Category Archives: Cultural

There are still two sides to the debate over vaxxination

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The most amazing part about the vaxxines to me is how trusting most people are about governments. I appreciate how difficult it is to get contrary information in the wave of covid terror-tactics that have been applied for the last year and a half, but even so, there are other sources of information that might just possibly make someone a bit hesitant to risk their life and health on a vaxxine based on a risky methodology that has been attempted before but has never succeeded.

With this in mind, let me encourage you to read the following article Viral Vaccines and the Jabberwock by David Solway. I will highlight a few excerpts but do encourage you to read it all. It may be a matter of life or death, yours.

We know that medical protocol requires a minimum five-year trial period to validate a vaccine, perhaps more. After less than a year, the product is still in the experimental stage, yet it has been approved for emergency use and may soon be ratified by the FDA.

PCR testing of the asymptomatic population was supposed to be failproof, yet the Ct (Cycle threshold) rates are generally so high as to produce enormous numbers of false positives….

Many state authorities and health officials believe in a “Zero Covid” recovery scenario before mandates and restrictions will be lifted. Yet it now widely known that the virus will be with us indefinitely, like the flu and the common cold….

We were assured that the vaccines would render us immune to the disease. It now turns out that the vaccinated are suffering “breakthrough” cases….

Dr. Daniel Stock, who is a trained immunologist, asks: “Why is a vaccine that is supposedly so effective have a breakout in the middle of the summer when respiratory viral syndromes don’t do that?”…

Dr. Stock’s six-minute video has been taken down by YouTube and his claims “factchecked” to death by an innumerable host of politically complicit Internet sites and media shills. Open debate and informed argument are obviously not tolerated in the current repressive milieu….

Distinguished virologists and epidemiologists … have deposed, with considerable evidence, that a condition called Antibody dependent enhancement, which allows the pathogen to invade cells, will render the vaccinated prone to the proliferating emergence of variants….

We are assured that that these elixirs are effective and safe, despite the fact that adverse reactions continue to be reported (or massively underreported). An Open Letter from Doctors for COVID Ethics records a total for the EU/UK/USA of 34,052 vaccine deaths and 5.46 million injuries as of August 1, 202.

His conclusion:

I firmly believe that the vaccines should not be mandated, whether by government or corporate enterprises, but remain the personal decision of the individual — moreover, an individual who is privy to full disclosure regarding both sides of the debate, a task admittedly growing more and more mercurial under the prevailing rule of media and Internet censorship. Censorship almost always means there is a valid or important argument across the polemical meridian that the authorities and their journalist enablers do not want people to hear. Anything that challenges unexamined beliefs and rattles unsifted confidence must be cancelled.

I am old enough to remember Thalidomide which for my generation was the lesson learned about rushing medications to market. It is an experience that is disappearing from the conscious memories of our communities. We shall soon enough know whether these vaxxines will replace those old memories with some new ones. And if not, virtually no one’s dying from the Covid. You can always get vaxxinated once we know these non-vaccines are safe.

Actually the Daniel Andrews edition

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Cannot get either image to show up. The one above should have been an Australian Covid Monopoly board with every square showing Go Directly to Jail.

I liked this one too, but you need to be Canadian which shows two mounties. Reconstructed from memory. The first one digging in the snow pulls out a boot, and say, “This is a boot.” And the other mounty says, “What is this a boot?” It’s kinda funny if you are a Canadian.

And I am sorry the pictures don’t show up since it’s not as funny to have to explain a joke.

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I don’t actually believe Canadians talk like that anyway, but there was a chap I once knew who used to ask Canadians to say “out and about and around the house” and he would laugh and tell us we had just said “oot and aboot and aroond the hoos”. Couldn’t hear it myself, but it made him laugh.

Of course, my old test for Americans was to ask them to say “dog” and “log”. If they didn’t rhyme, then they were Americans. Canadians always do.

I also had a girlfriend one time who was English and she said that in England the words “Mary”, “Merry” and “marry” are each pronounced differently but in Canada they are all pronounced the same. Certainly, I always pronounce them the same.

America’s future?

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Afghan
2021—————————————————————————– 2071

In fact, how unrealistic is this as the future of women across “the West”. Nothing stands still. And with things as unpredictable as they are, who’s to say where things might end up. After 911 did you think the US would end up surrendering to the Taliban less than twenty years later? There are some very determined people on the other side to whom modern feminism will hardly be a response or an obstacle. I wish the modern left wasn’t as stupid as they are. With them, anything is possible. See below.

ONE DAY LATER: It really is astonishing how ignorant these journalists are. And there she is in the middle of Kabul surrounded by everything and reporting to Americans about what is going on and listen to her. She could not be more naive.

Covid ethics-such a cute concept

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From the Australian Spectator reprinted here.

What is even more concerning is that, as alerted to by the Doctors for Covid Ethics, a Freedom of Information request to the Australian drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration that granted provisional approval to the Pfizer vaccine, confirms that it has never seen the study data.

In other words, the TGA never saw or requested the patient data from Pfizer and simply accepted their reporting of their study as true. This means that when the head of the TGA John Skerritt said that “the safety evidence is pretty thorough” on February 6, his words would ring hollow to most Australians who have assumed, rightly or wrongly, that the TGA had actually looked at the patient data before granting any such approval. As noted by Doctors for Covid Ethics on its website, it is currently not known whether any of the major government agencies around the globe (FDA, MHRA or EMA) has independently verified, or attempted to verify, Pfizer’s data, before proceeding with provisional/emergency authorisation of Pfizer’s mRNA therapy vaccine.

For any government, either by itself or via corporate proxy, to attempt to mandate vaccines in circumstances where there has not been adequate testing and analysis of risks as well as benefits would constitute not only a violation of the principle of informed consent (which Prime Minister Scott Morrison has stated he believes in – see this press conference as an example) — but a violation of Australia’s obligations under international law with respect to medical experimentation. 

Indeed, after National Cabinet on August 6, Scott Morrison indicated that mandatory vaccination could breach privacy laws, discrimination laws, and Australia’s policy remained that vaccines should be voluntary and free. In particular, he declared: “In our country, everyone has choices and they have choices that are supported by the rule of law and simply making the point that those choices have to be exercised, are consistent with the rule of law.”

Let’s just see if these will simply be more hollow words from the hollow man.

There was then this comment by Mud Crab replying to another comment by DJ. Is he lying? What if it’s true?

DJ mentions:

“They rolled out the Moderna mRNA experimental injections at his facility, and he says:

‘I’ve seen 32 elderly people pass away immediately after taking the Moderna vaccine. None of that is being talked about on the News. It doesn’t fit their narrative.’”

Correct. The Narrative must be protected.

Here in Oz on the tga.gov.au they publish weekly reports into what the Jab is doing. They were admitting for a while that there were people who had died with a short period of receiving a jab. The numbers were increasing at 15 to 20 per week. The report then devoted an entire sentence to say (paraphrasing from memory) that “we compared these death rates to the expected seasonal death rates and since they are more or less the same then nothing to worry about”.

Australian Government report on vaccination side effects effectively says “People die all the time, get over it.”

Interestingly these weekly reports stopped listing the current totals of recent jab deaths two reports ago, only referring to them in general terms. I understand after some careful reading that these deaths are about 430 now (c.f. total number of claimed Covid deaths in Australia of roughly 950, all of which were, apparently, outside the seasonal expected death rates and therefore Very Important, apparently).

Using some very rough modelling based on the amount of Australians that have taken the Jab so far we could be looking at over 1200 deaths post jab that are all, apparently, completely normal cause hey, people die all the time, okay?

To the TGA reports ‘credit’ they do admit that at least 7 (reports are weekly, I am behind) people have died from jab related blood clot complications. Of these 6 are of people below the age of 52 and 5 are people in 30s and 40s.

When you compare those numbers to the ‘Covid Deaths’ in the same age groups here in Australia, while the numbers are fortunately still very low, there are actually slightly more Jab deaths than Covid.

The numbers are complicated by the recent death of a 33 year ‘healthy’ woman in NSW who had Covid and die… and… umm… also had a Rare Heart Condition… but totally died from Covid which is why NSW is completely justified in employed the army against it’s on civilian population now. Prior to this death (which had clearly nothing to do with her rare heart condition) there were no deaths in Australia for women under 50.

(also, Sharks kill on average 5 people per year in Australia. If you are not part of the ‘old people’ demographic in Australia you are more likely to be killed by a shark then die from/with Covid. Stats don’t lie.)

So we have nearly equal Jab related blood clot deaths to ‘Covid Deaths’ in the below 50s age group. These numbers should be taken with the understanding that only about a third of Australians have taken at least one jab and the jab roll out started with ‘old people’ and worked down.

So with more people possibly getting the jab and with the jab expanding into the below 50s age demograph is might be of concern to some that Jab related deaths in this younger age group are likely to increase.

AND, as it has been shown, the Jab will NOT stop you from catching Covid and is only claimed to reduce the symptoms.

Now 30 or so deaths in a population of 26 or so million may seem like a small number, but try allowing 30 people to die in ANY other context.

(and from my risk reduction training in my Day Job, the best way to reduce risk is to remove the original cause. If Jabs are known to kill people [you] can prevent those deaths by stopping the Jab. It is how we are training (repeatedly) to think in the real world.)

But yeah, The Narrative.

We needed to destroy that village in order to save it… I mean those burning buildings were there when we got there!

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

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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

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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.
 
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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.

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

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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

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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.