Wow, it's hard to believe that it's been weeks since the last time I checked in here. Where has the time gone? … Well … let's reflect on that, shall we …
To start with, I've been writing a hell of a lot of Javascript code—which may sound like a shitty thing to be doing, but hey, at least I'm not stuck writing ASP or C#, right? (Yeah, I know, that joke's not going to mean anything to anybody who actually reads it). It's funny how things change though, isn't it? I wrote a post years ago, talking about how, despite the industry-wide dominance of Python as a general-purpose scripting language, I still had a soft spot for Perl. Now, several years, and thousands of lines of Python code later, I can't think of a single situation where I'd choose to use Perl. And yes, even Javascript's starting to grow on me.
… Yeah, alright, I'll can the nerd talk now, okay?
In all seriousness though, it is good to be able to work from home, especially at a time like this. Of course, the flip side of working in isolation is that once you get some momentum going, it's easy to just keep working around the clock without stopping. Thankfully, I've been prevented from overdoing it by the thousands of phone-calls I've been getting from house-bound rellies with nothing better to do. Y'know, I'm not even surprised by the aunts and uncles, but there's cousins I haven't spoken to in years, who've been ringing up, just to chat. I would have thought that in this era of Facebook, video games, and Netflix, people would have enough distractions on hand to keep themselves occupied indefinitely. Obviously, I was erroneous in this assumption. Of course, the sporadic internet slowdowns—and in some cases, complete outages—probably haven't been helping in that regard.
So yes, I have heard many, many, many tales of woe, from people all over the country who have been unable to purchase dunny roll. Thankfully, this hasn't posed much of a problem for me personally. Having been through a few major floods and things, I tend to keep a stockpile of food, medicine, cash, and other essentials on hand anyway—y'know, just in case. However, I have noticed that switching from fresh vegetables to canned goods has had a negative impact on both my mood and energy levels. Hasn't done much for my bowels, either, unfortunately. Still, could be worse, I suppose.
Actually, scratch that, it has been worse. I've also been battling a bad case of hay-fever—which is really unusual for this time of year. It's also been unusual in its severity. The first couple of days were the kind where you have to tie a towel around your face to soak up the constant, unrelenting rivers of snot. Mercifully, it's under control now, thanks to some fancy 24hr allergy relief pills I found at the back of the cupboard—which were only a couple of years out of date. Interestingly, virtually all my rellies from Southern Queensland have told me that they and people they know have had severe bouts of hay-fever recently too. Very curious indeed. Obviously, something's in the air.
The other thing that's been dragging on and causing a pain in my arse, is that my parents have finally bought their retirement home. For those who don't know, the plan is for me to move in and look after them as they get into their twilight years. This whole process should have been relatively straight forward—after all, they have enough in savings to have bought the property four times over. However, since their savings are currently generating far more in earnings than they're going to pay back in interest, they decided to borrow the money. Unfortunately, since the royal commission, the banks seem to have gotten quite picky in regards to the circumstances under which they lend. And it's not like they just give you a list of criteria you've got to meet in order to get a loan—oh no—they give you a single criteria, and if you meet that, then they give you another one, and once you meet that, they give you another one, and so on and so forth—and as you go on, the hoops you've got to jump through get progressively more ridiculous. At one point, they informed my parents that they had "too many accounts", and that they would have to close one in order to get approval. After closing an account (at a different bank), they were then informed that they would need a written statement confirming that the account had been closed. So they returned to the other bank, only to be told that the branch office didn't have a printer, so the manager gave them a hand-written statement. This was rejected by the bank issuing the loan, so they had to wait two weeks to get a printed statement sent out from the head office in Brisbane.
This has all been compounded by the fact that my folks insist on doing everything face to face, but live in a little country town where all the banks have long since closed their local branches—so every single one of these meetings has required hundreds of kilometres of car travel; which I have, of course, been roped into, since I agreed to help them out with everything. Stack on top of that, the fallout from a global pandemic—but keep in mind that this whole bloody rigmarole started well before anybody in Australia was talking about fucking Corona virus—and you're probably starting to get some idea of what I've been dealing with over the last couple of months.
Now, let's talk about the pandemic itself, shall we? …
Y'know, I can't decide whether I'm more disgusted with the government, who left the borders open, in a ridiculous and self-defeating attempt to protect this "house of cards" economy that they've spent the last fifty years constructing; or the "woke" left, who spent their time talking about how racist borders are, and promoting stupid street stunts, like the "hug a Chinaman" campaign.
Actually, yes I can. I'm more disgusted with the woke left, because at least with the government, I wasn't expecting any more from them than what I got. At this point, I think I can honestly say that woke lefties are up there with libertarians as having the political philosophy that I despise most. Yes, I really do think that I'd rather live under an Islamic theocracy than contend with these fuckheads.
If temporarily closing your borders to stop the spread of disease is the new measure for what's considered racism, than I'm at a point where I'm willing to wear that label out of sheer spite. Not only am I considering changing my name from Alex to "Racist" via deed poll, I'm also launching a campaign for a referendum to rename the country "The Radically Racist Republic of Australia", and have started penning a new national anthem, tentatively titled "We're really, really, really, really, racist here, and if you don't like it, you can fuck off!" I'm thinking it should have a sort of pub-rock vibe to it, but I'm open to suggestions. And you can forget about asking whether or not it even makes sense for a person with my background to be promoting explicit racism as a political ideology; my utter loathing of these wretched cunts transcends all boundaries of logic and reason.
Having said that, the weaselly pricks on the other side of the isle haven't escaped my ire either. I'm not buying any of this song and dance where they point the finger at China and whinge about their disgusting culinary practices, or not being told sooner how serious the illness was. Bullshit. I knew how serious it was weeks before it got here, and all I had to go on was international news reports and a few podcasts. And if I fuckin' knew, the people in power absolutely fuckin' knew; the obfuscating turds.
Look, it's up to the Chinese to decide how they want to run their country. If they want to have market places where they sell bat soup and boil live dogs, I don't care. … well … look, I'm not going to condone it, but I'm not going to jump up and down and demand they change their ways either. What I am going to concern myself with is how Australia is being run—and it wasn't China that forced us to de-industrialise and move to a service-based economy. They didn't force us to become reliant on them for manufacturing; they didn't force us to privatise vital services and infrastructure; they didn't force us to let them come in and buy up everything they could get their hands on; and they didn't force us to make our universities reliant on overseas students. That was a succession of shitty decisions, made by a succession of shitty politicians, belonging to a succession of shitty governments.
A pox on all their houses.
And speaking of privatising vital services, let's talk about Qantas, shall we. What was the problem with having a state owned airline anyway—other than that it offended neo-liberal sensibilities? What we've got now is a "private" company that pays little to no tax, benefits from all kinds of subsidies and needs to run to the government for bailouts and concessions every few years. Well, fuck 'em. In my opinion, what they should have done was closed the borders, let Qantas go bankrupt, re-nationalised it, and then told that leech running it to fuck off back to Ireland. Explain to me why that would have been a bad idea.
Oh, and can I also point out how conventional economics has been revealed for the complete load of shit that it actually is. For years, conservatives have been telling us "You can't just print money without causing hyper-inflation." Of course, we all saw what a fucking crock that was in 2008. This time around, the American reserve is injecting a minimum of six trillion dollars into the Yank economy. Yes, those are dollars that were just made up out of thin air. The truth is that once you run a fully fiat monetary system, you fight inflation by strategically destroying money when and where you need to, but you don't actually need to run a balanced budget, and all this crap about surpluses, is nothing more than a fuckin' dog and pony show.
Oh, and before I forget, happy Easter everybody. Did that mongrel flea-bitten bunny find you alright? Did he wash his grubby little paws thoroughly before handling your choccies?
