2022 Threads
301 demonstrable authored self-threads.
No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with every…
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization have you looked at the guidelines for public health units, re. Covid? Lots of important codings, definitions etc. https://t.co/srE98cGM8c
From a nurse in NSW Health. “We are short staffed every shift by about 4 nurses. Cannot recruit any more staff, no one is applying. Staff are resigning because of the new protoc…
The next UK-imported spin, people in hospital ‘with Covid’ rather than ‘from Covid’. Only 25% of those hospitalised in the UK right now for Omicron are unvaccinated. The vast ma…
Telling people to ‘live with’ Covid while it’s still in pandemic mode is like telling people to return to their homes during the ‘emergency’ phase of a bushfire, instead of at t…
I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely…
Such a rich vein of horseshit here to be mined. Most obviously ‘balance’ and ‘proportionate’ as weasel words again, where nothing is being balanced, and the only proportional we…
Severity is the magic key that unlocks all of the politics of the pandemic. Using polio again as example, which was mostly mild, in the majority of people who contracted it. Cov…
How is this even believable? Missing a few weeks of school to get vaccinated against a lethal virus will harm children? Imagine putting your name to this letter. Let history jud…
The politics of maths. Covid deaths in the UK, but the same principles apply globally. Currently running between 300-500 deaths per day. That’s 110,000-150,000 per year. (1500 d…
Breakdown of reinfection data from the UK. From the latest UKHSA update report (https://t.co/v4cFa7Qz8I) Reinfections showing the same pattern as infections. Driven mostly by sc…
This bit of libertarian sleight of hand: “We’re now in a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free…When someone tells you they want to make something free,…
Tomas Pueyo got fame by being one of the first to talk about 'flattening the curve'. (Not great advice, as it turned out: a highly dispersed virus is easily eliminated using the…
Have Tweeted before maybe about what POW camps in the Korean War can teach us about Covid. But in case not.../1 https://t.co/b79VSMhsgl
Familiar with the spurious correlation page @Bertrandization and @RichardfromSyd1 ? https://t.co/NtT4ePD2Wn
The embarrassing dysfunction of rich countries during the pandemic should force us to take stock of what we’ve become. But it probably won’t. Sir Richard Barrons, former Command…
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injust…
There’s something so glorious about actual journalism. We don’t see much of it any more, it’s too often PR for the vested interests who bought up all the mastheads. https://t.co…
We live in epidemic social systems. We’ve replaced a public sphere of institutions focused on multi-generational, often invisible action on collective problems, with a daily, ev…
Testing ventilation in the workplace. Pleasantly surprised. https://t.co/c4Tyc2Panh
The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw materia…
All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persist…
We don’t understand time. We’re born old, and get younger every day. A baby carries the biological and evolutionary history of its species, going back millions of years. Old. As…
"The NSW WHS legislation is a risk-based framework that considers what is ‘reasonably practicable’. SafeWork NSW appreciates that exceptional circumstances require flexibility o…
Decoupling. From mid-2021, UK cases settled into a new non-zero baseline. But deaths followed, and have also settled into an ‘endemic’ 3-figure state. Omicron then caused a rise…
“Yesterday, our dear officials were struggling with an evolving pandemic driven by a novel virus that made us all look like slow-witted fools. But today we are all living in the…
This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to ana…
One of 3 ‘endemic’ puff pieces from the ABC today. Highlights: 1) “Professor Jenkins believes the virus will soon become endemic on the east coast of Australia…/1 https://t.co/G…
Life in libertarian Australia. My wife is a teacher, and in the absence of any measures from the NSW Govt: - I put an air purifier in her room. I didn't ask. - I got her better…
From a public policy point of view, the only moonshot I see working longer-term against pandemics is ventilation. It's engineering. Behavioural and attitudinal change is a lost…
Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to '…
Two (true) stories from inside NSW schools that highlight how RATs have become the new public health magic beans. 1) A teacher came to school for 2 days, with symptoms, 'because…
@RichardfromSyd1 @Bertrandization thoughts? Richard it relates also to our discussion yesterday with Simon Rowe (was that his name?) https://t.co/mONB2qTQaK
Who qualifies for a (free) Covid test in NSW? Outside schools. Nobody. Once chemists are stocked with RATs, only a doctor can get you a free test. Even the vulnerable groups lis…
Of course the hope is that by mid-to-late 2022 Covid will have settled into a low-prevalence, low-morbidity endemic state. I keep coming back to the fact that the only vaccines…
Democracy is failing not because politicians are rorting and lying and pursuing only what is popular. They've always done that. /1 #auspol https://t.co/4uoofWcyzn
To flip the endemic death narrative back upon itself. This is US data, from January 2020 to 4 February 2022. Overwhelmingly (outside a pandemic too), people don’t die ‘of’ influ…
The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally…
I thought Grace Tame’s speech at the press Club was one for the ages. Like Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. The only ‘but’ for me is a more general observation. As we’ve lost th…
Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let…
Ongoing ANU polling shows how populism fails. The country is clearly unimpressed with 'Let it Rip' Covid, but is powerless to do anything in real time because populist democracy…
The government relentlessly attacks super because it’s maybe an even greater threat to them than unions. VAST amounts of the nation’s wealth is now in super funds. And we - me a…
Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick th…
Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to…
Why are we pretending the pandemic is over? Because the wealthy are now comfortable they're protected. No sarcasm here, this is the literal underlying political reality. Working…
I’d like a new ‘proportionate’ response to the pandemic. Those who argue for widespread infection of the population - 50% is a number bandied about - must demonstrate their comm…
It’s dark when I get up for work, and it’s still summer. The result of daylight saving robbing one end of the day for the other (and thus nothing is ‘saved’). Have always hated…
Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol
The reason I plead with people to join unions is not because I’m a union organiser (I’m not), or closely associated with the ALP (not either). But because politics is not just b…
James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I t…
Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate…
Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality t…
Some conservatives say technology will fix climate change. They say the same thing about ending wars. And yet despite the overwhelming technological might of Western powers, whe…
Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t…
10 reasons I give people for why I still wear a mask (in case of interest). It's good to have comebacks ready. 1) I'm focused on the vulnerable in our community, not myself. 2)…
Another expert on the radio this afternoon, talking about the death of a 2-year old from Covid. Parents can be reassured, apparently, that the ‘majority’ of children will have a…
The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T
Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H
This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC)…
"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or he…
The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and b…
Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U
SKY News currently screening a half-hour party political featuring Josh Frydenberg, under the pretend cover of journalism about the budget. Nauseating. His opponent, an independ…
This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP
The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for…
Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evid…
What political opponents to the current conservative, neoliberal, libertarian orthodoxy in the developed may need to do is be as populist as their opponents. Good people are too…
Thanks to @JayneFlan. Workers who contract Covid and are working in an area of ‘presumptive employment’ (more below) are ‘automatically presumed to have contracted the disease i…
I think it’s worth focusing on the scale of National Cabinet incompetence in 2021-22. Also, electorally I think that Victoria-driven outbreak in 2020 was maybe much more fundame…
Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a simila…
I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, w…
Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspec…
The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it mean…
"Britain has led from the front in removing social distancing restrictions, having rightly taken the view that once everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated has had that chan…
“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where w…
This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know the…
Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being…
So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2…
74 people died of Covid in NSW this week. Watch the vid. Why aren’t ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns mocked as ‘hysteria’? Road safety is hugely expensive, and complicated,…
Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying som…
“We need to start living with this virus, a similar way we live with the flu.” Tony Blakely. ‘Living with’ other infectious diseases was always about avoiding catching them. Lik…
The real reason ‘living with the virus’ had to become the strategy. Poor people were forgetting their place. ‘Endemic’ was originally a term applied to infectious diseases when…
Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Abori…
The Opposition Leader and candidate for PM gets Covid mid-campaign, and Covid still won't be an election issue. Sing it with me: "Australians All Let Us Rejoice For We are Dumb…
If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wage…
Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. O…
Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest we forget means to not forget the ‘sacrifice’ of those who died. But…
Australia was in the Vietnam War for ten years. Just over 500 Australians died. 5000 Australians have died of Covid in the past 5 months.
7-day average for deaths has hit 42 now. We need the election out of the way so that hopefully somebody in Canberra can do some grown up public health work. Including reporters,…
The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes,…
The PM is relentlessly trying to bed down US and UK-style libertarianism here. All the ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ guff. But who invented government? We did. All…
Election logic is actually pretty simple. Walter Lippmann used to say that a public votes in a new government when problems overflow politics and start to enter their lives. Rep…
All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions…
A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others pre…
The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and mo…
Queensland is an outlier in federal elections. Paradoxically, it’s the most European and American in how it votes. The most receptive to small government, neoliberal and liberta…
A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics…
I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a…
The real issue I see here, about the way National Cabinet has trashed our public health system. 1) Cost wasn't the reason most people didn't get flu shots before. They never saw…
“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the…
Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we…
Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or a…
Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the…
The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still…
Political libertarianism has succeeded in savaging public institutions using fundamentalist ideas about ‘freedom’. Of action, but also of speech. We’re in a bind now, this funda…
Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it.…
Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little commun…
I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don'…
The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate p…
The existence of local councils was driven by public health action in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sewer, clean water, garbage collection, drainage. The shape of our societies w…
There's not a single number here that has moved meaningfully in months. The State has given up, in every way. And I think it gets worse, in terms of our ongoing public health. #…
Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respo…
Paradoxically, progressive voters are the main cause of populism. The most divorced from the basic realities of power and how it’s exercised to bring about change. Conservatives…
Modern economics provides a veneer of pseudoscientific language to disguise ongoing colonial feudalism. For example, cheap labour from overseas used to be called slavery. Now ca…
I’m loving the actuaries riding into battle against the Covid minimisers. Very short thread on deaths, based on recent analysis of US death data from https://t.co/4zjjZrbXKB /1
The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened u…
Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections…
NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been…
What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strat…
The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are imm…
Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting h…
Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No…
Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas ti…
Sharon Lewin this morning, quite correctly restating that the national Covid strategy is reduction in severe disease and death. That's what's tying our hands. We need it to be a…
More minimising fun with numbers, this time the ABC. Look, Australia is doing well! We’re killing relatively far fewer than the pandemic bloodbath overseas! Maths and language a…
Listening to Phil Coorey chat to Hamish McDonald on RN Breakfast, saying there's no way people would accept closing businesses again. Hey fellas, they're already broken, vast nu…
The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the dif…
More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a busin…
Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, w…
‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, com…
I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livesto…
Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybod…
Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protec…
‘Working from home’ is another framing that needs rethinking. It’s like ‘work-life balance’. We keep framing work as an opposite to life and home. Many workers like working from…
People need permission to wear masks. Freedom is not letting individuals do what they want. Society is so obsessively social that this just leads to slavish, collective imitatio…
Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, t…
We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #au…
Albo is a good bloke. But for the love of our sanity, the best way to keep the costs of Covid action down is to suppression transmission. (Business should shoulder much of that…
These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hiera…
@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as B…
"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with f…
One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we…
Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give…
Something about Twitter. I rarely use it as a mobilising tool to try to generate wide public action, because most of the public never use it. (Last estimate I saw was less than…
The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll…
Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask…
Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin a…
It's interesting to compare absolute and per capita case numbers. When you do it becomes clear what the true function of National Cabinet is. Absolute numbers first, suggesting…
We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demons…
There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. S…
For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in…
Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was l…
Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, whi…
The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how…
I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what i…
How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doi…
Every time we hear claims that countries must spend X% of GDP on defence, I’m reminded of the power of defence industries as lobbyists. And gas companies of course argued for a…
The first privatised pandemic can learn from multiple privatised wars. Most modern wars, like Ukraine, are really big trade shows for private arms manufacturers. Major powers be…
The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk a…
Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built…
An expose into the way top officials are neutered now by populist politicians in NSW. We've all watched Utopia, it's not parody now. What's less seen with populism I think is th…
The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (…
Two things jump out here. Firstly the high number of deaths even in younger age groups. And also how much more lethal Omicron was than Delta, in Australia, despite desperate att…
The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to i…
We miss how Oz politics really works. Australians act as a community. All through the 20+ years of federal LNP resistance to renewables, Australians ignored their bullshit and a…
A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off.…
Some claim the greatest epidemic in human history is the surge in Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) in the 20th century. Heart disease is (many don’t realise) mostly unknown before t…
Paul Ewald has suggested infectious causes for our main chronic diseases. So while we notice big acute disease events, like pandemics, we maybe miss the possible chronic disease…
The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definiti…
I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, m…
About 5% of the population are strong believers in the conservative cause célèbres of the past 30 years. That 5% is funded by the top 1% to make enough noise to create an impres…
NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitud…
Here's a great example of how the politics of the economy sucks us all in. The almost universal hatred of monopolies. A monopoly is just an economy of scale. The 'free market' w…
For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other…
When the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, the eventual enquiry found that an internal NASA culture of suppression of individual criticism led to the disaster. I thought of t…
ABC radio on the way home, talking about vulnerable people having to isolate themselves more and more to avoid Covid. Some staggering number of people with blood cancer (over 10…
Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mec…
Governments do nothing about Covid because they do nothing about anything. They represent privilege. Unions were always the counterbalance. They’re the way the politics of ordin…
What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, beca…
Phew, finally the average daily deaths is down to about double the daily average in Victoria's nightmare 2020 outbreak. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/BrdehfOURQ
The best way to regulate your speed when driving wouldn’t be to remove the speedo from the car. But that’s what we’re doing with Covid data, stripping it away, flying blind. We…
"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the g…
The @theprojecttv segment on whether we’re declaring the pandemic over too soon was a pathetic example of how broken public health is. Serious story, great contribution from @en…
It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains histo…
"Many of the deaths aren’t counted in the official Covid tally, he said, because they happen months after Covid infections. “The deaths that are being reported as Covid deaths g…
‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’…
Thanks to @stephenjduckett. A low fatality rate for a disease = thousands of deaths with mass infection. But also older people dying of Covid may only lose a handful of years of…
Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role,…
“So if you've had four … you would have had the most recent one within the last few months, and that would protect you until at least Christmas…so it might be something you do i…
Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big S…
The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model…
A beautiful example of the barren stupidity of libertarian politics. ‘Personal responsibility’ on the roads leads to gridlock. But if every individual driver drives slower via a…
Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phone…
Tales from the Covid front lines. 1. RN Breakfast, Jane Halton asked how her review into vaccine procurement is going. Couldn't reveal details, except to give a general sense th…
Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular…
More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experie…
We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much t…
When you use a chronic rather than acute disease lens, it almost reverses who’s ‘vulnerable’ to Covid. https://t.co/EZYgTMRpBC
h/t to all of those who fought so hard to infect the kids. You must be feeling nothing like the bottom-feeding arseholes people with a brain and a conscience think you are. http…
This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about h…
The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid,…
I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to ext…
Plagues and wars are about the only things that have ever re-balanced inequality in history. Why vested interests today are so determined to not let us fight Covid. https://t.co…
The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to…
The UK is in a death spiral, created by politicians whose entire lives from their student days has been devoted to sterile debates about fanatical, hardened ideas. The type of i…
Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in poli…
“Allen Cheng…said if mandatory isolation laws were lifted, the onus would fall on workplaces to enforce their own rules about when employees should come back to work and whether…
Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that somet…
The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid o…
Since the beginning of the pandemic, taxpayers in Australia have provided: - $29 billion in direct health support, and - $314 billion in economic support. A couple of critical q…
I know some suspect me of having drunk the authoritarian Kool Aid, by suggesting we abolish elections. But I often Tweet about how societies are now modelled after high schools,…
The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so…
The war on popularity, part something. Power is achieved by a majority of votes. This is how the voting system works. The problem with it is, ‘majority rules’ is profoundly unde…
The focus of infection in public discussion is the acute phase. The main game is likely always the chronic phase. Some research suggests our other major killers like heart disea…
Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservati…
Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see l…
There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread t…
Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at schoo…
An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic…
The history of public health is so vital I think to understanding the Covid debacle we're living right now. There's maybe an assumption that the public health practice politicia…
It appears rich hybrid immunity is 'devastating (millions of) people's lives and livelihoods'. https://t.co/6Bt1JwRaeb
Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t a laughing stock from Day 1. It got up because popularity-based poli…
Wrong ideas about democracy also lead to despair about the millions of followers of people like Trump, and Alex Jones. Because we believe democracy is some magical aggregation o…
We should all make a submission to this inquiry if we have something relevant to one of the terms of reference. It’s one of our only opportunities to be heard on Covid. The Clea…
Listened to a piece on ABC Radio this week about building ventilation. @DrPieterPeach made a guest cameo. Innes Willox said new buildings could factor in better ventilation, but…
Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” Public health similarly used to be us following the…
I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toi…
The most powerful 4Corners I’ve seen for some time. Modern societies still run on cheap imported labour i.e. slavery. ‘Economy’ is just our modern re-branding. Covid exposed it.…
Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to…
I've seen some updated Covid advice from schools, following the ending of isolation requirements. All I've seen say that's the change they're making, i.e. no isolation. 'Attenda…
The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window i…
No prizes for guessing which bit the AFR cherry-picked from the independent (of evidence) review. As an ex-teacher and parent, one of the things that most disgusted me in this p…
Have read much of the report now. There's lots that's good in here. But a private review of a public health emergency says everything that's wrong with the Western Covid respons…
To understand how conservative politicians capture the vote of poorer people, imagine you're somebody who has no success with relationships. Nobody wants you. Would you rather:…
Democracies cycling through ever more leaders, as our popularity-based politics inevitably fails. We’re so stuck in the headlights of populism that all we can think to do is to…
I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics…
The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselv…
I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim that the ‘vast majority’ don’t commit fraud or waste is true for all j…
I worked in schools, and think we criminally downplay their formative role in our entire culture. (See my pinned Tweet.) This image shows us nearly everything important about so…
The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, b…
“The reality is that this virus is simply behaving like every other known human virus in adapting to the host and becoming more transmissible and less virulent, so it can coexis…
The real and clear story here is that the 'protocols' are nonsense for preventing Covid spread. And they're more rigorous that what we use on land. The whole country is a public…
Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedo…
The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideolo…
Brad Hazzard on RN, describing the early days of Covid as 'silly' when we were concerned about 200 cases in the community. No Brad, what's silly is you and your libertarian mate…
For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about social media isn’t the technology itself, it’s the core idea behind…
Because they can. We need strong media regulation, including social media, which I think should probably be shut down. Libertarians use ‘free speech’ to pretend continuous propa…
To link two themes I Tweet about, social media replaces the adult world, mediated by institutions going back multiple generations, with a high school culture. It’s a technology…
Listening to the usual banalities about energy on #insiders, a gossip column for the elected populist dimwits. Here’s the disconnect between the Australian community (heart of o…
We need birthday cake Covid questions to politicians. John Hewson’s GST campaign derailed when asked a specific question about how it would apply to birthday cakes. With Covid p…
‘Immunity debt’ is really public health debt. Australia swapped an established and powerful public health approach in late-2021 for a neoliberal, libertarian political approach…
The problem with US-based democracy theory is that it only knows the cartoon extremism of the US experience. So everything is these boring big binaries of authoritarianism vs ‘b…
Described as 'bipartisan' politics at the time, what it really shows is that both men have an election coming up. Elections were once a (poor) means to an end, now they're an en…
I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate…
I dunno, I feel the collective attention span is about 5 seconds. It doesn’t seem along ago we were all pointing out that social media being free meant ‘we were the product’. Su…
Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the o…
Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, w…
Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals.…
Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as…
I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices…
For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, re…
The privatised pandemic. If we still had widespread PCR testing, and if we followed the advice of ‘stay home if we’re sick’ during these mass waves of infection, society would b…
In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to…
For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, ar…
Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, wit…
“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all…
Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everyth…
Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’v…
The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their…
Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climat…
Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible…
Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics…
There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 200…
This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on.…
Christian Drosten says the population getting infected multiple times is all that will end the pandemic, without mucosal vaccines. But on the other hand he (and others) say don'…
I seem to have developed a change to my sense of taste in the past 24 hours. Not the absence of taste, but more like a de-emphasising of some flavours. Did a PCR this morning, w…
To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be…
Who's going to be the Al Gore of Covid? Remember how people gasped when he rode the lift to the top of that graph? Some of the Covid graphs are even higher and steeper, showing…
Grandparents on both side of the family now hospitalised in the latest Covid surges. No sympathy please, it’s not about that. They took every precaution possible. They were isol…
Neoliberalism has a chronic or 'long' form too. Long neoliberalism is what we're living now, where society is under siege from problems in every direction, and we can do nothing…
1) Why do these tougher questions have to come from the public? What are journalists paid for? ‘A lot of people have said’ would be a fail in a first-year journalism assignment.…
The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperi…
The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It mi…
If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conform…
We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without conte…
Tragically @KarenCutter4 is on holiday (which she deserves), so looking at the NSW weekly epi report without her guidance. - lead summary point is that ‘we are likely to have re…
This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are…
Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians…
UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by havi…
The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephone…
Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across m…
2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the s…
At the end of another terrible Covid year, I think we need to zoom out and recognise we’re in the middle of a pattern that repeats throughout history. Plagues and wars are all t…
I have @NjbBari3 to thank for a revelation today. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d contracted Covid, because my sense of taste started to go a bit wonky. But 2 PCRs and multi…
Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international com…
POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the ca…
I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same so…
While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and e…
That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal…