July 2022

Today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Here he is with mum many years ago. He'd have been 92 today. I'm like him in many ways, and not in others. He only rarely ever tried to deliberately teach me anything or impart any life wisdom. That in itself was a lesson, because I learned so much from him, not least to not sentimentalise life or parenthood. He left us alone, to develop into who we were, without trying to steer it much. That's not as common nowadays. A brilliant, quiet and understated man. Most who knew him knew almost nothing about him, and that was deliberate I think. He taught me that the ultimate strength is gentleness, only the truly strong can be truly gentle. Miss you old fart.

Remember the people who said kids needed to get back in school during a pandemic for their 'mental health'? Reckon they ever went to school?

The UK projected to have up to 60,000 Monkeypox cases per day, by end of the year. Nothing being done, as with Covid.

Dum di dum…

There has never been a time in our history when this would have been seen as anything except batshit insane. Except now. Honest question - where do people see this ending, what do they see as the point of it?

If you think the world is divided between ‘planned’ economies, like China, and the ‘market economies’ like us where supply and demand and individual consumers in the ‘marketplace’ drive things, have a read of this superb short piece. It’s a fiction. Just as the Economy is a fiction. We’re as planned as the Chinese, it’s just that businesses do the planning instead of government. It also explains why we get inflation (it has nothing to do with how much we pay people).

For those comfortable with the political line that vaccination was all we needed to do for Covid, here’s the reality. The vaccines were based on a strain of the virus that is 2 years’ old (and now extinct, the original Wuhan strain). It’s literally like using flu vaccines from 2 years ago, 2 years past their use-by date. At the same time, follow the data. The free flu shots, accompanied by urgent messaging about how bad this flu season is? Less than half of Australia bothered. And Covid vaccinations with the 2-year old vaccines stalled months ago. So the bare minimum of public health Australia was doing, getting vaccinated - well, we’re not even doing that. We’re destroying our public health system. I think people mostly don’t even know what that is, they think it means doctors, nurses and hospitals. That’s medicine, not public health. You can luxuriate in the comfort of the spin and slogans, ‘living with the virus’, ‘just like the flu’, ‘we’re all going to get this eventually’ etc., which are designed to make you do just that. It won’t stop the tidal wave of illness, death and ‘economic’ destruction.

The UK is predicting 60,000 monkeypox cases per day, by Christmas. I’m still waiting to see how fond people are of ‘living with’ a virus when it means pustules full of pus on their genitals and faces.

Ah travel, the true refuge of everything dumb.

Knock me over with a feather. Covid has been ‘hitting tens of thousands of Australians’ every day since Christmas time, this is not a new situation. Some leaders and health experts need to prepare for possible future criminal charges when a Royal Commission is held.

I reckon this is so common. And they don’t mean to become the person who hurt them, they try to be the opposite of the person who hurt them. But it means they’re trapped inside the same universe of pain. Like how people who try to go against the crowd are more enslaved to the crowd even than those who don’t, more damaged by it.

I’ve been asked that first question so many times.

When politicians ‘opened up’ to Covid, vaccinations stopped. Stone dead. And less than half of us went to get a free flu shot since then. And now stories like this. People are not seeing the bigger picture here I don’t think, we have a public health system (not hospitals, doctors and nurses, that’s medicine), whose job it is to maintain control over infectious disease, 365 days of every year. Politicians who don’t believe the ‘public’ is a thing are destroying it, deliberately. Because public health action (they think) interrupts the ‘Economy’. Look at how schools, hospitals, airports, and businesses more generally are collapsing right now. That’s what governments invented public health (more than 200 years ago) to prevent. In this pandemic libertarian politicians used classic propaganda techniques to describe public health action as ‘lockdowns’, so people felt they were being locked up. It’s beyond idiocy. Every person who parrots lines like ‘live with the virus’, ‘it’s just like the flu’, we’re all going to get this eventually’ is just repeating this propaganda. The ear worms worked. Fertile ground for the anti-vax crowd, as we see below, they weaponise the ongoing Covid deaths as evidence ‘the vaccines don’t work’. And then they move on to all other vaccines. But those deaths are just politicians sidelining the public health teams, who do all the control work, alongside vaccines, to keep infections down.

We may be about to have two pandemics operating at the same time. Covid and monkeypox. I know people desperately want to believe Covid is over, but that’s political spin. If you think several hundred people dying every week and tens of thousands being infected per day is ‘over’, MIB is here to help.

That lesion on his nose? That’s monkeypox. Coming to a town near you. Don’t forget to get out and enjoy this great State with your Dine and Discover vouchers.

What’s your own answer to this headline’s question?

Amazing series, one of the best I’ve seen.

Understatement of the day award.

Buckle up, Lithgow and Bathurst people.

Last Covid post for the day, but maybe the most important. Right now we’re actually living multiple pandemics, at the same time. Not Covid, but Covids, plural. Two key points: 1) the time between new variants is decreasing quickly (graph below), they’re arriving faster and faster, and 2) the new strains and variants aren’t strongly related to each other. This means we have multiple Covids all happening at once, and we’re adding more and more Covids at ever increasing speed (see the current list under the graph). We have epidemics piling on top of epidemics. There’s also little cross-immunity between strains - if you get one, it provides no immunity to another. Covid is literally feasting on us. Because we’re not restricting its spread, it’s evolving in every possible way at once, generating new variants and strains at will. And our vaccines are based on ONE strain, now long extinct. You can see where this will end, total failure of the vaccines. And we’re doing nothing else. We have to stop it spreading.

All these kids are clinically vulnerable to Covid, having diabetes. Not one mask in sight. With the Health Minister, no less.

This 👇

In my experience meetings have grown in organisations at the same time as managers have become more useless and higher paid. Meetings are the way those managers hide that they don’t know what they’re doing. If they did they’d just tell people to do it, which is what they’re paid to do. Some organisations spend pretty much their entire time in meetings trying to figure out what to do, and nobody asks why the people paid big bucks to know that, don’t.

Look at the explosion of death from late-2021. That’s when we said we’d ‘live with the virus’ (you can’t make this stuff up). Also note that bottom axis is the baseline, so while it looks like nobody is dying pre-pandemic and during 2020 and early 2021, what’s actually happening is that the deaths are so excessive after let it rip, that all the others disappear in the scaling. Also look at that period between October 2020 and July 2021. That was when we had control of the virus. Statistically that period was the healthiest Australia has EVER been, our excess deaths went hugely into the negative, meaning thousands were being kept alive who would have died even in non-pandemic times. Idiots call that period ‘lockdowns’. Actually we were hardly locked down at all, at that time. The stats show it. We were just controlling Covid, and that also controlled some of the greatest other killers, like flu, which we eliminated. We could return to that right now. Doesn’t need ‘lockdowns’, it just needs control of outbreaks. As humans have done for several thousand years. Until late-2021, when the lunatics took over the asylum.

Happy birthday mate.

Last week a group of people at work were having a little private chuckle at me still wearing a mask. They're now all at home in bed with Covid. Workplaces are being decimated right now, literally dropping like flies. People are supposed to notify people they work with if they test positive, I'm not seeing it in most workplaces. Everything is being done to maximise secrecy in NSW, to keep businesses open. Assume everybody is infected, you won't be far off the mark.

Tennis is such a prissy sport. It's historically been played by the rich, as they're the only people who had enough land or money to build a court. It therefore has this genteel horror of anything a bit bogan. Give me 100 Kyrgios for every Eveready bunny baseline ball smasher with lovely manners. The game is now like watching 2 ball machines slugging it out.

NSW Health has never stopped asking people to wear masks inside. Politicians have said we don’t have to. About 99% of people are listening to the politicians, and about 1% to NSW Health. If you’re not wearing a mask, can you explain why you trust a politician’s opinion on a lethal disease more than all of the medical professionals in NSW Health? Do you trust politicians on anything else? If not, why believe them on this one, which could kill you?

Kerry Chant today: “We need to act now to slow the spread of the virus in the community.” The government reply: “No.”

One of the main reasons cars dominate cities, is that city design has been handed over to property developers. A car is a dream to a property developer, because they can keep building millions of houses on unoccupied land, and not worry whether there’s an integration with city life more generally. People can just hop in their car and drive to get stuff, rather than the developer having to provide it. So we end up with vast car parks, which we call suburbs (mostly devoid of any sort of cultural, social or even economic life), surrounding modern cities. And the traffic gridlock we see is people driving to get all of the things that the property developer doesn’t provide, where they live.

I constantly hear from friends and work colleagues who’ve had Covid that ‘at least they got it out of the way’. This myth will kill people. Some of them now being infected for the second and third times, looking much less gung ho. People are being re-infected in as little as EIGHTEEN DAYS. The Project last night detailed American research showing the big increase in risk of death within 12 months for those who have been infected more than once. Covid is a chronic disease, your infection (the ‘acute’ phase), will often be mild, like HIV. But it’s what the virus then does in your body in the years afterwards that may kill you, as AIDS did for people who got HIV.

This tracks the increase in cases across the 70 top LGAs. Have a look at number 1, Lithgow people, I’ve added a blue arrow. To explain the graphic, the percentages show you the percentage change in cases in the past 14 days. Lithgow leading the State. The dots on the right convert this into a chance of catching Covid, what it was 14 days ago (grey) and what it is today (coloured). Anything around 1 in 50 is like hanging out closely with an infected friend. 1 in 200 like being in a family of 4, 1 in 2500 being in contact with a friend of an infected friend.

NSW Health has been saying this for months. No government backing, so the Chief Health Officer is reduced to begging us all to do it. Ridiculous, and not working, I barely see a single person in a mask every day. And many I know would never even see these messages.

"The Queensland government is warning of an escalation in the number of health and hospital staff unable to work due to COVID in the midst of the state's growing COVID-19 wave." Look at their response. Same as ours. None.

I encourage everybody to read this one. The reason I post so much about Covid is that I study the pandemic (for work but also for myself), and what's happening is not what people are being told. This is a potential catastrophe on a scale people have not realised. It may last for generations.

Happy birthday!

Happy Birthday :)

“I think a lot of people are still under this misconception that all we need to do is just let the virus run through and everyone will get it and it’ll be done,” she said. “That’s not the case because of these variants - it just comes back around and you get infected again.”

Pox update. A virus for which washing your hands may actually be useful.

Happy birthday Captain!

Happy birthday :)

Multiple people have said to me that there wouldn't be backing for stronger Covid measures, because the experience of too many has been 'mild'. A few things I'd say about that: 1) most obviously, as I've posted about here before, the fact the acute illness you might get is mild means almost nothing at all. HIV is overwhelmingly mild for people who catch it. It's the chronic phase 8-10 years later that can kill them. 2) since when was 'I'm fine' an argument for not fixing emergencies? When we have a bushfire or flood, the people not impacted in Australia still fall over themselves to help the people who were. The whole foundation of public health is to all act, together, to stop disease impacting others. 3) look at the current flood response, how the community rallies instantly and hugely to help. Even those who have no connection to the floods at all. Why don't we do that for Covid? 4) I know why we don't do it for Covid. Politicians of a particular belief system have spent the past 2 years priming the public with a constant barrage of messages about how the real danger here is disrupting the 'Economy', and that all public health measures take away peoples' freedoms. They did this deliberately to head-off strong public health action. They lost that battle initially, but then when NSW deliberately opened up to Delta and then Omicron, the floodgates burst. NSW was the Trojan Horse of the 'let it rip'/anti-elimination group.

'It's all about merit until merit has tits.' Naomi Wu

So Australia can prepare itself. Already happening here.

I posted here about BA.5 weeks ago. Just so people know I don't make up shit ;)

Also called this weeks ago. It’s amazing the things you know, if you actually care enough to pay attention.

If you’re hoping catching Covid will ‘get it over with’, bad news. You’ll be lucky to get 4 weeks of immunity. I’ve seen some reinfections reported within 18 days. Remembering also each infection potentially does permanent damage to your immune system, and some people die after only 2 or 3.

Do you really want to be a person in history who thought ‘living with’ a pandemic was a good idea? It will go down as possibly the greatest act of collective stupidity of all time. And it’s all very deliberately engineered, you can see it in how Asia responds to Covid, compared to us.

Taronga at Dubbo is nothing like I remember it as a kid. Has come on astonishingly, a really beautiful zoo. They even use some of the techniques of the old English landscape gardeners, to give the illusion there’s no fence at all between you and the animals. Also one of the few public attractions left that is relatively Covid safe.

There are massive solar and wind farms near Wellington, from a distance you think it must be some bluey-silver crop, like lavender. Companies from around the world have been queuing for years to try to get these installed in Australia, we have enormous amounts of land and sunshine and wind. Some regional and farming people opposed these from the start, with the claim they ‘destroy good agricultural land’. Let’s be blunt here, most agricultural land worldwide is nothing more than soil mining. Every living thing cleared and killed, topsoil washed and blown out to sea, a yearly dose of super needed to get anything to grow at all. Cattle and sheep can happily graze under solar panels, in fact they’re healthier and happier because they get something most farmers now never provide them - shelter. The soil no longer bakes unprotected in summer heat and winter frosts, and the panels even trap condensation, giving more moisture to the soil. On top of it all, it gives desperately needed new income streams to farmers. Old Australia is dying now, and not before time. Blocking transformational change so badly needed here.

This is the basic science people are not being told. A vaccine is not a drug, you don’t take it and then you’re ‘fixed’. A vaccine tweaks the ecological balance of an ecosystem of microbes, temporarily in one direction. The microbes continue to evolve, if you let them, and will eventually beat the vaccine. That’s why thinking we can beat Covid just by vaccinating is so delusional and dangerous. We need to *control the spread* of Covid as well. This is what we’ve been doing for more than 200 years for all other infectious diseases. We only stopped doing it in the past 2 years because of a group of politicians with very specific, lethal beliefs, funded by big money. Later I’ll share a story about chickens that shows just how dangerous this is.

I’d forgotten this photo. A good likeness.

Driving through the Australian countryside again yesterday, I think we’re blinded by too many landscape paintings. The thing that should jump out screaming at us (I think), is that there’s nothing in it. Trees here and there, the odd flock of sheep or cows, or ploughed fields. Not a single person or other animal or plant. It looks pretty enough, but it’s in dire trouble. What we call the ‘bush’ is really a landscape emptied of nearly everything alive. These are our soil mines, fenced off to keep a tiny, tiny handful of animals in (fences that prevent the flow of animals across the landscape). The landscape is dead, not much more than a painting.

I learned this from the Australian biologist Tim Low. Which of these two locations has the greatest biodiversity? The city, or the bush? Answer: the city. Hands down. The bush is a wasteland, created by agriculture. I remember posting once about how city and country are not two things. Property development in cities gradually pushed all agricultural activity out to the fringes, which we then called the ‘bush’. Animals and plants had no chance of surviving modern agriculture, so moved to the city.

Only 33 dead listed yesterday, in NSW, about a big classroom full of kids. ‘Tis but a scratch.

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They established Tablelands Building Company in Bathurst, still running today. One of their sidelines was building motels in multiple towns and running those, a real growth industry at that time. They were fantastically successful entrepreneurs. One was the Motel Capri, still in Bathurst, a classic piece of 1950s/60s architecture. Motels were new then, mass ownership of cars was new and you could park your car right outside your room. There were also fuel bowsers (see the pic) at the motel where guests could re-fuel. The 60s and 70s had such wonderful style, I still remember living amongst it, mum and dad had wonderful furniture and clothes and cars etc. Anyway, somebody posted this picture of the Capri, from 1960, to the Bathurst Memories site. Looking at it closely, I suddenly realised my dad is the figure you can see standing at the bowsers. He used to help guests fuel their cars.

I promised to talk about chickens. This isn’t a chicken doing the splits, it’s a chicken with Marek’s DIsease. A type of herpes virus. It’s deadly to pretty much any chicken who catches it. I’m telling this story because originally Marek’s DIsease wasn’t that deadly, and how it became that is a story for us, during Covid times. There’s a vaccination for Marek’s Disease, and commercial chooks get it. It’s successful at stopping them dying, though it does little to stop them passing it on to other chickens (ringing any bells yet?) Over the years of using this vaccine, strains of the virus that would normally not have survived because they’re lethal (if a chicken dies, it can’t pass it on), survived because the vaccine kept the chicken alive. This caused the gradual natural selection of strands of Marek’s that are lethal to any chicken who isn’t vaccinated. Without constant vaccination, all chickens would die. This is the danger of vaccinating with a vaccine that doesn’t stop transmission, only severe disease, and then not controlling spread of a virus. It will tend to push that virus to ever-more lethal variants. Covid vaccines are pretty good against severe disease, and pretty hopeless now at stopping transmission. And we’re not stopping transmission with other measures, we’re happily all out getting repeatedly infected. I’m sure you can join the dots and write the ending yourself.

Yesterday the new PM said Covid from this point on is a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. ScoMo-lite. Treating a pandemic with personal responsibility is like telling people to build their own roads. It’s a collective disaster that can only be fixed collectively, an individual is powerless to do it. Meanwhile the little personal responsibility happening out there looks a bit like this Tweet.

The equivalent of ‘vaccines will end the pandemic’, for floods, is ‘levees and higher dam walls will stop floods’. They won’t, look at Lismore. Its flood levees are nearly 11 metres high. It makes no difference for a large flood. The NSW Governent is also still banging on about raising the dam wall at Warragamba. They’ve been told (as Lismore were told) by engineers this won’t work and will just lead to more flood damage, with the houses property developers want to build on the flood plains. As always property developers are running the State.

Alcohol doesn’t seem the real problem here, though I’m sure it doesn’t help. Florida.

Imagine a health system already falling over, getting 400,000 new long-term patients. And that’s just current numbers, every day we infect tens of thousands more to add to the tally.

America is becoming an extended season of Catweasel.

The true 'bludgers' in Australia are the entitled, lazy business community. Many having done almost nothing themselves to fight Covid in this pandemic except rort JobKeeper, they now say they 'can't retreat'. Retreat from what? How do you go backwards from doing fuck all? A lot of them even forced employees to buy their own masks and tests. https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/we-cannot-retreat-businesses-warn-a-return-to-work-from-home-won-t-work-for-them-20220710-p5b0ft.html

In the 19th century the entire city of Chicago was raised over 4 feet, to allow installation of a sewage and stormwater system. The city had suffered repeated epidemics of typhoid and cholera. In 2022 people say we can't even ask people to wear a mask. This is the pathetic snowflakes we have become.

Booked in for my 4th vaccine shot this afternoon. If you're over 30, just do it. The government and business will do not one other thing to protect you, it's up to you now.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1546245019702640641 Click to view, only a minute.

Every grinning ‘wheeee the pandemic is over’ photo I see on social media, with people ‘living their good life’, makes me feel more like the situation is beyond hopeless.

Dedicated to everybody not wearing a mask.

Spend 5 minutes on this, from last night’s Project. Firstly to see the astonishingly embarrassing performance from the representative of Australian business. And secondly to see Steve Price, who I would not agree with on just about everything, absolutely nail the common sense we need right now. How bad things have become, that right-wing shock jocks are now the most sensible people in the room.

Drummer and bass player loving that extended guitar solo. Happy birthday little bro! Hopefully somebody can get you to sit still long enough to celebrate it, will try for lunch 🙂 Love ya.

There is no species dumber than the perpetual traveller.

I've travelled quite a lot. I hate the process of actually getting from one place to another, packed into planes like sardines, interrupted sleep, lost bags, foul shared toilets and showers etc. I don't mind it when I arrive, but this is where I think what I post about travel isn't clear. The problem for me with travel is there's an impossible tension between being a native, and being a visitor. Being a visitor is not fun, you can't really ever settle like you can in your own home. Try staying even with a friend for a few weeks and watch how tense both of you become. But you're not native either. It feels very ungrounded, for me, unless your real purpose of travel is the Instagram and Facebook posts to say 'hey look where I am'. Carrie Bickmore talks about that a bit here, how the social media images of her holiday were't really how the holiday was.

The Victorian Chief Health Officer told the Victorian government to mandate masks in places like childcare and shops. The Victorian government said no. Why? They're 'empowering' people to do it themselves. They actually said that. They have an election in November 2022. Never, ever allow politicians to run an emergency response. We don't do it for bushfires or floods. Covid has killed orders of magnitudes more people than either of those.

Here’s some limbo, Dorothy ;)

I'm curious how many are aware of the difference between public health and medicine? They're different fields, staffed by different people, but so often I see people assume medical doctors and hospitals are responsible for advising on pandemics. They really, really aren't. Modern governments often choose them as advisers (as they have in this pandemic), because they don't want to do the public health work, which (they think) impacts their beloved 'Economy'. (Quick reminder that the Economy is a fiction, it doesn't exist.) Thus why we ended up with a strategy to protect hospitals, instead of people. Public health is only just over 200 years old, and was invented by governments to fight population-level health problems. Installing sewers, providing fresh water and air, etc. Your local NSW Health staff include public health professionals. They're not the doctors and nurses who treat you medically. The doubling of our life expectancy over the past 200 years is almost ENTIRELY due to public health. NOT medicine. Public health are the people who know how to fight pandemics. The people our politicians have deliberately excluded from our Covid response. We're governed by a political philosophy that doesn't even believe the 'public' is a thing. Why they say Covid is now a matter of 'personal responsibility'. That's a criminal lie, and deliberate sidelining of 200+ years of expertise.

Great choice of words.

OK, I'm going to need to try these.

FINALLY journalists are seeing it, but way too late. Infecting an entire population and hoping you have enough hospital beds is not a public health strategy, it’s a public disease strategy. I still don’t think people see that this isn’t just a health issue (though the health effects are astronomical and still growing), society is falling apart. Stop just regurgitating the mindless slogans that allowed this to happen, like ‘living with the virus’. It’s all political bullshit, not science. People are so proud about hating politicians and not trusting them, but for this one thing that matters more than anything else, they’re joining hands with the pollies and racing each other like lemmings towards the edge of the cliff.

Another 36 dead yesterday. Over 2000 in hospital. This is just NSW. Our leaders' (and our) response? Nothing.

Australia’s Covid deaths include 632 people aged 20 to 59, and 18 children and adolescents.

For those struggling with understanding that Covid isn't a health problem (though it's that too). It's smashing the economy as fast as it's maiming and killing people. 776,000 Australians worked fewer hours in June due to illness, more than twice the number affected two years ago. 37% of Australians now also have no statutory sick leave. Anybody working anywhere right now is experiencing the collapse of basic services.

Managing building environments for people who always feel cold is extremely difficult. Often the entire building ends up heated to sauna-like temperatures to appease them. Great article about alternatives. https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/2022/07/14/heat-yourself-survive-winter-15/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020220715_with%20Tag

Happy Birthday to you!

Happy Birthday for yesterday!

Engineers save many more lives than doctors or medicine do. So many more that they're not even in the same ballpark. Not to have a go at medicine, but to refocus attention on what it is that is the biggest contribution to keeping us all alive and well. Engineers could save us from Covid, if we let them. Building the London sewers.

Imagining a singer's speaking voice is difficult. Freddie Mercury for example had a much lower speaking voice than people were often expecting. This wasn't how I was expecting Kate Bush to sound, in ordinary speech.

When you 'get government out of peoples' lives', business moves in instead. You don't get to elect which businesses.

National Cabinet will discuss whether to keep emergency payments for casual workers with Covid. A quiz, will they: A. keep the disaster payments, or B. ‘fix’ it by letting people who are sick with Covid go to work, instead? You might think B won’t happen. The NSW Premier is already proposing it prior to the meeting. The Brits did it in February already. (Was a disaster.)

People may have seen me posting here for a few years now about how the political battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are actually something else. The continuation of the driving force of our history, the battle between Church and State. And here it all is, in black and white. Not hidden, just waiting for people to notice. I’m also absolutely agnostic as to who should win this battle, States have been mostly hopeless in the tiny amount of historical time they’ve been in the ascendancy, whereas Churches actually built and ran our societies for most of the last two thousand years. Ultimately this is an even deeper battle, between people who think you can run a society with everybody believing whatever they like, and people who think you need a unified belief system of some form. I think the latter is practically true, how we act is based on our beliefs, and if we all believe different things, we can’t act collectively. We can’t be a society.

The 2 ways we’re told to stop people getting sick right now is for the government to spend billions more, or for us to take ‘personal responsibility’ for Covid. Anybody notice the enormous elephant in the room here, the sleight of hand? Where do the overwhelming majority of people catch Covid? At work. In businesses. Covid is overwhelmingly a WHS issue, that business is refusing to deal with. By law they’re required to, but they’re not doing it. We don’t need new mandates really, we just need WHS law to be enforced. But as always happens, business privatises the profits, and socialises the losses. It’s spent the past 10 years gorging itself on record profits, while wages and working conditions are in free fall. Now that the entire country is being repeatedly infected with a lethal virus inside businesses, it’s handing responsibility for it all back to government, and to me and you.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday :)

It doesn’t seem rocket science to me that if you have a problem with emergency payments, the best solution is to fix the emergency.

Nothing is sexier than smart. When malls sucked civic life out of communities, they ended up recreating many of the things they stole. And now, just maybe, the community may steal them back. It’s that sort of smart I get up for every day.

Happy Birthday Snowy!

Australia currently averaging over 54 Covid deaths per day. And as you can see, it’s still going up, we’ve been slaughtering since well before Christmas. Some say Australians won’t tolerate actions like masks again. But they will tolerate over 50 people dying, per day? Have we all gone completely bonkers?

The comfort many take from catching Covid, multiple times, is that they believe the idea that it will create ‘herd immunity’. Which they see as the same as ‘endemic’. So many people will catch it and become immune that it will stop it spreading, the story goes, as in the picture. Why that’s a recipe for killing yourself pretty quickly: 1) Infection with Covid doesn’t create immunity. 2) Humans have never achieved herd immunity for any disease through infection. 3) The only time herd immunity has been achieved is when we’ve had vaccines that prevent transmission. Like the vaccines for mumps, measles, chickenpox - the ones you get as a kid mostly. 4) The Covid vaccines don’t prevent transmission. What we’re seeing right now, the entire population getting infected over and over, will just continue forever, unless we stop it. It won’t stop by itself, unless Covid gets bored and goes away, which is unlikely. Immunity certainly won’t do it, herd or otherwise.

It might dawn on the ‘society is an Economy’ people at some point that you can’t live with a pandemic. Might.

The majority of people have no problem wearing a mask at all. The resistance to it is both small, and deliberately engineered. It's easily engineered in the other direction.

It comes from the Greek, 'en demos', meaning 'in the people'. Literally.

Earlier in the year the let it rip Queensland Chief Health Officer assured Australia that mass infections were creating a 'wall of immunity', which would lead to Covid fading away. Nick Coatsworth said the same. How it's going. Click to watch.

So, ask yourself what Scotty’s plan for leadership of Australia was longer term. Quite something.

A Crimson Snow apple. Amazing flavour, something really new. Can’t get enough of them.

Reckon the nurses can keep going like this indefinitely? The ones who don’t resign. The ludicrous, lethal fantasy we’re living.

Listened to a Sydney nurse describe the total exhaustion at work, and how it's not eased up all year, despite talk of 'waves'. Many leaving the profession. And as you can see from the Great Leader, it's all going to get worse, and he could not care less. This is the 6th 'last wave' of this pandemic. People elect these dipshits.

This is how we're 'fixing' Covid. By just not talking about it.

We wash ourselves a lot in Australia. More than any other country I think. Interesting to wonder why. Also I was on the Levis webpage today and it recommended washing your denim jeans only every 10 years? How does that work?

Politics has always been a battle between working people (nearly everybody), and a tiny financial elite. When working people get screwed very badly, it's very dangerous for the elites, who remember things like the French Revolution. So they run clown candidates for office pretending to stand for 'freedom', tapping into the widespread anger at how screwed everybody is. That freedom is really the removal of government, and replacement by a dictatorship, run by the clown. The dictatorship then screws working people even more.

In reality it's even worse than it looks. The way hospitalisations were counted changed in February, so the current level is actually about equivalent to what it was in January. And it's still climbing fast.

Happy Birthday Lisa :)

If you work in any of these jobs or industries, under workers’ compensation law in NSW you don’t have to prove you caught Covid at work. Your employer has to prove you didn‘t.

8-9 months of prolonged slaughter, and climbing even faster now again. None of this is making Covid go away. When do people and politicians say 'hey, we have this wrong, we've stuffed up'?

The Project talking about a huge list of drugs now unavailable because of the pandemic wrecking supply chains. A diabetes patient going without his drugs entirely, they’re not available. Society is falling apart. This isn’t just a health issue, living with the virus is social suicide.

It’s nearly always the same people trying to make out Covid isn’t a problem, that have regaled us about how climate change isn’t a problem either, for years. It’s time to have zero tolerance for dumb. Dumb kills.

Today’s trivia. What’s this?

Lithgow Council suggesting rate rises of 26.5%, or cutting services. Some very hard questions need to be asked. Also employing expensive financial consultants to do work the large number of very highly paid senior staff at Council should know how to do themselves. Time to appoint an administrator.

A description of one of hundreds of millions who will suffer the long-term chronic effects of Covid infection. We’re doing this deliberately, celebrating ‘living with’ it. We’ll wake up with the biggest ‘wtf were we thinking’ hangover in years to come.

All grace.

Canada is trying 'living with the virus' too. Buy shares in cough syrup is my tip of the day. (By the way, it's peak summer in Canada right now, for those who still think this will all go away when winter is over here.)

"The planet’s had enough of our shit, so it’s decided to kill us. Some will burn, some will drown, and most will starve. Enough people have woken up to that now that denying it for the sake of a few backhanders from the fossil fuel industry is no longer a viable political strategy. It’s good, in a way, that the coalition denies this, too. It will keep them out of power for a long time." John Birmingham

Come on 'live with the virus' folk, help us to understand.

4500-year-old Egyptian dress, made of gold and faience.

The National Health Service in the UK has already collapsed. 332,000 people there have been waiting more than a year for treatment. Not coincidentally, over 300,000 people now have long-term chronic illness from Covid there and can no longer work - the red in the graph below. It’s still climbing. This is our (near) future. Living with the virus. Total society collapse.

No pandemic in the history of the world wads stopped by people becoming infected. Not one. Also, ‘endemic’ is just a technical word meaning ‘a disease out of control’.

It amazes me that people believe the story that goes: ‘Australia was locked down for 2 years, and now it’s opening up’. Australia has been open for most of the pandemic, and NOW it’s shutting down, with infection. Also, the true cause of the current inflation is seen in this graph, rampant profiteering. Typically the blame is shifted to workers’ wages, which never budge.

BA.5 is one of the variants now hitting us here. Look at what it did in Japan, a nation much more committed to public health than us.

Watch the UK, we follow them in every detail. Now health staff there are cashing in annual leave days to be able to afford to pay bills, while tens of thousands resign in exhausted disgust. Come on ‘live with the virus’ people, where are you? All so quiet, ‘living your best life’ no doubt, or some other bullshit adolescent life philosophy.

It didn’t occur to the Brexit crowd that leaving Europe would mean basic things, like needing to now show your passport and other papers when re-entering Europe.

Politicians will have fun persuading people to ignore this pandemic, with pus-filled lesions on their faces and genitals. Takes some doing, to have 2 pandemics running in parallel.

For those who have or are thinking about getting solar, and would love a battery but the price of a battery makes them go pale, here's the cheapest battery by far you can use instead. An electric hot water heater. A technology almost abandoned, but with solar now the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to store any excess energy you generate. 25-30% of your household energy use is hot water.

A solar panel is installed in Australia every 44 seconds. We easily lead the world in household solar, more than 20% greater than other heavyweights like Japan and Germany. Just look at the graph, the growth (yellow is energy made by rooftop solar) is phenomenal, and speeding up. The bizarre problem Australia will have is so much generation delegated to homes that the mainstream power generation industry could collapse. All due to a decade of inaction on storage and transmission by the previous federal government. Why the current rush is to build new lines and new storage now, to be able to share all this energy around. Expect to see a lot of 'virtual power plants', fancy term for linking all of these households together to create virtual power stations, to replace the old coal and gas plants. You can already join one of those now. As for those who spent the past 10 years talking about 'baseload' (which they don't understand), power stations will struggle to survive even to 2030. Not because we stop building them, but because we don't need them.

How to weigh a koala.

“There is, then, a contradiction of love. We cannot intercept the signs of a loved person without proceeding from worlds that have not waited for us to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest. The lover wants his beloved to devote to him her preferences, her gestures, her caresses. But the beloved’s gestures, at the very moment they are addressed to us, still express that unknown world that excludes us. …jealousy is deeper than love, it contain’s love’s truth. This is because jealousy goes further in the apprehension and interpretation of signs. It is the destination of love, its finality. Indeed, it is inevitable that the signs of a loved person, once we ‘explicate’ them, should be revealed as deceptive: addressed to us, applied to us, they nonetheless express worlds that exclude us and that the beloved will not and cannot make us know. Not by virtue of any particular ill will on the beloved’s part, but of a deeper contradiction, which inheres in the nature of love…” Gilles Deleuze Proust and Signs

Talking about solar because energy right now is the key that unlocks a lot of what looks crazy about society. Here’s another reason to install solar, if you haven’t already, and to install as much of it as you can afford. (It’s so cheap now, and getting cheaper every day.) It’s far and away the best investment for your money you can find. Everything else - stocks/shares, bonds, property etc. are tanking, because they’ve been vastly overinflated for years, a giant Ponzi scheme. But you will always need energy at home. And the payback is enormous. In the example below (not atypical), a return of more than 1000% over 25 years. You’ll be lucky to find another investment that makes you 3 or 4%, over that time period. This is all money straight into your hands too, it’s literally the savings from not paying for energy, plus selling your surplus back to the grid. No need to cash-in any investment, it keeps paying you, every single day, for the rest of your life.

Lots of talk about masks and mandates. We need to push back on the stupidity of the idea a mandate removes peoples’ freedoms. Here’s just one of thousands of examples. Is ‘swim between the flags’ oppression? Tyranny? Mandates are a collective framework for action. They make life better and more free, for everybody.

There was a time when these numbers would have outraged Australians. The reason it doesn't now is that they're being deliberately led to not care. Groups are always led, whether it's a committee or a society. They 'follow the leader'. The leader of NSW is on a business trip to Korea, and couldn't care less about this tidal wave of death. He calls people who do 'bedwetters'.

506 people have died of Covid in the past week, in Australia. This is what 500 people looks like.

Those who think Covid isn’t an intrinsically political thing can explain these photos, I’m sure. Social behaviour is led, and you can see very clearly here who led Australians to ignore basics like masking.

Australians haven’t been wearing masks since before the election. And again, you have to wonder why that might be. But you won’t need to wonder too hard.

That 'minimum demand' note on the graph is another way to counter the myths of 'baseload power'. Australia is swimming in home-grown electricity, growing exponentially, and at that minimum point the grid itself will fall over if nothing is done. That's what 'baseload' has always meant, the minimum amount of energy people have to USE to stop the grid failing. It's not a supply thing, it's a demand thing. The previous government knew this, it had this graph from AEMO. To call for new coal power stations once you look at the actual data is so beyond stupid that I can't think of a word for it. There was not going to be any shortage of electricity, exactly the opposite. What did the new government do immediately? What AEMO said needed doing, new distribution lines and storage, to deal with this enormous existing supply of electricity.

Blue whale.

Some people still cling to the idea that Australian Aborigines were primitives. But you won't find any other 'primitive' people whose cultures or civilisations lasted more than a few thousand years. You won't find any 'advanced' civilisations who did either. 70-100,000 years of continuous civilisation here, the greatest achievement in all of human history. And an almost total mystery. The Don Bradman of civilisations, but orders of magnitude more astonishing even than him. And our curiosity about how they did it? Zero.

Straya, belting it out of the park.

Covid change in the past 2 weeks, by local government area. Have highlighted Bathurst for reference. Percentage is percentage change in the past 2 weeks. The “1 in” figure on the right is what proportion of the LGA population was infected in the past 2 weeks.

I wish we’d fix one pandemic before the next starts.

In the past 2 days, more than 3 times as many people were infected with Covid in Australia as were infected in all of 2020. About 120 of these people will die.

This technology isn’t well known. It’s not just a fan, it’s a vortex fan. (Thus ‘vor-nado’.) It creates vortices, which then swirl around your room. It’s what they call an ‘air circulator’, for that reason, rather than a fan, which just blasts air in one direction. You can buy it just as a fan, to circulate air in your room in hot or cold weather, or with a heating element included, for heating. Vortices are how air naturally circulates. Vortices are actually the secret to understanding all things, as Archimedes discovered, but that’s a much longer post :)

Astonishingly, pretending the pandemic is over isn’t working.

James Lovelock died on Tuesday, on his 103rd birthday. People may have heard of Gaia, the idea he developed together with Lynn Margulis. Often misunderstood as saying the Earth is alive, a superorganism. What they were really saying is that living things don’t exist in an ‘environment’, but instead create the environment itself. Oxygen for example began as pollution by certain microbes, a result of photosynthesis, that poisoned much of the life around at that time. Lovelock was an independent scholar, he refused all academic jobs and funded his own independent research, often from inventions. I’m an independent scholar, one of the ways Lovelock inspires me. Rest in Peace.

Bypass what politicians, media outlets and friends are telling you about Covid, and go straight to the expertise, like Professor Chris Goodnow. For those who won’t read it, his main points. It’s vastly more serious than a cold, getting it doesn’t in any way ‘get it over with’, and every time you get infected you increase your risk of severe heart, brain, kidney etc. complications proportionally. So double the risk after 2 infections, triple after 3 etc. Vaccination does NOT help reduce that risk, but it does help keep you alive in the short-term. Variant-specific vaccines also won’t fix this. Nothing we currently have in the medical kit is going to fix it. Getting infected certainly won’t. As Chris says, put your masks back on, and stop mixing in groups. Apologies to my friends who probably think I’ve become a hermit. I’m just trained in science, and don’t want to kill or maim my family, friends or myself.

Nothing but silence from the live with the virus folk.

🥺

A second booster reduces your chance of dying of Covid by 75% or more, if you’re 50+. I know some who haven’t even had the 3rd shot, let alone the 4th. Because the previous government told them 2 shots was ‘fully vaccinated’; they wanted to go to an election with high vaccination percentages.