57 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

1. Ikonoclast 12:49 pm “The rich should be … taxed if they fly.

   The rich should be taxed. Period. Their local and globalised flights of profits, revenues/incomes, and wealth to tax havens permanently grounded. Recovery, reorder. It is now or never.

   “Moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites and pay the price for decades – or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier.” – Naomi Klein

2. An Epidemic Graphing Calculator

   

   http://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html

   Code…
   http://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html

4. As you can see the following link is very very recent

5. https://twitter.com/hashtag/ScottyFromMassMurder?src=hashtag_click

6. The epidemic graphing calculator, see KT2’s post above, shows how critical it is to contain the virus very early. By going to the site and dragging the intervention start left and right you can see how the curve is affected. You can see how it explodes if intervention is even a few days late. Our Australian Prime Minister, SloMo, has failed at every point on the curve to bring in strict enough measures. Hence, we are condemned to an Italy-like experience almost certainly.

   At every point, SloMo has been behind the curve. Friday, “I’m going to the footy.” Monday. “All sporting events must take part without fans. A few days little it”s namby-pamby social-distancxing rules about 4 sqr meters. A few days later it’s “We can’t trust people so now we must close all the non-essential venues done. Then it’s “Schools will stay open” and then the somewhat wider Premiers of NSW and Vic say “Not on your nelly.”

   Several weeks ago, people in the know from epidemiologists and others were saying we should immediately close all non-essential venues, gatherings, events, businesses, schools and activities. If we had done that we could have rapidly flattened the curve and kept it below the critical level which permits the hospitals and medical staff to cope. Now, instead we have a full blown crisis. SloMo and his government are fully to blame for this.

   Being behind the curve means it is rapidly running away and getting further ahead of your measures. SloMo clearly does not understand this. He ignored the advice of Fire Chiefs for an emergency meeting well before our bushfire crisis summer. Now, he has ignored the advice to go in hard and early socially and medically on this crisis. He even sent National Health authorities and bosses back to the drawing-board when he didn’t like their initial advice. This led to another 5 day delay to implement more (still inadequate) measures.

   The SloMo government is dangerous to our health. They are always in denialism: climate change denialism, bush-fire risk denialism and now epidemic risk denialism. Their myopia and fixation on financial measures before epidemic containment measures is symptomatic of their inability to understand real problems in the real world. They put the cart before the horse. We should have contained first and then worked out financial relief. It should have taken one day to shut everything non-essential down, about four weeks ago or more, and then two days plus ongoing work to put the fincancial arrangements in place. It’s financial arrangements which can be rolled in stages. It’s lock-down which had to happen with a big bang approach.

   Thousands or even tens of thousands of Australians will now die unnecessarily: killed not just by the virus but by the SloMo government’s ineptitude and failure to grasp empirical realities on the ground and in the air.

7. Yes, KT2, people are often down on the pomos but the likes of Foucault and Baudrillard and earlier Barthes, have had some interesting things to say about media representation and performance in relation to the system.