That’s from Instapundit which is headed by these words: “ANTI-DESANTIS AD THAT READS LIKE A MOVE TO FLORIDA AD.” It’s almost impossible not to see the ad as a joke, but it’s serious, and in so many ways. Mentally deranged is closer.
In the letter – which was reported on by the FT – the signatories allege that Australia is making “big mistakes” in failing to reopen to the world. By making the lockdowns so severe (and so unceasingly long), the Australian government is putting politics before the well-being of the Australian people ahead of the federal elections that must be held by the end of May – when the Senate’s present term is slated to expire.
The companies that signed the letter “…employ almost one million Australians” and warned that lockdowns were having “long-lasting” effects on the economy. However, this shouldn’t be news to Australia’s political elite: Economists at Australia’s central bank, the RBA, already lowered their growth projections after a stronger-than-expected Q2 GDP print.
But all the incremental data seen so far suggests that Q3 could be a disaster – well that, coupled with the intensifying economic pressure from Beijing, which is trying to win a geopolitical stare-down contest with the Australian government by blocking a growing number of imports.
As for Australia’s infamous “drawbridge” border policy, the letter’s signatories insisted that the decision to close Australia’s borders was a colossal mistake.
“The borders should have never been closed,” Graham Turner, chief executive of travel company Flight Centre, told the Financial Times. “We’re making some very big mistakes here.”
“It’s time for corporate Australia to turn its disquiet and rumblings into a roar,” said Greg O’Neill, the chief executive of Melbourne fund manager La Trobe Financial, one of the signatories to the open letter sent by the Business Council of Australia. “It is time for courage and honesty. Not politics.”
Politics is politics. But courage and honesty would be nice for a change.
This was on the letters page at The Australian today: The Grief of Parents. It is a lament from someone who can find almost no sympathy from anyone who could actually do something. We live in the saddest of times when this is the only avenue for someone to get this message out more widely.
The Grief of Parents
I am a member of numerous support groups for parents of children and young adults who have declared a transgender identity. In all these cases the declaration of a transgender identity has come completely out of the blue, giving parents good reason to be sceptical of their child’s sudden ideation. As parents who have raised and nurtured these young people, we are being increasingly marginalised and undermined by teachers, medical professionals and now the courts.
Our scepticism and calls for caution, due to the irreversible nature of hormonal and surgical interventions, are derided by health professionals who seem to have no qualms about turning these young people against their “unsupportive” parents. Families are being torn apart with the immediate “affirmation” of a nebulous identity by clinicians.
Many parents know their children have been groomed online. Many children come from backgrounds of trauma, such as family separation, bullying or sexual assault. Many are on the autism spectrum. All that parents want is caution, exploratory therapy and a return to the medical ethos of “Do no harm”.
The mental health of these parents is overlooked. They are struggling. Their collective grief is insurmountable. Having our children taken away from us (“Court dismisses appeal in transgender teen removal case”, 29/9) is not the solution. Too many families have already been destroyed by this phenomenon.
What will it take for our health officials to heed the calls of these distressed parents?
Oh yes, 70 percent of Australians were agreeing “sometimes people’s freedoms need to be restricted to keep Australia safe.” Land of the unbrave, home of the unfree.
Someone asked me after the first Australia post what I meant by a democratic police state. Pretty much this. If Neil and Karen are not just not standing up for their rights but begging for kneepads, their leaders are almost duty-bound to provide them. Give the people what they want, especially when what they want is more power for me!
Welcome to the Pandemia in its purest form, no pandemic required.
Scholars have noted that anti-Semitism runs hottest in Arab countries where Jews for all intents and purposes don’t exist. Similarly, the fear of Sars-Cov-2 appears strongest in places that haven’t seen it. (The same trend is clear in the United States, by the way. The nursing home workers who have seen Covid’s real impact more closely than anyone else are the least afraid of it, at least based on their unwillingness to submit to vaccinations.)
In any case, Australia has been happy to be a modern-day hermit kingdom, with its states competing to impose the strictest Covid rules.
Want proof? Here’s proof.
And they keep making fun of us in America. At least I think it’s supposed to be satire.
Train travellers in Sydney wear masks during the Spanish flu outbreak in 1919
Here’s the subhead for the article:
The US has reached another ‘grim milestone’ and the fearmongering that ensued is yet another example of how ignorant and hysterical we’ve become.
The article is by Adam Creighton and is titled, Why comparing Covid-19 to the Spanish flu is absurd. Ignorant and hysterical isn’t the half of it. There also seems to be a wish to be frightened which seems near universal across the left on the way to some kind of outcome that you would really have to be nuts to endorse, but there you are. This is what the real thing looked like.
John Barry’s 550-page The Great Influenza, a magnificent piece of scholarship first published in 2004, chronicles a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, the greatest tragedy the world has seen since the plagues of the Middle Ages.
When a new influenza virus wiped out 6 per cent of a 1018-strong French army battalion, incapacitating another quarter, within days in May 1918, the world learned of the unimaginable horror in prospect.
When the British ship City of Exeter transformed into a floating morgue sailing to Philadelphia from Liverpool, a quarter of its sailors dying en route, American doctors braced for a tragedy that was about to tear through the world.
More than 50 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires died, 3 per cent of all Africa and about 17 million Indians in less than a year.
Doctors had never seen symptoms so horrific, a disease so deadly….
Unlike Covid-19, people only died from Spanish flu, never with.
“Blood was everywhere, on linens, clothes, pouring out of some men’s nostrils and even ears while other coughed it up. Many of the soldiers, boys in their teens, men in their twenties – healthy normally ruddy men – were turning blue,” Barry writes of a typical scene at US Army camps in late 1918, where soldiers assembled before heading to France.
At Camp Pike in Arkansas 13,000 of the 60,000 young men stationed there were hospitalised within days. One in 67 American soldiers – more than 50,000 – was killed by the virus within a few months, more than died in the Vietnam War.
Women inhale a zinc sulphate solution in Sydney during the Spanish flu outbreak. Picture: File
The carnage was so horrific, so sudden, many couldn’t take it. Colonel Charles Hagadorn, in charge of 40,000 soldiers at Camp Grant, where thousands died, a veteran of wars in Mexico and The Philippines, committed suicide as bodies piled up around him.
In Philadelphia, the worst-hit US city, authorities sent vans around the city to collect the bodies.
Briefly met up with my wife with two of her old friends in the park today and the moment I arrived one of them put on her mask. There is no level of contempt low enough for such fools who will create misery and harm for so many others before this scam has finally run its course. This is how the article ends.
Covid-19 will also change history, thanks to the hysterical over-reaction and self-inflicted damage of measures.
It won’t cause a war but it may have destroyed our liberal democratic society.
I wish I thought that was an exaggeration but it isn’t. Only time will tell.
It’s not just that he’s stupid, and not just that he’s a thug, but that he has no ability to understand any issue and the only means he has to deal with anything is through the use of force.
Or in this case the wise rule by the use of reason, the average mind rules through what has been learned through experience, the stupid rule only by the use of force since they have no understanding of any of the issues they must personally deal with.
This is direct from Instapundit. Dan Andrews is as thick and dumb as they come, but you would hope that there might be others in his government who see the massive damage the Victorian Government is inflicting on the State and on Australia’s good standing among the nations of the world.
The Aussie government insisted afterward that the rioters were the aggressors, even scolding them for urinating on Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. Is that the truth or just part of the state’s PR effort to keep the balance of popular opinion on the side of lockdowns by demonizing those who resist them?
The most disturbing video circulating today has no violence in it. It’s this scene of police officers in another part of the country interrogating a man in the interest of “public safety” about whether he knows of any protests coming up. I can’t tell if that’s because they’re worried about a riot in their jurisdiction too or if they’re really willing to go this far to prevent people from congregating in public for fear that they’ll spread the virus. Australia has lost very few people to COVID thanks to their lockdown strategy, but they’ve lost other important things in the process.
As bad as things are getting here in the States, we can’t fathom how much worse things would be without these down-home heroes. Sure, they might carry their paranoid anti-government theories a little too far. But their paranoia is far from unfounded, and even if they sometimes over-react, they keep America from falling into the opposite extreme: creeping tyranny, Aussie style. You can’t boil a frogs if he flips out every time you reach for the knob.
Like them, I’d prefer the burdens of liberty to a warm, sterile despotism. And that seems like an old-fashioned, all-American instinct to me. I can’t see Davey Crockett “sheltering in place” because the Department of Public Health asked him to. I can’t see Teddy Roosevelt triple-masking. I can’t see Johnny Cash stanning Dr. Fauci.
So, my apologies to those anti-maskers in Virginia. I rushed to judge you last summer, and that was wrong. May you continue to resist any whiff of conformism with righteous fury. May you give no quarter to the elite “consensus” of elite “institutions.” And may you never stop being pissed off. It just might save this republic.
I had no interest in making a second video on this topic I said my piece in my original video and was happy to leave it there. But things have escalated in recent weeks and vital information is not being conveyed that can help people make informed decisions for their own health.
Covid treatment protocols from around the world are being ignored and data is being deliberately suppressed as all we continue to hear is Vaccination is the only way forward. While I disagree with the methods protestors have used in our cities in recent days I share their frustrations at mandates and prolonged lockdowns.
But there is a way to go about getting your message across and here is my attempt to do that. The second half of this video contains maybe the most important information you’ll hear regarding the pandemic. What you do with that information is up to you.
Law of Markets 