“If science can’t be questioned it’s not science, it’s propaganda”

In early November Green Bay Packers quarterback, Aaron Rodgers caught the coronavirus and then announced he was going follow Joe Rogan’s advice and take Ivermectin.

Rodgers was back on the field a week later playing football.

That is from Packers QB Aaron Rodgers on Ivermectin: Many Teams Behind the Scenes Are Treating Players with Same Treatment That I Got. The Packers are the Green Bay Packers which is an American professional football team and Aaron Rogers is their star quarterback. That is, he is a multi-million dollar asset, whose availability to play on any given Sunday will have a major influence on the success of the team. 

And to keep him playing, they gave him Ivermectin, which is a treatment that is apparently used throughout the National Football League. 

Meanwhile football stadiums are filled week after week with maskless fans who have zero fear they will contract any of the Covid variants while sitting with thousands of others watching the game.

Covid madness in a single moment

This has gone round the world a hundred times already but just in case you missed it. An astonishing confrontation between a crazed [maskless] woman and some male trying to get through a flight while drinking. It is women [and men] like her that are keeping us from returning to normal life, where we all just go on about our business.

The story is told more comprehensively here. She was also arrested when the plane finally landed, discussed here.

And for what it’s worth, which is next to nothing to people like these, 150 studies show masks ineffective, harmful.

THE STORY CONTINUES: EXCLUSIVE: Raiders cheerleader turned high-flying realtor is revealed to be the ‘Delta Karen’ – arrested for vicious assault on 80-year-old passenger who took his mask off to eat (and she wasn’t wearing a mask either!). Naturally not covered by the American media but in the Daily Mail in the UK.

  • Delta passenger Patricia Cornwall was arrested by the FBI on Thursday after getting into an altercation with a male passenger for not putting his mask on
  • Cornwall, 51, was a former cheerleader with the Las Vegas Raiders, according to her social media
  • She worked as a real estate agent in Los Angeles but appeared to have relocated to the Florida panhandle in recent months 
  • The older male passenger had been eating at the time he was approached by an unmasked Cornwall and told to ‘mask up’
  • The pair shouted expletives at each other with Cornwall hitting, scratching and spitting at him during the row
  • She was then pulled to the back of the plane by crew members and other passengers where she was detained for the remainder of the flight
  • Cornwall was taken into custody when the plane reached Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport
  • Other passengers and flight crew members reported also being injured as a result of the attack 
  • An FBI source told DailyMail.com that Cornwall is due for an initial hearing on Monday at the Federal Courthouse in Atlanta 

What I had not known was the age of the mail passenger. That, too, is revealed.

A high-flying realtor who worked for Coldwell Banker and Berkshire Hathaway in California has been revealed as the ‘Delta Karen’ who was arrested by the FBI for attacking an 80-year-old passenger on a plane after he removed his face mask to eat – while she was herself maskless. 

Such an astonishing story is so many ways. It really is time to give up on masking the population. What is more astonishing to me is how everyone in America seems free to travel about, with or without masking up.

This is more than just a slippery slope


There has been mass confusion in Victoria about who can access childcare. The Premier’s office has now confirmed children can access childcare if just one of their parents is an authorised worker.

And so it says in The Age. An “authorised worker”? You do have to wonder where this will end up, and if you don’t wonder, you really should.

And this is from the US about us: Police Fire Rubber Bullets and Pepper-Spray Into Large Crowd of Anti-Lockdown Protesters in Melbourne (VIDEO). They think this is appalling. Why don’t we?

And this is also about us from the US: Massive Unrest as Australia Adopts China’s Authoritarian ‘COVID-Zero’ Approach.

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting illness, COVID-19, has caused mass hysteria on a global scale. Perhaps no response is as shocking as what we see in Australia. The country is included in the group of western democracies globally and among the Five Eyes intelligence community members. Yet, the nation’s response to the pandemic can only be described as authoritarian.

I find this particularly on the money. We really do accept insanity as a rational response.

In early August, Melbourne, Australia, imposed a mystifying sixth lockdown because eight cases of COVID-19 were detected. As cases of the Delta variant spread from the early clusters in the cities, nearly every major metro went back to implementing lockdowns. They remain in place and bar people from leaving their homes except for essential exercise, shopping, and caregiving.

Eight deaths in the midst of a flu epidemic in a state with 5.5 million should hardly cause a tremor never mind eight cases. We are such clowns.

A friend of mine who is a doctor was made to stay home for fourteen days because he was in some supermarket when some other person who supposedly tested positive was there at the same time. The kinds of damage we are doing to our ability to just get on with life is absurd.

US GDP growth 33.1%

AN UNSURPRISING UPDATE:

GDP Explodes 33.1% — Media Bury The Story

A few weeks ago we noted that the third-quarter GDP number was likely to be a stunner, defying the endless claims by the press that the economy will struggle to emerge from the COVID-19 lockdowns. We also warned that voters wouldn’t get the news through the mainstream press. Well, we were right on both counts.

__ Original story is below the line

It’s the sort of thing that only really interests economists since it has no personal meaning for anyone. Nevertheless, better this than the opposite. In its own way the Democrat decision not to provide a “stimulus” helped things out a bit, not that they would have known. Discussed here: U.S. GDP booms at 33.1% rate in Q3, better than expected.

Increased consumption along with sold gains in business and residential investment as well as exports fueled the third-quarter rebound. Decreases in government spending following the expiration of the CARES Act rescue funding subtracted from GDP.

It no doubt did subtract from GDP but it also added to growth. These Keynesian measures are such misleading indicators.

There is absolutely nothing to thank Daniel Andrews for

If there has ever been a more repulsive political leader in Australia than Daniel Andrews I cannot think who it was. The notion that the leader of a government through its incompetence has led to hundreds of deaths and the longest lockdown in the world is owed any gratitude is a notion so grotesque that only a socialist party could even have conceived of it.

And even now we are still in lockdown although some, but only some of the worst excesses have been lifted. The premier is a bungling idiot. He has done nothing that he can point towards with an ounce of pride. His stupidity has led to the deaths of many many individuals who would be alive today were it not for his personal involvement in the lockdown.

Daniel Andrews is, moreover, such an evil presence that he actually thinks he has been a positive influence on the outcomes we have endured in Victoria. Look at the other states, you stupid fool and tell me what you have achieved in Victoria. For others, in the grip of the Melbourne Syndrome, there are those who are grateful for still being alive in the midst of a viral epidemic that had virtually no possibility of killing them.

I, on the other hand, think of Andrews as a monster who has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, responsible for the destruction of millions of dollars of value across the state and for a lockdown that will drain the resources available to Victorians for a generation.

And it is still not over and Andrews has still not resigned. He must live inside the tightest most secure echo chamber ever constructed if all he can hear is the praise from deluded idiots for what he has done. Step outside, you buffoon, and hear what the rest of us think.

Josh Frydenberg has said it well, and he has said it in response to a Labor Party motion in the Federal Parliament to thank Dan Andrews for what he has done. How out of touch with reality can these people be! Repulsive remains the only word that captures the essence of Andrews and the sooner he leaves the political stage the better it will be. If you “Stand with Dan”, you are a pretty stupid person yourself.

There has never been a government with such a high approval-to-incompetence ratio

Guess who that is? And guess what it’s about. The first two minutes should make you sick. Do not watch too much more since it will be bad for your health. Much more dangerous than CV-1984.

So this is where we are with Mr Stupid: Andrews threatens border closures over Kiwi arrivals. There has never been a government with such a high approval-to-incompetence ratio. Bumbling fools comes nowhere near covering it. Twenty-one years of almost continuous Labor Party management have brought community expectations for their governments to the lowest level in history.

Mr Andrews said he had previously told the federal government Victoria was not part of the travel bubble and blamed federal authorities for the arrivals, saying he did not know they were coming and they should have been stopped before they boarded flights to Melbourne. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian made it clear her government would not prevent passengers travelling to Victoria, with a spokeswoman saying the issue was a matter for the southern state. Victoria’s borders are not closed to NSW…. Victorian authorities spent much of yesterday trying to track down the travellers, with Mr Andrews conceding the state’s health department had no power to stop passengers, detain them or force them into quarantine if they had arrived from interstate, rather than overseas.

They arrive from places where there are no cases of the Corona Virus, so what’s the problem? And if you want more evidence just how incompetent these people are, try this although there is much much more:

A spokeswoman for the federal Department of Health confirmed Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton was present at a meeting on October 12 when the matter of onwards travel of New Zealanders from Sydney to Melbourne was discussed. Mr Tudge also tweeted that Professor Sutton “did not raise any concerns” in the discussions. It also emerged Mr Andrews’ own department had given one of the arrivals from NZ the green light two weeks ago to travel onward to Victoria although the advice, from the Department of Premier and Cabinet, was issued before Mr Andrews had officially declared his state was not joining the travel bubble. The Age has also seen an email from the Premier’s Department, sent on October 12 in response to a query about travel from NZ via Sydney, that clearly advised that Victoria’s borders were open and that the traveller was free to arrive in the southern state.

I can only think Dan is still there because the rest of his cabinet has joined Michael O’Brien (the unknown leader of the Liberal Party) in not wanting to become Premier until the present Victorian mess is limited to the level of “Ongoing Catastrophe” from its present level of “Major Calamity”.

Australians watching American politics according to The Oz

This really is one of the creepiest stories I have come across in the papers in quite a while: Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars. It’s by Katrina Grace Kelly and it’s in The Australian.

Confession: it is easy to laugh when on the other side of the world, I suppose, but Donald Trump has been a source of great amusement for many years. However, as the mind-boggling events unfolded this week, the smile was wiped from my dial.

Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted — although when and where remains a secret — the President checked out of hospital and returned to the White House.

A day or so later, as the US death toll reached 211,532, reports on television claimed Trump was symptom free and had declared his infection a “blessing in disguise”.

This is her central point:

If the leader of any country has only one job, it is to keep their citizens out of harm’s way. Despite any other previous policy triumphs, if a leader doesn’t do everything to keep their people alive in the face of avoidable death, they won’t be appreciated.

I don’t want to get into just how inane I think this is. If you don’t see it yourself, I can do nothing to help you. But it was the sentence that followed that makes it clear just how much, in Jane Fonda’s words, “Covid is God’s gift to the Left”. Here we have, in The Oz:

Polls often are wrong but they have Trump on track to lose the election. If he does, it will be because of his COVID-19 response.

And it will be just because of this safety-first inanity from people of the left such as herself. Save me, she begs, save me. No one is any longer dying, there are other issues that also matter, and many that are much more important. But so far as she is concerned, that is the first priority with everything else a long way distant behind. Here are the first five comments under “Best Liked” and then a few others after that.

“Voters expect politicians to do everything to keep them safe”. No, we expect them to provide information so we can decide for ourselves how “safe” we want to be. It’s time we recaptured the notion of individual responsibility. The thought of big government nursing me from cradle to grave has me more worried than the virus.

Used to like reading your columns Katrina now they are better suited to the Guardian.

Keeping the population safe includes the responsibility of not destroying the economy.

KGK over the last couple of her articles, has shown herself to be a Dan lover and Trump/right hater/disliker. It’s always good to know the perspective from which the authors come. One thing though for KGK, as a person who will relentlessly defend Dan Andrews and his draconian lockdowns, can she please explain how my child in France was in the very same class with another child who was confirmed to have Covid. The Covid positive child stayed away from school for a few weeks and the rest of the class went on as normal with no one else (nor the teacher) getting Covid (and their classrooms is really, really small and packed with students). Compare this with Victoria where there are very very few diagnosed cases (certainly in comparison to France) but no kids going to school for 6 entire months. KGK, can you see why some people may see that there has been a bit of an over reaction by your man Dan? I think KGK ought to check her bias.

A very simple response Katrina. You’re so very, very wrong in your thinking.

“Telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19, which he has contracted.” Am I the only person in the world who understood his words to be along the lines of not letting yourself become too afraid to live and to still find joy in the world despite the times we are living in; but to take care and be responsible. The man has his faults but for just once could anyone report on his utterances with just a small degree of objectivity?

It is the perpetually terrified who have urged politicians to bring us to our knees. Governments cannot keep us safe. In the ultimate scenario it is they that send troops to die to achieve economic and moral objectives. Safety is am illusion. Live under the doona for as long as you like Katrina but the rest of us want to live life.

This is what gets my back up. People who are so quick to blame Trump for the deaths from corona but yet give a free pass to Dan Andrews. Seriously?? The same bloke who let 10000 BLM protesters run amuck thru Melbourne because apparently they couldn’t be policed but yet dragged a pregnant mother out of her home for supporting a Fb post about a protest. What a joke.

Sorry, but most of this is a string of nonsense cliches.

We can’t hide under the bed forever. I think it is eminently sensible advice to say ‘don’t let this virus rule our lives, we must learn to live with it’.

I swear people still peddling this fear campaign must live under a rock.

Columnists who try men’s souls

I get all the papers now since there is so little to do that the extra crossword puzzles and sudokus help fill in the day. But these are columns that try men’s souls, I can tell you, and from The Oz as well. And once again, Daniel Andrews is the cause. Let me take you first to Angela Shanahan and her pathetic Let’s give these poor pollies a break. There we find:

The Victorian Premier is held up as an incompetent fool, a crazed ideological warrior with no sense of “reality”, careless of the econo­mic devastation cutting a swath through his state, and adopting totalitarian methods of control.

And so he is and all of that. Angela, however, thinks we are being too hard on this poor, misbegotten sod:

These two premiers [Dan and the premier of Queensland] have become symbols of ideological warfare that preceded the pandemic. Many attacks directed at them have nothing to do with how well, or badly, they are managing to control the spread of the virus in their states. It is a type of proxy warfare. The border closures and even the economic versus fatality arguments are an extension of the ideological warfare that apparently cannot be halted even in times of national emergency.

She then added this, gratuitously to my mind, towards the end, so that I will now feel free to never read another word she writes:

Generally our politicians are men and women of quite high calibre and good character. (If you don’t believe me, look at the two contenders for the American presidency.)

Unbelievable. You can tell almost everything about someone’s politics by their attitude to Donald Trump.

Then we come to Katrina Grace Kelly who writes in her column today, We are managing the pandemic quite well, so stop the wild shrieking. Someone I had long ago stopped reading. The heading did get me in today, but the contents will keep me away for even longer after this. She is discussing the poll results that show Daniel Andrews has 61% approval for his handling of the Corona V:

This data rises above the chorus of remarks by federal coalition politicians, and hyperbolic and often inaccurate criticism from the angry tub-thumpers on SAD (Sky after Dark). On SAD, our Premier is called “Chairman Dan” or “Dictator Dan” and Victoria is referred to as a “socialist republic” and a “failed state”. These insults demean every Victorian, regardless of how they vote.

What about the extra 750 deaths in Victoria, you absurdist goose? The Sky After Dark crowd are trying to tell you something, but you are obviously too thick with sentimental eyewash to take in what they are saying. Any thoughts on the Chinese Road and Brick business? These are the first four comments under “Best”, that is, the comments most in keeping with the views of others.

Fact number one: the Victorian government’s massive incompetence in handling hotel quarantine has led to awful human and economic loss. It’s the biggest failure of public policy and administration in modern Australian history. This, really, is all that needs to be known. Nothing to do with the political opposition or politics more generally. Just sheer, industrial scale incompetence by the Victorian government.

Walking though the Geelong CBD is hard not to notice around 20% of the shop fronts are empty. The economic pain Andrews has caused with the bungled hotel quarantine program is yet to be felt and will linger for years to come. Andrews economic record is headed south at a rapid rate. He wasted $1.3 billion on not building a road and now the road he’s building to replace has a cost overrun of $3 billion and it not even half build. It pretty clear Andrews government is following the trajectory of the Cain Government and like Cain I expect Andrews to jump ship just as the economic pain starts to wash across the deck.

In this country your state of Victoria has failed to control this virus. 700+ deaths , billions lost, thousands of jobs lost, denial of civil liberties resulting in the hardest lock down in the world. People are shrieking because the ALP have lowered the standard of accountability of Government to the point that your Premier sets up an inquiry to investigate a failed hotel quarantine management policy that HE introduced and after months he finally shows up unprepared and doesn’t know who introduced private security guards. And you still “stand with Dan”. And the worst performing state govt in this country probably ever.

Nobody does diversions better than Labor or the sycophantic media cheer squad.

It’s lucky I now subscribe to The Age so I can get some balance in what I read in the press.