The Scummo Legacy

What’ll Scott Morrison, erstwhile (disastrous, devious, and deceitful) PM of Australia, be remembered for?

Situations like this one. He cut the heart and soul out of income supports for disabled people, pensioners, and job seekers, he pursued the most defenceless people with automated and almost always unjustified dunning letters, threatening letters that actually caused some hopeless (and may we add totally blameless) recipients to commit suicide; for the BIGGEST fire disaster season ever known, he dodged giving support to people who were made homeless, injured, or suffered life-altering consequences as a result of the fires – and then went right on to do the exact same thing to victims of flooding – also some of the WORST flood events in Australia’s written history.

And then along came COVID and he was in his element. And while he showed a complete disregard bordering on contempt for the people of the country who were relying on him and his government to arrange vaccines and treatments and quarantines, he was a veritable SAVIOUR to the big businesses and corporations that paid handsomely for his raw “salmonella chicken” curries and delicacies flown in from all over for his photo opportunities. . .

And (back to the first story now, where I started off) thanks to his complete cockup in handling COVID and COVID research and COVID studies and COVID pharmaceuticals, he created this situation where all those long COVID (and even mild COVID) aftereffects were ignored and buried under bullshit like “Scott The Welder” and “Scott The Hand Manhandler” and “Hold Hoses? – Nott Scott!” and all the other complete bullshit that accompanied the most despicable excuse for a human being in Australian history – and THAT’S saying something if you know Australia’s colourful history

We’re now finding out that ANY level of COVID causes changes in the brain, things like verbal compreh- … Look, I’ll just pull a few quotes out of the article for you:

“…brain regions are linked with fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches and cognitive problems…”

and

“…the left orbital-inferior frontal gyrus (a key region for language comprehension and production) and right orbital-inferior frontal gyrus (associated with various cognitive functions including attention, motor inhibition and imagery, as well as social cognitive processes)…”

(bold text highlighted by me for clarity)

— https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/

In the first case, there are several groups already affected by fatigue, insomnia, anxiety, depression, headaches and cognitive problems – people with ADHD, autism, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia – to whom any worsening of these symptoms could amount to quality-of-life-destroying effects.

Ms LaVelle is now caught up in the deliberate ignorance directed at COVID by Mr Morrison, and also by the cruel greedy cuts to welfare and support payments he signed off on in his spell in government. And there’ll be tens of thousands of people in Ms LaVelle’s situation going forward.

Viruses mutate when they transfer from host to host. This is why you catch flu year after year, because it mutates enough to evade your immune system. But the variability is not so wide as to radically alter the effects of the flu. Flu vaccinations help because they train your immune system to the most common of the current flu variations, but every time you catch flu it’s because it’s mutated enough that your immune system doesn’t recognise the new strain.

Some viruses have little effect – a “mild” flu – and some are demonstrably worse – Influenza A and Influenza B caused a bit of trouble in the 90s and 00s – and Spanish Flu was just a variant that had worse effects than most. And yet it’s been shown that EVERY flu you catch damages one or more organs, to some varying degree. For some infections, there’ll be only quite mild damage to organs. (Note though that even a common cold can cause you to rupture blood vessels when you sneeze – the classic blood nose – which leaves those blood vessels a bit weaker.)

For some infections, once your immune system has experienced the infective agent it’ll recognise it for a long time and protect you. This is the classical view of immunology and you can think of it as an umbrella for the particular virus.

But for highly variable infections such as COVID, you can think of the infection as being more like a bullet. Some are small and do little damage to anything, some are big and leave you with permanent lung or brain injuries, and some are shotgun shells full of projectiles, but your body is going to have a hard time shielding you when every re-infection is a roll of the dice. AND YOU’VE BEEN SHOT. There will be damage.

Because of its variability at evading the immune system without affecting its core damaging payload, COVID is far, far, FAR from over. It’s currently running at 5x to 15x the rate (depending which figures you look at – the main thing to note is that they ALL show a relatively large increase in COVID activity) that it was at the height of the “pandemic” and we will never see individual immunity, no herd immunity, and eradication by whatever means necessary is now our only hope.

It’s on! The COVIDocalypse.

And that brings us to the last highlight in the quotes above – social cognitive processes. It affects how a COVID survivor interacts with their society, and generally not in a good way. All you have to do there is check your social media circles – divide them into cautious maskers and reckless refusers.

Now survey and find out which ones have had COVID and which ones haven’t, in each group. I did it for my social; graph a few months ago. I searched for messages to do with masks, vaccinations, COVID, lockdown – most of the keywords you’d expect – using online sites. My eyeballed evaluation has given me the expectation that of the cautious socially-responsible group, around three-quarters had never had COVID whereas that was only about a quarter of the reckless group.

NB: this is my best “guesstimate” only and not a formal survey.

But if you catch COVID your cognitive functioning will be impacted so you’ll do slightly less critical thinking. And your social functions will be impacted, so you’ll feel less social responsibility to quarantine and not infect others, and you’ll worry about it less.

Welcome to The Anthropocene Zombie Apocalypse. Australian chapter brought to you by right wing greed and sociopathy, with especial mention of the most despicable little worm of a man who ran it into the ground for a while.


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(And good luck figuring out whether this is a COVID rant or a political one. Perhaps take it as a “porque no las dos?” article. From someone that hasn’t caught COVID nor neoliberal freemarket capitalism. )

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