kgwilson

The older 747s do blow a bit of smoke but most of the modern high bypass turbofans burn quite cleanly. The smoke indicates an incomplete fuel burn which is not only inefficient but costly.

He's got more faith in our assorted governments than I have. I do hope he is right though.

Two campervans with 8 people stopped at our local cafe this morning. I was chatting at the time to the owner who was setting up for takeaways. We were about 10 metres apart. They all just went and sat at a large outdoor table laughing etc in very close proximity to one another. They were all young European backpacker style people & said they were off to Byron Bay then Queensland. Jeff the cafe owner scolded them about their cavalier attitude & said he could only provide takeaways & they could only come in 1 at a time. He also said Byron Bay would have no facilities open & they would not get in to Qld & advised them to go to Yamba or Angourie where it was quieter & they could wait out the impending lockdown. One said we've got 6 month visas so we are allowed to go where we like. Jeff & I told them in no uncertain terms that they had better begin to act responsibly and listen to the radio, check the news on their phones etc. They just got up sneered at us & left. They had no idea. How many others are there out there with such attitudes. It is a very scary thought.

I attached the source to the initial post. It is the Lancet Medical Journal. Very technical so not easy to read from a lay perspective. The information is from the conclusion section of that paper.

Crikey if I manage to go for a fly tomorrow I might be headline news in the local rag.

Our stocks crashed, we get <1.0% on any fixed deposits, and our Superannuation is stuffed. Fires and floods. And now a virus pandemic. The down turn is hitting everybody really hard! Things couldn’t be much worse judging by this: In NY I saw a Mormon with only one wife. Exxon-Mobil lays off 25 US Congressmen. If the bank returns your cheque marked "Insufficient Funds," you call them and ask if they meant you or them. McDonald's is selling the 1/4 ouncer. Angelina Jolie adopted a child from America. My cousin had an exorcism but couldn't afford to pay for it, so they re-possessed her. A truckload of Germans was caught sneaking into Syria. A picture is now only worth 200 words. The Treasure Island Casino in Las Vegas is now managed by Somali pirates. And, finally... I was so depressed last night thinking about the economy, wars, jobs, my savings, Social Security, retirement funds, etc., I called the Suicide Hotline. I got a call centre in Pakistan, and when I told them I was suicidal, they got all excited and asked if I could drive a truck.

If you don't have the virus a mask is virtually useless. Wearing a mask means you are less likely to splutter it on to someone else. Masks were not designed to stop airborne contaminants they were designed to prevent the spread of infection. The disagreements between Federal and State Pollies is ridiculous. We can't stop it. Cases are doubling every 4 days. That is exponential growth. Containment only has a slim chance. It is slowing the spread that all the lockdown measures are designed to achieve.

You don't even have to destroy them to get enough scrap alloy for Bex. Just vacuum out the fuel tanks.

The logic in my post above is that I still haven't cancelled the Wings & Wheels planned the 14th of June but have given myself another week to see how this crisis worsens before making the announcement. The infection Bell Curve is going straight up at the moment & I don't expect it will even begin to flatten in a weeks time. I hope I'm wrong.

The Olympic committee & Japan have invested billions & they are holding on to the faint hope that it will all be over by the time the games are due. Understandable but reckless according to many. I would think that within a week or so they will announce the cancellation.

This site has now become a victim. Read Ians new important notice and think how we can collectively isolate and recover.

I agree the fallout will almost certainly be economic throughout the world. Depending on how long it goes on we may end up not just in a recession but a full blown depression. That would be catastophic and I think by the time that nears there will be vaccines and cures. The French, Americans and our own research has made massive inroads in the past few weeks and it is also being worked on frantically all over the world. I doubt that it will put much of a dent in population growth. This is slowing naturally but we are still adding 80 million people a year to the global total. We do have a plan for dealing with a huge number of infections developed for dealing with a major influenza pandemic. It is 232 pages long & I have not read it but I doubt it mentions numbers. Hopefully the measures put in place will flatten the bell curve. I note on Coronavirus Update (Live): 219,217 Cases and 8,965 Deaths from COVID-19 Virus Outbreak - Worldometer that China has had only 34 new cases in the last 3 days & 8 new deaths which is very small compared to numerous other countries. The question is can we control people like an authoritarian regime can?

What about wild redneck? There's plenty available.

Today we had the largest number of new infections reported (101) and the government is now rethinking the 500 limit on gatherings & may reduce this to 10, Coles is now placing limits on egg purchases & they are perishable. There were no fresh vegies, long life milk, bog rolls paper towels, tissues, rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes & a multitude of other tinned stuff at Woolies yesterday. They'd even run out of cat litter. CAT LITTER , who lives on that? The panic and hysteria is getting worse. I finally connected to the NBN on Friday & have no landline. I told them my mobile didn't work at home but they say it will be 7 days before it is operating. That's if there is anyone still working to do it. There are now 401 cases out of 25 million people. I didn't think the panic would be so bad but it gets crazier by the hour.

Same in Australia although we were quite slow to adopt the non smoking rules compared to NZ. You are not supposed to smoke within 10 metres of a shopping centre entrance & public building & it still annoys me to find smokers there and you have to run the gauntlet while they suck on cigarettes like there is no tomorrow. The smell is quite abhorrent to me now though like many people I socially smoked back in the 60s & 70s when it was considered almost healthy

Those smoking statistics make fascinating reading. Only Argentina in South America and Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria in Africa have higher smoking rates than Australia. Almost all of Europe and Asia have very high rates. Amazingly the Indian sub continent has low smoking rates with India itself the 6th lowest in the world. I too hated being covered in smoke at every restaurant & bar in Southern Europe. I think smoking in restaurants is now banned in the UK now borne out by their relatively low rate but I doubt it anywhere else in Europe

Scott from Marketing. I hadn't taken much notice of his early life till I found he was headhunted at 30 to head the new NZ Office of Tourism & Sport. There were some ugly political scandals & he was in the middle of some million dollar secret payments to ousted chairman, deputy chair & CEO of the NZ Tourism Board & he had overstepped his authority as reported by the Auditor General. He went back to Australia a year before his contract was up. He later laid claim to the highly successful NZ tourism slogan of 100% Pure NZ but as was proven later he had nothing to do with it. He was described as a cross between Rasputin and Crocodile Dundee by the editor of the Wellington Dominion Post and dubbed ScoMo Dundee. His exploits here are even more bizarre being sacked from tourism Australia with yet another Auditor General scathing report etc. ScoMos history is continuing to repeat itself. Here is a brief look. Kangaroo Court He seems to be trying to catch up with Trump but he is probably a few thousand lies behind at the moment.

I don't think announcing he was off to the Footy on Friday night was handling anything well. Seems a bit like going to Hawaii during the bushfires to me. You have to stay ahead of the game as public sentiment rapidly changes. Cricket Australia did this but not Morrison.

Great, lets all start smoking again & die from Lung cancer instead. The government will be back in the black from the massive increase in the cigarette tax it will get.

The hype is now so intense and it seems many governments have not taken the risk seriously enough, a pandemic has now been declared and new predictions are quite concerning. e.g. Germany now believes 70% of its 83 million people will become infected. The difference between Covid-19 & the Flu is that we just don't know. Things will get worse but by how much. Again we just don't know. Will the stimulus packages work or will this eventually be known as the great 2020 depression. I hope not.

I've been making my own beer since the 1980s. I started making a basic lager with little body or flavour but you got pretty pissed. I am somewhat more refined now and make a very nice IPA and Pale Ale derivatives but of course the cost of ingredients (I only use malt, no sugar) is exponentially higher than a crappy tasteless lager. Craft Breweries are finally making an inroad in to Australias Beer drinking culture. It happened 30 years ago in my native land and I enjoy going back to Nelson (NZ) just for the beer. There were around 40 breweries at one time for a population of 50,000, some very small, but the quality of almost all was outstanding. A pale ale I enjoyed out of WA some years ago was Little Creatures. They got big & were bought by Lion which is a shame but the beer is still pretty good, (expensive though).

The scientist expelled from Canada is a woman. The one who died in Wuhan is male. The woman, her husband and several students were expelled in July last year. It is thought (no proof) that the doctor (whistleblower) the Chinese tried to suppress who died was one of those students. The theft of genetically modified pathogens from Canada and the Chinese plan to produce biological weapons is pure speculation with again no proof.

The fact that Covid-19 got out there is almost certainly a failure of the system at the Chinese laboratory and not at all deliberate. Whether or not the intention was to develop some form of Biological weapon we will probably never know. Covid-19 seems no more or less dangerous than the Flu. It is just new, there is currently no vaccine and the world wide hype has turned it into the ultimate fear of the unknown.

The official line is it jumped from Bats to humans at a Fish market in Wuhan. How? A recent research paper published in the Lancet journal (copy attached) concludes the virus is most closely related to bats, however, most bat species in Wuhan were hibernating at the time, there were none available for sale at the sea food market, there is likely to be an intermediate host that has not been identified, no animal there has so far tested positive and probably only a single human was the source. A report by the Canadian Broadcasting Commission last October that a Chinese scientist, her husband and several students were expelled from Canada in July due to a so called "Policy Breach". They were working at the only level 4 lab of the Canadian Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg and made at least 5 trips to Wuhan China at that time. Details below. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/national-microbiology-lab-scientist-investigation-china-1.5307424 It is thought that they smuggled samples back to Wuhan in China to continue development of genetically engineered viruses. This Lab is only a few blocks from the Wuhan Fish market. Covid-19 is about 30% different from the SARS virus and could not have mutated from it as there must be multiple mutations which takes a very long time to change by 30%. It seems that the Chinese Lab stuffed up and one of the scientists contracted Covid 19 & spread it at the Fish market. The reports suggest this is the Whistleblower doctor who eventually died from it. He apparently was one of the students expelled from Canada. The Chinese are silent & won't co-operate with Canada since the expulsion of the Huawei VP last year. It is entrely possible that the underlying reason is development of biological weapons. PIIS0140673620302518.pdf

The Flu kills around 400,000 people a year world wide. The great majority of these fall into the same age brackets and pre-existing conditions scenario as Covid-19. The difference is that the Flu is accepted as normal and there are vaccines for it. Even so in the Winter of 2018 80% of the Flu vaccines administered were ineffective because they had been produced for Flu strains that were no longer an issue as they had mutated into new more virulent strains.