Willis's Walkabouts Newsletter 112, February 2021 — A Post-Covid World

If you can't find a single thing to interest you in this newsletter, you didn't look. Do yourself a favour and have a quick browse.

Covid is here to stay. A post-covid world means getting it more or less under control and learning to live with it.

There should be enough here to keep interested people coming back for weeks but if you have limited time, here are the ones I think everyone should read.

If you are viewing this on a mobile, the newsletter and many of the links should work better in a horizontal format.

What do you see? My gmail doesn't seem to show the light blue backgound of alternate sections or the red text that I see in yahoo and outlook. Very frustrating. Suggestions welcome. You can see a properly formatted version on our website.

Restricted content. Articles marked * or ** are on restricted websites Click for more info.

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In this issue

WW Special Offers

Get in soon or miss out.

Newsletter specials

The next four offers are not otherwise on our website and are exclusive to this newsletter. You must ask for the discount when you book.

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Covid Chaos

Our world will not go back to something resembling it's pre-pandemic state before 2022. Maybe never.

WW and Covid

We still had 15 people booked in two groups on our New Year trip three weeks before it started. Only seven began the trip. We had four people booked on our Bungles in the Wet trip four days before it began. Only three got there. We ran all three groups anyway.

Mandatory quarantine or not, as long as anyone is coming to Australia (or New Zealand) from overseas, we will continue to get occasional cases of community transmission. Victoria went back into lockdown at midnight on Friday 12 February. I suspect something similar will happen again. Governments will do what they can to stamp it out before it gets away but that means those booked on any particular trip may find they can't get here. Wherever possible, we will run the trip for those who can. I will repeat the notice near the top of our Availability and Specials page.

If any border restriction prevents someone from coming on a trip they booked, we will give them a 100% refund. That's a better deal than you'll get from some large companies which will give you a credit rather than your money back.

What's Happening

Here are a few things to consider when planning your next trip outside your home state.

The Zimbabwe Event

This one deserves a section on its own. The Zimbabwe Event Everything below is a quote from the article.

Think the author is exaggerating? Consider the situation in Mexico, the 15th largest economy in the world. 'The Death Market': Oxygen Shortage Leaves Mexicans to Die at Home *. I can't help but wonder what the country will look like in another year or two.

Covid Will NOT Go Away

Variants mean the coronavirus is here to stay — but perhaps as a lesser threat **
  • "The world will have to prepare for the possibility, even the likelihood, that over the long term, the novel coronavirus will become a persistent disease threat"
  • "There is little consensus about exactly how often immunity will need to be boosted, how often vaccines will need to be updated, or how long it will take for the interplay between the virus and the immune system to settle into a steady state in which disease is less severe."

Protect Yourself

It's more than just getting a jab. New Scientist published an article The 5 best things you can do to boost the chance of a vaccine working. If you don't want to catch the disease, click the link, read the article and follow the advice.

Covid Blog

If you haven't had a look at my Covid Blog recently, have a quick scroll through. Some of the stories there are as interesting today as when they first came out.

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Dumbing Down

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Protect Yourself

Phone Scams & Cybercrime

Wasted Money

Privacy May Soon Be A Thing Of The Past

There are ways to fight back, but they do require you to make an effort.

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The Most Powerful Religion In The World

"Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. ... This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do."

The above is a quote from a two page section I copied from a book I recently read. I think the author makes a lot of sense. And, I think there is a better way, but that requires a new vision for our society. We won't get that from any politician I've heard of. I hope to have some ideas about possible alternatives in the next issue.

I tried using an OCR (optical character recognition) scan program to copy the above. It failed so badly, it was much faster for me to type the two pages by hand than to correct the scan. Does anyone know of a good OCR program that will work with most scanners?

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Short Term Pain For Long Term Gain

The Four Horsemen: How did the world get into this mess, and how do we get out of it?
This article is written from a conventional economic point of view but it makes a lot of good points.
"choices will be further complicated by the need to make tradeoffs over time, since policy measures often have different effects in the short run and the longer run. This latter consideration is of particular importance. The first human imperative is always survival. Unfortunately, this implies a bias to near-term solutions without adequate consideration of their longer-term implications. Indeed, this human bias largely accounts for our current problems."

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Apocalypse

I don't think out consumerist society is sustainable. But, before we get to that kind of collapse, there are others that might make covid look insignificant.

What Happens When GPS Fails

America Has a GPS Problem *
The system is essential but also vulnerable. We need a backup.
"China, Russia, Iran, South Korea and Saudi Arabia all have eLoran systems because they don’t want to be as vulnerable as we are to disruptions of signals from space."
Good stories of how GPS has been hacked. I don't think Australia is any better than the US.

Cyber Warfare

Some attacks may be by lone individuals. Some are undoubtedly by foreign governments.

China

Taiwan Semiconductor makes the most advanced computer chips in the world. That makes it one of the most important companies in the world. China claims Taiwan is a part of China. One small miscalculation by someone somewhere could create a disaster.

The Apocalypse Is Coming

The Apocalypse as an 'Unveiling': What Religion Teaches Us About the End Times *
  • For people of many faiths, and even none at all, it can feel lately like the end of the world is near.
  • "About 44 percent of likely voters in the United States see the coronavirus pandemic and economic meltdown as either a wake-up call to faith, a sign of God's coming judgment or both."
  • "In the United States, where Christianity is by far the dominant religion, about 40 percent of American adults believe that Jesus is definitely or probably going to return to earth by 2050, including one in five religiously unaffiliated people."
"Including one in five religiously unaffiliated people." I'm not sure what to make of that.

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Making Sense of America

If you can't make sense of the recent election or how America functions (or doesn't function) these days, these articles will all help. There are lessons here for Australia. We ignore them at our peril.

Beyond Trump

The Great Divide

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that this article was important enough to deserve a section on its own.
Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. *
What is the truth? We analyzed some of the most popular social studies textbooks used in California and Texas. Here's how political divides shape what students learn about the nation's history.
The article has a number of interesting links for those who'd like to know more.

Health in America

Crossroads: Challenges and Choices in a Low Trust World

Crossroads: Challenges and Choices in a Low Trust World
Don't scroll through too quickly or you'll miss some very important points.

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WW Website & More Trips

Website

When I'm in town, the website gets updates most weeks, sometimes several updates in a single day. Here are a few pages you might want to look at every so often.

The website remains a work in progress. We can't possibly get it perfect, but with help, we can come close. Please let us know if you find any broken links, typos or other things which you think need correcting.

Trips In Danger

We can't organise guides and transport to run trips unless we have bookings well in advance. The following trips don't yet have the bookings we need to run them. If you are interested, you need to get in soon.

Have Bookings, Need more

Our 20% advance purchase discount remains available on all of these.

Booked Out

All three of our Drysdale trips plus Karijini in April are fully booked. Contact us if you'd like to go onto a waitlist.

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Australia

Can You Make A Difference?

Yes! There are many things you can do. One of the simplest is to vote. I find that independents and minor parties almost always agree with my views more than the major parties so they get my first preferences. In the last NT election, 3 of 25 seats were decided by margins of less than 25 votes. (5, 13 and 22). In three other seats, the margin was less than the number of informal votes. The government has a majority of two. It wouldn't have taken much to change the outcome.

Australia in the World

This Fascinating World Map was Drawn Based on Country Populations
Scroll down to Asia and Oceania. Where did Australia go? The continent is completely dwarfed by neighbouring Indonesia and the Philippines.

Save the S.​A. Outback

Just as I was about to send this newsletter, someone sent me a link to a petition to Save the S.A. Outback. The petition opposes legislation which, among other things, would remove stocking limits on pastoral leases and remove scientific expertise on the Board (the current Act requires an ecologist and a soil scientist). I see it as yet one more example of short term profit at the expense of long term environmental sustainability. I signed and urge you to click the link and do the same.

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Miscellaneous Stories I Enjoyed

Music

An America I Never Really Knew

I grew up during the Civil Rights struggle in America. Someone who went to the same high school I did was murdered in Mississippi in 1964. Even so, there is an incredible amount I never knew.

Animals

A Chilling Memory

Long time readers of this newsletter might remember the saga of my nephew who was murdered while travelling in Mexico. When I read the story below, I could not help but remember what we went through. Miriam Rodriguez paid a terrible price, but she was able to bring some people to justice. The world needs more people like that.

She Stalked Her Daughter's Killers Across Mexico, One by One *
Armed with a handgun, a fake ID card and disguises, Miriam Rodríguez was a one-woman detective squad, defying a system where criminal impunity often prevails.
The country is so torn apart by violence and impunity that a grieving mother had to solve the disappearance of her daughter largely on her own, and died violently because of it.

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Aboriginal Australia

WW on Aboriginal Land

The type of title varies, but most of our Australian tours take place on Aboriginal Land. Where possible, we attempt to work with traditional owners. Here are some of the ways we've done so or tried (we can't run a trip without bookings) to do so.

There are other individuals and groups we want to work with, but, until the final agreements are in place, we can't say more than we hope to be able to offer more experiences where you get to interact with some of the local people and gain an understanding of their culture as it exists today.

The Old Days

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Photos, Videos & Just For Fun

An upbeat ending to a long letter.

Best of All

Seven Wonders
Please take the time to scroll through to the end. I can't think of a better way to finish this newsletter.

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News About This Newsletter

Restricted websites. The NY Times allows non-subscribers to look at ten free articles each month. I've got more links than that in this newsletter so I've marked them with a red asterisk (*) so that you can choose which are of most interest to you. Bloomberg allows three free articles. The Washington Post and The Economist both have limits but I'm not sure what the current limits are so I've marked their articles with a double red asterisk (**).

Next Newsletter — March? April? Depends on how much time I have and how much changes with regard to our trips.

As always, I welcome a bit of feedback about some of the things in this newsletter and suggestions for the next one.

Sending the newsletter

I'm now using a paid version of MailChimp to send all of the newsletters. I'm not sure what I'll do if the list goes over 2500.

walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au is the contact address on our website. If you would like to continue to receive these newsletters, please include this address in your "friends list" so that it isn't blocked.

Emails sent to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au are currently automatically forwarded to rrwillis at internode.on.net. If you want to send an email to that address, replace the word "at" with the symbol @. I am trying not to put that address any place where it can be harvested by spam bots.

We don't want to add to the mass of email spam. If you don't want our newsletter, please send us an email and let us know. We'll then delete your name from our newsletter list.

Our email address is walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au.

Note. Both MailChimp and the other program we use to send some of these newsletters have an automatic delete at the bottom. Clicking that link will delete you from the mailing list on the server but it will not delete you from our main database. One of the programs will not allow the auto delete to send me an email notifying me that a deletion has been made. If you want to be sure that you are removed from all further mailings, please send an email to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au

If you know someone you think would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. The more people who get it, the more likely it is that I'll be able to run the trips which might interest you.

If you care about Kakadu, please have your say.
Best wishes.
Russell Willis

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