic apps seemed a solution to avoid traffic. But what they do is push the traffic into residential streets, where the jams now occur as well. The secret to understanding all of this I think is to stop believing in 'traffic'. It's not a thing, just as the Economy isn't a thing. It's a word used to try to summarise the individual beliefs and desires of millions of people. That's where you need to start. https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/your-navigation-app-is-making-traffic-unmanageable

A year ago debates abounded about 'living with the virus' (technically virus 'mitigation'), and eliminating it. Fans of the Economy argued then, and still do now, to live with the virus. They said the virus couldn't be eliminated. The numbers are in. Virus elimination the best for health, and for the economy. It also creates the *least* amount of impact on freedom, despite what the critics of 'lockdowns' blabber on about. 'Living with the virus' means having to set up hundreds of restrictions that are complex to administer and are needed for much longer than sharp 'lockdowns'. People who argued for the mitigation bullshit went very quiet on here ages ago. I don't care if this sounds intolerant, ideas matter, and I think they should feel the shame of the lethal nonsense they promoted.

Nails it, in every detail. NSW is the triumph of spin over substance that dominates federal government too. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/wa-premier-defends-strict-lockdown-by-comparing-it-to-nsw-model/ar-BB1gcIqc?ocid=spartan-dhp-feeds

Hazard reduction burning is right up there with daylight saving for me. A hazard reduction process that's orders of magnitude more hazardous than the hazard it's trying to prevent.

Here's a fact to blow your mind (maybe). There's no such thing as facts. People often question why experts disagree, can't they just 'stick to the facts'? The problem is, every single fact is only true within a wider framework of values and assumptions. And it's there people will inevitably disagree. This is also why science is not (as we're all taught) the study of how the world is, of facts. The world isn't some static thing waiting to be discovered, it changes depending on how we interact with it.

I want to challenge the idea that Australia is falling behind the rest of the world by being slow to vaccinate. Let's remember, there is effectively no Covid in Australia. We're not behind the rest of the world, we've been ahead of them for most of the past year. Vaccination is their way of catching up with us. When they get their shit together and eliminate Covid (we've already done that) using vaccines, then they'll have caught up with us. This matters because the quick vaccinators (who have killed nearly a million people between them) are trying to shift the global framework we discuss Covid with, away from public health work, towards 'opening up'. We can't let them do that, and we shouldn't do it here either. It will stop us stopping the pandemic.