Chief Stipe

Interesting one of the co-authors in the O'Driscoll paper co-wrote this one: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2749214/ The key finding being that there is no difference between N95 Masks vs Medical Masks for Preventing Influenza Amongst Health Care Professionals.

I know you are a busy man @curious in your retirement but if you do have a spare hour do some research on the impartiality of some of the science journals particularly Springer and Nature. This is a good place to start: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/03/book-publishers-part-ways-springer-nature-over-concerns-about-censorship-china It is bloody hard and time consuming to verify the veracity of research now - perhaps Professor Ioannidis's paper needs to be retitled - Why 75% of Published Research is False! We are only have to review the path over the last 20 months of the theory that Covid-19 originated as a Wuhan Lab escape!!

Why don't you peruse the research of an accomplished and respected scientist - Professor John Ioannidis - one of the most cited in the history of science. As of mid-2020 - John P.A. Ioannidis, of California’s Stanford University, has an h-index of 196 and was cited 267,437 times, ranking in 87th place. Perhaps this research for WHO: https://www.who.int/bulletin/online_first/BLT.20.265892.pdf Or perhaps this research - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7327471/ Or this where his IFR estimate is 0.15% or 99.85% of Covid-19 cases DON'T die!! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13554 Or his essay on the Under and Over Estimation of Covid-19 deaths - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00787-9 Or in your favourite "highest impact magazine" Nature this research about the number of self-citations (how many of O'Driscolls citations were SELF citations?) - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02479-7 But then perhaps when reviewing objectively O'Driscolll's research you might want to consider Ioannidis's seminal work which is one of the highest single most cited pieces of research: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 Ironically the title of that last research was: Why Most Published Research Is False!

Are you serious Curious? You know as well as I do that the academic performance measures are well and truly stuffed. Well I hope you know! It all got fucked up when the funding models were screwed. How many of the 97 citations were: Legit and cited by legit publications; Cited in critiques of the O'Driscoll's research; Cited on social media; Cited on news media; and so on and so on. Hand on heart you know that academic citations are a rort and have no correlation to the veracity or quality of the research.

"Highest Impact Factor" is measured how? I realise you are a social scientist @curious but I expected more rigour from you. As for your citation on age adjusted mortality the lead author is a Phd student with 3 publications who has jumped on the Covid-19 citation gravy train to climb the science rankings! Hardly an esteemed scientist of long standing. https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-o-driscoll-4a429199?originalSubdomain=uk

I might be wrong but Level 3 looks like it has been tightened. Level 4 with takeaways. I just can't see how racing can be allowed. Although that said manufacturers are allowed to operate so..... It is just the Government employees that have to stay at home during Level 3 afterall aside from Doctors and Nurses none of them are "essential services" are they?

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Since Purcell left we have seen absolutely NOTHING from BS Saundry. As for Cameron George unless he has secretarial resources available to him in Australia we won't see any output from him and he won't be back in the country until Christmas at the earliest!! Even if the Warriors are now out of the playoff's. Actually wouldn't George as CEO of the Warriors have had more work to do back here in NZ than being "on tour" with the team? WTF could he have contributed to the training of the team? Actually looking at the results perhaps he did contribute. Arranging hotels and transport is hardly a CEO's job is it?

Is Covid-19 THAT serious? What's more where is the proof that ANY Government intervention other than complete isolation and border lockdown (which comes at considerable cost) has any effect on outcomes once the virus becomes endemic? BTW the Nature Journal as an evidentiary source lacks credibility. Equally I could post numerous research articles from reputable journals that have more substantive evidence supporting the opposite of what O'Driscoll contends.

Well that is a mistake. Shall we post a list of all the Health Sector SNAFU's? BTW we didn't elect Ashley Bloomfield or ANY of his risk adverse advisors.

Then lock them up in hazmat suits - don't go to the races - it's dangerous as a horse might jump the fence; don't go fishing - you drown in water; don't drink alcohol - it makes you fat and kills your liver; don't drive or travel on the roads - vehicles crash; don't have sex - exchanging body fluids exchanges lots of things. Where do you want us to courier the food parcels to?

So the fact that racing is continuing is not a "Health Decision"?

Let's see how many weeks did Bowman get? Tommy Berry got a month - still able to ride in the money races today though. Avadulla got 6 months.....woops sorry he broke his neck in the fall that his horse broke its leg.

I see Kah will be able to ride jumpouts and trials in 14 days. I wonder if they will appeal the 3 month race ban. Seems to be unjust to me. Arguably you get less for worse directly related to racing. For example how many weeks do you get for hospitalising a jockey and killing a horse? Add to that the fact that they have already been fined by Dan Andrews.

I guess the responses about sums things up. More want to reminisce about Balmerino who raced 42 years ago than our up coming Spring Carnivals.

Even without Sword of State what a great bunch of 3yr olds! R6 SAN DOMENICO STAKES 1100m 16:30 Racenet Tips & Race Analysis Bookie Offers (4) Fields & Form Speedmap Odds Sort: Runner Number Odds: Best Odds 1. Stay Inside (6) 3yoC ds 😄 4: 3-0-0 L10: 1141x T: R & M Freedman J: T Berry (58.5kg) 2.60 2. Captivant (1) 3yoC 😄 6: 2-0-2 L10: 14x3531x T: P & P Snowden J: H Bowman (58.5kg) 34 4. Paulele (5) 3yoC ds 😄 6: 4-0-0 L10: 11x671x1 T: J Cummings J: J M Donald (57kg) 2.50 5. Mazu (4) 3yoC ds(D/A) 😄 3: 1-0-1 L10: 13x5 T: P & P Snowden J: S Clipperton (55kg) 71 6. Remarque (2) 3yoC db 😄 3: 1-0-1 L10: 15x3 T: M, W & J Hawkes J: R Bayliss (55kg) 5 7. Ranch Hand (9) 3yoC s 😄 6: 1-1-1 L10: 135x200x T: C Waller J: K McEvoy (55kg) 101 8. In The Congo (3) 3yoC ds 😄 3: 1-2-0 L10: 122 T: G Waterhouse & A Bott J: T Clark (55kg) 11 9. Maotai (8) 3yoC d 😄 3: 1-1-0 L10: 124 T: K Fogden J: J Collett (55kg) 51 3. Sword Of State (7) 3yoC d 😄 5: 4-0-1 L10: 13111x T: J Richards J: K McEvoy (58.5kg) Scratched

And there is no other factors in the Covid stats? 14 deaths under the age of 19 out of 14,600 total all age deaths in Sweden. All if those 14 had other prexisiting life threatening illnesses. Most of those that have died in NZ would have died anyway regardless of with Covid-19. There is a growing realisation that regardless of the measures being taken people will die of/with Covid-19. How many is acceptable? Meanwhile because the politicians and the risk adverse health bureaucrats don't want to be honest with the public we are wasting billions of dollars to save - how many? When we know that those billions could have been spent to significantly improve health outcomes for ALL for years to come.

Then a possibly accurate measure would be age adjusted mortality. In Sweden over the course of 20 months it has been between 1 and 2%. The average mortality age has not changed. This outcome has been the case in many countries. Are you suggesting that there are bodies hidden somewhere?

An autopsy would be a good start. Also an assessment of how shortened was their life. For example the dementia patients that died were in advanced stage dementia. Reaching that stage your life expectancy is less than two years. Most of us have seen the quality of life of those that are unfortunate enough to get to that stage.

The majority of deaths were. As was the fact that all had comorbidities. Don't fall for the brainwashing that "Covid-19 cases are BAD". 99% of them aren't. For those aged under 50 Covid-19 isn't as bad as influenza.

Australia is Falling Apart 27 August 2021 by Guy de la Bédoyère Steve Waterson’s latest piece in the Daily Sceptic provoked me to finish an essay I’ve been putting together for a while. As an historian, what really strikes me now is how brief the Covid crisis has been so far. Yes, I know it seems like 500 years since we were last able to travel freely and not hear about the pandemic on the nightly news. But in historical terms this is nothing. What will define the era is the social, political, and economic fallout and, trust me, that’s barely started. Governments are going to fall, millions of people are going to be ruined while others make fortunes, and some countries are going to disintegrate. But when, where or how is yet to be seen. This will take years – decades – but I think you can see the signs of fragmentation and epic change already – almost all self-inflicted as a result of the hysteria that has consumed us since early 2020. Let me make it clear from the outset: I love Australia. I’ve been there several times and travelled long distances. My maternal grandfather, whom I never met, died in Sydney. Two of his brothers died out there. I have lots of relatives in Australia and many close friends in places as far apart as Wodonga VIC and Denmark WA. I’ve constantly discussed with them what has been going on, and only escaped myself in late March 2020 on one of the last flights out of Perth. I was in the process of writing this piece when another article, this time by a pharmaceutical executive, about the terrible predicament Australia and New Zealand have placed themselves in, appeared on the Daily Sceptic. I decided to press on, because I hope this will complement that piece by showing just how dangerous that predicament is. I have watched with apprehension and astonishment at the direction Australia and New Zealand have travelled in the last 18 months. One thing I know very well is that those in the present never learn from the past. It’s also true that the past does not determine the future. I’m not in the business of predicting what will happen. There’s been too much of that since the Covid crisis broke and much of it has been wrong. But we can see what might happen or what could now happen. Early in this crisis, I wrote a piece for this site called Britain’s Covid Reich. In it I explained a central tenet of the totalitarian state: intolerance of diversity. This is an environment in which any variance from the state’s ideology is seen as a threat to the state. I had not envisaged when I wrote it that 15 months later I would be looking at a country on the other side of the world heading even further down that road. Not only that, but it looks dangerously like a country that could fall apart. Both Australia and New Zealand have hitherto bought into the zero-Covid crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, though at least some Australian politicians, and quite a few of their subjects (the best word for them now), have woken up to the realisation that there is no future in that policy. But so far much of what their national and regional governments have done has been justified by claims that zero-Covid will be the outcome. But the pandemic has created, and been allowed to create, destabilising circumstances that may be epoch-changing. We haven’t even yet reached the point in most countries where it is time for a major election. When the Black Death hit in the middle of the 14th century, the impact in terms of deaths, reaching up to half the population, was obvious. It took generations for the social, political, and economic effects to reveal themselves fully. We can already see how political opportunism has taken hold, especially in the United Kingdom where the SNP has fallen over itself to exploit Covid for its own advantage, despite the fact that its measures have been even less effective than in England. Now in the second Covid year, far from opening up, more and more countries are seeking opportunities to restrict access. The consequences are likely to be parochialism, ignorance, border tensions, and ever more friction over resources. My fear though is that Australia, of all the developed modern democratic states, has set out down a path that could in extremis result in the country breaking apart. Let’s not beat about the bush (a more appropriate term for Australia than anywhere else). This is a country that already teeters on the brink of viability. Natural disasters have the potential to destroy large swathes of Australia’s agriculture on a permanent basis. The country has never developed industry to a level that could serve it properly, preferring to rely on selling natural resources to China to make into things that get sent back to Australia. The national infrastructure is ramshackle. It was already the case that the individual states are more interested in their own futures than the country’s. That’s especially evident in WA, marginalised by Australian national politics. Australia is to some extent only a nation in name. Western Australia, one of the least populous states, is also the largest. Apart from air travel, it is connected to the rest of Australia by a few scrappy roads, easily taken out by a single cyclone, and one railway. For years its colossal mineral resources have bankrolled the country’s wealth. That has caused no end of frustration to Western Australia which benefits less than most states from any federal handouts. Few Australians from the rest of the country ever bother with going to WA. There is little love lost between WA and the eastern states. There is therefore an incipient sense of nationalism in Western Australia. It’s no more than a conceit at the moment, but Covid is accelerating the sense of frustration. Only now is the federal Government getting it together with the vaccine rollout and desperately trying to roll back the terrible mess it’s made. The chaotic response exhibited until recently has not been Australia’s finest honour. The fiasco has ridden on the back of the zero-Covid fantasy, a Land-That-Might-Have-Been. I had this from a relative in Queensland, a senior academic in the university there: In the midst of all this, WA is no hotbed of freedom. The state (which has a huge ex-pat British population) has been as keen on lockdowns as any other (though it has had remarkably few lockdown days – about 12 compared to Victoria’s 160+). But as Delta has taken a foothold in Victoria and New South Wales, WA has battened down its hatches further. WA is essentially closed to the rest of the country, desperate to keep Covid out at any price and terrified of what might happen if it gets in. The individual states are asserting their autonomy and doing so with ever more strident bio-authoritarian measures, some buying deeper into zero-Covid. The destruction of individual freedoms in Australia and the epic speed with which that has happened has no parallel in the modern world in a modern democratic state. Yes, I know these have been hitherto widely welcomed by Australians, but you’d have to be spectacularly naïve to think that such support will necessarily be sustained. In 1943, Germany was full of people who fanatically supported the Nazis. Two years later the country was full of people shaking their heads and wondering what on Earth they’d been thinking. The other day James Delingpole and Toby made a podcast in which they discussed Australia. They focused on Dan Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, and wondered how such an ordinary person could have become such a leader passing one arbitrary measure after another and speaking furiously about anyone who dares to challenge him. The prohibition in Victoria on mask lifting to consume alcohol has plumbed new depths, but it was only to be expected. Resorting to increasingly puerile rules is a characteristic of a beleaguered authoritarian regime and marks the point where punishing the people and hurling abuse at them for their treachery and failings is the last resort. It’s straight out of the totalitarian leader’s textbook and is a sign of desperation. One gathering Andrews was spitting blood about was an Orthodox Jewish engagement party. Last year I read a piece about some Orthodox Jews in New York whose views were very clearly expressed. If the choice was between following their way of life or being criminalised, they would choose the former even if it meant death. It takes a certain amount of political acumen, wisdom, knowledge, and experience to understand that. It’s a cultural lesson Dan Andrews has yet to learn. In all seriousness, it is my belief that if Australia and its states continue down this path they are already only a short distance from one or other of the administrations seeking to detain without trial, and even suspend elections ‘until the crisis is over’. This is no indulgent and silly warning produced by my overactive imagination. This is what happens in authoritarian states. Over and over again. The police in Victoria are already using protests to legitimate the severity of their own response. I’m not going to justify violence on anyone’s part, but the emergence of violent protests and the violent suppression of protests is an inevitable outcome of protracted limitations on personal freedoms. Even so, they mask what is probably far more widespread subversion. There are three possible outcomes: the crisis abates, the violence subsides and Australia goes back to normal, or the state succeeds in ramping up its controls to far more drastic levels and terrorising the population into acquiescence, or, in response to the suppression, the violence escalates to a far more serious and potentially fatal level in one city or another, attracting wider support and tipping towards the point of popular revolt. Right now in Australia Covid is starting to drift out of control. The reality that Delta cannot be restrained without turning every house into a prison cell is just starting to sink in. It means the core justification of the measures, the utopia of zero-Covid, cannot be attained. Ever. In the meantime at the very least WA is on a path that, if the crisis doesn’t fade, could one day lead to a secessionist movement. If that sounds ludicrous, you only need to consider the SNP’s secessionist dream, openly espoused and given huge momentum by capitalising on Covid. As a WA friend has just said to me: “We’ve never mattered over here.” When it comes to national elections all the votes are in Victoria and New South Wales. Western Australia is now proudly seeing itself as ‘Fortress WA’. Even compassionate reasons to cross the border from the east are disregarded, though needless to say politicians can move around freely. The tension is rising with the other states, but the premier Mark McGowan is sticking to his guns because as far as he is concerned life is normal in his state – if you can call life ‘normal’ in a place you cannot leave. There’s a lurking fear that the clock is ticking with Delta, but right now WA seems content to make hay while the sun shines, locked away in a paradise cut off from the rest of the world (and some of WA is a paradise, believe me). The economy is doing just fine – apparently. And most of the voters are on message. “The Covid situation seems to have enhanced that sense of Western Australia doing it itself and going its own way,” says University of Western Australia Social Demographer Amanda Davies. There’s a subtext though. WA’s hospitals are already in crisis. A Covid outbreak could cripple the system. WA’s stance and the mess elsewhere in Australia under the oppressive controls on movement and protest are leading to a pivotal moment in the nation’s history and with implications for the rest of the world. I make no prediction about what will happen. What I do know about authoritarian states is that, unless checked, they eventually become even more ruthlessly authoritarian, aided and abetted by part of their terrorised populations, or they collapse and their leaders end up either vilified, in prison, or at worst executed. Ultimately they always collapse. It’s only a question of time and Australia’s clock is ticking. Is change afoot? Gideon Rozner, an Australian at the Institute of Public Affairs, insisted in his piece in the Telegraph: “We Australians are sick of the zero-Covid delusion and the country’s ‘epidemiological time warp’.” The latest news is that Qantas is wheeling its A380s out of storage and cranking them up for a restart in December for flights to the U.S. and the U.K. The Chief Executive Alan Joyce says: “Public sentiment is changing dramatically. People are saying ‘we need to have a path out of Covid, a path back to our pre-Covid lives’.” Is he right? I certainly hope so, but Alan Joyce is really talking about the eastern states. WA for the moment is reading from another script. The stakes have never been higher, and especially for Australia as a country which it has only been since 1901. Here we see enshrined the potential fallout of Covid and the ruinous attempts to control it, as divergent interests and different priorities take over, whether in Australia or countless other places. It falls to only a few years to be turning points in world history. 2020 is going to be one of them but all bets should be off for now when it comes to the shape of things to come.

So if it could do that time with that run in NZ would it win races?