Monthly Archives: May 2020

It’s just like politics

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It’s actually just like everything where someone can come in second. This is about Michael Jordan. And this is what Jordan said, and while you read it, think about all those people who oppose the American President because he’s not a nice man:

“Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me.

“They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game, and I wasn’t going to take anything less. Now, if that means I have to go out there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f..kin’ do.”

He pauses as if he could not continue, and then he does: “When people see this, they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant’. Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well … That’s how I played the game.

“That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that, don’t play that way.”

Not just basketball, but everything is that way. Politics especially. Anyone who makes it to the top anywhere – even Miss Congeniality – has a ruthless streak that firstly seeks to learn the rules of the game and then to dominate and win. Most of us cannot do this ourselves and for our values to dominate leaders who can in-fight on our behalf are essential.

“The facts that we know for sure”

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Pompeo tells Salena Zito the world must ‘impose costs on China’ for coronavirus. More specifically he said this:

Let me start with the facts that we know for sure. We know this. We know that the virus originated in Wuhan, China. We don’t know precisely where inside of that, but we know that the Chinese Communist Party has been ruthless in denying us the ability to determine that very fact. Whether that began with their failure to provide information in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization. Whether that was them coercing the World Health Organization to be quiet about the scope and nature of this pandemic or taking doctors who were prepared to talk about what they were seeing in their offices and in their laboratories and denying them the ability to speak publicly, essentially disappearing them. Those are all things we know for sure. And then, we know that there were cases as far back, for sure, as December.

And there is more after that, lots more, including this.

This week, I was on the phone with a group of democracies that represent a significant piece of the globe’s GDP with my Indian counterpart, my South Korean counterpart, Brazil … I said India. Goodness. Japan, Australia. These are countries who all are staring at the same problems, that recognize that for decades, we ignored the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. That’s not partisan, that was both political parties ignored the risks connected to the Chinese Communist Party, who now are coming to recognize that the world needs to take a different path as we move forward from this current pandemic.

Their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy”

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Limbaugh asks VP Pence about blue states with ‘political desire to inflict pain’ by not opening. Obvious beyond obvious, deniable as a serious possibility only among those who would like to see PDT lose the next election.

As for Democrats utilizing the pandemic to their political advantage, Limbaugh said in March it was their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy.”

“That’s where we are right now because the Democrats, the bottom has fallen out of their presidential campaign,” he said, noting that the party has had to ‘settle’ on Joe Biden as their nominee.

“So … they’ve got the way they’re looking at this. They’re the ones talking about this could be an opening for the Democrats,” Limbaugh said. “And when you call them out on this, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not hoping people get sick. We’re talking about the economy.’

“OK, fine, chance to destroy the U.S. economy for the benefit of the Democratic Party,” Limbaugh added. “And this is what they’ve got going for them.”

Right on cue, Politico reported in early April the Democrats are planning to pin the tanking economy on Trump, even though, as is now evident, a number of blue-state governors and mayors continue to extend lockdown orders, keeping many businesses closed or opened only on a limited basis.

“We think the economy is central to what working people need to hear from candidates and elected officials up and down the ballot,” Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told the news site.

The virus does not know the political affiliation of state leaders, but it still seems to make a difference. In the US especially, the more to the left the leader is, the harder the lockdown has been and the more deaths that have been recorded as due to the corona virus.

Socialist distancing

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Part of a note to members from John Roskam discussing a video the IPA has just been released.

We Want To Work is a four-minute video we’ve released at the same time to both IPA Members and the public. It puts a human face to the jobs tragedy befalling Australia. Four Australians – Nathan from Central Coast in New South Wales, Phil from Townsville, and Richard and Julia from Melbourne explain what’s happened to them because of the lockdown and why they want to work.

Nathan and Richard each own and operate a small business, while Julia worked in a small business, and Phil was a pilot working for an airline. Small business has borne the brunt of the COVID-19 lockdown. Because so many politicians and journalists are now so removed from the real economy, this video is a feature of what is happening and what is only now starting to get the attention it deserves. It is noteworthy that on the executive board of the Prime Minister’s advisory panel to help business recover from the lockdown there are four people from big business, three public servants, and one former trade unionist. If ever there was a demonstration of how far the Liberal Party has moved from its base that’s it.

There’s no-one from small business. No-one. Literally no-one. Out of a committee of eight people.

Yet according to the PM “the creation of a new National COVID-19 Coordination Commission…will coordinate advice to the Australian Government on actions to anticipate and mitigate the economic and social effects of the global coronavirus pandemic.” In Australia, small business is 35% of the economy and employs 44% of the workforce.

The importance of small business to the economy and the community rests on many factors including the fact that small business is what drives employment growth in a way that big business doesn’t, small business is what gives the vast majority of people their first experience of the dignity of work, and small businesses and their owners and employees have a stake in society that big business doesn’t have.

I’ve mentioned to you before the work of an American author and demographer, Joel Kotkin. He’s a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in California, and two weeks ago he wrote a brilliant piece entitled ‘The Death of Small Business is a Tragedy for Jewish community and democracy’. What he said about America applies equally to Australia.

This is some of what Kotkin said about the impact of the lockdown on small business:

“Small-scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie…wherever there is small business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears.”— V.I. Lenin

A great connoisseur as well as sworn enemy of the free market, Vladimir Lenin might smile a bit if he witnessed what is now happening to small businesses in the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The longer the shutdown continues, the tougher things could become for many of the estimated 30 million small businesses that employ roughly half of all Americans. The prospects are particularly bleak for restaurants, small retail establishments and “personal service” establishments like salons and gyms whose primary selling point against larger firms has been their scale and familiarity with customers. According to the JP Morgan Institute, 50% small businesses have a mere 15 days of cash buffer or less.

If the shutdown lasts much longer, as many as three-quarters of independent restaurants simply won’t make it. In the end, once the fog of the pandemic dies down, we are likely to see a great deal more empty storefronts and many of our beloved local businesses abandoned….

If you get the chance read the whole piece. The significance of what Kotkin talks about is that it reveals that in the discussion about reopening the economy we’re talking about something much bigger than ‘the economy’ – we’re talking about the future of our democracy. Which is the reason why the IPA made We Want To Work.

They’re all socialists now.

Go back to work and not incidentally preserve our freedom

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This is my agenda which I just mailed off to a colleague.

If I might say so, dealing with the logic of the lockdown will not save us from this massive assault on our freedoms. The theory is plain enough. If there is an epidemic in which each person individually can pass on the disease to someone else by our proximity to each other, then to limit the reach of the disease, one must limit proximity. If there is more to it than that, I have not noticed. Beyond that basic premise, there were from the start an incredible flow of statistical projections that have turned out not just to be wrong, but overwrought. Every one of these projections has been abandoned. I wish I could say that therefore the rule of “the expert” is now at an end. It actually looks like it is only now just getting into full swing. This, in my view, is a large part of what should concern us.

If you want an economics analogy, we saw the same rule of expertise after the Global Financial Crisis. The supposed economic pandemic disappeared within half a year, but the destructive long-term effects of the various stimulus packages have continued to weigh our economies down to this day.

The problem is, if I may say so, rule by public servants who never have any accountability applied to any errors they make. There is much more that could be said on that, but will just leave it at that. There seems to be no means to unwind what has been set in motion, especially since this has been so monstrously politicised. And with every political leader there has been an associated political agenda, not one of which has done a single bit of good.

Yet we have our own agenda, and this may be the time we bring this agenda into the national conversation. Our agenda is that we should decentralise decision making, allow individual initiative to lead in the search for solutions and medical cures, remove the restraints placed on the economy by the various policies to enforce “social distancing”, and we should open up the market place and allow everyone to get back to work, or to do whatever else they might choose to do. In the meantime, isolate those who are most at risk, and apply certain precautions especially on air travel.

The downside may be some additional deaths and a slightly longer duration of the corona virus within the population, although herd immunity will this way kick in sooner. But my near certainty is that the CV is now past the peak of its virulence. States that open up will not appear any worse off than those that do not. But we should be using this moment to emphasise the elements of our political, economic and social systems for what they are, the greatest protection that each and every person has. We should state clearly that the approach that has been adopted is a losers’ strategy which has no obvious end in sight, and we should be seeking a free and open society, in which everyone understands the risks that are inevitably there, and in which everyone does what they can to secure their own safety. We should make it clear that the government cannot protect you.

The government should obviously remain active in gathering and providing information on how each of us individually needs to act to limit the risks we face. By arguing against a lockdown and in favour of a freedom-based approach would not only be the best solution to the problem of the spread of the corona virus, but would also be in keeping with our own philosophies.

This seems to be similar to the approach suggested by Conrad Black: A Farrago of Democrat Delusions Will Bury Them in 2020.

In a month, Trump had invoked the National Emergencies and War Production Acts to get instant testing, now being conducted 300,000 times a day, and had General Motors and others manufacturing pulmonary ventilator machines. He “flattened the curve,” produced a formidable financial assistance plan for the shut-down country, and now urges everyone to work and school, as we now know that for the eighty percent of people beneath the age of 60 without compromised immune systems, the fatality rate is one for every 22,000 people.

Here is the contrast:

This is the Democrats’ plan: pretend Trump was responsible for the pitiful state of crisis medical response that he inherited, and that he didn’t act promptly in reducing the flow of incoming people from coronavirus-afflicted countries; pretend that he didn’t build an entire emergency medical service in three weeks; pretend that scores of millions of people should remain idle for months for the sake of a statistically very small number of potential deaths among the 260 million healthy Americans beneath the age of 60; pretend that it is Trump’s duty to impoverish a third of his countrymen as he sacrifices himself politically; and pretend that the revelation of unprecedented skulduggery by the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign in 2016 in corrupting the FBI and intelligence agencies and using them to try to influence and then undo a presidential election is just a red herring designed to distract the country.

We need to not just open our economies, we need to return to an open society as soon as we possibly can.

Suicidal benevolence

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At Instapundit. A conversation related to this article: Has the coronavirus crisis changed how Americans feel about universal health care?

“Has the coronavirus crisis changed how Americans feel about universal health care?” What if… After all the controversy and rejection of “ObamaCare,” kind of makes one wonder if that has been the point of this “pandemic” all along…

It kinda makes sense, but no, that was not the point of the Rona Panic. This was all an election year stunt to hurt the economy and Trump’s re-election chances, and nothing more. They just had no clue so many Americans would fall in line and allow themselves to be turned into slaves. This has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The embrace of slavery is the point that leaves me in despair. Our countrymen don’t want to be free, I am appalled.

It’s not an embrace of slavery. We’re a loving country and this was packaged as necessary to keep each other alive.

My favourite book ever

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No one will any longer read it, but it is the best story by the world’s greatest story teller. It is The Histories by Herodotus. I mention it only because it is discussed here in War for the West, written by possibly my favourite living essayist, Joseph Epstein. The subheading for the article is, “What if the Persians had defeated the Greeks?” Just a bit of the article to give you a taste, and what I have found wonderous was that not all that long ago, the mayor of Athens was someone named Themistocles.

One cannot award so grand a victory to any single city-state or heroic figure, yet without the Athenians and Themistocles Greece would doubtless have fallen to Xerxes. Thermopylae apart, during the Persian war the Spartans, in Peter Green’s words, showed “over-cautious conservatism, slowness to move in a crisis.” In the war itself no city-state paid a higher price than the Athenians, having their city occupied and destroyed and all of surrounding Attica devastated by Persian troops. The Persian invasion goaded Athens, abetted through the suasion of Themistocles, to convert from a standard hoplite infantry to a naval power. When the Athenian silver mines at Laurium struck a rich vein, Themistocles convinced the assembly at Athens that the profits from the mines, rather than be divided among the populace, be used to build the Athenian fleet up from 70 to 200 triremes. He had also convinced them to build up the fortifications round the harbor at Piraeus, which would house these ships.

A tougher sale came later when Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to desert their city before the onslaught of the Persians and board their new fleet, with older men and women and children and their valuables sent off to safety at Aegina, Salamis, and Troezen. The winning strategy at Salamis, that of drawing the Persian ships into the narrow straits where the Greek triremes awaited, was also devised by Themistocles, and the Greek victory at Salamis is surely among the most significant battles in all history. Perhaps most impressive of all, Themistocles was able to convince the various Greek city-states to set aside their rivalries and join together, if only temporarily, to fight the barbarian foe. As Plutarch writes, Themistocles “put an end to all the civil wars of Greece, composed their differences, and persuaded them to lay aside all enmity during the war with the Persians.”

What makes Themistocles of special interest is that he wasn’t, like Pericles or Marcus Aurelius, a man of sterling character. He was closer to a Chicago politician, an operator, a main chancer, not above accepting bribes nor bribing others. No one was more adroit than he at manipulating the new Athenian democracy, perhaps because no one more embodied it in his person than he. “Themistocles,” wrote the classicist Maurice Bowra, “was the personification of the vigorous Athenian spirit.” In the language of the current day, Tom Holland notes that “he could infight, he could network, he could spin.” Herodotus does not pass up an opportunity to emphasize Themistocles’ wiliness. But Themistocles was ultimately wily for the public good. “I cannot tune a harp,” Themistocles said, “but I know how to take a modest city in hand and raise it to greatness.” Which is precisely what he did.

What happened after that you will need to read Epstein’s article to find out, or perhaps better, to read Herodotus’s Histories for yourself.

State of ignorance

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Ah Victoria. Not only keeping our schools closed but this as well: Victoria massive $773m deficit revealed as tough restrictions to stay, despite mass job losses.

Victoria is facing a budget deficit of $773 million with Treasurer Tim Pallas saying “the worst is yet to come”.

The March Quarterly results revealed on Friday show Victoria has had its $618 million surplus forecast for 2019/20 wiped out as a result of the pandemic.

Mr Pallas however said the blow was “not as bad” as previously expected but said the numbers were likely to get worse.

Going forward he has ruled out a surplus in the near future saying “these are unprecedented times and our focus is on families”.

“We are not chasing surplus and we will not be posting a surplus in this year’s budget,” he said….

Net debt is expected to rise to $38.9 billion, but Mr Pallas said the debt profile and expenditure would be evaluated in the lead up to when the budget is released in October.

Make sense of this if you can. Labor is trashing the place with no obvious connection to virus control.

Your liberties are being taken away

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This is the title Virologist accuses Fauci of cover-up – Video but just try getting the video. Try yourself, because I could not. Here’s the entire post:

“You need to wake up! Your liberties are being taken away, all because of the fake news that’s out there.”

Dr Judy Mikovits, PhD., molecular biologist and science researcher, accuses Dr Anthony Fauci of directing a cover-up.” What he (Fauci) is saying is absolute propaganda, the same kind of propaganda that he’s perpetrated to kill millions since 1984,” says Dr Mikovits, a former AIDS scientist. She says Fauci was responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

(For those ten people in the world who may not know who Fauci is, he is director of the National Institute or Allergy and Infectious Diseases and has been heading the corona virus pandemic task force.)

Video

Mikovits, who wrote the book Plague of Corruption, is featured in a video attempting to expose Fauci, but the video keeps being removed from YouTube, Facebook and other outlets. That video can be seen here:  plandemicmovie.com.

Here are a few excerpts from the video:

“If we activate mandatory vaccines globally, I imagine these people that own the vaccines (Fauci, Redfield, Gates) stand to make hundreds of billions of dollars,” says Mikovits.

And yet, “there is no vaccine currently on the schedule for any rna virus that works.”

“If Fauci can’t be honest with the public about his connection with this lab (the Wuhan Institute of Virology), then Fauci has to go.”

Doctors wonder: “Why are we being pressured to add ‘covid’ to death certificates?”

Answer: “To increase the numbers…fear is a great way to control people.”

“Doctors are being incentivized to say that people died of Covid-19.” “Yeah. Thirteen thousand dollars from Medicare if you call it Covid-19.”

“In a survey polling nearly 2,300 doctors in 30 countries, hydroxychlorquine ranked as the most effective medication to treat the virus.”

“There is (sic) no dissenting voices allowed any more in this free country.”

“It’s beyond comprehension how a society can be so fooled, that the types of propaganda continue to where they’re just driving us to hate each other.”

“You need to wake up! Your liberties are being taken away, all because of the fake news that’s out there.”

Mikovits also accuses Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a prominent member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, of being responsible for the deaths of millions during the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Thanks to Michele Selover for this video.

Again, the video can be seen here: www.plandemicmovie.com

Actually at the time of posting, the video cannot be seen. They may really be taking your liberties away. You may know it, you may be able to observe it. But you won’t be able to do a thing.

The corona virus agenda

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It has been my view from the start that the CV lockdown has been the last (hopefully the last) throw of the dice to steal the presidential election in November. The Democrats, like the left in general, care nothing about anyone, except themselves. Their aim is power, not social welfare. The lockdowns across the world following the coronavirus outbreak is their effort to take the election if they can just bamboozle enough of the population, and mix it in with just enough of their usual corrupt electoral practices. But this latest stunt is the most sickening and vile of all of the efforts they have ever undertaken if that is indeed what they have done. We here in Australia are just following the lead set in the USA.

Let’s review the evidence: Wuhan Virus Watch: Over Half of All U.S. Deaths Have Occurred in Just Five States. Guess which ones (as shown on the map below).

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/cases-in-us.html

Of the nearly 80,000 deaths from the virus in this country as of Saturday afternoon, nearly 48,700, or about 60 percent, had occurred in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

New York remains the hardest-hit state of any in the country by far, having logged nearly 27,000 deaths as of Saturday afternoon. The next-hardest-hit state, New Jersey, had recorded over 9,100.

What a surprise. These are all Democratic states. And then there’s New York, you say. So add this in next: Cuomo’s COVID-19 Panic Killed Thousands In Nursing Homes.

Over the weekend, Democrat Cuomo announced that nursing homes would no longer have to accept patients discharged from hospitals who were COVID-19 positive. Which leads to a question: Why in the world were they required to do so before?

Why? Because this way more people would die. Same states you might have noticed.

Let’s pile on a bit. From: Gov. Cuomo admits he was wrong to order nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients. There’s more here than just an admission of guilt and incompetence:

While the gov’s people imply that some homes simply misunderstood the rules, the real message to operators was that declaring themselves overwhelmed would put their licenses at risk.

Notably, the chief of one Cobble Hill facility not only had his request for PPE denied, he got turned down cold when he then asked to transfer patients.

Then, too, Zucker’s Department of Health has issued other heartless orders during this crisis — the now-rescinded “don’t even try to resuscitate” mandate to EMTs for cardiac-arrest cases, as well as telling at least one home it was OK to keep staffers on the job after they’d tested positive.

To which may be added this: Why an added month of lockdown will devastate New York small businesses.

As the shutdown drags on, New York officials fear that half the city’s smallest businesses are going to fail. Restaurants, bars, shops and salons will become boarded-up storefronts. Neighborhoods will feel like ghost towns.

It’s a grim prospect, yet officials seem ready to let it happen. Gem Spa in the East Village, known since the 1920s for its egg creams, is shutting for good, and the Strand, the iconic book store, says it may also.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo hasn’t indicated when the city will reopen as part of his multiphase reopening plan. Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted on Monday that the process might start sometime in June, but in recent days he has also said reopening is “a few months away at minimum.”

None of this has anything to do with saving lives, specially in New York, since the aim almost entirely is to do what they can to stop Donald Trump from being re-elected. They are sick evil people but the evidence seems to be only one way. To create just enough momentum away from the President to elect a Democrat.

And a reminder what social distancing looked like when I was young.

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