September 2021

"Cases are rising, dangerously so, in New South Wales but, despite the protestations of its Premier to the contrary, it is because of the slow response and very loose lockdown enabling the virus to continue to spread. ‘Harsh’ lockdowns have worked in Australia; loose ones haven’t." https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300396343/covid19-heres-why-jacinda-arderns-british-critics-are-wrong

This is the lunar module for Apollo 11. First people on the moon. The top half of the module, the ‘ascent stage’ which carried Armstrong and Aldrin off the moon back to the main ship in orbit, is thought to be still orbiting the moon.

Hey protest fans, finally we got to the endpoint. The Brittany Higgins case shut down, and now every legislative change stemming from the furore voted down by the government. Just saying. Join a union.

'Tis actually true. And they don't pay me. These things are awesome.

Data from Israel, where even booster shots (3rd vaccine doses) are now starting to fail after 6 months.

Danish Arctic explorer Peter Freuchen and wife Dagmar Gale - 1947. By Irving Penn. Freuchen escaped from a snowed-in blizzard shelter using a knife he fashioned out of his own frozen faeces.

NSW now moving to the 'heroes' phase. Standard libertarian government strategy. Do nothing to prevent the disaster - whether it's bushfires, or a pandemic - so that the last line of defence, emergency services workers, become the only front-line of attack. Then create narratives about how heroic they are, jingoism. It distracts people from emergency workers being used as cannon fodder.

This is a HUGE announcement. Australia's top experts have had enough of the relentless ongoing bullshit from the NSW Government and PM, and have formed their own independent advisory group to cut through the crap. OzSAGE. Check on them regularly, and have a look at the list of experts involved. Like a Justice League of brilliance. (As an aside, I suggested this idea when chatting to some of them a few months ago. Maybe they were going to do it anyway, but it's hugely exciting they've done it.)

Word for word, exactly what she said today. People must die so others can have their leisure time back.

Just realised I forgot the link! https://theconversation.com/introducing-ozsage-a-source-of-practical-expert-advice-for-how-to-reopen-australia-from-covid-safely-166943

A very short explanation of what ‘live with the virus’ actually means. It absolutely doesn’t mean everybody get vaccinated, and then we’re safe and we can let the virus do what it likes. We need Covid to become like measles, with occasional outbreaks, but not widespread disease. Right now the ‘live with the virus’ folk plan to let tens of thousands get infected every day. Allowing people to become infected is not a plan.

There’s a lot of public discussion about the Doherty Report. Here’s the crux of it, outcomes for different levels of vaccination (adults only). The first 6 months after ‘opening up’. Worth noting: - even at the 80% vaccination figure, nearly half-a-million symptomatic infections, and multiples of that number for asymptomatic infection - at the 6 month mark, about 80 deaths per day (as the Queensland Premier said, though she implied the model says that’s ongoing, which isn’t correct. It’s just the peak) - deaths even at the top 80% figure will be 3 times an average flu year. What’s more important than any of that though are key assumptions. Most importantly that contact tracing is functioning. In NSW it isn’t, it’s broken. When you factor that in, deaths rise to over 25,000, even at the 80% figure. Why every serious public health person in the country says that the 70 and 80% figures must be of the TOTAL population, including children.

This bison at -35 degrees C is how Kell describes feeling every day of winter.

I worked with academics for many years. Like many others, they have a hatred of administration, or bureaucracy. But administration doesn’t exist, in fact the law refuses to define it, for that very reason. Administration is the daily hard work of maintaining the things we value. A person who hates administration is always a person who doesn’t do any of that hard work.

Pico Iyer sees something I don’t think many Australians themselves do. Living in Australia plugs you into something ancient, that works away at you unconsciously, by osmosis. You can physically feel it if you return from somewhere like Europe, where every square centimetre has been cultivated by human hands. Not Australia, a continent cut off for millenia, and retaining that ancient connection. Australians will ‘reconcile’ with Aboriginal Australia when they consciously begin to understand this. The landscape is deep time, it talks to you from there.

Writers are often our most entertainingly insightful gifts. John Birmingham wins the internet today firstly for ‘Morrjiklian homunculus’, and then for nailing the exact politics in play right now, around children and Covid: “But if they can just get those ballots in the box, before the little caskets start dropping into the earth…”

The federal government funds private schools so that there’s equity for all children.

Ah Jacinda. Listen to Gladys. What you’re doing is impossible.

When they announce that people who have died of Covid had ‘underlying health conditions’, it’s worth remembering nearly half of all Australians have those.

O dear Bathurst. Also worth noting here that cases are growing faster outside the LGAs 'of concern' than inside them. Unsurprisingly, with the NSW mockdown. The Premier yesterday released 'modelling' on hospitalisations and ICU numbers. It was only based on the 12 LGAs of concern, i.e. only one row on this graph. She had also not released it before because 'data changes daily'. And then released data that was two weeks' old. She makes Alan Bond look like a parish priest.

Reckon the 'live with the virus, because you can't beat Delta' folk here in Australia have been reading this graph upside down? Or they're just dangerously useless?

How disgusting is it that at the exact time NSW is expected to have the most people in hospital and dying of Covid, this Premier is planning to open up bars and restaurants for vaccinated residents of suburbs like Mosman? https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/nsw/2021/09/07/vaccination-app-nsw/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PM%20Extra%20-%2020210907

Spend one minute watching this Florida school board meeting, and I think it’ll become clear why democracy isn’t, and never was, government by the people. For the people, yes. But not by the people.

This vaccination rollout will be a brilliant test of the Australia we live in, compared to the one we maybe think we live in. Right now about 5 million Australians are saying they won't get a vaccine. Compare to our earlier campaigns against smallpox and polio, where the nation collectively stood up to defeat those scourges. About 5 decades of libertarian politics has turned many countries into just a loose assortment of individual consumers, rather than nations. With 'rights', and feelings they express through protest. Australia may be heading down the same path, let's watch those percentages.

This story today, announced at the daily Gladys at 11am. Analysis commissioned by the NSW Government, to determine safety of sending kids back to school. They did a similar analysis last year after national lockdown. Here's what wasn't said: - the analysis was done on schools that were closed for holidays, and lockdowns (i.e. no kids there) - they could only find 8 primary and 8 high school students with Covid, because all the others were at home on holiday or in lockdown. And they found, as the headline says, low transmission. Well bugger me. It's hard to spread Covid to other students, when they're not there. Last year they concluded the same, based on 18 students. The rest were at home. Guess what? It didn't spread either.

Quentin is a Professor of Economics at ANU. Two separate posts of two of his Tweets today, linked but independently astonishing. Remember Australia’s ‘Freedom Day’, defined as 80% adults vaccinated, is before Christmas.

And the other from Quentin.

Probably the best word to sum up the whole pandemic.

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate, isolated culture. Beginning in their own rooms, and with schools becoming an intensely separate social culture increasingly isolated from the adult world. The internet and social media have dramatically accelerated this. This means whole generations now come to adulthood seeing the world in adolescent ways, and maintain that the rest of their lives. ‘Grown ups’ who well into their 50s and beyond still find their favourite bands, sporting teams and drinking a main focus of their lives. ‘Having a fun time’. It’s all they know, not their fault, we removed the part of our culture where the two social worlds intersected. Society farmed kids out to schools and the entertainment industry to focus itself on recreational adult lifestyles, free of child interference. Take any serious issue the world faces, and you’ll see it’s caused by adults who still see the world like a big high school. It’s the only world they know. The obsession with personal feelings and emotions, with jockeying for social status, with friendship, with personal appearance and self-improvement, and an economic system focused on individual success, like your position in a class or in the HSC. Every serious issue becomes which ‘team’ you’re part of, forming your alliances, like you do in school. The substance of the issue itself? Ignored. The biggest growth professions are about ‘messaging’. About marketing. Trying to turn issues into juicy sound bites, which will get the momentary attention of societies of adolescents. No long-term, multi-generational construction of institutions to run society, but competition for limited attention in a market of personal tastes and opinions. We’re awash with fads, in all areas of life. Climate change or a pandemic become like selling soft drink. ‘Influencers’ replace leaders.

The NSW Government 'follows the health advice' in the same way a yacht tacks into a strong headwind.

There is nothing sexier than smart.

Of course there's nothing wrong with checking if people are OK, it's lovely. But it's an example of how collective problems become individual problems, in societies of adolescents. There are many discoverable reasons why people are not OK, but this shifts attention instead to how individuals are coping. Workplaces are almost universally appallingly managed. Hands up if shit managers at your work respond to criticism by suggesting you access employee counselling programs? Relationships carry the weight of communities that no longer act as communities. Etc. Those are the things we really need to talk about.

The government released a ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic yesterday. The metaphor tells you everything. Nobody uses roadmaps any more, we all use GPS. Real-time data adjusted to constantly changing conditions. Somebody wanting a roadmap is somebody wanting to ram their way through an obstacle, in this case the complexity of a rampant lethal virus. Business wants ‘certainty’, that’s what this is about. Life is never certain, business is a terrible guide for how to run a society or a pandemic. Like these mega-roads, you get a bit of a muscular feeling of driving things forward. Eventually it all just collapses back into congestion. The roadmap will fail.

NZ continues to smash Delta. Can't be done, says the Gladbot. Pity that's one of her lies we can't refer to ICAC, though they're very busy with her others.

The NSW Premier just announced she will no longer be giving daily press conferences. NSW Health staff will do them instead. She announced this immediately after saying the next few weeks will be the worst for Covid cases and deaths. How's that for leadership. Like Churchill announcing he'd go on a holiday on D-Day. She also won't allow NSW parliament to meet. No scrutiny. Just corruption, in plain sight.

Imagine working these fields every day.

Did people read this one? If you follow every tiny detail of the pandemic, as I have to for work, it’s things already known. But for many you can read here how NSW has just barefaced lied for months. It isn’t following health advice, it isn’t following the National Plan, and it isn’t following the Doherty modelling that underlies that plan. It’s also getting nearly half of the country’s vaccine supplies through a corrupt deal with the PM, at the expense of other States. The NSW business community wanted the State open, and it doesn’t care how many people die to make that happen. And now the government has closed parliament and press conferences, to go into hiding when the bodies pile up. Come on people, ffs.

An ex-head of the AMA.

New Zealand from space.

Happy Birthday Brett :)

Happy Birthday Evert!

I have many friends who struggle with sleep. I’ve never been a fantastic sleeper either. This modified section from Claire Weekes I think is worth repeating regularly. I’m not sure I’ve met anybody who struggled with sleep who wasn’t making the same mistake. They were all *trying* to sleep, in some way. “Don’t be too concerned because you can’t sleep. The very act of being prepared to accept being awake relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for sleep. You have to wait for it.”

Schools are safe. Pigs arse. What sort of leaders send unvaccinated kids back to school in a pandemic?

We need to get the kids back in school, so that all of our pointless ‘hobby farm’ small businesses, 75% of which were going to fail in 5 years anyway without the pandemic, can get back to work.

Morning music trivia. Which US band copied the format of this famous Stones clip almost to the letter, in a massive 1980s hit?

Covid will in no way be 'like the flu'. Flu is an endemic disease, Covid is not. Also the 'peak' of cases and hospitalisations - there is no one peak. The peak shifts every time you change conditions.

Political strategy is one of my areas of expertise. The constant talk about Delta being too hard to control is political strategy. NZ is controlling it as easily as it did in 2020. What’s happening in NSW and Victoria then, why can’t they? We need to look outside the States, to the federal government. Notice in 2020 JobKeeper payments were targeted at employers, to keep businesses afloat while employees went home. In 2021, they (deliberately) changed the payment to go to individuals, if they lost work. In other words, they made it much harder for businesses to close, because the business had to suffer first before employees qualified for a payment. On top of that, these individuals only qualified for a payment if the business was in a ‘hotspot’, as defined by the federal government. In other words, the virus had to have already smashed an area, before income support kicked in. And we wonder why the virus got out of control in 2021. Look at the PM and Treasurer - there’s your main answer.

As people know, one of my pet peeves. It’s there in the sign, ‘Zero G’. As if these people are suddenly free of gravity. There’s as much gravity on these people as there is on you or I. Even trained scientists perpetuate this myth. It matters because the myths about gravity shape every single thing we do, every day. The vast majority of whole countries labour against their ‘weight’ every day, when it’s actually just an illusion. You can’t feel your own weight.

Such a crucial point. Those ‘live with the virus’ people who want you to believe vaccines will turn Covid into something ‘just like the flu’ (by which they mean a mild flu season) are lying. Or stupid. Or both.

Happy Birthday :)

Happy belated birthday!

When you get a hedge trimmer for Christmas.

Can’t help think that the NSW Government taking a global event, and pretending it can fence it off in the poorer parts of Sydney, is going to do lasting damage to the entire city.

At 80% of adults vaccinated, 40,000 Australians per day are still estimated to become infected with Covid. Many of those will be children. How about we be a bit patient and vaccinate 80% of the WHOLE population first, hey?

The latest thing is to say that it doesn’t matter if lots of people get infected, provided they’re all vaccinated and don’t end up in hospital. Let’s test that against normal life. Say there was an epidemic of head lice, or whooping cough. Would we say to kids and adults with lice or whooping cough ’it’s fine to keep coming to school/work, we’re all vaccinated here and we have nit shampoo, and these things aren’t going to put us in hospital’? I think we know the answer.

Happy Birthday sir.

That road outside our front door connects us to every other spot on Earth. That sounds great for us. But what it also does is remove any reason for our quarter-acre of Earth, our home, to exist. Transport makes all parts of Earth equivalent. When you can always get what you need from somewhere else, there’s no reason your space has to exist. Movement is dislocation, always. Anything that sits on a road becomes road kill.

Something that’s become clear in this pandemic is how invisible basic public health work, which goes on every day of every year, is to much of the community. Take the idea again, that it doesn’t matter how many people get infected with Covid, if the vaccines keep most of them out of hospital. That’s just nonsense. What determines whether you’re in an epidemic or pandemic is the number of infections, not hospitalisations. The vision politicians have given people, that we can live alongside masses of Covid infections, safe with our vaccinations, matches nothing in basic public health practice for the past 3500 years. If we don’t control infections, the pandemic won’t end. By definition we will still be in a pandemic, with epidemic numbers of new infections. Wave after wave of them. Measles a good example, we’re all vaccinated, but if we get an outbreak, we jump on it. We don’t allow hundreds of thousands of people to wander around in the community infected with measles.

Why aren’t we as a society insisting upon vaccinating kids against Covid before sending them back to school? Here’s a historical comparison. Whooping cough, pertussis. Before vaccines, about 50-120 deaths per year. I’ve also included the projection of deaths of children from Covid, by the Doherty Report, in the 6 months after re-opening. About the same as used to die of whooping cough. In fact for most of the diseases we immunise kids for, the story is the same. ‘Most kids were fine’ pre-vaccines. The same nonsense we hear now about Covid, ‘most kids are fine’. Why don’t we just drop all childhood immunisation, if that’s what we really think now? How did we become that society?

Happy Birthday cuz!

I'm not sure people have fully imagined yet the chaos we'll see when the vaccinated half of the State is asked to enforce vaccine passports for the other half.

This is a growing pattern in Western democracies. Gated communities. Where the well-off shield themselves from crime and poverty. From the rest of society. Billionaires have bought entire islands and built bunkers to shelter from world collapse from climate change, at the top end of the gated community market. We’re seeing it right now in Sydney, with the pandemic. The West and South-West of the city has been locked down for months, to stop virus getting out. (Remember the virus got into these poorer communities from wealthy suburbs to their East.) And now the ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic turns every vaccinated person into a gated community. We’re now seeing it as the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’. As if you can individually choose to be in a pandemic or not. Pandemics are caused by the way the whole society is organised. Using vaccines as some sort of Covid-condom to escape the pandemic is not only repulsive, it also won’t work.

People have probably heard a lot about the Doherty modelling in the news, the guide governments are using for the 70% and 80% re-openings. Wanted to share some of it because I’m not sure how many people have actually read it. The NSW Premier warned people yesterday to be prepared for a shock when the State re-opens, and here’s why. The yellow highlighted figures. Opening at 70%, which NSW will reach in the new few weeks, there would be 500,000-600,000 new infections in the following six months. That’s over 3000 a day. 2000-3000 ICU admissions, which is enormously above actual State capacity. At 80%, about 300,000 infections in the following 6 months, nearly 2000 a day. ICU 1300-2000, again well above State capacity. Doherty have also come out this morning and said their estimates of ICU patients and deaths are much too low, as they were based on the Alpha variant of Covid, not Delta. So those numbers will be much higher once they correct them. What does this all mean? It means that the idea we will have much ‘freedom’ back at either 70 or 80% of adults vaccinated is a fairy tale. There will still be strong restrictions, even lockdowns.

When waiting in line at a local vaccination clinic the other week, it was clear the number 1 factor people seem to use for choosing a mask is appearance. Most of the masks I saw were pretty useless, even if they looked great. Some good advice here. I stock up on proper masks, much to my wife's amusement ;) https://www.ozsage.org/media_releases/community-mask-use/

You can only go for so long telling every kid at school that they're as smart as every other kid, before the shit hits the fan.

Know when kids in science at school say 'how am I going to use this in later life'? We have a new answer. You may not have a later life, if you don't shut up and learn. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/health/gofundme-set-up-to-cover-funeral-costs-of-antivax-mum-of-four-who-died-of-covid19/news-story/303975c31e1eed1d1f7a0320dac10f4e

Construction re-opens next week in NSW, even if construction workers aren’t vaccinated. And 5000 at a horse race in mid-October. But vaccinating kids for school isn’t in the roadmap at all. NSW is owned and run by property developers, gambling, booze and farmers.

Is everybody happy infecting several hundred thousand children and killing up to 60 of them in the next 6 months, under the government's re-opening plan? These are the government's numbers, before you people who think the world is a battle between Labor and the LNP get your knickers in a twist. The roadmap needs to allow time to vaccinate children. What sort of person would argue otherwise?

Happy Birthday Ames, the bestest short person in the world.

I think Australia is sleepwalking into something it just isn't seeing. Right now it thinks the opening up plans of 70 and 80-% are great, because they think it'll be just more of what they have right now, with extra freedoms. Here's an example of how I think that's so dangerously delusional. My workplace was closed all last week, because of a Covid case. It's the main administrative building for an entire country town. One case. When Gladys throws open the State at 70% and 80% there are going to be tens and even hundreds of THOUSANDS of infections in the community. She's not denying it, this is the National Plan. The delusion is 'vaccines will keep us all safe'. Only half the State will be vaccinated when it's opened. Only half will have had the opportunity to be vaccinated, this isn't about vaccine hesitancy. Thousands every DAY will become infected, many of them children. Thousands of VACCINATED people will become infected. If you think life can be normal again because of vaccines, think about something like whooping cough. Most of us are vaccinated. I am, still caught it a few years ago. I was forced to isolate, and rightly so, it's a shit of a disease, even when vaccinated. Now where do people think all of these *thousands* of infected Covid people will be every day? At work, at school, in the shops? Of course not, I mean some will be because they won't even know they're infected. But they'll have to isolate. What happens when thousands of people have to isolate every day? Things stop running. Schools stop functioning, businesses lose key workers. Businesses have to close for Covid cleaning. Etc. The place SHUTS DOWN. Now what was the point of opening up, only to then force everything to shut down again? No point, none. It's beyond stupid. The only other option is to do a US and UK, and just not care, and allow people to become infected and die in their thousands. (And you little 'alarmism' nellies out there, this is IN the national opening up plan. Go read it.)

100,000 children infected in just one week in England. The government there not even bothering to isolate infected people in schools, it all got too hard. If you don't think NSW could end up like this, you're not paying attention. NSW has been following the UK strategy for months. If you read the NSW school re-opening plan, it's literally not much more than 'open a window'. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/22/its-scary-record-covid-absences-cause-concern-in-englands-schools

Remember Nick Coatsworth, the eye candy Deputy Chief Health Officer of Australia? He's a world champion wanker.

Is trans theory the most stupid thing humans have ever invented? It's a tough field. I'm no conservative reactionary by the way, far from it. I just call stupid, stupid. Tell me why I'm wrong.

The UN’s hip new educational TikTok. I watched it about 20 times and can’t remember a single word, my brain couldn’t process just how bad it all was.

Here’s one for the people who can’t process an issue without a detour through their favourite political team. Lots to see here about NSW ‘success’ with vaccination.

Thanks to the O’Regan bakery. Sorry I was at the other end of the house when you dropped it off Shan! All mine :)

The NSW Premier and our PM both tell us that the reason 2021 is different is because ‘Delta is like nothing we have seen before’. More lies, more spin. We’ve beaten far more infectious diseases than Delta. The only difference between 2020 and 2021 is that in 2021, these two governments hijacked two years of hard slog from the Australian people, to eliminate Covid, and rammed through their ‘live with the virus’ lethal fantasy. How did they do it? Look at the graph. They withdrew the support to business they provided in 2020, which then forced people to have to go to work. There they got infected, and then infected their communities. Then in their cynicism, they blamed it on the culture of these workers in Western Sydney, and anti-vaxxers. Our lives are tabloid newspapers.

I post a lot less to FB these days, because it’s so bloody dull. Like reading personal ads and classifieds. An Israeli scientist said something the other day that interested me. He said the world is broken because when the major issues of the day are discussed, people only talk about them in relation to the people they *don’t* know (politicians, celebrities etc.), and only rarely in relation to the people they do know. So instead of ideas being blended into the lived experience of ourselves and our friends, they become cliches and stereotypes, slogans mouthed by strangers. Everything is the angry firing of these slogan missiles. While in the meantime we mostly share with those we know what we’re doing (not often what we’re thinking), because the thought of disagreeing with those close to us is too stressful. Gradually the world becomes these insular personal lives, curated to some impersonation of happiness, which we imitate between ourselves. And the rest of the world just seems insane and apocalyptic, because it’s not real, it’s that constructed impersonal world of people we don’t actually know, holding simplified views which we then put into battle, like we’re watching footy, backing our team.

An aspect of the months between now and Christmas many aren’t aware of, is that the National Covid plan, modelled by Doherty and driven by the PM, involves the mass infection of children. This is quite deliberate, as it also was in the UK, to drive the community closer to herd immunity. You can see the projected numbers in the table I’ve included, from the Doherty Report. (And this is only symptomatic infections - asymptomatic ones are 3-4 times as high again, so about 1.5 million kids in the next 6 months.) There are about 6 weeks of in-person schooling left in 2021, if schools go back at the planned October 25. The government could choose to make all of Term 4 virtual learning, so that all children can be vaccinated by the time school starts again in 2022. It’d only be 6 weeks more of face-to-face learning missed. Why would any society deliberately infect its children with a pandemic virus? Anybody paying attention to this stuff?

Data from the US is now suggesting vaccination plus infection with the Delta strain is equivalent to being unvaccinated, against the Alpha strain from last year. In other words, we’re heading back to square one. What has caused this? All the leaders and people who tried to use vaccines as a way out of the pandemic, without controlling spread of the disease with restrictions.

Happy Birthday Dan! As a present I've planned a complete demolition of England in the Ashes later this year :)

Happy Birthday! Have a ripper.

Happy birthday to you! You look like a monkey and live in a zoo etc.

If copper + tin + bronze = silver Platinum-gold =?

I guess if you’re in an ICU, you are technically still ‘living’.