Steve Waterson, the Commercial Editor of the Australian, has kindly given us permission to reprint his latest column. It’s another jeremiad against Australia’s staggeringly incompetent ruling class, as they frantically try and spin their mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis as a mature, statesmanlike response. Meanwhile, the regulations that ordinary Australians have to cope with grow ever more ridiculous. Sit down to drink, but stand up near a park bench; exercise, but don’t rest; go shopping but don’t browse; under no circumstances talk to anyone you know, despite the masks that afford magic protection from nanometre Covid dust… “The list is a never-ending carousel of hilarity,” says Waterson.
Well, that was worth waiting for. Finally a tiny glimpse of the modelling that has underpinned government decision-making on our Covid response, and very convincing it is too. And unbelievably, literally unbelievably, precise.
Let’s not go through the various conditional predictions of the virus’s impact, especially the “worst-case” scenario, which happily generates a number far short of “everybody dies”, which I would regard as the worst case.
Instead here’s what the Doherty Institute says could happen if we suffered a six-month uncontrolled outbreak with only 60% of the population vaccinated: there would be 737,971 infections and 5,294 deaths. Note the super-scientific accuracy: not 737,970 or 737,972 infections; why, that would just be sloppy guesswork.
I’m teasing, of course (it’s one of the few pleasures not yet forbidden in these joyless times), and have no doubt the statisticians are doing their very best with the data; so let’s assume they’re correct that almost three-quarters of a million would be infected, of whom 5,000 would die.
Many of us in the anti-lockdown corner are asked how many lives we would sacrifice to see the country open up again, our accusers triumphantly certain there is no decent answer because, as the NSW Premier told us in May, “no death is acceptable”.
She and her interstate counterparts would rather smash our lives and livelihoods in pursuit of their ridiculous, hubristic ambition.
If a foreign power were causing damage on this scale we would regard it as an act of war, when deaths in defence of the country would become acceptable again.
Perhaps we should bite the bullet and say 5,000 predominantly old people taken prematurely is a sad but tolerable price to pay for the restoration of our freedoms and the repair of our society – as long as it’s not my precious grandparents. Oh wait, mine have already died of old age, like all my ancestors since humans first wandered out of the African Rift Valley. It happens a lot, I understand. And by the way, those 5,000 projected deaths assume we could find no other way of protecting the vulnerable, which is hard to believe.
The Prime Minister’s proud boast is that our closed borders and hyper vigilance have “saved 30,000 lives” since the start of the epidemic last year. More unverifiable modelling; but again, let’s assume he’s right. I wonder how many of the saved have succumbed to other ailments in that time; or will next week’s census reveal a Cocoon-like bubble of healthy nonagenarians, 30,000 strong, laughing at Covid and death in all its other guises?
At best, we’ve dragged their lives out for a few more lonely months sequestered from their families, just as we’ve kicked the whole pandemic a little way down the road, at an almost inconceivable cost. As our leaders and their worker bees finesse their incarceration strategy, in the background the cries of misery grow louder.
The politicians look on, stern-faced and witless, bleating their platitudes about feeling our pain, and urging us to get vaccinated as the only way to escape the shackles on our lives, as though they had nothing to do with the sinister emergency powers they have granted themselves and aimed against us. “A surge in cases has closed restaurants”; “the latest outbreak means tradesmen can’t go to work”; “thanks to some selfish cab driver we must stay at home for the next month”.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the virus hasn’t done this to us; you have, cosy in your luxurious offices with your index-linked financial cushions, surrounded by sycophants and shoving people around like demented puppetmasters.
It may come as a shock to those snorting and gobbling at the trough of public money, but not everyone makes their living by opening a spreadsheet on a laptop, reaching out to a stakeholder and unmuting themselves on a Zoom call.
There are people who pay taxes (rather than recycle them) by travelling every day to places where they make actual things with their hands, who build home offices rather than work from them.
Some then have the audacity to consider their manual or menial work essential, as though they are under some obligation to put food on the table for their families.
And these ungrateful wretches, instead of praising the wisdom of their superiors who imprison them in their unfashionable suburbs, have the nerve to march in the streets in complaint, thousands of people engaged in reckless superspreader events that have led to a massive zero new infections.
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” wails Shakespeare’s King Lear. Echoing him, our politicians and bureaucrats, parents to their infantilised population, are “disgusted” (NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian) with these “filthy” (NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Gary Worboys) “boofheads” (NSW Police Minister David Elliot), “wankers” (NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner) and “hooligans, dropkicks” (WA Premier Mark McGowan). Treasure the eloquent, statesmanlike rhetoric of these latter-day Ciceros; that’s the way to bring the people along with you in difficult times.
Instead they govern by regulations that grow daily more ridiculous. Sit down to drink, but stand up near a park bench; exercise, but don’t rest; go shopping but don’t browse, even though the sadists at Coles have moved everything you wanted into different aisles; under no circumstances talk to anyone you know, despite the masks that afford magic protection from nanometre Covid dust; the list is a never-ending carousel of hilarity.
The latest inanity from the future governor of Queensland (remember her, the one who did more than anyone else to dissuade people from receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine?) is to warn against online shopping.
“Do you need those people out in the community delivering packages and things?” she asks. No, your excellency, of course not, let them park their vans and bikes and get a well-paid, non-executive board position like your pals do.
What begins as absurdity soon turns dark. In NSW you must carry evidence of your address at all times when outside your home, and produce it to a police officer – “Papers please!” – on demand. You must carry a mask on your person, even to walk the dog around the block. Cold War Berlin-style police checkpoints have appeared on our streets to confirm cars are within 10km of their homes, and their occupants not intending to protest against their rulers. The army is on patrol in areas whose citizens are often refugees from regimes where camouflage battle-dress is rarely a welcome sight.
Do Western concepts of freedom no longer matter in Australia? Is it a trivial matter that we are commanded not to leave our homes? Does it seriously not bother anyone in office that we are being compared – accurately – to North Korea in our legislated refusal to allow our citizens to leave the country, or overseas Australians to return? This is very bad company we find ourselves in.
The politicians say they’re faced with tough decisions, but they’re not making decisions at all. They defend their abdication of responsibility by loftily declaring they are acting on the health advice they receive. They don’t evaluate that advice, mind, they simply follow it.
And it leads always to the same destination: lockdown. It’s “horrible”, Berejiklian said this week, “but we know we have no option”. In Victoria, Premier Daniel Andrews parrots her: “There are no alternatives to lockdown,” he said on Thursday. Unless of course you don’t order a lockdown, which I think does qualify as an option, and a much more appealing one.
Lockdowns certainly work in the crudest sense, in that by isolating people you limit viral transmission, but that’s not the point.
It’s the cost-benefit analysis that’s missing, absent from the moment our governments panicked and abandoned our sensible national pandemic plan to follow the brutes of Communist China into a policy of dystopian oppression, to “keep us safe”.
Let’s turn the acceptable casualty question around and direct it to our leaders: how many fruitful young lives are you happy to waste to keep those Covid numbers low?
How many small businesses are you ready to see disappear? How many suicides will you tolerate? How many bankruptcies? How many children should forgo their formative primary education and socialisation? How many deaths from other untreated illness are acceptable to you?
How much sorrow are you willing to impose on your subjects? How many grief-stricken families must bury parents and children without ceremony, like backyard pets? How many tears will soften your stony, self-righteous hearts?
Whether born of stupidity or callousness, the effect of our current aimless course is the same. State against state, city against country, suburb against suburb, office worker against tradesman, old against young, vaccinated against unvaccinated: it is a heartless, divisive and dehumanising policy. And worse, it doesn’t work.
The very people we elect to safeguard our freedoms are shredding them, causing fractures in society that may never be healed.
Surely there are politicians in every party who are silently appalled by this mounting despair and devastation. If their leaders cannot find a path out of this madness, perhaps those others should speak up and think about taking the reins, before the electorate’s frustration turns to fury.
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How naive I was until not so long, believing that the presentation of facts and evidence in a competent way was all that was needed to establish truth and debunk lies.
The ridiculous trial of Galileo was a story from the past, of how backward we were and how far we had come.
It turns out there is a powerful organisation and infrastructure in place which all but guarantees that facts and evidence alone are not enough to challenge official dogma and lies.
The real story about Galileo was not a dispute of the facts, because the Church’s own scientists knew Galileo was correct.
But the Church presented itself as God’s representative on Earth, so the Church’s words and directions were those if God.
The Church had always preached that the Sun revolved round a flat Earth. If they agreed with Galileo then either God was wrong, or they did not represent God on Earth. Since most would never believe God could be wrong, they would doubt the Church which would lose its authority and power.
It never was or is about facts, it’s about maintaining authority, power and control. Also why the facts about ‘climate change’ don’t matter.
Absolute nonsense. The Church did not preach a flat earth. The spherical nature of the earth had been known since ancient times and was widely accepted in the Middle Ages by most educated people, Thomas Aquinas mentions it in his Summa Theologica as an example of a well established scientific fact.
The Church initially supported the Ptolemaic system which had the sun and planets revolving around a spherical stationary earth. When Galileo’s discovery of the transit of Venus made that system untenable most astronomers, whether affiliated to the Church or not, adopted compromise models such as that of Tycho Braye, where some or all of the other planets revolved around the sun, which itself revolved around a stationary earth.
And they adopted such systems for valid scientific reasons. The evidence available at the time (notably the complete absence of observed stellar parallax) was strongly against any model of the universe in which the earth was not fixed. Galileo, despite his undeniable scientific achievements, was something of a fanatic in his support of the Copernican model, advocating it with a fervour that was not justified by the available evidence.
The Copernican model was not even strictly heliocentric. It had the sun moving in its own orbit around the empty centre of the solar system. It was frankly an ugly beast, even more than the Ptolemaic model. And of course it was wrong, as strictly speaking was Galileo. The correct model of the solar system was the elliptical heliocentric system of Johannes Kepler in which the earth and other planets moved in elliptical orbits with the sun at one of the foci. Galileo apparently knew of Kepler’s work but seems to have paid little attention to it.
It’s one of the ironies of history that Galileo is regarded as a champion of scientific rationalism, heroically fighting against the ignorance of blind faith, when the truth is actually closer to the other way round.
LOL……case proven I would say…in relation to having a debate, or at least a question about whether someone’s point can be challenged with different evidence…
Thank you JXB and David for your comments, you have made me want to go and take a look at this myself….which is how it should work, and is a good thing…?
There is no certainties in science just a certainty of the uncertain.
If a “fact checker” cannot check the facts of a story through his own research and diligence then he is not really a fact checker. As Dr Tom Jefferson points out:
“We have done the tough work over two decades…”
“Our interpretation is one you can – and should if you want – challenge.”
However, to challenge effectively requires a degree of knowledge at least on a par with the author’s and these thicko second-rate hacks are a long way from such intelligence levels even if they had the work ethic required to complete the necessary research.
Fact checkers really are the lowest of the low, riding on the coat-tails of others for forty pieces of silver. Scum.
So well done Dr Tom Jefferson and I wholeheartedly agree with your stance.
Which is why instead of challenging the facts by setting out their own contradicting evidence, they attack the person with slurs, accusations and abstractions.
Exactly.
When you attack the person rather than the facts you have lost the argument
The whole concept of some definitive “fact checking service” seems to have arrived along with the death of free speech and the rise of censorship. I have no recollection of seeing such things in my youth – people simply voiced differing opinions and cited whatever evidence they could muster to support their position. The notion that where there’s a dispute about who is “right” can be resolved by a “fact checker” is utter bullshit.
It’s not about facts it’s about the unbridled rage and hatred that occurs when the mass formation is challenged.
Dr Jefferson gets my vote, the difficulty we all have is that turning a 300 page report into a single phrase means you have to have a good grasp of the problem, the research and the conclusion whereas the majority of modern commentators just want to be able to reinforce their particular audience’s prejudices.
I trust Dr Jefferson to do this, I don’t trust the commentators. Simple as that.
As a basic principle, never engage with somebody who is ‘reaching out to you’ (rather than contacting or writing to you), they are submerged in the lingo of Clown World and have limited intellect.
Fact checkers should be looking to find out what the facts are and report them impartially. If someone sets out to confirm a pre-judged outcome, and perhaps even ignores evidence that doesn’t confirm their intended outcome, that isn’t fact checking, it’s propaganda.
In the good old days, peer review was all the fact checking that was needed.
It was known as peer review because the people who did the checking were of equivalent status to the author(s) of the original paper. These were the people who were deemed to have the requisite skill and specialist knowledge to fully evaluate the work.
Whereas fact checkers are qualified how?
The quoted correspondence reads exactly like every other fact checker letter I’ve ever seen quoted. They clearly write according to a script.
The Daily Telegraph published an article, “Why fake news travels fast” in its Saturday 4/2 colour supplement. It condescendingly describes the gullibility (my word) of people who believe manipulated news. The techniques are Discrediting, Emotion, Polarisation, Impersonation, Conspiracy Theories, and Online Trolling. A perfect description of what the ruling elite has done to the public over the last two or three years. Except this is a description of how Conspiracy Theorists operate. People are working at Cambridge, the Cabinet Office and the WHO to develop computer games to help people spot fake news (Bad News and Go Viral!). There is particular emphasis on controlling the thoughts and opinions of young people. People who do not believe the official government line are labelled “hardcore deniers” and have to be deprogrammed. The expert sighs and says this takes a long time to do – “you just have to be patient”.
I am in no doubt that the new WHO Constitution will regard “hardcore deniers” as suffering from mental health issues and in need of sectioning or treatment. “Young people are the future citizens and leaders of the country; the point is not to tell them what to believe but to inoculate them against these techniques” (listed above). All the language is continually analogous to immunization.
I highly recommend people read this article if they want to know how fact-checkers and experts in “cognitive anti-bodies” are claiming a monopoly on their version of the truth.
https://brownstone.org/articles/studies-and-articles-on-mask-ineffectiveness-and-harms/
“More than 170 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and HarmsBY
PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER DECEMBER 20, 2021″