Family & everyday life

Republics have home-grown heads of State. I'm not seeing the big advantage. https://t.co/qV8pw1Jr8W

Some events in life bring home sharply how real it is. Like this morning. The cat pissing down one of the gas heating vents.

@MikeySlezak @liammannix another example of population vs individual risk? Peanut allergies. Some kids have them, peanuts are banned in schools. 1/n There isn’t a low risk every child will react to a peanut. There are a handful of kids who…

@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate.…

#covid19 a year since the disaster of 2020 summer holidays and Covid in Europe, they’ve learned nothing. https://t.co/rt5E1sphj2

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#covid19 #auspol the constant calls to 'open up' during the pandemic have been the grown up version of 'are we there yet?' from kids in cars.

#auspol #covid19 The developed world reminds me of the struggle road workers have getting cars to slow down. The desperation to run 'normal life' alongside a pandemic. Hoping that vaccinating removes the need to do basic restrictions on…

#auspol ask those constantly arguing for the importance of getting borders open and returning to 'normal life' whether their plan includes infecting the nation's children.

#auspol @JaneCaro the obvious story is the pitiful amounts on offer. The wider story is, millions of kids were being left behind BEFORE the pandemic, and nobody cared. Still no priority vaccinations for teachers and students. Childcare for…

#auspol #covid19 it's clear many here in Oz are just as casual about infecting children. Many of us were deliberately infected with measles and chicken pox and mumps etc. as kids, because it would 'do us no harm'. Now we vaccinate for all…

#covid19 #auspol viruses spread through social activity. Social activity is governed by political systems and ideas. The seriousness of a pandemic is therefore deeply implicated in the political ideas used to address it. 1/3 The clear…

A prominent Australian infectious diseases expert was on radio this morning, being quite cavalier about the chance of children becoming infected in Australia. Does most of them little harm etc. None of this would get ethics approval for…

#auspol leaders and experts need to be asked right now if they plan to infect children and young adults widely, when opening up. Quite staggering that it's even contemplated. https://t.co/8wLhcdlY6S

#covid19AUS #auspol a game the whole family can play. Take the expression 'we need to learn to live with X', and replace the X with: - Covid - paedophilia - Ebola - people smuggling - organised crime - welfare fraud - drugs. Why don't we…

#auspol pop quiz. Should we 'learn to live with': A. this family, or B. a lethal pandemic pathogen? https://t.co/HBORuhmj7p

#auspol be immediately suspicious of those who paid no attention over the past 10-15 years as educational outcomes in Australian schools went backwards, now calling to get kids back in school in the middle of a pandemic, for the sake of…

#auspol and with school holidays imminent. When NSW has pulled this off before, the fact they did was taken as a sign of good management, rather than the absence of risk management. You only get so many rolls of the dice...…

#auspol #COVID19Aus great response from @CrabbBrendan to the question on 7.30 last night, about whether NSW is paving the way to us all living with Covid. "I don't think anybody wants to live with Covid." (possibly paraphrasing, going on…

#covid19 Pandemics kill orders of magnitude more people than wars. You can spot a privileged person by their furious desire to get an OS holiday back, in the middle of a pandemic. Like demanding a jaunt to Vietnam in 1973, or the Somme in…

#covid19nsw Those in the regions who have travelled to Greater Sydney since 21 June required to isolate for 14 days. Not seen anything about whether their family members must now do the same?

#covid19aus a global emergency, which goes away if people stay home. Worth pondering.

#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

#covid19 all pandemics are really about territory. About ‘home’. Destruction of the homes of living things, by ungrounded cultures of obsessive travel. Cultures whose own homes are increasingly jet planes and hotels. We need to ‘come in to…

#auspol aged care isn’t just a sector of the Australian economy. Without immigration, the entire continent is just an aged care home. https://t.co/g6UV86GZHF

#covid19 #auspol has anybody told Singapore that the definition of pandemic is that it’s an international event? You can’t end it at home. You can’t live with a pandemic virus as if it’s an endemic virus. You have to make it an endemic…

#auspol #COVID19nsw workplaces a critical risk. Employers not bound by the public health orders on how many battery hens they cram into cubicle farms. Many telling staff they can't work from home, and to pay for their own masks.…

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol I mean, this is fine. But as always there's that 'living with the virus' subtext, where we whack-a-mole it while trying to live 'normal' lives in the midst of a pandemic. Like a holiday to the Somme in 1916.…

#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#covid19aus #auspol can somebody please ask National Cabinet if part of their 4-stage plan is to infect all children, as the UK is doing? It seems important. https://t.co/2jIvbYSBzh

#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays…

@SkyNews Press Preview discussing gleefully the wilful infection of children with Covid, and a range of other nonsensical 'live with the virus' variants. The damage Maggie did to the UK is sad to behold. Each to their own, Spirit of the…

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#auspol #covid19 understand this, and you understand not only what caused the pandemic, but what keeps it going. An 'economic' world where work = freedom, and being in your own home is being 'locked down'. As the Nazis said, 'Arbeit Macht…

#covid19 #auspol yet another uncritical puff piece, describing widespread infection of children, and of the vaccinated, both highly risky (and also unethical, with children) strategies. https://t.co/Z2cLceq1DI

@auspol #covid19 to understand why countries are so casually infecting children with Covid, you have to understand that most of them are rich, old, and living off migrant labour. There's no generational thought, just an eternal 'lifestyle'…

#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the irrelevant and powerless resources of individuals. /1…

#covid19nsw #auspol Dear Premier/CHO, can you say specifically whether children will be allowed to become infected as part of the National Plan?

#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus NSW's stay at home orders. An awful lot of people still going to work? https://t.co/dHuZyKfPAl

#covid19aus #auspol "‘[It] is not because schools aren’t a safe place, they are a safe place, but what we really need to do in greater Sydney is reduce mobility,” Ms Berejiklian said. Pay attention Australia. Once adults are vaccinated,…

#covid19 #auspol just as climate change mostly isn't about the small actions you take at home, the pandemic also isn't mostly up to all of us. It's up to a handful of leaders to make strong decisions. Don't become the scapegoat for their…

#auspol #covid19nsw would be lovely to move away from the naughty children narrative libertarians are forced into, 'if you all do the right thing', to 'come on NSW, let's smash this". You know, NSW, the collective, non-libertarian thing.

#nswlockdown #auspol #covid19nsw this is the time to think. Large test numbers show again that the community is self-organising beautifully. The daily stern 'naughty children' narrative from the police, government and CHO underway. There's…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it seems NSW is following its usual absence-of-risk-management approach. Sightseeing the exponential curve. 'Don't leave home', but leave all the businesses open, so people will be sacked if they do stay…

#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet.…

@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in…

#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected…

#QandA can we please ask whether Australia plans to vaccinate children?

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#covid19aus #auspol for the same reason nobody ever asks whether the plan is to allow children to become infected at Stage 4 of the national plan. Because old people and children are expendable. https://t.co/JL8lQi6YfC

#covid19aus #auspol finally attention to vaccination of children, in today's NSW press conference. Encouraging signs.

#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance…

#covid19 #auspol Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where we end up when we turn societies into economies. Most of the world can’t afford to shelter in their own home (if they have one) from a lethal virus. The wealthy…

#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N Both the PM…

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus trying to find expert analysis of National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (their 3rd, the first 2 disappeared into irrelevance). You can’t predict the weather more than about 3 days out…/1 https://t.co/sJgSbnCxfn …but again…

#auspol #covid19aus when I was a teacher, some staff had kids climbing the walls while the classroom next door was quietly learning. I’m sure the staff with kids climbing the walls thought it was a resounding success that they at least…

@DrZoeHyde what did you make of the CHO and leaders today saying children mostly catch Covid ‘from adults’? Isn’t this just an obvious attempt to deflect attention from the safety of schools?

#covid19nsw can somebody explain how ‘Operation Stay at Home’ will restrict movement, when most people are just going to workplaces the government refuses to close?

#covid19 #auspol I sometimes think of Dresden, when the public narrative shifts to a bit of stay at home time being too hard, less than 2 years into a pandemic. The bombing was 6 years into horrendous suffering and sacrifice.…

#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#auspol #covid19aus wonder if #DoNotInfectOurChildren could get some momentum behind it. About 6 months’ worth of momentum.

#auspol #covid19aus like they care less about education or children's' mental health. To a modern conservative, a school is childcare for the workforce. Or it's a hugely subsidised private networking tool for the upper classes.…

@juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1 @Mike_Honey_ the announced threshold for allowing NSW school re-opening when stay at home orders are lifted and the community transmission in an LGA is lower than 50 per 100,000 population. Do we have that…

#auspol #covid19aus I still remember a time when staying at home was called a holiday. The homicidal cunning of the modern political libertarian, to reframe ‘freedom’ as going to work, and oppression as being in your own home. Gotta love…

#auspol #covid19aus Greg Hunt regurgitating the laughable ‘kids need to be at school for their mental health’ line. Why would anybody believe conservatives on schools? Oz school performance has been in free fall, and they just fund…

#insiders #auspol ok, so let’s draw the line in the sand here. People casually infecting children, rather than waiting a few more months to get them vaccinated. Not me. ‘Chronic, debilitating lockdowns’, ffs, Labor as bad. Try Covid for…

#auspol #covid19aus imagine saying ‘it’s not about the number of kids being hit by cars, it’s about the number of kids being badly injured when hit by cars’. https://t.co/uXrqQIjNMD

We talk about variants. Every variant to date has been produced by a political ideology, generating mass infection and mutation. A new variant today: the 'let's bring Aussies home at 80%' variant.

#auspol #covid19aus so transparent. The National Plan always was just a re-election document. It shifts attention off both of his failures - vaccination and quarantine - claiming that at 80% it’s vaccination job-done, and people can…

@liammannix Zoe always good on schools and kids and Covid. https://t.co/SO4h1HQcY1

#covid19aus It’s fine to infect children, provided they don’t end up in hospital? This makes me curious what the rate of hospitalisation would be for all childhood infectious diseases, without vaccination. Were we wasting our time,…

#insiders #covid19aus if we’re no longer concerned about children contracting infectious diseases, why don’t we abandon the entire national childhood immunisation program, for all infectious disease? Imagine the money we could save.

#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde @RealOzSAGE I was going to do a detailed break-down on the latest NCIRS report which the NSW Government used today to assure people sending the kiddies back to school is safe. But maybe.../1…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus #covid19nsw maybe the NSW Cabinet is going to Hawaii for a holiday. It's a favoured location for LNP leaders during natural disasters.

#nswpol #auspol saying we need to learn to live with Covid, in the middle of a catastrophic outbreak, is like saying we need to learn to live with climate change by sending the firefighters home in the middle of bushfires.…

#auspol 2021 outbreaks have been about workplaces. No commitment to pay people to stay home, so that’s where the virus went. Just as it will go to schools, into unvaccinated children, before Christmas. The same patterns the world over.…

Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus Delta was never the real problem. Lockdowns were softer in 2021 than in 2020, due to refusal by government to provide the same level of support to workers to stay home. Money is the best vaccine.…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

#auspol #covid19aus suspect a fairly common story out of Western Sydney, friends of mine. Family with adult son and daughter living at home, son with 2 kids of his own. All adults double-jabbed. Son works in aged care, has been isolating…

#auspol #covid19aus one of the curious things in this pandemic is just how immune to some basic empirical evidence so many seem to be. For example it doesn’t take a lot of time to watch international news and see just how many countries go…

Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#auspol #covid19aus ⁦@DrZoeHyde⁩ ⁦@drajm⁩ can somebody help me with the highlighted sentence from today’s National Cabinet? I read it as: “The best way to protect children from Covid is…it doesn’t really matter if they get Covid.”…

#covid19aus #auspol The normalisation of throwing kids under a bus. Pertussis deaths in the past century. Pre-vaccinations, annual deaths from whooping cough in Australia were in that 50-120 range. Significant morbidity as well. /1…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

#auspol #covid19aus ok, Pfizer on its way for 5-11 year olds. Let’s vaccinate all of the kids. https://t.co/ytYEV1SrCd

This new world where things are fine for kids provided they don't end up in hospital will make parenting a lot easier.

#auspol #covid19aus the only thing that might slow the 'live with the virus' variant is a national strike. People refusing to get vaccinated or to send their kids to school until all of the roadmaps include time for *all* Australians,…

#auspol #covid19aus Serious question. Is this the first time in the history of the world that a pandemic strategy is 'deliberately infect hundreds of thousands of people'? /1 https://t.co/BL9Aoohxpp Every day I'm lost for words, that we…

#auspol @RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus 100,000 infected in a week. How does this reconcile with Doherty, who said spread in children is insignificant? Or the MCRI 'schools are safe'? https://t.co/75VjBzuIQP

NSW is preparing a Covid-saturated environment for them, to make them feel more at home. https://t.co/FpLMrdbs6E

#auspol I suggested tongue in cheek that if widespread hospitalisation and death is the metric for Covid and children, why not halt all childhood immunisation? Libertarians make sarcasm and irony redundant. https://t.co/zGE19wGbkA

#auspol #covid19aus substitute any other infectious disease for Covid in that headline, and ponder just how debased our democracies have become. Imagine a million kids getting flu in a month. In sane times that would be considered an…

#auspol #covid19aus I often say that NSW and the feds follow the UK lead in much of their pandemic thinking. Here’s another box we’re about to tick in Oz, mass and deliberate infection of children. Even modelled in the Doherty…

#auspol #covid19aus I’m guessing people who point to graphs like this are told ‘yes but the illness is mild in children’. Come on parents of Australia, draw a line in the sand before this is us. https://t.co/s0owIVF8Qh

@RealOzSAGE #covid19aus Brett Sutton gets a lot of eye candy comments, but you know, Dr Greg Kelly - come on people. Smart too, and heals kids! https://t.co/8pWutNZLbh

#nswpol come on journos, not too late to ask the Premier why it's OK to infect the State's children under her roadmaps. Why can't the timeline allow for them to be fully vaccinated?

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

#auspol #covid19aus this really is somebody from senior levels of the medical profession, arguing to infect kids rather than immunise them. What a world. https://t.co/8QX63s0Q0m

Hats off to the @GrattanInst and @stephenjduckett for calling it so early (July), and it's still bearing up well. There will be nothing like 'normal' life back until populations get to at *least* 80% total population vaccination. /1…

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

The further NSW Health senior staff get from Macquarie Street, the more they're able to call out the elephants in the room. 'Freedoms' the problem, children most at risk. Nearly all under-10s in the regions this week. @RealOzSAGE #nswpol…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

#auspol #covid19aus speaking with people I know, I don’t think it’s widely understood that this ‘herd immunity’ strategy with children is also the Australian National Plan. https://t.co/EnqfmQob0x

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus hands up if you’re cheering on ‘Freedom Day’ in NSW, on Monday? The day we start infecting the kids! Our 6-child Premier leading the charge. Act 2 - we start sending them down the mines again, they should never…

#auspol #nswpol As NSW gives Covid its freedom tomorrow, the libertarian brotherhood in the UK, having also argued to smash borders open and get people moving again, has settled back into libertarian life. Restricting people moving,…

Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools. And there’s something really important here that it made me…

#auspol #covid19aus “…the biggest challenge for Australians will be getting used to hearing about high numbers of confirmed cases. Even in vaccinated societies, the virus continued to circulate, but people did not end up with severe…

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than by Covid, have also endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Most diseases in that scheme are less harmful than Covid. #auspol…

#auspol #covid19aus Finally somebody asks one of the idiot political libertarians why Covid vaccination for children is any different to vaccination for measles, mumps and rubella. https://t.co/h2g0rokC4J

Worth remembering that in the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, the unvaccinated are mostly young kids, who can’t yet be vaccinated. The kids the Deputy Premier of NSW said it was ‘ludicrous’ to protect with masks.

Nothing about this data screams 'we need to get those kids back to school fast'. To me anyway. #auspol #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/x6IPsSGUJo

#auspol the Coalition party room is like one of those family barbecues for your extended family, were you get trapped in a corner by a drunk uncle and his lifelong 'theories'. https://t.co/c0QNdnEA3J

#auspol #covid19aus The NCIRS and the MCRI are the government’s go-to for advice on children in schools. Neither have the slightest connection with schools or education in their remit or research expertise, that I can see?…

Have watched and read numerous things on the apparent mental health and social damage done during the pandemic. A few thoughts about that, going back to some key assumptions. /1 #COVID19Aus Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption…

Hooray, now we can hopefully vaccinate the younger kids before they go to back to school! (Breaking news: I’ve just been informed we already sent all of the kids back to school, so that Qantas can return to profitability and the PM can win…

For a while there the let it rip crowd pretended their concern about schools was about kids missing out on education. They’re saying the quiet bits out loud now, Alan Tudge yesterday. It was always about business. #auspol #covid19aus…

The politics of zero. We’ve had 2 years of outright assault on the idea of zero Covid (both in the eradication and elimination sense.) But take this NSW Government strategy statement, and replace ‘The NSW Road Toll’ with ‘Covid morbidity…

Have friends and family in Germany who say ‘Australia shouldn’t be locking people down’. 100,000 dead there, and ‘living with the virus’. No surprises how that’s panning out. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/da44NBwJ81

Societies that prioritise financially comfortable elders owning multiple homes while making even one home unaffordable for the young, were never going to give a shit about kids getting Covid. https://t.co/KBzXHsmrJg

Based on reporting and public response, it appears this Covid thingy was mostly something about grounded planes and cancelled holidays. https://t.co/7uWKbBemE4

My son explaining why being back at school is better than online learning. “It’s easier to bludge at school, the teachers can’t tell if you’re doing anything”. #auspol #covid19aus

It would be naive to think something like this won’t happen here. Not only allowing children to become infected, but legislatively mandating it. A defining time for our societies. Choose your side. #auspol #covid19aus…

@9NewsAUS @7NewsAustralia @abcnews how about running this NSW breakdown past the Deputy Premier in NSW, to ask if he still thinks masks for kids in schools are 'ludicrous'? Would it hurt the NSW Cabinet to require masks in schools until…

Australia used Thalidomide. The US didn't, based on FDA advice. I'd recommend people follow the FDA strong advice to vaccinate kids aged 5-11 too. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/0rT6atxZ50 https://t.co/SG6NoiVrPE

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

The overriding reason given for surrendering to the spread of Covid is that we can't continue (apparently) to do the public health work needed to eliminate it. About 20 million people are so far thought to have died from Covid. That's more…

This is the only case numbers we should be looking at. The total world figure. Does the pandemic look over to you? Or just oscillating between idiot 'open up and live with the virus' euphoria and 'o shit' rapid retreat? International…

680 children have died of Covid in the US. Over 100 in the UK. Experts in Oz say we need more data to assess risk to children from the vaccines. Those vaccines aren't going to kill hundreds of children. Get on with it. #auspol #covid19aus…

The experts who say child vaccines aren't a priority, also argue against masks for kids in schools. Now they're slowing rollout of vaccines to under-12s, because of myocarditis and pericarditis risks. Didn't stop teen vaccines. /1 #auspol…

Is hundreds of children dead of Covid 'real world data'? Asking for a friend. We need a name for people determined at all costs to infect children. Actually, it's 'National Cabinet' - it's in the National Plan. #auspol #covid19aus…

The same people who say masks damage children socially and psychologically, are now eagerly pushing a system where they'll have swabs shoved up their noses and down their throats multiple times every week, instead. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Mr Hunt said while he expected children to be able to get vaccines shortly, caution was needed: "(Regulators) will work to make sure that there are no corners cut in ensuring the safety and protection of our children." (Corners = masks and…

Austria, one home of free-market libertarianism. When you deny the public exists, you end up reinventing it one (incarcerated) group at a time. Libertarians hate the lockdowns their own ideas cause. /1#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud…

The slower approval of vaccinations for kids for ‘safety’ reasons is a risk management triple somersault with double twist, being almost oblivious to risks already under our noses. At a minimum how about rigorous PH measures in schools in…

h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

We all remember this? People mocked for worrying about clotting risk, with AZ? 4 per million. The same mockers now say extreme caution is needed with Pfizer in children. Oz running at about 10 (mild) myocarditis cases per million. #auspol…

Do you think the spin merchants who came up with 'pandemic of the unvaccinated', as a libertarian dodge to get rid of PH measures, now think about kids being the only unvaccinated left? The group they're 'cautious' to vaccinate? #auspol…

The question for NSW seems to be, where to from here? Most of the cases in the blue circle are children, so cases may decline as they get vaxxed. If enough of us get a 3rd dose, it may drive NSW towards elimination. We know Covid is an…

The new NSW Health guidelines regarding ‘venues of concern’. If your kids are wondering what to train for when leaving school, I suggest WHS litigation, based on the underlined bit in red. Decades of guaranteed income. #auspol #COVID19Aus…

The 3 most pointless weeks of school remain this year. Send the kids home out of Covid’s way, ffs. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/CXY17dNyV7

Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

EU, US, Canada, Israel all now have approved vaccines for 5-11s. Several million children already vaccinated. Is the only obstacle for ATAGI approving it here the embarrassing political question - do we have supply? #auspol #covid19aus…

The ‘let’s infect the kids to save the Economy’ UK is now requiring masks in schools. In the monkey-see, monkey-do world of live with the virus zealots, maybe it will change the rhetoric from our homegrown child-infection cheer squad.…

My Year 5 daughter's teacher is a libertarian anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-anything public health person. Yesterday she told the class not to follow rules, not to let people tell you what to do. This will be her last 2 weeks at the…

My kids were gutted when school went back. Like all kids ever, in history, until the past 2 years. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7FPWNhpSor

Waleed halfway to the Holy Grail here. We're not acting 'globally' to end the pandemic. But we're not doing that because the 'global' as we think of it, doesn't exist. You can't create international from national. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Reduce the risk of lockdowns during the holiday season- Response to new variant of concern: Omicron https://t.co/pDVxuFZmfd

The UK facing an Omicron ‘tsunami’. Business interests are peddling the same BS about the importance of infecting children in schools, regardless. It’s about childcare for business, ignore the spin about education and mental health.…

Kids will respond to what’s expected of them. Just as societies do, to the expectations of their leaders. That’s the total vacuum in this pandemic, libertarians don’t lead, they see that as a conflict of interest. https://t.co/0Fog1C8sxU

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Hey Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus

Perhaps the hidden story of 'hospitalisations are all that matter'. As many have suspected in Australia too. Here's the UK experience. Bed occupancy rates look of concern, but maybe manageable post-vaccination. /1 #COVID19…

In which it becomes clear that the children of conservative politicians are without question raised almost single-handedly by their wives. https://t.co/4Q5JTteCfM

It's reassuring that the 'personal responsibility' line our home-gown libertarian loons trot out are identical to the ones used in the US and in the UK, where people are mown down by Covid in the hundreds of thousands.…

After all the crap about how we should infect kids rather than close schools, the NAPLAN comparison of 2019 to 2021 was released this week. The black squares? No statistical difference in performance. Lockdowns made no difference to…

NSW ‘treating people like adults’, says Premier. If you want public health restrictions to control Omicron, you're a child. Libertarians ARE children, spoiled rich kids who never did a day's real work in their lives. Their 'freedom' is…

I told my family at the beginning of December that we'd be under restrictions again before Christmas. I'm not a public health expert, but you have to be some type of moron to not have figured out yourself this was inevitable.…

I guess these things are inevitable in hopium land. My younger brother tested positive today. Triple-vaxed, wore masks everywhere, mostly works outside. Christmas plans over.

I find it’s usually people who have never worked in schools, and/or were popular at school, who think kids are damaged by not attending them. https://t.co/gIQu1Hrch4

My brother tested positive on a RAT before Christmas, and 3 times since. Still hasn’t got his PCR result. His wife now has a sore throat. No testing centres on the Central Coast until Wednesday. No RATs available. Is there a Pandemics for…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

Spoke with a GP today who said the system of GPs overseeing peoples’ Covid self-care at home in NSW is collapsing. #COVID19Aus

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 everything here, for example I think social media is a response to…

The UK now requiring masks again in schools, for children and staff. We haven’t even required them once here, there’s no ‘again’. We may surpass their stupidity yet. #covid19aus

Suspect a similar story in many workplaces. At mine, staff told ‘ask your Director if you wish to work from home’. You ask, response: ‘not at this time, we don’t have any transmission here’. The lunatics are running the asylum.

No mention (that I saw) in today’s presser about regional cases. Let’s pick Western NSW. A 350 jump in 1 day. Bathurst, the example I used yesterday, went from 120 yesterday, to 257 today. That’s the Deputy Premier’s home town. Heard…

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 in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But…

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. Covid the same. But both are public health emergencies. /1…

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 judge the depths to which some have sunk. #auspol…

Signatories to yesterday’s ‘Infect All of the Children for their Mental Health’ declaration here in Australia need to take note. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/lzw905kSEx

Latest NSW Government report (13 January) says NSW Health has 15,230 Covid patients under care. Most will be in the home (well in excess of the capacity of that care modality). NSW Health projections from last week (graph). Maybe we should…

“(PM) says that modelling work was presented today relating to NSW to get an understanding on how the return to school may impact the workforce.” Note that. Not the kids. Not the teachers. The workforce. We’re all pit ponies now.…

Bought an air purifier for my wife to use in her classroom. School won’t buy them. I reckon if you asked parents to chip in $10-$20 each to have one in each classroom many would be delighted. None of this is rocket science.

You can’t end a pandemic at home. https://t.co/eWbfZ38N0U

Precious from Brad Hazzard this morning: “Give a damn about your community, your family and most particularly, the health staff across NSW who you expect to be looking after you if and when you end up in our hospital system.” Say it in the…

Hands up if you reckon the Covid-minimiser experts' kids are being home-schooled? (If they have kids.)

The family photo needs updating. Nobody is listening to you any more, clowns. Go rort some grants and leave your public health teams to finish the job. https://t.co/LloDoP94Xn

The problem is that not once have our leaders steeled us for a fight. It’s all been endless promises of it being over. Like bribing your kids with lollipops. #auspol https://t.co/7jdt5wRjSC

Drove past my local drive-through PCR test site yesterday to see how it’s going. Not one person there. Probably all at home trying to buy RAT tests online.

Nothing to fear people of NSW. Room at the hospital for the kids. https://t.co/7C160s9R6U

NSW now forbidding anything less than a surgical mask in schools. Will be interesting if they also forbid anything better than that. My kids will be wearing better. https://t.co/stjhmDzJw8

This pandemic and all of its problems stems from societies that have been shaped as high schools. That’s where we learn our social models, and we construct the adult world to match. Look at the desperate pleas to get kids back to school,…

We need kids back in school, so that Australia can continue its decline towards the bottom of the OECD. Spare me the bullshit about us caring about education or mental health. There was little meaningful action on either, pre-pandemic.…

Libertarians are like those husbands who say to their wives, 'what do you do all day?' https://t.co/ciRB6aUZpF

The great public health achievement of the 20th century was the massive reduction in child mortality. The 21st century is sending children to school in the middle of a pandemic wave, unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated.…

Conversation with a colleague, about back to school RATs and her children. "I won't be testing them twice a week, only if they have symptoms, it's too upsetting for them". I sympathise. Disease control should never have been outsourced to…

I like to holiday in the years pre-pandemic, when we were still trying to eliminate infectious disease. All of it. https://t.co/ABUGvsRGYE

Meet just one of the libertarian leaders responsible for the Covid train wreck. The UK Treasurer. That’s a conservative estimate of his net worth, others are closer to $400-500 million. His father in law is a billionaire. Rishi is…

Those 'bumps' are the children, teachers and parents of NSW becoming infected with a lethal virus. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/c9hR9Cb5Jv

Public health, libertarian style. My wife, a primary teacher, said her year 3 class were discussing the RAT testing. One of the kids said 'what's that?' The other kids explained. Nope, never heard of it, the other kid said. Parents not…

Watching my kids swab their noses twice a week, them hating it and the anticipation of what the result might be, I’m reminded of the fuckwits who thought this was better for them than the relaxed studying from home they did in the past 2…

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 masks, KF94. - I got her to measure CO2 levels in her…

Yesterday somebody was arguing with me about the need for more protections in schools. Their response was that very few if any ‘healthy’ children will die. Eugenics really is the new craze.

School cases building now in NSW, more each day. Parents notified of confirmed cases, but not of close contacts (close contact kids disappear, not even teachers are told why). Of TTIQ, only T is operating. It’s theatre.…

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 I tested negative on my RATs'. /1 #COVID19Aus 2) A year 3…

It feels like cruise ships bookend both ends of this pandemic so far. And explain a lot of everything in-between. 'We're ready to go': Retirees demand cruise holidays return https://t.co/7WHCRznKlP

In case there was any doubt left that infecting hundreds of thousands of children with a lethal virus and forcing them to take it home and infect their families kinda freaks the kids out. https://t.co/kXh6V7PRNP

The only thing children seem resilient to in this pandemic is infection. Everything else, including public health measures to prevent infection, risks damaging them for life. Strip away this constant BS. The sub-text is always the Economy.…

Don’t believe the spin about how well things are going in schools. Week 1 was badly disrupted in many, and that was nearly all infection carried forward from holidays. School spread is only just beginning. My local school is already unable…

Schools, week 2. Talking to a parent whose primary school aged child has Covid. Diarrhoea and vomiting so bad the child is hallucinating. And to what end? It won’t stop them catching it again. Children and staff disappearing every day,…

Fine example of the use of rates to minimise the scale of a problem. This is children too, what moral backbone. https://t.co/YSMAEUXvM5

Half the town I live in is isolating not because of asymptomatic testing, but because at least one member of the family is sick with Covid. We can do this the smart way, with testing, or just wait for widespread illness to do the isolation…

Hearing anecdotally that many schools are already not even bothering to notify parents if a child is positive in a class. I know it from my own school, several kids are positive, but nothing has come from the school. #nswpol

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 thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

One cutting edge of inter-generational tension is surely pathology waiting rooms. Pathologists open early, presumably to allow working people and school kids to get tests before the day. It doesn't work, at 7.30am waiting rooms queued out…

Yesterday we got details about school infections in NSW. Over 20,000 children infected in the first 2 weeks, more than 500 staff infected last week alone. Is it a headline? No. In populist democracy, elections are Prom Night. All focus is…

Hands up who holidayed in France in this pandemic? Anybody? Anybody? https://t.co/JXX8TXzNhp

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 get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

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 commitment to this suggestion by exhibiting the proportionately…

This advice works well for rich people who can watch the pandemic from home on the TV. https://t.co/yZSUaFHLb2

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 belief, but also power. /1 https://t.co/VhKM13BDIV Ultimately…

The casual indifference to mass infection of children is at least partly explained by demographics (many things are). Rich countries are still ageing badly. They’re retirement homes increasingly staffed by cheap overseas labour. Societies…

As rich, privileged nations, this is our time to rejoin the world that the majority of humanity never left. It makes us ‘anxious’. I’d rather it made us determined to stop planning holidays and put our shoulders to the wheel fixing things.…

Two of my kids are still wearing a mask. Next week the NSW Government removes all school mask requirements. This weekend we'll discuss what to do. One is still weeks away from a 2nd vaccine dose. 21st century Australia feels like 17th…

In true libertarian market fashion, I may offer to pay my kids to keep their masks on. Just to reward them for swimming against the tide of dumb.

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 those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600…

Schools in NSW have now been back almost exactly one month. Either a lot of kids have caught Covid at school, or we have a major truancy problem. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/MXCihTnvgL

A friend with kids in a Catholic High School. They will celebrate lifting of restrictions with a whole-school mass. Singing, the works. Small country town. I smell danger, to the entire town.

You’d only need 2-3 stories like this in the news every day to derail the whole living with Covid rubbish. You can understand politicians suppressing it, but what’s the conspiracy of silence from media outlets? Nobody gives a shit about…

The most recent NSW Government guidelines for Covid isolation require people to restart isolation, if somebody else in their household develops Covid while the family is isolating and they haven't been distancing from them. Haven't seen…

Going on holidays for a few weeks, so will likely only be occasionally here, if at all.

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 mild illness. /1 Worth repeating I think that there isn’t a…

The continuous motivated rubbish about how kids don’t catch Covid in schools. If they don’t, why does proper ventilation drop cases there by over 80%? https://t.co/IVgjLnRhxL

They're going to need to. Only people working from home, Macquarie Street and/or retired seem unaware of the chaos in employment land at the moment. https://t.co/H0Oe82fN98

Cases in Queensland jumped 15% in the community last week, and 55% in schools. How long do we have to keep listening to prominent minimisers saying ‘kids catch it in the community, not in schools’?

Remembering that loud, ignorant voices insisted we send our children back to schools to get infected with Covid, so they could rescue their mental health and education. Education results have been in free fall for at least a decade. And…

For a conservative, one is born privileged, or poor. It’s about ‘breeding’. This aristocratic view in the past at least included a sense of duty, of noblesse oblige. The servants were part of the family. Now replaced with the gig economy.…

Living the NSW dream. A friend tells of staff at work with kids at home badly ill with Covid. Staff are there because they've tested negative on a RAT, as per government rules. The kids have only been sick less than a week. No masks…

Notice the Infinite Covid folk have shifted from endemic now, to permanent epidemic waves. Nobody noticed in the press gallery? Hello? Anybody home? https://t.co/ZhGs3Copik

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 From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

I’m no virologist, but the number of people I’ve seen say Covid will become mild ‘like other coronaviruses’? Aren’t Sars-Cov-1 and MERS an easy counter to that? Like any virus family, there seem a whole range of virulence outcomes that are…

WIll the real story of how hospital in the home and other outside hospital care modalities were used during this pandemic ever be told?

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-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

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 nice, politically. We’ve seen outrageous populism from…

One of the disturbing experiences of the pandemic is the revealing of thoughts and beliefs of close friends and family. Beliefs they had often kept to themselves until now. And the nastiness of some of those beliefs, that are now seen in…

It may have been these stats that prompted some to demand kids be unmasked. Maybe they think the paediatric staff in hospitals need more to do. https://t.co/iBrBiHWSue

With very few exceptions, I’ve found that those who are causally indifferent to mass infection are nearly always light years from the operational front-line of society’s basic services. Working from home, opining from the safety of a…

When I caught whooping cough a few years ago, never at any time did a medical professional reassure the rest of the community that they were all going to get whooping cough, and their vaccines would protect them. They told me to go home…

Fewer than 50% of kids under 11 in NSW have been vaccinated. There’s a public health PhD in there, about why this is.

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 suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

Term 1 has been a farce. An epic farce. Every single prominent voice who said this would be better than what kids had last year should be publicly ridiculed. https://t.co/u9ftf5clMx

“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 we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

Mental health is worse when kids are at school, which the research is quite clear about. Academic performance was often better under lockdowns too, because students got individual attention. ‘Disruptions’ is sanitised drivel, it means…

It’s sad that respect for these children and their families was entirely absent when they were sent to Covid-saturated schools to become infected. https://t.co/a7WezUb9kB

Remote learning during polio epidemics. The children appear to have survived without civilisational collapse or lifelong mental illness. https://t.co/LsWiH1PndN

NSW school holidays are underway. Read any significant changes in case numbers with that firmly in mind, I think. Perversely, reduction in spread from kids being out of school will be used as an excuse to have even fewer protections in…

Today's suggested press conference question. "Prime Minister, what percentage of workers are currently at home sick because they're infected with Covid?"

Australians hug the coastline in our homes and holidays in desperate denial of most of the continent we occupied. Travel is our passion i.e. being somewhere else. We’re never just here. We have no understanding of place.…

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 immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

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 something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person…

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 they were left to fester in poorer countries. Now endemic =…

Do you reckon: 1) business has realised removing close contact rules is the government shifting liability from itself, to business, under WHS? 2) people realise they’ll have to use their own sick/carer’s leave (if they have any) to stay…

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 Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

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. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

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 Kipling’s poem asked us to not forget the futility of empire…

As Term 2 begins, feel comforted that the reason we’re infecting all of the kids is so that people can get their below-the-poverty-line income from a job, rather than welfare.

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 most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

That sweet moment when your mother reminds you you're old enough to have had a smallpox vaccination.

Working or learning from home are apparently very bad. But DIY healthcare with a potentially lethal disease is now the Australian way. Is it not transparently obvious, what’s going on here? Pretty coloured memes don’t hide public health…

And the percentage of 5-11 vaccinated actually went backwards. Probably some new kids turning 5? If preventing the death of your citizens isn’t your core job National Cabinet, why do we need you? To keep business open? Dead people don’t…

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 matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

“People are moving on when the personal risk is low”. I want to contrast this idea continuously with the Australia we actually know. No RFS firefighter for example ‘moves on’ if their own home and safety is assured. They’re there to save…

Where I am today is some sort of approximation to Antarctica, with gale force icy winds. Should be bracing for NSW schools getting those windows open to ventilate. Maybe NSW Cabinet could come and meet in one of the classrooms, full of…

In pandemics microbes invade the ecological niches or ‘homes’ of other living things. Destruction of habitat. Our hyper-mobility is petrol on a pandemic fire. We are never ‘home’, never grounded. Our imperial DNA still lays waste to the…

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 any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

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 incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

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 fundamentalism stops beliefs from being regulated. Fish knows it.…

Last week's school shooting in the US wasn't a problem, because it only killed the tiniest fraction of a percent of all children. That'd be a heckuva paper to write, hey. https://t.co/UmD9Ob93ao

Easy to be gobsmacked by the gun drills in US schools. But we, like they, still have no Covid mitigations in schools. Covid has killed orders of magnitude more children than guns in schools. You don’t want Covid or guns, in schools.…

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. #auspol /1 https://t.co/nOFQTUqI4Y Fewer than half of the…

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 respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid.…

Where are the experts and politicians who say kids had to be back at school because they were missing too much education? My kids learned a helluva lot more in lockdown than they are in the Covid soup at school. #auspol…

Are we at the ‘send them back down the mines’ point yet, in our evolution of care for children? I can’t believe I live in a society that wilfully infects children with dangerous diseases, and then reinfects them, repeatedly. Egged on by…

Same pattern the world over. Listen to the actuaries and the insurers they advise. Having to put dollars and cents against Covid statements cuts straight through the BS. Many insurance folk here in Oz are also still working from home. They…

I’m not sure we see our own culture as still infected by empire. The need to always be invading the space of others, to accumulate places. No real understanding of place at all, of home. Home to us is just an address, defined by a road,…

As an engineer, my advice to SKY is that engineering is a very complex field, and it’s best for them to begin with training closer to home. Journalism, for example. https://t.co/K7STLEwCe8

Stories of ‘personal responsibility’ public health. Relented and let my youngest go to a small sleepover, after 2 years. Says one of the kids was sick, coughing, ‘but wasn’t contagious’. I asked how they knew? ‘She coughed on her…

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 out in the community for many days, while highly contagious…

Not sure if it's BA.5, but I'm hearing of a LOT more people infected in my community (home and work) this week? Anybody else? Some are reinfections too.

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 hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

Personal Covid stories Part 2. My wife is a primary school teacher, I have 2 kids still at school. I work in an open office with several hundred people. We’ve just finished 2 tough school terms, masked, with HEPA filters and ventilation,…

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 public HEALTH strategy, against DISEASE. Against infection.…

Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running…

Last week a group of people I know were having a chuckle about me wearing a mask That group is now all home in bed with Covid. I'm sending them all my schadenfreude. https://t.co/6mpxq7sQdp

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 different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

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 everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol -…

‘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 home because they want their work to happen in their…

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, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

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 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.

More NSW Premier: “…we have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick you can go to work.” With HIV, this is what we did when we told HIV+ people to keep having sex with other people without…

If we need expert advice on how to manage Covid at home, then it shouldn't be being managed at home. #auspol https://t.co/VjKKAuTRyN

"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 flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay…

Another politician on the radio at lunch time, saying schools must stay open. Just looking through my press clippings for any politician (or health adviser) saying in this pandemic 'children should not be infected with a pandemic virus'.…

Personal responsibility public health. Overheard yesterday, a woman who’s recovering from Covid saying her husband had tried desperately to catch it off her, so they could get it over with and go to Fiji.

An 80-year-old mother of a friend, with COPD and hypertension, had NBN installed yesterday. Two installers. Neither wore a mask. One has now tested positive. Obviously didn't feel the 'urge' from the CMO. What a disgrace this country has…

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 and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

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 let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

We're not far off putting signs along the top coast begging for the boats to come back. The country will be a continent-sized aged care home with no staff. https://t.co/bq8xETywVl

Young adults in a workplace told me they’ve been avoiding ‘anybody who has kids’. They’re the people at work they see getting repeat infections. Hello experts who tell us kids catch Covid in the community, not in school. Infecting our kids…

A 4-10 week infectious period for monkeypox may be just the shot in the arm work from home needs, for recalcitrant employers. Or they may just buy a lot of band aids to cover the lesions. Don't discount the latter in 2022.

Even if it’s true (it isn’t) that ‘Australians won’t tolerate more public health protections’, so what? I was a teacher, most kids would rather do nothing at school all day. It’s not an option. If you put your hand up for election, do your…

For the first time in 2.5 years, I’ve caught something. Dunno what it is yet, though identical symptom-wise to what my wife and youngest brought home from school last week. I was as ‘personally responsible’ as a person could be. But…

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 about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

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 on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

Surprising Covid hasn't led to a remake of The Good Life. A show about reclaiming agency in life, centred on your home. Often called 'self-sufficiency', but it's not that. You can't live 'off the grid', without a grid. Just about shifting…

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 (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

The concern for child mental health in this pandemic, and the assertion not being at school damages it. Here’s the last (2015) major survey on this. About 1 in 7 females aged 16-17 had considered suicide. About 1 in 20 had actually tried…

NSW has spent a fortune installing security fencing around schools, ostensibly to prevent trespass and vandalism. But the fences are also to keep kids in, to assist with absenteeism. Tell me the story again about lockdowns taking away…

Here’s one from the front-line of the RCT on neoliberal and libertarian political beliefs. Person sells own pension to pay for cost of living explosion, then dies of Covid, leaving children orphaned. https://t.co/6ROxH9tboU

Teaching friends say they’re having to test sick kids at school for Covid, and send them home if they test positive. Some parents aren’t bothering. Governments allow the parents to not bother.

Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Instead Saudi Arabia may still be, with our help. It should be humiliating to us as a nation that these Australian companies have to work with the HQ of world oil, because of 3…

I think there’s an assumption that the huge Covid death burden this year was mostly aged care residents. But they’re barely 25% of the total. The other 75% were practising personal responsibility public health. Do not try this at home.…

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’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

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 magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj One of the most telling…

“We have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick, you can go to work.” NSW Premier. The new 'just like the flu'. Except nobody caught flu 4 times a year. Nobody has months of annual sick leave.…

Jane Halton on The Project saying we need to remove masks on domestic flights so that children can get back to face to face education in schools. I got nothin’.

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 this in relation to National Cabinet and AHPPC, short thread.…

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 100,000?) just for starters. A quick thought experiment. Crime,…

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 mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only…

It’s almost like the dislocation from home is the most unpopular thing. People who felt ‘locked down’ wouldn’t answer in this way. More spin now unspinning. https://t.co/6lYmN38tDm

“…children in the UK were weaponised, exploited in an ideological battle...” The disgusting, deliberate infection of children, using outrageous propaganda equating SARS-Cov2 with colds and flu, and nonsense about mental health and…

Listening to the Covid minimising propaganda, you’d think staying at home, not travelling, or wearing a mask were some modern version of the Battle of the Somme. https://t.co/SIwOTzUGwr

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, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

We did a deal with the Chinese. They’d control Covid so they could keep running the entire manufacturing sectors of our outsourced economies. While we let everybody at home get infected while we fly around on planes ‘living our best life’.…

We’re in the Commonwealth, the Queen is still our monarch. I think a public holiday for her death would be logical. The throne-thumping economic zealots in charge…let’s see how skin-deep their commitment is. Maybe her funeral should be the…

‘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’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

If the whole world took a holiday for 6 weeks, at the same time, we could probably be free of Covid. The ‘Economy’ wouldn’t allow it. Essential workers could have strong PPE to keep the lights on. It’s all doable. But, the Economy wouldn’t…

Listening to the complaints about the public holiday from business. Business stops for nothing now, not even death. The weekend we all won 75 years ago has largely been re-taken by it. A day of cost pales next to the mass infection…

I think we need another public holiday to commemorate all of the thousands who have died in Australia this year from a mysterious disease that disappeared in late-2021, leading up to an election.

Still pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus. People are already staying home when they're sick, but asymptomatic carriers are infecting everybody else at work anyway. Respect would be to stop applying political ideology to a…

Can't quote-Tweet 2 Tweets at once, so will screenshot it. The decision to bastardise public health to mean only prevention of acute severe disease and death is coming home to roost. Infection is illness. Public illness, not public health.…

Sting says his kids don’t ask him for money. Maybe they’re waiting for him to offer, it’s a manners thing. Like many boomers, he plans to spend all of his intergenerational larceny before he goes. https://t.co/8ybWckHyHM

In the working from home debates, it might be useful to point out that for the vast majority of human history, working AWAY from home was the exception. I think it helps highlight what's really in play here.

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. https://t.co/KZUScLBLW5 h/t @MixtUpMixy

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 extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

"If people are unwell, they should stay home. But if they're not unwell, they should be able to live their lives." (Health Services Union) This is quite the advance in diagnostic medicine. Replacing all imaging, tests and medicine in…

"Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem." We're now 'electoral fundamentalists'. It's the popular, usually stupid kids from school who love electoral democracy, because it reproduces the way they dominated the bullying…

From the home of 'personal responsibility' public health, and also of zero Covid isolation. National Cabinet could use this empirical evidence to guide decision making, but then they have no agenda papers, because they have no agendas.…

@theprojecttv if not now, when? When the virus isn’t spreading throughout the whole community. You send the firefighters home when the fire is out. Grow a brain.

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 politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

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 something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

“There’s not a role for government in running every bit of peoples’ lives forever.” Anthony Albanese Great, we can all stay at home on permanent holiday. Unless there’s some other group that runs every bit of our lives already. 🤔

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 of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

If you know the cunning fanaticism of neoliberal political belief, you’ll know that the determination to get kids back into school during a pandemic was really about those schools being businesses who had been disrupted. Not about…

I won’t be going to the work Christmas party during a pandemic. They asked why. I said ‘I don’t want to give my family Covid for Christmas’. Blank looks. WHS is almost non-existent for Covid in many (most?) workplaces.

Epidemiologically, what happened at the purple arrow? A previous PM wanted to 'end' the pandemic and allow fun Christmas holidays, to give him a launchpad into the election. Popularity did it. Elections. We need to get them out of…

Non-Indigenous Australians never really engaged with the landscape they found, and huddle along the coasts as a home base for frequent overseas travel. When the void at home gnaws on them, they travel inland instead to try to accumulate…

I’m amused how world leaders lecture Putin and China on a ‘rules-based order’, and then at home ditch all the Covid rules and replace them with individual freedom to do what you like.

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 school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

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 it can be a very difficult task for old buildings. And that…

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 toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

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 pandemic is the total disregard for children and teachers. /1…

"Mr Shergold said there was never much evidence that children were likely to contract a severe COVID-19 infection." Is No Jab No Play the next target? Infectious disease is now welcomed in our schools? Most of the jabs are for diseases…

Flu is mauling young kids in the UK. The hypothesis I heard on UK TV today? They weren’t infected enough during lockdowns. Endless cycle after cycle of bullshit, unsurprisingly leading to wave after wave of disease. (UKHSA data)…

Kids who are infected with Covid may have a 77% greater chance of developing diabetes? How is this not the lead story in every news bulletin? We’re infecting ALL children, deliberately. The public health consequences in years ahead could…

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 societies today. Kids in the playground, with the classrooms off…

It doesn’t escape the Chinese I’m sure that the same Western leaders who bray about a ‘rules-based international order’ argue for ‘personal responsibility’ based order at home, weaponising the shredding of domestic law to win populist…

Here's an example of 'living with the virus' and 'protecting the vulnerable'. What options does this poor mother have to do either? Not send the kids to school, where no real effort is made to prevent them becoming infected?…

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 our democracy), and the elected dimwits. From AEMO. There is so…

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 politicians get away with ignoring it by sticking to…

The ABC could mean ‘will be returning after Covid-19’. But sadly they mean that Covid-19 is already over. Difficult to see these kids reaching the same age as the elderly folk they’re buddying with here, with several Covid infections each…

“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany. https://t.co/PVGmxgeg8c

Time to get the risk matrix out again. ‘Infecting all kids cripples our future’, as an example. Minimisers always talk about likelihood. They never talk about impact. Even at unlikely or very unlikely, impact would be severe. So risk is at…

Thankfully we got all the kids back to school to get infected, otherwise their education would have been left behind. https://t.co/rrX1wymEgU

More rich hybrid morbidity. A family member battling multiple opportunistic infections, which doctor says suggests they’re immunocompromised (they weren’t prior to their 2 Covid infections). A friend in hospital today to have exploratory…

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 up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.

I have a hunch when we watch Downton Abbey, if we were to project ourselves into the story we imagine ourselves as one of the family. Not as one of the servants. But we’re nearly all the servants, by exact historical comparison. We’re just…

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 be ‘locked down’ in the same way as when we did that to prevent…

1) Lockdowns restrict circulation and gatherings to prevent infection. 2) Mass infection restricts circulation and gatherings as people ‘stay home when sick’. Both are ‘lockdowns’. You cannot live with a pandemic. Lockdowns are inevitable.…

“Chief medical officer Paul Kelly saying it was not likely Christmas would be spent under restrictions.” Smoke and mirrors. Infected family members will be eating in their bedrooms so as not to kill grandma. Privatised restrictions.

Problems that disrupt the economy are framed as individual anxiety. Reports that residents in flood-affected towns demanded basic precautions yesterday, like getting kids and workers across a river as levels rose, and were told to ‘stop…

Some Covid minimisers and politicians say we'll need to cycle through waves of Covid for another decade. Many industries are already on the brink of collapse. Ideology doesn't heal the sick, care/teach children, or keep food in…

The political and business types who demand we 'learn to live with the virus' are often the type of men who tell their wives to shut the kids up. Private school boys raised to lead the world, but somebody else will do the washing, cooking…

'Schools must stay open'. Apparently for education, though actually as childcare for business. Some kids haven't had a regular teacher (or even much teaching) in months. https://t.co/e2jjKyJ1Bs

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, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

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, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1…

This is a regulator. A gas regulator. It regulates the flow of gas so you don’t incinerate your family and house when cooking a bbq. That’s what regulation means, to apportion, to enable. Politicians who remove regulations, like mandates,…

Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered…

What using popularity (elections) to drive society's decisions does. A simple calculation of home-grown almost free energy, versus buying it from overseas at the cost of tens of billions per year, while incinerating the planet, comes down…

Anybody with me yet on getting rid of elections? Why would grown-ups ever think popularity would solve any grown-up problem? We don’t raise our kids that way, we don’t run our businesses that way. https://t.co/aZsQqR6Kt4

The freest we’ve ever been individually, in that libertarian way which now dominates politics, was under ‘lockdowns’. We were allowed to stay home, for weeks or even months. What we call neoliberalism is just re-marketing work as freedom,…

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 of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

Apparently the most popular search term on SEEK for months has been ‘work from home’. So much for the oppression of lockdowns.

If you're confused why many businesses resist working from home, the whole function of what they call the 'economy' is to sever the link between work and home. That's what globalisation means.

It seems like only yesterday all leaders were interested in children’s health. The end of corruption exceptionalism. https://t.co/n4IeXYO6Wp

Fatalism is a childhood philosophy linked to powerlessness I think. Because often children can’t do anything about things. The fact it’s now our adult philosophy of life shows how adolescence has become our dominant cultural model.

I’m a parent and this sort of thing makes me very angry. What I was ‘taking away’ from my kids was their exposure to a lethal virus. The stuff grown ups have done forever, until the last 2 years. Now they have to weigh up having those…

If we had freedom, we could avoid infection. We’d be free to take evasive action. But we’re not, we have to work and kids have to go to school. And many workplaces are doing nothing to protect us. Only caged chickens, pigs and cows get…

The ridiculous claims about lockdown are not accidental. Those in charge know children now dying is political dynamite, so the propaganda is immediately rolled out to knee-cap any momentum building around it in the wrong direction.…

That kid at the front is the mask-wearer. Not an analogy, Western culture was an adult culture, embedded in its institutions, which school kids graduated into. N=1 politics destroyed the institutions. All that’s left is the social…

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 isolated from social life, and still got infected. The…

Because it enrages halfwits, I like to point out that ‘lockdowns’ just means ‘people get to stay home’. Anybody who watches the faces of people heading home on a Friday afternoon knows this used to be true freedom. Before the minimising…

An update on this. One sent home because the hospital was deemed a much too risky place to be. So HITH instead. The hospital, too risky. Australia, 2022. https://t.co/TQN9sdWIhH

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 missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

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 reached the peak in infections’. - this based on stable PCR…

‘Unelected’ has become an insult under populism. Do you elect your dentist, car mechanic, or airline pilot that flys you to your holiday destination? Or are they in their jobs because of a tested competence? What’s the test of running a…

Before the end of 2021 in Australia, what was ‘locked down’ was SARS-Cov-2. We stopped it spreading widely. The propaganda victory of the libertarians is to substitute people, for the virus. We weren’t locking down people. Being at home is…

The reason lockdowns became so potent politically is that the default state now is to be away from home. For work, for socialising, for travel. Like our homes are saucepans, and lockdowns sealed them up so that they were ready to blow.…

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 a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

Thunderbirds are go! Maybe some of our homegrown paediatricians and ID docs can get over there to herd (ha) the kids back into the schools, before they suffer critical damage to their mental health from learning at home.…

Australians travel obsessively, accumulating ‘sights’ like we used to collect stamps. Trying to rediscover a grounded sense of place, by going to lots of places. But it just marks us as children of empire. A ‘big lap’ is our own domestic…

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 having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were…

Overheard conversation at work, where somebody has Covid at home. Colleagues offering advice: “just let the whole family get it at once, like chickenpox, then it’ll be done with”. Slogans work.

Probably should have copied Covid into the ‘peaking before Christmas’ email. Politicians too gutless to front up with this message, which means many won’t even be aware of it and will slaughter members of family. https://t.co/cOX2CYjvVu

‘Why are you Tweeting, go and celebrate Christmas with your family!’ I can’t do that, National Cabinet gifted us Covid for Christmas. Trying to find their guidelines about how to have Christmas lunch with your elderly mother, without…

‘Battles’ is wrong, they were battling Covid before. Now they’re just letting it infect everybody, cheered on by the Infinite Covids here at home. https://t.co/TdZ2a5Cqch

This is the pressure cooker that blew open any attempt to control SARS-Cov-2. The obsessive need to travel. Understand why we can’t be settled, can’t be ‘home’, and I think we understand everything. What is the actual purpose of all of…

Our own culture is the one most invisible to us. Where politicians win elections denying asylum to the international homeless, and win more elections saying that staying in your own comfortable home to avoid infection is a restriction on…

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 camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

My favourite woes of the entitled holiday stories are people complaining in airports, because an industry crippled by and also driving infection isn’t providing the customer service they demand.

Only people who know nothing about schools thought sending kids home was bad for them. https://t.co/WH9JUHhk1K

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 electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

How long would Covid survive if we all just decided to stay home for a couple of months, globally? We can plan and coordinate world wars that run for years, I’m sure we could coordinate staying home for a couple of months.

Let’s call it a Covid holiday this time. Rather than a ‘lockdown’, which is libertarian propaganda tripe. https://t.co/GECXpYNxdz

To link two ideas. There’s a real movement towards a 4-day working week in some countries. Industrialised nations already produce way more than they need, so the ‘economy’ crowd really just fear less mountains of coin for themselves. So,…

Ask a Covid minimiser what great human project is being interrupted by slowing our economic lives to control a virus. 9 times out of 10 it’s their OS holiday, nothing else. Do we have any grand collective outcomes for what we’re all doing…

‘The poor can’t afford to stay home’. It’s fun watching this sudden concern for the poor and disenfranchised, from the same people who pay them no attention at all, until their own lifestyles are under threat. Now they call them ’the…

To flip the question today but ask the same thing. If people can’t stay home, and businesses can’t survive, if we hit pause to let a virus pass, what are we doing about it? Because that’s the exact definition of a society without…

I often imagine what people without a home make of rich countries, who think being asked to stay home is authoritarian oppression. https://t.co/CsTiHqgVFk

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

The wave that mysteriously didn’t end before Christmas maybe did at Christmas, if you squint at the positivity data. (Precautionary PCRs to prevent killing family members at Xmas lunch maybe in play here too.) But the wave is back! The…

Sadly there will also be no appreciable change to the number of homegrown experts queuing to cheer on another year of multiple infections for kids in schools. https://t.co/CLtI3fZaak

People released from the tyranny of lockdowns to return to work seem to want to go home again. Permanently. https://t.co/2AKW2RTGM2

Have spent a second Christmas holiday helping the local school improve its ventilation for the coming year. Some of the changes I’m funding myself. Meantime academics on 6-figure salaries, often working safely from home, cheer on another…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

My mum is just one of hundreds of thousands of Australians locked down by a sea of infection in the community. Catching Covid would likely kill her. So she’s stuck at home, for another year, unless we remove the infection lockdown.

Red arrow marks the beginning of the real Australian lockdown. Covid’s lockdown doesn’t even end at your front door, people isolating from other family members inside their own homes. You can’t do the most basic act in the community…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

All societies are an equilibrium of forces or power, not rational designs. For example policy on home ownership will reflect those who have power in that area, like developers and existing homeowners. For Covid, nearly everybody is being…

So it turns out lockdowns are to blame for this. Lockdowns of most of the educationally disadvantaged kids in public schools, and lockdowns of most government money in private schools to build new swimming stadiums. https://t.co/P0QvrwDITA

Sitting at home Tweeting from the safety of their lounge rooms should mean many Covid minimisers have alarmingly high immunity debt, surely?

The regulator overwhelmed by the sewer. And this is just kids. Social media operates in direct opposition to the basic operational realities of democracy. https://t.co/39MfoJXQrL

Do the number of engine failures at Qantas only reflect the number of jet engines failing in the wider community? Asking for parents about to send their kids back to Covid soup.

We’re infecting an entire generation of kids, because our societies don’t like them. We don’t have many. They’re too expensive, a lifestyle choice to be balanced with travel, big houses and dining out. https://t.co/UVxzhA0peP

George Monbiot’s latest piece for The Guardian. School starts again in NSW next week. For another year, no meaningful action has been taken to prevent spread there. The Doherty modelling earlier in the pandemic modelled the mass infection…

A few of us raised this at the time. I don’t remember one media report querying why National Cabinet were requesting modelling of the mass infection of children. https://t.co/t0YbE00gNG

Not sure if it’s a metric ⁦@AntonyGreenElec⁩ uses, but when rich Tory supporter rock stars at home assembling their train sets ring TV stations to say ‘get rid of the Tories’, is there a landslide coming? https://t.co/FCFqXzzLIs

Probably just after it became acceptable to deliberately make your children sick, multiple times per year. https://t.co/TEhr5O0lDS

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

Multiple drownings on beaches this holidays, due to rips. It feels a bit like we’re in the ‘caught in the rip’ stage of Covid right now. https://t.co/ofD4G9X5BC

The class of society doing this are descended from those who sent kids down coal mines. https://t.co/mqcsut2emO

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

Not once in this entire piece is there mention of children being infected by Covid, in their millions. Repeatedly. Lots about disrupted schooling, but not how it could have been avoided with even basic risk mitigations in schools.…

The Audit Office of NSW, school attendance trends. Kids were escaping already before the pandemic, the continuing decline in attendance follows the same negative slope. Anybody who’s worked in secondary schools knows missing school is not…

Re-Tweeting this to a more general audience. Look at the calamitous trend in school attendance, driven by ongoing mass infection. This measure of attendance level is one designed to show educational damage, kids away for more than 10% of…

Two things, here. Another article that manages to avoid mentioning Covid even once. Millions of kids and their teachers being infected, multiple times, doesn’t even come up as a hypothesis. Ask any teacher about Covid absences, the tsunami…

Watch for this building push in Australia, to match the UK. Not even ‘stay home if you’re sick’ now. For both workplaces and schools, the sick will be expected to attend to prevent social collapse. https://t.co/vgVXxTWMNf

Attendance rates dropped by over 4% in Australian schools in 2022. (Multiply by number of kids and that’s a lot of kids away.) Attendance level (who was there more than 90% of the time, a key educational metric) fell over 21%. Acara…

Maybe. Though we’re living in an empirical test of this topic, with Covid. We’re infecting an entire generation of children, without blinking. We don’t have children, because we don’t like them. Adolescent cultures live in an eternal now,…

The principal at a local school has followed kids and other staff into isolation this week, as the virus feasts on an entire generation again. Is spending on school ventilation inflationary? Asking for a few million friends.…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

Hive mind question. I can get a Moderna bivalent 5th dose this week. But the pharmacist rang to say the Pfizer update bivalent (B.4/B.5?) will be arriving second week of March. Risk - I could catch in the 3 weeks (wife and kids in…

The Project running a story on kids not wanting to go back to school. A problem of ‘lockdowns’. No, school is a hostile environment for a lot more children than we’ve bothered to understand, and the pandemic made that visible. Just as…

Blake makes the excellent point in this article that the supposed invulnerability of children to disease is only about a century old. Prior to that most of them died young. Public health achieved that. The thing we’re not doing now.…

Slogans aren’t public policy. The Infinite Covids were ready to go with ‘get off the golf course’, to get older people back to work. Turns out they’re sick, not retired. They’re living with the virus, at home in bed. https://t.co/lTpDBDrysV

Rather than mobilising and monetising trolls, could expert Covid minimisers : - show us where ‘immunity debt’ and ‘hybrid immunity’ are in the textbooks? - show us where the same textbooks and even historical practice show the use of…

There are about 2900 vehicles for every service station in Australia. But you rarely get a large queue. Understanding that will also be key to rolling out EVs. EVs can charge at home, meaning we already have millions of service stations…

School kids and their parents driving repeated waves of Covid into the wider community? One Australian minimiser loves to say that spread in schools just matches the wider community. Probably because that’s where the spread starts.…

The 50-year long assault on taxation, under cover of libertarian nonsense about freedom, had one clear goal. To relieve the wealthy of their social obligations. This thread is a home-run of numbers to ram the point home.…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

Society is structured using high school as a framework. Not as Left or Right. Imagine the geeks and nerds petitioning the cool kids for changes. How do you reckon that would go? Politics is social, and social is status.…

Not clear to me that any of those things will do much to keep kids healthy. https://t.co/gEZBwdrBsZ

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

In today’s minimiser maths lesson, a school excursion can either use cars, or a bus. On the trip a car or the bus crashes, killing 3 children in each scenario. Which is the greater tragedy? Minimisers? The car, because the 3 dead on the…

In this glorious era of personal choice and responsibility, every activity my family might want to do has the same outcome. Get infected. That’s not choice. Nowhere is safe.

Another way the economy crowd hijacked politics and societies, is to turn budget nights into some sort of sacred ritual. Look through your family album and see if you can find any shots of ‘mum and dad putting together the family budget’.…

Of the 22 registered Covid deaths in NSW this week, 4 were at home, and had a Covid diagnosis prior to death. What situation may produce that? @KarenCutter4?

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

I would place a large bet that when crunch time comes on tax, the massive boomer entitlements will be ‘grandfathered’ for electoral reasons (if the boomers are still living), and Gen X and younger will again cop it in the neck.…

Western kids once had this sort of independence. Before neoliberal/libertarian politics implemented you do you, at scale. It takes a community to raise a child, as the saying goes. The libertarian morons see community as oppression.…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

For over 2000 years infection didn’t provide much immunity for kids at all. Then just at the time we started vaccinating them widely, they started beating the pathogens. Imagine being a health professional now advocating we just infect…

Political libertarians latched onto ‘mental heath’ as a scapegoat for social collapse (that they caused). Just as they discovered an interest in education only when schools weren’t babysitting the children of employees. It lets them appear…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

Remember when your kids (or if you're a teacher, your students) complained when you gave them direction? Basic psychology, they wouldn't respect you if you didn't. A tiny whining minority convinced weak politicians otherwise, with Covid.…

Many schools holding large assemblies and masses pre-Easter. To compensate for 2 weeks of holidays, where Covid will struggle a little bit more. Infect them all now instead.

Speaking to families this week struggling with every variety of -itis. Conjunctivitis & tonsillitis are biggies. They say ‘lockdowns reduced our immunity’, to rationalise their suffering. So I asked them ‘when was the last time you had…

The article ends with (official health) advice that would have done exactly nothing to prevent the infections: “So consider this a little reminder to do the right thing. Practise good hand hygiene and stay home if you feel sick.”…

Friend returned from sick leave today, after the whole family had suffered multiple infections for the past fortnight, including eyes glued shut with conjunctivitis. A very stressful time, by all accounts. Their first question to me:…

Thanks to @DavidJoffe64 for pointing out why it was so important to get kids back into school. The bullies had nobody to beat up. https://t.co/5jFnWaxzK9

A family, friends, very casual about Covid, have all had it 2-3 times. One daughter now has measles, another flu-like illness. The father also flu-like illness, ear problems and fluctuating blood pressure. Public health 2023. Straya.

Every one of the National Selfie Group, now and since it was formed, voted unanimously to end the pandemic by mass infection, mostly of children. Children were seen as the fast-track way to herd immunity. It’s a crime against the public.…

My 80-year old mother targeted by cybercrime today. Think she's ok. Anybody else noticing this stuff ramping up? Courtesy of the Silicon Valley libertarians and their rubbish software and hardware, developed with 'freedom of the…

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy,…

If those damned lockdowns hadn't stopped kids getting diabetes 2 or 3 times a year, this wouldn't be happening. Yes, sarcasm. https://t.co/kHC2QfFS4Z

I have older relatives who still keep much of their money in cash, hidden at home. It’s the equivalent of us all doing our own public health now. For the same reason, ‘the economy’ doesn’t serve ordinary people. It was designed explicitly…

The great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

When ‘live with the virus’ became the guiding idiocy of this pandemic, conceptually we should probably have shifted from immunity as the guiding principle, towards symbiotic classification. Ecological relationships. How you live with…

A co-worker is off very sick, says 'chest is very congested', but GP says no signs of infection, so no antibiotics, and sent home. That word, 'congestion', could be another way of saying 'has difficulty breathing'? Which needn't be a…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

3 million Australians live in a home that belongs to another Australian. That's our 'supply' problem. And you'd expect a growth in home ownership to lead to a reduction in rentals. But rentals grew as fast. Existing owners adding to their…

Everyday stories. From a local FB page. "Our daughter's teacher placed an Ad on a local FB page asking if any local teachers were able to fill shifts this week at our school. Turns out her and another two teachers that are “besties” all…

The NSW Government stepping up Covid action in some schools, due to a surge in Covid cases causing great disruption. Some kids being sent home, staff required to wear masks, large indoor events cancelled. None of it makes the news.

You see, it can be done. The same NSW school I was told about which reintroduced masking for all staff and sent sections of the school home to study, is also imposing compulsory RATs for all students still at school. Every day.

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

Never forget Dominic Perrottet’s outrageously stupid assertion that beating Covid was just about staying home when you were sick. Ignoring asymptomatic infection. Promoting repeated, mass infection with a pandemic virus.…

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

Here's a case-based Covid Tweet. A friend and his wife have 3 kids. All of them have Covid right now, contracted through the local school. All up all night vomiting. Have had Covid multiple times. No immunity appears to be forthcoming.

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

A friend’s wife, a teacher, is celebrating Mother’s Day sick in bed, where she’s been all week. Infection picked up in a school full of sick students and teachers. Thanks for the selfies, National Cabinet. They’re really helping everybody…

85-year old friend of my mother’s hasn’t had a 5th Covid shot, because her GP ‘said he doesn’t believe in it.’ Australia, 2023.

This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

Go ‘tabloid’ and don’t just use aggregate, summary data of Covid damage. Tell the stories of individuals impacted, in short pithy Tweets. That’s how conservatives won the public attention for their causes. Each individual case tells global…

Schools are only closing because teachers aren’t turning up to work, apparently. Why might that be? 🤔 In the meantime another expert suggests the best way to keep viruses out of schools is to get infected, and then stay home.…

Obvious, but not to some of our own homegrown public advisers and politicians, who seriously suggest that Covid is over because it’s simply a matter of ‘staying home when you’re sick’. 40% of people don’t even know they are sick.…

This is the bind belief in ‘the economy’ has left Western nations in. While at home they smash their own institutions in an iconoclastic rush to individual freedom, it leaves the stage open for countries like China to actually build…

Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school opening windows, with upper opening clerestory windows and/or…

This is the reading in the main living room with no windows open, reverse-cycle heating and in a well insulated home. (Upper-wall vents.) 5 people. It’s very cold and windy outside. I do have one window open (tilt) at either end of the…

The ad even says kids being sick is a major cause. But then says they should come to school more. I assume that means come to school sick, but then maybe logic is too high a bar for anything now. https://t.co/Fk4k3kBYfr

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as well, you only have to read their mission statements.…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

In so many ways the collapse of public health and other social problems stems from a lack of respect for teachers and education. For two fundamentally important reasons. Teachers mediate our relationship with knowledge, and also to each…

Gotta love the economy. First it fixed a pandemic by infecting everybody. Now it's going to fix work from home by increasing the number of people who will never own one.

Talking to a family yesterday where fighting has broken out over who made who else sick. Because they’ve had Covid multiple times, they’re not happy to now all be sick again, and the blame game has started. Was it a family gathering? Why…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

Only the most privileged and out-of-touch societies could make staying at home - ‘lockdowns’ - into a disaster. Imagine finding your own home an oppression. It’s not what the people I leave work with on a Friday are thinking. All smiles.

Our pro-child-infection homegrown experts swore this wasn’t the case. That kids caught it ‘in the community’. We will not forget, and what you’ve done to our children. https://t.co/OFO7Xwe4Sf

Beautiful description of the transition from a publicly-funded set of public health measures, allowing significant freedom, to privatised home lockdowns. Paid for by each of us individually. This is all that happened, just another…

Were you ever able to persuade bullies and the most popular kids in your year to do anything at all, at school? Did they not even acknowledge you exist? Albanese below, before becoming PM. Now he’s the head boy at school.…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

Society is a high school. Not an analogy, an actual cultural fact. This also means you can read all politics through your time in the classroom and playground. Libertarians are that tiny handful of kids who disrupt everybody else and…

So much for the idea that children are so fragile that missing a bit of school will render them mental health wrecks. My kids still laugh when i ask if missing school in ‘lockdowns’ was tough for them. Imagine a world believing that kids…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

We can’t vote our way out of our problems. Voting is the core OF our problems, popularity-based politics. A society that won’t do important things unless they’re popular is like a parent who feeds their kids nothing but ice cream. This…

Choosing who to lead a complex nation using only popularity as a metric not only gets you incompetence, it gets you sleaze and every other base human behaviour as well. Remember the most popular kids at school? Often sociopaths.…

Seeing lots of good people having Twitter holidays. Like fighting some sort of fight achieves something here. I don’t think it does. That’s the bullshit side of social media, the team sports. Knowledge is all that changes the world. Ignore…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

What’s that old saying, take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves? Take care of children, and society will take care of itself. Like the complete opposite of what we’re doing right now. https://t.co/4X3LxSDrYf

School. A small handful rule, based on popularity and bullying. Most do nothing to stop them, the kids in the background. This is what elections turned adult society into as well, the same social mechanism. Not an analogy. That kid in the…

Perversely, people are now LESS likely to stay home from work when sick. For two reasons. One because they’ve run out of sick leave, if they had any. The other because it would be an admission that Covid didn’t go away. The ‘not-Covids’…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

The reason I’m on Twitter was years of frustration with Facebook. Facebook doesn’t discuss, in my experience, you’re firing ideas into a void there mostly. But over time I’ve come to see it a bit differently, and also as a possible…

The real reason ‘lockdowns’ offended the status quo, is that they shifted the locus of control in societies towards homes. ‘Home’ is a concept the economy can’t allow. Note increasing numbers homeless and renting too. Colonialism, now…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

Fantastic resource. Also a window into a time not that long ago, when calm passion for knowledge was a hit for kids. Now social media has turned their lives into hysterical battles over their own identity. Identity is a libertarian…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

Ask why did work and home become so separate in the first place? Why is our labour and expertise not employed more inside the communities where we live? The ‘economy’ dispossesses, by definition. ‘Markets’ know no geography.…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

What’s happening in the UK is very interesting. It’s not just because it’s summer and more people are outdoors, and also school holidays. Thoughts? https://t.co/LjvIvnZyTH

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

I don’t remember my kids ever having influenza, and two of them are now adults. I don’t remember having it myself more than once in my decades of life. Is there asymptomatic influenza, or mild influenza? Or is this just more perversion of…

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

People post the most intimate details about themselves and friends and family, to global platforms. It reveals how they perceive collective life. The ‘we’ is entirely ‘me’. The hyper-reduction of collective life to the intimately personal.…

One response from the travel-fetishists is that 'humans have always loved to discover'. Like everybody who flies off on holiday is a new James Cook. All the places they travel to were discovered long ago. They mean discovering themselves.…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

What we call ‘home ownership’ is actually house ownership. A product of the real estate industry. An economic construct. Aboriginal concepts of home mean inhabiting place for tens of thousands of years. We’re lucky to make it to 11 years.…

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

Remember how staying home stopped Covid in its tracks? The economy fairies tell us that’s not a ‘sustainable’ ongoing model. But it does show that pandemics only exist because of mobility. 15-minute city type initiatives make societies…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is…

It’s hugely revealing to go back in time. Here are the projections National Cabinet was using for the first 6 months post let it rip. In reality about 10,000 people died, even with 70-80% vaccination coverage. AND we vaccinated many kids.…

Watching the national hysteria over The Matildas, including from many who never watch soccer, rams home that our deepest passion is the rivalry of team sports. We convert our politics, our science, our business, our everything, into it.…

Musk seems to be one of the libertarians who actually believes the nonsense that society is a whole bunch of disconnected individuals, and any kind of collective action is oppression. As always, The Simpsons got there first. /1…

Also, on your next holiday, ask the pilot if you can fly the plane for a bit. https://t.co/7dlcNHUf3z

“HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria shouldn’t be labeled as “just” epidemics or endemic. They are pandemics that have been beaten in rich countries. Allowing them to persist elsewhere is a policy choice and a budgetary decision.” /1…

The Anglo world’s problems with education can all be read through one fact. It’s deliberately infecting all of its children with a pandemic virus, in schools. Over and over. It doesn’t value children, or education. It’s childcare for…

Call me a plonker, but "Prevalence will rise and fall, influenced by seasons, school holidays and new subvariants, but it will always be pulled back towards the equilibrium level" sounds like the definition of epidemic disease to me, not…

Is it OK to ask @fleetstreetfox or @queenchristina_ if Press Preview participants still have the option to attend remotely from home? Or is there a forced normalisation of infection going on?

We don't hire employees or raise children using popularity. We know that would be stupid. And then we wonder why running a country using it, via elections, is a total disaster. https://t.co/PqAJC8Cg6j

In a libertarian culture it's look out for yourself. Your vehicle, like your home, becomes your world. You want it big. It's a 'get out of my way' car. Europeans tend to have smaller vehicles, because they're more social. Guess which way…

Daughter has to attend a consent workshop at uni. 'Names will be taken down, those who don't attend will be followed up'. No sense of irony.

The definition of a pandemic has been updated to capture the real human tragedy in play. 'Something that interrupts your overseas holiday.' https://t.co/HZF4VTrp0o

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

There are two big demand dips for electricity in NSW every day right now, one about 3.30-4am, and the other around 1pm. Supply is always greatest of a day time, because of big solar and wind input. But why is the lowest demand point also…

My wife bought me this t-shirt a few years ago. Thinking about wearing it to vote at the referendum. https://t.co/lG1vo4uFSN

This was such a ripper I want to ask 2 days in a row what society can't fight a pandemic, and educate its children at the same time? https://t.co/RYMSOgWFfa

Sending the kids home because the school ceilings might collapse on them. Given the Tories, it can't be long until they're all given hard hats and told to get back to school. https://t.co/H8ZCP2f5rD

The difference between this referendum and the one in 1967? We have social media now, an institutional home for things that previously were rejected as disgusting, ignorant and absurd. It needs to be turned off. https://t.co/7ryNrNkhHf

None of this happens. In the UK kids are told to go to school when they test positive. Nobody is isolating (or even testing) anywhere I have any contact with, in any workplace or school, unless they're so sick they can't stand up. (From:…

The huge disadvantage for regional people with university. A friend has 3 kids to put through uni. Will cost them $200,000 just in accommodation and food. If they lived in a capital city, that cost would be $0. The feds offer a measly…

Elections and populism more generally are the way all those kids at school who ran brutal status hierarchies maintain control when they enter adult life. They can't believe their luck. Look around and tell me you don't see it.

An an ex-teacher, the tragedy of social media is maybe more visible. We spend 13 years of slow, hard slog socialising children into knowledge. Social media undoes it inside months.

The biggest lie and founding myth of the economy is that mobility = freedom. Whether it’s our obsession with roads and cars, or travel, the more mobile we’ve become the less free we are. Another way we don’t understand Covid too. /1…

The true cause of the passion for travel can be found at home. We don’t even live in our own land, it’s a ‘resource’ to us. We travel to find the magic of place we’re incapable of making ourselves. https://t.co/4fOHTC03gL:~

Some stories ram home the unreality. The debate over Qatar and airfares. In a sane society the air travel debate would be an energy debate, not an airfare debate. Only 2-4% of the world fly internationally. About 1% of the world is…

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

Hospitalisations. I think many of us in the community aren’t really focused on that, but more on just how sick so many of the people we know are, and who aren’t getting better. Mostly at home, or even turning up to work, sick.…

Covid minimisers on here continuously telling us about our wonderful and ever-growing immunity. It must be happening somewhere else. I think a lot of the minimisers work from home. https://t.co/rpmRFiuATE

What nobody says is that one member of the family DIDN’T freeze to minimise risk. They filmed it. They even moved around to get better camera angles. That’s our social media world, even emergencies are just great platforms for curated…

If we stop talking about economies and go back to talking about societies and cultures, data takes on completely different meanings. In socio-cultural terms, A is ‘stay home’. That proved to be some form of collective trauma. We have no…

Here’s travel in a nutshell. Trash, and move on. Know how to fix this? Stop thinking of place as an experience to be consumed. Stop being promiscuous, with place. We don’t do this with human relationships, so why do we with locations?…

70 years of relative prosperity and peace without existential challenge will make your life feel like endless freedom, and any coordinated emergency government action seem like repression. Societies of spoiled children. A cultural reality,…

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

We are. And it's inevitable when popularity is the only measure of who wins. Try hiring staff or raising children using that metric and see how you go. Until we remove popularity as the selection mechanism for power, nothing will improve,…

It’s some chutzpah to say people being unable to visit critically ill family members in hospital was the problem in the early pandemic, rather than the absence of public health that allowed them to get infected in the first place.

Australia has 2 million more dogs than children. I bet if Covid killed a lot of dogs, we’d be doing more to stop it.

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

We need a new minimiser production of The Wall. Where kids rise up and demand to be sent back to school, singing ‘we need our education’. https://t.co/F55mdQOSzB

How stupid and sloganised the world now is, that anybody ever believed kids would be traumatised by not going to school. https://t.co/E9ulmzigpn

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

I imagine primary teachers all over the nation today using the referendum in their maths lessons, teaching kids how you 'end the division' by splitting something 60/40.

If you want an indication of how the economy cares so little about fresh air in schools. A primary teacher told me yesterday kids as young as Year 2 have been caught vaping in their school. But at least the free flow of commerce is…

Same age as my elderly mother. If you want to see a culture of permanent adolescence, how about 80-year-old rock stars? There were no 80-year-old rock stars headlining festivals when I was a teenager, we’d have considered that ridiculous.…

Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that…

I don’t know about you, but I felt my ‘freedom’ much more under assault from governments driving infection deep into my home and family, than by them stopping me buying coffees and flying to Europe and Bali.

Meantime in his home country populist boofheads are still beholden to existing generators and grid providers. This could be such an enormous, fast and cheap win for Oz. And it would bypass all of the LNP’s bag of dirty populist tricks.…

This is how the pandemic was privatised. You drive a public virus deep into private homes, to keep ‘the economy’ running. The people you then can’t protect are your own family. It’s an obscene violation, and with bitter irony creates much…

For the first 20-25 years after petrol and diesel cars were introduced, there were no service stations. You had to buy the fuel in a tin at the shop, like milk, and lug it home. Worth remembering with the hysteria about shortage of…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

Geoff's data is so useful to debunk the idea there's a meaningful 'mainstream media' now. I don't remember my own kids watching free to air TV for example in at least 6 years. Social media is the new public square. Which should terrify us.…

It’s the self-censorship that’s so hidden. Somebody at work returned from a long holiday, over a month. Regaled everybody all week about what a fabulous time they had. Confided in me this morning that they spent over a week of it in bed…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

One of the reasons petrol and diesel vehicles have a large range was to prevent them having to visit service stations regularly. There are only 6500 servos in Oz, for a vehicle fleet of over 10 million. It would be far too expensive to…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

The people who tell you a $10K home battery is ‘energy for the rich’. While they tow $125K caravans with $120K 4WDs, packed with $25K worth of fishing gear.

Ask an anti-EV person why the fans in their home don’t use 2-stroke or 4-stroke petrol engines. The answers ram home how stupid these debates are. Combustion engines are expensive to buy and run, stink (toxic exhaust gases), are…

Following the etymology of the word, economic politics is going to be forced to the realisation that households are ‘the economy’. Not business. Albanese needs to recognise fast this is his solution for energy. Just as it was Rudd’s for…

If you watch the start of a professional car race, you’ll see something you never see when a red light goes green on an ordinary road. All of the cars head off simultaneously. There’s something very interesting about why this happens, and…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

This sort of thing will have the agents of expert minimisers on the phone to them, in their Covid-safe holiday resorts. There's real danger truth could break out. https://t.co/msm4LH922u

We kept the family Covid-free through all of 2023. Only one infection in 4 years. Seems a good Christmas present.

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

'Stay home if unwell' is a lockdown. A privatised lockdown. They never went away, we just shifted the funding and governance model. https://t.co/phx544Y6ii

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

When your national strategy is to deliberately infect the entire population with a virus from a family that likes to infect people multiple times every year. And hope that will create a once-a-year every 5-10 years illness. People are paid…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

Yesterday various culture warriors posted with glee about line-ups at Tesla charging stations in Chicago, which is experiencing a major cold snap. And how some of the EVs had to be towed away, empty. This stuff goes viral quickly. Some…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a good life, albeit at a slower pace. She wants to celebrate it…

The common minimiser theme, that they and their friends and families want to have their social lives back, and ‘Zero Covids’ are free to continue to obsess about Covid alone. There’s a very recent public health shift that highlights how…

A dreaded day, highlighting the privatisation of public health. An important family gathering, that will have nowhere near adequate protections against Covid. I’ve pushed as hard as possible, without fracturing relationships. All because…

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

The large family event I dreaded today for its Covid safety - arrived to find the house with every window and door open, a nice strong breeze all day passing through the house, and 5 HEPA filters strategically placed in risky areas.…

Pathogens operate in an equivalent way to humans. An invasion phase (such as a pandemic), followed by a settlement (chronic) phase, where they occupy us for a prolonged time. The long-term goal is always the chronic, not the acute. A…

Kids with bags of camphor around their necks, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. It was thought by mothers that it may ward off infection. We can laugh now. But we’re doing absolutely nothing to protect kids from Covid.…

A week after a party with 50+ people, in an ordinary residential home, where we made sure all windows and doors were open and multiple HEPA filters were used, there’s not one report of any infection from any attendees.

A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4 years of teaching like that, never infected. /1 This was so…

It’s not evil corporates. It’s the social mechanism of school, popularity or likes, extended to adult life. Both kids and adults use social media. These platforms built-out adult life to be socially and culturally equivalent to school…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

Like many, I’d still like National Cabinet and ATAGI to explain how those who don’t even qualify for vaccines and boosters, like our youngest children, can achieve ‘hybrid immunity’. There’s nothing hybrid there, just getting sick,…

The double-climate/Covid special. Friend back from a holiday in Queensland. Spent most of the holiday isolating as family tested positive after arrival. Then humidity was 100% and temperature high-30s outside, so didn't want to go out…

The basic public health fact that every family in every community has a touchpoint in a school? That’s where the most mixing happens? Adults don’t need to go there, the kids bring it home? That’s been the only uncontrollable entry point…

My wife and kids are part of the cascading health and social problems that are still multiplying from shoving teachers and kids back into schools with zero Covid protections. The big push is on to prevent any future public health action of…

Children as spreaders of respiratory infection described as a 'Dickensian' slandering of them!! Public health began around the time Dickens died (1870), I've marked the spot with a red arrow. People were fed up with losing their kids to…

A friend just telling me about his first ever Covid infection, right now. I asked where he caught it. In hospital, caring for his father in the last week of his life. Well done NSW Health, icing on the cake in this sad week for him.

Power is power. As in energy is also political power. Today’s power hierarchies are mostly fossil fuel hierarchies. Adding solar to your home is easily the most revolutionary political act you can take. On all issues, including Covid.…

Do we think the local 'missing school is worse for kids than infecting them with dangerous diseases' loons anticipated sending kids to school with measles too? I'm sure they'll line up behind it. https://t.co/9zWLQL3TMD

Let’s reframe all the immunity debt stories as ‘hey we managed to stop a lot of infectious disease from circulating between 2019 and 2022. How could we continue that?’ Rather than ‘the poor kids missed their infections.’…

We’ve had two Covid infections in the family. Both courtesy of the education system. None of the rest of the family were infected, due to simple measures taken at home. So simple that it highlights the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ non-existent…

Watching the Welsh leg of the UK Covid inquiry, and a woman describing her husband early in the pandemic, falling at home and breaking his leg. And pleading with her not to call the ambulance, because he feared contracting Covid in…

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

History will judge those who advocate for the mass and repeated infection of children, with specious arguments about them being damaged more by missing school. Missing school! You can’t make these narratives up, they’re so disgustingly…

Until Covid I had no idea being at home was such a dangerous thing. Must be why people run out the door on a Friday afternoon smiling, every place I've ever worked. https://t.co/Cy3EQKOtXD

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

A lot of our workforce is now FIFO. The gap between blue and red collapses in old age, the workers sent home again. Ageing nations with sclerotic hysterias, importing workers while the natives live lifestyle retirements. People 85 and…

900,000 people in the UK are listed as not receiving a measles vaccine as children.

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Orwellian to watch GPs act as human shields for incompetent politicians. Not once in my life, as a child and then as a teacher in schools, have I EVER heard parents urged to send their kids to school sick. Until now. A disgrace.…

This still makes me furious. The despicable sociopathic rubbish we’re sold for Covid, that we have to choose between our children being physically or mentally ill. Accountability will come for those who sell this snake oil.…

We needed to get schools back open because kids were suffering. Yeh right. Kiddults drove it. Now back on their child-free cruises and in their child-free restaurants. Every teacher knows school’s greatest importance to politicians and…

It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

The ‘common cold’ is around 200 distinct viruses. Which adults catch 2-4 times a year, and children 10 or more. This is the endgame of disease normalisation, first to lump 200+ infections under a single ‘common’ moniker. And then to allow…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

It’s worth remembering that the prevalence numbers are not independent by age group. Much of that 18-54 year-old prevalence for example is likely parents and other family members catching Covid from their school-aged children.…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

Even Departments of Education knew the obvious, before Covid. Research shows influenza outbreaks for example are clearly driven by children. For even more targeted action (and reduced cost), primary school-aged children are the greatest…

Incorporating social mixing patterns into epidemiological modelling. This (to me) is where society understood as networked hubs is critical. And this: "...school children are the ‘bridge’ linking household and community transmission."…

“I remember when Glenn was in the ICU with Covid, one of the nurses came in and said ‘when we get these people home, how they’re going to actually live with Covid, and the destruction to their bodies?’ And I remember thinking, why is she…

We had granny flats in Australia when I was a kid. Now grannies own 3 homes, while their grandkids can’t afford to rent.

All change is led. So yes, it's not true an entire generation conspired to do this, no groups act in that way. But they have consistently, for 50 years, voted for the people who did. To pretend there's no culpability here is disingenuous.…

Overheard at a school drop-off, one mother speaking to another. “Every other bloody person sends their kid to school sick, I can’t have a day off, she’s coming to school.” Privatised public health.

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

This year’s home insurance renewal bills should be a real hoot for many climate deniers. Pollies will encourage us to blame the insurers, but political refusal to do collective things shifted all the risk management to individuals. As…

The thing I find bewilderingly amusing about immunity debt ideas is that you apparently need to be infected LOTS of times to have the immunity, but then it can evaporate in the space of a few weeks of sitting at home.…

The sovereign citizen movement is an example of networked society and how to work it. As authorities slowly recognise, it’s driven by a tiny handful of people, with networked followers. Target that tiny handful, ruthlessly, and the rest…

In reality-based politics, what people say on social media, including on EVs, is mostly hot air. We're still suffering from the idiot idea of 'range anxiety'. Most EVs don't need a servo for most of their driving, they'll charge at home.…

We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufacturing. But we never have been market economies. /1…

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency…

Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Entire communities are increasingly being run on these platforms.…

A cruise, a gig or a holiday OS usually does the job. https://t.co/5wXRv25oVl

The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

And just a receipt for the Covid trials one day, the GBD projection for herd immunity from focused protection. I can pass it onto my vulnerable mum, in her 5th year of being confined to home to stay alive. https://t.co/b25Ap6puBU

‘Protect the vulnerable’ with uncontrolled spread of Covid just means them locking themselves down at home. We didn’t end lockdowns. We privatised them. https://t.co/hvLW5LkfBW

Many old warriors still rail against the ‘MSM’, encouraged by cookers on social media. It’s a cultural thing, for them MSM was always the public square, the home of ‘we’, the public. It hasn’t been that for many years now.…

The spread of child-free spaces in a society that already isn’t having any children. What does that say to you? Sometimes just zoom out a little, and meanings become obvious. https://t.co/dQSS0opUFw

Schools were the 'sacrificial anode' of most countries' Covid response. Infect all the kids to (apparently) create herd immunity. Spin it by weeping crocodile tears about lost education and social contact. https://t.co/dVI6Q1xfPh

But don't ask the kids if they want Covid. Seen and not heard. Infect the buggers, so we can all get back to cruises and OS holidays. https://t.co/GsNud0tKZ4 https://t.co/rOyPtYVhS6

Get rid of it. And WIPE all the debts. Other countries are already falling off a demographic cliff with no young people, and those they have lumbered with huge debts, unaffordable housing etc. And then we wonder why they won’t have…

Another way to think about our perverse travel culture. The places we travel to ‘see’ are the exact equivalent of movie stars or other celebrities. 1/8 https://t.co/cjLUqNPnqd The places themselves are famous, in the same way. We want to…

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/AEBgD00M7b The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the…

Comment on public policy 3. Infecting all children deliberately to try to achieve herd immunity is profound violence against children. Nothing is being done.

If the world seems bewilderingly stupid, start seeing it as kidult culture. We created this over decades by isolating schools from adult life. The culture kids learn there has now re-built adult life, as adolescent life.…

The travel juggernaut taking another victim. I love that people ‘experiencing the world’ happens in great waves of social comparison. Locations ‘trend’. Most travel never leaves home. It’s about transacting imitative rivalry.…

In the bed next to my mother’s in hospital was a very young woman, early 20s at most. She’d had a stroke. I’m sure very young people have strokes too, sometimes. But this is two 20 or younger I’ve seen just this year where I live. Things…

Neither side wants a two-State solution? They both seem to want to exterminate the other. Partitioning is a very old approach that split India and Ireland and other colonies. If your kids were fighting, would locking them in their rooms…

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

The visceral reality of a broken public. My elderly mother, on IV antivirals right now for hospital-acquired Covid, had a visit from a neighbour yesterday. (Please no sympathy, I don't use social media to transact personal life, I share…

We so desperately needed expertise on human social behaviour to beat Covid. Instead we used graphs. An example from this week. Person at work about to go OS on holiday for 2 weeks. Very excited. /1 Then a member of their team came to work,…

Anecdatally, there’s a growing amount of Covid about. The gift of hybrid immunity, from National Cabinet, on this Mother’s Day weekend.

Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

‘Authoritarian’ leaders are just populist leaders, whose populist fantasies aren’t working. Like the school teacher or parent who yells all the time, because they can no longer control the kids.

Hospital sent my mum home after a week of therapy for hospital-acquired Covid. Off the back of 2 weeks of treatment for serious heart and lung issues. Wasn't tested for Covid before leaving hospital. Did a RAT at home. Positive. Has an…

Saw a letter from a local school to parents, pleading with them to keep sick children at home. The school is struggling to function. We’re more than 2 years into ‘living with’ Covid. When can we expect this to be actually doable?

Almost in every case the Infinite Covids are not impacted much by the widespread, continuous infection. (Yet.) They're working from home. They have a partner who looks after the sick kids. They're childless. They're retired and comfortably…

Sat in a risk management conference for several hours today, the only person with a mask on, while attendees swapped stories about the number of sick colleagues and children they have. Bring on retirement.

It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of thing. I refuse to allow these platforms to become the venue for my personal life. /1 While we’re all aware of the mis/disinformation…

New Covid hybrid immunity adventures. A friend's office is barely functioning, so many people away either with Covid, or with kids who have Covid. Now the cleaners have Covid too. Staff are being asked to do basic cleaning themselves. Make…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

Our obsessive travel culture isn’t about ‘seeing the world’. It’s about using geography to feed our imitative rivalry at home. The shift from being there, to being seen there. And even before social media did this, what did ‘there’ even…

More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as Covid minimisers have twisted it to mean. People are SO sick…

Just as many of the old resist Covid action because it interrupts their recreational lifestyles, younger adults with children resisted lockdowns because it meant they had to interrupt theirs too, looking after their own children. ‘Fun’ is…

Many workplaces are relying upon NSW Health’s advice of ‘symptom-free’ people being allowed back at work. Not only is that public health gibberish, it’s also the least practical option. The same workplaces often require a doctor’s…

The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that caused this pandemic. Beginning with the idiocy of the…

“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

Two more parents gone home from work with kids running temperatures of 41. Another work colleague gone home with aches and pains and sore throat. https://t.co/P8SJVFil63

I sit less than a metre away from somebody at work who had classic Covid symptoms yesterday. Is at home with Covid today. A respirator and air purifier as always makes me about the only person left there to do any work.

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

I bought one of these (Xiaomi Pro H) over 3 years ago, to have in my office space at work. It's never registered the need for a filter replacement. Checking, it's still at nearly 50%, after 3 years. My wife uses one in a classroom, a…

A casualty of America's lack of a conception of a public sphere, is the continuous assault on other countries by get-rich-quick entrepreneurial inventions. At home designed to fulfil the American Dream (of liberation from public squalor).…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

I shared the story of my mother here a month or two ago, 80, extremely vulnerable, a Novid until needing treatment in hospital for heart and lung issues. She then caught Covid there. I wrote to the healthcare body, who flick-passed it to…

A friend's wife has been very sick. Swabbed for influenza, RSV and Covid. All negative. Other possible candidates, in peoples' experience right now?

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off…

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

The social process I Tweet about, where only catastrophe leads social change, was also seen by Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in the 14th century. He called it Asabiyya. Meaningful change only comes from external threat. Not internal…

Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

The great threat of working from home for ‘the economy’ isn’t about where people work. It’s the danger of them rediscovering what ‘home’ means. Of re-centering their lives around place. The economy has always been, socially, an assault…

All of this cooker nonsense is adolescents complaining about being grounded. Adolescents view freedom as freedom from restraint. Rules. Adults see restraints as enabling much greater freedoms. Adolescent culture will win while its home,…

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

At a time when we’re facing a catastrophic shortage of young workers, and the young will never afford a home, HECS/HELP debts should be removed entirely. Conservatives gamed both education and health, to force a shift to privatisation.…

I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’s dawning realisation. /1 https://t.co/aWP2zXeGHl…

If you want to change the world, stay home more.

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

I’m having a week off from work. A window into our culture, a person asked me what I plan to do in my holiday. “Nothing”. “Surely you’re going to DO something?!” Always gotta be doing. Never just being. Why staying at home in lockdowns was…

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

I see this, and feel somehow a social outsider, that my immediate response isn’t “let’s fly to Europe for a holiday!”. https://t.co/k1nX7WeQCY

And like most rich countries, we have no bloody children anyway. And the ones we do manage to have are lumbered with huge debts at the start of their working lives, can’t afford homes, and can’t get well-paid jobs anyway. Get rid of…

We still have the idea that societies operate using information. They absolutely don’t, they operate using status and conformity. People are ignoring Covid because their friends and family are. That’s it. Our guidance in life has ALWAYS…

Most of the men (and it was mostly men) who advised us all to just soldier on with infections have wives who dealt with the snot and phlegm and fevers, in their sick children. Or they sent them to boarding school so never dealt with it at…

It’s that busy world of perpetual adolescence, what we call ‘the economy’ now, that is cheerfully sacrificing children and the old to Covid. Worth pondering in conjunction with this quote, I think. https://t.co/R8vRKdTAQ8

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

I agree with Paul Ewald that persistent/chronic infection is likely the great causation for much human illness. Why in evolutionary terms would pathogens prefer a ‘quick kill’ over a ‘setting up an ongoing home’ model? Killing your host…

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints…

I don't think it was Steve I was on the phone with yesterday. My stepfather and sister also contracted Covid during the same hospital visit. It was a smorgasboard of Covid. https://t.co/yVzZs4lqOp

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all…

Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives. That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1…

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

Shut Covid down in schools and you're on the way to ending the pandemic. Tell 'expert' advisers drunk on infecting our children to shut up and go and work as a casual in the schools in the meantime. https://t.co/UfO1Yi5EBY

'Good news!', the boss said, 'we've found somebody to help you back-fill the 3 people away sick!' That somebody has just gone home sick.

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this…

A footnote to this. I don’t think many of the sick people in my workplace actually caught things at work. Nearly always it’s those with young, school-aged children who get sick. My Tweet was about the public health debacle we’re all…

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

I’ve not found the damage caused by social media to have an age limit. The people who sacked the Capitol building when Biden was elected weren’t children. https://t.co/VcFxoS1n35

Another social problem dumped in the ‘teach kids about it at school’ category. Kids already have a more sophisticated understanding of social media than adults. It doesn’t matter what size the boat is in the sewer. It’s still a sewer.

Aged care Covid deaths mapped against community deaths from Covid. The vulnerable live in the community, their deaths follow the same patterns. Not controlling Covid in the community kills the aged. 1/2 https://t.co/98hNZS9W2F…

Reading a local FB group. Parents congratulating kids in a local team today, “even though 3 of them were really too sick to play”. I know one of those families. The kid has whooping cough. Personal responsibility public health.

My daughter’s teacher asked a class how many of them had not had Covid. She was the only one to put her hand up. Also the only one masked. I’m sure minimisers will say she’s been damaged by not fitting in. I prefer to think her vascular…

Working from home saved Australians $85 billion in transport costs alone. The pandemic was an economic bonanza for very many ordinary Australians. Catastrophes shift societies. It's why the status quo mobilised so fast to 'live with' Covid…

The thing an economy can never allow is a strong culture of 'home'. Economies need continuous displacement and dislocation. It's no accident having a place called home is now mostly unachievable for much of the population.…

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

Fighting a pandemic with an immune system seems like fighting bushfires by giving each home a bucket full of water.

I worked in schools, so advice from people who don’t doesn’t interest me. Teachers (not mentioned) also work in schools. I’ve never seen them as sick as they’ve been in the past 2 years. I’ve never seen children as sick. I’ve never seen…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

Don't conceptualise children and disease. Just ask a primary school teacher, or a parent. Or a school principal who can't find any relief staff. https://t.co/rGeiobQYOa

"Children transmit Covid-19 at a lower rate to children than to adults. Household adults are at highest risk of transmisison from an infected child...". Schools are hubs driving Covid into communities, via family members.…

Remind those who say a lack of public chargers means EVs are impractical that for about the first 25 years after combustion cars were introduced, there were no gas/service stations. You bought the fuel in a tin at the pharmacist or general…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

Just making breakfast for my wife and saw this. This sort of schema is one we love as a society, because it sets up two opposing teams. The solution to team sports culture isn’t more team sports. Sorry, just isn’t. https://t.co/O1M9njN2uj

My kids still laugh when I ask them if lockdowns were hard for them. One even asked if I was joking, not having to go school was the best time of their life. https://t.co/dgLqT7fnfw

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse. As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a…

Catastrophes change societies. They're the only things that do. EV owners in Florida are charging at home and getting out of there. The power of a distributed energy system, which fossil fuels absolutely aren't. https://t.co/Dtw56cDuKT

A colleague recounted how their family is just back on its feet. One child had pneumonia, then both children and mum caught whooping cough. The whole family then contracted one of the circulating virus nasties (she couldn't remember the…

The people who argue that closing schools during the early pandemic was bad for kids? They haven’t been inside a school for a long time. https://t.co/XFaFo26Kbt

Adolescent cultures don’t like children. It’s why they don’t have them, and why they infect the children they do have with lethal viruses. They have lifestyles, not lives. https://t.co/Mmej9tKW11 https://t.co/7VsioKRL3Y

Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-risk situations. But quite a lot of people are not in that…

And again, those who said kids missing school was harming them haven’t set foot in one in a long time. We’re brutalising an entire generation. Infecting them all - the lot - over and over with a novel and lethal virus, is just the latest…

“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.” Autocracies are thousands of years older than elections. To unpack that concept - autocracy. /1…

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in…

"School closures – which were not recommended by health experts – caused long-term harm to children..." Yes they were, the AHPPC recommended them as required. Thankfully we're infecting all the kids now instead. https://t.co/nMtMxZJyEd

Today is Friday. The day most people I know celebrate as the end of the working week. Fri-yay. They celebrated particularly during lockdowns, when they didn’t have to come to work at all. Just as many kids rightly celebrated missing…

If you use a social instead of a political or economic lens for society, you’ll see the same patterns repeating throughout history. Take a classic Agatha Christie story. So often the lynchpin of these was the social mechanism of families…

I will cross-post to here and BlueSKy in transition likely to there as a more permanent home.

Friend, incredulous I'm still masking, 'aren't your kids missing out on dining out?' 'I'd rather thay have a functioning immune system than a plate of schnitzel and chips.' The concerns of Teenage Society. Whether you're getting your…

Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a daycare facility. They spent almost 22 years in jail. Status did…

When you read about the almost impossibly complex challenges of treating post-viral syndromes, it really hits home just how fucking stupid ‘living with viruses’ is as a public health strategy. https://t.co/thRmnSBHxr

Friend: "people couldn’t come to wife’s 40th. One of them who had Covid is still sick and has an autoimmune disease. Can’t walk up an incline, constantly nauseous, extremely fatigued and has insomnia. She may have to retire at the age of…

One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a belief about how groups behave, that is also wrong. /1 The belief…

Aside from the wisdom of the ban itself, as we saw with Covid, we misunderstand mandates. Their greatest power in this case comes from the bargaining power it gives parents, with their children. ‘Hey, it’s illegal’. Just as it used to be a…

Wow, that's incredibly sad. Gemma was a fighter. Like others I thought she'd come through the worst of it. And so tragic for her family. Bye Gemma. https://t.co/N4QJC1tWu1

Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that same 3 years, tens of billions spent on job creation schemes. /1…

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Murdered his mother to feed a status-driven social media lifestyle. These are the stories that define our culture today, rather than the pap about ‘the economy’. https://t.co/i7dUwqaMDj

Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet? Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in…

Pretty much everybody who goes on this show lists the main thing they want to ‘escape’. Cars. Traffic and roads. Cars are (apparently) designed to take us places we want to go. The places we most want to go, are places without cars. 1/2…

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Good luck with that. It defines the culture, gotta be always moving, always doing. Can’t just be. Children of accumulating empires, now bucket lists of…

Tired of the bullshit of electoral politics on energy (or anything), where the ALP has no strategic brains or balls to implement anything, and the LNP are just wreckers employed by fossil fuel interests…? In 2024 you can avoid all of it.…

@BYDCompany are you in the home battery business? Because you could absolutely clean up there, existing offerings are still far too expensive for what you get.

Fantastically useful thread for conversations with friends and family. https://t.co/SjIFbAmLqP

The idiot paradox at the heart of our travel culture is that most of the places we go to gawp at in wonder were made by people who just stayed home, for generations, and made them the wonderful places they are.

Most of the places we flock to in our travels were made by people who rarely if ever left home. We travel to try to recapture what it is they understood, and we don’t. If we stayed home we might succeed. https://t.co/njyZALLbZM

‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I love that home of many an oil man, Texas, is infected badly with a cheap renewable energy virus. https://t.co/rODIorRPoh

A culture locked in perpetual adolescence, in one photo. No elderly grandfathers filled stadiums when I was young. We don’t notice obvious things. https://t.co/Okg5joAf0Q

The basic act of segregating children from adult life in schools caused a violent change to our societies, that we’re still living through (and not understanding). When you put people together, they form a ‘culture’. That becomes their…

My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of…

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence. Let’s…

The places we travel to see are beautiful because the people there stayed home, and made them that. Which is what we should do. Make our own places beautiful, instead of being parasites on homegrown beauty elsewhere. https://t.co/BWWNzOVAem

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6…

DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with. Thinking is a specialised skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and…

When societies actually feel existential threat, they act like adults, together. When they don’t, they act like children, multiplying grievances and complaints at every opportunity. We’re deeply in kidult culture now. You can’t take a crap…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

The fundamental purpose of recreational travel isn’t to ‘see’ or even ‘experience’ places. It’s to use those places as a stage to perform social status games on, at home. To be able to tell *others*, that you’ve been there. Imitative…

The distant lands we read about and imagine are always far more accurately captured by that distant reading, than by going there to visit. Like a probe capturing Jupiter. Going there will take you further from the ‘real’ Jupiter than…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

For most of history, there was no separate culture of children. Kids joined the adult world at a very young age, and never left it. Then we invented universal mass schooling. That literally inverted our cultures. At first schools…

Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

Negotiating basic ideas and behaviours around things like public health and renewable energy with friends, family and colleagues rams home every day the damage social media is doing. It’s like living in a perpetually growing community of…

Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how far gone we now are. Let me say it again. Mob rule doesn’t…

Scientific American trapped in the web of Infinite Covid framings. The Infinite Covids say kids missing school is a reason to let them all be infected with viruses instead. The sane response is to use public health to stop infections, and…

The almost universal worshipping of small business reveals how far we’re infected by the terrible American disease of iconoclastic hatred of anything institutional. All sides of politics worship small business. It’s a terrible mistake. /1…

It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to destroy Tesla. Righteous zealotry has replaced public life.…

Nothing changes in kidult culture. The only catastrophe is disrupted holidays. Not pandemics, not climate change. Just interruption to lifestyles. The daily team sports of manufactured identities is the only priority. Status games.…

The ‘Left’ in the US continues to impotently go to ‘the people’. The Right continues to win because it goes to, and owns, social media. The people is a fiction. All humans form hierarchical status groups, when they go home from town halls.…

I’ve lost track of the number of causes that think progress has been made because somebody managed to mobilise large crowds. The myth of ‘the people’ running politics. ‘People power’! Functionally it’s a rock concert, not power. People go…

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

Calling everything fascism is an attempt to import mid-20th century Orwellian gravitas to (we think) give our mostly hot air words more impact. Our narrative is ‘things were going OK, then suddenly fascist tech overlords somehow took…

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is…

Why do we infect an entire generation of children repeatedly with a novel virus? Because we have a kidult culture. You can see it even in the memes, the most ‘dumb’ thing you can do apparently is have children. https://t.co/EcUL6Dpw2A

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

No point teaching kids a fantasy civics curriculum that pretends countries are still governed by traditional institutions. They’re governed by social media. That’s the ‘literacy’ 100% of citizens need, not just kids. https://t.co/j9SoZVuiVX

It’s estimated that 40-50% of humans who have ever lived died from some kind of infection. This doesn’t include chronic and persistent infection. Antibiotics and vaccines drove that closer to 10%. Both require simultaneous control of…

My local hospital justified my elderly mother catching Covid there by saying that the levels of Covid in the hospital reflected the levels in the wider community. Maybe the theatres were as clean as the local public toilets too.…

This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why. Note the Trump administration’s immediate response, calling out ‘unelected’ judges. The worst insult to a populist is ‘unelected’.…

All the wasted time on vacuous fascism memes here and elsewhere. Trump is doing with the Presidency what he does with everything. Cons people, for the enrichment of himself and his family. https://t.co/lgSwYhQOpj

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular…

The anti-vax crusader from work is home on extended sick leave for the third time this year.

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

Recreational travel cultures like to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes, and in ‘border protection’ to stop others wandering…

These things follow a cycle. The Anglo empire (Britain and the US) first plunder other lands, usually for oil or other resources. Installing puppet regimes to squash any local desire to gain benefit from the arrangement. Stage 2 is another…

Renewable energy is a needed revolution. The only placeholder I’ll put in the ground in 2025 is that I bet we look back in a few decades and wonder why we privatised almost all of it, from Day 1. I bet that will be a chicken that comes…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is where a society grafts its knowledge onto its present-day culture. The playground is where kids bring their outside social lives to…

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture. I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’ Then others in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them…

We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we…

Kidults aren’t adults. They’re children in an adult world. Thus they’re selfish. All the major powers derive their modern culture from previous revolutions. For the West, it was the counterculture. The taking over of adult life, by teenage…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age when humans can only just walk and talk, they go to school. They remain there until they reach adulthood. Throughout their entire…

A teacher friend tells me parents often complain if their children aren’t featured on the school social media feeds. That’s where people live, in kidult society. Social media replaced public life, it’s not a communication tool. It’s our…

If you don’t know your culture as a culture, you know nothing about why things happen. Our culture believes that there is no greater catastrophe than the denial of social life. That is its deepest, most unquestioned assumption. /1…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

Friend of the family, early-80s, admitted to a major teaching hospital in Sydney for surgery for lung cancer. 60% of lung removed. Caught Covid in hospital. Hospital response? Sent them home.

Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in…

More than half the children born in all of history died before they reached their teens. Mostly from infections or infectious diseases. https://t.co/AFSb1o85E3

Henry Home (Lord Kames) noted that the difference between absolute despotism, where all are equal except for one man, and absolute democracy, is simply one man. Democracy hides the one man behind the legal fiction of ‘popular sovereignty’.…

Sharing recent NY advice about masking for Covid, a friend said there was no way their kids would be wearing anything over their face that restricts the flow of oxygen to their brains. The propaganda works.

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

When you superimpose Putnam’s observations on the shift between “I” and “We” cultures, and the fertility rate. Kidult culture doesn’t like children. They get in the way. Adolescence replaces all other life stages. https://t.co/rdC5pWfvXZ

In my town years back, a tradesman was burned while working on a shop renovation. He was taken to hospital, feeling OK, and asked when he would be allowed to go home. Doctors said he wasn’t going home. He was going to die from his burns.…

Work from home is a classic example of how only catastrophic disruption to the status quo enables real social change. Without the pandemic there was not a snowball’s chance in hell it would ever have taken off widely.

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

For most of modern history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. So why aren’t we today? Only catastrophe really changes societies. The Black Death killed up to half of Europe. That destroyed peasantry as a way of life. /1…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

If the ALP wants to head off Voice-like populist climate politics from the LNP, it needs to continue to focus strategically on households. Continue to subsidise power bills, and electrification of home energy use. Really get serious on…

Covid ruined Christmas for me. When public health was outsourced to households, every family gathering became the venue of the fake debates on social media, fracturing friendships and families. Public health was invented to delegate…

I’m in the tiny minority who dislike travel. It feels like a violation to me, of my own groundedness and of the people whose homes we invade. As a culture we have no understanding of what it means to inhabit space. We pass through it, we…

A P.S. to this story. Kids barely in their teens getting shingles and it becoming meningitis is quite rare. Particularly when the child has had both chickenpox *and* the vaccine against chickenpox, previously. The specialist 'puzzled'. Not…

#Insiders the idiot argument against social media laws that ‘kids will find a way around them’ is totally irrelevant. Most adults ignore speed limits, it’s not an argument for not having speed limits.

Treasury finally has Jim house-trained. First with his ridiculous EV tax, and now on energy bill relief. Call the bill relief ‘grandfathering’ and it’s exactly the process used for many other major transitions. https://t.co/60tdfb6lIt

We don't use social media. We live inside it. The damage isn't just to children, it's to the entire culture. The medium is *always* the message. Civilisation is the deliberate separation of popularity and truth. Social media is…

AI suggested something to me that I hadn’t seen before. It recommended using an air purifier if isolating with Covid at home, to protect others. Good. But that this can also speed recovery, because the infected isn’t re-breathing viral…

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about managing elite rivalries at home, as it also was in Rome.…

If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not…

Why aren’t most schools as well ventilated as other public and even private buildings? Because these are low-status spaces. Shit-holes in a whole range of ways, ventilation just one of them. Education has very low status. Children have…

I wish countries were investing in bringing HVAC into classrooms, so that schools weren’t the only public or private large buildings having to choose between thermal comfort and fresh air. Bored with ‘bring back’ nostalgia too. Most kids…

‘Nanny’ States happen when adults act like children.

The destruction of public health was really the privatisation of it, as we’d already done for energy, education, transport etc. The pathogens are still there, but now you have to deal with them at home. Matthew, see if you can get some…

I’m genuinely looking forward to the national directive that tells us to work from home to conserve fuel.

The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the…

The great possibility of AI? That it will smother the great tidal wave of opinion that we confuse with democracy, which has pulverised centuries of social progress under cover of nonsense about free speech. There are signs people will shut…

Cutting off jet flights is the real showstopper for Kidult culture. That’s the one that broke the Covid public health action back. Nobody can stay home. Home would mean place being meaningful to us, rather than bucket lists of collectable…

Having machines fight each other in war would be progress, above making the kids of poorer parts of the population do it, on behalf of battling global elites. https://t.co/Om7UTvDn9Z

Dunkelman traces how nation-building institutions now struggle to build anything at all. We can easily list those who obstruct this building work, like the sponsored small government movements that are really about entrenching established…

Here’s a window into kidult culture. Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. Kidults love dogs because they’re pliable and lavish us with seeming unconditional love (which is really more pack loyalty). 1/3…

Populism is the culture-wide attempt to restore Kings. A quarter of a century is about as good as it gets, which is nothing in historical terms. Populism always founders on succession. Cronyism tries to shoehorn the leader’s family into…

We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is…

When you actually work with the public, in government, Elinor Ostrom’s critical empirical work showing regulation and enforcement as key to any sort of free community life really rams home. Freedom comes from regulation and enforcement.…

We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1…