You have to keep doing it right
Diary of the last nine hours
9.11am
In today's episode of Is Life As We Know It Gone Forever, a star lineup has been assembled in Wellington and we get to watch on the livestream.
All our favourites are there - Professor Skegg, Professor Baker, Dr Saint Ashley, the nice lady from the cover of Time, and they’re here to talk sense, so naturally some people are getting irritable as fuck.
Dude. You really are political junk mail, arent you? Take a cue from Australia’s feckless bloated sham of a leader if you can’t sit still. Scarf a burger or something.
Seriously, the message will be here in due course, and I guarantee by the end of today you’ll be moaning about having heard it too often.
Anyway yada yada yada boring sensible reasoning about why this is the way to go and now we get to the envelope opening and the winner is:
all of us, if we roll up our sleeves and in the meantime scan scan scan.
In brief: Life As We Know It cannot be restored yet, not while there is Delta in the wild, not while we are hostage to random variables.
The good news is: we have a pretty good facsimile of normal life going on here, and that's a lot more than most places are enjoying. The vaccine is light at the end of the tunnel but to get to the end of the tunnel everybody must get jabbed. Or as near to everybody as possible.
And there is no such thing as a shortcut.
Once everybody - or near to that as possible - is jabbed, we can start opening the border.
Terms of re-entry will come in one of three flavours, depending on where you're coming from:
relatively easy,
not quite so relatively easy
and:
2 weeks in MIQ, same old same old
Makes perfect sense. Sounds safe and wise. Will it play okay with people like Seymour and Hosking? Ha! Joke question!
If the government says up they say down.
If it says black they say white.
If it says only a fool would want to take a shortcut they say shortcut shortcut shortcut and kicking the back of the car seat and whining are we there yet.
The clear message of today is: not taking shortcuts has kept us protected. If you open up before the great majority are vaccinated, we can expect the sort of thing we see in Sydney and Suva. Who would want that?
Reader Caroline puts it in even blunter terms
Our great success has been to avoid the soft weak compromise, the impatient shortcut.
In lockdown there was proper money made available to people so that they were not caught - as some are in Sydney - between staying put or earning money, or - as they are in Fiji - with no money at all.
You have to do it right. You have to keep doing it right.
11.11am
Oh but it’s all very well to rhapsodise about paying people to stay put in lockdown, what about the crippling debt?
Glad you asked, Mr Sneering Clickbait Hosking. We must be one of the most indebted nations on the planet after all that borrowing mustn’t we?
Er, no. Cheers to @antihobbes for this:
Also on the topic of our 'eye-watering amount of inflation-inducing debt', that's us at the bottom there by Tuvalu
11.43am
A sponsor wants the Hurricanes to take action over shareholder board member and hundred-mile-an-hour-asshole Troy Bowker, who has been sharing his very special perspective with such expressions of goodness and wisdom as: sucking up to the Left Māori agenda and: I’m rich as fuck and don’t care what the left wing losers think.
You can buy a piece of a footy franchise.
You can buy all the lavish indulgence late capitalism offers someone who sees everything in life as a transaction.
But you cannot buy respect.
That’s determined by the way you are, and the way you act.
11.35am
Happy 50th anniversary to the album Who’s Next.
Great record. If this writing thing stops working for me, one of my backup plans is to try my hand as a hairdresser because I fancy setting up as Barber O'Reilly with a sign in the window reading Who’s Next?
On the radio this morning they were talking with my old mate Graham Reid about the album, and rock, and 1971, and he said music loomed larger in our lives in a world that was less wired, networked, live, and accessible.
It's very true. I do believe that in a more connected world I would have probably heard the words of the album The Who Live at Leeds read out loud. I would thus have accurately grasped its meaning. And consequently I would not have lifted a copy out of the bin in the Record Hunter in Collinsons Mall wondering: what's the big deal about where they live?
Last week we watched the doco 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything which you can find on your Apple TV channel. I now understand many more T Rex lyrics than I did a week ago. I also have new insights about that asshole Nixon, and deepened admiration for Angela Davis and Marvin Gaye. And Carole King sitting at a piano talking is just a joy. It's a rich exploration and altogether worth your time.
1.23pm
Disheartening news arrives for anti vaxxers wanting to believe there is an easy cure for Covid that big pharma and the globalists have been hiding and it comes in the form of the animal worm treatment Ivermectin.
Bad luck swivel eyes! Try again, grifting yellow ex-president!
The data says: nope, it don’t do shit.
2.05pm
Just in from Paris: this stuff really works. Like, really works. If you’re a policymaker with the Code Red IPCC report ringing in your ears, you should be opening the damn floodgates.
Justin Oaksford writes:
The transformation of Paris is one of the few things giving me hope these days. If you actually *build* the green infrastructure, even when people hate you, they will use it. Local elected *can* affect climate change significantly and immediately if they actually care.
3.00pm
This short film will hurt your heart.
4.20pm
Great song. Great album. But sadly we seem to keep getting fools trying to fool us again and again and......Pop up leader and Comrades Hosking and Seymour take a bow.
I play that song when the elections roll around. The true left in NZ politics is now the sole responsibility of the Greens...