June 2021

Channel 9 trying to do a good thing, and in the process probably damaging public health work even further. Much of what they promise vaccination will do here, like get us flying again, may not actually be true. The US and UK discovering right now what happens when you promise the public vaccines will end the pandemic, and they don't. The woke Twitter crowd focused only on how many white people are in the ad.

One simple (and non-political) way to understand why Melbourne has needed to lock-down more than Sydney in the pandemic, is to look at how much movement occurs in each city. A city with more movement, means more people mixing, and more chance for the virus to spread. It will therefore need stronger restrictions. Melbourne has much less congestion than Sydney. Sydney is a car park.

Carlo Perindani. Glorious light and colour. The mystery and magic of paint 'capturing' an image.

People-years is a measure I think we should use more. The International Space Station took the equivalent of 3 million people-years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Technologies don't just hold our morals, they're also the actual glue that holds societies together. To build something you need to co-operate. To maintain it you need to maintain that co-operation into the future, across multiple generations. Humans never agree, unless they build. Technology is democracy. Struggling democracies are societies that don't build things.

Ask those always pushing to open borders and get back to 'normal' life whether their thinking includes infecting all of our children? Because they haven't thought much about that, or about anything much except themselves. The UK facing this right now.

I saw that arm and thought it was me for a second. Then the hair tipped me off.

Deepti is a UK pandemic expert. A few of her superb Tweets, this is exactly the danger I believe we're not seeing. If you vaccinate AND let the virus continue to circulate, it's like pouring petrol on a fire. But millions of us think the OS holidays will be back on as soon as we all get the jab. Our politicians tell us that. Much suffering ahead.

There are 65 million kilometres of roads in the world. Laid end--to-end, that's enough to circle the planet more than 1600 times. For most of those journeys we end the day exactly where we started, it's a commute, not a trip. Nothing removes power from ordinary people more than making them mobile. 'Move to where the jobs are'. Roads are mostly about uprooting people from their homes, their land, which then becomes expendable. Why the landscape is increasingly empty, and we live in mega-cities of commerce. The 'Economy'.

Happy Birthday!

Names that make you always sound old? I’ll start: Joan.

This from the TGA today, our main regulator for medicines. Stay with me, I know it might seem dry... "With the ongoing risk of COVID outbreaks in Australia and the potential for severe long-term effects or fatal consequences of infection, the benefits for the AstraZeneca vaccine continue to outweigh the risks." The thing is, the TGA has done no risk assessment of outbreaks in Australia, which is what they're using to weigh up the risks of that vaccine. There are quite precise actual numbers on vaccine risk, but if you're going to balance those against outbreak risk, you need numbers for that too. They don't have them. They haven't even done an assessment, it's pure assertion. This matters because the entire vaccination strategy depends on these risk assessment. Politics has poisoned our expertise.

Remember how lockdowns were going to destroy the Economy? Yeh, nah. Also, this link. Stopping the country has made it better, in almost every way. But we want the old 'normal' back. Bizarre. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/this-has-never-been-seen-before-common-illnesses-wiped-out-in-fight-against-covid-19-20210603-p57xpa.html

Happy birthday :)

I used Westconnex for the first time last weekend, as well as the cross-city tunnel. All very smooth, and bliss to avoid Parramatta Road. But whoa, $40 in tolls! Public-private partnerships (PPP) are really just spin, it's only a clever way to disguise user-pays. Unfortunately these projects also just end up causing more vehicles on the road, and the benefit is short-lived.

Have done a lot of risk management in my work. Here's another example of what to me is quite outrageous dishonesty in the vaccine debate. Just about every expert, doctor and politician is telling people every day that the risk to them from the AZ vaccine is extremely low. Examples of more chances of being eaten by a shark etc. But that's just the *likelihood* of an event, only one dimension of risk. A proper risk assessment also assesses impact. Once you add severe impact, the risk of this vaccine is at *least* medium, to each person.

I know many have a chuckle with my anger at Daylight Saving (DST). But it's part of a greater slavery, to time itself. As this article says, clocks don't measure time - they create it. Until we understand that, we will continue to be slaves to our own destruction, it's that serious. What maps did to space, the clock did to time. Both instruments of imperial control. We're still the children of empire, living inside maps and clocks, idiotically seeing 'freedom' as travel (space), and DST (time). Both just enslave us even more.

Before 1847 there was no such thing as 'time' or 'space' in England. Each locality was a whole universe unto itself, with its own rhythms of life driven by things like seasons and cropping, and didn't see itself as part of some wider space. As part of a kingdom under God and King, sure, but not as a location on a map. The railways created the idea of the country as a single space to be mapped and travelled through. And then forced a standard (GMT) time on all locations, to allow the trains to run. Travel created both space and time, and to this day we think we live 'in' time and space. Because we're the culture of travel.

For more than a year we've had to listen to how smart NSW's approach to the pandemic has been, avoiding 'lockdown', to minimise disruption to the Economy. The actual costs show that to be nothing more than political spin. By rejecting lockdowns, NSW was forced to introduce a much greater number of more gentle restrictions, applied over a much longer time. It costs the 'Economy' a fortune. This is dollars per week.

Happy Birthday!!

Hmm, it seems people are soon going to have to choose between the mental health destruction of children not going to school (seriously, I can barely type that without laughing), or them getting Covid.

Got my first Astra dose yesterday. Listening to whining UK tourists on TV right now, saying 'what was the point of getting vaccinated if we can't travel?' The fault of idiot politicians promising people that vaccination means the end of the pandemic. Far fewer than half of the UK population is fully vaccinated, and they're one of the fastest countries. The sense of entitlement of travellers is one of the most disgusting spectacles. That's our travel culture, people who would happily infect kids, provided they get their OS holiday.

I love heat pumps, we should all get rid of wood and gas fires and use heat pumps instead. Some of the amazing physics. These two scenes, one obviously looks much 'hotter' than the other. But actually there's about 80-90% as much energy in the air on that frosty morning as there is on the stinking summer day. Heat pumps don't generate heat or cool anything, they just move that existing heat around. They can provide 5 times as much heat or cooling as the electricity they use, up to 600% efficient. No other form of heating or cooling even gets close to 100%.

The pandemic is nearly over! Say the US and UK, look at them there, in their imperial blue-green, gobbling up all of the world vaccine supply, and desperate to get back in jet planes, to spread the virus even further. A pox on both of their houses.

Happy birthday!

Have a great birthday Rob!

Heard on radio. Not all funny people are smart. But all smart people are funny.

What's happening in the UK, in a great animation. Still slow to learn that defeating a pandemic is primarily about stopping people getting infected, by restricting their social and 'economic' activity. Hoping vaccines will give them a quick-fix. https://youtu.be/KfpOrRtlask

Waleed's thinking is everything Australian culture has come to hate. Nuanced, researched, complex. Many Australians hate him for it, often the types whose banner of Straya-ness is putting a flag somewhere. It's hard to say it, but Australia is a profoundly stupid country in many ways, and getting worse. https://www.smh.com.au/national/it-makes-no-sense-to-ask-why-melbourne-20210609-p57zba.html?btis

The red bits are land within 1km of a road. The other colours are areas of ecological significance. Notice that where you have roads/red, you have not much else. North America, Europe, the seats of modern empires. Researchers say the key to keeping what's left of the other non-red areas is to stop the growth of roads. Travel kills pretty much everything.

Frits Thaulow (1847-1906). Love the water.

Ah, travellers.

Say you were asked to go and find Coca-Cola, the company. Like being asked to go and get a pair of shoes from your cupboard. Where would you go? To its headquarters? But it exists all around the world. There's no doubt it exists, but *where* is it? You won't find it. Nothing exists 'in' space like that. Not even you. Sure there's a place where your body is, but your identity extends way beyond that. Half the people who might read this, for example, have never been in the same room as me.

Christian Drosten, a leading German virologist, on why the idea of 'herd immunity' may be misleading. If you don't get vaccinated, you will catch this virus, eventually.

Was I: A. Trying to get to work, or B. Filming a car commercial?

Hygiene theatre. Most of the Covid practices that have got the highest emphasis in the pandemic, like washing hands and staying 1.5 m apart, are next to useless at stopping the spread of Covid. This hugely expensive plexiglass wall in a theatre restaurant a good example, it wouldn't protect a single person there, on either side of it. Ventilation is the key, and why haven't politicians focused on that? Because it would impact business. The Economy.

For the person who's hard to buy for. A colourful lizard bouquet.

I'm seeing the same Economy-driven nonsense in other natural events now, not just the pandemic. For example yesterday, this was the travel advisory for the highway. I was on that road yesterday morning, there's no way it should have been open, the ice was about 3 inches thick, cars sliding etc. What's 'unnecessary' travel? Going to work, is that necessary? To school? Who the fuck knows? Just like Gladys advising people to be 'cautious' with the virus. What if somebody at work said 'I don't want to sit in a cubicle with a dozen other people with little ventilation, I want to be cautious'? Good luck buddy, you'll be fired.

I'm not a language Nazi, but 'lightening' is what lightning does to the sky - makes it lighter. Or removing weight.

Workers in the US earn $10 less per hour today than the same job 40 years ago. Our current government aspires for Oz to follow this model. Look at the wage numbers in Australia if you think that's an exaggeration, exactly the same trend happening here.

Measles is a master of infection. It spreads literally like wildfire. But another thing it does is even more interesting. If you catch it, it can wipe your immune system's memory of every other disease you were already immune to. Called immune amnesia.

A question. Would you willingly allow children to become infected with Covid? The UK is doing it. On one day alone over 136,000 students were absent, due to Covid infections in themselves or in people they mix with. This country will do the same, vaccinate the adults and then just let kids get infected. Is that OK?

Risk management concepts. On the left, risk based on likelihood of an event only. The 'odds' of it happening. On the right, risk with likelihood + impact. A good word here, as the 'impact' will be a splatter on the right, and a soft foot on the ground on the left. The chance of falling the same in both situations. The consequences dramatically different. None of this nuance is in the public vaccination debates.

If I can ask, what decision have my fellow over-50s made re AZ vaccination, in Oz? Noting that I had my first dose this week.

The correct gesture when Vladimir offers you tea.

After more than a year, people still not getting it. Elimination *is* still having a 'few cases' of Covid in the community. It's not eradication. What these economic thinkers mean is open right up, and contact trace outbreaks. It's an exponential virus, that is IMPOSSIBLE. You can't finesse an exponential, it will destroy you. Every country that has tried, without exception, has failed. It's basic maths. And the patronising 'we need to learn to live with risks'. That is what we're doing, morons. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-13/australia-zero-covid-public-support-for-lockdowns-shifting/100203006

Some research suggesting that a person's intelligence is directly related to the size of their pupil, the black hole in the middle of the eye. A larger pupil, in proper lighting (bright lights will make it automatically shrink, that's its job) signifies higher intelligence. I'm usually against this sort of research, but there's a logic here - intelligence is being open to what's around you, letting it in.

This is a scandal of epic proportions. And yet this government continues to enjoy election-winning polling. Courts not only judged the Robodebt scheme unlawful, they were scathing in saying politicians who invented it knew it was unlawful. Hundreds if not thousands of people died. People who vote for this government were outraged over 4 deaths with pink batts, but a $2 billion corruption scandal that led to hundreds or more deaths leaves them unmoved? Look in the mirror, Australia.

You can find this on Netflix. It's an extraordinary film, made by Peter Galison, a scholar in my area who studies scientific imagery in particular. It's the story of how they captured the first ever image of a black hole. The film is beautifully made, not some dry doco. And take the title literally, black holes really are the edge of not just what we know, but of reality itself. You can't imagine anything that can match the actual reality here.

Hmm. For context, the Europeans restricted AZ to the over 60s, not 50s like here. This means they're now saying don't give it to anybody. Huge. https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-06-13/astrazeneca-shots-should-be-halted-for-over-60s-too-ema-official

There's no question the great political experiment of the past 50 or more years, is libertarianism. The idea that governments get in the way, and we need to do everything to 'free' individuals from them. All the anti-bureaucracy, small government, pro-private sector rhetoric that wins elections comes from this. The problem is, it's complete bullshit. Not one country has ever been run on libertarian ideas. The countries that make the most noise about being libertarian, like the US, have governments that are larger and spend more than countries who embrace the role of the State. It's literally grown ups doing that teenage rebellion thing of claiming that they're repressed, while living in the comforts of home. In reality the outcome is that libertarians just tweak governments to favour themselves, they never really get rid of government, in fact as above - they make it bigger. Because their ideas are fantasies, driven by a refusal to grow up. It matters, because these same ideas created the pandemic, and have killed over 10 million people so far.

Happy Birthday Maicee :)

A day late, but happy birthday!

Here's an example of how this pandemic is actually a battle against libertarianism, not a virus. Headline from the UK today. 'Freedom', as if sheltering from a lethal virus is some sort of authoritarian oppression. Societies run by these ideas don't survive, they're literally suicide cults. And yet these are the governments winning elections worldwide.

Ever noticed that FB is almost entirely hyperlinks? Images, text, names etc. - all links. Hyperlinks aren't just a tool. They're the way all of the parts of our lives that used to be relatively separate are now being drawn together. Who we are as people, news, ideas, events, all now live together in a single space of hyperlinks. That's a fundamental anthropological shift for humanity, often unnoticed I think.

Hey young people, remember not being able to afford a house? Well we oldies have more in store for you. Prepare to be infected. This is criminal, I'm so disgusted. This is the UK, the US is following suit. The first person who says to me 'but children aren't affected by this virus' will get my size 14s to the throat.

100 years ago the measure of a good business was the ability to pay a living wage. Now business opposes the very idea of it, and tries to get cheap labour from overseas. Think about that measure of a good business - how well it can pay employees. Employees are customers of businesses. The shift to profit for business as a measure of a good business has sucked money out of all businesses.

"Resilience has been built out of our health systems, and replaced by just-in-time systems designed to run at close to 100 per cent bed occupancy in normal times." Also the reason supermarkets sell out of toilet paper in outbreaks, blamed on 'panic buying' because we see the world as one big tabloid newspaper. Drama tarts.

Once upon a time, you could buy cigarettes in hospital.

One of my passions is unravelling the big generalist terms that dominate our lives. Like 'The Economy'. Or 'business'. Or 'traffic'. None of those exist. Another that doesn't is 'the public'. There is no such thing. It's a handy summary term we use to describe everybody together, somehow. But one of the reasons I spend ages looking at photos of crowds is, you can clearly see that every single person in them is still thinking and feeling as an individual. A crowd is individuals choosing to act in certain ways, never an actual separate thing.

I've held off commenting on the updated AZ vaccine advice. Obviously it makes me angry, that I missed a Pfizer dose by not waiting 2 more weeks, I thought they wouldn't budge. I told you so seems childish, but far out it's a common theme in Australia, where even 5 minutes of thought reveals the stupidity of so much of what goes on. Michael is a leading haematologist in the UK, where they've used a lot of AZ, so their data is important. He warned about the 50-59 age group months ago. This is now data emerging for safety of second dose, which the government and experts here said was absolutely fine yesterday. Let's remember this when this vaccine is eventually withdrawn entirely.

When we reach the point in Australia (and we will) when public voices call for us to infect children with Covid, so older folk can go on OS holidays with open borders, remember research like this. Showing that people who get Covid, even mildly, may get permanent brain damage. Remember also that even vaccinated people can get Covid, and thus permanent brain damage.

Why vaccines aren't a fast-track back to 'normal' life.

How do you have a lockdown without having a lockdown? By asking the public to do it for you. Smoke and mirrors.

Another extraordinary stuff-up. Should be worth some extra popularity points for ScoMo, on past history. Come on Australia, you’re much smarter than this.

Can anybody explain what possible purpose the words 'strongly encouraged' have in a public health notice?

Would you like to do this? You already are. Imagine that space station coming up underneath Chris Hadfield and pressing up into him as he sits there floating. That's what the Earth is doing to you, every moment, as you float in space.

Hadn't seen this Monet before. Again, glorious light.

The Delta variant of Covid, infecting cells. The cells look like balloons. This is because there's so much virus replicating inside them that the spike proteins on their surface 'melt' the cells.

The problem with the idea of herd immunity is, humans don't live in herds. The herd regularly jumps on a plane and escapes the paddock. This pandemic will just keep rolling along, killing as it goes, until humans learn that travel destroys.

Portraits of Romans from 2 thousand years ago, found in a necropolis in Egypt. Faces staring out at us from the distant past. Images capture souls, you can feel them.

The reality of Gladys' strategy that's no strategy of 'encouraging' people. Yesterday she asked people to avoid going out and mixing with others, while this outbreak is underway in Sydney. She was spotted last night at this restaurant, with a party of 50+ people.

I'm never condescending. (That means talking down to people.)

National Cabinet to meet today to discuss vaccine hesitancy. Ideas come full circle, remember the #metoo discussion about consent? Does anybody remember a suggestion that somebody hesitant to have sex with somebody needed an advertising campaign to persuade them to just do it? Vaccine hesitancy is a failure of medical consent procedure. An ethical failure. A paternalistic 'doctor knows best' approach. The public defeats pandemics, not doctors.

Puzzle. If you wrote out the numbers one to one thousand, in words, and then arranged them alphabetically, which number would be last? No Google cheats.

Serious question. Should violent criminals be allowed to work in schools? I'm sure we'd all say no. And yet we're fine with Covid circulating in schools. Please help me understand the difference.

Gotta fight stupid wherever you see it. Australia and NZ *ARE* living with Covid. That's what all of our public health measures are for. Unsurprisingly one of the Bibles of the Economy crowd arguing to...well, it's not clear. Let everybody get infected, presumably. That's what they mean by 'living with Covid'. Let's give everybody a bit of Ebola too. https://www.economist.com/asia/2021/05/22/australia-and-new-zealand-cannot-hide-from-covid-19-for-ever?utm_campaign=a_io_fy2122_q1_conversions-cb-dr_abo-allaudiences&utm_medium=social-paid&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=content_staticlinkad_np-australiacovid-n-may_article&utm_term=followers&twclid=11407080803759116310

Happy Birthday to you. 34. Geepers.

Happy birthday for yesterday!

If you want to let swindlers and charlatans screw up your life with their Economy-speak, don't read this. https://theconversation.com/please-no-more-questions-about-how-we-are-going-to-pay-off-the-covid-debt-158056

I'm still yet to see a re-structure or hire in a larger organisation that didn't ultimately reduce to some senior person trying to dump work they don't want. Dressed up in all sorts of mumbo jumbo about 'strategic' things.

Imagining the NSW spin doctors having long, late nights, trying to find a way to rationalise locking down Sydney after spending a year vomiting nonsense about NSW not needing to do that sort of thing. Why you should never have politicians running a pandemic response. You can be certain that it will be some variation of 'NSW is the best'. I think Gladys had daddy-approval issues.

When you can't even stop your Cabinet getting Covid. Lunacy in real-time.

The government public messaging seems to have missed this, so for information. If you've been in Greater Sydney (includes the Blue Mountains), or the Central Coast, Shellharbour or Wollongong since 10 June, you MUST wear a mask in public places. That includes at work. So if you live in Lithgow for example, and have been to any of those places, you should be wearing a mask, inside or outside (where it's an organised event outside) when you're in public, and at work. There are some exceptions (schools for example), details in the public health order, at: https://legislation.nsw.gov.au/information/covid19-legislation/greater-sydney

Have a look at Sydney today - deserted. This is Sydney not 'locked down'. Same as being locked down, but takes even longer. You can either learn the specifics of this stuff, or just keep repeating the same promotional bullshit slogans from the NSW Government. Research clearly shows this approach costs more, harms more people and restricts our freedoms more.

Some people un-friended me on FB for suggesting the big protests for women's rights would come to pretty much nothing. I wish them well in their glorious victory.

Sydney today, again. What the righteous and stupid call 'panic buying'. What happens when a fragile just-in-time supply chain meets a public planning to not live just-in-time, for a while.

So far contact tracing and vaccines have been tried as silver-bullet fixes for the pandemic. Neither will end it, it's like hoping a bunch of flowers will paper over a dysfunctional relationship. A pandemic is a complex socio-political event, the creation of a dysfunctional 'normal' life. Until we understand that, the virus will just keep killing.

900 people exposed to Covid at a Sydney hairdresser. You people with hair disgust me.

Hmm, a shorter way of saying ‘stay at home order’. Anyone?

Andrea Gonzalez Caballero. I may have a crush.

The Sydney outbreak.

Scientists are puzzled that brain activity drops when a person is 'hallucinating'. You'd expect bran activity to go up, if the brain is creating all of these images. What they're not getting is that the brain produces NO images. What we perceive every day isn't in the brain. Our perceptions are the world itself, shaped by our body's action in it. If you're awake and alert, the world as you see it isn't actually the world. Your eyes aren't windows. It's the world presented to you according to your potential action in it. Something looks close or far away, because physically that's your body's current physical relationship to that thing. When you sleep or take drugs, that potential action goes and the world looks COMPLETELY different. As in this image. Perception is only about action, it's not a window onto the world. Your dreams are the world as it is when you're not acting in it, they're not 'in your head'.

It's not a cat, but stick with me. This idea of a 'proportionate' approach to the pandemic. A grown-up colouring game, one LGA at a time. NSW refuses to 'lock down' a whole area when there's a major outbreak. But all this does is force it to lock down that same area, a piece at a time, over a much longer time. It costs more, infects more people and ultimately creates even more restriction than a lockdown declared immediately, because the restrictions end up being used for a much longer time. On top of that, it restricts people dis-proportionately. Those in the epicentre of the outbreak get restricted, while everybody else gets to pretend that 'normal' life continues. Unfortunately societies don't work in that nice neat suburb way. The virus eventually gets out. Much smarter, faster, cheaper, and less harmful for everybody to just down tools immediately, when there's a major outbreak.

Remember the 'R number' from earlier in the pandemic"? An R less than 1 means a pandemic is under control. This is Sydney's R number for the past 5 days. I think many whose idea of thinking through the pandemic has been to back one team or another (Victoria vs Gladys, for example, like it's a State of Origin game), or to take one tool from the public health toolkit like contact tracing or vaccines, and think they will magically end the pandemic, are about to suffer for their laziness.

The NSW Government Covid strategy has arrived at its inevitable destination. A pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. You sometimes win at gambling, in the short-term. You never do in the longer term. No amount of puff pieces on Gladys' boyfriends will get them out of this one.

The thing with propaganda is, it really works. People grasp it, to save them from doing any thinking of their own. It doesn't age well.

If you Google 'love', you get this sort of image. I'm back on love because of a quote from the Buddha I saw, that said if you like a flower, you pick it. If you love it, you water it. It'd be easy to sentimentalise even that, but watering takes work. Gardening is hard work. Definitions of love are all about positive feelings and emotions. Why is a fight not love? A disagreement or debate? Why can you not love somebody intensely even though you don't really like them very much? They drive you crazy etc.

It's readers of the Telegraph who often go on about 'media bias'. I guess they know it well.

Kings School claimed $7 million in JobKeeper payments. A school for the haves, and the have-mores.

Closing a loop on many of my posts. We're 18 months into a global emergency, which would go away in weeks if everybody stayed home.

Politicians who believe we live in economies, not societies, adore transport projects. Do we stop and ask why? Transport is displacement, and displacement is dispossession. Taking goods and people from where they live, and shifting them somewhere else. That's all 'the Economy' is. Imagine a leader announcing tens of billions in spending to help people work from home, to strengthen neighbourhood resilience. It won't happen when the Economy is the priority. A 'job' is the key thing there - work divorced from location. It's no accident that conservative politicians prioritise 2 things in this pandemic - getting borders open, getting people back into jobs. The pandemic itself is nothing more than the result of all of this displacement, of people and things. A society of continuous, disconnected movement. If we'd all stayed home for a few weeks, it would never have happened.

A man who knows the Economy inside-out.

Here’s one for the people who have Australia love it or leave bumper stickers. A society that can’t replace its own population is a society in terminal decline. The only thing keeping Australia from becoming an aged care home is immigration. Also the only thing keeping the Economy afloat. Because the Economy doesn’t exist, it’s just people.

We absolutely smashed the flu last year, globally. Fell off a cliff. An important question is, why can't we do that every year? Why do we accept to live with potentially lethal infections? Until we understand why our lifestyles encourage infectious disease, we won't understand what's not normal or healthy about them.

Travel started the pandemic, and is determined to keep it going, while whining about not being allowed to do more travel.

Choose your sides people. I watch the UK news every day, today’s bulletin is a story about how 250,000 school children have had to isolate at home because ‘only 9000’ of them were actually infected with Covid. Only! In the same bulletin, UK government has exempted business leaders from quarantine to go about their business. In the next story, conservative politicians were arguing to remove not only public health restrictions, but even the most basic social distancing such as 1 m distance between people, to ‘protect business’. These are the same people who will happily incinerate the planet by obstructing all action on climate change, to protect their regular flow of profits. At the same time, they use their rat cunning to get all of the working people they screw through their business interests, to vote for them by promising all of the things their business interests are actually taking away, like sovereignty and people’s livelihoods 

Some fantastic work being done by data people in this pandemic. This site (think it's also available as a mobile app) will tell you where the nearest Covid cases are, and what the current restrictions are. https://covid19nearme.com.au/state/nsw

ScoMo pulled a real swifty yesterday, announcing younger people can get the AZ vaccine after talking to their doctor. Turns out he hadn't consulted anybody. Medical experts furious. Will probably get a boost in popularity.

Bananaby is even popular in his own electorate. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5FFGFTUcAEX6c5?format=jpg&name=medium

I don’t do favourites, but I doubt there’s ever been a more beautiful piece of music.

Schools are by far the greatest drivers of social mixing. Look at the mobility plummet when schools are closed. Remember how many demand schools be open in a pandemic, when virus is in circulation. I call those people fuckwits, not going to sugar-coat it. Time to make a stand for kids, and for ending this pandemic, which is mostly about getting the fuckwits out of the way, not the virus.

I’m sure it’s your birthday today, have a good one :)

Gladys has tried this one too. Conservative governments the world over are deeply in-bred. When the pandemic is going badly, they suggest we stop releasing the data. Trump did this, he also did it with election results. Whose side are you on people? Cat videos? Proven to be completely ineffective in defeating the pandemic.

Have been lucky to be able to discuss this pandemic with Brendan many times. His thinking is always spot-on. You cannot live with this virus, the next time somebody near you suggests we should, hit them across the face with a bit of 4x2.