I'm married to an Australian. I returned to Australia from the UK in October.

This is my experience of what happened to me when I arrived in the country during COVID.

I think it will help people understand how criminally bad our government's response has been. (a thread).

Something I wish everyone knew: the bar's not as high as you think.

You can get that job, meet that person, start that company.

But because you think the bar's so high, you won't even try. Which is what makes the bar so low!

In the space of half a year, a new class division was ripped through American society: those who can live normally through pandemic lockdowns and restrictions versus those who can't. The two sides have a great deal of difficulty communicating across that chasm.

Of course, media and political elites are, at worst, inconvenienced by lockdowns, so news coverage is heavily slanted against the people who are really suffering from these policies. They're already as forgotten as the designated losers of globalist trade policy.

Spend a day watching mainstream media pandemic coverage, then spend the evening with people whose livelihoods have been utterly ruined by pandemic restrictions. It's like traveling from the Earth to Mars. Completely different worlds, totally different outlooks.

It's exactly like the divide between "free trade" winners and losers, people living in comfortable financial and media bubbles vs. people living in hollowed-out ghost towns with skyrocketing mortality rates. The Wuhan virus gave us a new, even bigger class of Designated Losers.

The new class divide cracked open along some economic and social fault lines that were already present and deepening, such as the growing number of people who preferred minimizing human contact while socializing online. It really is the social schism of the new century.

I am a resident of Louisiana.
Tomorrow, I will drop hard copies of this letter in the mail, but I've emailed it to the GOP office and also to Senator Cassidy's office today.
*sorry for the run-ons and so forth.

Dear LAGOP:
Your tone deaf condemnation and censure of Senator Cassidy is misguided and alienating.
As it turns out, remarking that he is without a party places him in a privileged arena if our state’s Republicans are choosing to categorically deny the Senator his

elected responsibility to listen to evidence at a trial and cast a vote appropriate to his conscience.
Senator Cassidy has the ability to muster the courage it takes to be truly honorable, and extend the thought and reasoning it takes to make tough choices regardless of

subversive pressure being applied.
Unlike yourselves, Senator Cassidy has the capacity to read a room. The room he had to read most likely felt cold and lonely. The room he had to read most likely felt suffocating, and fraught with dubious outcomes for himself personally.

But he persisted with honor, and he persisted with valor. He deserves respect for that.
Perhaps reading that room is something for which you should take a look at doing a bit more closely. The Republican Party will no doubt see some changes in the next years.

I have now been sick with #longcovid for almost a year—below, some reflections on my convalescence. (1/10)

While remaining mostly functional, in many ways, I'm more sick in 2021 than I was in 2020. Two weeks ago, when I last felt well enough to walk outside, I managed only 0.7km before the post-exertional malaise came on: brain fog, fatigue, pain in my neck and arm. (2/10)

I was formerly a (somewhat) competitive distance runner. It's not that I'm ignorant of how to push my body, nor the consequences. During my first marathon, I pushed through hypoglycaemia, black and white vision, before having a seizure just over the finish line. (3/10)

Post-exertional malaise is different, sustained, worse. And it comes just as surely from over-doing it at work, or in researching long covid, as from exercise. I used to have so much energy. Where is that man I was just last year? I miss him. (4/10)

The closest I've come to death was in a single-vehicle accident in the remote Pilbara. In the air, in the desert, upside-down, I remember a moment of stillness, of acceptance, of simple knowing that my agency, at that moment, was subordinate to basic physics and biology. (5/10)