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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Yes, the legacy media can win it for Kamala. They’ve been doing it all along.
They won’t stop with their hoaxes, misinformation, biased reporting, etc. until they feel the damage to their reputation is too great, caused at some unpredictable point when Kamala is “certified as the winner” and to continue the charade is too risky. Or, their employers are losing money by continuing the charade. Their efforts won’t subside until early 2025, if ever.
And a new hoax today. Days before the election, it’s the same old playbook.
Trump faces ‘twisted’ Epstein sexual assault allegation from ex-model
Haha, yes it’s like comedy at this moment in time, really pathetic. Here’s Gad Saad’s counter ‘Me Too’ confession;
https://x.com/GadSaad/status/1849490091854516446
Sexual allegations have been weaponised by politicians and other power-seekers over at least the last century, although the nature of the allegations has drifted according to match whatever behaviour the current generation considers, or can be persuaded to deem, scandalous. I am reminded of the DSK-IMF “scandal”: the real objective is not justice for the (invented) “victim” but smearing of the “perpetrator”. On a much lower plane, but far more numerous, were the “outings” of gay men in the early 1960s. Such exposures featured prominently of The News Of The World, especially if it included teachers or politicians. Supposedly these cases were suddenly exposed, but I suggest that the behaviour was long known and exposed only when, for whatever real reason, a competitor needed to be clinically disposed of. Half a century later the tactic still works, but the details of the “offensive” behaviour are different.
On reflection, I think there is a deeper agenda with these political shenanigans: politicians “read the room” by trying to be seen to be sympathetic to the “victim”, and go on to hint that anyone who does not publicly share that sympathy is siding with the “perpetrator”. Usually the tactic works, as it is the psychology of cult membership, explored in Asch Conformity Experiments. Sometimes the tactic results in a politician’s being hoist by their own petard, as in the case of Kaba/Abbott gaffe.
I think the Trump win will be big enough to outweigh the lawfare. He then has many things to do but most urgently ensure fair efficient voting for federal elections at least and sacking and disciplining the political lawyers hired by the Dems.
Breaking News…
https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-charged-with-terror-offences-after-handing-himself-in-at-police-s/
I bloody knew they would charge him under the Terrorism Act – the firkin evil Next Tuesdays.
Yeah I saw that, plus I saw it coming. I think we all did, including him. All for ignoring the corrupt courts and sharing the truth. On remand and court 10am Monday. God knows how that will go…
I do hope he’s got good lawyers who can wangle it his way once more though. The tw*ts have been baying for his blood for ages. And that arsewipe, Nick Lowles, who definitely incited hate and violence for posting pure BS about a woman having acid chucked on her was left well alone by the police, that so many on here respect and sympathize with. System is rigged and corrupt to the core. Go figure..
It’s very sad Mogs. Very, very sad. Corruption in this country is now the norm. I do feel sorry for Tommy Robinson. Heart of a Lion.
Good luck Tommy.
Agreed. The outpouring of support and love on Twitter is unreal. How much you betting there’ll be agent provocateurs hiding out in the crowds tomorrow to try and incite patriots to violence off the back of this arrest? Using his absence to their advantage. Hopefully his supporters are wise to these underhand, predictable tactics by now and won’t take the bait. It must remain peaceful above all else or you’re just playing into the bent police and establishment’s hands.
There’s a link to a new interview with Tommy in this tweet, which I’ve not got round to watching yet, where he talks about the whole controversy and his expected arrest;
https://x.com/vpopulimedia/status/1849730160737616357
Thanks Mogs.
Why is civilization going backwards? Modern humans have never been so well off, the environment never been so clean. Why is censorship increasing, why are we de-industrializing, why are life expectancies decreasing?
‘Big State’ totalitarian socialism across Europe.
Structural reform and institutional change, ‘systemic reform’, is required not just in Britain but across Europe.
https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3132657.pdf
Blair’s and Boris’s Britain:
‘The UK workforce currently totals around 33.2 million, of which around 17.9% (5.9 million) work in the public sector.’
‘The number employed by the civil service is now 34% higher than its minimum in 2016, and only 4% less than its most recent peak in 2005.’
https://www.civilservant.org.uk/information-numbers.html
U.S. government expenditure 36% of gdp
Britain 44%
France 58%
Italy 57%
Germany 50%
De-industrialisation continues apace due to the high price of electricity, a direct consequence of ‘nut zero’ policies.
2024 electricity rates in the United States are generally lower than those in the UK, with an average cost of around 13.9p per kilowatt-hour (kWh), whereas in the UK, it is around 22.36p per kWh.
That’s why we need to “Build Back Better”.
IQ of 75. Spot on. A brain dead plant for the CIA Deep State.
Fake News is still faking its polls. It is still trying to deep fake the sheeple. Drumpf is probably winning 2:1 but they have to keep ‘it close’ to justify and cover the vote fraud.
Michigan < 8 mn adults 18+. No more than 6 mn will register to vote. Yes you need to register to vote. 8.4 mn adults in Michigan are currently registered to vote. 2.4 million potential vote fraud in one state.
So the Fake News can win it for the blo n go hoe, by covering up the massive vote fraud – just as they did in 2020 with the Corona Scamdemic coup. A 30 million vote fraud.
If she loses I guarantee that they won’t hand over power. Does show the imbecility and SSRI fueled irrational exuberance when they decided to focus on a campaign based upon nebulous ‘joy’. It lasted about three days but that it occured at all is remarkable. All of those tablets and all of those financial incentives to doctors to give them out at patient request and all those advertisments on the television. A few decades of that and you’re away with the fairies.
Thanks James for your optimism and succinct summary of the EC rules. A great article.
On the subject of swing States, it is interesting to consider Michigan.
Trump won that state in 2016 (but Biden in 2020). Before that, the last Republican win in that state was as long ago as 1988 (George Bush senior).
So is Michigan really a swing state? It seems that Michigan was turned into a swing state by Trump, who promised to rejuvenate American manufacturing. I can remember in the last days of the presidential campaign in 2016, Trump campaigning in the state and the Democrats only belatedly realising it was in play, and scrambling to up their game there.
Enjoy the wine!