October 2022

Brendan is one of the leading pandemic authorities in the world. We need to listen a lot more to people like him. He’s 100% right that ‘Australians think it’s over’. And they think it’s over mostly because the previous PM wanted them to think that before Christmas last year, so he could go into an election looking like the man who ended the pandemic, with us having had lovely holidays over Christmas on his behalf. 25,000 Australians are projected to die from Covid this year. If that doesn’t appall you, I think you should be deeply ashamed. (For the slogan-infected ‘just like the flu’ folk, about 600 people die of flu in an average flu year.) It’s also vital to understand that how we all behave makes these deaths happen. We spread it, to the people who die, in our social activity, even if our own case is ‘mild’. And Covid is not mild for anybody, it might just look that way in the short term.

You wouldn’t know from the stories we hear just how much amazing, fast change has already happened with renewable energy. Most of regional WA for example will soon not even bother with the grid. And this will be a much more resilient system.

Finally free of Tony Abbott’s string and tin can internet. Fibre to the home is glorious. Thanks to cable guru Russell Commins! I made no comments about Daylight Saving this year, because Covid came along and showed DST was just the tip of an entire iceberg of stupidity. All society is a high school now, permanent adolescence, ‘living our best lives’, so it’s pointless even arguing. Get on the beers, etc. Over it.

We need to get rid of elections. There’s a huge list of basic jobs any community needs to get done, none of which are controversial. Right now though they don’t get done unless somebody can make it popular to do them. It’s like not mowing your lawn or fixing your toilet, until you can get everybody in the street to agree to it. Politicians drip-feed only a fraction of the needed money into communities, for electoral purposes, often with big novelty cheques. (They give vast amounts of it away in things like tax cuts, to curry favour with mates.) We don’t need them, government officials at all levels know what work needs doing, all politicians do is add a layer of pork-barrelling between the money and the jobs. If we want politicians, select them randomly by lot (sortition). As we do for juries. Every problem we have in politics would disappear overnight.

It’s almost impossible to believe, but this blindness is what our own National Cabinet CHOSE to introduce here this week too. One of the revelations in this pandemic for me is how fully grown adults think an existential crisis can be over, just because they’re sick of it and say it is.

A critically important thing to remember after this week’s National Cabinet meeting is that we didn’t stop isolation of Covid cases. We stopped public health orders doing that. It’s still the legal responsibility of your employer to do it, as well as many other things, to stop you getting Covid. In fact for many jobs, you don’t even need to prove you caught it at work to get compensation, the employer has to prove you didn’t. Have a look at the standard WHS control measures for Covid below. Many Australian businesses are doing none of them. Not one. There are heavy penalties for employers who don’t, including jail. Remind your boss. Some WHS experts say the default should be remote work where possible, unless an employer can show they’re implementing these layers of control (remote work is one of the layers, number 1 in fact). National Cabinet says it’s now all ‘personal responsibility’, which is an illegal lie.

PASC = Post-acute sequelae of Covid-19 i.e. effects of Covid after infection. Red is inflammation. The control is somebody without Covid. Combined PET-MRI scan.

The WA power system is under pressure because the foreign-owned coal mine that provides coal to its power station is about to go belly up. It’s another fossil fuel stranded asset, that nobody wants because the industry is dead. East coast coal survives for now because of the war in Ukraine, but it’s a temporary stay of execution. We have 10 years to modernise our power grid, something we should have been doing for the past 20 but which the previous government refused. It’s going to be brutal.

In today’s let’s pretend Covid is over news, the US is projecting a minimum of 100 million infections over its autumn and winter. Meanwhile Germany is bringing masks back.

If you don't have solar and can afford it, now is the time. (Worth pointing out again that the ROI on solar panels is orders of magnitude greater than any other investment you can make with your money right now.) The ACT uses 100% renewable energy and won't be impacted at all. That tells us a lot about the future.

A new type of Covid denialism is large numbers of people wandering around in workplaces with coughs and sneezes saying 'it's just a cold'. They have no proof of that, it's completely made up. But it gives them an excuse to be sick, at work, and not get tested. And now if their employer doesn't have strong policies about being sick at work, they're free to infect everybody else there.

I love a truck and driver parade in Bathurst.

This beautiful satellite image shows a mine in Inner Mongolia that is the key to the whole modern world. The Bayan Obo mine. Most of the rare earth minerals used in modern technology come from China, it produces over 90% of the world supply. It also has far and away the greatest reserves of these minerals. Which is another reason fossil fuel companies pay for propaganda to say renewable technology is impractical, because China has nearly 40% of the known reserves. It also builds more than 90% of the technology these minerals produce, while our own countries create fake wealth using financial industry speculative instruments. The Chinese still build things. In fact they build most of our things, because we're too stupid and lazy to do it ourselves. The device you're reading this post on is nearly certainly built using the minerals from this mine.

Rain or shine. Behind all of the umbrellas is the drivers.

How much longer can this bullshit go on? Where we pretend we’re living with a pandemic? Like saying we’re going to stop putting out bushfires, and tell flooded people to get swimming lessons.

Fuck OPEC. Those who cling to fantasies about continuing with their petrol and diesel cars need to remember that OPEC is little more than a mafia group. That's who you're making rich. They've been running the world for more than 50 years. Now slashing production to push up prices to make themselves and Vladimir Putin even richer.

I often say we float upon the surface of the Earth. The floating happens in multiple ways. For example your bones float in your body, like the solid parts of this chair float in the wires. None of these solid parts touch each other, tension is what holds the structure up. Our usual model says the bones are like a frame that we hang everything else off. That's incorrect, in fact bones are just tissues amongst all of your other tissues. They even change shape according to the forces applied to them, they grow to respond to those forces. Our whole body is sculpted by gravity.

Because National Cabinet copies everything the UK does, here’s a window into our Christmas this year, if it helps with your planning.

Happy Birthday :)

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t wear them because nobody is leading them to do otherwise. There’s no independent choice in operation. That’s how high school works. FB and other social media extend the dynamics of high school life into adulthood, perpetuating it across all age groups. I posted a while ago that this is how the Koreans ran such brutally effective POW camps in the Korean War. They recognised about 5% of people actually lead behaviour, the rest imitate and follow that 5%. So they killed that 5%, and the rest of the prisoners then did exactly as they were told. Today people won’t wear a mask or stop going to mass Covid spreading events because they don’t want to ‘stand out from the crowd’, to be the ‘odd one out’. They’re still in high school. The whole society is.

Most of our immunity will be pretty much gone by Christmas. There are no plans to do anything about it. An acceptable risk level for disease is 0.1% or less. This is 40 times greater than that.

For solar, bypass all the salespeople and energy companies selling you panels (nearly all of them will rip you off). Use the Solar Quotes website, it does all of the work for you, brilliant. Set up and run by an ex-CSIRO electrical engineer. Will find you 3 quotes from excellent installers, and also provide a guarantee if they muck you around (which they won’t if they’re on his lists). https://www.solarquotes.com.au/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIv5_A5JvP-gIVxZJmAh2XbwRvEAAYASAAEgLenfD_BwE

Water’s been gushing out of the ground in the hills around Lithgow for months, even when it’s not raining. At the same time, if you go up Hassans Walls Road and look up slope, a huge number of trees are well past vertical, falling down the hill. (Pic is Wolgan Road.) And huge slabs of rock are falling down the hills. A wet spring and summer might be interesting.

I imagine if this was an electric vehicle charging station, how it would be plastered over the news everywhere by the petrol and diesel fetishists. Funnily, electric vehicle charging stations don’t tend to blow up, nor does electricity. Far more petrol and diesel cars catch fire than electric cars too, despite the best efforts of the fetishists to convince you of the opposite.

This is the Covid story we’re all about to live. All existing vaccines lose effectiveness within 5 months. This isn’t unusual, your annual flu shot is the same, we’re saved by flu disappearing over Spring and Summer, giving us time to be boosted before the next winter. Covid doesn’t disappear over the warmer months. It’s not a seasonal disease like flu, just one more way the two have nothing in common. Last summer was a Covid disaster here, for example. Most Australians are therefore already past the period where their vaccines are strongly effective, having had their final shot 6 or more months ago. What’s the plan? There isn’t one. The last major protections we had, isolating infected people for 5 days (already a hopelessly weak protection), was removed by National Cabinet a short time ago. Why? Because the NSW and Victorian Premiers have elections soon, and thought it would be popular, so convinced National Cabinet to drop more measures. Just as Scott Morrison went to his election dropping measures, thinking it would be popular. The UK already arrived at this point, and we copied them. They’re seeing dramatic increases in infections and hospitalisations, right now. You cannot vaccinate your way out of a pandemic, if you believe you can, you’ve been listening to politicians, not scientists.

The corner store may be back. Had predicted this years ago, that we’d go back to more local-based shopping, but with the power of big supply chains behind it. I’d definitely shop at a corner store I could walk to.

Climate change has so many ways of destroying society, and I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The damage to local road and rail over the past few years isn’t sustainable, enormously expensive to fix.

I've been dreading this day. Latour was probably my greatest influence in thinking about the world, I can't even begin to describe the ways his genius changed the way we can think about everything. His own mentor Michel Serres died only recently too. Bruno was also a marker on my PhD over 30 years ago now, and didn't ask me to make one change, which was nice. We sometimes swapped emails and he made me see my own first training as a materials scientist in a whole new way. He was the reason I went on to do philosophy as PG training. He was an international academic celebrity when he died, the most important thinker alive, I think. So funny, such a brilliant writer, he taught me (which he says he learned from the authors of the Bible) that you have to write in ways that draw people in. The French President spoke beautifully of his life. A wonderful spirit gone, I couldn't recommend a more amazing person for people to read.

Weather permitting, my solar panels should be installed by the end of the year. Just in time. If you’re a fan of coal, oil and gas power, I hope you have deep pockets. And a memory, of being told those were the path to ‘affordable’ power.

“I once got Alzheimers from the flu”, said nobody ever.

Todd Sampson's two-part doco on social media premiered last night. Included in it was research that showed more than 80% of social media posts are about the person who posts them. Also why people encourage those posts, because it gives them permission to post even more about themselves. We're deeply in love with talking about ourselves.

Read this, these utes are already on the boats on their way here, arriving within weeks. Why are businesses lining up to buy them? They’ve done the sums, it will save them LOTS of money. At least 5 times cheaper over the lifetime of the vehicle. And that’s even before prices of EVs come down with economies of scale and removing subsidies for petrol and diesel. Electric vehicles run for many more years than combustion clunkers, and the electricity is so much cheaper than fuel. Nothing to do with Greenies, just basic economics and engineering. And they have more ‘grunt’ than petrol or diesel utes. Just to correct the pig ignorance of a previous PM.

There are already nearly 60,000 people in NSW with Long Covid. Waiting lists to see medical expertise about it are already over a year long. And you should know, there is no real medical expertise on what to do about it, most of it is for show. Ask chronic disease sufferers about a lifetime of hell with no care options. That will soon be a large portion of the population. And all willingly self-inflicted.

My first real insight into the genius of electric motors was a line trimmer (whipper snipper) my dad bought me more than 30 years ago. The Ryobi Electro Scorpion. It’s still going strong, and hasn’t once in more than 30 years needed any maintenance or oil or fuel. Just electricity. Michael Faraday’s genius engine, the electric motor, will finally get its time, and rid us of the noisy, stinking, inefficient world of combustion engines.

Alex Jones is like the Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or Paul Murray of the US. This legal case was parents of the Sandy Hook school massacre suing him for running repeated conspiracy stories that the massacre was a hoax. This should mean he’s ruined, and not before time. One of the vermin who have weaponised continuous opposition to basic civilised society for a few decades now. It’s time for good people to kick all of these scum to the kerb.

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.” Jane Austen. An ancestor on my mum's side, with a well-deserved reputation for being a giant of human thought.

Because government dumped responsibility for Covid on you and me, as 'personal responsibility', this will help you assess risk for hospitalisation and death. Note it doesn't assess any of the dangers of long-term infection.

Adding a billion atomic bombs worth of heat to the ocean in the past 30 years funnily enough has created a lot of rain.

An Australian ICU nurse was so angry at the minimising Covid crap in her local newspaper, she posted a powerful counter to it. I’ve included it all here, it’s a quick and enlightening (I hope for some) read. We should be ashamed that she needs to do it.

One of the followers of this truckload of human smegma dug up the grave of one of the Sandy Hook shooting victims (school children), to try to prove it was empty.

This is Covid, there's no way half the school has seasonal flu at the same time. It's not even winter there. All of the lies and stupidity are exhausting.

Bathurst car races. Then, 2-3 days later. If you take comfort from ‘it’s only 19 people’, it’s worth remembering most people aren’t even bothering to test, and those that do don’t even have to report the result now. And exponential growth always starts with 1 person.

The amazing things actually happening in the world are rarely reported. You don’t need ‘positivity’, which is just bullshit pop psychology. You need to hear what’s actually happening.

Saul Griffiths is on a mission to electrify everything. Which is what we need to do if we’re not all going to be incinerated by climate change. And we have to do it fast. He’s an engineer, and amongst other things he’s been doing, he’s mobilising his entire suburb to electrify. If you have iView, check him out on Fran Kelly’s Frankly show this week (thanks Julia for the heads up). Amongst many other things, he talks about how electric cars use one-third of the energy per kilometre of a petrol or diesel car, and are 10 times cheaper to maintain over their lifetime. And how Australian rooftop solar is the cheapest energy in the entire world now, a story of real revolution. The indicators on climate change are genuinely disastrous, we don’t have long. No other work is more important if we’re going to survive. Mass community-driven electrification may be our best hope. Why I talk about it a lot, it will also save you thousands of dollars per year!

Happy birthday!

Imagine willingly allowing yourself to become infected with this virus.

Society is falling apart, and it's like we're just hoping it will fix itself. But it keeps getting worse, not better. The way we did things pre-Covid is not coming back, no matter how much we pretend.

It seems we have a choice between curated happy online personas living their best (Instagram-filtered) lives, and righteous vandalism. Social media means we now never leave high school.

Every time I walk through the car park of doctor surgeries past the expensive European cars, I'm reminded that they're public servants and are not held to account like any other public servant. The scale of the rorting and waste is staggering. Nurses and other HCWs in the meantime earn a pittance. And the over-servicing is ridiculous. For example I'd love a shingles vaccination, which I'll have to pay for. But to even be able to access it I need to have 3 GP appointments. Bloody ridiculous, a nurse or pharmacist could give it to me. And note how many GPs work short hours now, part-time. They earn so much they barely notice the missed earnings. According to their own professional website, the average GP earns $330,000 per year. I think in reality for most it's $150,000-$260,000 per year. Other specialists can earn $500,000-$1 million a year. All taxpayer dosh. Dentists are as bad if not worse, but at least don't get to rort Medicare. (They just rort your private health insurance.)

Great article showing the brutally fast changes underway. This was Australia’s newest coal-fired plant, and remember many were calling for us to build even more. It’s gone belly up, entirely for economic reasons. None of this is tough maths, if you have high coal prices, you also have high coal-fired electricity prices. And coal plants are hopelessly inflexible, you can’t adjust them to shifts in demand. 60% of what’s left of coal-fired electricity in Australia will be gone by 2030. That’s 7 years.

If you didn’t see this last night, I highly recommend you watch it on iView. Griffith in NSW is collapsing. And everywhere else will follow. What Covid did is expose a dark secret. Slavery never ended, we just called it ‘labour hire’ instead. When Covid stopped the flow of slaves, our entire ‘economy’ began to collapse. Watch the story, how helpless Griffith is to do a thing about it. Half a million beautiful orange trees sit there unpicked, for the second year in a row. Most businesses in town, and the hospital and GP surgeries, don’t have enough or even any staff. I’ve said all along we either beat Covid, or it will destroy us. Watch this, it’s not melodramatic, just a simple description of what’s happening right now. Society is on the brink of collapse.

My plug for understanding gravity, why I talk about it a lot. I lifted 12 tonnes (yep, tonnes) in less than 3 hours this morning, boxes of files. Not a single sore muscle or even any tiredness. Was a good test. I do no workouts of any kind, and the only ‘exercise’ I do is a walk every day. I let gravity work me out, in everything I do. Even sitting in a chair. The secret to lifting is not to lift. Add the weight to your body, and then just move with that added weight.

Transgender activism is a pretty nasty cult. See the comments on the death of Robbie Coltrane. Other transgender people are calling discrimination because their breast alteration surgery is given lower priority than women with breast cancer. They’re calling it a ‘gendered cancer’. We’re well past batshit crazy.

When you fly somewhere, do you and all the other passengers vote for what the pilot should be doing at each stage of the flight? No? So why do we elect leaders of complex societies, who have a much more complicated job than a pilot? Elections are destroying democracy. A symptom of how much this is true is the number of people who will swear elections actually ARE democracy.

The new IR legislation next week is said to remove 'pay secrecy'. Not before bloody time. You should always be able to know what others at work are paid, and also to know what the salary is for a job you're applying for. It was blatant corruption, to suppress wages.

This sounds normal.

Peter Andrews' work says the same thing. You have to store the water in the soil, not in dams. I suspect this is also why Australia doesn't really have big rivers like other continents do. The water doesn't flow out to sea, the landscape captures it. Or it used to. Once you put obstacles in the way of the water, to slow it down, you discover the pattern again. https://www.theguardian.com/vitasoy-growing-a-better-world/2022/oct/19/from-concrete-to-sponge-how-to-slow-the-flow-on-australias-farmland

I see quite a few pregnant women unmasked, and worry about their health and their baby's. One I know lost her baby, and blames the vaccines. I suspect she'd had Covid herself. This is the consequence of pretending a lethal disease is like a cold.

Notice politicians saying our only Covid threat is new variants? You'll never exhaust the way these bastards are lying to make us pretend it's all over. Have a look at the variant mapping. They just stopped naming the new variants, and call it all 'Omicron' now. That way they can say there are no new variants.

So many pings here for me, having left an institution going through the same crisis of incompetent management. Constantly renaming things because they had no idea how to actually manage anything.

Here’s today’s quiz. Who was actually running the country since the mid-1990s? This should as much as anything make Australians determined to electrify everything, to give a giant middle finger to the people who did and profited from this. Electric is the true buy Australian. Unless of course you have some fetish for making Texans and Arabs rich.

“The world has spent an estimated $2 trillion on dams in recent decades. But Veldkamp’s startling conclusion is that the activity has left 23 per cent of the global population with less water, compared with only 20 per cent who have gained.” Thinking dams give you more water is like getting a bigger wallet and thinking you’ll have more money.

As a counterweight to the standard ‘here we all are ignoring Covid’ FB fare. In 2 parts. Part 1.

Part 2.

Happy Birthday :)

Almost word for word everything I’ve said about Lithgow in relation to coal and power. Because it’s what the businesses themselves say, I just listen to them. The change will be fast, and brutal. The town will only survive if it doesn’t listen to people who don’t understand that.

I have so many memories of sessions like this, where everybody sits around trying to figure out what the organisation they’re working for is supposed to be doing. Nobody ever figures it out. The sessions only happen at all because the people paid a lot of money to know what to do don’t have a clue, and therefore aren’t doing it.

This is a real crisis for all forms of football. There’s no obvious solution to this apart from not to play.

Kids who have had Covid are up to 77% more likely to develop diabetes. How is this not the headline every day of the week? Remembering we’re infecting ALL kids, deliberately, because we believe the spin it’s ‘just a cold’. I’ve posted a few times about how the real catastrophe of Covid will only play out over coming years.

Australian researchers study soap bubbles to design the most efficient way to dig an open-cut mine. Our lives would be almost infinitely more amazing if we ran societies on smart, and not on the social conformity of the schoolground, which infects life now at all ages. That’s what social media is, the schoolyard for adults.

How to make a steel wheel for a train.

Have posted before about the possible similarity of action of HIV and Covid. The virus lives in your body after you test negative, probably for years or even for life. As with HIV, where the initial infection was often very mild, but people were dead within a decade. And people line up to catch this bastard, multiple times. Thinking it’s like a cold. “McComsey, who has spent the last two decades studying HIV, said that the data they have found so far paints a picture that is eerily familiar. “Now I just look at it, and I’m like gosh, it’s like a déjà vu,” McComsey said.

Another favourite from corporate group work sessions. Where the bored, half-asleep people at the tables all offer up the least boring idea they can think of, the group summarises on butcher’s paper, and the rest of the room then gets to put a coloured sticker on which of the boring ideas they find the least boring too. The meeting organiser takes all of this remnant boredom away and summarises it, in documents nobody ever reads.

Happy Birthday Wayne!

‘Living with the virus’. Harry Styles on world tour, having breaks between every song to reportedly use an oxygen mask.

These are neutralisation assays, tests done to show how our antibodies (the main part of our immune systems that fight infection) respond to different viruses. These are people who have had 3 doses of vaccine, and a Covid infection, what politicians are calling ‘hybrid immunity’ and the strategy we’re using to end the pandemic. The different Covid variants are along the bottom axis. The most recent ones are on the right (BA.2.75.2, BQ.1, BQ.1.1 and XBB). The coloured dots show where antibodies were produced i.e. our immune system fought the virus. As you can see after 1 month (top graph), for the latest variants there’s hardly any immunity at all. After 7.5 months (bottom graph), immunity is zero. Most Australians are approaching or past 7-8 months since their last vaccination and/or infection. Many have only had 2 shots, let alone 3. We’re heading into Christmas almost completely unprotected. There are no plans to do anything about it.

🙄

All grandstanding for the NSW election. I doubt this project will ever happen.

You can't make this stuff up. Now if you get Covid on a cruise, staff or passenger, they lock you in your cabin for 5 days, while the cruise continues, including with guests disembarking in all destinations, carrying Covid with them to infect the locals. After those 5 days you're highly likely to be still infectious, plus we know from earlier in the pandemic that keeping people in their rooms spreads the virus throughout the ship anyway. Do people not register the depth of the insanity we're living with now? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-24/covid-19-cases-confirmed-aboard-coral-princess-cruise-liner/101571326

"Furthermore, the data showed the increase was most significant among individuals ages 25-44, who are not usually considered at high risk for heart attack." https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-10-covid-surges-linked-spike-heart.html

There's an assumption that if we just let COVID run, it will become mild over time, like a cold. Here's why that's insanity. Malaria has been infecting humans for over 50,000 years. It's as lethal now as it was 50,000 years ago.

I didn't know what this was. I do now. I'm sure others here might.

I do realise most people won’t change their behaviour, because they think nobody else will either, so it’s like school, peer pressure will win. Without change being led, nothing will change. Yaneer is an international pandemic expert. This is your time to break from the crowd, and save your own life and the life of the people you love. ‘If not today then tomorrow’ refers to the research showing the terrible damage Covid does to hearts and other organs, which kills some time after you’re infected. Months or even years.

Growing up we’re often told white bread isn’t that good for you. But it turns out, it is. The Japanese already knew it.

“The basic problem with government budgets is that they are still framed around the idea that surpluses are good, and deficits are bad, which is ridiculous. Governments are not companies making profits and losses, paying dividends and growing the business by investing. They are machines for redistributing money, from those who have got it to those who need it.” Alan Kohler

Happy birthday :)

SARS-Cov2 (Covid) is only allowed to be studied in a Class 3 Biosafety facility. It's a Class 3 Biohazard, like bubonic plague, and anthrax. Kids are allowed to breathe it in all day at school, unprotected. And you too at work or when socialising. Picture below is what a scientist has to wear in a Class 3 facility.

It’s not funny, but it made me laugh, that we’re this dumb. Over 400 infected on board this cruise, and counting. Heading to Brisbane.

I don’t know if many even read the Covid stuff I post, but I do it anyway in the hope it saves even one life. I’ve never seen stronger proof that we never leave high school than this pandemic. Hardly anybody does or says anything out of fear of being different to everybody else.

From the government who tears up planning controls so people can build on floodplains, we now get politicians deciding to remove concrete and steel from major projects, saying engineers are overdoing it. It reminds me of that scene in Amadeus where the emperor says to Mozart that he’s using ‘too many notes’.

Happy Birthday sir!

The judge told the jurors at least 17 times not to 'do their own research'. A classic example of institutional expertise up against populist dimwits. The dimwits won, again. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/27/jury-discharged-in-bruce-lehrmann-case-after-material-entered-jury-room-that-ought-not-to-have

As with the Cardinal Pell trial, this is what happens when populism replaces our basic institutions. In Pell's case, the High Court ended up acquitting him because it found the jury 'lacked sufficient doubt' i.e. they'd already made up their minds before they arrived. And now a juror in the Lehrman trial was 'doing their own research', classic populism. I don't have a clue in either case who is guilty and who isn't. It's irrelevant what we think. The purpose of the justice system is to FIND OUT. As with Pell, there was so much pre-assumed guilt by the time this trial started, I suspect it may have been overturned on appeal too, even if the trial had been allowed to finish. Populism is people launching their own crusades based on their own (or no) facts. A social media-driven lynch mob.

Reference to AIDS again here. Immune system damage from 'mild' Covid, possibly irreparable.

There are more people hospitalised for Covid in the US than there are known Covid cases. (They don't test. Like us now.)

There’s such ancient sophistication in the law, which we’re never taught about. Like what’s currently happening in the Bruce Lehrmann trial, and the explanations for why the jury was dismissed. Imagine if you were on trial and were convicted, because some of the jurors saw something on YouTube and used that as the basis of their decision, rather than the evidence your lawyer had put before them. It’s gross injustice. I remember the kangaroo courters here with the Cardinal Pell trial, and me saying I thought he’d win because people were disrespecting the process. Exactly what happened, it prejudiced the verdict. Doesn’t mean I think Pell was right, I have no idea. But if he was guilty, it was the kangaroo courters who got him off in the end, not his lawyers. Also the principle that tabloid life has made us forget. That a person must be proved guilty, the baseline is always that they are innocent until proved otherwise. Why a person (like Lehrmann in this case) is free to say nothing at all in their own defence. It’s got nothing to do with justice ‘ignoring victims of crime’ (more tabloid rubbish). This is how the law works, and should work, you are always innocent until proved otherwise. Proved. If you ever end up in court accused of something, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that principle a lot more than we do right now.

Those who are so deeply infected with slogans about renewable energy cling to hydrogen as some sort of last-stand of resistance. Hydrogen is an excellent fuel, but is 3 to 4 times as expensive as just basic solar, wind and batteries.

Myxomatosis in rabbits is another warning about Covid. When it was first introduced here it killed just about every rabbit it infected. Then it seemed to become more mild, and people assumed rabbits had developed immunity to it. But when scientists recently checked again to see how it’s going, they discovered something horrifying. The virus has now evolved to be more like HIV/AIDS, and in those years they thought the virus was mild it was actually detroying rabbit immune systems. Once that destruction has reached a certain point, the rabbits die. Just as it took 10 years for people infected with HIV to develop AIDS through immune system damage, as the virus occupied their cells and ate people alive from the inside out.

More recent workshops I saw online. This is what passes for work in far too many organisations now. When you don’t have leadership with a clue what to do, you end up in endless workshops with post-it notes, butcher’s paper and games to pretend genius and innovation will emerge from Play School for grown-ups.

Boom.

This is why I think the NDIS will not only ultimately fail, it may in fact consume our entire democracy and sink it. A big caveat upfront, I’m a huge fan of the NDIS and what it represents. But I think we’ve introduced it into a context that will engulf it, and everything else besides. The problem is this is an age of continuous invention of ‘disability’. Like this piece, another new condition. Our response to the destruction of our societies by wealthy elites is to go inwards, and invent an almost infinite number of new forms of identity from our suffering. Rather than tackle the simple root cause of this suffering, which is the hijacking of all of society by these same wealthy elites. It should make us gasp that the NDIS is already twice as expensive as Medicare. The suffering is real, and out there, but we’re not going to fix it by consuming the entire public budget in supporting every new invented identity from this suffering. We need to end the suffering, not support the disability-identities.

Smart thinking. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2022/oct/31/raising-warragamba-dam-probably-cant-stop-floods-theres-a-simpler-solution-closer-to-home

Some bars in the NT still have wet t-shirt competitions. Some of the young women I heard interviewed there in the audience said they found the competitions 'empowering', and allowed women to 'celebrate their bodies'. I need to retire, so I can escape high school once and for all. Maybe.

Here in the West we create cartoon-like caricatures of China. For example we say their Covid policy is a fantasy. But that fantasy is all that’s keeping any of our lives going. China is the world’s factory, one of the few nations still building things, while the rest of us just try to make capital gains on speculative investments in housing and financial instruments. Or bloody cryptocurrency.