October 2021

Cut and run before the Covid Roadmap carnage begins.

The gushing about Gladys. This is the woman who, when asked yesterday about whether children will die of Covid under her Covid strategy, said ‘regrettably yes’.

We have a PM rushing to an election by destroying 2 years of hard Covid work. And a NSW Premier who gets wide applause for leading a government with such entrenched corruption that ICAC wouldn’t have know where to start. Both are very popular. Trump was and is very popular and was corrupt. Do people not see we’re no different to Trump supporters now? If breaking the law and infecting hundreds of thousands of children with a deadly virus now wins elections, what have we become? We’re hypnotised by meaningless, feel-good political slogans. Too lazy to actually look at the specific issues, voting for people who make us feel good. It’s high school all over again, we never left. Popularity wins. Nothing is emptier or more dangerous than popularity.

Here’s the former NSW Auditor-General speaking about Gladys’ resignation. (Don’t forget either that this NSW Government also rorted the bushfire relief funding.) I plead with people to not embrace populism, where leaders and basic law and due process are seen as two opposing teams. That’s high school behaviour. I have zero interest in ALP vs LNP. I’m an official, I’m interested in things being run well, openly and fairly. Corruption destroys societies, no matter how popular it is.

Fresh from killing 140,000 Brits, and another thousand each week, with an idiot ‘live with the virus’ strategy (which we’re copying now in Oz by the way), now the UK has nationwide fuel shortages. More populist libertarian fantasy, Brexit. And as we saw here in NSW, who do these libertarian loons blame for virus deaths and lack of petrol? You and me. The public. Libertarianism is dead, it doesn’t work. A society isn’t just a bunch of individuals.

Going to re-post this from Dr Ellie Murray, one Tweet per comment on my own post. That way hopefully people can read the whole thing just by looking through the comments. If you want to know how the pandemic ends, read on.

One of the leading contenders for Gladys’ job. A key member of the NSW Crisis Cabinet that determined NSW’s Covid strategy.

Society is just conversation. All of it, even the Economy. Great article about what this means for journalism. If you look at something like FB, notice that in libertarian societies like ours, a ‘public’ act is thought to be sharing of information and pictures about ourselves. Society as a stage for individual performance. Going back to an earlier post, I think this is because school culture has turned societies into millions of permanent adolescents. Adolescents are obsessed with how they appear to others, with presenting themselves to the group. They hate rules.

Don’t forget the UK strategy, of deliberately infecting children rather than vaccinating them, is also the Australian strategy. No conspiracies, this is actually the strategy. The leaders who promote this strategy are popular. What do we think that says about the societies we live in?

In years to come, remember this video. Substitute ‘cholera’ or ‘Ebola’ for ‘this virus’, and you’ll get a sense of how collectively insane we all now are. That we swallow these ridiculous, meaningless slogans, like hypnotised chickens. No integrity or leadership, saddling future generations with a new endemic disease. I doubt most people understand what the implications of that are. Hang your heads in shame, Australia.

May the best team win. And good luck to the Bunnies too.

The questions Australians are not asking. The answers may hit them like a truck, before Christmas. How many know what Alan spells out here? Really worth your time.

Two things I think will explain most of the apparent craziness of the world right now. One is seeing it as a giant high school - have posted about that, and it’s literally true. The other is understanding that we all actually want to be ruled by Kings and Queens. As Dave Graeber and Marshal Sahlins explain here.

The UK, a few weeks ahead of us in opening up schools to widespread infection. I’m not understanding why Australian parents are just meekly allowing this. Instead they’re applauding the woman who approved the same strategy for NSW, as she resigns for corruption.

Leonardo Da Vinci reading his social media comments.

OzSAGE, a collection of some of Australia’s top experts across a range of fields, has released a guide for sending kids back to school, during Covid. A great read for all. I think this is a line in the sand issue for me, I really struggle to maintain respect for people who are fine with hundreds of thousands of children being infected.

I think my frustration with social media is exactly this, it's called the 'Spiral of Silence'. See excerpt below, but the link is only a page of reading too. People simply refuse to engage in discussion most of the time, out of fear of violating their friendship groups. Which is further evidence of how the culture of schooling has turned society into millions of permanent adolescents, because this is the culture of adolescence. Positioning yourself and maintaining that position, within groups. Where your opinion isn't an idea, it's a label that positions you socially. "So, at the end of the day it is clear – most of us will only share our opinions if we think our audience will agree. Regardless of whether it is offline or online, our desire to be accepted and part of the group is a far stronger pull than our desire to express our beliefs and ‘risk’ group membership." https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/internet-security/really-expressing-social-media-scared/

Please sign, so that 'open a window' isn't the only public health measure used to protect young children. https://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/la/Pages/ePetition-details.aspx?q=rpEwNg2UB9+LpW1NhPZzdA==

Read this article (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/10/2/2055693/-COVID-19-must-be-eliminated-not-endemic-if-America-is-going-to-survive) about ’living with Covid’, and contrast it with what our PM said this week (vid). Desperate to hear what you think. Nothing to be afraid of, put it out there.

The clearest statement of Australia’s national covid plan that I’ve seen. I’m not joking.

Decode this.

How communities are fracturing. The article blames FB, people often blame social media for this sort of thing. Like saying guns are why people get shot, it’s too simple. I think social media is making existing differences of belief in communities visible. Differences that prosperity and peace hid. Rich countries don’t do discussion, they can buy a lifestyle that bypasses conflict. Disagreement takes practice. We don’t have any practice in it now.

Fat, rich, whiney countries are opening up their countries to infect millions of people, many of them children. To save businesses, 75% of which were going to fail inside 3 years anyway, without the pandemic. India, much poorer, is eliminating Covid. I saw NSW parents online yesterday celebrating that they could send their unvaccinated kids back to school a week earlier. Just when I think we couldn’t get any dumber.

Have watched a lot of scandi noir in lockdowns, love it. Bloodlands is Irish noir, with James Nesbitt, one of my favourite actors. I love a show with a twist, that upends everything you thought was happening. This one has a twist on a twist, it’s a corker. A crime thriller about the ongoing legacy of ‘The Troubles’ in Ireland, the internal civil war that still simmers.

Australia lies with its vaccine data, only reporting over-16s. This is the real NSW data. 0+ is the whole State, not just those aged 16 and over. At our re-opening day next Monday, only just over half of the State will be vaccinated. About 3.5 million people still won’t be, through no fault of their own. The virus will mow them down like a truck doing 80 at a 40 school zone crossing. Nothing like declaring victory with a job only half-done.

This is the UK. It has vaccinated significantly more people than we have (66%, versus our 58% in NSW). This is what happens when you ‘open up’ while the virus is still circulating. Why is this not the most obvious thing? NSW starts ‘re-opening’ on Monday. Even when NSW reaches 90% of 16+ vaccinated, that’s still only about 70% of people vaccinated. Which is still 2.5 million people unvaccinated, not by choice, to be infected and potentially maimed or killed.

As one prominent journalist said, the NSW Government is run for business, by business. Shredders going flat-out in the Reverend Dom’s office, with all the NSW Health advice. The Deputy Premier, our own novelty cheque Paul Toole, has also just announced primary school students, the only unvaccinated group left, won’t be wearing face masks, because it’s ’ludicrous’. They’re being infected in the hundreds of thousands overseas.

I know I post Covid things into the void. More than 800 children have been hospitalised in NSW for Covid since this outbreak began. And this is before restrictions are lifted. 5% of child Covid cases are ending up in hospital. (That’s very high.) If the government’s own projections of child infections come to pass, that’s thousands of children about to be in hospital, in NSW. But hey, pubs will be open! Travel overseas! Nothing to see here.

Rotary gives more money to the World Health Organisation than most countries. Australia well down the list. Another reason why pandemics happen and take ages to make go away. The graph tells the story.

Australians are much more Aboriginal than they realise, I think. Not only does the landscape shape us in ways we don’t understand, but our encounter with aboriginal people has become part of our cultural DNA. Take the Australian accent, as one example. It surprises me it’s not more noticed how similar it is to Aboriginal English, in the way the sounds are spoken.

This is why NSW and Victoria lost control of Covid in 2021, but not in 2020. Wasn’t anything to do with the Delta variant. The federal government gutted income support to workers and businesses, forcing people to go to work and get infected. You can read just how bad this got, here. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/melbourne-spotless-laundry-walkout-covid-coronavirus

Underneath grand narratives you’ll usually find some simple, practical thing that explains things. The US has a much more libertarian, individual freedom focus than Australia. That comes down to underlying beliefs. But underlying beliefs have to be enacted too. One thing I hadn’t realised about the US is how little community sport happens there. Most sport is organised through schools. Whereas it’s like a national religion in Australia. That’s one of the key places the sense of community is generated and maintained, outside all usual social boundaries. Aussies do love sport, but it’s much more important than just throwing balls around. It’s a key to something very distinct about living here.

Talking about vaccines for younger kids. Professor Cheng, co-chair of ATAGI, the group that will rule on safety: “When we are thinking about 80-year-olds, where the danger of COVID is really obvious, [about] a third of people die,” he said. “When we are looking at kids, who rarely go to hospital and as a rule don’t die from COVID, then that’s sort of a different equation.” My problem with this is, it would exclude pretty much all of the diseases we currently vaccinate kids for. Only tiny numbers of children ever got really sick from things like mumps, chickenpox, measles, even polio. I feel scientists here are absorbing the political slogans, like ‘kids don’t get really sick from Covid’, and it’s shaping their thinking inappropriately.

Something to remember if you support the ‘live with the virus’ idea. We’re all going to catch Covid at some point, vaccinated or not. Covid is a vascular disease, not a respiratory disease. It can attack any of your organs, even in mild cases, which we will all get.

Paul Toole on TV just now, saying they can’t delay re-opening because people have all had an opportunity to be vaccinated. I’m genuinely curious if people actually understand this. Once we hit 60%, things open. All 25 million of us could be standing in the vaccine queue together, on the same day, but they’d re-open with 10 million still standing in line. That’s how the plan was designed.

Feedback suggests some people like a different perspective on the pandemic, beyond the endless repetition of meaningless political slogans like 'live with the virus'. So I'll keep at it. Today - hospitalisations. "It's not case numbers that matter, it's hospitalisations and deaths'. Everybody repeats that slogan now, as if it's common sense. Like all the other slogans, it's nonsense. The graphic shows the leading causes of death in Australia, across age groups. Do we assess the seriousness of all of these according to how many people go to hospital? Nope. Most people with these conditions rarely go to hospital. Many will die at home or in the community. Put it this way, would we say heart disease isn't a problem in Australia, because we have enough beds for people who get heart disease? It's so ridiculous as to be laughable, nobody would say it. And yet this is what now passes for common sense, with Covid.

The subtleties of spin. Now we have 'Freedom Day', the health data released daily has been butchered. Case numbers pushed down the graphic, vaccinations now top place. No details of which LHDs the cases are in, no details of the deaths, no indication of new hospitalisations or ICU numbers.

Worth remembering that what we have 'freed' today is Covid. Like the freedom to take off your seatbelt on a freeway.

Nothing like a big, cold beer to wash that Covid down. (The Premier here breaching the Public Health Orders by standing while drinking, but hey, get that beer in ya.)

Well now, the zoomed-out version shows 5 lots of fines for Revenue NSW, score. It is good to see normal service returning in NSW, where the blokes are at the pub, the ladies homeschooling, the alcohol and gambling and real estate industries back in the driver’s seat. ‘Private industry’ (very very private, ssshh, ICAC) back calling the shots. Not a pesky public health sheila in sight.

Things we haven’t learned in the past 2 years. 1. We really hate borders and restrictions when they’re applied to us, but we fall over ourselves to vote for politicians who apply them to other people. 2. Most of the shittiest, lowest paid work in our societies is invisible, and is done by immigrants or temporary foreign workers. As the UK has now discovered, in the Brexit fantasy, where suddenly nobody is there to do that work. 3. The only thing stopping our countries becoming large aged-care homes is those immigrant workers. Our own populations are ageing very badly, we don’t have children any more. And the ones we do have, we happily infect with viruses, so we can go to the pub and get on planes.

The new Premier said these words yesterday. Orwell used to say that politics is all about language. Look at that word - 'alongside'. What does it mean? The problem is, Covid doesn't live alongside us. It lives INSIDE us. The spin is supposed to make you feel we can drive along in the car and wave at Covid safely through the window, like there's some parallel reality where Covid will live, alongside us, and we'll be safe.

The UK is 'living with Covid' (we're copying them). 1.1 million of them now have long Covid. Over 400,000 of those have had it more than a year. Another 1500 added every week. The impact on the brain for those with long Covid is said to be equivalent to having dementia.

This is what both frustrates me and gives me hope. Numbers are how many days until each age group reaches the vaccination threshold (70, 80, 90%). I've circled NSW in red for the 90% threshold, you can see by about mid-November the whole State 16 and above will be 90% vaccinated. That'll make us one of the most vaccinated places on Earth. 12-15 aren't shown, they're currently just under 20% fully vaxxed. The frustration here is, the huge rush to open at 70% (never part of the National Plan), when waiting only a few more weeks would have had 90+% of the State over 16 vaxxed. It would also have given time to get the 12-15 vaxxes done, and bring us closer to under 12s. You can see how children are the sacrificial lambs here, not factored into the timelines at all.

Those who back the NSW Government the way they might back an NRL team often defend what they do by also praising NSW Health. It’s been many months since the NSW Government listened much to NSW Health. Now they’ve introduced the Trump distinction, that politicians are ‘taking back control from experts’. Ponder that, the smart thing to do and the thing to do, now seen as opposites.

The NSW Government spent a fortune upgrading its air conditioning system so that its air is changed every 7.5 minutes. Its 'effort' on schools returning? 'Open a window'. And also 'masks are ludicrous' (our new Deputy Premier and local member). No primary school children vaccinated.

Every period in history sees itself as breaking free from history. As the new 'modern' thing that leaves history behind. Like every generation thinks it invented sex. Here's a fun example of that being untrue. With the huge funneling of wealth to the top of society, the Regency England of Jane Austen is on its way back, where if you're not born into an inheritance, you're screwed.

I was at this concert in Hamburg in 1982. The hall was about the size of the Bathurst Civic Centre, but had the full Queen stage, lights and sound etc. So it was incredibly hot and loud, and blinding, and awesome. (We also ran into Freddie and Brian sneaking in a side door, and just stood there next to them for a bit before the show watching the support band, which was a bit surreal.) It was the song though that made me think - can a person fall in love with the same person twice? Is it possible?

The R number. Mentioned a lot in the pandemic, basically a measure of how much a virus spreads between people. There are two Rs - R0, and Re. R0 is how many people each person would infect if there was nothing to prevent the spread. Re is the spread once those preventions are in place. Anything above an R of 1 is exponential spread. For the flu, R0 is between 1 and 2. So if you catch flu, you’ll likely pass it on to only 1 or 2 other people. The R0 for Covid (Delta) is between 6 and 9. If you catch it, you’ll likely pass it on to 6-9 others. (Covid is nothing ‘like the flu’. The lockdowns smashed flu, with its puny R of 1-2. Covid is still going strong.) There’s an equation that lets you calculate Re, once you add vaccinations. Re = R0 x (1-X*Ve) X - proportion of people vaccinated Ve - efficacy of the vaccine you’re using. Let’s say Australia manages to get 90% of all people vaccinated. That will make X = 0.9. We’re using AZ and Pfizer which have different vaccine efficacy (Ve), AZ is about 60-70% (0.6-0.7), Pfizer is about 95% (0.95). So to average out across the country, let’s say 80%, or a Ve of 0.8. We’ll take the R0 of Delta to be 8 (it’s between 6 and 9) Plugging into the equation: Re = 8 x (1 - 0.9 x 0.8 ) = 2.24 So if Australia relies upon just vaccinations, which is the big push, each person who gets Covid will potentially still infect over 2 people. Exponential growth. (Covid is worse than the flu, even *after* vaccinations.) Even if you get 95% vaccine coverage, Re is still nearly 2. Vaccines won’t fix Covid for us. Not by themselves.

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than they are by Covid, have endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Nearly all of the diseases in that scheme are less harmful to children than Covid.

This is what you call a fossil find. Gascoyne Junction, Western Australia. Jenni can tell us what we're looking at? Remarkable preservation.

The health system, like most systems, is run at about 60-70% full capacity, to allow for the peaks and troughs that happen each year. Right now, globally, politicians are trying to run health systems at 100+% capacity, full-time, to try to fast-track their way out of the pandemic. Health care workers will burn out and/or resign, unless public health measures (which politicians have responsibility for) are used as well. That's what 'live with the virus' means, to a politician - let Covid spread, and let the health system mop up the damage.

Was chatting to one of Australia’s leading virologists yesterday, about how he sees Covid panning out in the years ahead, with the ‘living with Covid’ idea. For comparison, in a bad flu year in Australia, we get about 250,000 cases of flu, which stresses the health system badly. (Probably quite a few more than this too, as we don’t test for flu.) Given Covid is many times as infectious as flu, some virologists are predicting 5-7 million cases of Covid per year in Australia, in years to come. The UK currently experiencing the stupidity of ‘live with the virus’ (link), and finding it’s nothing ‘like the flu’ at all. (For the economically obsessed, flu costs Australian businesses about $7 billion a year. Covid will be many multiples of that, at these projections.)

Not just ignoring the health advice now, also ignoring the National Plan and Doherty modelling. Our very own God-bothering Trumpie. (Just for the slow people at the back, the vaccines don't stop people carrying or spreading the virus.) I'm still trying to figure out what it is about ultra-conservative Christian and economic types that thinks screwing the poor and ignoring basic health advice is the way to go. Dom should ask - what would Jesus do?

“The latest figures, published yesterday, show the UK's daily coronavirus cases have reached their highest level since July, with 45,066 new infections recorded…scientific advisers and ministers are now beginning to show nerves about the recent rise in infections.” The UK, living with the virus.

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith, screaming at him in Sinhalese, as the other customers added their voices to his, complaining that Farsith had added something to the meal. Flour perhaps? The Tamil-speaking waiter thought they might be angry because of the unfortunate lump of flour he could see quite clearly in the curry sauce. The flour was meant to thicken the gravy, but it had not broken down. He and his brother were not trained chefs after all. They’d worked a couple of brutal years as labourers in Saudi Arabia, long enough to earn the money needed to start up this small restaurant in their village in the green fields of the Gal Oya Valley, in south eastern Sri Lanka. Farsith tried to ignore the angry diner, but the man kept shouting at him that he had ‘put it in’. Well they had, hadn’t they. Flour was in the recipe. So in his poor, halting Sinhalese he answered, “I don’t know. Yes, we put?” The mob erupted, surging over and around the counter to beat seven kinds of hell out of the brothers, destroying the restaurant and rolling on to burn down the local mosque. As you do...sparked by a viral Facebook post claiming that police had seized thousands of sterilization pills from a Muslim pharmacist in the village. The pills were part of a cunning Islamist plot to depopulate Sri Lanka of its Sinhalese Buddhist inhabitants by chemically castrating the males. It was, of course, utter bullshit. But Facebook’s algorithm does not discriminate against utter bullshit. Indeed, if the content is measurably ‘sticky’ and ‘sharable’ the Zuckbot gets very excited and starts pimping it out with extreme prejudice.“ John Birmingham

What you’re allowed to do ≠ the safe thing to do.

Another powerful political strategy - normalisation. Shifting what ‘normal’ means. Why people don’t even bat an eyelid at the idea of mass infections, of hundreds or even thousands of people dying every week. Why Australia for example right now is excited about ‘Freedom Day’ nonsense, at a time infections are about to take off, with only half the population vaccinated. And infecting young children, for previous generations a mortal sin, now brushed off as necessary collateral damage.

Lots still to do.

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat that out of me, you can’t function as a teacher with a fear of standing in front of a crowd. But here’s another way to think about crowds. A crowd isn’t real. There is no crowd watching you. There are a whole lot of individuals out there, thinking and feeling their own individual thing, about you or often about somerthing else entirely, like their day, or their boyfriend etc. You are always only ever playing or speaking to one person. Lots of one person, but just one person. Never to a ‘crowd’. The best performers intuitively know this, they perform the same way to 3 people as they do to 30,000. Why they seem to be ‘speaking to’ you, as a listener, individually.

NSW is ‘open for business’. Also open for sport, music, swimming, visiting friends etc. The fact he only mentions business is just more evidence that NSW is run by business, for business. Here’s a thing. ‘Business’ doesn’t exist. You can test that very easily. How many businesses would exist, without customers? (Zero.) How many customers would continue to exist, without businesses? (All of them.)

The people who argued black and blue here last year that 'kids don't get Covid' have now modified that to 'it doesn't matter if they get Covid'. Usually people without young kids. They learned a different set of morals to me. It's not entirely clear to me what morals they have at all, to be honest, beyond wanting to get back on planes and in pubs and restaurants. If those are morals.

Ted Cruz is a libertarian pissant from the US who is one of the promoters of the "I stand with the people of Australia" rubbish. A message he wrote below, and wonderful response from the NT Chief Minister. The Chief Minister followed up by asking Cruz to donate to his 'grow a mullet' fundraising campaign.

In July 2021, Boris Johnson urged Britons to ‘learn to live with the virus’. (Sounding familiar?). It’s going well.

Such fine Australians have formed the modern LNP. Saying the quiet bits out loud.

Isn't this great, even where parents try to carry the cost of clean air in schools, because the NSW government won't do anything, they're not allowed. No masks, 'open a window'. Just disgusting, corrupt, and probably would win an election because society is dumber by the day.

It is lethal. If you don't know what libertarianism is, worth doing some reading. Many vote for the LNP today because they think they're voting for Liberals and Nationals. They're not, they've long since transformed into libertarian parties. Nothing at all like the Coalition even of my youth. John Howard drove that shift, towards the Republican libertarian attack politics of the US. He imported their actual personnel to introduce it here. It's done enormous damage to Australia in the past 25 years. Senior members of his own party resigned in disgust, including former Liberal Prime Ministers.

We’re so close to Trumpland now here.

I rarely post about my personal life to FB, which leads some to assume I don’t have one and ‘live on FB’ instead. I spend maybe 15 minutes on FB a day. They on the other hand think you don't have a life, if it's not on FB. Hmm. Somebody is living on FB here, not sure it's me.

Of course it didn't. We're a society of adolescents, interested in drinking and holidays. The world is a high school.

Third straight day of increases in NSW. This is a jump of about 100 in a day. And schools only reopened this week. Next week will be interesting.

From the UK. A present for Paul 'masks are ludicrous for school children' Toole, Deputy Premier. Also for the 'kids don't transmit Covid' folks from last year, here on FB.

A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again. Alexander Pope

The world seems more stupid today. I know a lot of people feel that. It's not because individual people are getting dumber though, I don't think. It's because a huge part of a society acting intelligently is its institutions, which carry the accumulated wisdom of many generations. Those are being destroyed, libertarians call them 'bureaucracies', and replace them with populist boofheads. Good article here on the difference between dumb (individuals), and stupid (groups).

Keith Pitt today repeated the tired old ‘find me a solar panel that works when the sun doesn’t shine’ line. Find me a tap that works when it’s not raining, Keith.

Rebekah is a paediatrician.

More life as a high school. Melbourne re-opens. It’s curious that the narrative around lockdowns has been that people are healthiest and happiest when they can mix socially. That without it, they become lonely and depressed. As if being social is our default human state, which lockdown has taken away from us. That’s just plain wrong. Social life is a life of imitation, comparison and status. It’s some of of the most miserable aspects of life, from school through to adulthood. A society that sees freedom as social life is a high school. Adolescents are obsessed with social life, adults are supposed to grow out of it, to have fewer friends as they age because they no longer need them. They’re more comfortable just being themselves, with their families. Not anti-social, but more mature and less needy of interaction. Less co-dependent.

Assumption School in Bathurst already closed because of Covid. Only years 1 and 2 there. It took only 4 days. If the idiot NSW Government follows its idiot overlords in the UK, the next stage will be to just keep schools open and not even allow parents to know if there are Covid cases there. Watch this space.

Happy Birthday to you!

The 'living with the virus' slogan. Anybody uttering it needs to explain exactly what they mean. Here's an example - whooping cough. Pertussis. We 'live with' it. There's a vaccine. Between 2008 and 2012 we had a whooping cough epidemic, over 140,000 cases, and 40,000 in 2011 alone. It's evolving to become a superbug, because we're not controlling it. If you get an outbreak in a school, kids get sent home. It causes massive disruption, public health action. Parents need to skip work to look after the kids. I caught it myself a few years ago, despite being vaccinated. Vaccines aren't a magic bullet, to 'live with' an infectious pathogen, you need to constantly fight it, at multiple levels. Not vax-and-forget.

67 schools have been closed since the beginning of Term 4 in NSW, because of Covid. Most kids not back yet.

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.” Marie Curie

Reckon they were discussing the best public health strategy to end the pandemic? Me either.

It’s back tonight! Best, dorkiest show on TV.

Found this photo on my phone, I must have accidentally snapped it when out for a walk yesterday. We treat the Earth beneath us as just ‘the ground’, like an inert mass we fall onto and rest on with our ‘weight’. In reality we’re all astronauts, floating in space while this planet comes up underneath us, with every step. How badly we teach science, that people think you need a rocket to reach ‘space’. You’re in space right now.

“Singapore had previously announced in June it would be abandoning its zero-Covid strategy in favor of a new plan to live with the virus. The shift was possible thanks to the country's high vaccination rates, which are among the best in the world.” (Their vaccination rate is much higher than ours.) ‘Living with the virus’ only works when you’ve controlled the virus. It doesn’t mean just letting people get infected at whim, thinking vaccines will protect them.

Covid school closures, Victoria, Term 4. Most kids not back at school yet.

Hooray. Now the TGA and ATAGI here can do their assessment, and we can vaccinate kids before they all go back to school. (Wait: I’ve just been informed we already sent all of the kids back to school.) I’m sure people think I’m obsessed about this issue. Sorry that I’ll be the last picked on the ‘let’s infect all the kids!’ team.

Brilliant political cartooning out of the UK.

This is cool, to see the patterns of air movement. Have often wondered if making air pollution visible would create greater action on it. People won’t pay much attention to something they can’t see. Imagine if every car, truck and bus had some colouring added to its exhaust gases, so we could directly see the impact of their use.

Happy Birthday! Now eligible for the pension?

So often the smart and right thing to do won’t be the popular thing to do. Have a look at this excerpt from a BBC interview in 1967, of a female government minister introducing drink driving laws. Don’t go along with the crowd to avoid confrontation, call out stupid wherever you see it. That’s the only true test of character.

Eglinton now. Schools only really opening again today, and here we are already. Put masks on the kids if we’re so desperate to open schools to get back in restaurants, pubs and planes. Only 7 weeks of school left, what sort of society infects its children rather than wait a few more weeks to vaccinate them? Why don’t we just give up all childhood vaccinations, if that’s our new morality?

Cases (blue) and R value (orange), for NSW. R is the rate at which the infections are spreading.

The Deputy Premier referred to use of masks in schools as 'ludicrous'. This is the official CDC advice, in the US, just so you get a sense of the calibre of the NSW Government: "Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status."

Politicians have now forced children back into schools, mid-pandemic, with little or no protection, because of apparent concern for their education. The same politicians who presided over this educational performance for the past 20 years, and did - nothing. You’re a schmuck if you believe they give a fig about education. They want kids at school because they want parents at work. It’s about the Economy.

Those who doubt school re-openings are nothing about education - this is a federal minister, speaking on Sunday. Disgusts me that there isn’t public outcry about the deliberate infection of children with Covid. Not a conspiracy theory, it’s in the Doherty modelling, which nobody reads. Open your eyes, the mass infection of children in the UK right now. 98 of them now dead.

CDC, Centre for Disease Control in the US, their main regulatory body. Compare and contrast with our 'masks are ludicrous in schools' Deputy Premier. Yesterday most Covid cases in NSW were in the regions. When asked about opening up travel to the regions, the Premier commented on 'low business and consumer confidence' there that needs fixing. Want to know what destroys business and consumer confidence? Covid outbreaks.

Everything about this plan is laughable. Even the title, 'The Australian Way'. Just another book of meaningless political slogans to get him through the election. The man is vacuous, completely devoid of any vision or belief, except his own gain. People really don't understood the disaster coming down the road from climate change. It's going to make Covid look like a weekend picnic.

Happy Birthday to you! Rock on.

I saw a woman comment that “men choose relationships, but women choose sex”. At first I thought hang on, isn’t that backwards? And then the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like an a-ha thing. While of course men often like and want sex, it’s not usually them that chooses whether it will happen. At the same time, while women like relationships, a relationship that lasts is one a man has decided to commit to.

Wish I could remember the name of this variety. Has the most incredible perfume.

Imagine a road safety strategy that said 'we're getting thousands of crashes a week, but very few people need to go to hospital.' Substitute 'Covid cases' for 'crashes', and you have our national Covid strategy.

More of Trump’s America for Australia. Like voluntary voting, requiring an ID to vote sounds sensible, but is actually a strategy to reduce votes from people who don’t vote for conservative parties. This country really needs to get off its lazy unthinking arse and stop this shift towards American-style libertarian politics. Nothing to do with Labor or Liberal or Green, this politics will destroy all of that.

58% of Americans opposed going to the moon, when Kennedy announced it. ‘Moonshot’ became a term to mean pushing for a massive collective achievement. Kennedy succeeded. Compare and contrast this with the pandemic, where the most powerful voices are those telling us to give up, that ‘you can’t eliminate Covid’, that we have to ‘live with it’. Ask yourselves what alternative moonshots are these people offering us? What great community aims, what longstanding problems and suffering do they want us to overcome, together? You won’t find anything. Their aims are all about consolidating their own privilege. Tax cuts is about the only public policy they have. Those who vote for them want to ‘have fun’, to travel and have big expensive homes and high status education for their kids. No collective vision at all, just mass wanking.

NSW has a zero road deaths road safety strategy. Quoting from it: “The NSW road toll isn't simply a number. It is people. Sadly, it's closer to home than you think. It's people like you. Grandparents, mothers, fathers, children. And it's a number that's unacceptable, no matter how small it gets, until it gets to zero.” Why can’t we use those same words and that same zero objective, for Covid? Just an indication of how politics has debased basic common sense.

NSW vaccinations have stalled in almost the worst place (not that you would know that, the public stories are all just about getting back on planes). In the 20-29 year olds, the group that also spreads the virus the most. See the red circled numbers. They’re going up, meaning the projected time until they’re at 90% vaxxed is blowing out. Basically it means vaccinations have stalled in that age group.

We’ve used this deep fryer for years, it’s superb. Couldn’t recommend it enough, so easy to use, the design makes all of the usual hassles of deep frying disappear. Themostatically-controlled heating of the oil, oil automatically filters and drains to the (removable) storage container etc.

The NSW Government still refuses to even mandate masks for children. Only 6-7 weeks of school left, what possible reason could there be for not talking that basic precaution?

Probably the greatest thing I’ve ever learned is that how an anglepoise lamp operates is also how our bodies work. They support us in whatever position or shape we choose at the time. Standing, sitting, walking etc. All of your tissues are elastically wrapped around you, to support you without effort, just like these lamps will sit in any position we put them in. Floating in space. We’re literally suspended in space, effortlessly, by our own tissues. But we grow up not knowing that, and so use our bodies in perverse ways. We think we have to move ourselves, or we have to lift ourselves out of a chair or up stairs. Or that we even need to hold ourselves up just to do something as basic as sit or stand. The bizarre thing is that we ever believed that - how do you lift yourself or move yourself? You ARE yourself. You can’t separate one part of you off from everything else, to try to move or lift the rest of you. It all happens at once, all of you, all at the same time. You’re just like this lamp.

The fracturing of shared beliefs that has crippled action on both climate change and the pandemic. This *is* at the same time the ‘plurality of belief’ that we say is the strength of our democratic countries. How do you square that circle? You can’t. So maybe our ideas about democracy are just hopelessly wrong.