The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

A week is a long time in politics. It is an even longer time in the Viral Times
And three weeks is an eternity
3 weeks ago there were 50 active cases of COVID 19 in Victoria. Now there are more than 800 and more than 200 confirmed new cases each day

The graph looks like a very steep U bend with peaks in March and July

It seems that the weakest link is the quarantine hotels. Most states in Australia have the army or police managing these places but Victoria for some inexplicable reason subcontracted the job out to private security firms. Probably the same dodgy sorts they outsource the refugee prison camps to.
Aside from claiming non existent security guards, it seems the real ones weren’t trained that well and some were to put it politely ‘fraternising with the enemy’

So some of these guards got infected and brought the bug into their own communities from where it spread like wildfire

Apparently it turned out to be a sufficiently big story that this outbreak was covered by the BBC and my sister in Amsterdam heard about it

( Bugs, beds and booze )


A quick fix of the recent federal government stats

It's been a quiet start to the new year over here in the wild west which certainly cannot be said for the east coast of Australia.




The photos and videos are scary enough. So the reality must be very frightening indeed. And now a wicked twist has turned up. Over the last 20 years and especially since the advent of smart phones, the internet has slowly taken over everything. It has become the main source of news and information for so many people. That's OK as long as the lights are on and the mobile phone tower infrastructure is intact. But that is no longer the case in many of the areas affected by the fires. The fires have burned down many power lines and it is far too dangerous to fix them. So even if the mobile phone network is functioning, once the batteries are gone, it has become very difficult to recharge them


The ABC local radio is one of the major sources of disaster information for when apps no longer work but most folks these days don't have old fashioned radios but use their mobile phones for that purpose. So it turns out that one of the most important and resilient channels for information is no longer reaching its intended audience.

My trusty little transistor radio is now more snap, crackle and pop than crisp and clear sound and the Radio National channel to which it is almost permanently tuned is particularly sensitive to dead zones. Basically anywhere with a lot of electrical or electronic activities such as shopping centres or bus stations are veritable dead zones. So I resort more and more to listening to programs as podcasts where the sound is much better and clearer and never just drops out due to loss of signal. But of course audio just eats phone batteries.


There have been people driven to the beach to escape the flames, skies that are pitch black in the middle of the day and trucks and cars just picked up and thrown by the wind. That is how a firefighter died just the other day.

And now Scomo wants to have an all government meeting in March to discuss the catastrophic bush fires. Greg Mullins, one of the country's most experienced firefighters wanted to have a meeting with the Prime Minister LAST March but he wasn't interested back then. Too busy cosying up to his Murdoch mates

Scomo will soon discover that the economy is a 100% fully owned subsidiary of the environment. And when that goes down in ashes and flames, the economy will not be far behind.
Now that even for people who have not lost their homes and everything, the sense of safety and normality has been shattered, shopping and buying stuff is going to be the very last thing on their minds

Strange and scary times indeed

Stolen from Ozfille

It's Truth in Advertising Time.
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Two years as Top Dog and this is all Trumble has to show for it. Sharing a bed with Bananaby Joyce and pretending that there isn't really a certain third person in the marriage

What's the point of all those brains and eloquence when at heart Trumble is little more than a spineless blobfish who dreams of being an Irukandji when he grows up just like his 'joined at the hip' best mate Donald who really is the most toxic blob on the planet

Izzie's ickle niecekins adored this little ditty and wanted to hear it again and again and again. She lived to tell the tale

In Australia you don't have to go to the zoo to see all the creepy crawlies. But the most toxic of all is the Cane Toad. Coming soon to a workplace near you!

Izzie’s been absent from Cyberia yet again. Still managed a few more days of decadent culture vulture activities but the main attraction had been the soap opera that is the Australian Labor Party and their antics in Canberra

In the old days when the Lying Rodent was at the helm, the serpent was constantly squawking about the gossip on the Hill. Used to be a Question Time junkie. Our favorite celebrities were The Rat himself, Peter Costello, Evil Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott and a certain Julia Gillard. But once Kevin 747 took office Question Time became insufferably boring. Soon gave up listening and did not return until that interesting June day in 2010 known unofficially as the Night of the Long Knives. After deposing her lord and master, the deputy prime minister took the top job, went straight into Question Time and wiped the floor with the opposition. Blood sports had never sounded so good. But then came the announcement of the federal election and Cool Julia became a wooden brain dead boring zombie, a shadow of her former snarky quick witted self. The smile became a snarl and before long she was just as boring and pathetic as her predecessors. Power does such strange and awful things to people.

But Julia was too nice. Like Barack Obama, she gave the plum position of foreign minister to her former rival. Guess she thought it would keep him busy and out of mischief. The usual thing would be to shove him onto the back bench or to give him the portfolio for Immigration and/ or Indigenous affairs which by its nature means pissing off everybody and being generally hated for being too soft on queue jumping asylum seekers or a cold and heartless bastard leaving refugees to drown at sea
The funny thing about Kevin 07 was that he got elected for not being John Howard but he actually presented himself as John Howard Lite. Sometimes the only difference looks to be a pair of bushy eyebrows and 20 something years
He turned out to be just as petty as the old lying rodent. It seems he had been plotting and scheming revenge, casting about withering icy looks and snarky comments ever since he was deposed.



In the middle of some overseas assignment he called a press conference at midnight in Washington announcing his resignation as Minister of Foreign Affairs. It just happened to coincide with prime time television news in the Eastern states of Oz.
So the gloves were off and war was declared. The first round of the big fight was 10am this morning Sydney time. Unlike in 2010, they both stayed in the ring. Last time when Julia Gillard announced her challenge to his leadership, he stepped aside and did not go to the count. Most peculiar indeed. Often a challenger will win by just one vote but old Kevin did not dare to even take his chances

Since then all sorts of dirty laundry has been washed in public. Turns out he is a bit of what is called in polite circles a ‘micromanager’. It was funny that the same accusation was made against Steve Jobs of Apple and he just came out and admitted that he was a ‘control freak and proud of it’.
Calling some one a C F seems even more socially taboo than calling them a F C***.




For some inexplicable reason, Izzie kept thinking of the house elves in connection to old Kevin and Sirius Black commenting that a good way to judge some one’s character is to observe how they treat those below them in the pecking order. By all accounts it seems that Kevin Rudd is a bit of a kiss up, kick down kind of guy.
The Mr Sheen aura started to fade when stories came out about him reducing an airhostess to tears because she did not serve his meal quick enough or having a hissy fit because a hotel did not have a hair dryer in his room. All this was long before any rumours of challenges to leadership started doing the rounds.
So it seems that anyone who had to work with him or for him did not have a good word to say and maybe that was why he did not put his hand up to be counted in the June 2010 coup
Kevin Rudd is very brainy but not wise and seems to have the emotional maturity of a three year old. The Mad Monk Tony Abbot is also supposed to be very smart too but it is impossible to believe it looking at his strutting and posturing in Parliament and his pathetic attempts at being an Iron Man Vladimir Putin wannabee. He certainly does not seem to have a single idea in that head of his. It is not for nothing that one of his many nicknames is “Dr No”

Malcolm Turnbull, the man the mad monk defeated by one vote in a leadership challenge was very smart and very suave and full of good ideas but he too had an oversized ego. In his desperation to dump dirt on Kevin Rudd who was prime minister when he was still the leader of the opposition back in June 2009 he did not do due diligence on sources associating Kevin with dodgy used car salesmen doing special mates rates.
The present prime minister does seem to be emotionally intelligent but comes across as a soulless ice queen.
Now that the drama is over, Izzie can go back to ignoring the antics on the hill. But it would be fun to have a Hofstadter’s huge plasma screen SubjuncTV so we could tweek the channels and see Australia with the mad monk at the helm. Lycra, bike helmets and membership of Opus Dei would be compulsory. The reality would be just too scary to imagine

And here's another take on the drama that is politics in Oz
The Goblet of Dire
Got such a fit of the giggles reading this and especially the prequel with the really creepy 11 years under the dominion of the Dark Lord

But Izzie thinks that Kevin is more like Percy Weasley than Harry Potter. It's a local politician Geoff Gallop who was the spitting image of the Potter boy. He resigned several years ago due to his problem with Dementors