fences

The debate is raging about the “Vaccination Passport”, the “Covid-Pass” or whatever it is called. At this stage, it seems we don’t trust anyone. The social fabric which was already frayed by the Democrat/Republican barney(s) is further distended by the Covid effect. The insurers and the lawyers are awaiting for any wrong moves by private organisations say like the US Open…

Imagine that you contract Covid-19 by sitting next to an infected person at a tennis match. Have you been vaccinated? has the person next to you been vaccinated? Can you prove that you got Covid-19 from this other person, not from another fellow three rows behind you? Thus people running shows have to have protection against lawsuits… The “passports” are not to make sur you catch nothing, but that the companies don’t get sued for negligence.

plunger

From time to time we need to see how others think. This isn't "disinformation", but different points of view on the theme of risk management and cost-benefit analysis...

pizza

Give a man a car and he will learn to drive.

Give a man a gun and he will learn to kill.

Give the man a bomber and he will learn to bomb.

Give a man a prayer and he will believe in god.

Give all these to a man and he will kill in the name of god.

                                        — Robert Urbanoski

Donnez une voiture à un homme et il apprendra à conduire.

Donnez une arme à un homme et il apprendra à tuer.

Donnez un bombardier à un homme et il apprendra à bombarder.

Donnez une prière à un homme et il croira en Dieu.

truth

... but in general, the reason is much simpler and less sinister. It is because we employ a rational framework of cost-benefit analysis, whereby, when making public policy choices, we do not examine only one side of the ledger (number of people who will die if cars are permitted) but also consider the immense costs generated by policies that would prevent those deaths (massive limits on our ability to travel, vastly increased times to get from one place to another, restrictions on what we can experience in our lives, enormous financial costs from returning to the pre-automobile days).

By Glenn Greenwald

fairy

New South Wales has reported 1218 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 – another daily infection record – and six deaths.

The entire state is currently locked down and police are cracking down on compliance measures as authorities battle to contain the spread of the virulent Delta strain.

The six deaths recorded in the 24 hours to 8pm on Saturday included three people in their 80s and three in their 70s. None were fully vaccinated.

The death toll for the current outbreak now sits at 89.

There are now more than 810 COVID-19 patients in NSW in hospital, with 126 in intensive care and 54 ventilated.

Of those 126 in intensive care, only one was fully vaccinated.

tragic

Almost half of all children globally are at Extremely High risk of suffering harmful consequences of climate change and other environmental shocks. Frogs and pollinators are at the sharp end of the loss of biodiversity. Fast fashion: first world behaviour with third world environmental and social consequences. Third world?? – bah, who cares?

By Peter Sainsbury

atmos

DER SPIEGEL: In fact, the Arctic is warming more dramatically than any other part of the world. What does that mean for Greenland?

Ahlstrøm: In recent decades, circulation patterns in the atmosphere have changed. We have evidence that warm air is reaching the ice sheet more and more frequently. This has to do with changes in the jet stream. They ensure that the air over Greenland in summer comes less frequently from the far north – and very often from the mid-latitudes, where it is warmer.

pectoralis

The warning from Tehran was voiced on Saturday by the secretary the Supreme National Security Council, Admiral Ali Shamkhani, who tweeted it in Farsi, English, Hebrew, and Arabic.

fed-up

It is hard for an old cartoonist like Gus to keep track of ScoMo's crap and make fun out of it... One could say that satire is exhausting under the present circumstances and Gus' pencils can't match the brilliance of Shakespeare (I mean the cartoonist). This is why I borrow the cartoon above. It illustrates the story which comes with it: ScoMo is the master of marketing stationary bullshit while promising that it is on the move...

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coal

Josh Frydenberg has acknowledged that managing carbon risk is now a major preoccupation in global capital markets as the Morrison government mulls what commitments it will take to the Cop26 in Glasgow later this year.

blinken

Dozens of Australian nationals and visa holders stranded in Afghanistan were plucked from the suburbs of Kabul this week as part of a tense multinational extraction effort to get foreigners into the airport and on board evacuation flights, the ABC can reveal.

history

"We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity." 

Stephen Hawking 

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone." 

infectious...

The NSW government has unveiled its long-awaited roadmap for schools to return to face-to-face teaching, as the state recorded 882 COVID-19 cases and two deaths.

pies

"it is clear that the West believes in diversity rather than in uniformity, in pluralism rather than in monism or dualism, in inclusion rather than exclusion, in liberty rather than in authority, in truth rather than in power, in conversion rather than in annihilation, in the individual rather than in the organization, in reconciliation rather than in triumph, in heterogeneity rather than in homogeneity, in relativisms rather than in absolutes, and in approximations rather than in final answers.”

amateurs

The mainstream media are divided between two ways of interpreting the fall of Kabul. For some, the Democrats are cowards and the departure from Afghanistan discourages the allies. For others, they have played well and placed a thorn in the side of the Russians and the Chinese. These two views correspond to the traditional paradigm of the American Empire.