Monthly Archives: August 2021

Harmless as an enemy, treacherous as a friend

Posted on by
2

Taliban

If we are going to discuss the fall of Afghanistan, you have to go to the real experts, so we’ll start with Mark Steyn on The Scale of Humiliation in which he deals with the fall of Kabul. This is how he ends:

America’s Afghan policy, from 1921 to 2021 – and, in defiance of the usual trajectory, first farce, then tragedy. A decade or so back, I quoted Bernard Lewis:

“I was on a panel with the great Bernard Lewis a couple of years ago – actually six or seven years ago – and Bernard said that the danger here is that America risks being seen as harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend… It’s a very dangerous lesson to teach the planet.”

Looking at things at the moment, there is nowhere else for America to go but down. Just a bit more from Mark before we turn to other things.

America is not “too big to fail”: It’s failing by almost every metric right now. The world-record brokey-brokey-brokeness manifested by the current spending bills is only possible because the US dollar is the global currency. When that ends, we’re Weimar with smartphones. Clearly, Chairman Xi and his allies occasionally muse on the best moment to yank the dollar out from under. If you were in Beijing watching telly today, would you perhaps be considering advancing those plans?

In other words, is this not merely a humiliation but America’s Suez moment? In my bestseller After America, I recalled a long-ago conversation with the Countess of Avon (Clarissa Churchill, Winston’s niece, widow of the then prime minister Anthony Eden – and still with us at the splendid age of 101). Somewhere along the way, Lady Avon observed ruefully that the eight days of the Suez crisis in late 1956 marked the great divide between the words “British Empire” being still taken seriously and their being a sneering punchline.

And then there is this from the former President:

President Donald J. Trump: “Joe Biden gets it wrong every time on foreign policy, and many other issues. Everyone knew he couldn’t handle the pressure. Even Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, said as much.After I took out ISIS, I established a credible deterrent. That deterrent is now gone.

The Taliban no longer has fear or respect for America, or America’s power. What a disgrace it will be when the Taliban raises their flag over America’s Embassy in Kabul. This is complete failure through weakness, incompetence, and total strategic incoherence….

“He ran out of Afghanistan instead of following the plan our Administration left for him—a plan that protected our people and our property, and ensured the Taliban would never dream of taking our Embassy or providing a base for new attacks against America.

The political map of the world is being redrawn.

AND THEN THERE WAS THIS: I just came across the following which I think is apposite of so much that is wrong in America: Taliban Spokesman Has Active Twitter Account, Trump Still Suspended. It’s not just that the left in America (and all across the Western world) are ignorant, but that they are wilfully ignorant, and proud of it.

We have to spend money we don’t have to stop us from going bankrupt

Posted on by
Reply

Let me again mention my book on Classical Economics and the Modern Economy the review of which I discussed here. It is not all that unusual that an author should be fond of a book he has written, so you will have to forgive me having written the following to a colleague who has also written a positive review of the book somewhere else. This is what I wrote:

It was indeed a phenomenal review. But then I wrote to someone else, as a joke, that it has made me want to read the book myself, which in fact is what I have now begun to do and am half way through. And while you may feel he has provided a more in-depth understanding, and undoubtedly he has, yours was as on-the-mark as any I could have hoped for.

In re-reading what I sent to the publisher more than a year ago, and possibly finished the copy editing process at least a year ago, I am amazed how well it has come out. It says everything I even now would want to say and it says it as clearly as I am capable of saying it. I found one gremlin (and they were always going to be there), but there is nothing I wish I had added and there were a number of surprises where I had said something I had forgotten I had even included.

But what reading the text made me realise even more than before, no one else, certainly no one else alive today, will ever see what the book is saying. It will perhaps be in fifty years when some library goes about selling off its discarded texts that someone might pick it up and read it then and really see the point, in the same ways as I saw Mill’s point 150 years after his Principles was published in 1848.

But for almost anyone alive today, I am much too obscure and no one will ever take my word for it against the massive edifice of modern theory. For all that, I have just read the small bit on productive vs unproductive consumption and have marvelled again at how such a perspective has evaporated entirely from the body of economic theory. It is not only obvious, but essential.

And then this came up which you would have to understand economic theory in an entirely different way from what you see in the textbooks to see just how stupid this is: V.P. Biden ’09: ‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’.

On Wednesday, Democrats passed a $3.5 trillion budget resolution and, with the help of 19 Republicans, a $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill.

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the total public debt outstanding as of Aug. 9, 2021, was $28,427,651,083,061.54, or roughly $28.4 trillion.

How this will prevent the US from going bankrupt we will now all live to see for ourselves.

How many instances of a “rare” occurrence do there have to be before they are no longer seen as rare?

Posted on by
2

Honestly, what can one make of this: Georgia Clark: 27-year-old Australian reporter hospitalized with pericarditis 10 days after Pfizer injection, encourages others to still get the injections. 

And to the above, let me supplement this: Panic Porn: Media Buried Key Detail About Florida Teachers Dying Of COVID.

Here in Free Florida, we are quite used to the Democrats’ never-ending fear-mongering and hyperbolic attacks on Governor Ron DeSantis. And we see right through both the national and the local partisan bias, a bias that often entails “shock” headlines that bury the facts.  This is what President Trump accurately labeled “fake news.”

Take, for example, these recent hysterical and (intentionally) misleading headlines from the Democrat propagandist media:

  • Insider: “Three teachers died of COVID-19 within 24 hours in Broward County, Florida. Schools there are defying Gov. DeSantis’ ban on mask mandates”
  • CBS News: “Four Broward County educators die from COVID-19 within 24 hours, as Florida’s battle over masks in schools continues”
  • Ocala Star Banner: “COVID deaths of 4 Marion school employees leads to push for mask mandate”

The fact that these deaths were amongst teachers is supposed to be specially significant, but as the article points out:

What’s missing? A lot. Not the least of which is that the school year has not even started in Florida, so not one these teachers died “in the line of duty” and as a direct result of DeSantis barring masking mandates, as is intentionally implied by the media’s feeding frenzy.

And I am also curious what might happen when Ms Clark decides to have children assuming she ever does. I wonder if she wonders about the same thing herself. I bet she does, but I am even more sure she will never say so in public.

covid COVID C-0-V-I-D!!!!!!

Posted on by
1

There are a lot of people being terrified by their own governments about one of the most seemingly benign diseases ever to strike a population. Covid is not cholera, typhoid, the bubonic plague. It kills old people with “comorbidities” who are probably dying from the comorbidities. American hospitals are given thousands of dollars for each Covid patient they deal with so their numbers are obviously inflated, and the tests to detect Covid are deeply flawed with many false positives. Which brings me to this: How Phony Coronavirus “Fear Videos” Were Used as Psychological Weapons to Bring America to Her Knees.

If you were online during January 2020 you likely saw the barrage of video clips that were supposedly coming out of China depicting ghastly “Coronavirus” scenes.

Most of those videos have been quietly wiped off the internet, but back in January and February those grisly videos were a viral sensation and they scared the sense out of Americans.

The videos captured supposed Coronavirus victims in various stages of pandemic horror. Some showed people foaming at the mouth and collapsing in the streets, while others featured ominous government officials wearing Hazmat suits, hovering over lifeless bodies struck down from the virus.

It was a virtual buffet of fear-porn, and Americans couldn’t get enough of it.

Personally, I saw hundreds of those videos. The comments from people sharing the clips would range from sarcastic “Just the flu” type stuff — intended to mock and shame anyone who tried to downplay the seriousness of the virus — to wild conspiracy theories claiming Coronavirus caused brain swelling, spontaneous convulsions, and instant death.

I have put this video up before but how are we going to get people off this terror-path our governments have put before us if we don’t remind people of what is being done? Just click and then watch. You’ve seen it all before anyway.

In any case, go to the link above to read through the efforts made to terrify us. There is an agenda afoot and when it has played out in full, if we allow it, we will regret it.

So much wilderness, so little reason

Posted on by
1

Below is my response to Peter Smith’s latest posts, one at The Pipeline and the other at Quadrant Online. First, however, these were the posts:

Vaccines: Blessing or Curse?
Covid, Data & Derangement

And this was my response.

As always, a complete bashing of covid histrionics. I continue to wish that logic would have some impact on what governments do, but we apparently trust governments to save us so much nowadays that we never think there is any individual responsibility involved. Fatal traffic accidents are the figures that I find the most interesting contrast with Covid – in the twelve months to July 2020, there were 1148, which turns out to be 102 per month. Way higher than covid, and these are people often, in fact mostly in the prime of life, many of them children. And I saw today that our health ministers are all but blocking the importing of inputs into vaping, which might have reduced deaths from lung cancer, but would have reduced revenues from tobacco taxes even more.
 
image.png
 
Specially liked this:
 
Booster jabs and tinkering with the vaccines may well become the public-health objective. Slipping into the shadows will be the objective of preventing serious illness and deaths. It’s called “Solutioneering” after the philosopher Roger James. Means become ends.
 
I guess if you are going to find yourself in such highbrow company at The Pipeline, you have to be able to demonstrate you belong, which you anyway already did.
 
Well done. A voice of reason in the wilderness. And there is certainly a lot of wilderness out there without much evidence of reason.

COVID-19 recommendations and rules have been illogical, inconsistent and/or harmful

Posted on by
2

From The Scientific Case against the Medical Establishment’s handling of COVID-19 – Part 1: Overview.

1 – Although our primary defense against almost any disease is our immune system, there has been almost no public education or emphasis about this by the Medical Establishment. Some claim that our immune system is ineffective until after it has been exposed to COVID-19 (Humoral immunity). However, children have proven to have a higher immunity against COVID-19 without having been exposed to it — which may say that their innate immune system (e.g., with T-cells) is stopping it. Additionally, children and adults can have some CrossReactive immunity, also rarely acknowledged or discussed. Most importantly, there is no down-side to adults getting in good health to maximize the power of their immune system.

2 – The general COVID-19 rules and recommendations from the Medical Establishment have been illogical, inconsistent and/or harmful.

Masks are a good example. To begin with, just requiring an unspecified standard “mask” is scientifically worthless  as most masks are ineffective. Studies have also concluded that masks can cause health issues. Also, one day the rules say masks are essential, and days later they are acknowledged as not being needed. Etc.

3 – COVID-19 data from (or supported by) the Medical Establishment, has been incomplete to purposefully deceptive. [This includes data about COVID-19 injections.] For example, the data on COVID-19 deaths fails to distinguish between dying from COVID-19 vs. dying with COVID-19. (Per the CDC: 95% of US COVID-19 deaths had an average of four (4) co-morbidi4es!) This results in highly inflated COVID-19 death figures, which allows government officials to justify enacting shutdowns, etc. Further, there is no accounting of deaths from the government regulations (e.g. suicides, drug overdoses, criminal acts, etc.).

4 – Inexplicably, to date the Medical Establishment has yet to support some well-documented effec4ve COVID-19 therapies (see this outstanding discussion by a renowned MD). The main “therapy” (for what the Medical Establishment calls a pandemic), has been for vic4ms to go home, drink fluids, etc. — then go to the hospital when they are in dire straits. This stunningly inadequate protocol is despite well-documented scientific studies that various therapies (when started early) will markedly improve a pa4ent’s outcome. Even OTCs like Zinc and Vitamin D have been scientifically shown to have measurable benefits. (Combining them would likely result in even beher outcomes.) Conversely, the Medical Establishment has endorsed a therapy (Remdesivir) that has scientifically been shown to be less effective than essen4ally all other op4ons, and no more effective than taking Vitamin C! This is what the FDA boasts is their understanding of: “The Science of Safety and Effectiveness.” Last, consider that emergency use vaccines are only allowed when there is not an approved therapy… No one knows for sure, but the lack of a sound and uniform COVID-19 therapy, has likely been the cause of over 100,000 American deaths.

5 – The Medical Establishment allowed the PCR test to be used to determine whether or not an individual (e.g., a deceased person) has COVID-19 — while the inventor said that this was a “useless” application.

6 – The Medical Establishment’s handling of COVID-19 injections, has been in conflict with Science and their obligation to act in the best interest of the public. See here for details. Some of this unscientific behavior may be attributed to the (unstated) COVID-19 end game. From appearances the Medical Establishment’s objective seems to be to eradicate COVID-19. Although that may sound desirable to citizens, the reality is that it is an impossibility. The Medical Establishment should instead acknowledge that the best we can do is to evolve the COVID-19 pandemic, to a manageable endemic (like the flu). A key part of this plan is to have an effective therapy protocol — which has been missing here.

A summary of all of the recent lies of the left

Posted on by
1

The title is Why Don’t They Believe Us? and this is the subhead:

You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.

But it’s not about vaxxine hesitancy, not really. It’s about how the American left and the media in particular, always lie and never tell the truth if some concocted lie better suits their purpose. Nothing found in the media and stated by our political leaders can be believed. This summarises the entire article, which is focused on America but no matter where you live, you will recognise every last bit of it. I encourage you to read the article from end to end. Very depressing but also with a very light touch. This is where the article ends up, but it is a trip down memory lane, every moment of which you will recall.

The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don’t, that masks don’t work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of “health intervention,” that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a “mostly peaceful” form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are “still learning,” that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn’t, that you shouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another … are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don’t, you will be a second-class citizen.

They lie relentlessly. There is an agenda on the left and only what supports that agenda will ever appear in the press, on the tele or be allowed to show up on Facebook or twitter. Half of America now see they have been relentlessly lied to, but the other half do not. Useful idiots is the phrase Lenin invented to describe them. They will believe whatever they are told and will repeat all of it without shame. What a bizarre world we live in. The truth is still available, but massive numbers prefer the lies and will believe nothing else.

“His choice of music as a violin soloist has been as iconoclastic as his conducting repertoire”

Posted on by
1

This is a wonderful article by Heather Mac Donald: For the Love of Music. I will say up front what you must first surmise and then be told in a roundabout way. That the person she is profiling has a black skin. And while it shouldn’t matter, and of course does not so far as music is concerned, it does matter here. Because this is the point of the story which is found in the opening para:

Conductor and violinist John McLaughlin Williams has a question for advocates of deblinding auditions: “Why hold an audition at all? Why not just send in a head shot?”

It’s a crushing point if the aim is to have the best performers playing the best music. However:

Williams is scathing about the introduction of identity politics into music. “It will be the death of quality,” he warns. “It will breed resentment from musicians who have worked all their lives to achieve perfection.” An orchestra’s primary reasonability is to make the best music it can with the best musicians available, according to Williams; social justice is not its comparative advantage. “It’s ridiculous to pursue 12 percent black representation in orchestras,” he says. “It’s an unrealistic expectation, given the deliriously difficult level of competition now, especially from Asians.” Moreover, programming and hiring by race will not bring blacks into the concert hall over the long term unless those black audiences have an underlying interest in the music.

This is not just true of music but about everything, except the mechanic who fixes the brakes on your car. And then there is this. His discovery and now mine: Sir Arnold Bax.

His choice of music as a violin soloist has been as iconoclastic as his conducting repertoire. British composer Sir Arnold Bax is rarely, if ever, performed in the United States. Williams encountered some of Bax’s symphonic scores during his library sleuthing. They were a “revelation,” he says: “Strong, biting, hard-edged music of struggle, yet tinged with the wistfulness of one who has known loss. I was hooked.” Ever the contrarian, Williams became “really interested” in Bax’s violin concerto after reading a negative assessment of the work. He tracked down the music in the Library of Congress and gave the concerto its U.S. premiere in 1990—52 years after it was written—soloing on the violin with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston. Williams’s masterful performance, available on YouTube, digs into Bax’s complicated syncopations with rhythmic flair and suavely shapes the concerto’s melodic lines.

It’s what I am listening to now. Indeed a revelation, but the racist politics of the symphany orchestra is a death wish on classical music. This is the final para:

Williams has not backed down from expressing views that put him at odds with much of the musical establishment, however. This past Fourth of July, he posted on Facebook: “Happy Birthday to the greatest country the world has ever known. It is a place where the humblest and most common can achieve the highest and most respected places in society through dint of hard work, determination, and a willingness to take risks. Our core documents were sagaciously designed to encompass everyone and they do despite those who tried to prevent it.”

His beliefs are as out of fashion as his musical taste, but there is still an underground and we may yet prevail.

Covid is just a pretext for doing things the left has had in mind for quite a long time

Posted on by
1

Someone I am on a five-way chat with about Covid has just written:

Looks like vaccines won’t get us out of this mess.

To which I have replied:

And exactly what mess is it that we are in? Covid is just a pretext for doing all kinds of things that the left has had in mind for quite a long time. Every politician who has had a conservative bent has tried to walk away from this entire episode, no masks, no vaccines, no lockdowns, but between the pressures from the left – which include every major media organisation in the world with no exception – and the terror stricken populations everywhere, who in spite of all the evidence believe they will die within the week unless the most stringent approach is taken to dealing with this covid – we are being pushed farther and farther towards a series of stricter measures that will, if their plans work out, leave our Western civilisation looking like it’s being managed by the CCP. Only a handful in public places have seen through the political manoeuvering but everywhere, even on “the right” we take the Chinese Flu seriously without any real evidence that it is all that lethal. I find Gerard’s posts interesting because virtually every one of them underscores and emphasises that we are no more in danger from Covid than the people of Salem were in danger of witchcraft.
 
Not that you cannot die from Covid; but you are very very unlikely to. It is now no more than a bad cold, specially if you keep Ivermectin in the house with a plentiful supply of zinc.
 
Hope to see you all eventually.
 
As for why he wrote what he wrote, he attached this: Effectiveness of Some COVID-19 Vaccines Has Dropped Significantly: Study. As if any of that will matter.
 
Anyone waiting for the Covid to disappear is going to be waiting a very very long time if it’s up to those who have locked us down. Two stories about Australia. First this: Coronavirus: Australia Locks Down 431,000+ People in Capital over 4 Cases.
 
Canberra ordered the entire Australian Capital Territory (ACT), home to over 431,000 people, into total lockdown Thursday for seven days to contain four new cases of the Chinese coronavirus, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported.
 
And then there’s this: Australia is paralysed by fear with the sub-head: “The land of Crocodile Dundee wants to hide under the blanket forever.”
 

Inserting a word like ‘only’ before the number of coronavirus deaths has become a mark of callousness in this sentimental age. Yet the coronavirus death toll in Australia demands to be put into perspective given the draconian restrictions to economic and social life now in force.

There have been around 30 deaths in Australia since cases began to rise at the start of July. In Britain, around 2,000 people died of Covid-19 in that same period, but Britons have not been incarcerated in their own homes and the army is not manning border checkpoints between Surrey and Kent.

The meek acceptance of some of the harshest lockdowns in the world in the land of Crocodile Dundee cries out for an explanation. Why do the Brits have the courage to wander around freely after recording 188,000 positive tests in a week? Why aren’t they being kept at home for their own safety? Why aren’t their movements controlled by a list of regulations 27 pages long, as they are in Melbourne after a mere 50 locally acquired cases were discovered in the same period? Why is it okay for Brits to stand maskless to order two pints of lager and a packet of crisps when the picnic police are fining people in Sydney a thousand bucks for the crime of eating a sandwich in the park?

Since the odds of having caught the virus in Australia so far is tiny, as are the chances of it killing healthy people under the age of 70, one would have thought Australians would have collectively told the public-health nags to pull their bloody heads in. Not so. Many people want them to go harder. The premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, for instance, is constantly badgered at her press conferences for being too soft, for not locking down harder and sooner, and for not extending the indoor mask rule to everywhere outside the home.

The simple explanation is that Australians are behaving this way because most are scared witless. The July edition of Ipsos’s regular report, What Worries the World, found that Australians fret about Covid more than people in 25 of the 28 countries surveyed.

Australia’s good fortune in controlling the spread of earlier Covid-19 variants is rapidly becoming a curse with the arrival of the far more infectious Delta variant. One reason for its early success was the prompt closure of external borders and a dogged commitment to keep them that way. The number of passengers on inbound international flights has been restricted for 16 months, making it devilishly difficult for Australian citizens to come home, let alone for others to visit. The compulsory-detention rule used to apply only to those arriving without a visa. In a grim irony, today everyone is arrested the moment they step off the plane, frog-marched on to a bus by armed police, driven to a quarantine hotel with a police motorcycle escort and forbidden from stepping out of their room for a fortnight. In the spirit of the Magna Carta, no one is exempt. As I write, our 28th prime minister is incarcerated in a 4.5 star tourist hotel that has seen better days following his return from official duties in London and India.

In addition to lockable borders and first-class universal healthcare, Australia possesses a greater strength that has, regretfully, been largely untapped: a tolerant, liberal democracy where the rules are willingly obeyed by consent, not coercion. Australia’s strong social fabric and spirit of volunteerism – usually manifested in networks of community institutions like surf life-saving clubs, ‘flying doctors’ and rural fire brigades – has not been called on to help.

Instead, the instruments of public-health compliance are the police, supplemented by the army, and so-called ‘authorised officers’ – petty officials with extraordinary powers who can order you to stand in line, or board a bus, and can even compel you to enter a hotel room where your alcohol consumption will be monitored and restricted for the next 14 days.

There must have been a saner, more reasonable approach we could have adopted – one that wasn’t built on the nutty idea that Australia and New Zealand could eliminate the coronavirus altogether, and then use magical powers to keep it out. Reason, however, has been an ineffective weapon in responding to the many public-policy absurdities that have perplexed us since coronavirus entered our lives. Policy is largely being driven by the heart, not the head. Our response to the pandemic is sentimental, and the predominant emotion is fear. Combine that with the modern culture of safetyism and you end up with a real conundrum. How can we come out from under the blanket knowing there is a risk that someone might get sick and die? How can we ensure we’re safe against every known danger, let alone those we might not even know about? Every granny’s life is sacred after all.

Australia’s Zero Covid dystopia

 

The deification of chief government health officers, who have risen from obscurity to become minor celebrities, has been one of the biggest mistakes so far. It has allowed politicians to outsource responsibility and avoid doing a key part of their job, which is to decide the proper balance between competing policy imperatives and to test their judgement in parliament. Instead, the authority of parliament and a thousand years of history that lies behind it has been usurped by ‘The Science’. It is an odd kind of ‘science’ that denies us the right to dispute its findings, that ignores discordant evidence, that remains rigid in the face of new facts, that keeps its data close to its chest and that cancels dissenting voices. In other words, it is not science at all. It is a form of superstition.

It is as if the world has been gripped by a kind of trembling disease, an epidemic of twitching like the one that swept through European schools in the late 19th century. We are fighting not one, but two pandemics, as Niall Ferguson observes in Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. There is a contagion of the body and a contagion of the mind, spreading with equal rapidity on two social networks, one physical and one virtual. Coronavirus is an unwelcome visitor to be sure, but the severity of the measures and the costs incurred – both financial and human – can hardly be said to be proportionate to the risk anymore.

With hindsight, the die was cast early last year by the extravagant modelling that wildly overstated the deadliness of what we then called the novel coronavirus. The fear that escaped from the Imperial College laboratory back then has proved resistant to new evidence. The political class was infected all at once by the early, extravagant assumptions, and the media were using their licence to exaggerate still further – because that’s what the media do.

Fear has been amplified in a feedback loop, circling back to the public where it has become entrenched, altering judgements of reality. In early June, when this year’s death toll in Australia was precisely one, a survey asked people to mark on a sliding scale the number of people who they thought had died. The average response was 256.

It’s by Nick Cater – that’s his picture – one of the very few sane commentators left in the country. And everything he has written is exactly as he has described it.