As part of the campaign to get rid of Morrison from the leadership of the Liberal Party after the diabolically bad Newspoll numbers, Barnaby Joyce’s text message to Brittany Higgin (via a third party) from March 2021, was leaked. At the time he sent the message, Joyce was a backbencher, not having yet unseated the previous incumbent, Michael McCormack.
There is a story floating around which relates to the physicist, Albert Einstein, teaching a class. Whether it is true or not, I haven’t been able to determine. Given how many bogus quotes are attributed to Einstein, I’m sceptical of its veracity. However, the story goes like this.
Einstein is supposed to have written the following equations on a blackboard:
9 x 1 = 9
9 x 2 = 18
9 x 3 = 27
9 x 4 = 36
9 x 5 = 45
9 x 6 = 54
9 x 7 = 63
I was having discussion about how vaccination makes people much less likely to get sick and die, and a bloke, again, jumped into a thread about deaths from vaccines (as is his wont)1, and asked if “you ppl source information anywhere other than your television?” I replied: “Yeah. Science, Nature, NEJM, The Lancet, New Scientist, ATAGI, TGA, NIH, CDC, ourworldindata, worldometers, assorted universities and other scientific organisations. Where do you get yours? Craig Kelly?
Many years ago, the daughter of a family friend started up with a boyfriend who I had not met. They eventually married and had children. One new year’s eve, my family was invited to the family friends’ house for a party. When we arrived, I was the first to get to the door so I knocked and the boyfriend was the one who opened the door. The first thing he said to me was ‘I don’t like your tie’. For someone in their early teens this was enough to demolish any limited self-confidence I had.
Back in July of 2021, the Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, announced that Covid-19 had become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated”1.
The idiotic Barnaby Joyce was on Radio National with journalist Patricia Karvelas and told her that the “best test of a competent government is that people don’t die” and that Australia has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19 in the world.
Prior to a National Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had another brain fart. In a silly attempt to reduce the problems with supply chains induced by his long wished-for opening up of ‘the economy’ and its predicted concomitant massive increase in infection rates of the Omicron variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, he floated the idea of allowing children (under 18s) to drive forklifts1.
I first became aware of this some hours after it happened, and I find it hard to fathom what was going through Morrison’s mind, such as it is, when responding to a question from a journalist. At a press conference, said journalist asked Morrison what he thought about “the man that’s been charged over the death of the missing nine-year old girl”.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce says panic buying and hoarding is leading to shortages of COVID-19 rapid antigen test (RAT) kits as Australians struggle to find the kits. Joyce said 200 million tests were on their way, and that Australians should only buy what they needed. He said: “Unfortunately, people are taking vastly more home than they need” and that people should not “take more than what you require because that means someone else misses out”1.