Having reached 50 000 pages views I thought I had better write something new. Below is a photo of Wellington harbour taken in summer this year. I have actually moved out of the central city since then, and am now about 50 kilometres north, but not out of danger. The whole region is back on alert, even though there has never been a Covid case in this area.

This is because of the most recent Covid 19 scare. An Australian tourist visited town the previous weekend, then returned home and had a positive test. And, of course, a single case means that the so-called alert level has to be raised, thousands of people have been tested, and major events have been cancelled, such as the Wellington marathon. Now we also have all the usual academic tossers appearing in the media, raising fears of another quick lockdown.

So, as I write this we have had another day without any new cases. Yesterday the Minister for Covid restrictions extended the so-called Level 2 Alert, despite the fact there is not a sign of any community transmission. Apparently there is more time needed to be sure. The really annoying thing is that the academic tossers are keeping on the pressure for new restrictions, based on what happens overseas. The tosser in chief, Michael Baker, claims that overseas countries are ahead of us on mask-wearing. But that is because they have completely failed to ‘eliminate’ the virus, and thus face wave after wave of new variants. It was Baker that was the architect of Elimination, which only works if the borders remain closed. Where New Zealand is behind is on vaccination, even the elderly have not been successfully vaccinated here, and if more resources had been put into this, rather than pointless testing, we would still be ahead.

You also have to wonder what people like Professor Baker actually do in a university, and how he keeps up with all his responsibilities for supervision. I have a very jaundiced view of this, having tried for may years to do post-graduate research with academics who could not be bothered most of the time. Maybe the real scientists are more conscientious than the so-called social scientists. But research supervision actually takes time, and Baker does so much media and public meetings, that he can’t possible be supervising students as well. Of course, if I had not been left to my own devices for 6 months at a time while doing a PhD at the Auckland University of Technology, the blog would not have been started, and an attempt at local tax haven research made, though it was ignored in Wellington and in the media.