November 2021

It’s looking increasingly like the Covid vaccines may need to be 3-dose vaccines. Not a booster so much as a 3-dose primary course. So far in Oz even boosters are just voluntary. We should be using vaccines to drive down transmission, eliminating Covid, not just trying to prevent hospitalisation. There are some worrying signs of long-term possible side-effects of even mild Covid infection. It’s not a cold, it’s not the flu. Not even vaguely similar.

A pandemic is caused by economics, not by a virus. Most of the countries who could easily afford to smash Covid earlier on, simply refused to do it. Now that their lack of action has spread it to the whole world, they’re hogging all of the world’s vaccines so they can resume their OS holidays. Spoiled children, whining about being grounded from their lifestyle lives.

Remember the ridiculous hoo-ha about the $14 billion school hall building program in the GFC? We got school halls out of that scheme.

The look on the face says it all.

Not just allowing children to become infected with Covid. Now legislatively mandating it. Choose your side people, history will be a harsh judge. If you think infecting children with a novel multi-system virus is a good thing, come out and say it. Be a grown up, even just for a day. Who cares what others think, you’re not in high school any more.

Happy Birthday to you! I hope it's a great day in many ways :)

Protests make protestors feel good. Not really sure they achieve anything else. Exhibit A.

Covid cases are beginning to climb again in NSW. You can see here where it's mostly happening - in kids, in schools. On the 'herd immunity' front, people need to know that infection with Covid confers relatively little ongoing immunity, many people have had 2 or 3 infections overseas in the past year. Often the second infection is even more serious than the first. And then some get 'Long Covid', which is poorly understood but potentially may create lifelong morbidity.

Happy Birthday to you :)

Last Christmas the tourism industry killed hundreds of thousands of Europeans around Christmas time. Another 500,000+ expected to die between now and February. Just think about that, half a million or more now eagerly awaiting Christmas, who will be dead by February. There's some close relationship between a passion for being on planes, and rank stupidity.

Over and over and over the stupidity goes. I've marked in red on the graph the date the newspaper headline was published. Will we reach a point where people understand that the only way to live with Covid, is to kill it? I'm not seeing it dawning on people yet. (By the way, Denmark has vaccinated more people than we have.)

This is a wonderful, digitally-interactive article, describing all of the action that has been long underway by industry to change Australia. Really, really worth your time, don’t believe any of the political nonsense on TV about climate change action, business is SO far ahead of any of it, already. For example did you know that AEMO, our energy regulator, is already predicting that by 2025 - less than 4 years away - Australia will already have days where 100% of its electricity comes from renewables? But it goes MUCH further than that, this is our opportunity to be the richest country on Earth. Have a look.

I could understand if people who have a passion for slogans voted for this federal government. They do a lot of slogans. I’m yet to find a single other thing they do. (Smart observers are suggesting the money may be being saved up as an election pork-barrelling war chest.)

Covid can enter the brain directly, through your nose. Vaccination won’t stop it.

Focus groups apparently show Australians were ‘outraged’ Emmanuel Macron called Scott Morrison a liar. Uh huh. The focus groups must have been his wife and kids.

Surely at some point we need to learn to live with sharks. This closing of beaches is an outrageous assault on our freedoms.

Kit is a smart person. A mathematical biologist in the UK deeply involved in the pandemic.

This alphabetised list of 'genders' should represent the last gasp of the gender identification movement. Just one of many damning examples in the image, 'Smoothiegender'. I'm no reactionary. Transgender is defined as being born with a sex that doesn't match your perceived gender identity. At the same time transgender theory says (rightly) that sex and gender are distinct. But those are two mutually incompatible beliefs. You can't be born with a gender that doesn't match your sex, if gender and sex are completely separate things - they never match, for anybody. https://lgbta.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Gender?from=S

I like Simon Holmes a Court, we've chatted a few times. His family came from a time when the wealthy in this country actually thought about the public good, and not just tax cuts. Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of this and the next century, if we could remove the current crowd of incompetent and corrupt apologists for the fossil fuel industry.

Magnificent etching by Ah Kee, 'unwritten (becoming)', 2011.

Covid has killed about 20 million people. More than World War 1. In war, if you get a new, decisive weapon, what do you do with it? You use it, to try to win. We got our new, decisive weapon against Covid - vaccines. What are we doing with them? Surrendering. 'Living with the virus'. The stupidity of it gets to me every single day, you may have noticed. Finally we have a weapon against Covid, and we - give up.

Is this what swingers do?

Daily Covid stat. Red line is average road toll in NSW. All the other lines are Covid deaths currently in NSW (see the key top left). 'Living with Covid'. In a bad flu season we might lose 600 people. Covid at least twice as bad as both flu and road deaths, and this is at low case numbers.

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died of diarrhoea and dysentery. Some people don't like comparing the pandemic to a war, despite (as I said yesterday) Covid so far having killed more people than WW1. But wars are already pandemics, the fighting in history has killed far fewer people than the epidemics the wars created. We're in a world war right now, possibly the biggest ever. And people seem to think it's as good as over, and are booking their international holidays. Total divorce from reality, we're a society of children, throwing 'we can't live like this' tantrums because it's all too hard.

You can look at this two ways. Regulators being cautious, as they're supposed to be. Or key members of these expert groups being culture warring, political operatives who have spent weeks attacking any sort of protection for children from Covid. Infecting children has become like a membership ritual for these operatives. They oppose masks in schools, school closures if there are infections, and remote learning. Doesn't matter what happens, they will find some new way to say 'kids must be at school', they've been doing it for 2 years. They're actually conservative politically, and conservatives want kids in school so parents can work. It's about the Economy. Time to cut through the BS spin. Major regulators like the FDA are fine with these vaccines. Covid has killed about 700 children in the US, and over 100 in the UK. Put that against the myocarditis and pericarditis risks select experts proclaim to be concerned about, with the vaccines. So far overwhelmingly mild, in children. One of these experts yesterday said that 'needle phobia' is another reason to hold off (I'm not making that up). Time to tell them to stop playing politics with childrens' lives. https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-to-wait-for-data-from-us-children-before-clearing-vaccine-here-20211109-p597e2.html?fbclid=IwAR05-pE_E6Js37apVoN3-8rFIXulH7x_qMUu3_QhYNK-DqswLJrzF963uws

This morning's discussion, with an emeritus professor of epidemiology, who opines that kids shouldn't wear masks in schools because it will harm their 'social and psychological development'. I mean really, is there a threshold amount of bullshit beyond which society is just a big compost heap? We make kids wear dorky hats at school. Not one child curls up in a foetal position because they have to wear the dorky hat.

Paul Keating said something today that reminded me how racist and patronising we can be. Our current constant pile-on, on China. How it’s been extending its reach in the South China Sea, building new islands etc. As Keating points out, the US Navy has been moored 13 miles off China for years. Imagine if the Chinese navy moored 13 miles off the US Coast, and just sat there, for years. Bullying, anyone? The Chinese want to push the Americans away from their coastline.

The coming possible tidal wave of compensation claims against employers by employees who catch Covid at work (projected over $600 million in NSW alone). It’s not just health that Covid impacts. Flu already costs Australian business over $7 billion per year. If you backed the live with the virus team, did you read the form guide?

Any day England loses at something is a good day :)

I sometimes think New Zealand is the only place left on Earth that hasn't gone batshit crazy. What they're arguing for in this article was common wisdom less than 30 years ago. I don't think we see just how much our societies have become debased by libertarian ideas and politicians. https://theconversation.com/why-we-must-not-allow-covid-to-become-endemic-in-new-zealand-169608

"More than 270 NSW schools and 300 childcare centres have closed due to COVID-19 cases in the past month...". The same people who say kids wearing masks will damage them psychologically and socially, are now saying the answer is to shove swabs up their noses and down their throats, multiple times per week. (Note: it will be parents who have to do it.) You know what the answer is? Close the schools until the vaccines are available. Less than 6 weeks of the school year to go, at the most pointless time of the school year anyway. The government can stop being a tightwad and pay the parents to stay home.

The pandemic isn’t over, just because you’re over it.

I know pandemic stuff bores some people. There's a fair amount of hopium around, that hoping it's over will make it over. But there are critical ideas that aren't making it into the public conversations. Take 'endemic'. Covid will be 'like the flu', 'endemic'. This is the current pattern of Covid cases in the world. It's actually what endemic Covid will likely look like. A high amount of Covid permanently in the community (at the moment about 40 cases per million is the baseline, from the graph). Then repeated epidemic waves, as the virus surges and retreats, over and over again. Not just in winter, like the flu - potentially all year, in every season. And vastly more cases and deaths than flu, because Covid is about 4-6 times as infectious, and much more damaging to our bodies. With businesses and schools constantly closing down to cope with these repeated surges. The thing people ultimately don't get is, endemic Covid isn't coming. What we're experiencing right now IS how it will be.

From Yves Smith. Sorry for tiny print (but worth your time.)

Unprepared to do the basic grown-up work of stopping a virus spreading, Austria will instead lock up the unvaccinated. The hilarious irony of this pandemic is that it’s the same whinging libertarians going on about lockdowns, whose ideas produce lockdowns. Austria is one of the homes of libertarian politics. This isn’t a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, it’s a pandemic of bloody libertarians who won’t do the basic grown up work of stopping it.

Vaccinating sperm sounds like fiddly work.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial in the US (guy who took an AR-15 semi-automatic to a street protest and killed 2 people) features this performance. Surely only rivalled by Dave Warner and sandpapergate. In other highlights, the judge’s phone ringtone is the Donald Trump rallying song. It went off twice during the trial. A true Trumpian, when video evidence was zoomed in to reveal greater detail, the judge said it was trickery. Like an episode of Catweasel.

Saw this online and just had to correct a few typos.

I’m happy to be only a handful of years off a possible retirement. Not because I don’t like to work - I love to work. But our societies seem increasingly meaningless, as Stan Grant highlights here. What’s it all for? What are we all working towards? The current answer is: our own individual selves, things mostly defined around our personal ambitions and feelings and identities. (That’s the libertarian shift I post about a lot.) No society can survive that.

The UK government has now deliberately infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of UK children aged 5-14. Meantime they and politically conservative medical professionals argue that vaccines for this age group need to be ultra-carefully assessed, for risk. Infecting the entire generation apparently isn’t risky though.

Happy Birthday Shaz!

Am trying to figure out if I'm more excited Australia won the T20 World Cup. Or that England lost it.

Once we infect the world's kids with Covid, let's get them back down the mines.

Eric Idle told me that Robin Williams was the most spontaneously funny person he ever met. They were dear friends and spent a lot of time together. To me the pain was always obvious in Williams, it oozed out of him. This picture captures it so well, I think.

Today’s news from Covid land. The ‘booster’ shots are really the 3rd dose in a 3-dose schedule. They work like gangbusters, whether you had AZ or Pfizer, they’ll supercharge you to the same level. If you’re wondering whether to get a booster, don’t - just do it, as soon as you qualify. The government should be using vaccines to prevent and control transmission, instead they’re still just using them to prevent you going to hospital. Because they want us to ‘live with the virus’. Kill the fucking virus.

I want this job, looking after orphaned ‘roos. Just around the corner from my place, for the info of my OS friends.

There will be no endemic Covid, despite what politicians and (alarmingly) some experts might tell you. It's an epidemic disease. Trying to live with it is like inviting Covid to be your flatmate, and then discovering s/he throws massive wild parties all the time without telling you, trashing your house. Flu? It's sporadic, the blue line. Covid is nothing like flu.

As a measure of just how out of 'balance' (a word dear to modern conservatives, by which they mean 'do nothing') society is, the other day one of Australia's most powerful unions negotiated a 3% per annum pay rise for its workers. And (this is the amazing bit), the head of the Reserve Bank of Australia said the pay rise wasn't enough. Everybody outside the zealots in the LNP knows that economies function when people have money. The LNP and other modern libertarians think you should give the rich lots of money, and then wait for them to pass it on to everybody else. How often does that happen - take a guess?

I often look at what's happened to J.K. Rowling and think about the staggering misogyny of the woke folk. Women have lost the right to claim even menstruation as theirs. And now she's not invited to the reunion celebrating her work.

As Alan says, 'can-do capitalism' can't do wages. Covid has brought to light the slavery that underpins most of our lives. https://thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2021/11/18/cheap-workers-import-alan-kohler/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020211118

The world is full of such nice people. Spoke to a person yesterday whose work ute got trapped in floodwaters. Came back the next morning to try to retrieve it, and found somebody had been overnight, flogged all of the gardening machinery off the back of the ute, and drilled out all of the locks on the toolboxes, to help themselves to all of the tools as well. I'd put money on the person who did this voting for politicians with strong 'law and order' platforms.

50 million people are infected with Covid, every 90 days.

I think you should get your 3rd Covid vaccine dose the first day you’re eligible. Numbers are off the charts, sustained fantastic protection. 2 doses will not be enough, don’t wait for politicians to realise that.

Look up ‘leader’ in the dictionary, and see if it mentions anything about saying you ‘understand’ protesters threatening to kill a State Premier. Have been warning we’re on our own road to Trump here in Oz for years now.

I don't drink tea or coffee because caffeine doesn't agree with me. But I can recommend an alternative that I've developed. Fresh ground cinnamon and ginger, in hot water. Yum.

I reckon they have a mole.

The UK was one of the pioneers of ‘living with Covid’. How it’s going…

American extremist groups are behind the local rallies. The local freedumb protesters copy the signs without having a clue what they mean. The 14th constitutional amendment is an American legal instrument, it doesn’t exist here.

We’re ‘waiting for more data’ here in Oz. Must be coming by post, in the Christmas mail. The Sloganator probably forgot to order paediatric doses. I’m not joking, all he does is plan his own re-election, and he either forgot to order them, or he thinks jabbing the kiddies just before the election next year will be great PR.

‘I have faith in NSW Health’ many said to me over the past year. In the delusion NSW Health was actually being listened to. The facts are coming out now.

The same libertarian ideas that call it a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' are responsible for the unvaccinated being unvaccinated.

Why masks matter. The limo driver who leaked Delta into Australia, in NSW? (Because Gladys didn't require him to wear one.) So far, that's led to 169,000 Covid cases, more than 1000 deaths, and billions in lost economic revenue. All preventable with a mask worth $3.50.

Between May and November 2020 Australians were the healthiest they've ever been. What's bad for the 'Economy' is terribly GOOD for us. The 'Economy' is a tool, and obviously one that isn't working. Let's get rid of it.

Double vaccinated. Wear a mask. https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/2021/11/22/tottie-goldsmith-hospital-covd/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PM%20Extra%20-%2020211122_State%20Specific

NSW Covid projections through to June 2022. ct = contact tracing. You can see it’s critical this remains high (NSW is scaling it back rapidly), and that under-12s get vaccinated before the 2022 school year.

Karen from Bunnings, auditioning for her future court appearance. Anyone reckon we can't become the US? I wouldn't put money on it. https://twitter.com/i/status/1462224280054165509

Not all Liberals are vacuous slogan machines. Well done sir. Can't see Mr Economy in NSW doing the same. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-23/tas-school-year-start-could-be-delayed-covid-vaccination/100642918

Vaccine doses are being thrown away. We could all be getting boosters right now, but the government won't allow it because of (guess): the election. For them the vaccines work fine for 6 months to do the only thing they want them to do - keep you out of hospital. They don't care one jot if you get infected, or about eliminating or even controlling the virus. 3rd doses could eliminate Covid in Australia. It's not their priority. They don't want to suggest a 3rd dose is necessary, because it would create tension leading up to the election.

I was particularly taken by the bit circled in red.

Happy Birthday mate!

This one yesterday sobering context for the joyous 'return to normal' I see in restaurants, pubs and just about everywhere else. All 13 were fully vaccinated. 11 caught Covid. Despite what politicians say, Covid is incredibly bad for you, and will quite possibly either shorten your life significantly, or give you lifelong serious complications, even if you get a mild case.

Singapore at 93% and Portugal at 90%, of the TOTAL population vaccinated, now having to lock down again. (Australia currently at only 77% vaxxed.) Please people, when a politician says we must 'live with Covid', they are LYING. Just because we want the pandemic to be over, doesn't make it over. Australia heading into a summer of Covid stupidity, egged on by the Fat Idiot Controller, who wants a warm after-glow leading into the election early next year.

Latest South African variant, scaring the virology community. We thought Delta was bad (blue line). This one is mutating 4 times faster than flu (why we have a different flu shot every year - this Covid variant is mutating 4 times faster than that again). Our 'live with the virus' is causing this, it's like being overrun with mosquitoes in your house, and just giving everybody Aerogard rather than installing fly screens. We have to eliminate spread of Covid.

Round of applause for whoever in the Department of Health put this tool together. It lets you track Covid restrictions across the entire country, in a few clicks, across all the different areas of life. If you're not sure what you're allowed to do or need to do, use this. https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/covid19-restriction-checker

Pictures tell stories. What the pandemic showed so clearly was who the really essential workers are in our socieities. Nurses, teachers, supermarket staff, sewer and water workers etc. Leading politicians are deliberately ignoring those lessons, and going straight back to hard hats and high-vis, on trophy projects for cashed-up mates and political donors. It’s time to vote for what’s good for ordinary Australians, not for these pirates who raid our public treasuries for their cashed-up buddies.

This new variant of Covid, in the red, is now called ‘Omicron’. Europe has closed international travel to Africa to stop it, as has the US. Australia? Nothing yet. Why? Because the government doesn’t want to upset its ‘back to normal’ re-election narrative.

Think about this one for a moment. ‘Finally will have a Saturday off’ i.e. wage-slave to a job. To go to a freedom rally to protest protections from Covid. Full libertarian victory, even the young see going to meaningless underpaid jobs as freedom, and basic public health measures as oppression.

B.1.1.529 is the new Omicron variant.

Now the Australian government has caught up with the rest of the world with travel restrictions for the new Covid variant, let’s see if it will also relax its 6-month rule on 3rd vaccine doses. Politically it doesn’t want to, because it can go to an election saying Australia is “more than 80% fully vaccinated”. (It isn’t.) Switching to 3-doses as fully vaccinated returns that number to less than 2%. Look at ‘living with the virus’, ‘just like the flu’ in the UK. 45,000 cases per DAY. Does anybody remember us ever having 45,000 new cases of flu per day? Peel away the bullshit people. Eliminate Covid.

The housing industry, and politicians getting big budget revenue from housing prices, have spent the past nearly 3 decades selling us a lie that has ruined the lives of entire generations. The lie - that high housing prices are due to a lack of supply of houses. It was always so obviously just a PR line from the housing industry, which obviously makes money by - building more houses. As the article says, it’s always how much people can borrow that determines house prices, not supply and demand. So now rising interest rates will drive house prices down. And wipe out potentially millions of Australians, saddled with ludicrous mortgages for vastly overpriced homes.

So many of the things we take for granted as part of our lives are things clever engineers worked a long time on. Do you think the handlebars on a bike are for steering? I bet you’ll be surprised. Watch this.

If you examine spin even for 30 seconds, it dissolves into nonsense. This one a favourite - ‘live alongside’ Covid. Wtf does it mean? You obviously can’t live alongside it, it lives *in* people. The words are exactly chosen to make you think you can sit next to it on a bus, or wave to it across the supermarket, without it touching you.

From my walk yesterday. This is resilience.

Happy Birthday!

Rupert again doing his bit to undermine all public health efforts, to keep that Economy running. Total BS, in every detail. The second this variant appeared, the spin started, to protect Christmas retail and travel, worldwide. Cases and hospitalisations going through the roof in South Africa.

The Omicron Covid variant is infecting people who have had 3 doses of vaccine. The vaccines won't prevent infection. You may think, following politicians, that this doesn't matter, because the vaccines will keep you out of hospital. Well... Imagine being told you'd had a mild stroke. Would that be a good thing, because it was mild? Of course not, a stroke is a bad thing. People saying Covid will be 'mild' with vaccines are focusing on the 'mild' part of 'mild Covid', and leaving out the 'Covid' part. Covid is a multi-system vascular disease. It attacks all organs, and more. It causes a type of brain damage that leads to dementia, and can also cause diabetes, even if 'mild'. I know I'm a broken record, but 'living with' Covid is like wanting to keep crocodiles in your pool at home.

Happy Birthday Eva! I'm sure you'll celebrate in style :)