Category Archives: Cultural

The Melbourne Syndrome revisited

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Nothing has Changed from a Year Ago

This was an article I wrote exactly a year ago: The Melbourne Syndrome which was published at the American Institute for Economic Research. What remains the most astonishing part is how little has changed. Victoria is still governed by our own version of Captain Bligh who knows only how to order others about while understanding nothing about how to deal with the actual problems we have. Just do what you are told and stay in your house.

I invite you to go to the link to see how creepy the parallels are, but let me quote from what was published one year ago. 

Now why should it be the “Melbourne” syndrome? There are plenty of places similar where you find such attitudes. It should be called the “Melbourne” Syndrome because Melbourne has now implemented the hardest and longest 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 coronavirus 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.

We are the most compliant people on the planet dealing with the harshest set of restrictions found anywhere on the planet. It does bring to mind Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We have been doing the same thing for a year, nothing has improved, but Melbourne now holds the record for the longest lockdown of any city in the world. But then there was this near the end of the article.

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.

That was something like four lockdowns ago. Nothing has improved. Nothing is better. We are more tightly locked down than ever. And Daniel Andrews is still loved by the majority of Victoria’s citizens. So I will end as I ended a year ago.

You can therefore still see traces here in Australia’s origins as a penal colony.

Donald Trump and vaxxination

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I have a friend who keeps urging me to get with the program on vaxxination. His central point was that I should follow Donald Trump since I had thought he was a great president and he has been advocating getting the vax.

I thought that was absolutely typical of the way the left thinks about issues. You have the party line from which no deviations are permitted. It’s one of the reasons I almost never discuss politics with anyone on the left. Aside from how shallow their arguments invariably are – assuming they are even willing to get into such discussions with me which they usually are not – there is no reason to bother since everything they believe is their own cut-and-paste version of what can be found in the local versions of The New York Times.

Of course, for me I choose who to follow according to whether they hold views that are close to mine, rather than I follow the leader in whatever views they might specifically have. I therefore went to look to see whether I had ever mentioned that on the issue of vaxxination that I followed a different course. And the first thing I noticed is that I have hardly mentioned PDT since January. But that secondly, that I had actually said something about him and vaxxines, although it was way back in April. This was the post: Vaccine irony. And this is what I said:

President Trump obviously meant well when rushing a vaccine to availability.  He had no idea that Fauci had been funding that lab in Wuhan, that despite legal prohibition of gain-of-function (making known viruses more lethal) experiments in the US, he was funding that research in China as well.

And no doubt he had meant well, but as the post specifically states, that does not necessarily mean everything had worked out as he might have hoped.

Time will tell. Unwillingness to trust governments will actually mean something this time.

And oddly this came up just yesterday, from CNN. This is what the issue was:

Dr. Jonathan Reiner reacts to President Donald Trump telling the Wall Street Journal that he “probably won’t” get a Covid-19 vaccine booster.

And this is what his comment was:

Almost intentional sabotage.

These lefties! PDT brings these experimentall vaxxines into existence within a year at ‘warp speed” as he says, but gets no credit.

And I might note that the President had even had Covid, but was cured almost overnight. How he was cured so rapidly has never been publicly stated, but it was with either HCQ or Ivermectin.

In regard to Ivermectin, you really need to read this: Ivermectin for COVID-19: real-time meta analysis of 63 studies. This was the bottom line.

“Ivermectin is an effective treatment for COVID-19.”

Anyone who says anything else is complicit in mass murder.

They don’t seem to be very worried about covid spreading any more

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More here, some of it even very rude: VIDEOS: Multiple Stadiums Break Into ‘F**k Joe Biden’ Chants At NCAA Division 1 Football Games. I don’t approve of what they say, of course, but will defend to the death their right to say it.

First do no harm

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First do no harm. 

That’s the principle behind medical practice, with the other half, presumably, do some good. So what are we to make of this: The Vaccines don’t work – Israel records highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the World despite 78% of population being fully vaccinated. 

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The issue is not whether one should get vaxxinated. The question is one of costs and benefits. If someone is vaxxinated, what good will it do? But also, what harm will it do? Vaccinations in the past had almost no known downsides, at least not by the time they reached the public. In this case, however, the upside appears to be non-existent.

Despite compounding vaccination, the nation still suffers, with the world’s worst seven-day rolling average number of covid cases per capita. Israel is on track to pass 11,000 daily covid cases — an infection rate that is magnitudes higher than a year before, when everyone in the country was unvaccinated.

Using a non-neutralizing vaccine against a novel, endemic virus only perpetuates the transmissibility of the virus among people. When the spike protein of that virus is forcibly replicated throughout the population, entirely new health problems occur.

By placing selective pressure on an amino acid sequence of the virus, and scaling up that attack across the population, these vaccine programs only cause mutations in the viral sequence, leading to new outbreaks and vaccine failure.

Virtually no one is dying from Covid any more, at least not amongst almost the entire population. Certainly more used to die during flu season. What follows in the years to come we will only know in the years to come. Meanwhile, why take a vaxxine with a massive and known failure rate with the possibility of massive but still unknown harm that we will only know at some time in the future.

And even if there is no harm, which we will not know for some time, why take a vaxxine that does no good?

My thanks to Gold v Fiat in a previous comment for putting me onto this posting

Death rates with and without Ivermectin

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The map is from Ivermectin Safety Profile by David Archibald. Here’s what the different colours mean.

In the graphic above, the blue area shows the countries of Africa that distribute ivermectin once or twice a year for the control of parasites. The brown area is the countries that don’t. The brown line is the daily deaths from Covid per one hundred thousand people in those countries. The blue line is the same for the blue area — which is enjoying a far, far lower Covid death rate. A lot of the poor and backward countries of South America, Africa and Asia have now approved ivermectin for Covid.

So the question is why haven’t the rest of us done the same? When we finally work it out, I suspect there won’t be enough lampposts to go around.

A study in cynicism and the modern world

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Here’s the actual title, Diary of an Acclimatised Beauty: Treating, but it really is a study in cynicism and the modern world. Here is the passage that first caught my eye, just in case you were wondering why there are so many covid cases in the US.

American hospitals are actually paid 20 percent more for a coronavirus diagnosis and therefore ‘you can rest assured they are telling people to ‘put it on the DRG‘ which he explained is some code for getting the highest reimbursement from the government. The reimbursement didn’t make that much sense to me as I well understood the U.S. was not all on one shared government programme but he further explained that since Covid, there were nearly no private hospitals anymore; and that everyone had become dependent on the government dollar. He also explained it was the same for anyone getting a Covid test, and although I’d already interacted with a dozen or so hospital employees—they would indeed test me for Covid before I left.

It’s a fascinating article on so many levels. This bit is from close to the end.

‘I’m really not happy about a conversation I just had about the business model of a hospital, and I thought I was getting better care in the U.S., than from the National Health.’

‘You probably are.’ Daddy said, ‘But it is a business, and not a very successful one either. Most hospitals are losing money, so there’s an incentive to lie about the diagnosis. Even a positive coronavirus test while treating your eye injury will mean they can bill for 20 percent more so if you want to do them a favour why don’t you tell them you have symptoms of flu.’

‘I’m serious, Daddy.’

‘As am I.

It’s the way of the world.

Whatever else it is about, it’s not about your health

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Just how stupid are these people terrorised  by Covid. This stupid! 

Since the info above is clear and visible to me but not necessarily on the blog, here is a summary of what it says.

Australian Flu Cases in 2019:          302,092

Australian Covid Cases 2020-21       46,726

Australian Flu Deaths in 2019:               950

Australian Covid Deaths 2020-21            985

If these numbers are even remotely correct it’s a shameful madness.

Might match these figures up with another set from Instapundit.

Might add a few comments from the Instapundit post just for emphasis.

I don’t care any more, and I didn’t care much all those eons ago that this madness started. The odds of dying of this seem to me SMALL unless you are already seriously compromised and hanging by one or more threads anyway. Isn’t that right ? BUT the odds that things like passports and State coercion set the stage for a more tyrannical society filled with panicked ,fearful, non-reasoning , obiedient, and judgemental humans seem very large indeed. I’ll take Covid any day over ANY of this ‘helping’ lunacy. And I can because ‘they’ have but little hold on me. But they have a large hold on YOU, if you need to work or learn or just be social with others.

At this point there are no numbers to justify not going back to normal. We are where we are because a loud minority wants to continue the panic and the totalitarians are happy to make use of the useful idiots to grab power. Our rights are being infringed for the sake of someone else feeling safe and I’m sick to death of these ninnies who are still so invested in being afraid of something almost 2 years later. There is no logic, no reason, no facts to back anything from saying “Carry on with your lives. This is as good as it gets.” except that people are invested in feeling anxious and wrapping themselves up in it like a blanket. They hate everyone who isn’t willing to act as cowardly as they are.

CDC– underreporting breakthroughs. Just like that, being asymptomatic – or having only minor symptoms – will no longer count as a “Covid case” but only if you’ve been vaccinated:

            ‘As of May 1, 2021, CDC transitioned from monitoring all reported        vaccine breakthrough cases to focus on identifying and investigating only hospitalized or fatal cases due to any cause. This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance. Previous case counts, which were last updated on April 26, 2021, are available for reference only and will not be updated moving forward.’

Protecting the health of children and adults

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This is a website that examines the dangers of vaxxination for children: Safer to Wait – Protecting Children’s Health.

1. Children are at extremely low risk from Covid-19

2. They are not drivers of transmission

3. The vaccines use completely new technologies

4. Serious and fatal adverse reactions have been reported

5. There is no medium or long-term safety data

6. The vaccine manufacturers have zero liability

7. Natural immunity is safer and more effective

8. There are safe and effective treatments for Covid-19

9. Past emergency use vaccines have caused harm

10. It’s not needed for us to reach herd immunity

There is additional information on each of the above at the link.