June 2022

I’ve run out of words for the disgust I feel about what’s happening in schools.

One of the urban myths I’ve heard from several car enthusiasts now is that around the world there are electric car graveyards, where electric cars are dumped because it’s more expensive to replace the battery than buy a new car. The stories are rubbish. Get over it revheads, the internal combustion engine was always rubbish technology. It’s over. Together with the mechanics who service them.

That look on Brian May’s face at the end here, which says ‘yes people, he really did just sing that note.’

The announcement of free flu shots was driven mostly by sheer, terrified panic at what we’re doing to our healthcare sector. Running it way past the rev limiter, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

I have never known the Australian community to be as sick as it is right now. The amount of infection and other health issues out there is staggering. You can’t do even the most basic, social, work or school thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks. It’s a national disgrace, and nobody is being held to account for it.

As power prices skyrocket, and everything else shoots up in price too, I hope people remember all of this is due to 10 years of total neglect by the now-gone federal government. Absolutely asleep at the wheel, for almost a decade. It will take years to fix it. Their very explicit motto was 'getting government out of peoples' lives'. If people now want the government to fix these things, they have to be prepared to wait while the current government tries to rebuild from the ruins.

I'm sure we can all live with the pus-filled lesions. So long as the pubs and restaurants and gigs stay open.

Perfect example of a press release from a lobbyist (Property Council of Australia in this case, acting for landlords of commercial property), pretending to be a news story. The whole bloody country is run by property developers and other large industries, through their lobbyists.

It’s like having everybody snort asbestos every day, and then waiting a few decades until they all start to drop dead. (Remember HIV takes 8-10 years to develop into AIDS.) Where’s our backbone, our fight to protect our children, ourselves and our societies? Just lemmings walking towards the cliff.

A few years ago I posted here about what seemed to me to be a bit of a crisis in body image, and the huge growth in body modification procedures. I was surprised at the backlash, it seemed this was even more widespread than I thought, and had really hit a nerve. And yet, here we are.

A really superb piece showing more clearly than ever before how the story of the past 30 years has been a story of the reversal of a century of workers’ gains. All very deliberate, forced by conservative governments who managed to stay in power by shifting politics to culture war arguments.

Millions of COVID-19 patients may have an undiagnosed, potentially fatal acute kidney disease, according to a new study. University of Queensland researchers say one in five virus patients admitted to hospital and two in five in intensive care develop acute kidney disease (AKI), a condition where the kidneys fail to filter waste from the blood. University of Queensland PhD candidate and kidney specialist Dr Marina Wainstein says a new study indicates AKI rates in COVID-19 patients could be double that. Doctors test for the disease by monitoring a patient's urination and creatinine levels in their blood, but Dr Wainstein says if a patient's creatinine levels rise before they're hospitalised they may not be diagnosed with AKI.

Australia organises itself around the idea of community. It doesn’t really think much about it (which is a threat I think, we could lose it), it just does it. Other countries use territory and class and rank etc. to organise their countries. We use community, a social thing. At every scale, from our local street through to national events. Maybe the only country to organise itself based on how we live together socially, as a group. It even explains how we use FB, Australian FB is saturated with community-focused posts. The recent election I think was this community focus finally rejecting years of attempts to turn us into a country of aspirational individuals, like the US and UK.

Happy Birthday :)

A day late, sorry, happy birthday!

The saving grace with Murdoch papers is that nobody reads them.

I’m glad to be at an age where pox scars from pus-filled lesions won’t impact my dateability.

Just like the flu.

What’s going on in schools and hospitals is a national emergency. It’s hard to know how this all ends, we’re not the country we once were. This is the result of decades of gutting public services and institutions in favour of the politics of ‘individual aspiration’. Unfortunately these ‘free’ individuals and their tax cuts can’t do surgery or teach classes.

Can society survive $10 iceberg lettuce? A serious question. It’s an indicator of breakdown.

Edward and the others in the Royal Box not really digging the new political Duran Duran lyrics.

Smell really happens in the brain. The brain is just one organ Covid attacks. We’re starting to see that now in a widespread way.

On Tik Tok people are saying that petrol now has no smell. A technological wonder! That loss of smell is brain damage caused by Covid infection. Wear a mask.

Everybody is being urged to get the whole family vaccinated against flu (a very good idea). Meanwhile, childhood vaccinations against Covid stalled months ago with fewer than 50% of kids vaccinated. When the NSW Government let Covid rip, telling people the danger was over.

A shock if you’ve been asleep for about 2 years.

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of Australians has gone unnoticed. We all still thought we were doing well. Only banks were doing well. Jesus driving the moneylenders out of the temple was a metaphor that we once understood.

An ED department in an Australian hospital right now. A major metropolitan hospital. Schools are even worse, some have 35 classes without teachers on a given day. Society is falling apart.

Thinking of stock outside on a night like this. One of the things about sheep is how effective their wool is as an insulator. Notice the snow on them isn’t melted by their body heat, because that body heat never reaches it. The wool keeps it close to them. Farmers have been known to thrust their freezing hands into a sheep’s wool to warm them.

Happy birthday :)

Happy 40th Rob! Have a great day.

I think maybe teachers look at stuff like this and feel the break down of societies faster than others. They see the problems coming, earlier.

We all know about SIDS, with babies. Probably less known is SADS, with adults. And I’m guessing what’s going on here isn’t baffling at all. Our good friend Covid, that we invited to live with us.

I find many people assume Lithgow is lower than Bathurst and the Blue Mountains, in elevation terms. That it’s ‘in a hole’. (For the geographically challenged Lithgow is in a valley. Like alpine towns around the world.) In fact Lithgow is over 400m higher above sea level, than Bathurst. Lithgow is actually higher than both Cooma and Jindabyne. It’s also higher than all of the Blue Mountains towns. See below. When you drive to the Blue Mountains from Lithgow, it’s a downhill drive. It may not feel it, but your fuel tank will tell you. It’s also what makes Lithgow Australia’s coldest city, on average. That ‘on average’ will make it one of the places everybody wants to live, as climate change worsens, believe me. 1140m - Lithgow 1113m - Oberon 1064m - Mount Victoria 1017m - Katoomba 867m - Wentworth Falls 732m - Lawson 371m - Springwood 164m - Glenbrook

Life is (literally) a big high school. The pandemic proves it. Many prefer illness and dying, to being unpopular.

8 months into 'living with Covid', hundreds still dying every week. 21 just today, in NSW. How many more months of this do people need to call BS? Do they know that NSW Health has asked for compulsory indoor masks and other measures to be returned? Do they know the government said no? 'Following the health advice', remember that? Remember Kerry Chant? Curious why you don't see her any more? Or even the Health Minister? The Premier joked he brought back QR codes but de-coupled them from contact tracing, so effectively they did nothing, to fool people into going out again.

What a joke. They're not even serious, it's politics, not a serious proposal, the reactors they're talking about aren't even available or tested. To think the clowns in the LNP drove Australia's world-leading solar industry offshore, and are still such pricks that they can't admit they stuffed the whole thing up completely.

Coffee on the supermarket shelves in the Ukraine.

Following up on my post yesterday about elevation of various towns in the area, here's the topographical map I'm using, which is incredible fun. Zoom in and out and click at different points to get elevations. The highest occupied land in the Lithgow and Blue Mountains area is (I think) Clarence. Which, for the pedants, is Lithgow. Lithgow also has the highest elevation unoccupied land. Lithgow's train station and main road is in its valleys, not on its ridges, unlike Blue Mountains villages, which are the reverse, and is where their elevation is measured. All of them are lower than Clarence even at their ridges anyway (where very few if any people live), and several suburbs of Lithgow are also higher than 950m . If you take the Bell's Line into the mountains, it's downhill the whole way.

The pollies announced they were shifting away from reporting deaths from Covid, to report 'excess deaths' instead. Excess deaths are deaths above the normal number of deaths expected in a given time period. It was a sneaky move on their part to try to hide the deaths. It hasn't worked.

Another in my series of 'Covid is destroying society, and people are somehow not even noticing'.

The highway between Bathurst and Lithgow tonight was ridiculous. Like Parramatta Road, the whole way. The beginning of the great aussie long weekend. Beats me why so many want to spend that 3rd day sitting in a traffic jam, kind of defeats the purpose.

The Drosera family. Only about 5mm high. Eats ants.

Not a rugby league expert, but I do think a great team will always beat a team only of great players. They should have run the Panthers as the NSW team, for Origin. All of them. Cutting the core out of that team without its normal support players meant it couldn’t fire.

I fear everybody might come first. But here goes. Justin had a ‘mild’ case of Covid in February. Now this. Who can join the dots?

Saw an American reviewer say (correctly) that it was questionable value to pay over $450 for nosebleed seats to see Paul McCartney, whose voice is gone. He sounds like a wrinkly at an aged care home singing happy birthday. The boomers are monetising the live music scene with obscene pricing, just as they’ve done with housing, and every other institution they encountered in their life journey, for personal gain. This was them 60 years ago, changing the world. Ha. And for those who take this personally, this is a demographic and cultural argument. Boomers are as nice as anybody else, it has diddly squat to do with how nice they are as people. Generationally they were iconoclasts, society-smashers. That was fun for a while. Now we’re living in the ruins.

And yet…still nothing changes. No comment and certainly no action from government. Deliberate suppression of any mention of Covid at all, every day. Meantime the public takes little to no responsibility at all either, in the majority. No government responsibility, no personal responsibility. While society collapses.

Yes, seeing a lot of this.

My kids are resilient, I’m proud of that. None of the drama queen anxiety at every tiny hurdle in life’s journey, that is popular now. But even they’re getting tired of having limited social options with the ongoing Covid disaster. We could just say, off you go, have fun. But why would we allow them to be infected with a brain-eating (neurotropic) bat virus? Politicians who tell you it’s like them catching a cold or flu are lying to you. People have no problem believing that politicians lie, but then believe every word they say about Covid.

‘Base load’ power does NOT mean ‘a base amount of energy needed to keep society running’. That’s politicians using slogans to change the facts. Base load power is the amount of power we all need to USE, to prevent having to turn coal-fired power plants off overnight. It’s very expensive and damaging to have to stop and start them regularly. ‘Base load power’ is a measure of how inflexible coal-fired power stations are, it has nothing to do with how much energy society needs at all.

Feb 2022: Justin and Hailey Bieber contract COVID March 2022: Hailey has stroke at age 25 June 2022: Justin has Ramsay Hunt Syndrome at age 28

Relative Julia?

It’s been nearly a century since working hours were last changed across the board, which is ridiculous given how automated the making of many of the things we need now is. It’s time for the 4-day working week. In 1948 we agreed upon a 5-day working week. That’s already back out to 7, we’re going backwards.

I’d genuinely welcome anybody explaining how 2022 isn’t the greatest disaster in our history. ‘Living with’ Covid is not making it go away, it’s what caused this. Those average deaths and infections don’t budge, every single day, 8 months after that idiot slogan became our public health ‘strategy’. People act as if the whole thing is over. Government is corrupted, and won’t save us. Only we can make this stop.

108, that’s a fine innings Alun. Have a great birthday :)

Australia is being literally robbed by fossil fuel multinationals. (Note this is true for coal, as well as gas.) And what do Australians say about it? They attack everybody who tries to build domestic energy capacity to free ourselves from these parasites, as a ‘greenie’. We’re a whole new type of dumb here now.

Lithgow is not unlike most other regional towns or even Oz cities. Some key facts which I think the city needs to come to grips with, to survive, because I think its image of itself is about 150 years old: - the biggest employer and growth industry is health and aged care, and other social and professional services, and they’re all still growing fast - employment in mining and manufacturing has collapsed by several *hundred* percent in only a handful of years - mining is less than 9% of Lithgow’s workforce, and is still going backwards fast - Lithgow’s mines are now mostly owned by Thailand, which also gets nearly all the revenue from them. The money Lithgow gets from the mines is mostly wages, and again that’s now less than 9% of the town’s workforce. Some of my best friends in Lithgow work in the coal industry. I’m as concerned about their future as I am about the town’s future. Mt Piper will also close before 2030, another employer, as will other coal-fired plants in NSW, which is where 40% of Lithgow’s coal goes.

Happy Birthday!

In the last 7 years the world's biggest resource companies have made $138 billion from Australian resources without paying us a single cent in corporate income tax. I paid more tax than those companies. It's time to be smart Australia, we've had a decade of criminal, slogan-driven stupidity. Start with a windfall tax on gas exporters, today. The UK have just done it.

If you're worth $250 million and can't 'live with' Covid, where does that leave the rest of us? I think we know.

Show me the money. What's a nurse earn? "...a full-time GP in Australia earns on average between $200,000 to $350,000 per annum. As we said above, if you get transferred to a rural area, work more shifts during evenings and weekends, try locuming, and complete more procedures, earnings could boost up to $500,000 and more per annum...GPs considering a challenging and rewarding career in areas of workforce shortage and rural areas can often access additional incentives such as relocation assistance, housing allowances, a car or cash sign-on bonuses. This is further enhanced by the General Practice Rural Incentives Programme (GPRIP) through which eligible GPs can access from $12,000 to $60,000 p.a."

Long past time energy production is re-nationalised, like all essential services. Imagine ever thinking putting it out to the private sector was a good idea.

Just sayin'.

'Private industry is more efficient than government' is one of those empty, meaningless slogans designed for numpties who want to avoid thinking about anything. We're living that lie right now, with electricity. Nationalise the lot, kick the rent-seeking private industry parasites out. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/2022/06/14/power-companies-accused-of-engineering-crisis-for-profit/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020220615

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday :)

Another example of how Australia just slept through a disastrous 10 years, under the previous government. We're seriously on track to becoming a third world country. https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/aussie-exposes-problem-with-electric-cars-after-trip-from-canberra-to-sydney-takes-an-entire-day/news-story/d32fa96ee3f90759756a78824f6f8f48

Sanity starting to return. Businesses who can't afford this shouldn't be in business. https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2022/06/15/minimum-wage-increase-3/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020220615

What the pretty pictures mean is: 1) people infected with Omicron get reinfected with Omicron, it doesn't make them immune 2) even with vaccination, infection 'dampens' the immune system i.e. stops it responding to the infection. Or in other words, vaccination and infection, and all permutations thereof, won't stop the pandemic. We have to stop the virus spreading. That means masks, restricting movement and gatherings. All the stuff politicians say 'we can't go back to'. Like we have a choice.

Wow. Boom. Who knew that regulating a basic service was the answer all along. https://www.news.com.au/finance/money/costs/aemo-issues-new-power-outage-warnings-as-electricity-demands-outstrips-generation/news-story/3b0258e5cde0bf6493dbbfe2d611a31d

5 years old, and still a bullseye. RIP John.

The exciting thing is you now don’t have to wait for old age to get Alzheimers. A trip to the pub, a show or a restaurant and it can be yours straight away. ‘Brain-eating bat virus’, I can’t take credit for the joke, because it isn’t a joke.

If the species survives Covid (an open question), what's left will likely be incinerated.

My favourite take on the current energy crisis is "this is why we need more coal-fired power stations". Like the ones currently falling apart and costing a fortune to run, which no business will touch with a stick. A close second is "it's greenies", none of whom have had any real political power in Australia or anywhere in the world, ever.

Have often posted about why I think small business is a major hurdle to a much better Australia. We worship it, unthinkingly. It doesn't have the economies of scale to be a healthy backbone for a society, it's an ideological passion countries have rather than an economic one.

BA.4 and BA.5 hitting NSW, there on the right. Covid's latest trick is called 'imprinting'. Meaning if you get infected with an earlier variant of Covid, it imprints on your immune system. Which sounds great, except it makes your immune system respond to the previous variant, not the one you're now infected with. It then also weakens your previous immunity, from your prior infection. Similar to what measles does, when it wipes your immune memory to lots of other diseases as well. (This includes cancer.) Vaccination + infection (our current 'strategy') doesn't give you better immunity, it lessens it because it stops your immune system responding well to new variants. In a nutshell Covid is like a blender for our immune system. Like HIV.

Trivia time! What’s wrong with this idea?

This is the end of petrol and diesel vehicles. And the comparison is even more dramatic if you use solar rather than ordinary grid power, where the cost to drive 100km drops to $1.28. With current petrol prices, that petrol column is also over $20. Who’s going to pay 10-20 times as much to fuel the car? Nobody.

Again a shame that those here from the past 2 years advocating getting kids back to school no matter the Covid risk have now gone quiet. People forgot that we didn’t allow kids at school for much less serious diseases. But they were sent like lambs to the slaughter, for Covid, a lethal disease. To this day it staggers me people weren’t outraged.

In 1974 NY photographer Daniel Sorine snapped a couple of mimes in Central Park. 35 years later he looked at the negatives and realised one of the mimes was a young Robin Williams.

I discovered in the pandemic that quite a few of my friends have political beliefs straight out of the libertarian ‘freedom’ politics of the US and UK. I also discovered quite a few have been investing in cryptocurrencies. It maybe reinforced that by not talking about our beliefs because we worry about disagreeing, they fly undercover and by the time people who hold them are in serious trouble, it’s too late. The community used to be a test ground for belief, to help people not get led astray.

Good piece, describing the disaster of using the ‘market’ instead of regulation for our energy. The reason the market doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t exist. It’s another name for the ‘Economy’, which also doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale invented by rich people to rationalise why they’re rich and everybody else isn’t.

It’s interesting that peak power usage in NSW is at almost exactly 6pm, every night. I’d have thought it might be a bit later in the evening, from prime time onwards, with heating/cooling etc. Is it maybe that families eat later now, and that’s when all the cooking is at its peak?

This film opened closer to World War 2 than to today.

Joyce is also one of the main border-busters with Covid, which has killed over 7000 Australians since Christmas. Has earned himself over $100m gutting Qantas, which was once the envy of world airlines. You’d be brave to fly them now.

Fun to watch the Vixens getting smashed by the Fever, after they threw the game against the Magpies last week to screw the Swifts.

Orwell often said politics is mostly about language. One of my favourites is one the boy racers of the world use, to argue against speed limits, ‘drive to the conditions’. What it really means is ‘we should be allowed to drive as fast as we like, because we’re wonderfully skilled drivers and won’t crash.’ Basically it’s a recipe to turn roads into race tracks. Speed limits aren’t just about safety, having cars travelling at roughly the same speed also spaces out traffic, whereas ‘driving to the conditions’ bunches it up into repeated traffic jams.

The BA.5 strain of Covid is exploding in NSW. Please pay attention to this, what happens when people get even ‘mildly’ infected. This is why I post the comparisons to HIV, they’re very close. We may be years off seeing the true scale of this disaster.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Can anybody fly a plane?” Living with the virus.

Deaths still going up too, 8 months in. Maybe getting people infected to stop them getting infected was as stupid an idea as it sounds.

Over 1300 people have died of Covid in Australia since the election. In 4 weeks.

I know, more Covid. But people are not being told these things. I've been saying for 2 years we must eliminate this virus circulating in our community. Do not believe people who say it can't be done, they're politicians. It can and must and will be done.

I think being lonely is the only opportunity you get to really understand anything. Loneliness is treated like a condition, that needs fixing. But it’s the only time when you see life as it actually is, not refracted through all of your social and intimate relationships. I don’t think we recognise how much those relationships prevent us seeing things for how they really are, how much they overwhelm our senses and thoughts.

Happy Birthday to you :)

Somebody laughed at me yesterday for wearing a mask. Those who have had Covid and now feel protected, firstly reinfections are now common. And latest research: "Compared to those with first infection, those with reinfection had increased organ system disorders: lung 5.0%, cardiovascular 5.0%, blood disorders 2.6%, fatigue 3.3%, gastrointestinal 2.7%, kidney 1.4%, mental health 12.1%, diabetes 2.2%, neurologic 3.6%". Also: "...those who only had one infection had an increased risk of at least one sequela (side-effect) of 8.4%, two infections 23.4%, and three or more infections 36.3%."

The astonishing thing about the transgender movement is how fast it became mainstream. I think it’s driven largely by social media, which allowed the bypassing of the usual testing process for the ideas through various institutions and public discussions, over an extended time. And the proof of the pudding is in the almost fanatical vitriol any discussion of the ideas attracts, a sure sign of social media heritage. I’m as open-minded as anybody. I’ve looked at the theory behind trans and it’s intrinsically self-contradictory. I suspect people rally behind it because it’s sold as a discrimination issue, so it’s become a social movement almost completely divorced from actual consideration of the content of what people are backing. I’m yet to see one explanation for how a belief system can say sex ≠ gender, while also saying trans = sex at birth not matching assigned gender. Those are mutually contradictory statements. The majority of trans people are also born as men, wishing to identify as women. It’s largely men wishing to claim womanhood for themselves, which attracts hardly any comment. To me it’s disgraceful, that women fought for self-determination for so many generations, only to arrive at a point where men ‘own’ womanhood itself, simply by declaring it. In discussions with people it also seems that many confuse transgender with gender dysphasia. Not the same thing.

Listen to this drivel, she knew it was a lie. Kerry Chant's body language tells us exactly how much horseshit was spewed out at Gladys' daily press conferences. I didn’t see anybody angry about this at the time, as I was. Have lost respect for so many people in this pandemic, and I doubt that respect may ever be restored. Still waiting for the ICAC findings on Gladys.

Hey old fart, happy birthday :)

Today Australia passed an average of 50 Covid deaths per day. And still climbing. Anybody home?

This shows how many people are being reinfected with Covid, in the UK. So they've had Covid before, this is their 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc. infection. Huge skewing to children, because we're sending them to school with almost no protections, in the middle of a pandemic. Covid is feasting on them. If, as seems increasingly likely, SARS2 is like HIV, and the real health issues are several years off (the 'AIDS' part of the illness), we may be decimating the entire next generation. Does anybody remember recommendations that we all go out and catch HIV, as kids? I didn't think so.

It seems to me the common story people in Australia would tell about the pandemic is ‘we locked down for 2 years, then we opened up to live with the virus’. The ABS is here to help. If you look at all of the lockdowns in those 2 years, they’re vastly outnumbered, overwhelmingly, by times where we weren’t locked down. Our Covid story is backwards, it’s political spin. Here’s the real story. We spent 2 years controlling the virus, in the way we’ve controlled viruses for several hundred years. Our lives were pretty free. Then we let it control us. And that’s our life right now. We’re controlled by Covid, and have lost all control over it. All because of one political belief, that public health measures restrict our freedom. Imagine, that people came to believe that.

Most of the core work local governments do had its origins in public health. Providing clean water, removing sewage, collecting and disposing of garbage, approving buildings, administering local parks and sporting facilities, etc. It’s not health as in medicine, it’s the health of the community itself. Local government was created directly in response to past pandemics.

Nobody seems ‘seriously concerned’ about having enormous reservoirs in the hills above Lithgow. Lake Lyell is a man-made lake, ‘pristine beauty’, lol. Gotta keep it pure for the jet skis.

See that bit at the bottom, about zero melanoma deaths? 4 people die daily of melanoma in Australia, and zero is our goal. Zero is also our target for road deaths. 50 die daily of Covid, and our goal is to ignore it completely. Or to say ‘it’s just like the flu’. In the past, if flu had killed 50 people a day for 8 months straight and deaths were still climbing, it would have been declared a national emergency.

I don’t make it up.

The ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ nonsense. (Most of us are in bed and need bugger all energy when the sun doesn’t shine, though it can be windy 24 hours per day.) This is South Australia’s big battery. Some key facts: - it took only 63 days to build, and they since added more batteries because it was so quick and easy - it provides 150 megawatts of instantly-dispatchable (within a fraction of a second) power to the grid - it paid for itself in less than 2 years. On average it takes 7 years to build a coal plant. It provides hardly any ‘dispatchable’ power. And it costs a fortune to run and maintain the whole time it’s in operation.

Ah Peter Collignon, one of the previous government's go-to experts on Covid. You can see why.

A pandemic caused by obscene amounts of travel has now crippled the travel industry. Colour me astonished. The themes I post about often inter-relate, I was very popular posting for years about how our travel culture was going to collapse.

Lots of talk of ‘wage-price spirals’. The fear that paying ordinary working people more will drive inflation. No concern at all about capital-price spirals in housing, for the past 30 years, driving prices higher and higher. Or massive tax cuts to rich people coming in the next few years, income-price spirals, what if they spend it and drive up inflation! (says nobody) At the end of the day there’s always a way to rationalise a minority of people getting most of the money.

Because our Covid strategy (do nothing) has copied the UK for some time, an update on how it’s going there. This is what epidemic diseases will do forever unless you stop them, cycle up and down in waves of illness and death. Covid currently doing it about 4 times every year.

Happy birthday!

105 Covid deaths in NSW this week, a day to go. Australia should hit 10,000 deaths for the pandemic, next week. For the ‘just like the flu’ folk, that’s about two decades of flu deaths. In 2 years.

There have been: - 5160 known cases of Covid in Lithgow. - the real number would be at least twice that - more than 115 of them have been this week.

This is a longitudinal (over time) study of UK people who have been infected with SARS2 (Covid). Their brains were scanned before and after infections. These are predominantly ‘mild’ (non-hospitalised) infections. What they found: - significant reduction in grey matter in the brains (what you think with) - tissue damage to the brain, particularly in the smell and taste areas, and - an overall reduction in brain volume. A brain-eating bat virus. Literally what SARS2 is. But it also damages other organs too, it’s multi-talented. I look around and I see people queuing up to catch it, multiple times. Put a fucking mask on.

Know why 99.5% of adults over 50 carry the virus that causes shingles? Because when they were young, some idiot suggested it was best to ‘live with’ chickenpox. So everybody was infected, deliberately. Ringing any bells?

Posted here before a similar reduction in heart disease risk, with flu vaccination. Most of our chronic diseases may turn out to be caused by infectious disease. DIseases like cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis etc. may be as contagious as the common cold, because they’re caused by earlier infection. Covid will be next, and we’re already seeing some of the chronic conditions it may cause in the heart, brain and kidneys.

AIDS is a 3-Act play, normally over 10-12 years. We’re in Act 1 of Covid.

Updated the numbers.

I’m no expert in League, but I’m sure I said after that first game ‘just put Penrith in the blue jerseys, that’ll do it’.

Anything you might have heard or believed about catching Covid to 'get it over with', forget and ignore immediately. Getting infected won't make you immune, some overseas are on their 4th and 5th infections, in 2 years. And this virus is nothing AT ALL like a cold or flu, so ignore that as well. It's like repeatedly infecting yourself with hepatitis, HIV or tuberculosis. You're potentially taking years off your life.

Remember the people who said we had to let the virus rip, to save the Economy? And the people who said 'um, the Economy is just people'? Guess who was right.

As people now start to become re-infected with Covid, be aware that the new strains, BA.4 and BA.5, appear to be both much more dangerous (doctors I know reporting intubations firing up again), and also as contagious as Omicron. It’s a lethal cocktail.

I’ll use Lithgow as an example. The idea that Covid will become ‘endemic’. The term was first used to describe out of control disease in poor countries, that we couldn’t be bothered helping. Just as we often say crime is endemic in some neighbourhoods, that we don’t want to fix. It means out of control disease. Politicians have tried to make us think it means disease that is like the seasonal flu we experience each year. Seasonal flu is…seasonal. Outside winter you hardly see it. You get a small peak every year, in winter. But look at the graph, for Covid. We’re into our 7th month of it spreading and killing with Omicron, and it’s not going down. It’s an epidemic pattern, not seasonal. It may continue like this forever, unless we stop it (smallpox for example killed in epidemic waves for centuries.) We have to stop it spreading. The vaccines won’t do that, though they’re vital to the battle. We have to stop people becoming infected.

40 dead today. That was the national daily average until just a week or so ago. Now NSW alone is that number. Ffs people, look at what's going on. Give up the charade that normal life has returned. Save lives, maybe even your own.

54 people have died of flu in Australia, in 2022. 7135 people have died of Covid. 'Just like the flu.'

Look at what the pandemic did to Australian population growth. No immigration. Some might cheer that on, but it's worth remembering our own population is ageing very badly, and without immigration there's nobody to do a lot of the work. As we've discovered in the pandemic as well.

Thanks @[1112555254:2048:Dan]. Read this people, we’re following the UK Covid strategy (do nothing) to the letter. In the UK they’re seeing how that ends, and it’s a disaster of unprecedented proportions.

I see the toxic positivity online, can feel the desperation behind it, people trying to pretend everything is fine and normal when in fact the whole place is falling apart. As if posting happy things will make the bad things go away, and we can all live in this positivity cocoon, away from life’s troubles. It reminds me of research on stress. People do everything they can to try to ‘relieve’ stress, to ‘relax’. But that will always inevitably fail, if you don’t fix the situation that’s causing the stress. And the same research actually says something more, that the easiest way to fix the problem is to stop seeing it as a problem. Life has challenges, always, what we as rich nations have forgotten. ‘Rising to a challenge’ used to be the most ‘positive’ and exciting thing humans did. Now it sends us into a foetal position with anxiety. I post about Covid for example not to be ‘negative’, but to positively embrace the actual challenge we all have to face right now. I love the challenge of it, even as I hate the disease.

Every time I open LinkedIn it occurs to me that you need to be vaguely interested in your own 'career' to have even a passing interest in anybody else's. Total fail on the first for me, so unremitting boredom on the second. To me a career is just a job, and jobs are increasingly meaningless drudge led by unimaginative dullards whose only passion is ruthlessly protecting their own status and position. What I want to be when I grow up? Nothing. My whole 'mission' in life is just to understand. That's it, that's the whole mission.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday :)

Act 2. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/06/over-half-of-people-with-long-covid-for-two-years-are-declared-unfit-to-work/

Australia and electricity. Remove heads from anuses with a loud satisfying pop, and have a look. This is AEMO data, the regulator. - 100% of our electricity needs, Australia-wide, will be met by renewables at times already by 2025. 3 years away. - our electricity from renewables grew from 38% to over 60%, in just 3 years. - renewable projects queued ready to go and held up by the previous government have a capacity twice that of our *entire* current market.

Don’t you love NSW Government spin, ‘temporarily non-operational’. Meaning ‘the State is so infested with Covid we can’t operate.’ You have virtually zero protection from these new strains if you’ve been infected before, and vaccination also does almost nothing to stop them infecting you. Wear a mask, ventilate rooms, stay out of crowded places.

3 decades of spin has prevented people finding out about the genius of electrifying our energy and transport. For example, cars. Electric cars will not only be vastly more efficient, require almost no maintenance, have zero pollution or engine noise (our cities will be so quiet), have zero reliance upon foreign oil (meaning we will never again have to buy from the Middle East or elsewhere) and also perform much better in the acceleration sense than petrol or diesel cars. They'll also be one of the largest parts of the energy storage capacity of the country. We'll have 20 million mobile batteries. A car's batteries have much higher capacity than any home battery. You'll be able to use your car to both store surplus power from your own solar panels, and to power your home if needed.

Happy Birthday, if you're even using FB!

To be unwavering, unflinching, and uncompromising is rare, but not impossible. To be an outsider and those things, nothing is harder. To not care one tiny bit what anybody else thinks. One in a billion people are truly like that.

I’m thinking this forecast for this time next week is a bit precise.

Another ripper from AEMO. Have a look how fast coal disappears from the energy mix, only a handful of years away. And also important is the massive *increase* in energy we’ll then have available, over the next 50 years. Supply was never the problem. Political vandals were the problem.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday! When are you going to lose all that hair?