November 2022

Wyangala Dam. Bathurst has a major flood warning too.

About half-a-dozen people I know this week have experienced severe medical episodes, life-threatening. All were healthy beforehand and had no prior conditions. All have had Covid. In all cases doctors have no idea what caused the episodes, and also no idea what to do about them. All were fully vaccinated. This is the war of attrition on our bodies I post about a lot. When people have Covid, it’s just the beginning. The real damage comes later for most.

Today's trivia question. Not a hard one, unless you're a politician, employer or an economist i.e. an idiot.

Even Channel 9 starting to register the disaster. Don't wait for these stories to act, your life actually depends on it. Politicians will do nothing to protect you. https://twitter.com/i/status/1587353399141584900

Out of interest I rang the local Mitsubishi dealer to ask what the waiting time is now on the Outlander hybrid. 13 to 14 months. The reason for this (which the salesperson didn't tell me, but I already knew) is interesting. 1) Worldwide there's still a shortage of semiconductor chips, which are in everything now. Covid caused this shortage. This is also why there's so much international angst over Taiwan - they make most of the world's semiconductors. 2) The initial release of this car in Australia was swamped by fleet buyers, who are trying to electrify their fleets. They know what the petrol and diesel-heads still refuse to accept, that EVs are far superior technology, and are much, much cheaper to own and run. I'll probably buy one of these, and at the end of its life use it as a home battery for my solar panels. Almost twice the capacity of a Tesla Powerwall home battery, and can be used all through the life of the car as the power source for your home.

This is Tesla’s car-making plant in Shanghai. It had the capacity to roll out 750,000 Teslas per year. They’ve just upgraded that to make it 1.1 million per year. It’ll reduce waiting times in Australia significantly, where demand is white-hot for all electric cars. This change will happen so fast that, again, I wouldn’t buy a petrol or diesel now, if you ever expect to make money selling it again.

Australia is swimming in solar-generated energy from our own rooftops. More than twice what any other country produces, per person. The big jump in electricity prices is caused by the previous government not building any of the infrastructure to use that energy, which is therefore just sitting there unable to be distributed. The same people who now say we need more coal plants and even nuclear plants, as if supply is the problem. We’re swimming in energy. Distribution and storage is the problem, which they did nothing about.

The official update site for the gas outage. https://jemena.com.au/about/newsroom/media-release/2022/gas-supply-outage-update-bathurst,-lithgow,-oberon

I see very little evidence anybody cares. It's a defining moment in Australian society, deliberately infecting our children. Over and over, not just once. Our society may not survive it, the health costs alone could be beyond our capacity to pay. And seriously, if protecting the next generation isn't the main reason we're fucking alive, what is? Travel? Eating out? Entertainment?

So with gas non-existent in some of the Central West right now, and hugely expensive when it isn't, and petrol now back well over $2 a litre with the removal of the reduction in excise and OPEC deliberately cutting production to boost profits....does 'electrify everything' make sense? None of this is going to get any better.

For background on why your wallet is bleeding at the petrol pump, OPEC is the cartel of oil producing countries that have held the world to ransom for the past century. If we electrify everything, the tens of billions we pay OPEC each year from Australia alone for fuel drops to zero dollars. Not one more cent to these bastards. The ultimate 'buy Australian' campaign is to electrify everything we can, and power it with renewables. And if you're still recovering from energy slogans from the past 20 years and think this means we won't have enough energy, the problem is we have way more than we need (from rooftop solar), that we can't distribute to everybody fast enough, and store in batteries and dams and hydrogen. All things we should have been building for the past decade. If we had we'd now be the Saudi Arabia of the new world. The next decade will be a race to catch up, it'll be brutal.

One of the interesting things about the gas outage is that they have to individually reconnect pretty much every single building. Not for engineering reasons (that I know of), but because I think of the risk some people may have left the gas on when it wasn't working, and might end up with a building full of gas. Even when they repair the main lines, it could still take weeks to get everybody back on.

Yep.

Love the allergy advice on the egg carton.

Happy Birthday Julia! So young :)

Lithgow, Wang and Oberon don't even have the mains to their towns restored, so you can imagine how long they'll be waiting.

Freemantle, outside Bathurst. I think climate change is often thought of as something that just impacts the weather. But our infrastructure isn't set up to cope with even this earliest phase of warming. What comes next doesn't bear thinking about. Best you can do is not live in a floodplain right now, and electrify your home, including backup storage. You can do that for much less than it costs to buy a new car, which you won't be able to drive on many roads anyway.

Have any of my friends in 'bodywork' traditions ever seen anything on the benefits of sitting with legs wide apart? On a chair I mean. To me it seems to activate a lot of the musculature around the hips, torso and buttocks a lot better than sitting with legs straight forward. To me sitting in the traditional way almost forces a tightening around that mid-body, because the legs are doing almost nothing. But if you widen them considerably, as people do when sitting backwards on a chair, it feels a lot more supportive, with your support distributed better across a much wider range of active muscles.

A game Kell and I play when watching Grand Designs is checking out what happens to the houses after they're finished and filmed. We haven't found one yet that wasn't sold within a year or two of being finished. People go bankrupt building the 'home of their dreams' and end up having to sell to become solvent again. Also a cautionary tale about using architects, who often seem to have very little idea about how to do something within a budget. I enjoy the show, but its weakness is it focuses on homes built by people who either have way more money than the average person, or way more debt.

'Just like the flu'.

@[100011634545260:2048:Tod Walsh] https://eng.unimelb.edu.au/industry/sustainable-resources/news-and-events/shear-pressure-to-improve-mine-tailings-management

One to ponder as you pack into pubs, gigs, restaurants and planes. This is the urgent research underway to understand similarities between HIV and Covid. All of the experience of Covid to date is in that 0-6 week mark, where people get an infection, are more or less sick, and then recover (or not). Then they think it’s over, and get 2-3 more infections in a year. They enter the ‘clinical latency’ stage, where the virus lives in you but you don’t notice it. Just prior to that it ‘seeds’ your lymphatic system. With HIV we know at the other end of that latency period, which for HIV is normally 8-10 years, the virus has done so much damage to the immune system (CD4+ cells) in the latency period that the immune system collapses. That’s what AIDS is. What’s bad about Covid so far is that we’re seeing dysfunctional immune responses (people catching everything right now) already only a few months after infection, not 8-10 years.

If any locals don’t have heating at the moment and need some, I have a Vornado vortex heater available for loan. We also have 3-4 electric column heaters.

My no-gas shower hack (for those who don’t live near me, gas infrastructure was damaged in flooding, so multiple towns have no gas for several weeks, maybe even months). I heated a big pot of water on the stove, and mixed it with cold in a watering can with a shower-rose type head on it. Only a 9L watering can, too much bigger and it’s a bit unwieldy. It was plenty of hot water for a full shower. Just tipped it over my head and body as required. I don’t have hair to wash, but had so much water left that I could easily have done that as well. Made me realise how much water and energy we waste in an average shower.

In the US and Europe they’ve been infecting kids with Covid longer than us. You can see what it does to immune systems, leaving people wide-open to other infections. This is what AIDS does - Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, you acquire an immune deficiency by a virus destroying your immune system. My kids are about the only kids I see at school still wearing a mask. It’s hard for them. But losing your immune system is a lot worse.

Snow gums in Victoria.

Australia has only 44 years left of gas in reserves, at current rate of consumption. And gas is considered the ‘transition’ fuel. It’s an urgent thing.

Just watching the Wang episode. O boy. The jell-o shots in the cool room in the middle of the day a highlight. Plus Becky’s missing teeth.

If you read anything this week, make it this fantastic piece by Cory. WW2 upended social hierarchies. Those hierarchies reasserted themselves from the late-1970s until today. That’s what modern ‘economic’ politics really is. Nothing you see in life and work and politics will make sense unless you understand the real historical forces in play here, that turned societies into ‘economies’ (which don’t exist). It’s a fascinating story.

The International Energy Agency projects net income for oil and gas producers will double in 2022 to US$4 trillion. Always follow the money. That’s the 4 trillion reasons to electrify everything. They use their spare change to run continuous propaganda campaigns against renewable energy, electric cars, and even fighting a pandemic. We can be free of these parasites, and fast, if we’re smart.

The engineering behind restoring the gas supply (a story that is amazing) reminds me again how much most of what we call modern life is nearly entirely down to engineers. It’s not democracy that created the modern world. Engineers did. The fastest way to end Covid? Ask the engineers to do it. Get all of the politicians and show pony doctors out of the way. In Victorian times that’s what they did, engineers have saved orders of magnitude more lives in history than politics or even medicine.

I enjoyed this debacle. Only one house made any real money, and it turns out illegally, through dummy bidding. Huge numbers of Australians can’t even afford a roof over their heads, which makes the show incredibly offensive.

This research taking us further towards the functional equivalence of Covid and HIV/AIDS. It shows that Covid infects (and kills) T cells, which is what HIV does, that then leads to AIDS. It can take several years for HIV to do that (8-10). Nobody knows yet how long Covid may need to do the same thing. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-00919-x

The energy crisis in WA isn’t caused by windmills or solar panels. It’s all here, it’s failures in gas and coal plants, and bankrupt coal mines. A grid powered by renewables will give us energy that is almost free, forever, and much more reliable.

Something not often mentioned by the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ energy folk is firstly that we obviously still manage to have water when it isn’t raining. We use storage. But the big sleeper here is going to be electric cars, which are huge batteries on wheels, 50-100kWh batteries. For comparison, a Tesla home battery that people use with their solar systems is 13.5 kWh. So your electric car will have easily enough stored energy to run your home overnight too. To give an indication of scale, there are about 20 million vehicles in Australia. Even at the lower end of 50 kWh batteries in each one, that’s one BILLION kWh of new storage that will enter the grid, without having to build a single dam or giant battery.

“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany.

Yay Lithgow. One correction, Lithgow will have full gas back inside 2 weeks. 4 weeks (more likely 6) is for the permanent fix next to the river in Bathurst, but we’ll have full gas supply by the end of next week. And vulnerable people will have gas by the end of this week, via LNG trucked in from Victoria.

Letting Covid run our societies turned out to be a very bad, probably fatal idea, for the 'economy'. Which, as I say a lot, doesn't even exist. It's just people. If you make them sick, the economy stops.

Naughty Victoria kept publishing its Covid data every day, after National Cabinet said they wouldn't do it any more. You can see why they didn't want us to see any more data. Put a mask on.

When even hybrids are seen as a possible dead-end, you can see how brutally fast the transition to EVs will likely be. Buying a full petrol or diesel right now is a recipe for owning a stranded asset.

Another way to look at Australia’s problems, through the lens of engineering. The largest countries in the world graduate more engineers every year than Australia graduates students in ALL fields. Yes they’re much bigger populations, but per capita most of them are training 10 times as many engineers as we are. (And it’s even worse than that, because many engineers we’re training are coming from overseas.) In a nutshell, Australia doesn’t build big things any more. It’s a giant quarry, mostly. Have a look at the graph, where we make our money. That leaves it dangerously exposed. Australia is also very short of tradespeople, but when you look at the work shortage areas, the majority are in construction i.e. housing and other buildings. Australia doesn’t need more houses or more renovated houses, that’s been our one-trick asset bubble pony to try to make quick money. The Block is our national economy. We need a manufacturing industry again. Remember when we used to build cars, before Tony Abbott destroyed the industry? Now Australians wait 12-18 months to buy a new car, at the arse-end of the queue, from overseas manufacturers. We need our trades working on massive nation-building projects, not just Block-like housing renovations. New power stations and grids. New water engineering. Massive climate mitigation engineering. Retrofitting all of our buildings with proper ventilation to stop pandemics. Etc. How did this all happen? We spent most of the past 30 years with governments who refused to invest in Australia. They saw that as ‘government spending’, their nightmare. They thought giving us all tax cuts and low wages would force us to rise up and spontaneously start building new train lines, new power stations and power grids. The whole idea is so ridiculous it’s still amazing people bought it. And so here we are, a giant quarry. Like a third world nation, supplying mining raw materials to rich countries, who build things with them.

The temporary gas being installed in Wang won't go to most households in Lithgow, Wang and Oberon. End of next week for most of us to get gas back on.

The next 2-3 years are looking grim for Australian households. Worse than the 1990s recession. All because the Reserve Bank, which believes the economy is a thing, is raising interest rates to stop inflation, by making it harder for ordinary people to afford things. Economy people say that drives down inflation, because customers have no money then to buy anything, so prices go down. But those ordinary people aren't the reason prices are rising. Business gouging people for 3 decades is the reason. Business profits go up and up and up, and so do prices. It's extortion. One of the reasons I suggest people electrify everything is the brutal reality that it will save them a lot of money. They're going to need it.

Covid cases up 45% in NSW this week. Testing of course way down after the government stopped requiring it, so that’s cases up 45% even with reduced testing. The test positivity rate is a measure of how many positives you’re missing, by not testing. The blue line tells the story. It surprises me that when you talk about Covid risk, people tend to talk only about risk to themselves. Not to the other people they infect.

This is what we're going to see in increasing numbers. Young healthy person gets Covid, and their immune system gets wiped clean, leaving them wide open to every other infection. Have posted as well about how research is showing Covid destroys T cells, which is what HIV does. So these Covid infections may cause eventual collapse of our immune system. Which = death. The risks we're taking with our whole society are insane.

Karen's an actuary. When they say 'faaaark', it's not good.

Happy birtday Di!

*shakes head*

And still, nothing is done. Imagine openly admitting this, and nobody cares.

Have we crossed a threshold of stupid yet that might prompt any interest at all about this ongoing pandemic disaster? I have multiple friends happily signing up for cruises and posting about them.

Got home today to discover the sewer line from the house was blocked. A week now of no showering or baths has meant not enough water to flush the line out regularly. So now not only no hot showers, but no toilets either. Hopefully get it cleared tomorrow. There’s only a very small fall in the line here, but if you have no showering right now it doesn’t hurt to fill and empty the bath every few days to flush out the lines. Depends on your plumbing. The idiot who plumbed our place decades ago somehow installed the overflow relief gully outside higher than the laundry drain, so any sewer overflow or backup ends up in the laundry, rather than outside.

Happy 50th! A milestone birthday. Hope you’re being spoiled.

Happy Birthday old mate 🙂 Hope you and family are well.

When we watch period dramas, I’m guessing most of us identify ourselves with the main characters, because that’s how the shows are written. But in historical terms, we’re actually the servants in these shows. It’s 2022 so we don’t see it as clearly, but that tiny wealthy elite that are the focus of these shows is not us. Many of us work for ‘service industries’, and ‘service’ is the old name for being a servant. It’s actually, literally, what we still are. There’s a very important difference though. In the period dramas, the servants lived with the rich families. They were provided for, given a roof over their heads, food etc. They were the ‘downstairs’ inhabitants. It’s a concept that was called ‘noblesse oblige’, meaning the obligation on the rich to help those who weren’t. None of that has survived. Now we servants are left to our own devices. To a ‘free market’ where we have to sell ourselves. (Like on the appalling Linkedin.) Again we haven’t noticed this because of one thing - debt. Personal debt has allowed us to maintain an illusion of progress since the times of these period dramas. That’s crashing down now. Interest rates are being used to smash ordinary people to curb the excesses of the wealthy. And as icing on the cake, everybody is being forced to become infected with a pandemic virus. If you don’t feel like a servant, look a bit harder.

Went out for dinner for Alice’s 12th birthday yesterday. I had to sneak this snap, they hate photos. Was lovely. They asked if we wanted to sit inside, which everybody else in the restaurant had chosen to do. In the same week we were all warned there’s a massive surge in Covid infections, the whole place was packed, not a mask anywhere, not a care about Covid in the world. I always want to ask, do you think about the person who might die if your own infection gets to them? Even if you don’t care about infecting yourself? But it’s a pointless conversation. 95% of people (empirically studied) simply follow what everybody else is doing. They never make an independent decision. That’s how high school works, and it doesn’t shift in adult life.

I had no idea how widespread botox and plastic surgery was at first. I now wonder the same thing about crypto.

Riddle me this. If you don’t have movement and gathering restrictions (‘lockdowns’), everybody gets infected. If they get infected, Perrotwit says ‘stay home’. Which is where you’d be if he locked us down. Notice you end up in the same place either way? Except his way, everybody ends up sick, and thousands die.

Living with the virus.

What’s this trend to go to places of natural beauty and strike ridiculous poses? Could we be any more shallow and superficial?

The new Eglinton lakes. I’m sad my photo going across the Eglinton Bridge didn’t work out, it was breathtaking amounts of water.

What struck me again in the middle of the Bathurst floods yesterday is how destructive ‘the economy’ is. A sensible society would have looked at that river yesterday and said ‘I think people should take a day off, this thing could get nasty’. But the economy won’t allow that. Instead by mid-afternoon the town was split in two, with people trapped on either side, often with emergency reasons to be on the other side. And people from across the country, not just locals. The same story we’re living with Covid. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the economy. Last year when we had a big snow drop, I got halfway to Bathurst and decided it was ridiculous, cars sliding all over the place. But the ‘open for business’ NSW Government were determined to keep that road open. They need to go, and fast. Election early next year.

Took me an hour-and-a-half to get from Raglan to the centre of Bathurst this morning. ‘Stay home until we get this road properly open’, imagine a society with brains.

Happy birthday Shaz!

Great summary piece from Finn (electrical engineer) on how car batteries will become a central part of our new grid. And covers the new terms, V2L, V2G and V2H.

Happy birthday Shaz! Sorry if that's twice, not sure the first one went through.

If you see Peter Collignon on the TV, telling everybody to keep calm and get infected, just be aware of his track record. Like all the Covid minimisers. (Incidentally they often sell him as a 'pandemic expert'. He isn't.)

Induction cooktops are easily the best way to cook. They give a level of control and efficiency and speed-to-heat that nothing else matches. Gas was a chef option for a long time, because they love the look of the flames. But even the Micheln-star restaurants are moving to induction now, you can't get close to them with anything else. https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/getting-an-induction-cooktop-switching-from-gas/101624780?fbclid=IwAR25z0W8LC2isQ-ax18otm0iDVBMjKkU5EeBe2-aMESPdyjLgA2c__sVmeo

Cooking with gas is responsible for up to 12% of childhood asthma cases in Australia. A child living in a gas-cooking household faces a similar risk of asthma to one living with smokers.

Great double act. I got to have a conversation with Eric Idle about comedy last year, I put an idea to him about Monty Python, which he agreed with. (The idea was the Pythons aren’t comedians.)

Being in the middle of the flood activity, I can tell you who’s fixing it. Engineers. I can tell you who isn’t - politicians. We have this bizarre idea that politicians ‘run’ towns, States and countries. They don’t, they never have. Their job is to be a public face of the necessary action. An important job. But in recent years they’ve actually decided that they run things. That’s why we get an increasing number of natural disasters. Like climate change flooding, an energy grid that’s broken, and a pandemic that we’re not even fighting. We need to get rid of elections, so we can stop this ludicrous fantasy that politicians run things. They’re clueless, they don’t have a single idea what to do. I noticed this working at CSU, because it happens in organisations too. Leaders suddenly bypass actual expertise and launch crazy fantasies of their own making. It’s why CSU went into a nosedive.

Again, this is what happens when politicians actually try to run countries. (This is UK data.) People end up dead. Lots of people. Or injured for life. It also destroys the beloved economy, that big adult fairy tale. We don’t need better leaders, we need leaders to piss off and just go and kiss babies, while people who actually know what to do get on with it.

'Living with the virus' is an idiot idea concocted mostly by male politicians and business leaders, whose wives and staff do all the actual work in society. They don't have a clue about any of it.

Happy anniversary! May you live long lives together as house cleaners ;)

That brutal transition to renewables just got more brutal. And it needs to be, if humanity is to survive. Good on him for putting his money behind this, blasting out the old directors to accelerate the transition. Generation X, doing most of the work to stop the world falling apart, and rarely even mentioned. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-15/agl-board-rolled-in-favour-of-mike-cannon-brookes/101655224

Scotland just blew up its last coal-fired power plant. (Check the great video from the World Economic Forum.) It will produce almost 100% of its electricty with renewables by the end of this year. Like I say, this transition will be brutally fast, much faster than we understand yet here in Australia.

I collect Vegemite jars. Not as a collector, I use them. They’re one of the most fantastic containers, with a really strong and watertight lid. I store nuts and bolts in them, nails, moisturisers, I take some foods to work for lunch in them because they don’t leak, etc. It’s terrible that stuff like this ends up in landfill.

You can't make it up, reality is funnier than any fiction.

Happy Birthday!

And we're away...

Covid cases up another 60% in NSW this week (more than 20,000). Hospital admissions up another 35%. Another 24 dead.

:)

Finally somebody with a backbone.

NSW Health has never stopped telling us to wear masks and avoid crowds. That’s never stopped being the medical advice. Bizarrely, people are basing their own health and that of their family and friends on the advice of politicians instead.

We’re told that getting Covid repeatedly will give us ‘hybrid immunity’. It’s just another political lie. Have a look at what repeated infections does.

Imagine if 39 people had been killed in the floods this week. The way we've normalised this production line of carnage is disgusting.

38 Australians died on MH17. 39 people died of Covid in NSW, just last week.

A petrol car is about 25% efficient. An electric car is 90% efficient. It's your money (going to Texans and Arabs, if you go with petrol, and diesel.)

Brilliantly simple. We could have been doing this for the past 20 years and energy would be as good as free right now for Australians. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/17/new-battery-technology-could-be-a-game-changer-for-regional-australian-communities

Look at what BP is doing up north. 26 gigawatts of wind and solar power, for use in Australia and Asia. That's enough to power a third of Australia. Ignore the rubbish in the news, look at what's really happening. And brutally fast.

Fossil fuel companies have made $2.8 billion in profits every single DAY for the past 50 years. Buying politicians is what they do with their small change.

Today is world toilet day. My first training in engineering included learning how to make toilets. They get a lot of jokes, but toilets are very complex objects, and have saved more lives than pretty much anything else.

Multiple great things in here that the title of the article won’t lead you to. The most bizarre belief that decades of a certain politics now makes common is that regulation is restriction, or even oppression. That’s completely backwards, humans invented regulation to FREE themselves. To remove oppression. That’s what laws are there to do, to prevent oppression. What else would the ‘rule of law’ even mean?

Stretches for tight muscles, and strengthening for weak muscles. Physios and other physical therapists use both a lot. But the underlying model seems wrong to me. Muscles are not elastic bands, they're living tissue. They get tight or loose in response to the forces on your body. For example if you stand and lean forward, the muscles up the back of your body will tighten to stop you falling over. Those muscles don't need 'releasing', if you did you'd fall flat on your face. Muscles are tight (or loose) for a reason, in other words, and you need to address that reason.

“The dark ages were not dark because there was no light, but because people refused to see it”. James Michener, Space. Referring to the Chinese being aware of a supernova at that time, but not the West.

Used NorthConnex for the first time not long ago. Brilliant road, between Lithgow and the Central Coast now you can avoid every Sydney non-freeway street. But boy you pay for it. $25 each way.

COP 27 mostly failed, for the same reason it always fails. The $2.8 billion profit per day fossil fuel industry knee-capped it. The only win was emergency funding for the most vulnerable nations. But nobody committed to providing the actual money, and like protection of the vulnerable (all of us, but let's stick just with the really sick) from Covid, it won't actually happen. I don't think many have any idea of the magnitude of the disaster coming our way. Lithgow without gas for a week or so is just a taster. The climate scientists doubt civilisation itself will survive. But hey, some guy on YouTube...

As Dr Tyler Black always says, a specialist in child psychology and trauma, easily the best way to protect a child's mental health in this pandemic is to stop people getting Covid. All the other bullshit about them needing to be at school and doing 'normal' things is just that -- bullshit. Driven by business who want their parents at work. 10.5 million children have lost a parent or caregiver to Covid so far, and paediatric hospital wards are overflowing.

10GB of mobile data—less than one week’s consumption for many Australians today—is more data than any Australian mobile network transmitted in the entire twelve months of the year 2000.

'Balancing' Covid action against the economy. Hey presto, the economy tanks. Almost like it doesn't exist, and is just the people. Who are now too sick to work. Not rocket science.

One of the reasons people feel looser after stretching is that they're actually stretching/damaging their ligaments. Which in turn can then weaken the support around their joints.

There's an election in Victoria this weekend. It will have zero impact on Covid, where all sides agree to just keep infecting and killing thousands, and calling it 'going back to normal'. You can't vote your way out of a pandemic.

I've had intermittent AF for about 30 years. I think people who do intense exercise are at higher risk (as I was doing at the time, and of course Lisa Curry would be much more than that again). It's one of the reasons I stopped doing much exercise at all, just walking now. https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/2022/11/22/lisa-curry-atrial-fibrillation/?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=News%20Alert%20-%2020221122

Two things I think have done this. One something I used to post about - T20. It’s destroying the wider game by giving crowds an appetite for nothing but bashing, and players an appetite for big sacks of money. Second is that there’s far too much cricket, driven by bottomless greed for money by players and associations.

Have decided on a Tesla Powerwall. It will likely never fully pay for itself at current prices (though I nabbed one before the recent price hike), but with electricity prices projected to rise by as much as 80% next year, who knows if that equation might shift rapidly (and the government may introduce price controls before Christmas). But there are other reasons to have one of these, see the graph. I think the next 5 years at least could be extremely volatile with home energy, both in terms of price and supply. Having your own backup may be a good plan. The Central West just discovered that with gas. I suspect that’s just a taster of what’s to come. I also think our domestic coal mining and power generation could go belly up faster than we think. We don’t own much of it, so we’ll have next to no control over it.

I notice SKY News and other Murdoch neanderthals continue to bash Tim Flannery, for saying we'll never fill our dams again. The thing is, he never said it. The prime idiot Andrew Bolt put the words in his mouth. Flannery said that at the time he was speaking (2007), the rains coming would not be enough to fill the dams, because the landscape was so dry. And he was right. He never said they would never fill again. Just one more example of how all public debate in Australia has been replaced with meaningless slogans, funded by fossil fuel companies making nearly $3 billion profit a day.

Please don't spray WD-40 into the toilet. I know, people are happily infecting themselves with a lethal virus, so stupid is on-trend. But let's just try to not do one more stupid thing.

The mining industry is outraged at the new IR laws designed to boost wages. Can't imagine why.

Today the 16,000th Australian died of Covid. Nearly all of them died after we said Covid was 'over'.

This is test results for one patient. Multiple distinct infections. Immune system damage, preventing the body fighting the infections off. Covid did this, it attacks the immune system. Covid minimisers will try to tell you it's because we all didn't get sick enough during lockdowns (multiple people have repeated that spin to me). It's scientific garbage, a complete fabricated lie.

Geez. Ex-Lithgow lad, for a while anyway. Said it made him the man he is today.

Come on people, when will we call BS on the whole living with the virus idea? 40 countries considering this because they can't get pilots, they're all either sick, or retired when the industry was smashed by Covid.

Pity they spelled seized wrong, otherwise a hole-in-one.

If your muscles feel stiff, it’s tempting to do what this person is doing, to try to stretch them. To think that your muscles are either loose or tight. But muscles adapt precisely to what you’re doing, if they feel tight it just means you’re doing something different, say sitting in front of a computer every day, and then going for a walk. So the tissue feels tight because you’re challenging your body to be more open, to help you walk. No need to stretch it separately, tissue responds to what you do. Let it be stiff and just carry on as normal, and it will adapt to your new way of being.

I know FB has become mostly a place to share what we're all doing every day. And I provide lean pickings for people there, sorry. I don't put my private life onto social media very much, I'm surprised so many do. Though by sharing thoughts I think we get much closer to each other anyway than leafing through each other's snaps. I imagine it like a relationship, would you rather hear what your partner thinks, or just look at pictures of what they did all day? The same reason I think 'selfies' are badly named. A picture shows you how others see you, it's not your self. Your self is your thoughts and feelings, expressed in words.

Queensland is looking to reframe 'Long Covid' as 'Your Recovery from Covid'. That's the world we live in, where brains and actual meaningful action are replaced by endless spin, while doing nothing.

Opinion on the radio this afternoon that China has to let Covid spread. Like they have to face the inevitable. China builds pretty much everything we use, supplies a huge majority of the raw materials for everything else, and buys about 5 times more of our exports than any other country. Letting Covid spread in China would shut us down. Dumb is still winning.

To give an indication of the catastrophe uncontrolled spread of Covid could be in China, firstly for the Chinese, the health and hospital system isn’t great, and they have millions upon millions of old people. They’re also vaccinated with a sub-par vaccine. For us, in terms of what it might do to our lives. China manufactures as much as the US, Japan and Germany combined. It’s where we outsourced most of our manufacturing when we decided to be economies run purely by banks and speculative investments. You won’t find anything we use in our daily lives that couldn’t suddenly disappear, including critical technology to run everything we do. The AdBlue scare not long ago just the tiniest taste of what could be to come. And even that one isn’t fixed yet. We don’t build anything ourselves, the Chinese do it for us.

This is quite seriously all the ‘economy’ is. A magic trick for grown ups, to protect the status quo by shrouding it in economic mumbo jumbo. Notice everything that might upset the status quo, like paying people more or stopping them becoming infected with Covid, is bad for the ‘economy’. This was all deliberate, the economy is based on equilibrium economic theory, that says society finds a natural equilibrium if you just leave it alone - free market theory. That ‘leave it alone’ IS the protection of the status quo. If you say society is a free market, you’re saying don’t touch it, everything will fix itself.

Happy Birthday buddy! Rock on.

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me why if you want to be an architect or nurse or teacher or engineer in Australia, or any job that needs university training, you have to pay for your own training. But if you're a tradie, you not only have your training paid for, but you get paid a wage while you're training as well. The average salary for tradies in Australia is between $70,000-$90,000. The average salary of a university graduate is $45,000-$70,000. University graduates also then carry large debts from their training, to pay for out of those salaries over many years.

So true, nobody cares. But they’re being led to not care. 95% of people just do what everybody else does. We see that at school, and it continues into adult life. If the 5% don’t lead us to fight climate change and Covid, we won’t fight it.

Seattle airport earlier today.

“…we still don’t know how long these changes to the immune system last, and if the immune system recovers. We also don’t know if SARS-CoV-2 triggers other chronic illnesses…”

Watching a soccer world cup game. Professional soccer is amazingly boring. 99% of the game is players dribbling around going nowhere, with every tackle causing excruciating pain and appeals to the ref that look like the overacting in silent movies, when cameras made the big overblown acting of the stage that preceded film look ridiculous. Now the refs carry a can of white spray paint to mark where to place the ball for penalties, and to limit where defenders can stand. Everybody on the field earns more than the town they grew up in, and has a $500 haircut. The game might be improved by removing some of the positions, it’s dominated by defence. And automatic red cards for every fall which video replay shows to be an obvious fake penalty-milker.

I post a bit about stretching, about why it’s mostly a waste of time, and in fact may be damaging. Here’s an extended wonderful passage by my friend David Gorman which gives a lot more detail. A bit of reading, but I think so valuable to everybody. Those tensions you feel often aren’t ‘tight muscles’, they’re your connective tissue providing support to your narrow activity, which any more open activity is then straining against. But as David says, just keep at that more open activity, the connective tissue will stretch and reset to that openness, all by itself. You don’t have to ‘stretch’, your everyday more open activity will do it all for you. In fact if you do stretch, you may damage yourself, and in effect you’re just training your connective tissues to assume those stretch positions, not loosening them up for ordinary everyday activity. Muscles and connective tissue adapt precisely to your most dominant activity. “The passive connective tissue is arranged in the body in precise opposition to disconnecting stresses and its major characteristic is that it is constantly trying to shrink, that is, to shorten in itself against these disconnecting stresses. It will shrink up in this manner until it becomes under enough tension to prevent it shortening any further. The resistance to the shrinking which brings the connective tissue under tension is, of course, from us going about our daily activities, bending, turning, flinging our arms about and constantly subjecting the tissue to lengthenings and stretches. The ongoing result being that the connective tissue will always shrink up to the edges of your range of motion. For an individual so unlucky as to have had an accident such that they are in hospital in a coma this shortening of the connective tissue will become so marked as to tighten them virtually into a foetal position. To keep the joints open and free physiotherapists must supply the range of motion by regularly moving the patient. Similarly, if your daily habit of use were to become more tight and narrow, the connective tissue would gradually take up whatever resulting slack by physiologically shortening until it comes under stretch from your new, more restricted range of movement. If you subsequently were to release these compressions and use yourself more openly, the connective tissue would be brought under greater stretch and would gradually yield to become longer tissue. All this happens bit by bit over a time scale which would produce noticeable changes in a period of several weeks. Thus, I've come to call this connective tissue passive, since it is not directly responsive to your thought in the manner of the active muscles. Instead it follows your activities, adapting to them and defining your limits at any one moment as a product of the use of all previous moments. We often tend to think of and feel our connective tissue as restriction which prevents us from having a broader range of motion and thus begs for stretching exercises to open it out giving us more 'room' to move. But it is important to be aware that the connective tissue is not there to get in your way, rather it is your basic level of integrity and security. The point being that it doesn't matter what you do, the connective tissue will always tighten up to the borders of that use, giving you the range within which you have the skill and practice to operate, but securing you from any precipitate and potentially damaging excursions beyond. Since most of our movements take place comfortably within that normal range, the occasional activity which ventures outside is bound to meet the resistance of the connective tissue. Any stretching and opening of that resistance will be transitory if the majority of time is spent operating well within the familiar range. Expansion will only be able to be maintained when the consistent day-to-day use also expands to use this new space fully enough to keep it open.”

Living with the virus. I’m waiting for year 11 and 12 students to be asked to teach classes.

When your girlfriend really doesn’t like AC/DC. ‘Headbanger’ another possible caption.

I want to use aged care as an example of how political slogans actually kill people. Was having a conversation with a healthcare worker (HCW) who works in aged care. We all know Covid has gone on a killing spree in aged care. The HCW’s beliefs: - Covid is ‘just like the flu’ (false, a slogan) - we can’t stop Covid, just as we can’t stop the flu (false, a slogan) - we need to give old people in aged care ‘autonomy’ to decide whether to take the risk of infection or not (false, a slogan). A HCW with these beliefs is going to go to work and make zero effort to stop anybody getting Covid. It’s not care at all, it’s assisted dying.

At least 32 people were infected with Covid by a jogger running through a park, unmasked.

The fastest way to rein in inflation is to put some sort of price control on gas and electricity. That’s what’s driving much of the inflation. Not peoples’s wages, which haven’t gone up in a decade. The fastest way to make sure this never happens again? Stop using gas and coal for energy.

High-level cardiologist pleading with people to avoid Covid, and explaining why. Fantastic explanation also of current thinking on Long Covid. 148 million people with that condition now. Have a listen, it may save your life in discussion with doctors.

That profile picture is cute. Which means you'll probably get rid of it now.

About time too. Another disgraceful practice gone. 10 years of total incompetence to try to undo.

Using somebody who looks like a pimp or dealer as your financial branding face is a curious new approach.

I suspect many people believe vaccination protects them from getting Covid. I’ve circled in red the effectiveness of the vaccines in stopping transmission, after 6 months, which is about the last time most Australians had a shot. It’s zero. Why I wear a mask every day, the vaccines offer me no protection against catching Covid. But for the anti-vax types, I’m also fully vaccinated, because it at least gives me a 60% chance of staying out of hospital. That isn’t great either, which makes the mask even more important.

"Schools and daycares are sending letters home to parents talking about this "immunity debt.” They’re saying that healthy children are getting sicker, even dying, because they weren't exposed to enough germs over the last two years. Newspapers and TV stations across the country are running with it, proposing it as a "possible reason" for this year's explosion in pediatric hospitalizations." From the US. I'm hearing the same thing here. To be clear, there is no such thing as immunity debt, it's scientific nonsense. The reason children are getting sick in huge numbers there is that Covid has damaged their immune systems. It's starting here too, kids getting infections with all sorts of things, from RSV to chickenpox.

Happy birthday, have a great day :)

Nick Cave is one of those artists I feel people are supposed to like, he has cred. I've never heard him do anything that interests me. Each to their own. Bowie a bit the same, liked some of his songs, but musically not particularly interesting.

He’s back again.

Think I’ve said it before, but while I love dogs, dog-love is that slobbery, needy love that repels us in other people. I much prefer cat-love, where you never really know how much you’re even liked. In all honesty I’ve always preferred that in relationships too, that sense of a strong identity, not easily ‘tamed’.

Happy birthday Eva! I'm sure you'll celebrate in style.

We got rid of our private health insurance a few years ago now, except for extras. The whole system is corrupt and just shovels wheelbarrows of money from the taxpayer into private hospitals and specialists' pockets. Here's the basic sums as I see them. Say you pay $1000 a year for health insurance for your family. If you don't, the government penalises you if you take it up again later, 2% for every year you're over 31. (How's that for 'private', the government even running the penalty system for these insurance companies). Say you take it up again at age 65, having dumped it at age 30. That's 35 years of penalty, which maxes out at 70% extra premiums under the penalty system. So $1700 per year. But if you do that, you're still way ahead. You've saved paying $35,000 to the insurance company in the intervening 35 years. And the penalty only applies for 10 years to boot.