May 2022

Geez, it’s even worse than I first realised. Half that edition of the paper. Fydenberg is in real trouble, and as a result we see like testicles hanging out of a pair of speedos the cosy relationship between the Murdoch empire and the LNP in Australia.

Just one more catastrophe to add to the avoidable disasters confronting us. Because we were too lazy to think, and ridiculed the people who did. Covid is the same. Did you know it’s now the #2 cause of death in Australia? It’s unlikely, if you’re getting your information from the news or social media.

Good on Michael for peeling away the happy clappy Covid is over bullshit. Wait until young kids start needing liver transplants here, or die from Covid-hepatitis, as is happening overseas now. Will we still put restaurants, gigs, travel and sport above Covid then? Will we still force kids to go to school so employers have a workforce? I really don't know, but I suspect sadly yes.

It's staggering to me that a man who is bone-idle, part of a weird religious cult, and a master at blaming everybody else for things he's supposed to be doing, still rates higher as preferred PM. You have to really be paying attention to nothing of substance at all to think he's done a job at all, let alone a good job.

Daniel Lewkovitz, for the Liberal Democrats. What woman could resist?

Hilarious genius, their best yet. If you've been basically asleep for the past 3 years, here's your election primer.

I was listening to Peter Doherty on the way home today. The Australian Nobel Prize winner in immunology. He was a bit lost for words at what Australia is doing with Covid, more than 5000 dead since Christmas, nearly 6 million infected. The thing that scares him the most is the long-term effect of infection on people. He said Australia ‘hasn’t thought this through’. I get so frustrated with Covid, as is obvious to people who read my posts. To hear political slogans trotted out over and over as if they’re science, like ‘live with the virus’, and ‘just like the flu’. Doherty was scathing on the flu comparison. We’re in the middle of something so disastrous, and I struggle to find even a handful of people every day who give enough of a shit to say anything about it.

The 'fog of war'. That's literally where we now are, where trusted institutions have to compete with every opinionated halfwit online 'doing their own research'. As Steve Bannon always advises, one of Trump's minions, flood the public space with 'shit' so nobody knows what's true any more, and follows the twit who offers them the strongest, simplest messages. All very deliberate political strategy.

This unbiased media thing the Murdochistas always talk about is 'do as I say, not as I do', obviously. I'm yet to meet anybody who spews rubbish on Covid, the Economy or just about anything else who isn't just quoting one of Rupert's mastheads, chapter and verse. I don't care that people aren't supposed to discuss politics. If you vote for a government who doesn't believe in government, you'll get exactly what you sign up for. Nothing.

23 dead from Covid in NSW today. Is this OK? Anybody? Is silence 'shit, we may have this wrong'?

The Supreme Court in the US is rumoured to have just overturned Roe v Wade.

The government spinning this as ‘you need us to manage these difficult economic times’. (Which they created.) Like asking rapists to be gynaecologists.

If you're carrying a lot of debt, here's your how to vote card.

When interest rates are close to 0%, house prices go through the roof (ha) because people can afford to take on a lot more debt. It creates a bidding war on properties. So when interest rates go up again, the debts people are carrying are enormously larger. Amazed this seems so difficult to understand.

Several major banks have already passed on the full interest rate rise to mortgage holders. But haven’t passed it on to those with savings accounts. Banks are bastards. The Royal Commission was supposed to stop that. It was never implemented. Because (guess the punch line)…the government who commissioned it did nothing.

Happy birthday!

Another very senior ex-Liberal saying what I always say, the Liberals are not the party many think they are. Hijacked by pirates. In other news, Australia dropped from 25 in the world to 39, for press freedom. https://www.smh.com.au/national/i-was-deputy-leader-of-the-liberals-the-party-i-served-has-lost-its-way-20220502-p5ahuz.html

Slavitt was an adviser to US Presidents.

Evening chat at home. me: hey, Mike Cannon-Brookes is worth $20 billion. wife: hmm, actually you know he's pretty cute. me: look at that beard, it's so thin and wispy you can see his chin through it. wife: hmm, yes. $20 billion.

56 Covid deaths in Oz today. 96 over the past 2 days. But we can all have fun again. Except those 96 people and their families.

How it started: https://youtu.be/KTjlkEEP8Pg How it's going (pic).

Rumours of an absolutely explosive story about Josh Frydenberg, about to drop.

I mention it. The times we live in, that this isn't even an issue in the election campaign, and for most people I talk to. The world is completely stark raving mad.

Here’s the 2022 summary for Australia. A bus load of Australians dead every single day, since Christmas.

Maybe it’s an optical illusion, but ‘taking personal responsibility’ for Covid, the government’s Covid strategy, sure looks the same as ‘doing nothing at all about Covid’.

On personal responsibility, what's that in your life, for Covid? What do you do?

Yesterday the PM called basic checks and balances on political power 'public autocracy'. He's been running the (Trump) line that once somebody is elected, they have a 'mandate' to do anything they like. This is what happens when we don't do basic civics education, people have honestly no idea how a country is run. What the PM is describing as governance is actually corruption.

70 deaths already this week, in NSW. 4 days to go. Hey who remembers when we tried to save lives, as well as businesses and footy games?

At least 11,000 people in NSW have now caught Covid more than once. Catching it doesn't make it go away.

People vote for this.

Please spend 30 seconds on this? And share.

Depp v Heard. Can’t really attribute blame here, it seems totally dysfunctional on both sides. Not sure why Depp dresses like a gangster in a trial also dealing with domestic violence.

There’s probably not a better contrast between two understandings of Australia, the land. Aboriginal people didn’t use fences, instead they cultivated the land in a way they knew animals would love, to attract them. Fences would have stopped the animals being able to move around. They seduced the animals, giving them lush environments. So it was a win for both sides, some were killed for food, but many weren’t and the landscape was stunning. Our farming? Fences, animals owned as property. Guns and poison needed to kill any other animal that dares to try to enter the fenced land. Land that is often degraded, eroded, and lacking any variety of fauna or flora.

Prominent independents have had fake corflutes like this one plastered all over their electorates today. It’s under investigation. If found, the perpetrators face jail time, or a $11,000 fine as a minimum. How pathetic this country is becoming.

Both the US and UK are prey to destructive libertarian (‘freedom’) politics. I reckon the way they’re structured helps explain why. If you look at the electoral regions in both the UK and US, there are so many of them. The US has its 50 States and over 89,000(!) local government bodies (and elected officials in areas we don’t have elections like the judiciary), and the UK has hundreds of parishes, wards, boroughs etc. (no States). Australia of course has only the 8. It’s pretty obvious when you look at the maps that the US and UK have a lot of little islands of contested territory. Lots of tribes with their own powerful self-interests. Australia’s very few huge States on the other hand are mostly arbitrary lines on a map, with no real connection to the localities where people live. I think that unifies us much more easily, there’s not the same passionate territorial politics.

And another.

Louisiana is legislating to make use of IUDs illegal. Women who use them will be able to be charged with murder.

I finally figured out that ‘endemic’ means ‘kill lots of people, and more all the time.’

Most modern conservative parties are coalitions. This is because they don’t actually believe in anything much, except protecting the interests of those who are doing well. That’s how the parties originate, as a collection of aggrieved groups. The LNP for example began in the 20th century when wealthy landowners (Nat) and industrialists (Lib) joined forces to oppose the growing workers movements and their party, the ALP. The Libs and Nats agree on almost nothing. Except that they want working people to not be in charge. This is why these coalitions can easily be fractured, as we’re seeing right now, and picked apart. Because the things politicians in a coalition are against (and there are lots of things they’re against) rarely have much connection with each other. So the Libs and Nats are constantly at war, but also within the Libs and Nats people are always at war too.

Men are very simple creatures.

Another treat for the ‘ABC is biased’ people.

It’s taken a long time, but this story is slowly breaking through the live with the virus fantasy.

Worldwide children are experiencing a surge in hepatitis cases, some needing liver transplants, and some dying. It’s extraordinary watching the frantic attempt by Covid minimisers to deny Covid is responsible. The latest 2 hypotheses they have? Dogs causing it. And my personal favourite - children who were raised by stay-at-home mums have some ‘immunity debt’ (there is no such thing). Put a mask on your kids. Don’t worry that nobody else is doing it, we’re not in high school any more. Protect them, the government won’t.

Happy Birthday Ed!

Every single home renovation or building show I’ve watched in the past 20 years has removed fly screens from homes. I think that’s a terrible mistake that will have to be fixed at some point, with climate change already escalating mosquito-borne disease.

The great con of conservative pay-media is that it has no viewers. SKY call itself the ‘voice of the people’. Barely 40,000 people watch it. The let it rip Covid crowd always talk about ‘this is what the people wanted’, it’s the same bluff. It’s what their people wanted, all 40,000 of them. Elections are already telling a different story.

The big still to be told story of Covid will be Long Covid. Tens of millions with ongoing chronic illness, possibly for the rest of their lives.

To my American friends, we have spare rooms if you need them :)

Who remembers the Banking Royal Commission? The government doesn’t. The banks certainly don’t. They spent the pandemic gouging the public to new levels of greed. I’m sorry if you’re carrying large debt right now. Very, very difficult times coming. This is the same pattern that repeats throughout the centuries, driven by the finance industry. It’s why several religious traditions historically banned money lending.

If politicians had to pass even the basic due diligence you need at a job interview, many would be unemployed. Who remembers Pauline snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef, to prove it isn’t damaged by climate change? Snorkelling in one tiny spot. The Great Barrier Reef is 30% bigger than the UK.

A not atypical CO2 reading on a plane before it takes off. Less than 800ppm is considered OK ventilation, less than 600 excellent, outside air is just over 400. You won’t get me in a plane until the pandemic is over.

Exactly what he's doing with Katherine Deves. She's a microphone he uses to dog-whistle to the wider public.

Today's Covid update is brought to you by yesterday's Covid update. And the day before. Etc.

Like Pauline, Clive claims to be independent. But he's really a Liberal, Pauline even began as one. Clive's function is to vacuum up all the angry people who want to vote 'against the system', and deliver them to the LNP as preferences. As he did in the last election, with an $80 million spend.

Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, his look at the ‘far Right’, is compulsive viewing. To me it shows how boys have been left behind in our thinking. Young men have been weaponised by politics, because they lack role models, leadership and guidance. Barely any of them see a male teacher, for example, until high school. Some of the most vile nastiness of modern politics and social media is young men. They’re predominantly the ‘trolls’.

I see all sorts of theories as to why Western democracies seem to be a complete mess. But to me you can trace their decline to one point. That point we stopped building things. For 50 years China has built pretty much everything we use. The Romans knew that building things was the key to all peace and propsperity. Not really because it just gives you stuff, but because to plan, build and maintain takes social cooperation, across generations. Today China and Germany, for example, remember that. They’re both ‘economies’ that build things. Also the most successful economies in the world. Meawhile other countries are a sewer of ‘opinions’, unhitched from any collective social effort towards creating anything

Prince Charles opening the UK parliament, describing Boris Johnson's cost of living 'levelling up' plan, from a gold throne. 'Levelling up' means they're not going to make obscenely rich people poorer, they're going to try to make obscenely poor people obscenely rich too. (Of course they're not going to do that, but it's a nice slogan to make people stop asking.) I advise assuming every slogan coming out of conservative politics is really saying 'get back to work peasants.'

I always like to mention that the Australian Government copies pretty much everything the UK government does.

This is WITH the 20 cent cut to fuel excise. Electric and hybrid car sales are going gangbusters. Reality always catches up with spin.

Maybe we shouldn't be letting kids catch Covid, hey. What do we hear from Australian leaders and most Australians? Nothing. Sending them all to school to get infected. Photos of what you did on holiday or the weekend have no proven effectiveness against SARS-hepatitis.

51 people died of Covid in Australia yesterday. 57,637 (that we know of) were infected. Can somebody help me - 'living with Covid'. Is that the rampant growth in infections, or deaths? Or both?

If paying people $1 more an hour breaks the Economy, you see up close and personal what the Economy is, and why it was invented.

Still one of my favourite posts. I re-post it today on my birthday because getting ‘older’ is really getting younger. We’re never as old as we are on the day we’re born.

One of the election slogans is ‘the quiet Australians’. Vote for the quietest Australians. The 7513 dead from Covid, with a couple of hundred more each week. They’re very quiet. As are we, about them.

I fear for Lithgow. This will have nothing to do with Greenies. Cold, hard, brutal economics will shut the coal industry, and much faster than we think.

We're still the 'Commonwealth of Australia". I think people think that's just a name. It's not, it means what it says- all 'wealth' is considered to be common, meaning you need a full society to generate it. There is no such thing as isolated pockets of wealth. But the shift is on, as this article says, to create a permanent class of working poor here, as in the US and soon the UK. Who will be told they're not wealthy only because they don't work hard enough. Nobody is as lazy as the rich. They don't work. We can't let this ridiculous nonsense take root here. https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-must-avoid-entrenching-a-us-style-working-poor-20220511-p5akbe.html

'Live with the virus' requires health care and other core services to run at more than 100% capacity, 365 days of the year. This bullshit can't go on.

Childcare is an election issue. If you want to know why it got so astronomically expensive, it's always the same reason. It was privatised, as with aged care. Because the private sector is always more 'efficient' (at screwing people).

I know I'm mostly talking to myself, but when we launched 'living with the virus', did we think that meant it becoming the leading cause of death in Australia? Not one politician mentions it, they want us to pretend it's all over. What we're doing is criminal and immoral, isn't it? Anybody?

Most jobs aren’t about producing things. Most jobs are pointless, society produces so much already that there’s very little need for many of us to work. A job is the way those with most of society’s wealth ration it out to the rest of us. They hold the wealth, and you have to ‘work for them’ to get any of it. This is also why conservative politicians talk so much about ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’, it’s not about society needing to go back to producing things, we have way more than we need already. It’s about restoring control over the flow of wealth. They hate cash ‘handouts’, such a revealing word - who is ‘handing out’ the cash? It’s society’s wealth, it doesn’t belong to the wealthy. And they hate welfare, because that also removes some of their control over who gets a share of society’s wealth. Why the cashless welfare card is popular with them, it gives them back more control.

Democracy is not, and never has been, ‘majority rules’. That lie is what’s used to justify killing over 200 people per week right now.

The internal polling is telling ScoMo he's facing an apocalypse. And just for the record, right now is the WORST the pandemic has been. It's not over, I'm so over people acting as if it's over.

The US has had 100,000 new Covid cases per day, for the past 3 days. They clocked a million dead this week. In the past we might have gasped at this. But yesterday Australia, with less than 10% of the population of the US, had nearly 58,000 new infections. We're the new country people gasp about. Per capita that would be the same as the US having over 600,000 new cases, in a day.

With climate change on path to incinerate much of the planet, those who made fun of Lithgow for this are going to be our amusement, as they burn. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5806199/Lithgow-two-hour-drive-Sydney-Australias-coldest-city-making-chillier-Hobart.html?fbclid=IwAR12-s-Ee_J3CtPA_sxvVQqyuF_QvVGQd-Xd7k6NZtYlIaWPBRrDTI68JoA#v-2656192570498237552

Chinese ship the S.S. Election seen off the West coast.

"As one of the countries with the worst transmission rates of COVID-19 in the world, we urgently need a change of mindset to one where reducing the number of cases matters. We must reduce transmission rates, and to do this with minimal disruption to normal life. It can be done. But we must want it." https://www.smh.com.au/national/complacency-over-covid-is-costing-us-20220513-p5akzg.html

Somebody captioned this one “Man of the People”.

This new locum recruitment logo could really take off.

Right now may be a time to check what your superannuation investment strategy is. Not seeing those high growth strategies doing well for some time to come. The financial industry will tell you it’s about having a long-term view. As Keynes famously said, in the long-term we’re all dead. Over the long-term all investment returns are unsustainable, they’re exponential growth. We never do much better than the interest rate on a basic savings account, longer term.

“Doctors at some of Sydney’s biggest hospitals say emergency departments are so overcrowded that patients are being treated in corridors and ambulance trolleys, as the number of ambulances on the city’s roads at night has fallen below minimum levels most days this year. One senior emergency specialist warned that bed block - when hospitals are clogged with patients they do not have the beds to admit - was the “worst it has been” in decades.” (SMH) 86 dead so far again in NSW, this week, with 2 days to go. No sign yet that this tsunami of corpses is penetrating the concrete skulls of the live with the virus folk.

Some were a bit annoyed with the idea that car mechanics will mostly become extinct. (But they will.) I expect them to be equally annoyed with the coming extinction of manual vehicles. We mostly won’t even have gears.

I thoroughly research everything I post. There’s a reason some experts now call Covid ‘airborne AIDS’. A public health catastrophe, we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg.

Vote for a change to this disaster. I can guarantee you a vote for the LNP is a vote for a continued criminal refusal to do the basic public health work we’ve been doing for 150 years. The second they said a pandemic was a matter of ‘personal responsibility’, they should have been removed from office. It remans the most outrageous failure of governance in modern Australian history. Nothing about Left or Right or any of that rubbish, it’s the hijacking of Australian politics by libertarian extremists. Many in the LNP feel the same way. We’re looking at potentially generations of high morbidity and mortality in Australia, as are the UK and US.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Sam :)

lol. Also makes me more determined than ever to convince people that much of the Australian accent has its origins in our encounters with Aboriginal Australia. So much of what we call being Australian we got from Aborigines, we don’t even realise it.

Lol. Also more proof of my theory that much of the Australian accent happened because of our encounters with aborigines. So much of what we call the aussie way of life I think we actually got from them, we just forgot.

I’d always assumed funky cool came out of the US in the 1960s/70s. American woodcocks may beg to differ.

Where empty-nesters are encouraged to sell up their big, expensive homes, and then buy the small, less expensive homes that first homebuyers are trying to buy. Banking the several hundreds of thousands in change in a new election-bribing tax avoidance scheme for the boomers.

The 2 major policies announced by the PM today. 1) Young people gutting their tiny super to buy overpriced houses. 2) Old people boosting their astronomical super by selling the overpriced houses, to the young people.

Let’s hope all the One Nation voters in Hawke use these.

Watch the UK, we follow their Covid ‘strategy’ (i.e. do nothing). Covid is like HIV, Long Covid is like AIDS. The AIDS part of Covid is ramping up now. Like AIDS it will carry on for generations.

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal is the body that reviews government decisions. Under the current government, 40% of its members are now politically appointed. The government is now reviewing its own decisions. Just in case you were still pondering your vote.

Megan is an actuary. In my experience you won't get a better risk assessment than the one actuaries provide, because it's tied to understanding insurance and other financial losses.

Superb. Damien is bureau chief for the Australian office of the NY Times, now living in Sydney with his family. The same guy who realised what was unique about Australia through his kids joining the local surf lifesaving club. What he found is (I think) another thing we likely picked up in part from indigenous Australians, without even realising. The thing the modern LNP is trying to destroy by importing an American and UK political libertarianism of 'aspiration'. Which will destroy Australia, as it is destroying them.

#FireTheLiar

There is no shortage of houses in Australia. No lack of ‘supply’. That’s just another myth invented by the property industry. The problem is a minority owning multiple dwellings each, as ‘investment properties’, while the majority have none.

There’s no greater threat to Australia as we know it than the relentless attack by libertarians, mostly from the US, on how we live. They do it mostly through social medial, it’s a global brainwashing and propaganda campaign. Look at them trying to introduce the Trump ‘election was stolen’ bullshit into our election. Several of my close friends now parrot this rubbish, like drones. You may be surprised how many of your own friends and family have succumbed to this. It’s a toxic cancer on our democracy.

And again, watch the UK. Where they go, we follow. A lateral flow test is what we call a RAT.

The UK has been deliberately infecting its people for most of the pandemic. The live with the virus folk would have us believe this should mean they now have a lovely ‘wall of immunity’, to get back to normal life. How many cycles of this stupidity do we have to move through before people see they’ve been sold a pup? Would catching HIV multiple times make it go away? Incredible that people believe this nonsense.

Have a read so you can laugh every time somebody says the answer to get housing prices down, is to build more houses. Another prime example of political lobbying becoming a slogan, becoming 'common sense', becoming policy. What happens when you sack the officials whose job it is to screen out lobbyists. https://thefifthestate.com.au/innovation/residential-2/the-truth-behind-the-housing-supply-nonsense/

The AIDS part of Covid biting. Still not seeing much evidence most people realise the magnitude of the disaster they're living inside.

Mild in children. Like a dad joke, only stupider.

Average Covid deaths per day in Australia is now 42. For any flu season this would be considered a national emergency. And: - notice the trend, the number is still climbing - it's 5 months of relentless death, with no sign of slowing - this is with most of the population vaccinated, and the vaccines are waning fast. We're in la-la land here people. Mass, deadly delusion.

20% of Australians surveyed said they’ve gone to work while knowingly infected with Covid. Don’t blame them, they have to eat. Blame idiot governments who let Covid rip.

Michelle is one of the most experienced political journalists still working in Australia. She sees the insanity of where we currently are, because she lived through times that weren’t so completely bonkers.

Popular music isn’t a hotbed of smart. Eric’s finest work since his expletive-laden racist rant on stage in the 1970s.

The phone of a nurse working at one Melbourne hospital. If you’re out socialising like there’s no tomorrow, taking no Covid precautions, you and our governments are the reason nurses and others are drowning in sick people. Ever stop to think that it’s not just about you? That it could be the person you pass the virus onto whose life may be permanently changed, even ended? Covid waves don’t happen TO us, we’re not surfers. We ARE the waves, in our behaviours.

Latest polling suggests the election could go right down to the wire. Unbelievable, as it was last time, that such lethal incompetence as the current government is currently even in the ballpark to win. It will be a ballot on whether we're irreversibly heading down the same destruction of society rabbit hole as the US and UK, if the LNP win, it's that serious. I suspect many vote for the LNP because they always have, and think they're voting for the LNP of 30 years ago. They're really not, it's been hijacked by libertarian pirates. It's much more Trump than it is Menzies.

Thanks to Julia for finding this one. This morning's press conference, with the PM. Claiming all the Covid deaths in Australia are people 'with Covid', rather than them dying from Covid. That's a disgusting lie. Covid deaths reported daily are people who have died FROM Covid. In the same press conference the PM said he plans to do nothing, not one thing, to address the astronomical infection and death rates. That the answer is to live with Covid without 'fear'. How we feel about Covid doesn't make the slightest difference to what it does.

For those who opted for the horse wormer instead of a vaccine.

The Prime Minister is relentlessly flogging his ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ libertarian shtick. This is the cancer eating away at the US and UK, destroying them. What libertarians can’t understand is that the utopian world they dream of, of free individuals unshackled by government rules and regulations, is the world we all lived in BEFORE we had governments. It’s WHY we invented governments, to free us from that world.

Monkeypox (love the name, though it doesn’t come from monkeys) outbreak now, and a puzzling one. Nobody knows where it’s coming from. Notice not one person is suggesting we ‘live with’ monkeypox, they’re shutting it down as fast as they can. Covid is a much more deadly disease, and we all go out to pubs and breathe it in every week, having a jolly good time. Because we’re stupid.

The problem with democracy as we do it is, that it pays no attention to basic competence. If you go for a job interview or have a performance appraisal at work, how good you actually are at the job is critical. If you fail on those, you're toast. Populist politics though means that you can have no idea what you're doing, and still win, so long as you're popular. (This is how going to high school works, if it feels familiar.) Take the current election. On just about every measure of good governance and public administration, this government is the worst in Australian history. It's irrelevant what party it is, these are objectively measurable things. But it will have little impact in the election. It's like hiring the most popular people to work for you, even though they don't have a clue what they're doing. Democracy won't survive. It's already in free fall, worldwide.

That it took so long to approve this is testament to the forces of sheer bloody-minded stupidity that are increasingly running the country.

People who’ve had Covid may have damaged immune systems, their T cells compromised. (What HIV does to you, that causes AIDS.) So instead of getting immunity, as the politicians say, their immune system becomes irreparably damaged. They may not know about that for some time, the virus stays inside them and acts as a continuous wrecking ball. This may be why monkeypox is now appearing out of the blue, in a way never seen before. If you think catching Covid is like catching a cold or the flu, change that thinking fast. This happens just as much even to people who get ‘mild’ infections.

And on monkeypox (just love saying it), it’s popping up super fast worldwide now. Smallpox vaccination provides some protection against it, but we haven’t used those vaccines for over 40 years. And we never used them much in Australia anyway. If you’re ‘living with Covid’, monkeypox can’t wait to meet you.

All Australians should read this book. Damien is the Oz bureau chief for the NY Times. He brought his family to live here and discovered something really profound about us that I think many don’t even see. He knows us better than we do. Our politics is now dominated by US libertarian rubbish, about individual freedom, aspiration, the Economy etc. Cave lived all that in the US, and would never want it again after he discovered the unique magic of Australia. The tragedy is, that unique magic is disappearing every day, and foreigners like Cave see it more than Australians do.

Another Liberal telling people how it is. Tells you this isn't about party loyalties, it's about basic competence and corruption. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/federal-election-2022/2022/05/20/morrison-government-same-old-julia-banks/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020220520_with%20Tag

Those complacently allowing themselves to catch Covid should remember, it took HIV 8-10 YEARS to turn into AIDS in people, after their infection.

Scientists are now almost certain multiple sclerosis, a terrible and often fatal disease, is caused by earlier infection with glandular fever. Mononucleosis. Many of us have had it. It can take years to turn into MS, just as HIV takes years to turn into AIDS. I mention this as part of the Covid stuff because there are already early signs, as I've posted about, that it does terrible damage to your immune system, much worse than glandular fever. We're putting our entire societies at risk of terrible long-term disease. Do everything you can to avoid infection, wear a bloody mask for starters, and avoid crowds, particularly indoors.

For Lauren. And for others to note, I think.

Dum di dum.

More from the infectious disease hotline. What happens when you 'live with' an immune system-smashing virus. Remembering we're following the UK in our 'strategy'...

There’s one simple logic to all elections I think. It’s not about personalities, or even about policies. We live in a representative democracy. We delegate problems to our representatives to solve. We don’t want to deal with them, we pay them to do that. Governments change when those problems come back into our lives, when they start to leak out of politics. If you want to know if a government is about to change, sense whether people feel political problems are leaking into their personal lives. If they are, the government is toast.

I’m guessing no matter what else happens in the election today, Calare will get another term of Nationals doing nothing for Lithgow. Look at the latest NBN upgrades, as with the original rollout, Lithgow isn’t even on the list. Also nothing on transition of coal mining and power generation for the local community. Promising both of those will continue is an embarrassing lie. The Economy will close them, not Greenies. Bizarre that an old coal mining town, the foundation of industry in Australia, votes for the party of wealthy rural landowners who were set up to oppose everything miners stood for.

Saw Domicron interviewed at a polling booth this morning in NSW. One of the architects of live with the virus. Nobody asked him about the over 300,000 infections in Australia this week, and over 300 dead. He goes to the polls in less than 12 months. Never forget.

How do you spell desperate?

Election day musings. No other country in the world has an election day like ours, it’s like Grand Final Day but even bigger. It’s really hard to describe what’s unique about Australian society. But I think there is a word which captures it a bit - communitarian. (Not to be confused with communism or socialism, entirely different ideas.) Communitarianism means having a community basis for your society. You can see that at every level of Australian life. Sporting clubs, for weekend sports (amazingly non-existent in many parts of the world). Surf lifesaving clubs. Clean Up Australia Day. FireFight for bushfires. RFS firefighting. Etc. etc. Elections (one of the few societies where everybody votes.) Doing things as a community, as simple as that. A community is defined less by geography or maps than by shared interests and activities. I think this is a result of both our convict past and our encounters with indigenous Australians over the centuries. It has to be learned, practiced. The reason I attack political libertarians and other modern conservatives is that they try to transplant UK and US political ideas into this communitarian society. All that rubbish about individual freedom, replacing communities with ‘economies’ and de-personalised ‘markets’. Those ideas will destroy Australian life, if they take off. The damage has started.

At this stage, there’s no more LNP government. Just not clear what it will be instead, most likely a huge Labor-friendly cross bench, that will push the Labour decisions in directions that should be superb for the country.

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party. Here’s why, as I see it. For the past 30 years John Howard, Tony Abbott and now Scott Morrison have tried to remake the LNP as the Australian version of the US Republicans and UK Tories. The problem is, that’s fundamentally at odds with how Australia itself works. Australia is a pragmatic, communitarian society, unique on Earth. We work as a community to pragmatically solve problems, not strive individually to become prosperous, individually. A common-wealth. John Howard used the unprecedented propsperity we experienced during his time, due to an orgy of global debt driven by cheap money leading to a mining and housing boom (none of it of his making), to change the culture of the Liberal Party completely. Towards that US/UK libertarian attack politics model. People pay little attention to this sort of stuff, if times are good, and they were under Howard, because of those global debt-fuelled changes. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison continued that shift. Many prominent Liberals resigned in disgust. Last night independents and the ALP stole all of the blue ribbon seats which are Liberal heartland. Everything those old Liberal seats stand for has been trashed for years by Howard, Abbott and Morrison. The ‘base’ of the Liberal Party they talk about is really just the fewer than 50,000 Australians who watch SKY News. Now they’ve lost that heartland, and the moderate Liberals who used to represent it. The man who will probably now lead them, Peter Dutton, will have the task of rebuilding that core Liberal vote. The problem there is he’s even more of a warrior for the ideas that have now gutted the Liberal heartland than the leaders he’s following. It’s hard to see how the Liberal Party survives.

Chris is a renowned international journalist who has had enough. Worth reading his thoughts today.

A weekend of political Ratsak. Clearing out the vermin.

One sneaky word that needs to be banished from Australia is the idea of a political ‘base’. US attack politics, noxious rubbish. As if a politician has a special group of people they relate to and look after specially, and then everybody else is more at arm’s length. Even in my earlier life political parties didn’t think like that in Australia, if you ran for parliament, your ‘base’ was the entire Australian community. Not because everybody agreed with everybody else, but the clear assumption was there that what you do impacts the entire community. Not special deals for some subset ‘base’. We need to bring that back.

In this pic of Wang from 1966, the trees stripped bare interested me. And also what looks like a naked person riding a horse (circled).

The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed suburbs and it takes specific ‘events’ to try to make them all feel part of the same community. But Lithgow has changed little since 1952 when this footage was taken, that sense of community is in its DNA. People in town often have very little in common, but it doesn’t matter to that feeling of community. You just feel it here, it’s very hard to define. Partly it’s living in a valley, which prevents too much physical spread, and you can still walk to pretty much anywhere in town from anywhere else in not much time, which is more important I think than we often realise. But it’s more than that, I can walk the streets of Bathurst or Orange for example and not feel that same sense of community, except in abstract ways. I grew up in Bathurst and didn’t feel it. In Lithgow you feel like you’re a Lithgow person first, and an individual second. The community gets into you somehow, it defines you. This footage also a bit special for me, because my dad is in there somewhere. Lithgow was the first place he lived when he came to Australia, and he described attending the Marjorie celebrations to me before he died.

You get those moments when you enjoy being older. Like when your mother tells you you've had a smallpox vaccination, unlike most in Australia. With monkeypox around, that's nice to have.

Happy Birthday Lib :)

Happy Birthday Simon :)

Today's kitchen tip. Don't cut up chokos with bare hands.

Kellie Ann, take note.

Before there was a vaccine for chickenpox, people were encouraged to 'live with' it, even holding parties to get all their kids infected. Now every person who has had chickenpox (myself included) is at risk of developing shingles later in life, even multiple times. When you 'live with' a virus, it lives inside your body and waits to re-emerge. More than 30% of people who had chickenpox will get shingles. Shingles really should be called 'living with chickenpox'. Just as MS is 'living with mono'. It's not a good idea to live with any nasty virus.

The ALP has hit 76. Majority government.

Remember all the 'Dictator Dan' stuff? It's cost Josh and others their seats. Melbourne and Sydney are a sea of Labor red and independent teal. The live with the virus folk are tumbling like dominoes, as I thought they would. Perrottet will be next. A tiny minority of freedumb loons made all the Dictator Dan noise, driven by far-Right groups in the US.

Covid damages the immune system. A friend's experience in the past few months. - his entire family caught Covid - his entire family caught influenza - his entire family caught whooping cough. All in the space of only 2-3 months.

A large chickenpox outbreak in the Netherlands seems almost certainly to have actually been monkeypox. I’m sure our Premier will keep the schools open anyway, so coffee shops and gyms don’t go broke. Because that’s what matters. Are people sensing it yet, the scale of the catastrophe living with Covid is?

How did we become so dumb? When did it happen? Is it Covid brain injury?

I think it’s a mistake for anybody to claim the election victory as a victory for their interests or group. It was a victory for the Australian community, it was that community reasserting itself as the main focus of our politics. That isn’t mutually exclusive with it being a victory for women, as well, for example. It definitely was that, because they are marginalised in our communities. But we need to stop with tribalism, our teams at war with other teams.

Two bits of Australian political trivia. 1) The ALP is called the 'natural party of government' in Australia, because it's the only party who's ever won government alone. It's only ever been defeated by coalitions of various enemies. 2) The LNP in Queensland is not a coalition. It's a single party, called the Liberal National Party of Queensland.

It costs about $400 million to run a federal election. This one might crack $500 million.

I wonder if NSW Health staff have 'living with the virus' parties, and pin up pictures of Dom on their bedroom walls.

Very glad to have mine vaccinated this year. Let's hope the vaccine matches the circulating strain. "At least 10 per cent of children admitted to hospital with flu will be so sick that they need intensive care," NSW Chief Paediatrician Dr Matt O'Meara said.

Listening to an ex-head of the Commonwealth Department of Health on the way home, absolutely scathing about the outgoing government’s ’Covid denialism’. Almost nothing is being done, and infections and deaths are at ridiculous levels. He said staff in the federal department will be jubilant the government is gone, freeing them up to actually fight the pandemic. The veneer of spin and bullshit is finally dropping away. I’m still disgusted that government killed hundreds per week, and hardly anybody said anything about it.

Jon is a Canadian author who writes frequently about the pandemic. Here I think he nails the ‘happy-busy-good’ idiocy that is the attitude we’re all supposed to adopt while we become repeatedly infected, like cattle in a feedlot.

A public service announcement. Because the NSW Government certainly won't tell you.

Another public service announcement. Because Dom is making sure monkeypox isn't in the news either. This from the UK.

So many modern jobs are people constantly reminding senior people to do the work they've promised to do, because above a certain pay grade they're not competent enough to even organise their own jobs. Work that goes to them in the first place because they've gutted everybody else's authority to do anything. *waves to CSU*

Not sure how many more examples of ‘living with the virus’ we need to come to our senses.

Just in case you thought it had all magically gone away. Another 30 dead today, significantly more than those shot dead in a school yesterday in the US. In total 90 already dead this week in NSW alone.

Macca looked eternal for a lot of years. But on this current tour he really does sound like an 80 year old.

I think most of what we call Left v Right politics is really: - young vs old (we live in ageing populations) - urban v regional. As just one example. Guns in America. Mostly a battle of rural America v urban America.

Months ago I predicted a wipeout for the LNP in the federal election. They’ve now had the worst election result since they were formed. I don’t often loop back on my predictions in a told you so way, but here we are. I told you so ;)

It will be interesting to see if people are happy to ‘live with’ lesions full of pus on their faces, torso and genitals.

‘Let’s stay open NSW’. For those who don’t want to go out and get repeatedly infected with a brain-eating virus, there’s ‘mental health’ support. If you want to avoid being infected with a lethal virus, you apparently have a mental health problem.

Working from home and learning from home are now (apparently) bad. But DIY healthcare from home, with a potentially fatal disease, is good. This is Australia, 2022. Where public health is run by the business community.

😬

Happy birthday!

Animals are thought of as lacking sentience and intelligence, compared to us. I think that’s just us being arrogant drongos.

It's inspirational to see young, smart and cashed-up Australians calling enough on decades of obstruction to needed change in this country. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/agl-dumps-coal-split-plan-chairman-and-ceo-to-resign-20220529-p5apg4.html

Happy birthday Trace :)

Drive past any farm and you’ll see stock fighting over any tiny bit of shade they can find. I remember people arguing against solar panels because they said they would destroy good grazing land. Just another of a long list of stupidities that the country has had to live through for the past 30 years.

Your age is only superficially how you look on the outside. Really it’s about your cells. A recent study of the effect on cells of people who had been infected by Covid found the ageing of those cells as shown in the table below. Meantime we keep infecting everybody with almost gleeful abandon.

Another ‘told you so’ story. The anti-lockdown, Dictator Dan etc. rubbish was a tiny minority of whingers.

The bigger you make your roads, the more traffic you’ll get. Traffic breeds traffic. No government understands this. Most motorists don’t get it either.

Jon again, talking about our moral collapse, with Covid. About the widespread collapse of common decency. For all of us, not just politicians.

Here’s a story which I promise gets more interesting as it goes along. The ratio of tax paid to GDP in a country. (Stay with me!) GDP is a measure of how much wealth a country produces, usually in a year. Australia’s ratio of tax we all pay, to our total annual GDP, is 22.4%. That’s one of the lowest ratios in the world. Here’s where it gets interesting. If we increased that ratio to 24.4%, we would wipe out our current $1 trillion deficit in just 3 years. At 24.4% that ratio would STILL be one of the lowest in the developed world. But they won’t do it, because conservative politics has spent decades brainwashing us into thinking all tax is theft. Tax is really society choosing how much wealth to hold collectively (in government), and how much privately (in our personal hands). So right now, less than one-quarter of our wealth generated every year is held by us collectively. More than three-quarters of that wealth is held privately. And a huge percentage of that is held in only a very small number of hands. It’s a choice of how society, as a whole, invests its wealth. Not theft by the government of ‘our’ money. Government is us too, we invented it, the people who run it are ordinary people doing a job for the rest of us, that we asked them to do. Nobody is stealing anything. But I reckon having less than a quarter of our annual wealth invested in us as a society is pretty stupid.