August 2022

Happy birthday Carms!

People don't get fat because they over-eat, they over-eat because they get fat. An obese person is metabolically 'starved', their body keeps storing fat because it thinks it's starving (and the person feels that as hunger). What causes them to get fat is insulin imbalance, caused by eating too many carbohydrates (sugar being the worst), which fires up the insulin response. No amount of counting calories or doing exercise to 'burn off' calories will make you thin, if you don't stop the insulin response. Calories, 'energy balance' (in an out) is nonsense. Have a read, the highlights aren't mine, but it summarises how we have weight and fat completely wrong.

Maybe fewer novelty cheques coming Lithgow's way in future. Not before time. https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/2022/08/01/icac-mps-misuse-of-public-money/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20News%20-%2020220802_with%20Tag

Fat people are encouraged to 'burn off' the fat. It never, ever works, because it's based on junk science. Your body stores fat when it thinks you're at risk of starving, it's common sense. Nobody eats when they're full. Fat people are stuck in a biochemical trap where their insulin response is telling their body they're starving, so it stores every tiny thing they eat as fat. Turn off that insulin response and the fat falls away.

It's still amusing in a macabre way that the green columns here are called 'living with the virus'.

Pretending it's over is still not working.

Between 180,000 and 200,000 health care workers are thought to have died in this pandemic, treating others. This is what happens when you make your Covid strategy about number of hospital beds, instead of number of infections.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1554301467170832389

You pay a lot of money to see water as clear as this. But there’s a dark thing going on in the oceans, more of them are looking beautifully clear and blue like this, even outside the shallows. Climate change is heating the water so much it’s killing all the life in it, predominantly algae. That algae is the base of the food chain for everything else. The water is dead.

One of the most important things to note about the re-emergence of polio is that it was nearly always an incredibly mild disease, causing no symptoms at all or known lasting effects. But the minority it impacted badly were paralysed for life. That used to be enough to mobilise a population to take emergency action. Now we let much more dangerous pathogens just spread at will, because they interrupt our lifestyles. We need to look long and hard in the mirror every day at the society we’ve become.

Anybody fighting to avoid infection by Covid, an organ-eating bat virus, isn’t ‘anxious’. They’re smart. Those who line up to be repeatedly infected by it while babbling slogans like ‘live with the virus’, or ‘you have to live your life’, or ‘just like the flu’ are gullible morons. Does that lose me friends? Probably. But my appetite for morons in my life is now zero.

I see a lot of people trash the Greens. But I'd be interested what arguments people could muster against their current idea of making multinational gas companies, currently taking all of our gas for almost nothing and selling it at huge profits overseas, pay their tax and use it for free childcare and dental care for all?

With Covid, you're infectious for up to 2 weeks. (Why them letting you go back to work after 7 days is a joke.) Monkeypox is infectious for 4-10 weeks. Buckle up. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-04/monkeypox-latest-australia-vaccine-secured/101298754

Back when we cared about kids. Compare with today's advice, 'please keep the sick child at home, so long as it doesn't interrupt one of your 4 casual jobs that don't have any sick pay'.

The side of politics which refuses to wear a mask in parliament now berating others who don't wear a tie.

This is 'excess deaths' i.e. deaths above and beyond what we'd expect if we didn't have a pandemic. Notice for 2020 and most of 2021 we were healthier than we've ever been. Negative excess deaths i.e. thousands lived who would have died even without the pandemic. But apparently we couldn't keep living like that, so we had to slaughter thousands to be the unhealthiest we've ever been, in 2022, in grey. Kill one person and they'll put you in jail. Kill 10,000 and they'll give you a seat at National Cabinet.

Kids don’t catch Covid at school, how often did we hear that.

After the world wars we could point to the removal of genocidal dictators as a meaning for all the death and suffering. I’m finding it harder to think of a way the more than 10,000 families who’ve lost loved ones to Covid this year can feel like their sacrifice was for a higher purpose.

Another article that (to me) makes the same mistake about love. Seeing love as being selfless, and looking out for yourself is selfishness, or narcissism. If you want the world to be full of ‘love’, don’t always define it as something people only do when they act against their own instincts and feelings. People behave badly in relationships when they don’t have a handle on their own selves - they don’t have enough self-love, not too much. A mature adult acts in ways that is good for others because it’s also good for them, it’s not a binary. Also mirroring, which we all do. We all play a role when we meet a person we like, to try to be something we think they want. People do it not just (as this article says) to try to win somebody’s heart, they also do it to help keep that other person out of their personal space, to ’not make waves’ so that they protect their own space too. Pure, healthy narcissism.

This is an excellent short piece on Covid testing, what you need to know. I’ve lost count of the number of people who do a quick RAT, get a negative and say “I don’t have Covid”. Doesn’t mean that at all.

A Commonwealth Games highlight. Go England.

I can see a new San Diego volleyball club in germination here, @[1025558373:2048:Alex]. https://twitter.com/hana71172/status/1556208536912379904?s=21&t=D_bzGvjDD5bV-0IXsNgIPw

Are we sick of living the same dumb over and over again yet?

This team is surely one of the best teams in any sport in the world. Unbelievable skills.

Grease is a script high school teachers see all the time. Where smart girls decide the best way to keep the ‘bad boys’ they can’t resist on the leash is to mirror them. Some do it for an entire lifetime, consoling themselves with ‘boys will be boys’ slogans, as the boys grow fat from beer, stuck in a permanent adolescence. Vale Olivia. I knew this soundtrack inside out as a kid, Xanadu too (great songs from ELO). Did people know Barry Gibb wrote the theme song for Grease?

The whole world is short of teachers. Supply and demand means they'll pay them more to attract more people to the profession, right? Pig's arse.

Really is a no-brainer.

Olivia jamming with ABBA.

Saw this one on Twitter and it captures beautifully so much of what I post about here. How our culture is now a war on 'home'. We have no idea what home even means now, to us it's just an address, or some feelings of sentimentality at most. Neither of those are 'home'. This is also why we're such compulsive travellers. Highly recommended reading.

Memory loss after Covid in technical terms is called 'brain damage'. Living with the virus.

I've been very critical of people for not being more angry about the Covid situation. But really it's a complete absence of leadership. People no more understand how to beat a pandemic than they know how to fly an A380. So they just go along with what everybody else is doing, because in the past that was a safe guide. Somebody, somewhere, was looking after business. What's changed is that this is no longer true. The experts who used to run countries out of sight of the rest of us have now been sidelined. We even believe politicians 'run the country'. They wouldn't have the first idea how, and you can prove this by the fact the country keeps running just fine, in caretaker periods during elections. So now, for the first time in history, there is LITERALLY 'nobody flying the plane'. If you don't believe me, look at the chaos in the US and UK. Nations which are collapsing, fast. That's our future.

I've made this same point with many people. None of them ever have a reply.

More Covid data out of the US. I am interested US friends that difficulty walking or climbing stairs was on a healthy steep decline, until Covid. But you may not remember that, based on the blue line.

On radio today they were discussing 'Australia's greatest ever lolly'. Chocolate bars were included, and plenty of people saying the disappearance of the Polly Waffle is a national disgrace. I'm not really much of a lolly eater. I don't like any that are really sweet, though I like peppermint leaves, musk cigarettes and strawberries and cream. Toffees make me want to throw up, too much concentrated sweetness. Red frogs got a lot of votes, and this confirmed my experience in the netball canteen, where they were easily the most popular. I don't mind a jelly baby either, or snakes. The teeth lollies, whatever they're called, aren't bad either.

One way they mass produce pasta.

Why I compared Covid to HIV/AIDS, not an analogy. Both diseases attack T cells, the core of your immune system. Ask any GP how much illness they're seeing right now, researchers are thinking Covid infections are wiping out immunity to just about everything. Measles does that too, but you recover. Once the T cells are destroyed, you don't. That's why people died of AIDS, after having HIV. And remember it took 8-10 years for HIV infection to turn into AIDS. I watch people I know happily line up for multiple Covid infections, 'living their best life'. What can you do?

This is such a brilliant article about how the UK is literally falling apart. All because of simple political beliefs of the ruling party that are just empirically wrong. The same beliefs the ex-government here had and the NSW Government has. 'Getting government out of peoples' lives'. But government IS the people, who else would it be? It's code for 'letting privilege do whatever it wants.' Also the reason these governments won't fight Covid, because they think that would mean government being too much in our lives. Taking government out of peoples' lives just puts business into their lives instead. Read to see how that ends, we copy the UK slavishly now.

The next Gene Kelly.

Did you know that, well before the pandemic (2015), about 1 in 7 Australian girls aged 12-17 had contemplated suicide, and about 1 in 20 had actually tried to kill themselves? What did the people now making lots of noise about keeping schools open in a pandemic to protect child mental heath, say back in 2015 about this? Nothing. They have zero interest in child mental health, and 100% interest in keeping schools open in a pandemic as childcare for business.

Female comedian on radio yesterday, describing growing up for the sexes. GIRLS Teenage years: worried about bleeding into clothes. 20s: worried about getting pregnant. 30s: worried about not getting pregnant. BOYS teenage, 20s and 30s: having a good time.

The marginal cost of most things we use in society now is actually pretty much zero. Industrial manufacturing is so efficient that we long since haven’t needed most people to work at all. The only reason they do work is because a job is the way the tiny financial elite of society ration out the vast hordes of our money they sit on. Energy will be the next big thing to become free. Within a decade, many predict. To think we had politicians and many of the public for the past decade trying to fight to retain filthy, expensive fossil fuel-powered energy, when energy could have been free for all. People spending over $100 a week on petrol right now might reflect on that, as might the Brits about to have annual energy bills of over $8000.

547 people were killed by Covid this week, in Australia. Nearly 160,000 were infected.

In the US, parents of pre-schoolers having a working bee to make Corsi-Rosenthal boxes to protect their kids from Covid. Corsi, an engineer and Rosenthal, a producer of air conditioning filters, designed these as a very low-cost way to filter air. It’s just a box fan with some air con filters taped to it. These are extremely effective at cleaning air, and cost less than $100 to make. That schools don’t already have these is criminal neglect, in some countries students make them in class as a school project.

“Such a lack of transparency is indicative of a lack of respect for the institutions of government and for the general public who have a right to know how power is allocated.” I criticised this government for years, not because I’m a ‘Labor man’ or a ‘Leftie’ (such boring team sports rubbish). But because I’m a governance professional, it’s what I do for a living, and I saw the pirates hijacking the ship of State. A disgusting chapter in Australian history, and it’s not clear the damage that was done can be fixed.

No matter what type of heating (or cooling) you have, I think the cheapest and fastest way to get your bills down is still to buy an air circulator, as pictured. This is the ‘Vornado’, one of the best. Because heat and cold left to themselves sit at opposite vertical ends of a room (top and bottom, respectively), without air circulation you’re throwing a lot of energy at heating or cooling only about half the room, and with heating often the half above your head. Have had one of these running gently in my lounge room this week. Have been able to turn down the thermostat 2-3 degrees and still feel much warmer than I did before. They’re a fan, but a very special type, a vortex fan, that creates vortices. These then enter the room and mix the air continuously. Even laying on the ground I now feel the warmth.

‘News’ to me isn’t how many entitled whining babies have to queue for hours at airports to fly to holiday destinations.

Glorious.

“…actor Ezra Miller has announced they have begun treatment for complex mental health issues.” I’d suggest that ‘they’ there is part of it.

I like to share vehicle technology, because I’m convinced people are not really aware yet of the revolution underway. Mitsubishi’s new Outlander PHEV (plug-in hybrid) is a case in point. It has an 84km full-electric range, which for town driving will probably get you 2-3 weeks of driving on a single charge (and cost you a few dollars of electricty). But it also has the petrol engine, like a standard hybrid, for long trips if you’re not going to be near a charger. But it gets more interesting. It will, like other hybrids, charge itself as you drive along on longer trips, both with an onboard generator and also with regenerative braking (using the force of braking to generate electricity, trains do this too). You can modify just how much regenerative braking you do, if you set it to max you’ll get ‘single-pedal’ driving, not really needing to brake as taking your foot off the pedal will stop the car. This is actually a very pleasurable way to drive, and gives you maximum charging to boot. The car is is also V2H and V2G enabled (Vechicle to House and Vehicle to Grid). This means it can be used as a battery at home to power your house and also store excess solar energy you might produce. Its battery is twice the size of most home solar batteries, and much more reliable, so powering the home is a doddle for it. It also means you have access to full 240V power if you’re camping. It’s AWD and a fantastic off-roader, with a much more refined drive system than most 4WDs. To charge it you only need a standard power point (takes about 9 hours, so easily done overnight, at off-peak rates if you want). On a public fast-charger it takes 38 minutes. Have it serviced by Mitsubishi and they’ll also give you a 10 year/200,000km warranty. Engineers rock.

Yep. All because of an insane set of political beliefs that ‘privatise’ society. Insurance is as ‘capitalist’ as the day is long. It collapses in a privatised society. Disasters are empirical proof that these beliefs are simply wrong.

We bought one of these. Kluger Hybrid. Obviously fuel costs are a part of the decision, plus cheap (and local) servicing. But it’s also a ‘self-driving’ car, which people know is a real interest of mine. It isn’t marketed as that, for legal reasons car makers don’t want people to think they won’t have to pay any attention to the road. Like commercial planes, it’s really semi-autonomous, like an auto pilot in a plane. But it will drive itself, under the name of ’radar cruise control’, which is what self-driving really is. The technology is already here, car makers are just introducing it without the marketing fanfare, again for legal reasons.

Over 43 dead reported today. Still over 2000 in hospital. Just posting as a reminder that nothing has changed, still a tsunami of death. I don’t sense many care, certainly not enough to say or do anything. We don’t act unless we’re led.

Also a 2-year study reported today that psychotic episodes, seizures and dementia created by Covid infection aren’t fading over time.

Flame Trees is an interesting example of what a ‘songwriter’ is. Widely accredited to Don Walker, it turns out Walker only wrote the lyrics, Steve Prestwich wrote the music (and he didn’t like Walker’s lyrics). I see that a lot, people call the person who writes the words to a song a songwriter. I totally appreciate how words and music can go together to make something special, but it’s la la land to call lyric writing song writing. Everybody remembers Mozart wrote The Magic Flute, nobody remembers who wrote the libretto. The ‘deep’ lyrics of most songs are greeting card philosophy at best. The emotional response from the music gives the ideas in the song a feeling of profundity they usually just don’t have. Like Imagine, as one example, people worship that song. The lyrics would get you a fail in any junior high school essay on history, it’s sentimental rubbish.

Happy Birthday! Making your own cake?

Happy Birthday :)

Anti-vax roid rage. This anti-vaxer apparently stopped a car carrying a doctor who administered Covid vaccines, and this is what he did. The bodybuilding community is a hotbed of ‘natural health’ numpties (this guy is the brother of a famous bodybuilder, and is a bodybuilder himself). This is what politicians produce when they choose to make public health a political debating topic.

Thanks to @[585851453:2048:Adrian] for this great piece on why Australia is the canary in the global coal mine.

If you could go back in time…

If you do buy a recirculating fan - here’s a cheaper one from Dimplex - notice they’re designed to point straight up as well. You use it like this in winter, to circulate the warm air that gathers at your ceiling, where you can’t access it. Particularly powerful if you have high ceilings, where most of your heat ends up keeping the ceiling warm and not much else. You only need the fan on gently to get the circulation going and you’ll notice you need much less heat from your heating to then feel warm.

Novated leases are a massive government subsidy to petrol and diesel vehicles. Good to see them under the spotlight, so we can finally start to get affordable full-electric vehicles in Australia. We have 3 decades of corrupted government by lobbyists to strip away. There is not one way in which being dependent on a fuel source from the Middle East that pollutes horribly is a win for Australia. Watch this space, once we’re all driving blissfully silent and clean electrics, with much more grunt than puny combustion drivetrains, we’ll wonder what the hell we were thinking keeping 19th century technology for so long.

Riddle me this. One death due to some dipshit killing a child with a high-powered penis compensation device, may prompt a change in law (and that may be a good thing). But we’re mowing down a few hundred a week with Covid, every single week, and nobody says a thing.

And this happened despite 30 years of a federal government running resistance to renewables on behalf of big donors in the fossil fuel industry. Australians never subscribed to the economic hoo-ha they were peddling, they just went about doing it without government, installing their own solar at world record pace. Now government is back on our side. A revolution is underway, watch how fast this now flies.

Emma Mitchell uses neuroscience to design images that calm mental anxiety and stress. Very often the images end up being of flowers, mixed, as in a meadow. But also pets. Skimming through her images you do end up feeling very calm, here’s one to try. Just look at it for a while. The number of gardens seems in decline, as is the landscape. The things we don’t notice are often the most important things.

Kell’s birthday wish of ‘winter go away’ has not come true, alas. Happy Birthday smiley! We love you :)

The people who say Covid is a matter of ‘personal responsibility’ know they’re lying.

Many boomers get very upset at the idea of intergenerational injustice. They seem incapable of understanding privilege, and how you can still be a nice person, but privileged. I think I’m a nice person, but I know I live a privileged life, compared to the rest of the world. It’s not hard to hold those two ideas at the same time. Here’s an example of boomer privilege. I’m 55 next year. Some boomers I know retired at 55, because their super schemes allowed them to retire at that age. It actually cost them money if they kept working. Their schemes were also extraordinarily generous, they retired pretty much on their final salary, for life. Nobody else gets super like that now, not even close. Who’d like to retire at 55, being paid your peak salary for the rest of your life? Yes please. The crowning glory of this injustice? They didn’t even fund these gold-plated schemes, they put no money aside for them at all. The taxpayer footed the bill at the last moment, through what is disingenuously called ‘The Future Fund’. Nearly $200 billion of taxpayers’ money, used to fund this largesse. Imagine what that money could do in schools, roads, hospitals etc. The same group now pushing for tax cuts targeted at themselves, costing $243 billion, on top of it. The country will not survive unless justice is begun. This is the Woodstock generation. Of peace and love. And plundering the public good. And very nice.

The greatest epidemic of all time is likely the heart disease epidemic of the 20th century. Took off early in the century, peaked about the 1960s, and in decline ever since. The usual explanation for this is we ate bad things, we smoked. Then we ate better things, smoked less, etc. The problem is, the things we ate like saturated fat, are things we’d been eating for centuries, and few people know that heart disease was almost unknown before the 20th century. We also smoked heavily for centuries. A much more interesting idea is that the cause of this epidemic was the Spanish Flu. It happened early in the 20th century, and the heart disease epidemic may be the chronic phase of Spanish Flu infection. Which also explains why it started to fall after the 1960s, as the people exposed to Spanish Flu early in the century started to die out. There’s also research linking Parkinson’s Disease to the same Spanish Flu cause. This is what we may now be doing with Covid, but possibly much worse. We’re far too casual about infection. Infection is disease, and possibly the cause of all major chronic as well as acute disease. I despair watching people meekly accept Covid infection, potentially taking years off their lives. A quote from a researcher: “I think that COVID is setting us up for a hundred years of problems.” Eileen Crimmins, Chair in Gerontology at the USC Leonard Davis School.

This looks like flame. But it’s actually water vapour, lit by LED lights.

In the UK people are mobilising to refuse to pay extortionate electricity bills. The often claimed efficiency of private industry, which nobody actually checks to see if true. Well, reality has now checked. This never happened under public-owned energy services. It surprises me smart people fall for this nonsense, how will it ever be cheaper for people to have a basic service run by a for-profit organisation? Where do they think the profits come from?

Paul Keating recently described the UK as ‘an old theme park sliding into the Atlantic’. That’s genius wit. As is this video, watch and ponder that the NSW and previous federal governments here copied everything the UK does.

Business newspapers in the UK aren’t even pretending now.

Book stores are getting creative with marketing.

I love that Daikin has a level built into its brackets. And I quite like my photo :)

@[531582806:2048:Lauren] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220824/long-covid-mimics-other-post-viral-conditions

Can somebody tell me if they’re still rooting for ‘living with the virus’? It’s all gone so quiet, has a penny dropped, or are we just pretending nothing is happening?

Australia’s birth rate is only 1.66 babies per woman, well below the 2.1 needed to maintain the population without immigration. And in decline for the past 60 years. Now we can’t even get visa workers to come here. It won’t be long and we’ll be up on the north coast begging for the boats to come back.

Boys.

I’ve posted a lot about what I see as the fundamentally wrong theory behind transgender, and this article describes how that plays out in real lives. Really worth your time.

Why do footballers and cricketers constantly spit? Disgusting.

The astronaut Charles Duke left a framed and signed photo of his family on the moon, during the Apollo 16 mission. The light in space is very white, which is what struck a lot of the astronaut photographers. The yellow of the sun we see is created by the atmosphere of Earth.

Watching The Block. Most of what gets called beautiful design is eye-deep, for me. The rooms look like a magazine shoot, or hotel room styling. It’s hard to imagine any of it ever looking really lived-in, actual life in those rooms could only make them untidy and dirty.

Today Australia reaches 10 million Covid infections (officially known, in reality there may be at least twice that number). Nearly all of those have happened in the past 8 months. More than 13,000 Australians have died from those infections. That's about 20 years of deaths we see with flu, in 8 months. If you killed a single person, you'd go to jail for a long time. If you kill 13,000 and infect millions more with a brain-eating bat virus, you get to sit on National Cabinet. I'm ashamed that Australians aren't angrier about this. I'm as disgusted about that as I am about National Cabinet.

One of my pet themes, as people know. The party may at last be over.

I think heat pumps are incredibly sexy. They can deliver up to 15 times as much energy as they consume. Which makes them actual producers of renewable energy. A country can cut its entire energy bill literally in half by using heat pumps, and its heating/cooling part of those bills by much more than that again. Like electric cars, it’ll be what everybody has in not too many years. The UK and much of Europe and the US are only just learning about these in a widescale way, which is bizarre. I mention them because I think we could soon see a worldwide shortage, the US and Europe will be installing millions of them. Get yours now.

This is the car I posted about a couple of weeks ago. Completely sold out in a fortnight. You hear so much whining about things like electric cars and renewable energy. But that whining represents only about 5% of the population. They’re a very small, very noisy minority with big money behind them. The other 95% are clamouring for these things.

By global standards, Australian homes are absolute rubbish in terms of energy efficiency. Like our car fleet. For the same reason, property developers lobby relentlessly to prevent higher standards, and the fossil fuel industry lobbied to make us one of only two countries in the entire world (the other is Russia) without vehicle emission standards. Car manufacturers dump their inefficient rubbish on us. All of that is now changing.

Have a look at the comparison of what it costs to install good quality solar here, and in the UK and US. I saw a UK news report say a heat pump there costs the equivalent of $17,000 Australian dollars, madness. Presumably it was a whole-house combined boiler system too, but still, wow. We do some things right here. 6kW (6.6kW) solar cost in Australia: $6,000 – $9,000 6kW solar cost in UK: AUD ~ $13,600 – $17,000) 6kW solar cost in the USA: AUD ~ $17,900 – $19,400

For my European and US friends, don't assume severe winters are a barrier to heat pumps. Maine gets to nearly 40 below zero, heat pumps work just fine. Gotta love engineers, that we can extract heat from air at that temperature. https://energynews.us/2022/07/27/in-maine-heat-pumps-are-proving-themselves-even-against-extreme-cold/

I like sharing the personal stories about Covid that are suppressed by politicians.

For years we've heard this from farmers, 'nobody wants to work'. What they really mean is 'nobody wants to work for slave wages'. They're front of the queue demanding to get their offshore imported slaves back. This has been tested, local young people were sent to farming regions to get jobs. The farmers wouldn't employ them, because they would have had to pay them at least the minimum wage.

Imagine a country run by smart women. Who aren’t corrupted by donors, and do the obvious things that need doing. Exhibit A.

A while ago I posted an article about how precision fermentation may replace agriculture almost entirely. It may be the greatest ever revolution in human life. It’s arrived, see ABC report below. Agriculture is far and away the most destructive force on the planet, which is little known. So this could free up vast areas of land to be allowed to regenerate. (I think fruit and veg production should continue @[100030651427143:2048:Julia]!) The original report I posted is at the following link. I recommend it to everybody, it’s astonishing reading. Futurist stuff is often a bit gee whiz, but this is tracking as predicted. https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture

This research is now well known. And still National Cabinet today will (almost certainly) do what it always does, reduce protections against Covid even further. Shifting isolation from 7 days to 5. Most people will be highly infectious after 5 days, 40% still are at 7, so the existing isolation was already hopeless. You have to look after yourself and your family and friends, because National Cabinet really won’t. I don’t think people understand this enough, nobody has your back. And this is just heart disease. The scope of Covid long-term effects goes way beyond heart disease. Still staggers me as I watch people every day line up to get repeatedly re-infected, drunk on the ‘just like the flu’ propaganda.

Have seen this tip for saving water. If you're on a septic, maybe. Don't do it if you're sewered, it removes water from the whole system that is needed to flush it out properly.

Every day I think 'living with the virus' has reached peak stupid. But there's always some new stupid, every day.

One myth car lobbies put out there is that electric vehicles are a major fire risk. The data shows clearly how stupid that one is. Car fires by vehicle type: * Gas/petrol: 1,529.9 fires per 100k sales _ 199,533 total fires * Electric: _ _ _ 25.1 fires per 100k sales _ _ _ _ 52 total fires

Excellent run-down. New petrol and diesel vehicles will quickly become stranded assets. Fuel prices are about to climb quickly again, OPEC is planning to cut supply to boost prices and profits to themselves. And the excise cut will go as well. Australia can give a huge middle finger to OPEC and never be reliant upon imported energy ever again. Amazes me people still support 19th century filthy inefficient technology that makes Middle Eastern autocracies rich.

An estimated 110 trillion (!) tonnes of ice is forecast to melt on the Greenland ice sheet, even if we could stop accelerated global warming tomorrow. It’s already too late. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to cover Australia in about 11 metres of water.

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago. A thing of almost sublime beauty, with next to no moving parts or friction, and almost infinitely scalable power. With a Faraday engine, an ordinary family electric car can go from 0-100 in under 2 seconds. That’s better than a Formula 1 car. They have so much torque, engineers have to scale it back to prevent discomfort. I think in less than 5 years we’ll be wondering what the hell we were thinking, sticking with the (much later) combustion engine, with its hopeless inefficiency, filthy exhaust fumes, expensive fuel, and thousands of moving parts that need constant servicing. Some electric trains have been running with the same unchanged electric motors for 80 years.

Here’s Michael Faraday, genius, who invented the electric motor in 1821 while working on laws of induction and discovering electro-magnetism, which those who’ve done physics will appreciate. Over a century ago, and half a century before the internal combustion engine was invented. A thing of sublime beauty, with next to no moving parts or friction, and almost infinitely scalable power. With a Faraday engine, an ordinary family electric car can go from 0-100 in under 2 seconds. That’s better than a Formula 1 car. They have so much torque, engineers have to scale it back to prevent discomfort. There’s still an assumption in the community that petrol and diesel vehicles have more grunt, and electrics are like granny cars. It’s completely backwards, combustion engines are puny, inefficient, filthy and noisy. With thousands of moving parts that need regular servicing. Some electric trains have been running with the same unchanged electric motors for 80 years. It’s extraordinary that something so much better existed for 50 years before the combustion clunkers were even thought of, and only now are we making the shift back to them. It shows the power of the fossil fuel industry that it’s taken this long.