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28/05/2020
28 May 2020 These glorious insults are compiled by Marilla North from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words. A member of Parliament to Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease.” “That depends, Sir, “ said Disraeli, “whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.” “He […]
27/05/2020
27 May 2020 Call me old fashioned but I really believe in lifetime public servants paid a reasonable wage to do an honest job. They do not need ‘incentives’, ‘bonuses’, ‘commissions’ or other gimmicks. Salesmen have always rather revolted me when they judge everyone by how much commission they made on their sales, as some […]
27/05/2020
27 May 2020 The comedian Celeste Barbour set out to raise $30,000 for fire relief and people gave $51 million. She was going to give it to the Rural Fire Service. It turns out that the. RFS is basically a government-funded body which buys fire equipment, and had received rather less than recommended in the […]
27/05/2020
It seems that COVID-19 affects not only the lungs, but the heart, kidney, brain, gut, clotting and blood vessels, and that a lot of facts are still not clear.Here is an article from ScienceMag from the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science.www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-does-coronavirus-kill-clinicians-trace-ferocious-rampage-through-body-brain-toes
27/05/2020
27 May 2020
Sweden likes to present itself as a highly sophisticated welfare society where a caring State looks after all its citizens. But conservative governments have been quietly undermining its welfare system for some time, and this opening up of the country and talk of ‘herd immunity’ may be both hypocritical and very poor public policy.
The assumption that healthy people will not die, and the rest do not matter is a very callous moral judgement. The assumption that without normal commerce the economy will not function and thus it is the economy versus a few oldies welfare is a morally appalling position, which is creeping in by default.
When I was a NZ sheep and beef farmer standard practice was that the breeding females had a performance criterion. If they did not get pregnant before winter, they went to the abattoirs as they were too expensive to feed over winter.
Managers love performance criteria, and as Management now dictates political actions people now have to perform also. Not strong enough to survive a COVID19 infection? Funeral for you! It is assumed that the rest will be infected once and then be immune. And when most people have been infected so that the virus cannot propagate in the society, we (hopefully) have ‘herd immunity’.
Politics being what it is, things have to dressed up a bit. Less tests, fewer masks, omit certain types of hospitals, change the death certification. Do not state the policy bluntly, and give no mandatory orders from the top, but make it vague enough with scope for non-implementation of best practice and plausible deniability. Make concerned statements of good intent, select some good figures to quote, and praise the people for their fortitude. If the odd whistleblower says something and manages to get publicity, be surprised, deny, promise to investigate and call it a ‘one off’ case or situation.
Brave New World is here. The only surprise is that it has started in Sweden.
27/05/2020
Sweden likes to present itself as a highly sophisticated welfare society where a caring State looks after all its citizens. But conservative governments have been quietly undermining its welfare system for some time, and this opening up of the country and talk of ‘herd immunity’ may be both hypocritical and very poor public policy.
The assumption that healthy people will not die, and the rest do not matter is a very callous moral judgement. The assumption that without normal commerce the economy will not function and thus it is the economy versus a few oldies welfare is a morally appalling position, which is creeping in by default.
When I was a NZ sheep and beef farmer standard practice was that the breeding females had a performance criterion. If they did not get pregnant before winter, they went to the abattoirs as they were too expensive to feed over winter.
Managers love performance criteria, and as Management now dictates political actions people now have to perform also. Not strong enough to survive a COVID19 infection? Funeral for you! It is assumed that the rest will be infected once and then be immune. And when most people have been infected so that the virus cannot propagate in the society, we (hopefully) have ‘herd immunity’.
Politics being what it is, things have to dressed up a bit. Less tests, fewer masks, omit certain types of hospitals, change the death certification. Do not state the policy bluntly, and give no mandatory orders from the top, but make it vague enough with scope for non-implementation of best practice and plausible deniability. Make concerned statements of good intent, select some good figures to quote, and praise the people for their fortitude. If the odd whistleblower says something and manages to get publicity, be surprised, deny, promise to investigate and call it a ‘one off’ case or situation.
Brave New World is here. The only surprise is that it has started in Sweden.
23/05/2020
23 May 2020
I am not sure of the answer to this question. China obviously hid the facts initially as whistleblower Dr Li Wenliang revealed, later dying of COVID19 himself[1]. Dr Ai Fen of Wuhan Central Hospital also blew the whistle and has now disappeared[2].
China clearly suppressed information initially, and may not be telling the truth now, particularly on the numbers affected.
It used very authoritarian tactics and now claims that the infection of controlled. It seems hard to deny this, if we presume that millions of deaths cannot be hidden. The SARS virus was successfully suppressed with an unprecedented lockdown, and this would appear to be the same. Probably few other countries could have suppressed movement of people as effectively as China could, which is good and bad.
The initial cover up allowed movement to other countries which has allowed the epidemic to spread world wide.
Here is an Indian TV station calling out the WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus for not standing up to China, and giving a pretty damning assessment of his actions, both in not getting the facts from China early and then ignoring their delays. The circumstances of his election to WHO seems to be a reliance on China’s lobbying at WHO, and also his debts to China from his role as Health Minister and then foreign minister of Ethiopia. He is contrasted with the previous head of WHO Health, a Norwegian, Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland, who called out China and embarrassed them over SARS, so China had an incentive to get a more malleable person in the job.
The TV station seems to have a good story and also claims to be daring and young, though it is owned Esselgroup, which is owned by Subhash Chandra, an Indian billionaire with links to the BJP. Things are not always clear in politics , but it does seem that the Director-General is a Chinese patsy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1NGzmDVWxA&feature=youtu.be
[1] www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51403795, 7/2/20
[2] https://nypost.com/2020/04/01/whistleblowing-coronavirus-doctor-mysteriously-vanishes/
21/05/2020
21 May 2020
Readers may recall that I posted on this subject on 19/4/20, and had Dr Li as the original whistleblower on social media. He was an ophthalmologist who died of COVID-19. The origin of the virus was via the markets, but possibly via a bat research project in a secondary Wuhan research laboratory.
The document I used was cited but was from the web and not from a standard journal and sounded very plausible.
Now this document that again seems very plausible casts doubt on the previous story.
Presumably there will be a WHO investigation which will come up with a conclusion. This probably would have happened without the ham-fisted and tactless intervention of Morrison. Whether the US or China is deceiving us all may or may not become apparent. Both have quite a lot of prestige riding on the inquiry, and Trump needs someone to blame if he is win the November election.
About This Website
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The Fable of the Chinese Whistleblower | by Stephen S. Roach & Weijian Shan – Project Syndicate
21/05/2020
20 May 2020
Angus Taylor, our Energy Minister says we cannot be carbon neutral by 2050- 30 years away! Why not? Well we cannot have a target without a plan. And since we have chosen to have no plan, we cannot have a target.
This sort of circular semantic nonsense is what Angus Taylor is all about. He is now taking the Clean Energy Fund and using for that hoax, carbon capture and storage. The man should be sacked for his rorting and corruption, and his actions as a Minister are totally in the wrong direction for Australia.
Carbon capture is just a fossil industry bad joke. A lot of carbon dioxide comes out with natural gas, and is already separated, because of course it would stop the gas burning as well if it went in the gas pipes. So if it is already separated from natural gas. What happens then? It is released to the atmosphere; Obviously- the cheapest solution! Privatise the profits and externalise the costs. So there is lots of carbon dioxide to store or sequester. Is this possible? Perhaps at great cost. If so, it should be part of the cost of selling gas. How economic would gas be then?
But it goes on. Coal is concentrated carbon. When it combines with oxygen it releases a lot of energy in a process commonly known as burning. And instead of a compact little bit of carbon that can be passed around a Parliament there is huge amount of gas that has to be captured from the atmosphere, and stored somewhere, presumably under a lot of pressure and presumably forever. This is quite a problem, will be difficult to do and will cost a lot of energy, perhaps as much as burning it released. You could call it it a difficult scientific problem. Or you could call it a very silly thing to do. Create a problem, then spend a lot of money and time to try to find a way to fix it.
But the fossil fuel lobby wants to get at the clean energy money to try. This has two advantages. One is called ‘opportunity cost’, which the economists’ way of saying that if you have spent your money on A, you do not have that money to spend on B. You spend your clean energy money researching an unlikely solution to a problem that you have created by burning, and you do not have that money to spend on something like pumped hydro, which would allow the problem of energy storage of renewables to be addressed. So real progress towards renewable energy can be slowed. Also you can pretend that capturing the huge amounts of carbon dioxide is a scientifically feasible option with just a bit more government funded research. All this suits the fossils fuel industry who can continue to burn as usual. The parallels with the tobacco industry denying the obvious health effects and profiting from delayed definitive action is striking.
Angus Taylor came from a grazing family, went to Kings School, St Andrew’s College at Sydney Uni and Oxford. He studied Economics and Law and worked with investment bankers and was in a group that tried to buy Cubbie Station.
He may or may not know any science, but his track record of using taxpayers money for the interests of his connections are already the stuff of scandal and have led to calls for his resignation. This last lot of nonsense simply adds to that imperative.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/19/angus-taylor-says-it-is-not-australian-government-policy-to-achieve-net-zero-emissions-by-2050?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_News_Feed
21/05/2020
21 May 2020
Here is an old but relevant article of how a British gas company got approval to sell gas to China, and pay no tax.
It happened at exactly the time that Rudd was rolled for asking for a resources rent tax.
The CEO, Catherine Tanna was given a seat on the Board of the Reserve Bank.
I wrote to her in disgust on another matter, when I left EnergyAustralia, the Chinese consortium who bought the privatised Sydney County Council electricity customers, because they pay no tax. To my surprise, she wrote back saying that she was looking after her shareholders, (naturally not mentioning that they are all on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).
Here is an excellently researched article from the Michael West Website on how Prince Andrew as a UK Trade Ambassador, the Qld Liberal Government of Campbell Newman, and the Federal Labor Government, with Wayne Swan as Treasurer all dudded the Australian people. Now we have Qld Labor, and LNP Federally, but it makes no difference. Tanna is still on the Reserve Bank board, fracking still goes ahead, these folk still pay no tax and Australian gas prices are still sky high.
If we do not change, the luck will run out. We cannot trust our politicians. We need Swiss style Direct Democracy Now, with referenda able to be initiated by anyone, and a part-time, advisory Parliament with no career politicians. Yes, it will need major constitutional change, but tinkering with the Lib/Lab duo will not make a difference. A bigger change is needed, so we had better get on with it.
www.michaelwest.com.au/the-second-british-invasion-how-royal-cronies-and-the-gas-debacle-took-australia-for-billions/