Novacc Djocovid Gets Kicked Out

 Djoyless In Shtraya

The game where nobody is a winner, rounded into the third round as Novak Djokovic and his lawyers went to appeal the decision made to kick him out of the country. The court sat today, and Djokovic lost. He is due to be deported tonight - but not before some more brouhaha.

During the week renegade dickhead MP Craig Kelly was out there arguing that Djokovic was a political prisoner which made me laugh. Kelly was firmly behind the Coalition Government's stance on tough borders when he was with the Liberal Party. The only reason he's out there saying crap like this is because he's an anti-vaxer and so is Djokovic. 

Here's a sensible opinion piece in the whole thing by Van Badham. 

When the pandemic took hold in March 2020, Australia’s federal government shut international borders to control its spread — but made no provision for the tens of thousands of stranded Aussiesstuck overseas who wanted to come home. As Mr. Morrison dumped more pandemic management responsibilities onto the states, they enforced their own domestic borders. When these policies were combined with lockdowns, loved ones were separated for months at a time.

Only when states reached 80 percent vaccination rates were border protections relaxed — some as recently as only this week. The Morrison government’s failure to order enough vaccines for the population resulted in a rollout popularly referred to as a strollout. The process of social repair has been long and difficult.

So when ordinary Australians saw an unvaccinated tennis champion bragging on Instagram of a mysterious “exemption permission” that allowed him to traipse across the border, that went down like a lead balloon.

Anyway, here's what we know:

The three-judge panel of the Federal Court ruled unanimously against the tennis World No.1 on Sunday evening, after hearing his case in an extraordinary out-of-hours sitting earlier in the day.
He has been ordered to pay the costs of the federal government in running the case, while judges did not provide reasons for their decisions but said they would do so in the coming days.

So three justice were woken up on a Sunday morning to go preside over this shitshow, and judging from the photos, they look none too pleased about that. The Chef Justice said they were there to review whether the Federal government had made an irrational decision as to render the decision unlawful - and sure enough the justices could not find such a case. 

You can't help but think all of this was avoidable if Novak Djokovic could rise above his name and get the damn vaccine. I guess the less stupid party - the Australian Government - won, and there's something to be commended in that. Thank you learned Justices.  

Life Under Covid, Year 3

Unpacking Domicron Perrottet's Fateful Decision 

The conservative (small c here) thing to have done  with respect to the pandemic as it stood, coming out of lockdown in NSW would have been to maintain some of the controls in place. This isn't a controversial thing to say. After all, the whole point of the response to the pandemic carried out by governments has been to mitigate risks of infections spreading. All this talk of needing to "flatten the curve" back in 2020 as well as the QR codes used to track the comings and goings of citizens (and in the process the citizens giving up their privacy in exchange) as well as restricting numbers of people at indoor events and so on was to ensure the pandemic did not go out of control. It seems crazy to have to write this out, but the reason I have to say small-c conservative is because the capital-C Conservative leaders of NSW then let go of controls.

Ever since the fateful decision on15 December 2021, the pandemic has been out of control. Having no controls in place immediately led to the explosion of numbers as well as long queues at PCR testing sites. By the end of the week Rapid Antigen Testing kits were sold out everywhere. Just about every place anybody went to for food pharmaceuticals would lead to a belated alert days later that they might have been exposed to COVID-19. For 8 days the NSW government let the virus have its way with its population.

And the mind boggles as to why people claiming to be conservative in nature and practice would want to do such a thing. The only explanation is that they were not conservative at all, and were in fact libertarians. Perhaps they may even be capital-l Libertarians of the variety we might abhor - for it is hard to recall an election whereby we voted in a Libertarian government. This then, was the moment the nut job far right libertarians of NSW had finally obtained controls to the levers of government. What they did with it was tear a gaping hole in the fabric of society and then pretend this was some kind of state of natural law. 

It is deplorable and abhorrent - but it seems to be what we are living with. As such I wish to exercise my libertarian choices right back at them and no longer pay any taxes. What's the point of paying into a government that doesn't look after you in a time of crisis at all? 

How My Christmas And New Years Went Down

Thanks to Perrotet and Hazzard-the-Buzzard I was too leery to go watch the one movie I had been waiting for all year, 'Spider-Man: No Way Home'. I still haven't watched it. I hear the cinemas are still packed - which sounds like infection clusters waiting to explode. 

At close to midnight on Christmas my better half got a notification that she was in contact with somebody who was positive, only 3 days before. So on early Boxing Day we decided to go get a PCR test even though we were asymptomatic, only to find the queue to the local testing clinic a mile long. Sensibly - I must say - we decided we shouldn't wait for a PCR test when we were likely not going to test positive, which was a call I made based on common sense and the dread of sitting in a car inching towards a PCR test for 3-4 hours. Instead, we opted to go to the local pharmacy to see if they had RAT kits and of course, they were sold out. In the 1 minute I was there to ascertain they didn't have them and everybody was sold out, I would get a notification 3 days later. 

Naturally as the regulations would have it, we sat in self isolation monitoring our non-existent symptoms for 7 days, and watched a lot of TV. I think we got to the end of Season 6 of 'Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.',  a show we had been watching on and off for some months. We even got through the final 10 episodes of Vikings Season 6 and then New Years came rolling in. 

We only staggered out on the 3rd January to get some meat at the butchers - because hey supermarkets have run out. I did manage to get my Moderna booster shot that day, with was a highlight. No side effects, so that was good. On the 4th I visited my sister's place to learn about managing quails. Later that night we got pinged with a notification again for that visit to the butcher. That meant we were still monitoring symptoms until the 10th and really only got out that night. I fed some quails that night. 

It's been real, y'all.  

'Personal Responsibility' Says The Guy Who Takes None

Amid this turmoil in NSW which has now led to the turmoil of all Australia, we had the personally irresponsible Prime Minister Scomo the Lame-o declare it was all a matter of personal responsibility now. It sounds good, but it would have helped to have made taking that responsibility a feasible thing. As it is, the RAT kits are nowhere to be found and when you can get them, the price gouging is pretty steep. 

The way taking personal responsibility has worked out for me is to essentially go back into lockdown on my own account to the extent that is permissible and sustainable. I feel sorry for people who cannot avoid going out to work, and I'm completely basking the luxury of being able to self isolate as much as I can. Yet, to be told by this incompetent Prime Minister that it's all on my responsibility ledger now is a bit rich. 

This is the same Prime Minister who ran off to Hawaii during the 2019 bushfire crisis. 

I don't see these coalition governments - Federal and NSW - surviving the next election, but I felt the same way in 2019, so I don't know what to think any more. Clearly I live in a country with an idiot electorate. We've got to vote out these jokers. 

Speaking of Jokers

This business of Novak Djokovic and his no-vax ways is to put it mildly, a sick joke. 

First, he's a champion that not many people have warmed to because he's a Serbian asshole. To make things worse, while he's a great player but he is also an anti-vaxer. The second part sort of rules him out of visiting Australia during the pandemic - because that's the law. Then, he gets some kind of exemption because he's a tennis champ and really, the Australian Open really needs its drawcards right now. But Scomo and Border Force are natural born cunts so he gets pinged like some refugee (hilarious). He goes and stays in the quarantine facility with real refugees while his case is heard in court. The judge is a tennis fan and says he can stay, and that Border Force were out of line. And yet somehow the Minister in charge of border bullies Alex Hawke has the option to send him packing. Will he or won't he? Stay tuned. *gag*

The twists and turns are like a bad soap opera. Nobody except Serbian Anti-vaxers seem to like this guy - but people still want him to hit the ball at the Australian Open. It's a mystery who we're supposed to root for in this miserable story. That, in a nutshell is life during the pandemic in Australia, year 3.   

Up And Down With The Numbers

Curious, No?

The markets go up and then they go down. Over a long period of time, they tend to go up a certain percentage - and so if you're wise to it, you should just go put your money in indexed ETFs. Warren Buffett even claimed that his wife's ETFs did better than Berkshire Hathaway during the 2010s after the GFC. It may well be true, I don't quite have the means to verify the Berkshire Hathaway end of it. 

Still a quick look at the last 5 years of the S&P 500 tells an interesting story:

So at the end of 2018, it hit a little divot of sorts and was at 2416.62. from there, it climbed to 3380.16 on 14 Feb 2020 when the pandemic hit. It tumbled through march but recovered quickly, responding to the incredibly loose monetary conditions and has been climbing steadily ever since. The most recent peak was on New yers eve at 4766.16. Roughly double from the divot I mentioned. All in a span of 36 months. If you bought ETFs for S&P500 in December 2018, you'd be larfin' hard right now. How extraordinary is this? It took from Feb 1998 to Sep 2014 for the index to go from 1000 to 2000. Doubling your money in 36months is like, I dunno, Sydney real estate?

It makes you realise that what we're looking at is quite extraordinary, and probably tied closely to the extremely low interest rates and Quantitative Easing program run out of the US Fed - the Bernanke Put, so to speak - which was carried on by Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell most dutifully. All that money that was supposed to prop up the economy essentially propped up and rocket-launched the equities market instead. It went on for most of last decade.  

So people have been wondering about the inflation rate over in the USA because since about April 2021, we've seen it go up to 4.2%and then stay above 5%, and now creeping up to 6.8%. The original explanation was that it was the supply chain problems caused by the pandemic. However, more recently the explanation has turned into this being a serious bit of inflation thanks to the Fed printing money. For that to be true, I want to know where all this inflation was between Jan 2007 and March 2021 because if there was one thing the US Fed could not get up, it was the inflation rate. 14 years of the Bernanke Put and no inflation. Then the Pandemic came along and screwed trade and flow of goods, so now you've got inflation. 

Do we honestly think this bit of inflation is because the Fed is printing too much money and wage claims are rising? Come on - I haven't seen wages rising in the 5-10% range at all. At worst, some states raised the US minimum wage in 2021. The way the commentary is going, you would think that the lowly paid got double their money, but really, it's equity holders who got to double their money. The minimum pay raise looks like this. Sad. Clearly nobody doubled their money and a lot of places didn't budge from their paltry $7.25 an hour. You can rule out wage claims as the reason for the CPI rising in the USA. 

And yet the narrative is out there. The Fed's printed too much money so that's why there's this inflation. They ant the US Fed to cut back the QE thing and raise interest rates. It reads like equity traders and investors wanting to have a crash so they can buy back in. They're coming up with any old story to put pressure on the US Federal Reserve Bank to raise rates. They may come to rue what they wished for, because all those beautiful gains in the S&P500 just might come tumbling down when the rates start going up. Just remember, blaming the QE for the inflation that causes the rate spike is a lie.