We have 67 guests and no members online
It's official! The first Vaccine to get emergency approval is now being deployed in both the UK and USA. In a triumph of scientific effort the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine is 'first cab off the rank' with the Moderna and the Oxford/AstraZeneca offerings not far behind.
For more information go to: The race for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine on this website.
Meanwhile a number of countries are seeing accelerating deaths and the worst is yet to come.
In Part1, in July 2023, Wendy and I travelled north from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington, and then Vancouver, in Canada, from where we made our way east to Montreal.
In Part2, in August 2023, we flew from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, down to Miami, Florida, then Ubered to Fort Lauderdale, where we joined a western Caribbean cruise.
At the end of the cruise, we flew all the way back up to Boston.
From Boston we hired another car to drive, down the coast, to New York.
After New York we flew to Salt Lake City, Nevada, then on to Los Angeles, California, before returning to Sydney.
There is an obvious sub-text to my short story: The Secret, that I wrote in 2015 after a trip to Russia. Silly things, we might come to believe in, like 'the law of attraction' are not harmless.
The story is also a reflection on the difference between American and Australian stereotypes, that were evident from conversations on the cruise.
I lived in New York for some time and my eldest daughter was born there. I have visited the US fairly regularly since. It is, in many ways, the closest country to Australia that you will find, outside New Zealand. So, I have often been surprised by how different it is in other ways to Australia, given the great similarities in the median standard of living, shared popular culture and immigrant demographics.
I have come to the conclusion that this stems from our different founding origins.
Well, the Gillard government has done it; they have announced the long awaited price on carbon. But this time it's not the highly compromised CPRS previously announced by Kevin Rudd.
Accusations of lying and broken promises aside, the problem of using a tax rather than the earlier proposed cap-and-trade mechanism is devising a means by which the revenue raised will be returned to stimulate investment in new non-carbon based energy.