April 2022

Happy Birthday sis! Love ya, party hard.

Over 150 kids a week are being hospitalised for Covid in NSW.

I share facts that aren’t reported. It’s not an obsession. It’s trying to be a small part of saving society from morons, for my kids.

I fear for Lithgow’s future. The end of coal and of coal-fired power won’t come gradually, it will be sudden and brutal. It won’t be because of ‘greenies’. It’s basic economics, already happening everywhere in the world. It’s 19th century technology, inefficient and filthy, and now much more expensive than other available technologies.

Woke up and got up in glorious sunshine today. I think I’ve heard more people complain about Daylight Saving this year, getting up in the dark months before winter, than at any other time in my life. 70% of Americans have said they’re over it. Europe is over it. Maybe the tide is turning.

Ian is one of our top virologists. Getting Covid doesn’t ‘get it over with’. I have friends already who have the ‘brain fog’, which is actual brain damage. The cardiovascular damage is just as serious. Even mild cases of Covid can produce these outcomes, in years afterwards. We are lied to, every day. A disaster of potentially unimaginable proportions.

Politicians are pitching for the tradie vote again this election. Young men are now one of the key demographics. The past 20 years have seen a long list of cash and tax bribes sent the way of the tradie vote. Tradies on average earn good money, way more than many other jobs and professions that have been left to rot. Jobs women mostly do, like teaching, nursing, and aged care. Some of the nastiest political views in the country can be found amongst young men, thus the dual bribe and bait strategy, pitching ultra-conservative, Trumpian type views alongside the cash and tax bribes. It’s how ‘Howard’s battlers’ were won away from their traditional Labor heartland.

Australia’s house prices are an international embarrassment. There was a time when pricing your own kids out of a roof over their heads so that you could maximise your capital gains would have prompted emergency action. Now we even infect them with a lethal virus, because we want to go back to OS holidays and $25 hamburgers. The circle of life is broken.

It's really not rocket science. Peoples' wages have been rock-bottom for years because they no longer have any bargaining power. All that supply and demand rubbish is...rubbish. The government's plan to get your wages up relies upon you job-shopping, demanding more money. It's laughable, like most of what they do.

The UK, always our future. Send the kids to school with Covid. In the past you wouldn't get this advice even for a cold.

Amen to this. And you could append a long list of others, not just sadness. We’re a culture of distraction, from everything that really matters. FB is the engine room of that distraction.

The UK removed all Covid restrictions and free testing this week. Like all idiot 'live with the virus' attempts, it's been a disaster.

Toxic positivity is the desperate attempt to make all of life like an extended adolescence. Nothing but ‘happy’ times - going to gigs, hitting the piss, socialising, travelling, eating out, hanging out with friends etc. As Spinoza always said, the only true joy in life comes from understanding. You can pretend it’s something else, like love, or good times, but it isn’t. You need to understand to love, and to have genuinely good times, and not just avoidance behaviour, distraction from things you won’t confront. Shakespeare didn’t write about how he and his mates went on holiday somewhere, and had some pints and saw the Foo Fighters. He wrote about love, and suffering, and war, and relationships, and power etc. All things that made him passionately ‘happy’ to engage in. It’s what grown ups used to do. If we don’t find happiness in our actual reality, it eventually bites back hard. Like it is right now, 50 years of adolescent avoidance behaviour now threatening civilisation itself.

58 people died of Covid last week in NSW. 33 have died already this week.

Before the world went stark raving mad, people would have been amused by the incompetence highlighted by this headline.

Can't be a problem if you can't see it. This sort of crap used to get people put in jail.

The happiest countries in the world (something that is actually measured) are the countries who pay the most tax. The unhappiest are the ones who pay the least tax. It’s not about the tax, it’s about what that tax buys, for the people in those countries. Or doesn’t buy, in the unhappy countries, where social problems are dumped onto individuals to pay for out of their own pockets.

Happy Birthday! Celebrate with circus-style extravagance :)

lol. https://twitter.com/i/status/1511869935508930560

Living with the virus :)

OK, let’s go with today’s bachelor auction. What am I bid for ‘a humble man’?

Happy birthday :)

Katherine Wu deserves a journalism award at the end of this pandemic. If it ends. Why relying solely upon vaccines will never work. Ever. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/sterilizing-immunity-myth-covid-19-vaccines/620023/

China right now. If this plays out like HK did, it could be truly catastrophic in terms of deaths. But for us yellow peril racist Westerners, it could also mean most of our supply chains shut down completely.

"The 55-year-old triple-jabbed broadcaster and author caught the virus in January on a holiday to the Gold Coast." That's a story that's going to be repeated so many times in Australia. We seem pathologically incapable of staying home.

Yeh, wow. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/apr/07/fossil-dinosaur-killed-asteroid-strike-thescelosaurus-north-dakota-extinction

Time to become a country that builds things again. Not houses, got plenty of those. “The housing economy consists of residents buying and selling property from and to each other for ever-higher prices using borrowed money in a surreal pyramid of paper wealth creation, which hit A$9tn (more than 4 times GDP) in 2021. This structure is narrow and risky creating low-quality, fictional prosperity.” Satyajit Das

Pauline is paid over 200 thousand dollars a year. Your pets are smarter.

I love that Twitter is full of the world’s smartest people, who want to talk about something other than themselves.

Wonderful insight into China here. I particularly like the second Tweet, about how the Chinese are always focused on the longer term, on improving life across generations. In the West our retired people are the richest people in the world. We ‘dam’ up our wealth at that generational stage, not allowing it to flow between generations. Western civilisation is in terminal decline, it’s revolting on just about every historical measure. It won’t even fight a pandemic, we’re a joke.

This is the bit pre-elections I reckon we need to learn from. The ‘caretaker period’. When there are no politicains ‘running the country’, and the country continues just fine. That’s because politicians don’t run the country, ever.

Still a favourite.

Voting. People assume I’m sure that I hate the LNP. That’s not the case, my objection to the current LNP is that it isn’t a political party at all, it was captured by vested interests. That’s why many of its most prominent members, including former PMs, have left it. I think it’s vital to remember that the current LNP platform is actually ‘to get government out of peoples’ lives’. Pure Trump. This is a group running for government, with a policy to get rid of government. A ludicrous conflict of interest. It’s like hiring somebody to tutor your kids, who burns all of their books instead.

Happy birthday to you. Are you retired now?

The Australian Electoral Commission is brilliant. Funny, informative.

Covid isn’t a respiratory virus, it’s a vascular disease. The real sleeper is blood donations.

This seems safe.

Smart people overseas, asking the questions Australians aren’t asking.

If you're 18 and above, and you haven't enrolled, get off your arse right now.

Living with the virus story. A friend's co-worker was choking on a chicken bone at home (in Victoria). Rang an ambulance, they said there'd be an 'indefinite' wait. Drove themselves to hospital, and had to sit for 8 hours waiting to be seen.

Clever animals, dogs.

Did Jesus fly Jetstar to heaven at Easter? I think he just ascended. Australians engaging their deepest passion. Being somewhere else.

Do you reckon before you award wealthy Australians tax cuts worth $184 billion, you should first check if every school, hospital, road, river, sewer, NBN connection, women’s shelter, legal aid program etc. has all the money it needs?

What those who have been determined to portray Covid as a ‘sniffle’ have done to millions of human beings kicks you right in the guts when you read this. Notice we never hear the details of individuals who die of Covid? Another thing the ‘sniffle’ crowd do deliberately, to allow their relentless minimisation of the scale of the tragedy. We don’t even report deaths now, let alone hear the names of those who die or their stories. As Yong says, we’re ‘disenfranchising grief’. The live with the virus crowd have removed the ability of people impacted by this tragedy to even have a meaning for what’s happened to them. All they hear is to ‘get back to normal’. It makes a joke of their tragedy.

The Millennials are ok.

This guy does instructional guitar videos on YouTube, and is charming. It made me think about how times change. I figured out this beautiful Fleetwood Mac song on guitar, by ear as a teenager, using a record player. (This guy gets it a bit wrong, but it still sounds glorious.) Now you can learn watching a video like this, up close. Though boy it trained the ear having no visuals, this piece is relatively easy, I think back to some of the almost impossible to hear things I pulled apart to play, by ear, for hours as a kid. Good times.

Good Friday remembers a death. Even noticing death has become a challenge for many Australians. They’re happy that hundreds die per week from a preventable disease, provided they can get back on planes and into pubs and restaurants. They probably call themselves Christians too.

If only it were as easy to find lost things as it is to find lost weight.

Shucks.

Happy Birthday Mel :)

Watch this. (As context, 74 people have died so far this week of Covid, in NSW.) ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns have been in place for years. Hugely expensive and complex, and with strategies that stretch out for years. Nobody describes this as ‘hysteria’. Get smarter NSW. Fast.

The story across the developed world. Retirees are wealthier than people raising families. They’re the wealthiest group in society. (People really don’t think about how perverse that is.) People don’t have kids because they can’t afford to. This is also why we need all of those migrant workers. We don’t have enough young people. The same migrants we then abuse to win elections. Most rich countries are now giant nursing homes, staffed by slaves from overseas.

From the bottom of my toolbox. There is progress in history. Nobody misses re-wiring fuses.

Happy Birthday Aunty Bev! Glad you have some good weather to celebrate it in :)

Anybody remember the CWA tea rooms ever being closed for flu? Covid is not flu. Nothing like it. We can only ‘live with’ pathogens that are under control. Covid remains out of control.

We’re following the UK strategy. Ever wanted to drive an ambulance? Your chance may come.

Medical researchers are increasingly seeing Covid as a long-term chronic health problem, with your infection only the first, acute phase. Similar to HIV and AIDS. People could live quite a few years with HIV, sometimes without noticing. AIDS was the chronic phase.

I think work nosedived when ‘managers’ became Directors, CEOs and all sorts of other new titles. Driven by the MBA crowd. When the work of senior people stopped being the basic MANAGING of what’s going on, and disappeared up its own butt drawing pictures and having meetings about the pictures, called ‘strategy’ meetings. You’d be lucky to find a larger organisation today where senior staff have any direct connection to the actual work being done, or to managing staff directly.

It's believed Ryan had Covid in February. And of course there was Shane Warne. This is the mess we're now in, we may never know how many of these are directly linked to Covid infection. But Covid is well known to cause cardiovascular events, even amongst those who get it 'mildly'. The body forms clots to try to defend itself against the virus. Anti-coagulants (aspirin, warfarin etc.) make it worse. You have to actually get the virus out of the body. I think people will be white hot angry when they realise one day the lies politicians have told them about Covid.

How much longer can we pretend? For those determined to see this as 'just like the flu', when was the last time flu was still running strong after 5 months, over summer, with 5000 dead?

Happy 50th Cam! A man who gives genuine meaning to the phrase ‘would give you the shirt off his own back’. One of the nicest human beings on the planet.

In news from Dumbsville, by the end of the week close contacts of Covid cases won’t need to isolate. The official body says the things below should be implemented at the same time - let’s see how many actually happen. The businesses clamouring for this are probably too stupid to realise it now means all liability for infection under WHS will now rest with them. And you and I will have to use our own sick/carer’s leave to stay home and look after infected family. If we have any leave left.

'Executives', another MBA-driven way to justify doing nothing, for a wheelbarrow of money every week.

The SBS Insight discussion program last night was superb, on transgender sportspeople. The overwhelming conclusion, including from the transgender athletes there, was that transgender women should not be allowed to compete in female sports. https://www.theage.com.au/sport/majority-of-female-athletes-support-the-inclusion-of-transgender-women-20220419-p5aehx.html

There are so many aspects to assessing Covid risk. (The government considers almost none of them.) I'm 54 this year, so this shapes my own assessment. Vaccine-boosted people ages 50 to 64 are more than 10 times more likely to die from a severe breakthrough case than 18- to 49-year-olds with the same vaccination status.

10% of new Covid cases in the world every day are now in Australia. Australia has 0.3% of the world population.

Bohemian Rhapsody seems so obviously a song about Freddie Mercury’s mother having difficulty accepting he was gay, that the greatest mystery may be that its meaning has been considered mysterious, for so long.

Covid is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia, in history. Only Spanish Flu and Scarlett Fever have killed more, and the widespread massacres of Aboriginal Australians. Covid of course is still killing, so will likely achieve the top spot. We’re doing nothing to stop it. This is WITH an excellent vaccine, not available for Spanish Flu or Scarlett Fever epidemics. Which just shows the magnitude of the public health disaster, complete incompetence of government, and the empty slogans of ‘living with the virus’.

There’s a trend in job ads to no longer advertise a salary. And for people even inside an organisation to have no idea what other people inside the organisation are paid. Ask HR people and senior managers and they’ll give you some rubbish about privacy. (There is no privacy issue.) What it actually is, is wage suppression. One of the easiest ways to keep wages down is to not let people compare what they’re paid, with what other people are paid. Australia even allows secrecy clauses in employment contracts, to force employees to not disclose their salary. Those were already banned in the US and UK, because they were seen as disempowering employees.

Please don't be surprised that the politicians who told us to live with Covid, also hold these views. Society is returning to feudal times. Peasants were allowed to get the Black Death, and die. There were always more peasants.

I'm quite seriously surprised that the makers of Doctor Who haven't gone after Muse for the similarities between Uprising and the Dr Who theme. It's nice that they haven't, but given recent copyright litigation, this one is asking for trouble.

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re uncomfortable with the presence of a corpse. We pay people to bury and incinerate them. Some cultures though still have departed loved ones in their homes, for some time after death. This is about much more than ‘organic matter’. Corpses are the way humans felt their direct connection to the ground, to ‘objects’. A corpse isn’t alive, but it’s not strictly dead either, it’s not like soil or rocks. It’s jarring to stand over the corpse of a friend or family member or lover, because they do feel sort of there still. Look at Tollund Man, you still feel his life, after 2500 years. Death is the origin of the idea of ‘place’. I post a lot about how our idea of place is limited to street addresses, or countries on a map. We’re not grounded, maps are designed for travel, moving over the ground. It’s not a coincidence cultures, including ourselves, have rituals around death and burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We come from the Earth beneath our feet, and we return there. Death is what grounds us in space. It’s why societies built tombs, pyramids, mausoleums…sacred spaces that grounded their cultures in the ground beneath them. Many ancient cities are built on top of necropolises, you can still visit them. Death isn’t the opposite of life, it’s the grounded part of life. We have no sense of place now because we reject death. We want ourselves incinerated so we can avoid putting down roots, so we can travel. Corpses were also the way we invented language. They were the first objects that had meaning, as anybody today standing over the corpse of a loved one will feel, directly. Humans then invented statues, which are very like corpses, made from the ground but not of the ground. The pyramids and other tombs are surrounded by statues. Hieroglyphics were carved into these stones. From there language and writing followed. The dark lines of words on a white page are directly descended from the shadows statues and pyramids cast on the ground. Light needs shadow to create meaning. Shadow comes from objects, from the ground. From death. Meaning is the interplay of life and death. A world without death, without grounding, a world only of travel, is a world without meaning.

Happy birthday Tim!

72 people dead from Covid so far this week, in NSW. Do we care? Do we act? Do we say anything?

People-pleasers in relationships often have a history of some sort of trauma. I think this goes much wider though, because our social behaviour is now dominated by people-pleasing. The greatest fear many now have is disturbing the ‘positivity’ of everyday life. Of making any sort of waves. Everything is ‘gorgeous’ and ‘lovely’. Is there a collective trauma that brought this about? I think so. The brutal removal of custom, tradition, of generations of guidance for people in how to live their lives for the collective good. Replaced with a single, economic ‘market’. We market ourselves now (the depressing vanity of Linkedin). And like with individual relationships, this trauma draws us into toxic collective relationships. It makes us compliant to employers, politicians, social media influencers etc.

Have to wonder if the feds are regretting trash-talking Victoria throughout the pandemic. And Queensland. And WA. Anywhere there was a Labor government.

Happy Birthday Nicole, hope you’re well :)

Sunday quiz. Count the mistakes in this image.

That last row breaks up all voters for the coming election by age group. If you want a sense of an ageing population have a look at that enormous voting bloc aged 70 and over. Twice the size of the next biggest voting age group.

This project is a disgrace. $500 million! Brendan Nelson’s wet dream. Turning a genuine war memorial into a hangar for big boy’s war toys. The existing War Memorial had plenty of space, and the large exhibition hall that could easily have accommodated oodles of new material is being demolished as part of the upgrade.

The Chinese are experimenting with so many interesting things, it’s such a shame we can’t learn from them because of the resurgence of yellow peril politics. This is Chengdu, a city committed to using green space for a range of purposes, including flood mitigation. This high-rise development has had teething problems, with an outbreak of mosquitoes that drove a lot of people out, letting the plants run wild. But they’ll solve it. WIthin my lifetime the noise and filth of the internal combustion engine will lose its hold over our cities. I think they’ll become much nicer places.

When the man-baby got booted off Twitter, he set up his own social media network in a sulk. It’s been a disaster. What it shows is the bankruptcy of the libertarian ‘freedom’ ideas Trump and others peddle. Their whole belief system relies on the rest of us, a functioning, civilised society, to exist. All political libertarians do is whine and complain. They don’t build anything, they have no new ideas. What motivates them is attacking everybody else. That’s all libertarianism is, attacking society, ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’. But when they do, they have nothing to say to each other, they don’t stand FOR anything. They only stand AGAINST things. Adolescents who don’t want to tidy their rooms, it’s literally all they are, retarded emotional development.

For those sceptical of the ageing population and what it means for elections, the average age of a voter in Australia is 50. And look at how the older you get, the more you tend to vote conservative. Australia has been run by old people, for old people, for a couple of decades now.

Babies needing liver transplants now. The common factor identified? All had been infected with Covid in the months prior to their hepatitis. Minimisers desperately trying to say that adenovirus is to blame here, a common cold. Hilarious. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-hepatitis-outbreak-among-children-1.10754895

Here are current trends in hospitalisations. Because you won't see them much reported. Remembering this is the metric the government asked us to focus on.

Got my flu shot today. Some researchers I admire have thought for years that heart disease in general may be due to ongoing chronic infection, and/or damage caused by previous infections, from things like the flu. This research is bearing that out, heart attack risk reduced 45% in those at risk, if they have a flu shot. That's enormous. https://sph.med.unsw.edu.au/news/flu-jab-lowers-heart-attack-risk

"More than half of Aussies who took out a new home loan with one of the major banks lied about their circumstances on the advice of their banker to make sure their loan was approved, shocking new research has revealed." Inflation up over 5%. Interest rates to rise substantially. The whole country awash with Covid. Getting government out of peoples' lives = throwing them to the sharks.

When I drive through the Australian countryside, I notice how almost completely unoccupied it is. Apart from the odd farmhouse, the countryside is as good as empty of people. That’s not an accident. Like the Americans and their native peoples, we drove people off the land, often killing them in the process. Some of the killings would count as genocide, they were massacres. Now called the Frontier Wars. Read this, we knew we were doing it too, people admitted we were taking the land. Only recently has that recognition stopped. It’s a story that is going to grow over time, a national stain. And when you read some of the accounts of the countryside at the time of our arrival, we’ve destroyed the greatest wonder of the world, in all of history. No other civilisation has lasted more than a few thousand years, ours was tens of thousands of years old. An unimaginable treasure, destroyed, the whole world needed to learn how they did it.

At some point the idea the LNP are ‘better economic managers’ has to encounter reality, surely? As economists constantly point out as well, the 2 highest taxing and spending governments in Australian history are the Howard and Morrison governments.

Talking about the surge in hepatitis and liver transplants in children.

I strongly encourage anybody who has contracted Covid in some way via a school, including your kids being infected, to register your interest with this class action. Won't cost you a cent, the litigation firm does all of the work. But you may get a payout for any win, and the government may be held to account for the disgusting and deliberate infection of teachers, students, their families and friends. This includes money you lost at work having to care for Covid-infected kids, any psychological harm etc.

How the vaccines are now doing stopping you getting Covid. ChAdOx1-S is AstraZeneca. BNT162b2 is Pfizer. mRNA1273 is Moderna. In a nutshell, they're not really stopping infection at all, after 20 weeks, even with 3 doses. Effectiveness against dying from Covid drops to about 60%, at 25 weeks, if you haven't had a 3rd shot. (Get your 3rd shot. Wear a mask, avoid crowds, get fresh air into your buildings etc.) The vaccines are struggling because we're not doing anything else, so they're having to try to do the lot.

"The textbooks say, In 1900 most people died of infectious diseases, and today most people don't die of infectious disease; they die of cancer and heart disease and Alzheimer's and all these things. Well, in ten years I think the textbooks will have to be rewritten to say, "Throughout history most people have died of infectious disease, and most people continue to die of infectious disease." Paul Ewald

$5-$6 to fill an electric car. $100+ for petrol/diesel. Not going to be many jobs for mechanics in the future.

Happy Birthday!

Covid is just the shorts before the movie. It gets a lot worse from here. By the way, this isn't 'negativity', it's reality. 'Positivity' is people running away from reality and living in a fantasy. But I think there's actual joy in solving grown up problems.

“With more than 47,000 people testing positive in the past 24 hours, adjunct Professor Slevin says he ‘can’t think of anything comparable to the dissonance between what is happening on the ground and the political debate’.”

Nearly 6 million Australians have been infected with Covid since Christmas. On purpose. Remember that in times to come.

As Richard says, the simple reason wages haven’t gone up in Australia is that employers have refused to pay them. They always have some excuse for not paying them, it’s called self-regulation, meaning ‘we’ll do whatever we like’. We’ve been through decades of the wealthiest times in our history, and the same ‘we can’t afford this’ rubbish has been said the whole time.

If a giraffe walked down the main street of your town, what would be the reaction? Yes, amazement. This isn’t giraffe habitat. And yet Covid is everywhere, globally. Covid is an organism, like a giraffe. The only way it can spread so far and so fast is if the ecosystems of the world are damaged, possibly beyond repair. That’s exactly what we’re seeing.

A well-designed sailing boat can sail at nearly 3 times the speed of the wind.

77 dead from Covid in NSW this week. A day to go. Remind me what’s ‘normal’ here?

At last twerking mums get their own parking.

A person is dying of Covid in Australia about every 30 minutes.

Everyone eats their greens in Beaver households. (Don’t they have remarkable ‘hands’.)

No need to say ‘eat your greens’ to a beaver. (Love their ‘hands’.)

It’s not surprising that a culture which thinks changing clocks gives you extra sunshine, also thinks the best way to end a pandemic is to pretend it’s not happening.

When you replace your society with an Economy, there is no collective care. There is no collective, just a global market. And you’re just a 21st century disposable peasant worker in that market.

If anybody can find one letter of journalism in this propaganda, please let me know. The people who whine about the ABC being ‘biased’ usually read Murdoch papers like this one, and don’t see it.