Category Archives: Cultural

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 powerful state directing action must be avoided at all costs

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It’s getting harder to read the papers but also not easy to break the habits of a lifetime. So what greets me on the front page of the Australian today: Tough measures working: PM. And how does he know they’re working? Because hardly anyone is dying:

COVID-19 has so far infected more than 5314 Australians and killed 28, but Mr Morrison said that was a fraction of the figure forecast just two weeks ago.

“Had the virus kept growing at the same rate it was 12 days ago, we would now have more than 10,500 cases in this country,” he said.

A forecast is not a reality. Maybe the forecasters were wrong. I’ve been among economists long enough never to trust any forecast. Did I ever mention the time I was AFR Forecaster of the Year after the Great Share Market Crash of 1987? Everyone else was forecasting the high probability, if not the near certainty of a recession, while I said that the probability of a recession was effectively zero. In the end 1988 was one of the best years on record. But let’s return to the issue at hand.

The reality is that while the PM continues to go on about six months of lockdown ahead, which no one actually believes for a second unless they are a complete moron, someone like Daniel Andrews for example. He, of course, is enjoying every moment.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrew­s warned on Friday that his state might progress to “stage four” restrictions, without detail­ing­ what that would entail. “I think there will be a stage four — when I’m in a position and when I need to make those ­announcements, I will,” he said. Mr Andrews said adhering to social-distancing measures was a “matter of life and death”, and implor­ed Victorians to stay home. “Whether it be a big city hospital or a smaller regional hospital, they’ll all be overrun,” he said. “We’ll have people queuing for machines to help them breathe.”

One more forecast we can keep before us. And should our hospitals not be overrun, he will ask us all to thank him for his leadership. Which reminds me of this, which I have just come across: New York City is lying about Chinese virus death rates. Hadn’t even occurred to me, but this is far from implausible given the Democrat leadership in both city and state:

The mass hysteria over COVID-19 in the U.S. is driven in large measure by misleading statistics and bad math about the disease’s body count. Now that New York has become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, we are now regularly inundated on cable TV news with the latest pandemic statistics from the city. The statistics grow gloomier by the hour. These figures have frightened people into submission as state and local governments across America enact repressive measures they say are necessary to contain the virus or slow its proliferation. After doing everything in their power to oust President Donald Trump, journalists and others are now calling him a weakling for supposedly not doing enough, while they demand an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. The problem starts with the fact that the highly influential statistics from the Big Apple paint a false picture of what is actually happening. In New York City, the death of anyone who dies who tests positive for COVID-19 is counted as a coronavirus death. This is the case even if the coronavirus failed to play a significant role in the person’s passing or illness.

Amazing beyond incredible it it’s true. You can read the rest at the link. Now back to The Oz with the headline story: Split over Fair Work Act changes threatens $130bn wage rescue. The changes are temporary but legislated. Labor, however, wants to go through the Fair Work Commission which means it will hardly be automatic and whatever else it won’t happen as soon as it should, like right now. But then we have, on the front of the Inquirer section, the reliably wrong Paul Kelly with this: ‘Team Australia’ our new normal, for now. It’s actually the old normal that is our present normal.

There are lots of other things I could go to, but will end with this Coronavirus: Conservatives ride big government to rescue by a mind even more poorly attuned to reality than Daniel Andrews, our former foreign minister and ideological friend of the People’s Republic, Bob Carr. This is the sub-head for the story:

If capitalism is so good, why does it need socialism to save it every decade?

I will give you his final line but you may be sure that the first two words in the quote are not actually the limitation he really believes:

Right now, a powerful state directing action is what we need.

If the aim is to rob you, ruin the economy and steal your freedoms, they are just the people to do it.

MORE ON NEW YORK: Via Beachcomber in the comments. Where’s the bad news is the real question.

What’s the explanation for all this?

The medical, the statistical and the political

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You know, as in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

On the medical, I don’t know anything at all. I don’t know how one gets the Corona Virus, prevents it or cures it. An expertise far from my own about which I have nothing to say.

On the statistical side, I do know quite a bit, and importantly I have dealt with growth rates and trends for the whole of my professional life. And to be quite frank, from the start the numbers and the growth rates have looked benign, and once I had seen the figures for how many typically die from flu every year to provide a perspective, this had never seemed even remotely like a return to the Black Death and the Great Plague. It still might be, of course, but so far the data, despite all the scare mongering we’ve been treated to, has looked entirely like a beat up. Don’t say it can’t happen or won’t happen, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.

The political, however, is where I earned my living for many years and over which I never gave away my watching brief. Here’s the one absolute absolute I have come away from politics with:

Everyone has an agenda which they never resile from ever.

Therefore, once you know their agenda, you can be pretty sure you know how they will react to pretty well everything. Other people put it as, “never let a crisis go to waste”. They don’t have to create the event, but everyone will use circumstances to create conditions that bring about the outcomes they have always been trying to put in place.

We on the conservative side of politics are looking for opportunities to increase personal freedom and a higher standard of living for as many people as possible. That is the agenda and wherever I have worked, that has been the end I have worked towards achieving.

On the other side, on the “progressive” side of the fence, among the totalitarian fascists who dominate the politics of the left, the central aim in everything they do has been to accumulate personal power. Lots of useful idiots among them, who really wish to be nice, but at the top, among the leadership, it is power alone. There is plenty of pretence that they want to do things for you, but that is how they get you to follow along, provide support and become enemies of the only people who actually want to achieve the ends you actually want.

If you need a market economy to provide these outcomes, but it does not provide their leaders with personal power, then they will support socialism which ALWAYS leads to poverty.

You want free and open speech, which allows people to expose their lies, then they will shut down the ability to say what you wish, and in the meantime, lie at every opportunity that suits them.

You want the freedom to do what you want as you want without the government coming along to tell you to do something else instead, they will fabricate reasons why you should follow their orders instead, and tell you it’s for your own good as well.

So here we have been plunged into a panic because of fears of a pandemic that we are told will kill many thousands who might otherwise have lived on. They grab hold of the moment, exaggerate every claim and then scare everyone into adopting a socialist authoritarian agenda in which they now get everyone used to following orders and their directions.

Unless you are repulsed by the left and its tactics, but also understand what is going on, you can and will lose the lot.

No way forward other than into a wilderness

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This is a discussion of FDR’s Christian foundations when speaking to the American people. From Steve Hayward at Powerline. His aim is to get PDT to quote FDR along religious lines. Think how this might stew a few minds.

FDR, an Episcopalian, made the kind of remarks about religion that send the American Civil Liberties Union into paroxysms of rage when someone like George W. Bush or Sarah Palin say the same thing today. Democracy and Christianity, he said, were “two phases of the same civilization.” “We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation,” he said, “without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic.” During World War II FDR wrote a preface for an edition of the New Testament that was distributed to American troops: “As Commander-in-Chief, I take pleasure in commending the reading of the Bible to all who serve in the armed forces of the United States.” On the eve of the 1940 election, FDR said in a radio address: “Freedom of speech is of no use to a man who has nothing to say and freedom of worship is of no use to a man who has lost his God.” On June 6, 1944, FDR led the nation in prayer for our armed forces on live radio, and in his final inaugural address in 1945 he said, “So we pray to Him for the vision to see our way clearly … to achievement of His will.” Today’s liberals would regard these statements and acts as grounds for impeachment.

And really, are all Democrats now atheist? Are they anti-religious? Have they all lost their God? These are people with whom there is no possibility of communication. Whether they know it or not, they have lost their way and for whom there is no salvation. They may think there is an answer in politics, but on this they are absolutely wrong and for whom there is no way forward other than into a wilderness.

“You know it is going away”

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“I want to keep the country calm.”

And there is then this, which you don’t hear very much about: Sweden’s Approach To Coronavirus: Do Nothing.

Sweden has taken a slightly different approach to coronavirus than the rest of the world, allowing life to go on as ‘normal’ with a few exceptions.

Unlike neighboring Denmark – which has restricted meetings to 10 people or less, Swedes are still going out to nightclubs, hanging out with friends, and even ‘enjoying ice creams beneath a giant Thor statue in Mariatorget square,’ according to the BBC.

Not only is it going away, for almost all of us it’s hardly been present, as discussed here: Some Much-Needed Coronavirus Perspective. The final paras:

Depending on how deadly the coronavirus actually turns out to be — and at the moment we have no idea — the cure could truly be worse than the disease.

Let’s be clear, we are not suggesting that the coronavirus isn’t a serious threat, requiring extraordinary measures. And we understand that deaths due to a lifetime of bad health habits are different from a death sentence that people can pass on to each other.

But in any situation, context matters. Unfortunately, that’s the one thing missing from the 24/7 coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.

The reality is that it is impossible to find anyone saying anything on the CV who does not have a personal agenda of their own.

It’s all about Trump it’s only about Trump

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Start here: Poll: Biden leads Trump by 10 points as economic pessimism grows

Continue with this: Federal Reserve Says Unemployment Rate Could Hit 32%

There’s then this from the Washington Post: 33 times Trump downplayed the coronavirus

Followed by: An Epidemic of Media Partisanship

Plus this: Twitter Forces Laura Ingraham to Delete Post on Chloroquine Helping Coronavirus Patients

Supplemented by this: Is Michigan’s Governor Still Trying To Undermine Trump Over Hydroxychloroquine?

Although every so often a bit of the truth finds its way out: CDC advisor says ‘real’ fatality rate of COVID-19 is too low to justify ‘drastic crackdowns’. The first para:

Naive and sensationalist reporting on fatality rates from the novel coronavirus has contributed to toilet-paper hoarding, drastic crackdowns on civil rights by political figures, and potentially devastating and lasting economic impact.

BTW how many fatalities have there been in Australia so far?