March 2022

Over 106,000 children have been infected with Covid in the past 30 days in NSW. The government says it's going well.

How the Murdoch press works. Same commentator, different times. The first, when Bill Shorten was ALP leader talking about using government intervention to control electricity prices. The second, now, where private industry is threatening to buy and shut down coal-fired power stations.

To this day I struggle with the idea that even Lithgow falls over itself to vote for the National Party. It's testament to the skill of the State LNP in rorting targeted grants that the impression is given that the Nats do much at all for regional seats. All those picture opportunities with novelty cheques create the impression of us being looked after. And now the Nats have taken over the local council again too, again with lots of help from the novelty cheque photo opportunities. Many are constant re-announcements of the same initiatives. When you look at stuff that actually matters, like planning for a future without coal, and NBN rollouts, Lithgow is never even mentioned.

The PM has Covid. These pictures were taken on Sunday. All of these people are now at risk. Wear a mask. Like the old guy the PM was shaking hands with. Think of others instead of just yourself.

Half an hour, so many probably won't have time. But a really superb summary by one of the leading experts in the world (who luckily for us currently works in Australia), of what we now know about Covid. Hugely recommended, you might see why I never shut up, about Covid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UzOav3x8Q0&t=420s

A person has died of Covid on average every 30 minutes in Australia, in 2022. And we're saying it's over.

Lismore received no flood mitigation funding from the federal government prior to these floods. A quick scan of the electorate explains it. It’s the only Labor-voting town in a Nationals seat. That little patch of red near the top. Bring on the election.

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid away. It kills people. I’m not ‘anxious’ about Covid, as people are often condescendingly labelled who try to stop it spreading. I just know about Covid. If you know about Covid, you don’t think normal life is back. And this decision of mine is as much about protecting other people as it is about me. About vulnerable members of family, friends, and others in the community. About teachers, nurses, doctors, essential services, supermarkets etc. forced to work in a Covid soup. About the people dying every 30 minutes.

Current case numbers in Lithgow. And we know many people aren't testing, so real numbers likely much higher than this again. Still a long way over 100 cases/100,000 population per day, which is more than 10 times what's considered a relatively 'safe' level of spread.

Going to have my first ever social media holiday, a few weeks probably.

NSW was averaging 10,000 cases a day, before the masks came off. Already ludicrously high. Now on the rise again. 10,000+ people being infected a day means a community is very sick, and there are in reality many more, the testing regime is a joke. Politicians try to make it about hospitalisations. The real impact is being felt in workplaces and schools.

This prompted me to come back from my FB holiday a little early. Look at what's happening in Lithgow. And remember this is only those who get tested, many aren't bothering. This is a disease OUT OF CONTROL. Has been for months, and getting worse. Put a mask on, who cares if thousands of sheep aren't bothering. Covid is a 'decerebrating' disease, meaning it eats your brain. Quite literally. You do not want it, it's not a cold or flu, the impact of having it even mildly plays out potentially over many years.

A superb piece from the British journalist Ed Yong. Why are we tolerating so many Covid deaths? His article brilliantly explains why. Mostly because the history of disease shows time and again that once the privileged have options to avoid it, they dump it on the more disadvantaged folk and say 'it's over'. But also because as societies, we're no longer societies. We're individuals. We've forgotten how to think as a group. Politicians created that, deliberately, it's much easier to control people who can't act together, as a group. Look at FB, saturated with posts about 'me'. Even natural disasters become 'me at the natural disaster'.

I won't only talk about Covid, but it's kinda the issue threatening us all. 20-30,000 cases per day projected for NSW within weeks. The NSW Government response? Nothing. They say it's our fault, the community, we've 'gone to sleep' on Covid. The government is doing nothing, why are we paying them? Overwhelmingly it's kids and teenagers, catching it at school. The schools the government put no protections in place for, and in fact removed masks from this month.

I was mesmerised by this song as a kid. Nobody else writes songs quite like McCartney, endlessly creative. And one of the really great rock singers.

It looks a good idea at face value. But it isn’t. Even the insurance industry told them not to do it. As always with this government, it’s looking to offload the problem onto us, as individuals, with our insurance. What will fix this problem is fixing the causes of the disasters we need to insure against, and introducing mitigations in the meantime. Stuff government needs to do, and pay for. They have no interest in doing that. Many people will likely be unable to access insurance at all in the near future; that’s already happening.

I’ve never liked the green and gold uniforms for Australian athletes. We end up looking like some hybrid budgie/canary. (Yes I know it’s supposed to look a bit like wattle, and golden wheat etc. It doesn’t.) The Aboriginal flag colours though rock, really powerful. Let’s change our national sporting colours to those.

Wear a mask. Avoid crowds, especially indoors. Or just ignore all of that and get Covid, it’s very on-trend.

40% of people who leave isolation for Covid are still positive/infectious after 9-10 days. (NSW releases them after 7.) Basically they should never have removed the requirement to get a negative test before returning from isolation. Let's add it to the long list of fuck-ups.

2989 teachers in Victoria have contracted Covid in Term 1, so far. School casual budgets are exhausted, and teachers are running out of sick leave. More than 3 terms still to go in 2022. In other news, now you won’t even need to isolate if somebody in your family gets sick, you’re free to spread it to friends, elderly relatives, workmates and other families. As a bonus it will mean any time off you need to care for children or other family members with Covid will now need to come out of your own sick leave.

If you work with fencing disputes, you’ll get deep insights. The world would be a much better place I think if we stopped assuming people fundamentally like each other. They really don’t. Paradoxically, the world would be a much better and more peaceful place, if we accepted this. It’s only when we accept that we have to always negotiate our relationship with others, that they become good relationships. The poison starts when we assume we all like each other, and then start abusing our relationships by never negotiating them.

The NSW Government hasn’t listened to NSW Health for months. So at this stage, remembering it’s your life and your health, and those of your friends and loved ones, do you: - trust NSW Health, or - trust a NSW Cabinet beholden to vested interests in gambling, property development, sale of alcohol and other business interests?

They say the quiet bits out loud now. Not even a pretence of doing public health work. Get back to work, the lot of you, even if you’re infected. The life of battery chickens.

On Sundays I often remember the ‘day of rest’ idea we got from religion. It was against God’s will to work on the Sabbath. The Sabbath was actually a weekly ‘lockdown’. It bemuses me to watch those who hopped on the anti-lockdown train in this pandemic, as if the greatest sin was to stop us all working every day. It’s like slave philosophy, us defending our own slavery. In an ordinary year, there are over 50 Sabbath days. About 10 weeks of ‘lockdown’. Of course we long ago gave them up for the sake of continuous commerce. Just as we gave up the use of the sun to regulate our time, because clocks are about commerce too. Business invented ‘Daylight Saving’ too, so they wouldn’t have to give workers fewer hours to work to get social time in the sunshine. The people who defend it each year ‘because they like that extra hour of sunshine after work’ never seem to stop to think - why does it have to be ‘after work’? We’re now all ’on the clock’. It’s not progress.

Not always clear on the suburbs of Lithgow. I think I live in ‘Lithgow’ itself, not a suburb. Sometimes called ‘Extension Estate’, though often just ‘Lithgow’ on a map. Which means my water should be fine. Anybody know?

To give another sense of just how much the ‘live with the virus’ people renormalise the absurd. In the US, every day for the past 6 months, on average about the same number of people have died of Covid, as died in Hurricane Katrina. Every day. For 6 months.

I can’t think of a better test of a person’s moral character, than whether they support the deliberate mass infection of children. Don’t sit there saying nothing, tacitly allowing it because it lets you have your normal life of travel, hitting the piss, socialising, gigs, sport and restaurants back. Have the courage to stand up and say it, out loud: “I would rather we infect children with Covid, than me miss out on those other things”.

Because we follow the UK in our Covid response, have a look at what comes next for schools here. Anything to force schools to stay open, to keep the ‘live with the virus’ rubbish alive.

You’ll hear people say that kids aren’t getting Covid at school, they’re getting it in the community. Have a look at the actual science. On the left, infections in schools (blue line) with no masks. On the right, infections when masks were introduced.

Polls are probably less reliable today because people are also more fickle. Voting has become like putting a bet on at the horses, I think because people have less understanding of politics, they also have little longer-term thinking in their voting. They go with what’s ‘trending’ on the day, like on social media. Having said that, the polling numbers for more than the past year suggest the stench of the LNP carcass is getting too much for most.

Happy Birthday :)

You can see why some say Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st and 22nd centuries. Phenomenal amounts of flat, sunny land, basically a whole continent. Just need to get rid of the current dickheads in charge, at the election.

"“The so-called shadow lockdown was very powerful, we believe, in constraining the omicron wave in January on top of the holiday period...if that had been in March, it could have been a lot worse.” Professor Jodie McVernon (who does the government's Covid modelling). Buckle up.

50% or more of parents are not vaccinating their kids against Covid. The same parents who are happy for them to be infected at school. The same parents who ARE vaccinated, themselves. So they’re not anti-vaxers. What’s going on? It’s pretty simple. The government has been relentlessly saying for nearly 2 years that Covid is ‘mild’ in children. Just as they said 2 doses of vaccine meant ’fully vaccinated’. Because they wanted schools open, and to go to an election saying most of the country was fully vaccinated. This is the real-world impact of disgusting political spin. Child vaccination stalled, booster shots stalled.

John Howard used to say fuel prices are political dynamite. At current prices many will go to the wall, not just directly through the cost of buying fuel, but through the costs passed all the way down the supply chain. If you need a hard-headed economic reason to move to renewable energy, you’re living it right now. I can’t even fathom why people defend the status quo, Australia should be a renewable, cheap energy superpower.

The people who argued here last year and the year before that Covid wouldn't be a problem in schools are now deafening in their silence. Cowards, immoral bastards. What's the government's plan here? You can guess, the same plan it has for all Covid things. Nothing.

You hear the argument a lot, that employers can’t afford to pay higher wages. But wages are just like any other business expense. You can factor them in. What they really mean is they don’t want to pay people more, because it eats into their cut of the business income. If a business can’t afford to pay people properly, it’s a shit business run by people who can’t run a business. That was the metric a generation ago, before we all got some sort of collective lobotomy. It actually was, underpaying your staff used to be a seen as a sign of incompetence.

Boom.

O dear Brad, it's much worse than that. Many aren't even bothering doing the tests at all. How safe are we all feeling with dribbling idiots like this in charge?

Get in quick, plenty of Covid to go around.

I ponder how many times people will have to catch Covid in quick succession for the tidal wave of dumb to subside.

The only difference between a whole State in isolation because they're sick, and a lockdown, is that the former makes everybody sick.

Even the US is fed up with the idiot idea of Daylight Saving. I’d be happy to just get rid of the clock changes, like this, though I still think shifting daylight to later in the day robs early birds of their mornings. Easiest to just dump the whole thing entirely. Or give everybody an hour off in winter at the end of each day to get more sunshine after work.

Going back to the idea of ‘business’, and how I don’t think it’s even a thing. There are just customers. You can easily prove this. Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business? Yes. Only one is real. The only reason we think a ‘business’ exists is because customers with money keep it going. Management and boards of businesses don’t drive a business. Customers drive businesses. And workers do the work. The most management and a Board can do is suggest things to customers and workers, which if they accept, will make the ‘business’ continue. The oldest trick in the human playbook is to take this basic fact, that workers do the work, and are also the people the work is for, and pretend ‘leaders’ are the ones actually doing all of that. Leaders are vital, but they don’t do the work, nor are they the source of wealth. That’s always the people. Ask any CEO if their business will succeed in a ‘market’ full of cashed-up customers, or cashed-up CEOs. The extension of these basic facts is, a society is healthy and works, when the workers - the people - have wealth. That means customers have money to spend. You can see how our societies now do the opposite, and vastly overpay leaders, and suppress money to workers. The only thing not going up in our society right now is wages.

Queanbeyan High School, which had adopted some remote learning again because of mass infections amongst staff and students, has apparently now been given a directive from the NSW Government to resume normal operations. The mass infections haven’t gone away. Exactly what the UK did too. Instead of deal with the problem of mass infection in schools, force everybody to carry on with the charade that it’s not actually happening. People are even fined there for keeping sick kids home. Total, absolute contempt for children, teachers and education.

Somebody forgot to send the ‘Covid is mild’ memo to Hong Kong.

I share these so people see their futures. Who remembers having flu 2-3 times in a matter of weeks?

Check out the chuckle near the start when he talks about how QR codes became just a con job, to dupe people into going out again. And how sending kids to school had nothing to do with education or children at all, it was about making life seem ‘normal’ again. We’re in so much trouble, with Covid. I‘m convinced people have no idea how bad things are. It’s not surprising, they’re simply not being told.

I was sceptical about expandable garden hoses. But I got one to try (they’re not expensive), and love it. They’re made mostly of latex, and expand once you turn the tap on, many times over. It’s quite freaky to watch, like a snake unfurling. But even freakier when you turn the tap off again and let the remaining pressurised water in the hose release, as it shrinks back to original size. Means you don’t need to have a way to wind up and unwind your hose each time you use it.

To those who say ‘we can’t lock down forever’, a couple of things. 1) Nobody has ever suggested locking down forever, that’s a straw man of your own making. 2) You can be infected forever. Over and over. And not just once a year, like flu. Look at the UK. Many infected 3 times in the past year, some now at 4.

I wish the election would hurry up and get here. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/education-minister-blames-dud-teachers-for-declining-education-results-20220317-p5a5k6.html

An expert on money says what I always say here about it. It’s worth - nothing. The idea a government for example needs to be able to ‘pay for’ its promises, by having enough money, is nonsense. Government makes the money, it can have us much as it likes. Government is not a household, government is not a business. For individuals and businesses, money has a value, but only because what it allows the exchange of, goods and services. In itself it’s worth nothing.

Had a discussion yesterday about the Rockley Pub, now featuring a restaurant run by Matt Moran. My issue with some of these developments is that it’s partly a process of gentrification. Taking facilities in a poorer area, and reshaping them ‘upmarket’. Sure it will bring wealthier, mobile people to Rockley to eat and drink, and some money into the community. But overseas these developments often lead to the exclusion of the original poorer residents, some are even forced to move. You can see a bit of that now even in Central West towns, as people flee the Covid cities and drive house prices well up in our towns. Welcome investment in some ways, but pricing many locals out of the market too. Is it progress when a local town’s traditional diners go upmarket, become gentrified to attract passing trade and the wealthier in those towns? At a time when many of these towns desperately need new industries and jobs, what they’re getting is vastly overpriced hamburgers and coffees. They can sit in these swish cosmopolitan eateries and watch the tumbleweeds outside go past all the closed shops. City folk see country towns as the big city, minus the traffic and noise. They’re treating them like expensive suburbs in Sydney, which is what gentrification can turn them into.

‘We can’t live like this forever’ was one of the lines used to justify opening up NSW to mass infection. But economically we’re still behind 2021, so no forward progress at all. And huge numbers needlessly infected with a lethal virus. Workplaces and schools crippled with mass infections, amazing stories coming out of both that never reach the news.

Covid update. A quick rule-of-thumb, take whatever the government says, and believe the opposite. https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/australia/new-covid-case-numbers-across-australia-rise-by-37-in-a-week-as-omicron-subvariant-takes-hold/ar-AAVfUbF?ocid=msedgntp

I suspect Steven Marshall is just the first politician about to discover that the Australian public don’t see the role of a leader as deliberately infecting them all with a lethal virus.

An important thing to look out for when you’re doing RATs. As our immunity grows through vaccination and infection, we’re starting to get Covid symptoms much earlier than we did before. Previously people often had Covid but had no symptoms, and so could infect other people easily. This is because symptoms are our immune system fighting the virus, and we had no immunity to Covid, so it often caused few symptoms when we were infected (making it very dangerous). Now so many of us have been vaccinated and/or have been infected, we’re starting to develop symptoms much earlier. That’s a good thing, because it’s alerting us that we may be infectious much earlier too, like colds and the flu do. But there are 2 risks that come with this: 1) if you do a RAT when you first feel symptoms, it may come back negative because even though you have symptoms, you may not be contagious YET. Because our symptoms are now happening earlier, our contagiousness may also be coming on more slowly. So don’t assume you don’t have Covid, isolate and wait another day or more to test again. 2) Because our symptoms are now coming on earlier it also means if we follow the (idiot) government advice to only isolate for 7 days, about 40% of us will STILL BE INFECTIOUS when we go back to school or work, on the 8th day. So wear a bloody good mask if you don’t have the option to isolate for longer, for that second week after you test positive. The old 14-day isolation period took care of all this, but of course it had to go so idiot politicians could protect their fairy tale economy.

Like I’ve said for years, the day of reckoning is coming for the boomers. Unfortunately my suspicion is the retribution will mostly fall on Gen X, which is rarely mentioned. The boomers will be mostly dead. Gen X has many of the same problems as millennials, including housing unaffordability. It’s the middle child generation.

Delicious watching the windbags of the past 2 years trying to explain how kids actually did better during lockdown.

To put this in perspective, the average amount American families spend on home-cooked food during a year is about $3500. The same trend is happening in multiple countries, including Australia.

Happy Birthday!

O well, at least we got the pubs and OS holidays open again.

This sort of thing could mark an abrupt end of civilisation as we know it. There's no reason climate change has to happen gradually. Temperatures 30-40 degrees above normal, at both poles. 30-40 degrees!

Wow. Kimberley Kitching. What superb journalism. What needs to be exposed isn't what Murdoch hacks want you to believe. Read this. https://www.crikey.com.au/2022/03/21/the-true-story-of-kimberley-kitching-and-the-labor-gang/

You really don’t want to be on only 2 doses of vaccine right now. This is vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation. ChadOx1-S = AstraZeneca BNT162b = Pfizer mRNA-1273 = Moderna

Data from the US says not even 3 doses is going to be enough. The government, as always, saying nothing, with the Australian winter bearing down on us. 83% effective up to 2 months, down to only 31% effective after 5 months. This is for HOSPITALISATION. As I've said for more than 2 years, the only way to beat Covid long-term is to stop it spreading. We never let any serious infectious disease spread, have people lost their minds?

I still strongly believe most of Australia thinks 'living with the virus' is a crock of shit. The polls suggest so.

What a tangled web we weave...that's Kimberley Kitching, on the left. Apparently was a friend of Andrew Bolt for 10 years, and allegedly had an affair with him. Bolt has been in the frontline of beating up the story around her death to try to undermine Labor. A Royal Commission had also previously recommended criminal charges against Kitching for her time with the Health Services Union. A rotting carcass of a federal government now in utter desperation mode.

For my Brit friends. https://twitter.com/supertanskiii/status/1434593531524485131?s=21

Those who get ‘mild’ Covid have a 40% higher chance of developing Type 2 diabetes within a year.

Only took the two weeks since the floods for the NSW Government to remove requirements that floods be considered when approving new land for housing development. The State is run by developers, publicans and gambling companies. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2022/03/23/michael-pascoe-liberal-party-housing-affordability/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020220323

I'm a huge fan of PVC pipe. And this is another reason to add to my list.

Roy Morgan research on Australia's least trusted politicians also points to an upcoming rout. In my experience the group still clinging desperately to the bloated corpse is young men.

You know things are going badly when Liberal politicians don't even include Liberal Party logos on their election advertising. This is now common. The brand is toxic.

Happy Birthday! Eat much cake! Don't share photos of it to starving people without cake!

The nonsense of much trans theory is really tested in situations like this. The assumption that transgender is an unproblematic, oppressed concept is very wrong. Unfortunately the issue remains impossible to discuss, because both 'sides' just use it as a platform for pre-existing grievances.

Wikipedia so rocks. This news is already updated there, amazing. Was curious to see Barty cites missing being at home as part of her decision. That's something other Australians can learn from Aboriginal Australia, what 'home' means. https://www.news.com.au/sport/tennis/ash-barty-announces-shock-retirement-from-tennis-at-25/news-story/5a87487e7632dbd2e8d35c61c276589b

Another from the Roy Morgan report. Australians hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at that astronomical jump in love for national lockdowns in 2020. (The 2008 jump was Kevin Rudd’s rescue of Oz from the GFC.) The implications of this? I think National Cabinet’s decision to let Covid rip in Australia was the greatest act of political suicide in our history. To not only not protect Australians from a crisis, but to actually inflict it upon them. Deliberately. I think the election will be maybe the greatest electoral bloodbath in our history. Not calling it, just calling my gut feeling. The Premiers who backed the let it rip will be toast too, when their elections arrive. South Australia is the trailer for that movie.

How are peoples’ schools and workplaces going with Covid infections? Social media should be telling this story every day. It’s not being reported elsewhere.

My passion for discussing the myths around gravity feels a bit justified, when I see that over 5000 Australians die every year with the cause of death listed as ‘falling over’. The language is always so interesting. Falling ‘over’. Over what?

Sigh, what a shock. How these idiots keep their jobs, I dunno.

'No underlying health conditions'. I'm sure people are sick of Covid posts. I'm sick of people pretending it's all over. If you think this is an outlier, well over 100 kids have already died of Covid in the UK. More than 600 in the US.

No wonder health care workers have been asked to wear only the best masks. And the next wave is only just beginning. Shout out to health care workers, you don't deserve this.

Ignoring any love or hatred for The Greens, this makes a lot of sense? Why wouldn’t we do this? The change could also fund so much the country needs. Right now just about all $184 billion will go into the pockets of a tiny number of already wealthy Australians.

I know people have their little chuckles about my Daylight Savings Time crusades. Read the science people, nicely summarised here. We’re doing terrible, sometimes fatal, things to our bodies by fiddling with standard time. As the experts say at the end of this piece, we need standard time, ALL YEAR. Even the Russians decided that a few years ago, after trialling daylight saving all year. It’s bizarre that opponents of DST have always been portrayed as some sort of backwards yokels, when in fact they’ve been following the science. The real yokels here are the people who think you ‘save’ daylight by stealing an hour from the morning, forcing everybody to get up in the dark for most of the year. It makes us all tired and very sick. And it’s also naive, DST was actually invented so that employers woudn’t have to give people shorter working days.

How can you be only 37? Happy Birthday :)

Happy Birthday :)

In my lifetime already I predict we’ll look back at internal combustion engines and wonder what the hell we were doing using them as long as we did. Rubbish technology, hopelessly inefficient, thousands of moving parts and fluids that need constant servicing, drowning cities with non-stop noise, choking them with filthy and toxic air. And all making us reliant upon an energy source, oil, that is finite and concentrated in a few autocratic countries, who hold us hostage for it. On top of all that, electric cars beat the crap out of internal combustion cars, in performance.

Have posted before about how society is a high school, and how all adult life is being consumed by adolescence as a cultural model. (This is something researchers actually study.) A perfect illustration of this is the mass interest in the deaths of rock stars and sports stars. And the almost total indifference to 20 million people dead of a virus. Society is full of teenagers, many well into middle-age or even old-age.

Have been following this technology for a few years. I think it might change the world. It could mean no more colds, flus, or Covid. https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-type-ultraviolet-light-makes-indoor-air-safe-outdoors

Try buying a car right now, supply can be months away. Sometimes several years. Just one of many things in the ‘Economy’ grinding to a halt. The fact things are functioning at all globally is largely down to China’s Zero Covid policy. China is the world’s factory. If they abandon Zero Covid, the thing we all mock, you’ll see how much ‘living with the virus’ is a lethal fairy tale, very quickly.

Really good article about regional roads. While federal governments give away hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, to people who don’t need them, basic infrastructure in every town in Australia is falling apart. We blame local councils for this, but actually it’s the fault of how federal governments hog the vast majority of tax money, and piss it away in re-election bribes. Politicians should never be allowed to ‘run’ a country. It’s not their job. It shows how little we understand about democracy, that we think it is their job.

There’s been extensive use of actors from a variety of ethnic/racial backgrounds in Bridgerton. That’s likely a response to the attention in recent years to the lack of diversity in TV and film. I wonder if this has led to a perverse outcome. We now have ethnic actors playing aristocrats, the very people who oppressed them in history. Is that a bit weird? A bit like making a film about the Third Reich and using lots of Jewish actors to play the Nazis?

I mean, who knew this would happen. Anybody with a brain, maybe?

Scott firing his manager in his head, in rehearsal.

Imagine a school assembly, where a boy storms the stage to punch out another boy who he says has disrespected his girlfriend. Reckon the teachers would give him a standing ovation?

Cell gets ripped to bits by another micro-organism.

The bullshit comes in to land. No conspiracies, no stunts, no expressions of support for black women or people with alopecia etc. Just bog standard common assault. He may still lose his Oscar.

From next year taxes are raised on low and middle income earners, and slashed for high income earners. So throw the low and middle folk a cash bone just before the election and hope they’ll vote you in, and then get back to looking after the top end of town for another 3 years if you win.

Politicians asked us to look at hospitalisations and deaths. Both have been trending up all week. I looked, did you? How many are all aboard the bullshit train?

Everything about how this is still playing out suggests it was...common assault. Go figure.

Aren't we going well here in Australia. People needing to use credit to buy the basics of life. But at least wealthy Australians will get enormous tax cuts in the next few years, so they can buy the companies that will sell you bread, milk and petrol on credit.

Find the smallest font on this daily update. None of this is accidental.

I remember when we looked on in horror at the US and their Covid disaster. Good times.

I still don't think many, even most, people realise just how much we're destroying our own society, right now. They act as if we can constantly run our hospitals, schools and everything else in emergency mode. Terrible, possibly permanent damage, is being done to society, everywhere.

I put this in the category of stuff you REALLY need to know. Something that isn't said in public discussion, that I've seen, is that for a long list of workers (below), if you catch Covid-19 it is PRESUMED in law that you caught it at work. It isn't up to you to prove it, the employer has to prove you DIDN'T catch it at work. Compensation is automatic, unless your employer can prove you caught it somewhere else. For this reason whatever you do GET TESTED, and KEEP THE RESULTS. Those are key to any claims for compensation down the track. And the impact of Covid on the body can play out over many years, perhaps the rest of your life. The list of jobs that this applies for: the retail industry (other than businesses providing only on-line retail), the health care sector, including ambulance officers and public health employees, disability and aged care facilities, educational institutions, including pre-schools, schools and tertiary institutions (other than establishments providing only on-line teaching services), police and emergency services (including fire brigades and rural fire services), refuges, halfway houses and homeless shelters, passenger transport services, libraries, courts and tribunals, correctional centres and detention centres, restaurants, clubs and hotels, the construction industry, places of public entertainment or instruction (including cinemas, museums, galleries, cultural institutions and casinos), the cleaning industry cafes supermarkets funeral homes childcare facilities.