December 2022

National Cabinet said 2022 would be the year Covid ends. Instead teachers are 'crawling to the finish line', infected repeatedly. Kids too, though they're likely at school sneezing and coughing over everybody else.

The Novavax Covid vaccine was slow to arrive in Australia, but it seems to outperform all of the other vaccines by a long margin. I posted this week how the efficacy of the AZ and Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, which most of us got, drops to zero against infection after 6 months. Novavax? See below. Guess what Australia did with most of its 13 million doses of Novavax? They expired and had to be thrown away because vaccination stopped when politicians told everybody the pandemic was over, a year ago. About 16,000 Australians have died since that bastard act. If you kill one Australian, you'll go to jail. Kill 16,000 and they'll give you a seat on National Cabinet.

Fun fact about Lithgow. The average number of people per household? 2.

National emergency in the US with children succumbing to a whole range of different infections, because Covid has damaged their immune systems. We are deliberately infecting our children with this virus. And I don't see anybody on this banal sewer of social trivia say a word about it. Do people care? Where are they expressing their anger? Or just infect the kids, so we can all get back to the pub and cafes, and onto planes and boats? What a fucking society.

Covid cases up 20% again in NSW this week. (Of course most people aren't testing now, so it's oodles more than that.) Hospitalisations up 12%. The 'short and sharp peak' National Cabinet offered us as a fairy tale for a Happy Christmas looks like being at least 2 months. Overseas after that 2 month period the cases just took off again anyway.

I decided to share information about electric cars without selling our house. This guy is making money sharing it, I give it away for free.

Technically 45 degree angle parking was invented because it fits more cars than either parallel or a shallower angle, like 30 degrees. It was also thought to be easier for drivers to rejoin traffic, without having to turn sharply to get out of the space. One other thing not mentioned though which I think is as important, and not often seen because most 45-degree parking seems to be somewhere between 60-90 degrees, unless you paint the lines on the road as a guide. Parking at 45 degrees makes it much less likely your car will be damaged by the neighbouring car opening its doors. The doors are barely overlapping between neighbouring cars.

"My advice to my generation: for once in a generation, let’s think of the next generation. Invest. Hire. Create value. Take the next few years, while you can still stand, and build an asset that is worthy of transfer to the next generation. Let’s do something that’s good for the future. Let’s do something that benefits someone else other than ourselves. I know, that’s antithetical to our behavior in the past. But one’s never old to change."

Watching some world cup soccer again. In all seriousness, are there too many players on a soccer field? The reason games tend to be tedious grinding draws seems linked to the fact there are so few opportunities to attack.

Another perspective on stretching. If you lean forward like this, you’ll feel tension in your feet, legs and back. Do we try to stretch those areas to relieve that tension? No, because we know it’s caused by our leaning forward. To get rid of the tension we correct and come back out of the lean. This is actually true for every tension in your body. It’s not a tension ‘in’ that area of your body. It’s the response of your whole body, to something the whole body is doing. A ‘bad back’ isn’t happening in your back, it’s something your whole body is doing.

Now UK kids, immune systems shot by repeated Covid infection, are dying of Strep A. ‘It is what it is’, I hear a lot. No, it’s a disaster with clear solutions developed over centuries. We’re just not doing them.

3 times the power of a diesel truck.

Am watching the soccer, but the hockey yesterday (and always) is an infinitely more interesting game. And gets much less publicity. We’re also world champions in men’s hockey and have been for most of our lifetimes. Thanks to Scott for reminding me it was on, another game this afternoon.

You can now buy an attachment for your smartphone which turns it into an ultrasound machine. The quality of the images is equivalent to a hospital ultrasound machine. This could revolutionise medicine.

An example from real life of how the fundamental connection between all the different parts of our bodies is rarely touched by medicine nor understood more widely. This is the Temproromandibular joint (TMJ), at the top of your jaw, I’m told the most complicated joint in your body. If it plays up, it wreaks havoc on your body in multiple ways, as any sufferers of TMJ dysfunction (like me) know. My own example. I had incredibly tight hips, torso, neck and shoulders. I saw a physio multiple times about this, thinking there must be some functional injury as I never had tightness before. Every time the advice was the same - stretching and strengthening, of the tight bits. Hip stretches, shoulder and neck stretches etc. None of it ever worked. The moment I did some simple TMJ exercises to relieve the problems there, all of the tightening everywhere else in me disappeared. In a day.

Before Christmas Australia may cap the price of coal, to keep electricity prices down. Coal and gas companies are making huge windfall profits on the back of exorbitant international prices. This could be very bad news for Lithgow, we’ll have to wait and see how much the continued operation of the coal mines here was dependent on those windfall profits. It’s of course very good news for Australians more generally, but shows the danger Lithgow faces in coming years.

This was the world’s first drive-in petrol station, opening in 1913. At the time there were already 500,000 cars on the road. Just as context for those who think the fact there isn’t an EV charger on every corner already means that electric vehicles aren’t practical.

A tip for any business owner, is that if you come out and measure for a quote for a substantial amount of work, don't then go silent for the next 4 weeks. You may be busy, but quick emails or phone calls about a delay take only a few minutes. Doctors could learn that too.

Let's go Australia.

People here know I think protest is mostly a waste of time. But I also know who more deserves to be in jail here, many times over.

The price we’ll continue to pay for living in fantasy land. Idiot in chief also has Covid again. The second time.

"Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil." - Hannah Arendt

Nothing to see here.

Not something cats do. I had a friend at uni whose approach to aggressive dogs was to take a rolled up newspaper off a front lawn and beat the dog around the head repeatedly. (He was from a rough outback town.) They looked very surprised. Better than having your femoral arteries severed.

We apparently can’t mandate masks in schools. But we can pump the kids full of antibiotics, like feedlot animals. The UK, cutting edge insanity. Where they go, we always follow.

Happy birthday!

So many people I know now are getting 'mystery' infections. Often the mystery is not the infection itself, which might be chicken pox or glandular fever, but more that they're getting them with no obvious cause. The cause will become obvious in Australia, as it is now in the UK and US. We're just a bit behind them. Peoples' immune systems are being trashed by Covid, so pathogens are feasting on us.

Most of what gets into the public domain is hot air, on most topics. The argument over renewables was won a decade ago, by not even having an argument. Just engineering, and economics.

Neil Diamond retired from performing 5 years ago when he developed Parkinson’s Disease. He has such incredible songs, underrated masterpieces of pop. I find this clip of him at a musical opening about him in New York this week sad and poignant, when you see him struggling to overcome the horrible disease to sing one of his greats. Poignant too because one of the most interesting theories about Parkinson’s is that it’s ‘Long Influenza’. The result of flu in earlier life, with Parkinson’s then being the long-term impact of that earlier infection. Right now we’re infecting most of Australia with something much more dangerous than flu. Multiple times a year.

“COVID is deranging the immune system,” said John Wherry, director of the Penn Medicine Immune Health Institute… “Some patients, from their very first visit, seem to have an immune system in hyperdrive.”

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The number 1 reason most people won’t wear a mask right now, for example, is that nobody else is wearing one, and they don’t want to stand out from the crowd. Somebody at work the other day had to wear a mask, and spent the whole day apologising to everybody for it. They knew they’d violated what peer pressure expected in that situation. Humans invented a way around this. It’s called regulation. Laws, rules. Laws and rules give people permission to behave in ways that go against the status quo. It’s why the bastards currently infecting us all with Covid got rid of the rules first, telling us they were impacting our ‘freedom’. But without rules you have LESS freedom, you’re trapped inside intense peer pressure.

Marvellous what an election in March can do.

Both influenza and Covid have an ‘i’ in them. There the similarity ends.

Amazing numbers of Australians haven’t vaccinated their kids against Covid. Politicians told them the disease is ‘mild’ in children. I’m glad my kids are in the right-hand far column, and not the left.

Happy birthday Inez! A lovely day for it :)

I'm sure I said happy birthday yesterday, but in case I forgot!

It'll be interesting whether modern confessional 'look at poor me' victim politics swings support behind them. I doubt it, I think they'll be despised in the UK at least for the rest of their lives. https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/prince-harry-takes-swipe-at-william-charles-in-netflix-documentary-20221208-p5c4xp.html

*shrug*

Why Australia should already be by far the richest country in the world per person, but isn't. See that tiny proportion of world oil production that Norway has? It turned that into a sovereign wealth fund worth about $2 trillion, or about $350,000 per Norwegian. That makes it in the top 5 richest countries in the world. Australia barely makes the top 20. Australia on the graphs has a much greater share of other key world resources than Norway has. Far, far more, across multiple resources. Australia’s share of the production of iron ore, coking coal, lithium and bauxite alone is almost as big as is ALL 13 OPEC countries' dominance of world oil production. So why hasn't this made us the richest country in the world? Because Tony Abbott took a lot of money from big mining donors, including Gina Reinhardt (iron ore is her fortune) and did a deal with Clive Palmer (mining billionaire) and got rid of the mining tax. It would have made us rich beyond imagining. Instead all of that money flowed to Gina, Clive, foreign companies and foreign governments instead.

There are only 2 real meaningful ways to lower your power bills. One is to renationalise energy, as a basic of human life. All politicians are too stupid and gutless to do that. The other is generate your own power. Our panels will go up next week, you could say it’s not affordable for all, though it costs less than many overseas trips.

Got the World Cup on again. I realised the reason soccer crowds are so noisy and animated, singing, rioting etc., is that there’s nothing else to do. What’s happening out on the pitch is so boring, they’re forced to entertain themselves.

Happy birthday rock star :)

In relative terms almost nobody turning up to watch Test cricket now. Not enough ‘big bashing’, no doubt.

Research here showing that watching a stressful soccer match about doubles the risk of a cardiovascular event. One for the English fans right now.

Happy Birthday to you! And a lovely day for it as well. Be spoiled :)

This is Australia. Right now. Not a good time to be old. But if it helps, if we keep letting Covid spread at will, none of the rest of us will live to old age anyway.

South Australia today. Renewables are providing way above what the State needs, for electricity. 112%. The wholesale price is negative i.e. they’ll pay you to use it.

Between 1 in 50 and 1 in 25 Australians currently have Covid. With Christmas gatherings approaching.

“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realize that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with...you all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” Kurt Vonnegut I write about that a lot, it's literally true. Why I look forward to retirement, because I've had nearly 40 years of high school now. I'm sick of the bullshit.

I’ve felt this more every day of my life. At last count I’ve been in high school for about 42 years. Workplaces behave just like high schools, middle-aged adults have ‘besties’, grown adults are more interested in their favourite bands and curating their online presence, than in the entire population being infected repeatedly with a lethal virus. I'm not looking forward to retirement because I want to stop work, I'm looking forward to it because I might finally be free of high school.

Sexy.

40% increase in cardiovascular deaths in men aged 25-54 in the US, since the pandemic began. Not old, not ‘underlying conditions’, not ‘vulnerable’. Young men. ‘Living with the virus’, until they suddenly weren’t. Covid is a vascular disease, not a respiratory disease. Not a cold. Not flu. Wear a mask, you don’t want this shit inside you.

Messi is having one of his good days. Not much an opposition can do on those days.

There are only a handful of ways to get rich. You can inherit a lot of money, or win the lottery (both very rare). Or invent something (a song, a car…) that is so popular that millions buy it. The hardest road is to play all of the work games you have to play to get ahead in your profession. To climb the greasy pole of management. There is another way, I think much less common, which has been my chosen way. To define ‘enough’ in your life. To have a hard conversation with yourself about what would be enough for you, in your life, and why you’d want to go beyond that. In an age of relative abundance, this opens things up in ways that don’t seem to get a lot of thought. For example, by far the simplest way to get enough, to be almost rich, is to be free of debt. Without debt every dollar you earn is automatically multiples of what people with debt earn. I chose to be free of debt by the age of 50, as a life goal. And got there too. I played the greasy management pole games to get there, and then dumped that life. A lot of people earn more money than us. A lot of them have big debts too. But I have a reverse ‘career’, in that I decided to go the other direction in my last 10 years of work, towards basic operational work. Free of of all the organisational games of management. Free to be me. We defined enough, and reached it. It’s very liberating. Statistics suggest this isn’t the path most Australians have chosen. If you don’t define ‘enough’, you will always be a slave to ‘more’.

First day of homegrown power. It feels amazingly liberating, and fascinating too. Every news story about surging power prices makes us change the channel now. I’d do this 5 times over rather than spend the money on some Covid-saturated holiday. If they’d spelled the name correctly, it would have been the perfect install ;)

What’s funding our ‘living with the virus’.

A mystery of modern medical science is the extreme, childbirth-scale pain that is incurred by tripping onto soft grass inside that rectangle.

Happy birthday Phillip :)

Glorious to watch this fatuous, lethal, fundamentalist windbag being torn to shreds by quality lawyers, and not being able to evade as he’s used to.

I’ll call Wednesday 14 December freedom day.

Can’t believe it’s been a year. To lose a child must be the most unimaginable suffering. Makes it even more unfathomable that we’re all happily infecting them repeatedly with a virus that will kill many of them.

At an average school Christmas concert or presentation, each person in the room breathes in about 33 litres of used air per hour, breathed out by other people in the room. Imagine somebody giving you mouth-to-mouth and blowing 33 litres of air into you. Wear a mask. I know most won’t, because they have much greater fear of doing something different to what everybody else is doing, than they do of death. That’s how humans work.

Happy Birthday Alison :)

The NSW Government reported this week that the Covid wave has peaked, because hospital numbers have levelled off. Hospital admissions for Covid are up 11% this week. It's one more lie to add to the collection. I'm hoping people remember at the March State election.

A less well known way to heat your hot water (up to 30% or more of a household's energy costs) with solar is a hot water PV diverter. These clever devices take any excess solar you may be producing, and feed it to your electric hot water heater in chunks that make it work. For example, if your electric hot water has a 4.5 kW element, but you're only producing 2kw of surplus solar at that time, the diverter will drip-feed your 2kw surplus to the hot water heater in a way that still makes the 4.5 kW element work. Not as useful if you live somewhere cold, like I do, where in winter you may not have much if any excess solar. But if you live on the coast for example, these are a great idea, because you can use the old-style electric hot water storage heaters, which are pretty cheap and were being phased out until diverters came along.

The Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the US predicting up to 150,000 Covid deaths there before March 2023. That's the equivalent of 50 9/11 attacks.

Happy Birthday Boudi!

Testing the solar, stories. (I know many already have solar, but others not.) This morning washing machine, dishwasher, reverse cycle heating in the bathroom and jug all on at once. System dealt with it all with ease, no grid backup needed. And it was cloudy. We have so much surplus power we could install an old-style electric storage hot water heater as well, for 9 months of the year, and still not bother the grid for power. Winter is the challenge though in Lithgow, if you want to avoid grid usage at all, where solar production drops and usage goes up, with heating. Calculations show it’ll be neck-and-neck for doing that without grid power, but we’re not trying to be off-grid, it’s more a fun technical challenge. Adding electric hot water of the old style would make that almost impossible in those 3 months. Would have oodles of energy credits from the other months though, to pay for any difference.

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s the 1.8kW of ‘Home’ usage. 2.1kW going back to the grid. Battery already fully charged so sitting there waiting to power us overnight. Most nights we go to bed with about 80% of the battery charge still available, which would see us through maybe half of the next day, if we needed it. But the sun always comes up, so we don’t.

Real-time app example. Cloudy here, so the system is generating less than half of what it can do in full sun. Right now I have a washing machine and clothes dryer running, as well as multiple computers, TV etc. That’s the 1.8kW of ‘Home’ usage. 2.1kW going back to the grid. Battery already fully charged so sitting there waiting to power us overnight. Most nights we go to bed with about 80% of the battery charge still available, which would see us through maybe half of the next day, if we needed it. But the sun always comes up, so we don’t.

Last solar post, just as a comparison. Cloud gone, so system close to full generation. Over 9kW going back to the grid, so could run another 3 houses just off the surplus. (That 1.7 kW still the washing machine and clothes dryer, plus TV, computers etc.) Will use that surplus mostly to generate credits for winter. And maybe for hot water, when the government announces subsidies to convert gas to electric appliances in the next budget.

Some research shows that people who use a saline nasal spray have up to an 8-fold lower risk of hospitalisation, with Covid. The Covid vaccines don’t target the mucosal areas in the head, where you breathe Covid in, and saline can flush some of it out before it gets to your lungs. I use it before and after events where I can’t avoid crowds.

Enormous icebergs keep breaking free from the huge Antarctic ice sheet. There are 30 million cubic KILOMETRES of ice in Antarctica. That’s 90% of the world’s surface fresh water. If it all melted, the oceans would rise by 70 METRES. Let that sink in, it’s a staggering amount of water frozen down there. It’s melting. The icebergs are floating into the oceans and acting literally as giant ice cubes. To get a sense of the scale here, one iceberg alone is over 3000 square kilometres, and has the potential to cool the entire Southern Ocean by 1 degree. About 70,000 gigatonnes of ice is breaking free, 50 enormous icebergs. This could trigger a new Ice Age, previous Ice Ages often followed the breaking free of lots of large icebergs from Antarctica. Cooling the oceans can stop major currents from flowing around the globe. And those currents carry heat. The melting water also dilutes seawater, making it less salty, and this also dramatically changes how currents behave. It could also trigger more and more La Ninas, because those are dependent on ocean temperature. We’ve had 3 in a row here in Oz. An ice age was always one possible outcome of global warming, which perplexes people who don’t think very much. Hollywood even made a movie about it. And this is all happening very fast. These massive icebergs will enter the oceans within the next 2 years. I’ll post separately how you can even watch them with satellites.

Happy Birthday Nancy! Party responsibly ;)

Elon Musk is a wally, but one thing I admire about him is that he actually builds things. Good, innovative things, like the Powerwall 2. And satellite broadband, cars and trucks, rockets, solar roof tiles etc. All things Australia should have been building for the past 20-30 years. Instead we got tax cuts, which we pissed up against a wall bidding up prices on houses to about 10 times what the houses are actually worth.

The sleeper story of the soccer world cup is the beauty pageant for camels being held alongside, at the same time. 30,000 camels entered. A bit amusing, but there’s a very serious danger here. Camels carry and transmit a relative of Covid, called MERS. It’s much more deadly than Covid, about 30-35% of people who have been known to be infected with MERS have died. 1 in 3. Making it one of the deadliest infectious diseases in the world. Why this is super dangerous, to the point scientists pleaded before the World Cup not to hold the two events together (nobody listened, Qatar invested $220 billion in the World Cup, and money talks), is that as MERS and Covid are related, if a person is infected with both, it could lead to a horrifying Covid-MERS hybrid, as transmissible as Covid, and as lethal as MERS. There are 2.5 million fans at the soccer next door, and many are attending both events. There’s a ‘mystery virus’ sweeping the World Cup right now. It’s infected some of the French team. And of course every second person has Covid these days, so the chances of MERS finding a person already infected with Covid is very high.

A few people asked me to say a bit more about home batteries. I’ll talk about the Tesla Powerwall 2, because it’s what we have, but there are multiple brands out there now. But the Powerwall is probably still the best battery on the market. Unlike solar panels, generally batteries at their current prices won’t pay for themselves inside their warranty period (usually 10 years). But it’s like buying a car, you can buy it for its functionality and not expect it to pay for itself too (though it will for us, in the 10 years). In our case we use nearly all our power mornings and evenings, so this way electricity generated during the day can be used when we get home at night. Batteries will also come down in price as the industry scales up, and government incentives may also increase. But there’s more to these. - You don‘t need solar to have a battery, it will charge from grid power alone too. So you could set it to charge at off peak rates overnight for example, and use that cheaper electricity the next day. - With solar panels, you can set it up to provide a backup if there are blackouts. People with only solar panels lose power in blackouts like everybody else, but a Powerwall lets you charge from your panels even if the grid is down, and use the panel power as well directly, and use that power during the blackout. - The software is very smart and very powerful. For example you can have the battery charging from both solar and the grid, and the battery will figure out by itself which is cheaper for you in your usage pattern, and charge from that. If you’re using a lot of power during the day, it might put off charging from your solar panels so you can use cheap solar for that usage, and then charge itself overnight at cheaper time of use rates. - It also has in-built ‘storm watch’, where it uses your current location and monitors the weather data for storms. If it sees one coming, it will automatically prioritise charging the battery, so you have power in reserve if there’s a blackout. - You can also let it calculate for you the best use of ‘time of use’ electricity rates (peak, off-peak, shoulder), and change its storing behaviour to make best use of the rates. - It has AI built in which learns the pattern of your household’s power use, and then optimises its storage to minimise costs of electricity to you.

The live with the virus people honestly don’t seem to have given one thought to the fact that China makes and supplies just about every single thing we use.

A new twist on batteries today. One big government announcement, and one change coming. Both will have a profound impact on the decision whether or not to own a battery. Today the government announced the building of 8 mega-batteries by 2025. The graph below which I shared before, from the main energy regulator, explains why. By 2025 the amount of electricity generated by peoples’ home solar will be so massive, it may break the grid. During those years where morons carried bits of coal into parliament and did nothing to shift Australia to renewables, Australians did it anyway and installed millions of rooftop solar systems. Because the idiots in government didn’t upgrade the grid at the same time, we now have a tsunami of energy available from these panels, and nowhere to put it. Thus the new 8 mega batteries, to help store all of this energy. But there’s a more sinister development too. The main electricity distributors who manage the wider grid (Essential, Endeavour etc.), now want to tax solar panel owners who export to the grid. Rather than rub their hands together at all this super cheap electricity they can take and sell on, which might need them to invest in storage themselves, they’re proposing to tax ordinary people who export to the grid instead, to force them not to. Typical stupid, lazy, unimaginative Australian business in action. Owning your own battery is very useful in this context, because you’re less dependent on earning money by exporting back to the grid, you store your own power and use it instead. And this puts all the call for more ‘supply’, for more ‘baseload power’, into perspective. We don’t need more supply, we have way more than we can currently use. We need more distribution and storage. Fat and lazy gas, oil and coal companies will always spin the supply line, because they know their industries are in terminal decline.

This is such an exciting, revolutionary achievement, and spoiled in Australia by years of spin by politicians in the pockets of energy companies. I don’t think people have really registered yet what it will mean to be completely independent of the need to import over $50 billion of energy every year. Imagine what that money can do. And the quality of our air is going to improve off the scale, and our cities will become orders of magnitude less noisy. Everybody wins.

If you see a post from see showing pictures of me doing things, my account has probably been hacked. I never do fun posts like that.

A friend who’s a public health professional, who lost his own daughter to Covid, compiled this chart to show how every time we remove protections, people get sick and die. Our politicians call those protections ‘restrictions’, because they’re bastards. They know calling them restrictions will make people think removing public health measures is ‘freedom’. Just as changing the word ‘quarantine’ (which suggests containing a virus) to ‘lockdowns’ (which suggests locking people up, not the virus), got everybody to cheer when those protections were removed. They play us like puppets.

Happy Birthday Graeme! Have a fabulous day.

Memories, me texting Kell.

Power stations in NSW will be replaced by renewable energy zones (REZ). Really worth watching this short vid to see what's planned, and how quickly. For example the Central West-Orana zone will be first, and will be operational by 2025, powering 1.4 million homes. I post a lot about how brutally fast this will happen, because people really have no idea in my experience. Most existing coal-powered electricity generation areas are included in a new REZ. Not Lithgow though. It's going to be left behind if something doesn't happen, and really fast.

On renewable energy zones, here's the Central West-Orana zone. All those coloured dots are projects underway or already there. And in the far bottom-right of picture - Lithgow. An existing power generation hub, one of the only things keeping the town afloat. It's not in the new REZ. I speak to many people in town who seem to cling to the idea that it doesn't matter. Pigs might fly.

Waiting for them to call.

Blocking solar farms because they ruin the view. The view is a landscape cleared and trashed by farming, which these same farmers and local councils have presided over for more than 2 centuries. And we laugh at people who think the Earth is flat. The irony is this the only source of income left for many of the farmers on this destroyed land, it’s already in the NSW strategy.

The other day somebody asked me how Covid was going, and added ‘mostly old people, right?’ (Like that makes it OK.) No, not mostly old people.

Notice politicians don’t deliver the ‘please don’t kill members of your family over Christmas’ message. Because they’re gutless arseholes. It will also mean most people won’t hear or will ignore the message.

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own health, that of my friends and family, and to play some small part in getting rid of this lethal disease. Social media suggests to me I’ll be in the overwhelming minority, nation-wide. People would rather die than do something different to what everybody else is doing. We never leave high school, peer pressure is the driving force of everything we do.

I didn’t know that rocking horses were originally created to help teach children to ride a horse. They were the L-plates of earlier centuries.

This was the view under the Eglinton Bridge during the Bathurst floods.

We’re trying to infect our way out of a pandemic. Like saying you can overcome domestic violence by letting people beat up their partner repeatedly, until they become immune to it. It’s literally that stupid. Protect yourself. Also the best way to protect others, it’s not either/or. Others protecting themselves protects you. Start by not infecting family and friends over Christmas, and hopefully they’ll return the favour.

Merry Christmas everyone. Ours is a pretty restricted affair, with Covid joining us. How the year was always going to end, I guess, with few doing anything to stop it. 2023 could be the year we try a lot harder. I doubt we’re going to have a choice.

🤔

Took all of a week-and-a-half to make itself supremely useful.

Is this something Jesus said? My memory is rusty. 2023 needs to be a turning point to take back control from sociopaths.

Putting a large solar system on your house, even including a battery at today’s charges, costs less than buying a small car. How many households now have 4 or 5 cars? What’s the gain, in having those vehicles? How does it compare to covering all of your home’s energy needs, with a system that will last 25 years, probably 2-4 times as long as most people keep their cars? The ROI on just about every car is negative. A solar system will even power your electric car.

MRI of people kissing. The tongues get your attention at first, but watch the hearts too. They’re obviously not married.

This sort of story gives a whole new context to the driver-assist technologies now being included with cars. These accidents wouldn’t happen, with that technology.

Poorer countries surging ahead, while we in lazy and entitled rich countries cling to our ridiculously 19th century technologies like kids who won’t give up a teddy bear.

There’s a storm brewing in Covid vaccine science, and it’s a biggie. One of the key weapons your immune system has against pathogens is immunoglobulin, or Ig for short. Also called antibodies. They’re proteins which your immune system produces to fight invading pathogens. Vaccines trigger antibodies, it’s part of how they work. There are 5 types of antibodies: IgG, IgM, IgA, IgD and IgE. A recent experiment has found that repeated vaccination with mRNA vaccines (the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines most of us have had) creates a dominance of IgG antibodies, and a specific type called IgG4. That antibody is responsible they think for calming the ‘cytokine storm’ (massive inflammation) which kills most people who die of Covid. But there may be a very dangerous downside. The researchers think it’s possible this is now saving our lives in the short-term, but by calming that immune response it’s also creating a long-term home for the virus, inside our bodies. It’s making it easier for it to reinfect us, repeatedly. And the data backs this up, the more we get vaccinated, the more frequently we seem to get infected. If this turns out to be the case, the current vaccines may actually be accelerating our vulnerability to Covid. (Not a victory for anti-vaxers either, because without vaccination Covid totally trashes your immune system.) Covid is playing with us, feasting on us like a rotting carcass.

My latest entry in the cat v dog wars.

If you’ve had Covid and are having memory problems, you’re far from alone. Another recent story I heard was a guy who’d had Covid, driving to work at 8pm thinking it was 8am. And a woman getting lost driving her kids to work, on the same route she’d used for years.

An electric taxi in the early 1900s, New York. There’s an assumption that electric vehicles today are the new technology, replacing petrol and diesel. But electric cars were built 50 years before either petrol or diesel cars. At the turn of the 20th century they were the most popular cars in the world. What changed things was the power of the oil industry, lobbying for combustion engines. Inefficient, ridiculously complicated, stinking and noisy technology, but with the money from big oil behind it, it won the day. Now over a century later, justice is being done as hopeless combustion engine technology is replaced with technology that was always far superior to it. On ‘range anxiety’, where people have these bizarre ideas about petrol and diesel vehicles having longer range…for the first 25 years of petrol cars, there were no service stations. The only way you could fuel your car was carrying tins of fuel home from the shop, to fill it. It didn’t get you far. Now within a handful of years of the resurgence of electric, there are already thousands of options for charging (including at home), and it’s still just early days. You also don’t need fleets of thousands of petrol tankers continuously travelling highways to re-fuel service stations, which creates the illusion that combustion vehicles have greater range. The electricty just uses wires, no semi-trailers needed.

Dose 1 of this today. For shingles prevention. I really believe the most important thing you can do for your long-term health is to avoid infection of any kind. Everything from heart disease to cancer is likely caused by long-term, chronic infection. Getting a flu shot for example has a dramatic impact on heart disease risk, lowering it substantially. Just wish this one was subsidised, $300 a shot, ouch. $60 back under private health cover. There are a lot less worthy things for free on the PBS right now. And as a footnote, none of us would get shingles if there hadn’t been a ridiculous idea to ‘live with’ chickenpox and deliberately infect kids, when I was young. Shingles is Long Chickenpox. And it’s now linked (it’s awful enough on its own) to stroke and heart disease too.

Because politicians are doing everything they can to suppress information and data about Covid, I post updates on local cases occasionally, so people can see what’s really happening. Lithgow Hospital again restricting visitors. And look at Bathurst. And this is maybe only 10% of actual cases, because people either don’t test, or don’t report the tests.

Maybe it was the $5 question.

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.” Carl Sagan (Exhibit A - electric cars, and Covid.)

The rail strikes threatened in the US are mostly about a simple issue. The rail workers want 7 days of sick leave per year. They currently have ZERO sick days per year. In fact it’s even worse than that, they have zero UNPAID sick days as well. Shareholders have done very well out of these railways. This is what happens when you replace socieities, with economies.

Happy Birthday!

I enjoy all the Flat-Earther electric car memes. I encourage the Flat-Earthers to invest all of their money in combustion vehicles, as quickly as they can, so that they’re unable to afford the electricty to post to FB.

Another one for the Flat-Earthers. There’s a trend here, even without my glasses on.

Just a handful of comments on an article The Australian released saying sales of electric vehicles have tripled. Imagine being part of this community of fruit loops.

Anybody bothered by a gap between words and reality here?

The average Australian spends $163 a month on storage?

I want to see the New Year’s resolutions. Mine is the same every year. To be free. And there’s only one way. Everything else eventually leads to unhappiness, and it can take years to realise that.