February 2022

Good guide here on testing, in case you're confused as to when to get a test, which test to use etc. As I posted previously, I refuse to pay for Covid tests, and you should as well. You can probably put 2 and 2 together from this guide to figure out how to avoid it.

When I say these things about the PM, people say I'm biased. Now that Gladys is saying them, let's see...

We think the Spanish Flu ended in 1919. But it didn't. People just got sick of fighting it and reporting it in 1919. The 1920 variant was even more lethal, because of that collective giving up. This same thing then happened again multiple times across the rest of that century, and into the 21st century. And has eerie similarities with us right now, with Omicron. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/opinion/covid-pandemic-end.html

How’s everybody’s kids loving swabbing their noses twice a week and waiting to see if they’ve been infected, and have brought it home too? Fixed the ‘mental health’ issues of them doing a bit of online learning? Get used to it. Getting Covid doesn’t stop you getting it. Again, and again.

Remember people using delays to elective surgery as an argument against lockdowns? Those same people strangely quiet when letting Covid rip does the same thing. Letting it rip IS ‘lockdown’. A privatised one, where you pay for it, instead of the government.

Two tired concepts in public conversation are: 1) narcissism, and 2) toxic gender. Both take wider social and political issues and try to make them about individual psychology. Which suits those who are in society's driving seat just fine, to watch us fight amongst our individual selves, instead of against them.

Please read this? So we can stop all of the 'endemic' and 'live with the virus' nonsense? https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/endemicity-means-nothing/621423/?utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2022-02-01T12%3A00%3A57&utm_source=twitter

“But we’re living – and dying – with COVID, because … well, because the only alternative is more home schooling, lockdowns and closed borders, isn’t it? No, it’s not.”

At least 90 million people have been infected with Covid in the past 10 weeks, worldwide. That's more than were infected in the whole of 2020. Over 50,000 people are dying every week. In other news, Greg Hunt said on radio this morning that the more than 70,000 people still not fully vaccinated in aged care homes had chosen not to be vaccinated. You'd have to be some new breed of stupid to believe that. Staggering, the lies this government tells. They've killed over 500 older Australians in aged care in January alone.

My youngest is one of only 4 still wearing a mask in class. It shows how useless most parents seem to be in 2022. Children raising children.

End of life palliative care?

Week 1 of school, 400 staff out because of Covid, South Australia. Leaders have encouraged us to think this is just a hard period that we need to get through, and then it’ll be behind us. But catching Covid doesn’t stop it, you can catch it over and over again, and it can be worse for you each time. The Chief Medical Officer today said: “It will not be the last Omicron wave we will have, and it will not be the last wave of Covid we will have.” I know people probably stopped reading any of my posts ages ago. Not sure why we don’t engage with this disaster. And we’re not being led, in fact worse than that, we’ve been left to fend for ourselves.

As we hopefully watch the rotting carcass of the federal LNP disappear from the front benches in Canberra, another earlier reminder of their disgusting legacy. Remember year after year, the relentless bullshit about how they need to keep coal going to push our energy prices lower. Our energy prices did go lower, but it had nothing at all to do with coal. Australia should be a renewable energy superpower. The federal LNP, so entrenched with corrupt fossil fuel industry money, has been forcing our entrepreneurs offshore. The stench of corruption in our federal government has to be washed out at the upcoming election, Australia is in so much trouble if it isn’t.

Using maths to do politics. 0.1% is 1 in 1000 people. Starts to look a bit less rosy when you rephrase it that way? That’s over 25,000 Covid deaths every year (flu kills 1000 in a bad flu year.) To put this in perspective, if 0.1% of those who travel on planes in Australia were killed, 5000 would die in plane crashes every month.

"The people who have been saying “this isn’t over” have been ignored at almost every step of this pandemic, and they have also been right every time."

Anybody have experience with multi-focal contact lenses?

A negative RAT test does NOT mean you don't have Covid. If you have symptoms, or a family member with Covid, you have to isolate.

Omicron is the most infectious disease in history. The ‘measures’ the NSW government has introduced for schools are pathetic to prevent it, and are being applied in barely half-arsed ways anyway. As in the US and UK, a tsunami of infections is coming in schools. The 3000 infections in NSW public schools in week 1 (privates not even included yet) alone were mostly infections brought TO school, after the holidays. We haven’t seen even the beginning of the big surge in school infections yet. And from there, out into the wider community. Infections lead to hospitalisations, which lead to deaths. Which leads to ‘economic’ breakdown. The same script, over and over and over.

The Granville train disaster was called ‘the disaster that changed Australia’. 83 people died. This is where I challenge us to think. We’re having 7 Granvilles EVERY WEEK, with Covid. What is wrong with us? If a train crashed EVERY SINGLE DAY, killing over 80 people, we’d be outraged. But we’re killing that, and more, with Covid, every single day. Preventable deaths.

We’re at the 50th anniversary of what some call neoliberal and libertarian ideas. Basically ideas that say government is the problem, get it out of peoples’ lives and life and prosperity will flourish. Reality tells us where those ideas led. Rampant inequality, stagnant wages, soaring cost of living, no action against climate change or a pandemic. Who put government IN our lives? We did. To save us from the lives we’re now returning to. Govrnment always was just about economies of scale, pitching together to make all of our lives easier. Many hands make light work etc.

Hmm, sorry I’m late to say happy birthday! I didn’t get a reminder from FB.

Happy birthday Peter!

Stretching is one of those accepted things that actually seems pretty absurd. The idea that you can ‘stretch’ separate parts of you in this way, when in fact all of the parts are connected. A tightness somewhere is a whole-body problem.

It should strike us as strange that the only thing children are apparently resilient to in this pandemic, is infection itself. Everything else, like missing school and public health measures to prevent infection, will apparently damage them for life.

I see many tired of Covid measures, and saying we should just ‘go back to normal’. Nothing in these numbers is normal, and they’re getting worse every day. We need to grow up.

The US is giving away top quality masks (these are 3M Auras, best of the best). Yes, free.

Getting rid of the idiot idea of food calories will be as difficult as convincing people that fat isn’t bad for you.

Oh please please please have Peter Dutton take over leadership. The electoral carnage would be apocalyptic, the LNP may cease to exist.

Swab back into your nose at about 90 degrees to your face. Not up.

A senior member of the federal government described free Covid testing as 'largesse' this morning.

"And perhaps that's what our leaders and academic economists lost sight of. It wasn't the lockdowns at the root of the economic catastrophe that has befallen us in the past two years. It was a highly contagious virus."

Read this in the context of people being encouraged to think catching Covid will end the pandemic. You should be doing every single thing you can, to avoid being infected. It's not a cold. It's not flu (you should avoid flu at all costs too).

Happy Birthday sir! Not far behind you...

The NSW Premier has said today he doesn't think they'll bother with school RATs after the first 4 weeks of school. This was their plan all along. Do some symbolic testing when kids went back, to give the appearance of caring. Then when people were habituated to schools as Covid soup, take the tests away. The libertarian playbook. Refuse to deal with a pandemic. Then suppress all the evidence of the outcome. Without testing, you're flying totally blind. In the UK they're not even going to report how many die every day.

P.S. on tests. I'm not sure the people of NSW have realised yet that when the government ends free school Covid testing, NOBODY NOT ON A COMMONWEALTH CONCESSION CARD IN NSW WILL QUALIFY FOR A FREE COVID TEST. In the middle of a fucking pandemic, I kid you not. ALL tests will have to be paid for by you, the public. The only exception will be if a doctor prescribes one.

Indulge me here, a crystal ball looking deeper into 2022. Right now of course governments and probably most people are convinced the pandemic is as good as over, we're 'living with the virus' and life will return to normal with Covid being like a new flu that we deal in the way we deal with flu. That's unfortunately wrong in every single detail. And the really dangerous thing right now is that the vaccines these same governments and people are using to feel this confidence, are failing. Not through any fault of their own, but because we won't stop the spread of the virus, which therefore has trillions of fresh opportunities to mutate into new forms, every single day. By mid-2022 already, even our 3rd vaccine shots may be as good as useless against Covid. And then what? There are no other vaccines available at this time, and even if one is developed, it will take a long time to roll it out globally again.

It should shame us that the 'let's kill as few people as possible' NZ approach to Covid is considered unusual.

Once upon a time I worked for ANSTO, at the nuclear reactor in Menai. I love the warning on this radioactive rod (this one from overseas).

The UK is about to lift all Covid measures, even not requiring people with Covid to isolate. They can go to school, work, shops, restaurants etc. Hooray, you may say. The death rate in the UK for Covid is a steady 200 per day. That’s 70,000+ Covid deaths, per year. A bad flu year there is 1500 deaths. This is the big push, worldwide. Not to end the pandemic, but to just say it’s over. While millions die.

One of the big campaign things the PM says is that 'people want government out of their lives'. I think he's talking to the wrong country. An example. Masks. People will wear one if the government says you have to. If the government says you don't, they take them off. That's a healthy historical habit, in that previously government was always informed by expertise. Current governments have done everything they can to cut the link between politics and expertise. Right now, you need to follow the science, not the politicians. Because the politicians stopped listening to the science a long way back. The science is in the link.

The biggest cause of death in Australia is now Covid. And you won't know that if you listen to politicians or the news.

Are people still being notified by their school when there's a positive Covid case in their child's class?

So glad to be close to retirement. Almost nothing happening now is the Australia I grew up in.

This guy was vaccinated 3 times, hospitalised with initial Covid, then sent home, then pulmonary embolus, then bowel ischaemia (dead gut) due to a blood clot in the belly. "Just like the flu," hey?

A reminder that the beloved Gladys went to ICAC, and may still end up in jail. All that 'poor me and my treacherous boyfriend' bullshit. Read the Auditor-General's Report if you still believe any of that spin.

Happy Birthday Quizmaster!

Happy Birthday! A big one ;)

Two sayings we need to understand I think. 1) ‘Covid is just like the flu’. 2) ‘More people die with Covid, than die of Covid’. Both things Covid minimisers or deniers say every day. Both dangerous rubbish, and here’s why. The vast majority of people who die of influenza actually don’t. They die of pneumonia. In other words, they die WITH flu, not OF flu. Which is why the deniers add up flu + pneumonia deaths, when they compare with Covid deaths. (I’ve added US data for the last 2 years in the picture, just for interest.) But Covid not only kills a LOT more people than flu, alone. It triples the pneumonia deaths as well. It’s a killing machine, next to which flu is puny. Covid kills about 200 times more people than flu. That’s 20,000% more deaths. And we’re letting it. Nearly every person I know is acting like the pandemic is over.

Such a good point. WE make the surges. Our ‘it’s all over’, ‘you have to live your life’, ‘we can’t live in a bubble’ behaviour on the way down generates the next surge.

The people who will do best in 2022 will be those who wear a mask, even if government says you don’t have to. And those with no debt. If interest rates go up, many Australians with big mortgages are going to be in a lot of trouble. But if you have no debt, it’s good news, more return on your savings. Cheap money has been terrible for Australian society, encouraging speculation rather than saving and investment.

I keep posting about Covid, because there’s a total vacuum of actual information out there. Deaths first today. 1077 Australians have died of COVID in the last 15 days. That’s more than the 2020 road toll (1095), and twice the number of Australians who died in the Vietnam War (521).

And this is why the pandemic never ends. We celebrate the wrong things. We celebrate the removal of our protections against Covid, rather than the elimination of infections. Eliminating infections ends the pandemic. Eliminating public health measures just increases infections, and prolongs the pandemic. We’re going through another idiot ‘celebration’ phase right now, we don’t even notice we’re doing it I think. We’re literally a society of teenagers, celebrating not being grounded any more.

Happy Birtjday Belly :)

Sorry i missed it, belated Happy Birthday!

LEGAL BLOOD ALCOHOL LIMIT TO BE RAISED. With only 1000 road deaths a year in Australia, most not even alcohol-related, there is plenty of spare hospital capacity to deal with alcohol-related accidents. The legal blood alcohol limit is therefore to be raised progressively until hospital capacity to deal with alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents is reached. The increase will be 0.03g/100ml per month. This is a proportionate and cautious response, allowing society to adjust.

All of my FB posts are personal by the way. They’re my thoughts, can’t get more personal than that. Pictures of me doing things or describing my day are a third-person view of me. Like selfies, which don’t show a self at all, they show a third-person view of a person. Anyway, a personal thought for right now is to give thanks to the guys using chainsaws and a mega-mulcher all weekend outside the front window. How’s the serenity.

To go back to the numbers. You’re now more likely to die of Covid, than of any other cause. And this is *with* vaccinations. There isn’t a single condition underneath it on the list that we’re not moving Heaven and Earth to try to eliminate. But we’re ‘living with’ Covid. I bang this drum every day, because of just how toxically stupid that idea is.

Grace Tame is a superb operator. Smart, funny, refuses to be cowed. Her speech at the Press Club was up there with Julia Gillard’s on misogyny, for impact. But, there’s a but. Where’s Julia Gillard now? Anger without relentless, ongoing organisation is just…anger. Nearly everybody is angry today, about everything, and they should be. But if that’s where it all ends, we just end up with…anger. We’ve lost the ability to organise, because we’ve lost the ability to act collectively. We substitute expressions of individual emotion, for that organisation. It won’t be anywhere near enough to change anything.

‘Sharing your personal life’.

Ask yourself what masks are an 'impediment' to. To Covid, yes. But that's not what Domicron and Ben are talking about.

I love the winter olympics, more than the summer actually. Was watching the ski jumping yesterday, and was surprised that it's now a bit boring. It was once the most daring thing, like 'omg, can you believe they do this?' But now the multiple varieties of acrobatic 'air' winter sports (snowboarding, freestyle skiing etc.) makes it look pretty tame, you sit there thinking 'aren't they going to do at least a double-cork 1080 or something here?'

Second year of uni now, this one. Don't tell her I posted this, she'd kill me.

My Valentine, risking death at the mouths of sharks. She hates sharks. And spiders. And won't let me cook. Scolds me all the time. Ignores most of what I say. Is unimpressed by pretty much everything I do. Always feels cold. Wins every argument by saying 'I gave birth to 3 children' (she milks that one - how hard can childbirth be?). Says I wake her up too early in the morning. Hogs the TV remotes. Finds all the things I can't after looking for half an hour, in about 10 seconds. Is a smart-arse. And I so love her.

For Valentines Day, back to my (unpopular) suggestion that the essence of all love is jealousy. (I took this from Proust, blame him.) If you're not jealous, you're not in love. We treat jealousy as some character flaw, when in fact it's the only part of what we call love, that is actually love. Jealousy is the recognition that your beloved is another person. With their own thoughts and feelings, that can never be yours. We talk about jealousy like we talk about somebody stealing our car. But jealousy is recognising this unbreachable gap between you and another person, a gap that actually attracted you to them in the first place. Nobody falls in love with themselves, it's the differences between you and the other person that originally make them attractive to you. Their mystery. Real jealousy isn't worrying somebody is stealing your car, it's that shock of recognition that your partner is still a mystery to you, no matter how long you've been together. It's what makes a relationship feel as new as the first day, every day. If we drop the co-dependency thing that makes jealousy about installing a car alarm, to protect your property.

Go the nurses! Somebody calling this government out for the disgusting lies around Covid.

This humiliating defeat for prize buffoon Frydenberg reveals something much more interesting going on. It’s restoring democracy to business, shifting power from managers and Directors, back towards owners. And those owners are increasingly - me and you. Through our enormous super funds. This is why this government never stops attacking the superannuation system. It (rightly) sees it as it sees unions, power shifting back to working people.

‘We’re tired of the pandemic, let’s just say it’s over’ is the standard script worldwide now. Another reminder that it’s already killed more people than World War 1, and deaths are still climbing. And that returning to ‘normal’ fun social life is what generates the next big wave.

The 'I don't hold a hose' PM even threw his own wife under a bus on Sunday. Their holiday to Hawaii was her fault, apparently. His only contribution to public life is to deny responsibility for everything that goes wrong, and claim responsibility for everything that goes right, that he didn't do. Lazy, smug. Name one thing he's done in the past 3 years. One.

A Valentine's Day afterthought. I've posted on this before. 'Love'. I challenge anybody to define it, in its own terms. Without it being just some stronger form of affection, for example. I agree with Germaine, but also love IS a thing. It's just not what we say it is.

Esmeralda the tortoise at Taronga Zoo is 105 years old. She came to the zoo in 1947. She has a male companion, called Lance, who is 66 years old. Esmeralda has never had hatchlings. When asked if this means she's missed the boat with babies, her keeper said 'o no, she's in her prime, she could live to 250, or more.' Imagine what she's seen since 1947. And she'll possibly keep seeing for the rest of our lives, and for maybe a century or more after we're all gone.

Well the nurses don’t seem to buy ‘living with the virus’. How do people who believe that slogan explain how anybody with a vulnerability (about half the population) will function with Covid always circulating? Lock themselves in their homes, permanently?

“I regret going out when Omicron was running rampant”. I wish that was a more common view. On schools and Covid, the NSW Government published infection numbers at the end of week 1 of term. Since then - nothing. This is how they and conservative governments worldwide are trying to ‘end’ the pandemic. By suppressing the data, so that infections, disease and death become mostly invisible. And the public says - I want my holiday overseas.

Andy Slavitt was the former head of the US Medicare system, and an adviser to the US President on Covid. This is him being interviewed about projections for long-term living with Covid. (For comparison, on average America has about 50,000 flu deaths per year, and most of those are actually pneumonia.)

Victoria had 10,000 Covid cases in schools in the past week. NSW refuses to publish the data.

'Bureaucrats' are patient, funny people.

Let's see if Clive Palmer can steal an election for the LNP with a big bag of cash, like he did last time. People who hate all politicians are attracted to this sort of populist rubbish, so they vote UAP. Palmer's schitck about 'never trust the Liberals, Labor or Greens again' is just a barefaced lie. He did a massive preferences deal with the LNP at the last election. Palmer isn't the common man or woman, nor does he represent them. He's a mining magnate. He wants what's best for mining billionaires, not me and you.

'We have to live with it'. I get told that a lot. Do we live with HIV? Or cancer? Heart disease? Even flu? Do people even know how much money and effort goes into trying to eliminate all of those things? Do they notice we don't say to people 'sure, catch HIV, get heart disease, catch the flu, we need to live with these things'? It's a political slogan, empty of content. What it really means is 'we need to ignore it and live they way we used to live'. Or in other words, take no adult responsibility for it at all. Millions will continue to die, if we do that.

This is the magnitude of the damage Scott Morrison is prepared to do, to protect his own job. China-bashing is the fastest way to flush what’s left of Australian prosperity down the toilet. This election matters more than any other of my lifetime. Another LNP term would be catastrophic for Australia, on nearly every measure. And no, not because I’m an ALP voter, if that’s the extent of your thinking, just go away now.

Yesterday details finally leaked out about Covid infections in (public) schools in NSW. (We don’t have private school numbers.) It isn’t pretty. Over 20,000 students tested positive in the first 2 weeks of term. Over 500 staff tested positive last week alone. Is this OK, people? Defend it.

Pathology services open early so working people can get a test before heading to work. It’s great when you arrive to see waiting rooms overflowing with retirees, who have the whole day free.

The Chinese are smart. Always criticised for human rights abuses, they've now started responding with "why do Western countries allow millions of their own citizens to die from Covid?"

Take a pause from planning your next holiday or night out and notice an entire generation being infected, deliberately. You know, do that 'being a grown up' thing you may have read about in books.

"Randwick Council announced on Wednesday night that Malabar, Maroubra, Coogee, Clovelly and La Perouse beaches would also be closed for 24 hours while council lifeguards looked for any further sightings of sharks." One shark death 'locks down' all of those beaches. Over 2000 Australians dead of Covid since Christmas = 'we need to open up'.

Summary of today's NSW press conference. Premier: "the pandemic is over". Kerry Chant: "no, it's not." Brad Hazzard: "Dr Chant is taking a well-deserved holiday". https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/news/nsw-records-9995-new-covid19-infections-and-14-deaths/news-story/bedcd091f11d64f8c0a1ae0a851a7b57

I think this is a big mistake. Not because anybody should be forced to have sex, but because ’consent’ is a nebulous concept. Have posted before about how vast amounts of married sex is non-consensual, under the definitions that are being used. If consent worked as a concept, it would work in law too. It never has. This is a big complex problem, that we’re looking for simple solutions to.

A reminder that political parties 'launch' their election campaigns at the actual end of their campaigns, so that taxpayers foot the bill for their campaigning, including travel to all parts of the country.

So the NSW Government ensures there's no official data on Covid in schools. But social media usually knows. Claims of more than 100 infected kids at Bathurst High School right now. Plus staff.

From social media. The last source of Covid information in NSW. "I’m in Bathurst my daughter goes to Scots All Saints and the boarding house is riddled (with Covid). Same as the boy’s Catholic boarding school Stannies. Bathurst High have had over 100 cases this week plus staff. They had no one to teach year 9 and 10 math so they were supervised on the oval. What a shit show and it’s all being swept under the rug."

Today’s quiz question. What jumps out at you about this graph?

Have you ever felt betrayed? Not just in love, but more generally? Betrayal is the secret to all love, it’s another word for jealousy. All love is betrayal, because a person doesn’t love another person. They love their idea of the other person. So the essence of that other person is always betrayed, it’s unavoidable. Not a negative character trait.

What the graphs mean is simple. Infection with Omicron doesn’t give you immunity. A lot of people say ‘we’ll all get it eventually, let’s just get it over with’. But it won’t work, because you can re-catch it again within weeks, vaccinated or not. And it can damage your body more each time. The young teacher whose tragedy I shared yesterday had no underlying conditions. A pulmonary embolus is something Covid can do even to healthy people, even with ‘mild’ infection.

Happy Birthday!

Omicron is the most transmissible virus known in our history. A sub-variant of Omicron, BA.2, is now exploding worldwide. It’s thought to be 30-40% more transmissible again, than BA.1 (our current sub-variant). And studies are suggesting it may be as severe as Delta, the most lethal of all the variants. This is an arm’s race, and we’re losing. Allowing the virus to spread, to ‘live with’ it, is what causes this. It gives the virus trillions of chances every day to practise beating the vaccine, in vaccinated people. Politicians won’t tell you this. All of our vaccines will have waned before winter, and there’s no plan B.

I remember doing a bit of welding. Not like this though.

This will be an important message later in the week :)

The Premier has announced testing is to end in schools, with research showing transmission has been ‘extremely low’. The research he used ended at the red arrow on the graph below, before Christmas. Do what you like. Survive if you can.

For those keen to protect themselves and the ones they love from Covid. This is a risk guide produced by the University of California, which I think is excellent, to help people assess risk for themselves. Specifically, ‘should I keep wearing a mask’? Here’s how I apply it to my situation. I work in Bathurst, where Covid cases are currently more than 100 cases/100K/day. So more than 10 times the safer limit the UCSF suggests. That alone would make me keep my mask on. But I also have a child not fully vaccinated. Those two together mean I’ll be wearing a mask and taking other precautions for a long time yet.

There’s a wonderful theory in here, that I think is spot-on. We turned the pandemic into a 3-act film, because our perception of reality is based on the structure of films. Even the Covid protestors just copy films, as the article explains. Our happy ending was supposed to be Christmas 2021. Unfortunately reality isn’t a film.

It’s very dark when I get up for work now, and it’s still summer. Because of daylight saving, shifting that hour of daylight to the evening instead. People know how much I hate Daylight Saving. The pandemic has reinforced why actually, it’s humans thinking they can just redefine reality to suit their social lives. Exactly what we’ve seen in the pandemic too, we’re sick of it, so we just define it as over. Reality keeps special treatment for that sort of vanity.

It should be a matter of deep shame to all Australians that we’re one of the only developed countries in the world where millions of people have to pay for their own pandemic testing. Not even the libertarians in the UK and US went that far. And those self-tests (if people even do them) provide almost no useful epidemiological data for us to map where we’re at, with Covid, we’re literally flying blind. No idea how much Covid is out there, or where it is, or whether there are variants emerging or arrived from overseas - nothing. Governments are relying solely upon people turning up half-dead at hospital, as the only warning trigger.

I don't know how many people read these things. I strongly urge you to. "This is an epic public health disaster in the making." https://eand.co/living-with-covid-will-be-one-of-the-biggest-mistakes-of-the-21st-century-d06651354112

Tired of hot air from the LNP, Cannon-Brookes decides to offer to buy AGL and shut the coal power stations himself. Ballsy. AGL are blocking the bid for now. It shows how the transition to renewables is appealing not just to Greenies. There's HUGE money to be made. Countries and even towns that ignore the amazing pace of this shift will be tumbleweed junctions. And it's renewables that are driving prices down and reliability and 'dispatchability' up, don't believe the spin.

This is how dangerous the NSW and federal governments are. There was no train strike in NSW today, it was an old-school employer lockout. The NSW Government shut down the trains. Why? There’s only one reason that connects all the dots. The federal government’s vote in NSW is in dire trouble. A favour from Dom, to Scott. A free kick against Labor and unions.

At over 200 deaths per day, about 70,000 per year, and tens of thousands of infections per day. People are now completely ‘free’ again. Free to live with the virus. This is the insanity of where that idiot idea leads. To ‘live with’ Covid should be like living with HIV, or malaria, or TB. Meaning it’s sometimes there in the community, but most of us won’t catch it, because there’ll be precautions. But no, living with Covid is just political bullshit that means ‘we don’t want to fight this, you can just all get it, over and over, and take years off your lives, because our business donors need to keep making money’. NSW and Australia is heading down exactly the same path. And they don’t make money anyway, as we’ve seen, so this is just naked, brutal ideology with no meaningful outcome.

Good on the Herald, which is now steered by Peter Costello for those who think it’s some Leftie rag, for calling out what really went on yesterday. The Premier is a dangerous, dangerous man.

It’s still a perfect analogy. We find ways to keep the measures in place that save lives, while letting life move on. The same applies to Covid, the measures that bring cases and deaths down need to stay in place or be tweaked, rather than removed. I don’t think many realise this is what their local public health units do 365 days of every year. Idiot politicians have led people to think there are two options: let the virus spread at will, or lockdowns. It’s rubbish, there are all sorts of public health measures in place to make sure we’re not all constantly infected with disease. They’re beautifully designed, that’s why you don’t often notice them.

Professor of viral evolution.

The guidelines for chickenpox are significantly more stringent than those for Covid. About 6 people die of chickenpox every year in Australia. Over 2000 people have died of Covid in the past 7 weeks. Come on 'live with the virus' people. Explain this to the rest of us.

THIS is sexy.

Vladimir Putin renames Ukraine ‘Covid’. The West immediately gives up and lives with his invasion.

We (mistakenly) think democracy = what’s popular, wins. ‘Majority rules’. It doesn’t mean that, it never has. That’s populism. Populism always ends the same way. Leaders promise people to only do what’s popular. But like anybody in business knows, that’s the most fickle of beasts. What’s popular can shift multiple times per day. Populists always end up literally or figuratively hanged, as Mussolini found out, as the crowd moves on to some new popular thing.

Legally you can stop wearing masks this weekend. It’s highly recommended you don’t. Legally you can smoke. It’s highly recommended you don’t.

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly meaningless, no collective effort towards any sort of worthwhile aim. People focused on personal career goals, improving their personal appearance, curating their social images online, focused on their personal happiness. Marketing has replaced building actual things, at the core of society, and not just in business. We market ourselves too. Anything to make some individual person or organisation or thing try to stand out from everything else, rather than doing something together, collectively. My best years of working life were in an organisation that actually created things, built them. It then disappeared up its own arse, as 5-year careerists took over and refocused it on marketing the increasing absence of anything at its core. Life is now where we never leave high school. I finished high school years ago, and while I enjoyed it, I don’t want to go back. But now it’s everywhere. People increasingly have the same thoughts, habits and behaviours at 50 that they had at 17. I’m a happy person, but grown up society increasingly seems to not exist. You’re supposed to talk about your favourite bands, drinks and travel destinations well into middle age. People have seen how the pandemic has angered me, the absence of collective will and effort to beat an existential problem, together. It’s been used more as a platform for more individual marketing, ‘visibility’ for every individual gripe and grievance. We’ve spent more time prosecuting causes like freedom and gender and racial equity in the past 2 years than on beating Covid. Covid was only used as a launching pad. We can’t even conceive any more what it means to work together, as grown ups, to fix problems. To build things that will last for generations, not just some person’s career. Home is my favourite place in the world. Not because I’m anti-social, I like social things. But because our deepest relationship in life is to the ground underneath our feet. Why I hate travel culture, which never settles anywhere. The constant adoelscent need for distraction and new ’sights’. Society is on one giant unending gap year. That word - ‘home’ - should be the foundation of our whole culture. It means a lot more than we think it means, I reckon. Aborigines know it.

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the pinnacle of their working lives, with knowledge and experience and often a calm authority, coming from that and from them being adults who had got over a lot of the challenges of adult life outside work too. They’d raised families, paid off mortgages, buried parents etc. That’s how being over 50 feels, to me. No more need to defer to any stupidity. A calm focus on getting stuff done, and a pretty ruthless disregard for petty personal things, especially in a work context. People can fuck right off if they want to act like they’re still in high school, and I’ll tell them to their face. I feel at the peak of a life’s work right now, and I’m not sacrificing that to any more idiots playing high school Prom King and Queen games. I sometimes think people see me as a cranky person, but that’s definitely not me. What you see here on FB is that couldn’t give a shit adult over 50 stuff. Cutting through the niceties. I just don’t care, what people think about me, I rarely think about myself either. I’m a grown up, my focus is life and work, not me. Society has no leadership now, as rich countries we’ve indulged ourselves with political philosophies of personal freedom. A fish rots from the head, that cascades down through every layer of society, and we all now have to tolerate incompetent dickheads managing our work and lives, as high school popularity games fill workplaces. Zero tolerance for all of that now too, I’ve worked under several bosses who I swear must have struggled to put their own shoes on in the morning. Not any more.

Wonderful article that explains how the 'Economy' came to be a thing people believed in. And what a disastrous, abject failure it's been. https://prospect.org/economy/neoliberalism-political-success-economic-failure/

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and China maintain a collective identity, maintained by nation, race and geography. Geography to us in the West is just travel destinations. But we’re not going anywhere, to use Grant’s quote. ‘We appear ever rootless, not rooted’. Amen. As Michel Serres said 40 years ago, and which I repeat here a lot. Who is ‘we’? The question underneath it all. What does ‘we’ mean? It’s not just adding up all the individuals. But it’s not mobilising them all around old ideas of race or nationhood either, as the Russians are doing. This is why humans had gods for most of our history. They unified us. We can’t just reinvent them. But we can place something bigger than us at the centre of our lives and societies. That thing is the Earth. Climate change is it telling us this.

Everything seems to be becoming a ‘mental health’ issue. Much of what we call that is really people being treated like battery hens by the politics of the Economy. The neoliberals already medicalised a pandemic so they could ignore it - ‘get your jab, pandemic over’. It suits them just fine for you to blame your mental health for all of the problems you have balancing your underpaid shit job with trying to keep basic life running.

Paul Keating, in 1997. Back when we had leaders, and not just marketing men spewing empty slogans at us. Read this and then turn on the news. "The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move Europe’s military demarcation point to the very borders of the former Soviet Union—is, I believe, an error which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international system at the beginning of this century. The great question for Europe is no longer how to embed Germany in Europe—that has been achieved—but how to involve Russia in a way which secures the continent during the next century. And there was a very obvious absence of statecraft here. The Russians, under Mikhail Gorbachev, conceded that East Germany could remain in NATO as part of a united Germany. But now just half a dozen years later NATO has climbed up to the western border of the Ukraine. This message can be read in only one way: that although Russia has become a democracy, in the consciousness of western Europe it remains the state to be watched, the potential enemy... The words used to explain NATO’s expansion have been nuanced, and the dangers have been acknowledged. But however careful the words are, whatever the window dressing of the Permanent NATO– Russia Joint Council, everybody knows that Russia is the reason for NATO’s expansion. The decision is dangerous for several reasons. It will fuel insecurity in Russia and strengthen those strains of Russian thought, including the nationalists and former Communists in the Parliament, which are opposed to full engagement with the West. It will make more likely the restoration of military links between Russia and some of its former dependencies. It will make arms control, and especially nuclear arms control, more difficult to achieve. President Yeltsin’s offer to ‘take the tips off the warheads’ might have been described as a misstatement, or even the unconscious utterance of official briefing, but what are the chances of that happening now, with NATO creeping towards Russia’s western borders?"

Where might all of those 0-19 year olds be catching Covid? It can't be at school, the politicians say it's not spreading there. Must be a helluva lot of kids wagging. Better get the masks off all of them, nothing to see here.

A very powerful graphic to help explain what has prompted this current invasion in Ukraine.

Now that masks are gone too, I think it’s worth looking at the data when assessing risk. Here’s Lithgow. The green line is the average of cases. It’s not going down, in fact it’s going up. And this is based on the hopeless amount of testing actually going on, so there is much more Covid out there. I think it’s important to remember always that it’s politicians who want you to pretend this is all over, and to go back to ‘normal’. They’ve done that 5-6 times in the past 2 years, and have been wrong every time. The scientists still say wear a mask, avoid crowded indoor public spaces, etc. It’s not just your own life at stake here. Look at the median age of the 2790 postcode, 45. There are a lot of older vulnerable people living here. You’re legally allowed to smoke. But you’re likely to die from smoking, if you do it. Treat Covid the same way. What’s allowed is a terrible guide.

For the rich, ‘living with the virus’ is hiding from it on your superyacht, with classrooms for your kids. For you and me, it’s going back to school and work to get infected. We’re dumb because we fall for it.

Have a look at these 3 slides. Why isn’t this reported or widely known? Because - then people might question if we’re actually getting back to ‘normal’. Or they may not, they may just shrug and go to restaurants, pubs and on holidays anyway. Nothing would surprise me now. How will this part of the community ever live normal lives again with Covid widely circulating? The answer - they can’t, and won’t.

Two diagrams that illustrate the geopolitics in play. The entire rationale for NATO (blue) is driven by the US, to suppress Russia. That’s fine, countries make strategic decisions. But you can see how much Russia could feel picked on. Imagine if Russia or China started setting up partnerships with the countries surrounding Australia, for example, how we would feel about that. In fact we have seen how we feel about it, with the Chinese courting Pacific countries. We didn’t like it at all. The second image shows the way NATO has been deliberately expanding over the years.

Some say technology will fix climate change. The same people who think military hardware wins wars. We developed nations have war machinery unrivalled at any time in history. But…name the last war we actually won. Kuwait maybe in 1991, which was a triviality in military terms. Anything else? We don’t win wars for the same reason they happen. We replaced meaningful diplomacy with military toys linked to satellites. We’re like a giant gated community, protected (we think) by planetary-level CCTV. Being able to see criminals commit crimes doesn’t stop the crimes.

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed leaders like Johnson and Morrison seeing a war as a platform to rescue their own careers. More than 9000 people are still dying of Covid every day around the world. If over 60,000 people died in the Ukraine every week in this war, we’d be horrified. We’ve been killing that many with Covid for 2 years, and many still act as if the whole thing was a sniffle. We can deal with two disasters at once. The pandemic will still kill far more people than any war. The war will in fact escalate Covid deaths as well, not least because we seem unable to focus on both at once.

Don’t be afraid, Queensland flood victims. The government has your back. It will help communities set up GoFundMe campaigns to assist you. ‘Getting government out of peoples’ lives’. Isn’t it going well.

Let me thank all of those who have removed masks today. Such generosity in being Omicron's last hosts in the community.

I do like the pieces that go beyond the 'Putin is a tyrant and must be stopped' non-thinking. And spare us more symbolic protests in response, using another geopolitical emergency as just a platform for our own individual self-expression.

Roads don't like water.

Clive's push to keep the ALP out of government is back on, for the second election in a row. How do we feel Australia, about billionaires buying elections? He doesn't think he can win, he'll settle for the ALP not winning, as last time. That's a win, for Clive. Worth thinking about.

Lisa is a prominent Canadian doctor. Always smart.