August 2021

John Thaw, as Inspector Morse, stating the often unspoken truth of our great housing market democracies. Roads and cars enslave us, and houses even more so. We’ve ‘economised’ all the basics of life, turned them into markets. It’s not us who benefits. “What sort of life do we offer our young people? School; if you’re lucky, college, then marriage. A ‘starter home’. Then children. A two-bedroom semi. If you do well, you’ve just about got to 4 bedrooms when your kids leave to buy starter homes of their own. This British home-owning democracy we’re all so proud of - it’s really a form of slavery. Man was born free, but everywhere he’s in the property chain.”

When I see anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown people on Twitter, I sometimes look at their profile and history of Tweeting, to get a sense of the person. This isn’t an unusual flavour of what you find.

SKY News has a licence to broadcast in Australia. The government recently gave them tens of millions of dollars as well.

One of the many things we maybe will never know about Aboriginal Australia is how they could run faster than Usain Bolt, with no training at all.

Get vaccinated, people. Not because it will end the pandemic (it won’t), but because you need to protect yourself. The politicians in NSW and Canberra won’t. The targets way too low (actually only about 56% of the population vaccinated). And now they’ve promised them, they’ll likely do a UK when they reach them, and just open up anyway. It will kill many thousands, if they do, Gladys has already started the killing in NSW. The ‘live with the virus’ loons have never given up.

https://insightplus.mja.com.au/2021/28/sydney-avoids-4000-cases-but-lockdown-must-be-broadened/

Spreading. Like arsenic-flavoured peanut butter.

Nothing but data today on Covid, to show the critical danger to all NSW people right now. This one shows contact tracing being smashed. Those poor bastards working 24 hours a day, and not even close to keeping up. I once spoke with a NSW contact tracer, and she thanked me for speaking out, they're under strict orders to say nothing.

Re-posting this. I suspect this is the experience of many people in their jobs.

A well-meaning video mired in confusion. More gravity! You can’t ‘push yourself up’ out of a chair, because standing is not ‘up’, and sitting is not ‘down’. It’s your body in 2 different shapes, one supported by your bum, one by your feet. You shift your point of support from your bum to your feet, no lifting needed at all. You’re on the ground in both positions, you’re not further up or down for either.

Deepti is one of the best. Well worth a few minutes of your time, if you really want to understand this pandemic. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/08/02/gurd-a02.html

Looking behind the total daily case numbers for Sydney, which have been hovering around 200 for several days. That gives comfort to some, because it seems like it's under control. The thing with exponential growth is, it doesn't always double neatly in a day. It can take several days. The 'doubling time' measures this. See this graph - SW Sydney had exponential growth, for now they've turned it around, with the lockdown, and it's going down again. But (see next post)...

Part 2 of previous post. The 'but' is looking at cases outside the locked down areas. They have exponential growth, where virus leaked from SW Sydney. And it's doubling fast, every 5.4 days. This pattern will continue across every suburb of Sydney, unless they get serious about stopping the virus spreading. Vaccination alone can't do that.

This is malaria. It’s estimated it may have killed half the people who have ever lived. 50 billion people. It’s an endemic disease in many countries. They ‘live with’ it. Exactly what people want to do with Covid. The same people assume Covid will be a nice and gentle disease, like a cold or mild flu. There’s no reason that will be true, it could be as bad if not worse than malaria, if it’s allowed to become endemic. Vaccines won’t stop that, just as they don’t stop flu pandemics. I don’t think people see the terrible danger we may all be in, if we don’t eliminate Covid.

Just prepare for disappointment. The 70-80% target from National Cabinet won’t remove ‘lockdowns’. Nor will vaccination end the pandemic. The pandemic will be over when Covid is eliminated from circulation. There is no other way. If you don’t believe that, ask yourself why we don’t allow kids with measles to come to school.

There’s a common and simplistic view that ‘democracy’ means each person’s opinion is as equal as any other. It doesn’t mean that at all. Democracy is hierarchical, as hierarchical as any other system. That hierarchy is shaped by expertise. All democracy does differently is allow some input by all into who occupies some levels of that hierarchy. Unfortunately the simplistic view allows all beliefs to be equal. This eventually destroys any hierarchy, and with it the society built around it.

Covid is flatlining in the UK, and nobody is really sure why. It’s not vaccines, though they’re likely a major contributor. Not enough people are vaccinated there to explain the dramatic drop in cases. It could be school holidays, but again nobody is sure. The other possibility, which I mentioned last year, is that the virus may eventually get to a point where it just gives up. We talk only about immunity (ourselves), and not about virulence (the virus’ own agency).

Memories of 2020, when some people here on FB were insisting that schools were magically Covid-free zones. My experience is people just go quiet when their stupid assertions turn out to be stupid. Or they block you. This matters because the more support you give to a stupid belief, the more it has the power to destroy peoples' lives. Like the dawning realisation of many that the NSW Government is the Emperor wearing no clothes.

Read these daily updates. This is an unfolding catastrophe. Nearly every corner of the State now getting hits. What does the NSW Government do differently in response? Nothing. Get vaccinated, they're not going to save you, they listen to the wealth advice, not the health advice. Do it now.

Ah, social media. To those who love the #DictatorDan tag, a new tag has arrived. #GulagGladys.

A glimpse into the mind of people who think countries are businesses. (The more people the Sydney outbreak kills, the more productive it will become, using this logic.)

I don’t relate to people crying when they lose in a game. Even when I was young, you’d have copped a roasting for that sort of rubbish.

I’m now double-jabbed. Regional health providers have now been told to offer (encourage) people to have their second AZ shot after 8 weeks, and I’ve heard of some offering only 4. (Mine was 9 weeks.) Goes to show that the government is concerned the outbreak will go State-wide. They’re doing not much to prevent that, so hardly surprising.

Heh, let’s keep that Economy open by having the shops open. But not let customers inside. Seriously, did you vote for the NSW Government? Why?

This is really important. The PM established National Cabinet to bypass parliament. It has no jurisdiction and no authority. He tried to say it was a committee of the Cabinet so that its papers would be secret. A court has now overturned that. The sort of fine-grained ways democracy is undermined, in this case in a HUGE way, without anybody paying attention.

“They do nothing in particular, but they do it very well.” Gilbert & Sullivan, on the Royal Family.

Dennis Altman, a republican, has come to question whether constitutional monarchies may actually be better than republics. This comes back to the stuff Gabriel Tarde said, that societies will always look to maximise strong, unified belief. If you don’t offer them that through royalty, they will invent much more dangerous populist versions of it themselves anyway. And this is the world we’re seeing right now, where presidents and other leaders are taking on all of the trappings of monarchy, without any of the checks and balances. Without Kings and Queens, we just get tyrants.

You can’t run away from the pandemic, much as I’m sure it bores a lot of people. Ignore it and it will come for you, and your family. I persist with it because there is nothing else that is really important right now for a grown up to be focused on. Read this, the PM and NSW Premier are continuing their pandemic-long campaign to undermine what we need to do to end it. It may yet take the life of people you love the most. Your beliefs will determine the outcome.

Twice in Australian history, the ‘reserve powers’ have been used to remove a sitting government. Once in 1932, when the NSW Governor removed Premier Jack Lang (picture). And once in 1975, when the Governor-General removed Gough Whitlam. Both on confected, trivial ‘economic’ grounds. I thought about this today because Lang’s crime was to oppose an agreement by all other Premiers to implement an economic plan. Currently the NSW Government is acting against the national pandemic plan. Another day of catastrophic numbers. This will infect and kill many Australians. If history involved justice, the NSW Governor would remove the NSW Government from power immediately. It won’t happen, it’s symptomatic of how much idiot economic ideas have infected our brains that it wouldn’t even occur to people to do it. Leaders can kill their populations with impunity, but break an economic rule, and you have to go.

If you ever need cheering up, read reviews on booze shop sites for non-alcoholic wines.

Parents usually send their kids to uni to ‘get a good job’. It often does a lot more than that. Ideas and beliefs are the raw material of society, and therefore education can fracture relationships between generations, when they have very different educational backgrounds.

I wonder how many of the anti-vaccine folk will buckle once supply is available. Some libertarian fruit loops I know are still sticking to their guns, even calling Covid a ‘sniffle’. Covid will come for them, and I think some of them have realised this now.

Greg is a smart chap. The people who say we need to ‘live with Covid’ haven’t realised yet that what’s happening in NSW right now is what that looks like.

If you were one of those last year bizarrely saying schools would be safe from a respiratory virus, what drugs were you on?

How's 'living with the virus' going for everyone?

I saw this and thought of you. Not sure why.

This doesn't appear to be only targeted at current hotspots, I can't see any geographical references where NSW Health and the federal Department of Health have been posting it. If you want proof of the ineptitude of the NSW Government, I'll bet you most people in these age brackets can go onto the eligibility checker, and will be told they're not even eligible for a shot. Or maybe in a few months' time. The NSW Government needs to stop this outbreak, vaccines won't do it. People will die, in great numbers.

The pandemic is a tale of 2 ‘economies’. It’s been a great thing for many screwed by the traditional Economy, what we call ‘normal’ life. That’s because normal life was totally dysfunctional and was designed mostly to make a tiny handful of people very rich. They want that life back fast, why they’ve opposed action against the pandemic at every turn.

As people probably know, the terrible dangers of wood smoke is a bit of a constant theme for me. (It’s much, much worse than cigarette smoke, for example.)Bizarre that this is even a thing, in 2021.

Our bodies evolved to automatically coordinate to what we want to do. You never have to ‘do’ your movement, or even basic posture, as some people call it. Here’s a tip - any time you feel a strain or a tension or ‘weight’ in your body, it means only one thing. That strain or weight is the coordination of you not paying full attention to the task you’re currently doing. You’re trying to type on a keyboard while your attention is off in your thoughts, or on the TV etc. All weight and effort disappears by the simple act of paying proper attention.

Watch Health Hazzard mansplain superbly here, to prevent the Chief Health Officer of NSW answering any questions. They know her answering honestly here would end their government. Look at Dr Chant's body language. Astonishes me how many voters resist doing any sort of independent thought at all, and will blindly follow Gladys into the abyss.

I’m sure many thought I was on some politically-inspired year-long crusade against the NSW Government. I wasn’t. We’re seeing right now what angered me then, and infuriates me now. I see barely a whimper from fellow NSW people on this pathetic social media platform about it.

Cities before cars turned them into car parks.

DH Lawrence, himself a teacher, was scathing about the idea of universal education. His reasoning was that only a handful of people are suited for what we call more ‘academic’ type work, and forcing all kids to sit through it would fundamentally undermine respect for that knowledge in society. Are we seeing that right now, in our populist democracies, with millions in outright rebellion against expertise?

Have any Gladys fans had a 'hmmm' moment yet? Case numbers? It spreading to both Bathurst and Dubbo now? Hospital beds filling fast? Nothing sowing the seeds of doubt?

Guess which strategy NSW is using? Control by suburb. Like trying to fence wind. They're not following the health advice, if you believe that I have a great second-hand car for you.

Lost his entire family inside one week. Is it registering for people the catastrophe we’re in the middle of? Why don’t people talk about it? Are we using bullshit ‘positivity’ to try to avoid facing up to grown up realities? Covid is rampant in NSW. RAMPANT. It’s coming for all of us, and the government does nothing. And people mostly say nothing, like nothing is happening. I speak with senior health people every day, and they’re terrified. It is catastrophically out of control in NSW, do people not pay attention?

The pandemic has never been a medical or even biological event. It’s a political event. It was caused by and is being prolonged by pathological individualism - libertarianism. The NSW Government are libertarians. Libertarians live in a fantasy world where individuals live free of all social ties. In reality it’s the social ties that give them their freedom. They’re just teenagers who never grew up, railing against mum telling them to clean their room.

This lawyer in the UK was a big supporter of ‘natural immunity’, thought Covid was just like a cold or flu and his immune system would be all he’d need to beat it. And that the vaccines were more dangerous than Covid. This video was amongst his possessions when police found him dead, from Covid, in his home.

Every week I watch sport and see this sort of thing, nearly every decision challenged by players (and spectators). We don’t respect authority, we don’t respect custom or tradition or expertise. I don’t think we see these connections. The Chinese do, another way we don’t understand them. Their ‘authoritarianism’ is really just an overdose of custom and tradition.

This is Australia's number 1 public health expert.

NSW is about where the red arrow is. The Premier lies and says 'at least we don't have exponential growth'. Infections have been growing exponentially for the whole outbreak. Here's an indication of how terrible things are. Victoria just extended its lockdown because it has 5 cases it can't find the source for. The number of cases NSW can't find the source for? 2150.

“There are no cases here.” Said every person who was the first case, somewhere.

It’s a creative struggle. Work in progress with the t-shirt, but then every day more of these notifications. Can’t fit them all on.

A connected friend told me Chant resigned several weeks ago because the government wasn’t listening to her, and the resignation was rejected. It would bring down the NSW Government.

You don’t have to pay any attention to my advice. But it’s this. Assume the State is already in total lockdown. The government refuses to do it, but Covid is everywhere and spreading fast. Do the lockdown yourselves. You likely have little control over your work, but avoid all social gatherings, whether at home or in restaurants, shops, pubs etc. Assume wherever you go somebody is infected. Wear a decent mask where you can’t avoid people, and minimise your time with them. Open every window you can if it’s a shared space.

The virus isn't spreading because people aren't following the rules. It's spreading because the rules are pissweak.

The pandemic will be a trilogy (I’m quite serious). Year 1 - epidemiologists (epis) take on the Empire (Economy), and win. Year 2 - the Empire strikes back, using vaccines to restore the Economy to prime position. Year 3 - return of the epis, when the vaccines don’t end the pandemic.

Yaneer Bar-Yam is an Israeli complex systems specialist who studies pandemics. On the right here is the strategy every part of Australia apart from NSW is using. (He thinks Australia is amazing.) On the left in red is the strategy the rest of the world has used, which has killed millions. Read through the red list and compare to what you’re seeing in NSW right now.

Will NSW cases ‘skyrocket’ because the number of people ‘not following rules’ will skyrocket? Or because the government isn’t stopping the spread? (Hint: if you get it wrong, people you love may be dead by Christmas. What a game show, hey.)

The skyrocket is off. These people aren’t getting infected because they’re not following (pissweak) rules. They’re getting infected at workplaces the government refuses to close, and then taking it home to their families. An unforgivable, avoidable tragedy. You haven’t seen anything yet, the health system will likely collapse within the next few weeks, if the entire State isn’t locked down.

Sydney not being locked down, from what I can see. That’s where all the exponential growth is happening in cases, watch them continue to skyrocket if so. Note also the Premier suggesting they no longer report case numbers, at the press conference today. Always finding new flavours of corruption to play with.

The glory of social media is that the idiot things morons say can continue to embarrass them for years to come.

Coogee, this afternoon. With our little prurient tabloid minds, we say ‘why aren’t these people following the rules!’ They are following the rules. The rules are the problem.

Before we all get swept away in the latest tide of spin, NSW is not in total lockdown. The NSW Government has just extended the Sydney measures to the entire State. But…the Sydney measures aren’t working. They restrict mostly our social activity. Cases are still growing exponentially. What’s the cause? People are getting infected at work. This isn’t the Delta variant, it’s the Economy variant. Until the NSW Government stops prioritising business over lives, this disaster will continue.

Happy Birthday!

Burns victims sometimes aren’t aware that the damage they have is terminal. NSW is very close to that point, the damage done in the last 2 months may be irreversible. This may be just the start of the horrors, it’s as bad as that. And they still have most workplaces open, which is the real cause of the damage. The Economy is on a killing spree, and has only just started.

NSW was the test of the idea that we can try to live our normal lives - what we stupidly call ‘the Economy’ - alongside a pandemic virus. Are the true economic believers convinced yet? How many more people and businesses need to die to change their minds?

The Covid tour of NSW arrives in Bathurst, and adds new shows in Orange. A footlong of saving the Economy, with Covid special sauce. Imagine leaving a massive bushfire to burn for 2 months, unchecked. This is much, much worse.

Note the sting in the tail here. Look at the date. A week ago. Contact tracing is failing. Potentially infected people have been circulating in the Bathurst and Orange communities all week.

Very interesting graph showing projected impact of vaccination on the NSW outbreak. The different colour shadings are the different restrictions introduced over time. Note that the assumption here is heroic - that vaccination will cut transmission by 80%. (It won't, it'll be lucky to reach half of that.) But even with these heroic assumptions, that's 1200 cases per DAY, at the peak in mid-September.

Numbers still heading North. Why wouldn't they? NSW is doing nothing different. It has to close workplaces, that's where this is going wrong. Why won't they? Because they think there's an 'Economy'. People can not 'stay home' if they have to go to work. How hard is that to understand? Gladys lecturing people right now. Fuck off Gladys.

Lucky the workplaces the rest of us are in have much tougher infection control procedures than hospitals, hey.

Bit hard to see the graph, but NSW is red. Doubling time is how long it takes for the number of cases to double. It's dropping for NSW, which means cases may be about to really take off. We ain't seen nothing yet, alas.

Same trend here as overseas. Oldies get vaccinated, the virus moves to the kids. The test now is what our governments do next. Do they let kids become infected? That's the plan in NSW. I kid you not.

"For Covid-19, the aeroplane was the mosquito." Professor Heidi Drummer, on what caused this pandemic. Travel.

There’s some brilliant data work going on every day with the pandemic. Take this graph. It shows that the ‘stronger’ restrictions inside the most heavily impacted Sydney LGAs are doing - nothing. They’re more spin. Case numbers are growing at the same rate across NSW. The strategy is clearly wrong. What would fix it is targeting where people are actually getting infected - workplaces. Guess why they won’t do that? Anyone?

The Taliban are back. No matter how much we try to separate religion and politics, we always fail. The modernist view of the world we all grew up with says this is a bad thing. It’s very historically naive. I struggle to find many people who understand that the churches basically built our societies. A church was the very first thing in every town, for a reason. This isn’t a judgement as to whether that’s a good or bad thing, more me suggesting there’s a lot more complexity to this than our modernist ideas can see.

Slogans like ‘live with the virus’ got NSW into the mess it’s in. And unsurprisingly, more slogans are now keeping it there. Like ‘just stay home’, and ‘follow the rules’. Avoid everything a politician says in this pandemic, like the plague (ha). Look at the data. Money is the best vaccine. The reason Covid is ravaging the poorer parts of Sydney is…they’re poor. They need to work. Close the workplaces, pay them to stay home.

The reality of exponential growth that so many refuse to face up to. Or they don't understand.

Every day the Premier stands there and lectures people for breaking rules. Remember she leads an extreme libertarian government who don't believe in rules. This disaster is NOT about people breaking rules. It's about there being NO rules where they're needed. Close the fucking workplaces. The CHO just said she 'wants to see reduced attendance at workplaces'. She wants them closed, the government won't allow it.

When I post about the church, this is the historical sort of background I'm talking about. It's not about whether a person is 'religious' or not, it's much broader. We don't understand religion, we've turned it into a belief in things. It's much, much more than that. It built our entire civilisation. A basic historical fact, completely unrelated to the whole religion/anti-religion debates. How it did that is something we no longer understand. But we'll need to, if we're going to survive.

Again, avoid anything politicians say in a pandemic. Listen to people on the front-line, like this doctor. The so many people taking comfort from the daily weaponised spin from the NSW Government aren’t aware yet of the genuine horrors that are coming. Hundreds of untraced infections every day - it took only one to start this disaster. Do people just not register the seriousness of what’s going on here?

Listen to to the NSW Chief Health officer. Ignore the Premier completely. It’s ordinary people doing ordinary things - going to work - who are the problem. Why are they going to work? Because the government refuses to shut more workplaces.

Another bit of spin from the Premier, that 'jabs' are the answer here. They're not. Read about Israel.

The Reff for NSW is currently between 1.2 and 1.3. If you think this graph shows 'naughty people not following the rules', would you like to buy my old printer for $5000?

This is Mkayla Robinson from Mississippi. Her first day of year 8, and her brother's first day of Kindergarten. She died 8 days later of Covid. Never, ever believe politicians who say it's safe for kids to go to school with Covid in the community.

Yes. But watch, we can find $150 billion for tax cuts for the wealthy, but there won't be $50 million to give classrooms clean and safe air. https://theconversation.com/we-should-install-air-purifiers-with-hepa-filters-in-every-classroom-it-could-help-with-covid-bushfire-smoke-and-asthma-166332

if you're one of the people constantly posting here about rule-breakers in NSW, please read this. And then stop doing it. People are catching it at work, taking it home and infecting their families. Most of that work isn't essential, it's government spin.

This will take 1 minute and 11 seconds of your time. Please watch it. 'Zero Covid' does NOT mean 'no cases of Covid'. Despite what our idiot Premier and PM would have you believe. Today our Premier said she wasn't going for zero Covid. That means she's letting the State burn down (watch the video).

Extraordinary that the same people who looked on with horror at Trump, seem completely oblivious to the same thing happening here. Trump succeeded because conservative strategists progressively destroyed public institutions in the US. The institutions that ran the country and kept everybody safe and healthy. The same thing is happening in NSW right now, with the government ignoring health institutions and following the same political libertarian BS that Trump peddled. They’ve succeeded so well they even have us blaming each other for the disaster. It’s all the rule-breakers! At least Lisa isn’t falling for it.

Parents are about to face some very difficult decisions in NSW. There is no way schools in NSW will be able to re-open safely until about March 2022, on current virus case numbers. It's early August 2021. The government won't want schools closed that long. So without question they will be forcing kids back to school to catch the virus. They have mentioned vaccinating the young, but that will take months, and I doubt they want schools closed for those months. The terrible bind you end up in if you don't eliminate a lethal virus.

Remember this happening in Italy last year?

How a real leader works. They lead. NSW is a disgrace. Making the obvious point that parents won't tolerate their children becoming infected, which NSW will likely allow.

Covid case in Bathurst.

As an indication of the idiocy in NSW, I see so many ‘stay home’ messages on social media. People can’t stay home, they have to go to work. Why do they have to go to work? Because the NSW Government won’t close non-essential workplaces. Now the NSW Govt is pleading with people not to send kids to school or childcare. Why will parents keep sending them? BECAUSE THEY HAVE TO GO TO WORK. Ffs.

My favourite thing to watch is Nordic Noir. Watching a lot of shows with sub-titles made me think, notice that no matter the language or ‘culture’, the world people live in looks almost exactly the same. The houses, cars, phones, windows, furniture - the lot. Despite all the sentimental nonsense about ‘love’ and understanding, the thing that really unites all human beings is the material world. Objects and technologies are the glue that hold all societies together. They’re not tools, they’re contractual agreements.

NSW well on track to be in lockdown until at least Christmas. The 70-80% vaccination promise? Bullshit, ignore it. It’s only 40% of the population. Why I’d put some money on them infecting kids, Gladys won’t want to keep the lockdown.

825 cases today. There will be 3000-4000 per day within weeks. 10,000 (per day) by the end of September. The Premier doing her daily meaningless bullshitting, saying ‘once we get to 70-80% vaccination, we can live life freely’. That 70-80% comes from the Doherty report, which says it applies if you have 30 people or less with Covid in the community. She’s a fucking liar.

Projections. Between 8000-10000 cases per day, by October. Total people infected by the outbreak: between a quarter of a million and three-quarters of a million people.

5 cases in Bathurst now.

Projections for hospitalisations, ICU, those who will need ventilation, and deaths. NSW. We’re at about Day 60 now. Right on track on every metric.

Some more compliance porn for our populist tabloid minds yesterday, with the protests. Minds that, rather than understand, want to blame. The group in NSW who cares the least about the spread of infection right now isn’t the Covidiots. It’s the NSW Cabinet, they’re letting numbers grow exponentially every day. Focus your anger there, they want us fighting each other, so they avoid responsibility.

What aboriginal Australians know and we don’t, is that the world isn’t made of facts. It’s made of stories. Every fact is a story, it only makes sense within a narrative framework. Nicolas Rothwell, a writer, travels remoter parts of Australia, and has fascinating ideas about Australia. One, that Germaine Greer was shouted down for saying years ago, is that Australian narratives are shaped by the landscape and aboriginal people, without us even realising. And how Australia is resistant to the traditional novel form, to the framing of existence in novel-type stories. There’s a fascinating convergence between Australian story-telling, and Aboriginal stories. As Greer also said, we are more Aboriginal than we realise, so much of what being Australian means we took from them, and the landscape.

4000 children now have Covid in NSW. 1500 of them are under 9. Expect those numbers to explode, when the NSW Government re-opens schools without vaccinating children first.

Happy Birthday Kellie Ann! 42, time for a trade-in.

What happens when you turn ‘democracy’ from being just all of us choosing leaders every few years, who then go on to do the work of running the place with officials until the next election, into meaning everybody is their own expert and own leader. Democracies are dead, we’re in their dying phases.

The proposed truck driver’s blockade on Tuesday takes populist craziness to a whole new level. If you read these people online, they’re totally unhinged. I think the community anger would be nuclear.

Have been watching The Hunger Games. Made me think about 1984 too, how our dystopian fantasies seem to assume some evil authoritarian takeover of our freedoms. In reality, oppression doesn’t come from without. It comes from the people themselves, when they want direction and get none. They then rally behind anything that looks a bit like it, created by opportunistic bullies.

What's really going on in NSW right now.

Worth remembering if/when Gladys opens the schools before kids are vaccinated.

"Gladys has so spectacularly muffed the pandemic, and ICAC is bearing down on her still, so it is little wonder there is talk of a spill...Yet the Premier of NSW has been enormously popular. Berejiklian has the uncanny ability to contradict herself with absolute conviction, to obfuscate, day in day out, with such dogmatic authenticity that even she appears to believe she is telling the truth...It is clear she did not “follow the health advice." As evinced by Gladys’s handling of the Covid crisis, NSW is run by business for business...Business has the state government by the short and curlies."

Magicians work by diverting your attention. Like 'there's no exponential Covid growth in NSW'. Numbers have doubled in the past week, from 415 to 830. Exponential growth, with a doubling rate now of only 7-8 days. It's getting even faster.

We'll get another "70 and 80% freedom" day from the Premier today. Reality is going to bite really hard in NSW, brutally and lethally hard. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/24/ending-lockdowns-with-80-vaccinated-could-cause-25000-australian-deaths-new-modelling-suggests

Israel showing that the idea that we can all get vaccinated, and then infected at will because the vaccines will protect us, is bollocks.

70% of Oz adults vaxxed = 11 million Australians unvaxxed (6.2 million adults, 4.8 million children). 80% of Oz adults vaxxed = 9 million Australians unvaxxed (4.2 million adults, 4.8 million kids). All of those millions unvaxxed, most because they just haven't been offered a dose yet, will be exposed to Covid, if the country 'opens up' at either level of vaccination.

These are the tragedies that will play out in thousands of homes around Australia, because the NSW Government refused to control spread of the virus.

Yep. In fact I’m not sure I really want to know Australians who think we should open up before kids are vaccinated.

If you got the AZ vaccine, a reason to feel superior to all those Pfizer people 😉 It seems to last longer. On the flip side, vaccine efficacy is fading pretty quickly, within 8 months. Those who put all their eggs in the vaccine basket need to take note of that. It happens because the virus is allowed to continue to spread and mutate. ‘Live with the virus’ *doesn’t* mean ‘allow it to spread at will’.

Every day the NSW Premier and PM suggest to us that 70% and 80% vaccination will mean much of our freedom will return. It’s a lie, every single day. This is 30 seconds from the head of the Institute who did the report for National Cabinet. Without significant ‘public health measures’ (this includes lockdowns) infections and deaths will skyrocket, even at 80% vaccination of adults.

She lied. She's good at that. We'll likely hit 1000 cases in a day tomorrow. She's still doing nothing more to get case numbers down. Thinks vaccines will do it. They won't, far too slow. She's ignoring the national pandemic exit plan, which requires States to get case numbers as close to zero as possible. And ignoring the Doherty modelling that underlies it. And yet she'd probably still win an election. The real epidemic here is of stupid, not the virus.

The noise, just at idle. These things looked magnificent on the outside, but like a tin box on the inside. Hard to imagine what those Battle of Britain missions would have been like.

I remember my 500 millionth dose well.

I doubt many will bother to read this tale of unmitigated horror that possibly awaits us.

How much better will you sleep knowing that the PM has ignored expert advice to end the pandemic, and is quoting Batman movies instead?

Steve Duckett once ran the national health department. He knows his shit. "Governments cannot keep making unrealistic promises about easing restrictions at 70% and 80% adult vaccination, a plan that relied on optimistic scenarios in the first place, and one that now bears little relation to the real world. It is irresponsible to build public momentum and hope around targets that are unlikely going to be enough."

This is why a cat is the best pet I've ever had. Such a un-needy dignity about them.

This baby hearing for the first time wins the internet today. https://twitter.com/i/status/1429835867384918021

Sigh. We made it to the exponential elevator. The ride gets super bad from here.

I have to follow every millimetre of the pandemic for work, will keep sharing things you don’t see in the news. Contact tracing now. Currently the contact tracers are over 5200 cases behind. In other words, contact tracing has been destroyed in NSW. The gap is still widening, and about 1000 new mystery cases are added per day, and that’s growing. People need to know that the 70% and 80% figure the Premier and PM keep quoting is totally reliant upon functioning contact tracing. Meaning they’re about to open us up to a type of genocide.

I suspect tomorrow National Cabinet will be forced to include children in its vaccination targets. (That they weren’t there already - I mean, what can you say?) Tomorrow the NSW Premier announces her plans to get kids back to school. Prather and Osterholm are international pandemic experts. See below what they think about kids and Covid.

I don't make this stuff up. Have a look. Even at Gladys' beloved 80% of adults vaccinated, we're looking at 40,000 new infections PER DAY. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-26/covid-peak-in-nsw-still-six-weeks-away-modelling-shows/100411220?utm_campaign=news-article-share-next-actions-0&utm_content=twitter&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

Reality biting, fingers crossed. Kids to be vaccinated and more caution around the magical 70-80% drivel, at National Cabinet today. The PM will have to be dragged kicking and screaming, like every point in the pandemic so far. People need to remember he has almost no role in fighting a pandemic, constitutionally. He invented National Cabinet to try to get a seat at the table. Has used that seat ever since to try to undermine the public health work of the States. Without both he and Gladys, Oz would likely be fully vaccinated and with only a tiny number of cases, by now. Why I criticised them relentlessly over the past 2 years. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/aug/26/doherty-institute-urges-caution-in-lifting-australias-covid-restrictions-in-updated-advice-to-government#

Here’s a new Gladys neat trick. She’s said many times what matters isn’t how many people get infected, it’s how many end up in hospital. Look how many she’s hiding from that statistic by having people treated at home, or in apartment blocks the government hired to offload Covid patients into, out of hospital (‘out of hospital care’). Now hospital in the home is a thing, a very good idea when used properly. But 10 people have died at home so far, and for a large hospital you might have 50 in hospital in the home. NSW has 1600+, and climbing.

My grandmother died this month. My last remaining grandparent. Nanna. Because of Covid she got no funeral, though at some point we’ll get together and commemorate her. That’s her on the left, holding either me or Mike (hard to tell which, Mike is usually the ugly one). Same age as the Queen, always the way to remember her age. A good innings. Florence or Flo was a lady. Very proper, she had a calm about her, and liked to do things properly. She used to remind me of the Queen, actually. Fabulous cook and seamstress, and loved her garden. Had very large and delicate hands, which i remember curled around a lawn bowling ball, her passion later in life. A leftie, lefties always do things a certain way. And also around a beer or wine glass, also a passion. She’d correct our ocker ‘yeahs’ on the phone, and of course we’d play them to the max. I think she knew that. When visiting she always brought a galvanised tin full of cupcakes, with hundreds and thousands on top. Or sometimes lamingtons. She introduced me to grated carrot in spaghetti bolognaise, and also to cold toast. I once made her hot-buttered Vegemite toast and she corrected me, it must be made cold. I came to love the taste of cold Vegemite toast. Her’s and grandad’s house in Dundas was a window into a Sydney that is now gone. Only a tiny house really, by modern standards, in fact I’ve never quite figured out how they and their 3 girls actually fit in it, they may tell me now! Fibro, cosy. Carpet in the bathroom, that was a revelation to me. The first air conditioner I ever saw, back when they were a box in the wall that made as much noise as a combine harvester. And I think an Art Deco kitchen table, all of folded steel and laminate, with padded chairs, where grandad would sit and read the paper. And a clock that chimed every quarter hour, morning and night, which mum would affectionately call ‘that fucking clock’. In later years the growth in traffic in Sydney, and the proximity to one of the main roads there, meant traffic noise was a constant in the house. She got so accustomed to it that when she moved to Coolamon in her last years she told me she missed the racket, it helped her sleep. Dundas was farmlands in the Sydney of her youth, and you could still feel that history. Flo was skinny, legs like a budgie. If you saw the driveway and garage, this made sense, so narrow that she’d have been marooned in the car if she’d put on any weight. The yard had that brutal sort of buffalo grass that felt under your feet like (I assume) kissing a guy who hasn’t shaved for 5 days feels like. A chook shed, a veggie garden, that grandad would tend every morning with his low-tremolo whistling. And a sort of lean-to shade house with orchids, at the back. And an outside dunny, and incinerator. The Sydney that no longer exists. I sometimes watch old TV shows from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and think about the world the people at those times lived in. That was her world, as a young woman. Long gone, but her house and garden a tiny reminder of it. People who lived through that second world war, and whose lives were shaped by it. Who knew hardship and suffering, and the grace of getting through it. You often meet your grandparents when their working lives are already over. You often don’t really know them as people, just as grandparents. But just so you know, if you’re watching, that the impression you left was deep, and will always be with me. The last time I saw you you didn’t remember me in your words, but in your eyes you did. I hope you’re rolling that jack out onto the green, wherever you are. RIP Flo. Nanna. Love ya.

The modern libertarian would rather 50,000 people die, than you stay at home for a while. Just ponder that. They don’t give a flying four-X about your freedoms. To them you’re a worker. You staying at home eats into their profits. That’s all this has ever been about.

With schools re-opening, the NSW Government has mentioned a measure they’ll use to determine when a school is open or shut. It’s quite technical, which will no doubt stop many people paying attention to it. If the LGA has had fewer than 50 cases per 100,000 people in the previous 14 days, the school can be open. What they don’t tell you is that 50 is the cut-off to high risk of transmission in schools. Low risk is less than 5.

Happy Birthday :)

Happy Birthday Rob!

This mantis trapped in amber is about 30 million years old.

People of Australia, the rubber has hit the road. The massive national question right now is, will we open up the country and allow millions of children and adults to become infected with Covid? Or will we wait a few more months until everybody is vaccinated? Astounding, to me, that the PM believes the former is the way forward.

This incorporates vaccinations into projections. I think the reduction in transmission used in this model (80% for a double-vaccinated person) is way too optimistic. But it gives a way of looking at possible futures. Even at 80% reduction, this is a lethal mess. And the the Premier today, again, lied about the Doherty Report and their 70% and 80% numbers. Those numbers (and the whole Doherty model) now don’t apply to NSW, its contact tracing is broken.

Texts from inside Sydney ICUs. Will be broken inside 3 weeks, insiders say. That’s more than a month before Gladys thinks we’ll reach her magical 70%. Which wouldn’t work anyway.

Hands up if you believe and trust Gladys?

An international expert. But really, you’d have to be brain dead to believe otherwise. Or the PM or NSW Premier.

The most stupid time possible to move number 30 up on this list is in the middle of a pandemic. But many are doing it 🙈

Want to know just how venal the whole NSW thing is? Have a look.

Wil take less than 5 minutes of your time to listen to Allan Saul, a true expert, give a fantastic summary of what you need to know right now about the NSW Covid situation.

"For all the NSW government’s attempts in the 11am media conference to sell a positive vaccination story and downplay the soaring COVID cases, the numbers and the reports from the front line have crushed the spin."

Not even his ivermectin saved him. I have friends with similar beliefs, the pandemic flushed them out. Ended up blocking some and alienating others. I won't tolerate this sort of lethal bullshit in my life, sorry. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/caleb-wallace-anti-mask-freedom-005759054.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYmluZy5jb20v&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAC8CrGVAYiIJPEi-KxLb4P5O8afBHbz6rTRwifsFLgo2tGDABj0SEt3mK1tt9h7jqGx2dY_Xly1xpF2UZqA7BDUwrMJ8rnliYrnPoIaEl8hfGa0P3HJtlV87iEw6pmi3CbspYaNonS54E0yBrUsJ9tIQkbAKjX9f_uYyqz3HwUQG

I share what the top experts say. Ignore every word out of the NSW Government's mouth.

Another quote from Nicolas Rothwell. About writing, but it could be painting, fixing a car, raising a child, playing or writing a song etc. That mysterious nature of all things to act in ways we don’t control. If you pride yourself on not believing in God, maybe think that this is all the word actually means.

"No, we're not opening up at magic numbers." https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/08/31/vaccination-code-yellow-pascoe/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020210831

Compliance porn on rule-breakers might give people the jollies, but the problem is still workplaces. https://insidestory.org.au/lock-down-smarter-not-harder/

Live with the virus, hey.

By the end of this week, Dr Bad Haircut will be deleting this Tweet.

The ‘National Plan’ to exit the pandemic. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s a re-election plan for the PM. Look at what it does. It makes meaningless claims about the vaccination rollout being as good as over when 80% of adults are vaccinated, notice when - just before an election. And he’s now pushing the quarantine at home idea. What were the two areas he’s been under constant criticism for? Vaccination and quarantine. And now trying to get the Premiers on the hook if this all doesn’t happen. Just amazed people fall for bullshit artists like him.

Ian is a top virologist. Notice vaccines are only one slice of the cheese. Politicians who tell you we can vaccinate our way out of a pandemic are lying. Simple as that.