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So how will things now change?

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Obviously not guilty from the start. And as sinister as the entire episode has been, possibly the most sinister part is that one’s political beliefs are an almost perfect dye marker for how one receives the decision. For the left, it is symbolism alone that matters. On the right, it is that justice has finally been done. The left will attack you for your class membership in whatever way they wish to define you. There are no individual rights nor individual responsibility. This is the way of the left who are totalitarian through and through.

The left are a gang of ideological thugs who roam in packs. To the left, paedophilia is wrong, George Pell was accused of paedophilia, George Pell is a Catholic archbishop, therefore George Pell was guilty, irrespective of the virtual impossibility of his being actually guilty of the crime. It is the justice of the accusation, the Lubyanka, the show trial and bullet to the head. Not quite there yet, but they have effectively ruined Pell’s career, and have provided an exemplary lesson for anyone who falls outside the permitted norms as laid down by the left.

If this has been a learning experience, it is a learning experience for us. This is the Press Release from Daniel Andrews. Try finding an ounce of remorse in this meaningless statement:

I make no comment about today’s High Court decision. But I have a message for every single victim and survivor of child sex abuse: I see you. I hear you. I believe you.

And this is the only comment I can find from the Prime Minister, and there was no press release I could turn up.

The decision of the ‘highest court in the land must be respected’.

This was a handy dandy comment that could have been written a week ago. Works whichever way the decsion might have gone. As vacuous a form of words as could possibly have been constructed.

What should change? The ABC should have its charter revised so that it can only present cultural forms of entertainment. It should be forbidden to present news and political commentary.

And what will be changed? Nothing.

Morrison seems to take his lead in almost everything from Daniel Andrews, whether this decision in the High Court or in how to deal with the Corona Virus. What Morrison personally believes about anything political I really could not say.

George Pell unanimous 7-0 High Court decision to acquit

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George Pell was railroaded into prison by a corrupt administration of justice. The state of Victoria in which this persecution took place will forever have this judicial injustice as part of its legacy. The trial of George Pell will now join the trial of Ned Kelly in the judicial history of both Victoria and Australia. This is the statement issued by Cardinal Pell this morning.

Obviously not guilty from the start. And as sinister as the entire episode has been, possibly the most sinister part is that one’s political beliefs are an almost perfect dye marker for how one receives the decision. For the left, it is symbolism alone that matters. On the right, it is that justice has finally been done. The left will attack you for your class membership in whatever way they wish to define you. There are no individual rights nor is there individual responsibility. This is the way of the left who are totalitarian in every aspect of their lives.

The left are an evil gang of thugs who roam in packs. To the left, paedophilia is wrong, George Pell was accused of paedophilia, George Pell is a Catholic archbishop, therefore George Pell was guilty, irrespective of the virtual impossibility of his being actually guilty of the crime. It is the justice of the accusation, the Lubyanka, the show trial and the bullet to the head.

I think this hits the nail on the head: George Pell verdict: Victorian justice system is the biggest loser as convictions quashed“George Pell verdict: Victorian justice system is the biggest loser as convictions quashed”.

The Victorian justice system is the biggest loser from the High Court’s resounding vindication of Cardinal George Pell. After Victoria’s courts attempted to silence the world’s media over the cardinal’s conviction, it is now clear to all that the conviction itself should never have happened.

This state’s criminal justice system has tarnished the international reputation of Australian justice. The Pell conviction is a scandal that will rank alongside the outrageous jailing of Lindy Chamberlain for the murder of her baby – who was actually taken by a dingo.

Just like the Chamberlain case, the Pell disaster will inevitably find its way into a movie that will do no favours for a justice system that led to the jailing of a sick, old cardinal after years of frenzy that has been found to have no basis in law.r

Two of the most senior judges in Victoria – Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell – have been shown to have made a fundamental error; the reliability of the state’s jury system has been left in doubt; and the wisdom of the police in effectively advertising for complaints about the cardinal has also been called into question.

It does not end there. Pell’s tormentors in the media will need to re-examine the way they engaged in a campaign of character assassination against an innocent man.

The left feels on remorse since they are sanctimonious and immoral. Yet near enough half the country automatically votes for them, believing that their political sentiments demonstrate their high moral standards when in reality it shows they are vicious and ignorant to their very core. Almost a century later there is still discussion of Sacco and Venzetti. The story of George Pell will disappear within a week.

Social isolation must be maintained

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I saw this letter to the editor the other day and have now come to agree with how important the efforts being made to protect us are. Social isolation must be absolute, no exceptions, and must last until the Corona Virus is completely eradicated, not just here but across the world. Here was the letter which I found completely compelling.

My partner and I are around 70 but due to recent health issues and underlying conditions we are in a very high risk category, to the extent that I am not prepared to risk experimenting with life as usual. Can I say that neither of us is a vegetable in a nursing home. We have lives and plans, are active with our friends, we travel and have children and grandchildren. We have many years to enjoy.

A look around the world highlights that Australia is better off than some mainly because of the tough measures we have taken, not in spite of them. To suggest the extent of the battle is to isolate the vulnerable while the rest of you go about your business is short-sighted. As a member of the vulnerable let me say I’m not prepared to take one for the team.

He describes my own situation perfectly and what else is there to say? We vulnerable members of the community are not prepared to accept such selfishness from the rest of you, from all of those younger people who wish to get on with their lives, earn an income, save for the future, pay off their mortgages and continue meeting up with their friends and relations. Do they not understand that this will put people such as myself at much greater risk? Already almost fifty Australians have died from the Corona Virus. If present trends continue, this number might well rise to over 500.

With GDP around $1.5 trillion, the loss of 10 percent of our economic growth for the coming year is a mere $150 billion, although the actual number may, of course, be even higher. But sticking with the $150 billion figure, the cost of preserving those additional 500 from an early death, will come at a cost of only $30 million dollars for each life saved. Of course, even to think of money saved at a time like this is an ethical abomination.

The country has made a moral commitment to preserve lives at all cost. With my own life in such danger, along with the lives of all of our friends who are in that same boat, it would be an eternal disgrace for the country to choose to abandon us to the possibility of an early demise, or if not exactly early, to a demise sooner than might otherwise have occurred.

Good for Daniel Andrews who has shown such leadership in ensuring that every life is seen as precious.

You call that a plague? I’ll show you a plague

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If you want to know what the real thing is like, look at the following by James Hankins from Quillete: Social Distancing During the Black Death.

Every morning bodies of the dead—husbands, wives, children, servants—were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that “no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats.”

Like COVID-19, the disease spread with bewildering rapidity, but unlike in the modern pandemic, it infected everyone, young and old, rich and poor, not mainly the old and infirm. And again unlike the current virus, the effects of bubonic plague were particularly humiliating. Tumor-like growths as big as apples, called “bubos,” would appear in the groin or armpit. Gangrenous blotches would appear on hands and feet causing the skin to turn black and die. The victims would start coughing up blood, all their bodily fluids stank and their breath became putrid. “The stench of dead bodies, sickness and medicines seemed to fill and pollute the whole atmosphere.” There was no dying with dignity during the Black Death….

Everyone ran in panic from the sick. Neighbors shunned neighbors, relatives relatives. Children abandoned elderly parents and priests their flocks. Incredibly, “even fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.” Some reacted by locking themselves up with a few friends in some comfortable place stocked with food and fine wines. They would entertain themselves with music and refuse to receive any news of the dead. Others, often those without the means to escape, became fatalistic and began looting the houses of the dead, stuffing themselves with food and drink, heedless of the risks of infection.

We really have become an addled civilisation. If we aren’t tougher than this, we will not survive whatever might be the outcome from the Chinese Flu of the moment.

You know what, it can happen here

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From How a Police State is Born by Steve McCann.

When societies lose their freedom, it is not ordinarily because autocrats or tyrants have forcibly taken it away. It is usually the result of the population willingly surrendering their freedom in return for protection against an external threat. While the threat is oftentimes real, it is invariably exaggerated.

This is what we in the United States are experiencing. The general public has been stampeded by the fearmongering in the media into demanding action from the politicians at both the state and federal level. The politicians respond and do not pause to ask whether these actions will work — just do something! They do not ask if the financial and societal cost to the nation is worth the unknown and perhaps nebulous return.

Any student of history and human nature would recognize that these are the classic symptoms of collective hysteria. Hysteria is contagious. This nation is turning itself inside out as we, thanks to the media, are exaggerating the threat and not stopping to ask if the cure is worse than the disease.

He concludes:

In its 244-year history the United States has weathered seven of the worst pandemics in world history without the hysteria and loss of liberty and freedom. All indications reveal that the Coronavirus will be exponentially less life-threatening than any of these previous pandemics.

Is the Coronavirus pandemic serious enough to warrant putting much of the nation’s population into house imprisonment, or wrecking the economy for an indefinite period of time, or prohibiting worshipers from attending their churches, synagogues or mosques, or outlawing freedom of assembly and travel, or destroying businesses that have taken years to build up, or saddling future generations with unfathomable debt? The nation is choosing to plunge millions of people into depression, heart attacks, suicide and unbelievable distress, though they are not especially vulnerable and will only suffer mild symptoms or none at all.

This is what a police state is like. It is a nation in which the government can issue orders and edicts or convey preferences with no legal authority. Yet, it appears the majority of the American people are willing to sacrifice their freedoms and way of life in order to empower such a potential police state in the guise of conquering a pandemic. Governments never give up power once attained. They only seek to normalize it and now they have in their toolbox the knowledge that the citizenry will meekly acquiesce to any national emergency being declared an existential crisis which requires government to unconstitutionally impose its will on the people. 

Via Police States and the Corona Clampdown.

A reminder of what ought to be at the front of our minds right now and not brought back into the conversation when it’s too late

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That is what a socialist-fascist-totalitarian looks like. And as a reminder of what’s at stake, bear this in mind: ‘The alleged cure is immensely worse than the disease’.

Brendan O’Neill: We live in a country where parliament has been suspended, our most basic freedoms have been eroded, we are all virtually under house arrest, and there are a whole bunch of new rituals we all have to observe when we encounter other people, which is increasingly rare. Like me, are you a bit terrified by the speed and the ease with which Britain became this country?

Peter Hitchens: …the point that strikes me here is that – particularly in the Eastern European countries, but also largely in Russia – most people regarded the Soviets’ rule with a certain amount of contempt and made jokes about it and realised they were being mocked and fooled. In this case, the population accepts what they are being told, without any question. It’s extraordinary. The old USSR would have loved to have had a population like that in the Western world and in the United Kingdom, which genuinely believes the propaganda and does what it is told. You could say, ‘The chocolate ration has gone up’, when in fact it has gone down and people will believe it.

O’Neill: You have written some very solid pieces, questioning the need for this kind of shutdown. Let’s just talk for a moment about the extraordinary situation we find ourselves in. There is this novel virus, which undoubtedly causes great harm, especially to older people and to medically vulnerable people, and in response to it – which is unprecedented in human history – we have closed down virtually the whole of society and most of the economy, and in the process we have stored up immeasurable problems for the future. I think you have found it a bit of a struggle to convince people that this might not be the best way to tackle a virus?

Hitchens: It’s extraordinary. Again, the willingness of people to accept that ‘something must be done, and this is something, so we will do this’. The argument goes, ‘We have a problem, the way of solving it is to shut down the country and strangle civil liberties. Therefore, let’s do that.’

What I have been surprised by is how little examination there has been to whether there is any logic to this. It is as if you went to the doctor with measles and the doctor said that this was serious measles and the only treatment for it is to cut off your left leg. And he cuts off your left leg and then later on, you recover from the measles and he says, ‘This is fantastic. I’ve cured you of the measles, sorry about your leg.’ That is more or less what is going on now. We are being offered a supposed treatment which has nothing whatever to do with the problem.

Other countries have not resorted to these measures. We have modelled ourselves, bizarrely, on the most despotic country in the world, the People’s Republic of China, whose statistics are wholly unreliable and whose media are totally supine, so we can’t really know what is going on there. And in fact, all the countries which have had serious outbreaks of Covid-19, they have almost all reacted differently. Even Singapore and Hong Kong, which are widely praised for what they did, did different things. And yet, oddly enough, the results in Singapore and Hong Kong were quite similar. Japan has done something different. South Korea did something different. And again, the virus actually did not continue to grow at the rates which Imperial College apparently think are inevitable if we don’t shut down our society….

The alleged cure – and it is only alleged in this case – is immensely worse than the disease, because what happens to a society which trashes its economy? I will tell you what happens. It is unable to afford proper health provision, all of its standards decline, its food gets worse, its air quality gets worse, its housing gets worse, its water quality gets worse, and everybody gets iller.

Andrews knows nothing about diseases and their treatment, but knows a lot about how to never let a crisis go to waste. So therefore let me also add this: Joe Hildebrand on the week’s most ‘disgraceful’ coronavirus ban where I got the video of Daniel Andrews from.

Was there to see it myself and it does seem a long long time ago

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The Maple Leafs are now rightly seen as the worst sport franchise in North America. But a wonderful team in their glory days, although the Canadiens were always the team to beat.

Here is the video from the series. Only six teams in the NHL, no helmets on the players but Terry Sawchuk was wearing a mask but Johnny Bower wasn’t. Once saw Terry Sawchuk up close after a game when he played for Detroit and was on the subway heading for Union Station and I am my friend sat opposite him. I never saw a face so cut up in my life with hundreds of stitches. Could have played Frankenstein’s monster. By the time he took to wearing the mask it was much much too late. But the games were amazing and the hockey is fantastic. Alas, although I remember every player by name, I cannot remember the series other than the cheering at the game when we had won although I could not have told you until now who we were playing.

And this is the double overtime game 3 which I also don’t remember. I cannot understand how that is even possible, but so it seems. Also in Toronto so I would have been there. I and a friend bought standing room tickets for every game where we stood behind the seats up in “the Greys”.

A vast left wing conspiracy

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YES, I KNOW. IT RUINS THE NICE PANIC WE’VE GOT GOING:  Data & Numbers: COVID 19.

Chances increase daily that Winnie the Flu is a paper tiger.

19Posted at 1:54 am by Sarah Hoyt 

THESE DAYS WHEN ANGER IS OFTEN CRIPPLING IN TERMS OF WHAT I CAN PRODUCE, IT’S ALWAYS GOOD TO HAVE SOMETHING TO LAUGH ABOUT, AND THIS ONE IS A DOOZIE:  Sans sanction ni restrictions, le Portugal est (relativement) épargné par le #coronavirus.

For those who don’t feel like Google translate, that is roughly “Without sanctions or restrictions, Portugal is (relatively) spared by #coronavirus.  Fair. Portugal has far fewer fatalities than Spain or Italy, which is inexplicable.  Unless you assume that the Portuguese aren’t throwing grandma from the train, that is taking the opportunity to rid themselves of elders, while the other two nations almost certainly are.  Or take into account the fact that Portugal has a private medical system alongside state-provided health system. (Spain did too, but nationalized at the beginning of the crisis, because… I don’t know. What ARE they putting in the paella these days, anyway?)
BUT the truly hilarious thing in that article is that the Portuguese Prime Minister attributes this to the Portuguese being — I swear I have to pause and laugh before I type it — more organized than other Europeans.

I have no idea what he’s smoking, or where he found it, but that’s potent stuff.  Breaking rules and laws is by way of being a Portuguese pastime.  Portuguese don’t line up, they scrum.  There isn’t anything requiring order and careful deliberation that the Portuguese don’t do sideways, backwards and upside down.  And frankly that’s part of the reason I retain some fondness for the place!  Disciplined!  I told my husband and rendered him speechless for minutes!

15Posted at 12:35 am by Sarah Hoyt