Daniel Andrews may be a low-IQ psychopathic authoritarian thug but cometh the moment cometh the man.
So what if future generations will look back on us as the greatest collection of simpletons ever to have called themselves Australians. They will have no idea of what terror is when we have lived through a period in time when 0.0024% of the population has been carried off – or at least partly carried off since most had other co-morbidities – by this global pandemic.
People still think of socialists as well-meaning and on their side. I watched the trains go by yesterday, half a dozen passengers on each at most in the middle of the day, but running on a normal weekday schedule. The state is already bankrupt but going further and deeper each day.
Dan does not care about anyone. He is an ideologue of the left. He wants power and he hates private business. To trust people like that with power is an invitation to disaster. Covid was a chance occurrence but it is exactly what Marxists keep their eye out for.
“Please don’t ruin us.” Don’t you simpletons understand anything? That is exactly what he is out to do.
What seems essential for the future is that everyone becomes educated in the Leninist addition to Marxism. Lenin added into the mix how the capitalist system could be overthrown. He was a strategist.
We are watching Leninist practice before our eyes. Every public servant still working with the private sector being shut down. And, of course, virtually no one is dying while our freedoms are.
The other aspect is that Dan is basically a coward along with being a bully. His lack of intelligence is just an added feature. I just saw the other day a story about how there has been no back burning in the forests as fire season approaches because we cannot afford it.
His cowardice is shown in how he will happily attack the weak but never attacks anyone capable of fighting back, in this case the union movement.
What else is being demonstrated for the congenitally stupid is evidence that a centralised economy can continue to “work” as in we can still get by with these dictatorial powers in place. Who needs free enterprise? If this were a national government, we would be heading straight into Venezuelan territory, and there is no certainty at this stage that we will even avoid it now.
Understanding how Lenin operated: From Mack in the comments.
It’s all spelt out there: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/not-happy-dan-victoria-s-premier-cops-a-pandemic-pounding-20200626-p556h7.html “Andrews quickly became known as a factional hardhead. A long-term Labor player puts it this way: “Daniel was the first one to go to war in every internal battle. He was the one saddling up saying, ‘Let’s kill the person.’ ” “Any perceived internal enemy, or even someone who feels threatening to him, is frozen out, socially and professionally isolated. In cabinet, Andrews….. is supremely confident in his own views and sometimes unyielding. Criticism is met with anger and, for these reasons, few challenge him.”
Let me add the following from the article to flesh things out a bit.
To make things worse, Andrews now has the cover of the pandemic to hide anything that might have been going wrong before (the budget was looking shaky and the West Gate Tunnel project has been bogged in commercial dispute). O’Brien opens with a question about Andrews’ signing of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The deal, which promises cooperation between Victoria and China on policy, infrastructure, trade and finance, is controversial, putting Andrews at odds with his federal Labor colleagues, the federal Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and all other states in Australia….
Despite all sorts of scandal and controversy, from using taxpayer money to fund campaign workers to spending $1 billion on dumping the Napthine government’s East West Link road, he’s won two remarkable elections, vanquishing Denis Napthine’s Liberals in 2014 (the first single-term government since 1955) and then the “Danslide” election in 2018, which gave him a huge majority of seats in the lower house. (In 2012, when, as opposition leader, he was identified by focus groups as “the guy who looks like an accountant and hunches”, Andrews sought the advice of former prime minister Paul Keating. What did he want to know? I ask Keating. “About the getting of power and the use of it,” Keating says. “He had a hunger for power … and the leadership gene.”) …
But the picture that emerges is consistent: Andrews, they say, is loyal to his office staff but as party leader, can be vindictive and demands total fealty. Any perceived internal enemy, or even someone who feels threatening to him, is frozen out, socially and professionally isolated (such as former emergency services minister Jane Garrett, who found herself shunned by Andrews, and the minister for the prevention of family violence, the late Fiona Richardson, who the Premier refused to meet with for many years)….
Heading into the pandemic Andrews … was rolling out a popular $70 billion Big Build infrastructure program, funded mostly by debt and the leasing of the Port of Melbourne to a private consortium (it includes the level crossing removals; the Metro Tunnel, a major upgrade of the city loop with five new underground train stations due to open in 2026; and the West Gate Tunnel Project, an alternative road to the often bottlenecked West Gate Bridge, due to open in 2023)….
So he’s dominant, yes, but also, watching him in parliament, I wonder if an arrogance is creeping in. He shows a worrying dislike of transparency, with successful freedom-of-information requests at their lowest in five years.
… “Our Premier has done his best to cruel the city,” Grant Cohen, owner of the city’s beautiful Block Arcade shopping precinct, told The Age. “The only thing missing from the city is the tumbleweeds.”
I don’t know if anyone else has commented on this, but I find it interesting that this protest was to be in Ballarat, the same city as The Eureka Stockade. I no longer expect the same result if it goes to court as the first time round, nor the same reaction of the people of Victoria, since we no longer seem to have the same kind of reaction to oppressive authority we were once famous for.
Thousands of Melbourne residents celebrated the acquittal of the rebels, and paraded them through the streets upon their release from the Victorian Supreme Court.
Of course, the miners were part of a tax revolt. The Covid adventure has been presented as a freebie to save us from a virtually non-existent death threat. You want to see what’s coming. This was the lead story at the Oz today: Josh Frydenberg’s plan to fight back from Covid collapse. The first para should strike terror into the hearts of everyone, but it won’t:
Josh Frydenberg is preparing a five-year plan to create millions of jobs and reignite business investment, to anchor Australia’s recovery from the most severe recession since World War II.
Has the Dan Andrews economy gone national? Hope not, but maybe.
Good morning kids. Midweek and up front, more and harder evidence of the plot to steal the 2020 election by the Democrats via the Mail-In Voting scheme is coming into sharper focus. Even the media propagandists and others are starting to admit that my recent perception that Trump may be heading for the closest thing to a landslide victory since ’84 or ’88 is accurate, they are using that as merely the springboard to state that when the mail-in votes are tabulated, it will be as if the win was an illusion, or some such bilge.
Hawkfish — a “data analytics agency founded by Michael Bloomberg to support Democratic candidates” per Axios, contends that President Trump will likely win an “incredible victory” with the Electoral College on election night.However, Mendelsohn continues, “…when every legitimate vote is tallied and we get to that final day, which will be someday after Election Day, it will in fact show that what happened on election night was exactly that, a mirage. It looked like Donald Trump was in the lead and he fundamentally was not when every ballot gets counted…”
Of course, the ballots will no doubt be the result of harvesting, stealing, forgery or whatever else the Dems pull out of the back of Al Franken’s ’76 LeSabre trunk. It all depends on who is counting the votes and/or determining their validity. I have no idea what the process is for this, but if you remember the “hanging chad” madness that dragged on forever, that only involved the hand counting of ballots from, if I remember correctly, a single county, Palm Beach County (maybe one other?). We’re talking about a national election this time. Ho. Lee. Fook.
Vote on the day only, with ID. Have to be registered a month in advance, with a verified address. And your finger will get stained in purple dye. The end. Anything else, and you’re risking the dilution of the vote of legitimate citizens. Who, quite frankly, have had about enough. Or at least I have.
Seriously, is this doable? We will have to wait till the 11th of November to find out.
This is in Ballarat, a provincial city just outside Melbourne in the state of Victoria in the midst of Australia. We are unbelievably dealing with our own version of the Stasi who like all such arms of the law, are only following orders. Frightening and disgusting. This is full on totalitarian, never mind an extreme violation of free speech. I still don’t know what she has been charged with doing or what was actually illegal for her to have done.
Update: She was arrested for putting up a Facebook post for an anti-Lockdown protest. She didn’t even attend since the protest was not even to occur until the following Saturday. She only mentioned it on a note to her Facebook friends.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has called for COVID-19 restrictions to be relaxed, arguing officials have become trapped in “crisis mode” and that governments need to consider “uncomfortable questions” about the number of deaths they are prepared to live with.
“From a health perspective, this pandemic has been serious. From an economic perspective, it’s been disastrous,” he said.
“But I suspect that it’s from an overall wellbeing perspective that it will turn out worst of all. Because this is what happens when for much more than a mere moment, we let fear of falling sick stop us from being fully alive.
“Now that each one of us has had six months to consider this pandemic, and to make our own judgements about it, surely it’s time to relax the rules so that individuals can take more personal responsibility and make more of their own decisions about the risks they’re prepared to run.”
His key points:
Mr Abbott said governments approached the pandemic like “trauma doctors instead of thinking like health economists”
He accused Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews of wanting to extend a “health dictatorship” by pushing for an extension of state of emergency powers
He said the media had spread “virus hysteria” and people should be allowed to make their own decisions
Speaking in London to the UK think tank Policy Exchange, Mr Abbott said the media had spread “virus hysteria” and people should be allowed to make their own decisions.
For the ABC Daniel Andrews is more their kind of guy.
The moment was, of course, when he looked at his watch while Julia droned on. No one, of course, ever mentions how Kevin Rudd shoved her aside just before the 2013 election.
The chance of contracting COVID-19 in Victoria at the moment is less than 0.002 per cent. If Victoria were a country, it would be the 90th least dangerous place on the planet in which to shelter from the pandemic.
In the light of these reassuring facts, it seems surprising so few Victorians are protesting at their government’s gross over-reaction to the virus.
The severity of the spread in Victoria is roughly similar to Canada, which is also experiencing a second wave. Yet there are no reports of Canadians receiving six-month prison sentences for crossing a state provincial border or being wrestled to the ground by police for exposing naked faces.
There is, perhaps, this one extenuating circumstance to explain our craven submission to authority, and particularly Victoria’s, that Australia was founded as a penal colony, so there may remain an overlay of a marshal-law mentality that lies very near the surface within Australian governments, with a matching tendency to submit to this authority within the community. But we were also an English colony with a legal foundation built on the English common law, so that one can still hope there is still somewhere within our national DNA a love of freedom and a hatred of dictatorial restraint.
And to provide some perspective
Not saying it definitely won’t kill you, but it is still very unlikely.
Just remember, Daniel Andrews is the kind of guy who if he gets to take your freedom from you will be very reluctant to give it back.
That’s the middle of Melbourne in the middle of the day in the middle of the week
The Covid pandemic has brought on our modern version of The Stockholm Syndrome which you will recall are: “feelings of trust or affection felt in many cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards a captor.” We now have the Melbourne Syndrome, which I come across versions of every day:
Feelings of trust or affection felt during a lockdown by its victims towards their most authoritarian political leaders.
Now why should it be the “Melbourne” syndrome? There are plenty of place similar where you find similar attitudes. In my view, I believe it should be called the “Melbourne” Syndrome because Melbourne has now implemented the hardest lockdown at the hands of one of the most far-left and incompetent political leaders in the world, a leader who nevertheless retains high approval ratings, within a state in which the corona virus issue went from benign to statistically explosive (although the death rate is still near invisible at something like 0.002% per head of population). I therefore believe Melbourne should have the “honour” of bearing the name of this widely observed form of political insanity. Others are welcome to suggest alternative places and names.
And not only do we have the hardest lockdown possibly anywhere in the world, we also have the most incompetent leadership since unlike virtually everywhere else, following the initial peak, things in Melbourne managed to get far worse whereas the norm everywhere else, including the rest of Australia, was for conditions to have improved. And let me provide a reminder of what we are being asked to endure. These were “the Stage 4 Lockdowns” that were put in place by the Victorian Government at the the start of August when out of nowhere there was a large statistical increase in the number of cases although trivially small relative to the size of the population. Melbourne by the way is the capital city of the state of Victoria.
The “state of emergency” in Victoria has been upgraded to a “state of disaster”, meaning police can now enter your home to carry out spot checks even if you don’t give them permission and they don’t have a warrant.
Between the hours of 8 p.m. and 5 a.m., you’re not allowed to leave your homes except for work, medical care and caregiving.
Outside those hours, you may only leave your home for four reasons: shopping for food and essential items, care and caregiving, daily exercise and work. “We can no longer have people simply out and about for no good reason whatsoever,” said the Premier.
Daily exercise can only take place within a 5km radius of your home and cannot last longer than an hour.
You cannot exercise in groups of more than two, even if they’re members of the same household.
Apart from daily exercise, you are only allowed to leave your home once a day for essential supplies and food.
In the whole of Victoria, you cannot buy more than two of certain essential items, including dairy, meat, vegetables, fish and toilet paper.
Schools have closed again, with all Victoria school students returning to remote learning from Wednesday (except for vulnerable children and children of permitted workers). Childcare and kindergarten will be closed from Thursday.
Golf and tennis venues, which were open, have now been closed.
Weddings will no longer be allowed from Thursday, and funerals will be limited to 10 people.
Face masks anywhere outside your home have been mandatory for people in metropolitan Melbourne since July 22nd, but that rule has now been extended to the entire state of Victoria.
You cannot have visitors or go to another person’s house unless it is for the purpose of giving or receiving care. However, you can leave your house to visit a person if you are in an “intimate personal relationship” with them, even during curfew hours.
If you have a holiday home or were planning a holiday outside Melbourne, you must nevertheless remain in the city for the next six weeks.
The maximum fine for breaching a health order currently stands at $1,652.
Are people upset by these restrictions? The figures below are for Australia as a whole. Will get to Victoria in a moment.
As for the nature of the statistical collections, this is the Chief Medical Officer of Victoria specifically stating that to be classified as a Covid death only requires that the virus was present, not that it had been the actual cause of the fatality.
With this kind of approach, you could turn any common sickness into a statistical killer. Think of this as well, which is the first of the comments on the video.
I am a provider. One of my patients admitted herself into hospice d/t kidney failure and tested negative for “COVID.” When she died, they put on the death certificate death d/t “COVID.” We are in the early stages of a democide. THIS is what it feels like to have the governments force you to live in and breathe NONSENSE. War is peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength and 2+5=5.
And are the numbers in Victoria exaggerated. Here are some stats for Victoria versus the rest of Australia that were published the other day. Victoria has around a quarter of the country’s population.
New Cases Australia – 25,205
New Cases Victoria – 18,608
New Cases Outside Victoria – 6,597
Recent Deaths Australia – 156
Recent Deaths Victoria – 149
Recent Deaths Outside Victoria – 7
Total Deaths Australia – 549
Total Deaths Victoria – 462
Total Deaths Outside Victoria – 87
So this is where we are:
[The Premier] said restrictions would be in place until next year if Victorians didn’t adhere to them and case numbers didn’t decrease.
“It won’t be a 6-week strategy, it will be much longer,” he said.
“We will be into 2021 with significant lockdown in place.”
And do people resent this fantastic intrusion on their lives? Do they feel the heel of the state and wish to see it lifted? Here are the results of a poll of Victorians over whether they support the measures that have been taken:
The lockdown might be draconian, but Victorians overwhelmingly support the public health restrictions imposed to curb the second wave of coronavirus infections….
New research shows 72% of the sample backs the decision of the Victorian government to impose a curfew between 8pm and 5am, 71% supports curbs on leaving the house, while 70% endorse restrictions on business and the requirement that people travel no further than 5km from their house.
It’s the Melbourne Syndrome all right, unless someone can come up with an example even more absurd yet with the kind of wide support as we find in Melbourne, which used to be and was for many years the World’s Most Liveable City. Well we do still have very nice parks and restaurants, if only we were allowed to visit them, or our children, or our friends, or sit in a cafe, or go to the movies, or just to walk along the street or the beach more than a couple of miles from our home.
Really, is there anywhere else to compare with this? It is one of many such emails that have been sent to me from friends and family around the world who have found Melbourne mentioned in the local news. Melbourne does however stand well out from the pack.
You can therefore still see traces here in Australia’s origins as a penal colony.
There is, perhaps, this one extenuating circumstance to explain our craven submission to authority, and particularly Victoria’s, that Australia was founded as a penal colony, so there may remain an overlay of a marshal-law mentality that lies very near the surface within Australian governments, with a matching tendency to submit to this authority within the community. But we were also an English colony with a legal foundation built on the English common law, so that one can still hope there is still somewhere within our national DNA a love of freedom and a hatred of dictatorial restraint.
Trump likewise reposted messages asserting that the real death toll from the coronavirus is only around 9000 — not nearly 183,000 — because the others who died also had other health issues and most were of an advanced age.
“So get this straight — based on the recommendation of doctors Fauci and Birx the US shut down the entire economy based on 9000 American deaths to the China coronavirus,” said the summary of an article by the hard-line conservative website Gateway Pundit that was retweeted by the President, denigrating his own health advisers, Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Deborah Birx.
The post was a distortion of data available on the website of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, which reports that 6 per cent of coronavirus fatalities list only the virus on the death certificates. For other deaths, the patients had an average of 2.6 other conditions or causes of death. The statistics do not mean that they did not die because of the virus, but help explain who is most vulnerable to it.
Let me therefore take you to the post at Small Dead Animals which I cited before: Remember that thing called the Covid Pandemic?. Allow me to quote what you will never read in the Age or see on the ABC.
In last night’s Reader Tips, SDA regular Deplorable Meposted a link to this page on the CDC website. It leads to some interesting reading and very enlightening data (emphaseses mine):
Comorbidities
Table 3 shows the types of health conditions and contributing causes mentioned in conjunction with deaths involving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average, there were 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death. The number of deaths with each condition or cause is shown for all deaths and by age groups. For data on comorbidities,
A little more digging will take you to this page showing the cumulative deaths in America involving Covid-19. Here’s a screenshot of the data shown today. Furthermore you can go to this page to download a slightly older dataset which breaks down Covid-19 related deaths by age range. Here’s a screenshot of this dataset’s breakdown by age range.
For those, like most journalists, for whom #MathIsHard, let’s take a look at the numbers:
2020 Covid-19 related deaths in America: 167,558
Percentage of Covid-19 related deaths for ages 0 – 54: 8.16%
Percentage of these deaths purely caused by Covid-19: 6%
Number of Covid-19 related deaths for ages 0 – 54: 13,673
Number of deaths for ages 0 – 54, where Covid-19 was the only apparent cause: 820
Current US Population: 330,209,500
One can only wonder what historians will think, looking back at these minuscule Covid-19 death numbers of healthy people under 55 years old, asking why on earth much of our working activities were shut down? While one could offer politicians the benefit of the doubt in March and April, now that September is about to begin, why is anything still shut down?
To trust the people who report the news to understand what they are reporting and to get the story straight and explain what they are saying honestly may be the largest act of faith in the world today.
Law of Markets 