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Yesterday the maternity hospital bombing was front-page news in The Australian, one of Murdoch’s stable. The photo looked bad, very bad. In the face of evidence like that, what’s the average reader to think?
Talking of inflation, yesterday I filled the car with E91 petrol, i.e. 91 octane, 10% ethanol. The price has risen to 202.4 cents per litre. I put in 48.8 litres and paid out $98. Good grief. I remember when that much would have cost me $12 or so. Can I afford many, or maybe any, long trips any more?
Diesel prices are rising comparably, and 90% of Canberra’s leafy greens and fruit comes from Sydney on diesel-powered trucks. One guess what food prices will do.
I subscribe to The Guardian Weekly. Here’s an excerpt from their latest email which arrived a minute ago:
The sunflower is Ukraine’s national flower and has become a potent symbol of hope and resistance during the invasion. It’s a concept Egle Plytnikaite, a Lithuanian illustrator based in Vilnius, has captured poignantly in her cover art for this week’s edition.
“My goal was to depict the unbreakable spirit of Ukrainian people who united for their country in the darkest hour,” she writes. “They are experiencing an absolutely horrible and inhumane terror from Russian occupiers and yet they manage to keep morale high and fight back with incredible force. There is a saying that ‘you cannot make a free man kneel’ and Ukrainians are a living example of that.
“Slava Ukraini, heroyam slava!” (Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes)
For many people, the true horror of Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine was brought home last weekend by shocking images showing a family of four killed by Russian mortar fire while fleeing the town of Irpin. Yet, despite the dire conditions for civilians trapped in cities such as Kherson and Mariupol, determination to resist the Russian invasion stayed firm. Indeed, in refusing to leave Kyiv, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has epitomised courage and dignity in the face of Moscow’s onslaught.
Yet if I accept LezLuTHOR’s tweet, there’s not much going on in Irpin.
Very hard and time-consuming to compare and contrast the multitude of partisan opinions.
Quite the thread. Illusion warfare.
Ignoring the 33 numerology stuff, this entire post is interesting. What he filmed (or videoed) appears genuine and unstaged, although he could have pointed the camera away from scenes that don’t support his thesis. But on balance I’m inclined to say he didn’t.The Saker is available in Canberra on Firefox. So is RT.
I refuse to use Chrome for anything, suspecting/believing that it snoops. Yes, I know, a variety of Google cookies is unavoidable on a multitude of websites.
(News item on RT: “Tobacco giant sanctions Russia.” Isn’t that only good news from a health & welfare point of view?)
It’s wryly amusing to watch Australia attempting to bignote itself in joining the anti-China club. Not only is China our biggest customer for raw materials (and possibly foodstuffs; need to check), it’s also our biggest supplier of every type and kind of gadget. And aluminium metal for our naval patrol boats. Patrol boats to protect us from — one guess.
We signed a 99-year lease of the port of Darwin to a Chinese company some years ago. Darwin is where the bulk of our imported petroleum products arrive. We rely hugely on imports. One good cyclone, or one mysterious explosion, or 2 contaminated shiploads in a row, and we’re rationing petrol and diesel within 2 weeks. We do have a tiny oil reserve but it’s stored IN THE USA. Not here. The mind boggles.
We are so weak. So easily knocked off the global chessboard. Our governing elites seem so out of touch with reality.
Some people think Russia has made a colossal blunder, others think they are boxing very clever. (I wrote “Russia” not “Putin” because his is not the only mind involved in this.)
Maybe it’s a brilliant move. Reasoning: by taking action against Ukraine, the West has ganged up on Russia to a remarkable, unified degree. The West has shut Russia out of much of the global marketplace, especially for petroleum and natural gas. Oil reserves globally are very low at the moment and capex is way down. Even if it were to increase tomorrow, it would take 5 years for the boost to become apparent. Inflation rates are high and getting higher. The entire economy is dependent upon oil to give it life. Gail Tverberg opines that “Few people in America and Europe realize that the world economy is entirely dependent upon Russia’s exports of oil, coal and natural gas.” (emphasis mine)
In other words, Russia may have lured the glorious West into a trap, possibly a suicidal trap. It has achieved what it couldn’t easily have done before taking military action, i.e. ensure that the West firmly closes off its own supply lines. How long before our economies really totter and lurch, to everyone’s hurt?
That said, the whole effort could come badly unstuck. Wars are unpredictable. The only good war is no war.
I am noticing huge demonisation going on now. Anything Russian is to be loathed, despised and removed. I have a Russian friend; I can only hope that nothing nasty happens. It’s reminiscent of the Great War, WW1, where anything German was similarly demonised. Churchill prevented British women from attending a peace conference in the neutral Netherlands. Place names were anglicised. Foodstuff names were anglicised. Many lurid stories were circulated, most of which later proved to have been false. History rhymes.
I drove past the Russian embassy yesterday. No demonstrators, no placards, no banners. Nothing unusual except for an Australian Federal Police vehicle parked in the median strip opposite. Good; we’re honouring our obligations to protect foreign diplomats and their premises.
On the car radio came a news item that Australians were contacting the Ukrainian embassy to volunteer to go and join the fray. It sounded impressive until the newsreader announced the number so far: twenty. Yes, that’ll make a difference… They also played a clip from the Foreign Affairs minister saying that Australians should not go to war zones. Fair enough.
Actually, how embassies and high commissions are protected here gives an indication of the mental state, the gestalt, of the international community. When I moved to Canberra in the early 1980s there were three high commission buildings in a row: British, New Zealand, Canadian. (Commonwealth countries don’t send embassies to each other; they establish high commissions, hauts commissariats. Why this distinction I do not know.) None of these buildings had any sort of fence around it. All very relaxed. Some time after 9/11 the British high commission grounds sprouted a nice, strong fence. Some time later the Canadians got a fence. Finally, after a few more years, NZ joined the club and built their fence. Now we have three gated communities in a row. So sad.
The US and Russian embassies have always had stout fences. After 9/11 the US reinforced theirs by raising the ground by a metre or so all around and putting the fence on top of that, to prevent vehicles from trying to ram through the fence formerly at ground level. The Russian embassy fence is at ground level. The Ukrainian embassy is on the 12th floor of an office building in the downtown area.
The august Conversation this morning ran an article by a professor of History and Judaic Studies at the Uni of Michigan entitled “Putin’s claim to rid Ukraine of Nazis is especially absurd given its history.”
One excerpt:
For a brief period of time, Ukraine was the only state outside of Israel to have both a Jewish head of state and a Jewish head of government. “How could I be a Nazi?” Zelensky asked in a public address after the Russian invasion began. “Explain it to my grandfather.”
This is the kind of claim that requires careful analysis — but I simply do not have time.
There will be more such claims tomorrow and the next day and the next.
Veracious Poet wrote, “In the current climate of Clown World, where we never know what evil will be unleashed next, having physical possession of portable assets will be mission critical to survival, which also can be used as seed money to support small communities that pull together to survive the “useless eater” culling that is obviously upon us…”
Here’s another unleashable evil: personal property tax, with rates and scope vastly extended. TPTB will seek to tax EVERY physical asset. If you don’t pay, they will confiscate.
Australia doesn’t have PPT. Not yet, but I imagine TPTB are imagining it lots.
The Ukrainian situation will be very useful in our forthcoming federal elections. The incumbent (fossil-fuelled infinite-growth) party will strongly push the “national security” angle. I await to see what the (not much better) opposition will do. Not happy.
As you would expect, much agitation about Russia and Ukraine in the Oz MSM today.
Auntie (ABC) has these headlines among others:“Second wave of targeted missile strikes hits Ukraine and world leaders condemn Putin’s cold-blooded war.”
“The Russia-Ukraine crisis isn’t just unfloding on the ground. Cyber attacks are intensifying too.”
“The global economy is staring into the abyss as Ukraine invasion hits tje Australian stock market.”
“It’s 15,000 kilometres from Kyiv to Korumburra, but the Russia-Ukraine conflict will have impacts across Australia.”
“Russia sanctions, Ukraine conflict likely to increase petrol, gas, fertiliser and wheat prices.”
“China refuses to call Russia’s actions in Ukraine an invasion.”
“Why are building costs going through the rooof?”
“Australia won’t send troops, but how else is it going to help Ukraine?”No idea what terrifying stratagems Australia will deploy. The mouse that roared…
FYI, the national average unleaded petrol price rose to a record 179 cents per litre last week. Convert that to your local currencies and weights & measures, and see if running your car fits into your household budget. It does mine, but I don’t need to use the car a great deal.
One might argue that Trudeau has moved too far, too fast. He’s given the game away. The world can see clearly now how TPTB can (try to) control us simply by making it very difficult if not impossible to buy or sell using the state-authorised financial system.
This news is surely making its way around the world at very high speed, the Ukrainian sideshow not withstanding. I expect that a lot of people are making a lot of plans to deal with and counteract the situation.
So, maybe the stock market will do what proper science and the precautionary principle failed to do: control and punish the corporate culprits. How ironic: the Mammon-worshippers may be clobbered by Mammon.
On a different note, in Canberra plague conditions are easing. On Friday at 6pm the wretched masks will no longer be required except in certain “high risk” circumstances. Some venue limits have already have been eased, but since I never go to venues with limits, I am not affected. Third jabs have not been as accepted as the first two were; it’s something like 60% vs 98%. And yet we are being told that condtions are to be eased. Hmmm.
Why Friday 6pm? Canberra has late-night shopping on Fridays, and 6pm is knock-off time for most white-collar workers. (The blue-collar workers knocked off an hour or two earlier.) So now we can all go shopping! The traders were heeded by the government. Probably.
It always annoys me that the ending of any restrictions is always in the future, at some symbolic later date and time. If it was announced yesterday that masks aren’t needed as from COB Friday, then why couldn’t the change have been applied almost immediately? We have the technology these days to spread the news very fast, so it’s not as though a long period of adjustment is called for. Reminds me of a sort of a reverse Seneca Effect when it comes to the wielding of power: regulations are piled on very quickly but taken off slowly and reluctantly.
“…stakes can be continuously increased until the other side is compelled to capitulate.”
In fact, in the past entire wars have been decided this way. Opposing armies would gather on the field and simply parade around, maybe calling in extra units, building up the numbers and the armaments until one side’s general concluded that battle was futile and surrender.
Interesting idea in the video from SD Red that the truckers don’t need to gather, don’t need to protest in groups, don’t need to expose themselves to harassment, but simply decline to go to work. The Spanish have a saying that “the difference between civilisation and chaos is seven (missed) meals.” IOW, 2.33 days. I didn’t know that NYC is a mere 3 days away from empty food shelves. Here are some excerpts from an Australian government report from 2012, “Resilience in the Australian food supply chain” (emphasis mine):
1.5 Lessons from the Queensland floods
The Queensland floods during December 2010 to January 2011 were severe and widespread. The town of Rockhampton, with a population around 75,000, was cut off by road, rail and air for two weeks; the state capital, Brisbane, came within a day of running out of bread for its population; other towns and cities on the coast and inland were affected by floods, with around 100 large retail food stores and many more smaller food outlets inundated.
…
The experience revealed both the resilience and fragility of the food supply chain. While there were no reported instances of communities going hungry, this was only through massive effort on the part of both the food industry and authorities. This included logistics providers hiring large numbers of vehicles (trailers and prime movers) from Sydney, and large amounts of voluntary overtime by employees of trucking companies.
…
Concerns were also expressed about what a number of food industry participants saw as difficulties in working with the Australian Defence Force (ADF) to move food to affected areas. While respondents praised the efforts of Australian soldiers on the ground, they considered that logistically the lack of capacity and administrative hoops to be negotiated before food could be transported constitute a major risk.
…
A number of food industry stakeholders interviewed expressed disappointment at what they saw as lack of capability on the part of the ADF to assist with the food logistics task beyond immediate emergency food drops by helicopter. There is an apparent mismatch between industry expectations (among some businesses) and actual capacity. The ADF is not, in today’s defence planning environment, equipped to undertake large food logistics tasks, and itself relies on the private market for supply to its own messes and operational needs. It would be valuable to develop a better understanding within the industry of what ADF could realistically be expected to do in an emergency in relation to food supplies.Thanks, Doctor D., for that Guardian article. What a surprise! It actually addresses major concerns and collections of evidence! A reversal indeed.
As others are asking, where may this trend be heading? I feel that the trend in the Anglosphere and a number of European nations towards de-democratisation will not stop. We’re in for a period of fascistic rule, and can only hope that it will burn itself out when people learn that fascism will not save us from ourselves any more than any other political -ism.
Meanwhile the gyrations in the financial world seem to be growing larger. How long before the spinning top falls over? I’m not looking forward to that, but then, I don’t want the old, destructive system to continue either.
What Doug Ford said was music to my ears. The narrative is breaking down. If he ever wants to run for political office in Australia, I’d vote for him.
Switzerland’s example is a great encouragement!
The censorship decision by Public Health Scotland clearly illustrates the strictly scientific basis of health management, doesn’t it just.
I don’t know about Canada, but in Australia the Governor-General has the power to sack a government. This power has been exercised only once so far, in 1975. I’d LOVE to see it exercised again. Two small problems here: IMO there’s no credible replacement for the current bunch; and G-Gs are selected because they’re unlikely to rock the boat.
A federal election is coming up and the campaigning has already started. Early signs are that it will be NASTY and more than usually full of lies. The PM is already accusing the opposition of being “soft on China” (that’ll be the key, wedge issue—”national security”) but never mind it was his party’s government which signed a 99-year lease of the port of Darwin to a Chinese company. A reverse Hong Kong. Our defence industry is purchasing aluminium for new warships from — guess who — China, to protect us from — guess who — China, and we got a defective batch (I wonder how that happened). The PM has been scolded by ASIO (our chief spooks) for saying “unhelpful” things about China but the PM doesn’t care. If he’s part of Team WEF then I assume he will do whatever it takes to stay in power. Most of our petroleum products are imported from South-East Asian refineries through easily blocked maritime choke points. We are so utterly STUPID. Such a mess and a muddle we’ve made. A reasonable chap would think we’d planned it.
A brief note on house prices in Oz.
One Sydney property in a posh area:
1972 $33,900
1979 $123,000
1983 $127,600
2009 $1,300,000
2013 $2,580,000A very average house in a convenient area of Canberra:
1980 $69,000
2005 $400,000
2021 $1,900,000Some young people I’ve chatted with have told me that they have given up all hope of ever owning a house and a home.
Sorry to be glum but I think the Canadian protestors have lost this battle. I don’t know if it was planned this way, but Canada has served as a proving ground for repressive techniques. From where I sit, they appear to have been quite successful. Maybe not; but the current mood of TPTB and the apparent quiescence of the bulk of the population means that the Emergency Powers Act likely will be invoked as often as necessary.
I expect now that the abolition of cash will be done first in Canada. And spread as a preventative measure. It’s all about national security, don’cha know.
I keep coming back to Uruguay as an example of a democratic country that went fascist. A series of economic crises and the fight against left-wing guerillas provoked a coup d’état in 1973. Eventually democracy was returned in 1985, but the period left deep hurts in the population and calls for justice which have not been acted upon. One of my workmates years ago was a young fellow whose parents had fled Uruguay for Australia, which at that time was indeed a place of refuge for (many) oppressed people.
What the glorious west is seeing now is a coup d’état but from the top, by those already in power, not even a palace revolution. A new development in history? Probably other examples from elsewhere but I lack the time to find them.
Does the Canadian Emergency Powers Act stipulate a maximum period of time that it may be invoked, or may it remain invoked indefinitely? It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s can be permanent or at least indefinite. How convenient. Yep, this is what TPTB wanted: choose not to deal with a situation, let it grow, declare it a threat, and bring out the big guns to “fix” it. Forever.
I don’t know if Australia has similar legislation. Wouldn’t surprise me that it has but so far nationally we’ve been unproblematic for TPTB.
Rationing can be useful, especially now that we seem to be hitting limits to growth. (Look up Doughnut Economics.) Otherwise the market will drive up the price of a resource and trade in it until it’s utterly exhausted, or until hoarding and black-marketeering make it unavailable anyway. The caviar sturgeon is a good example: because caviar is always a valuable and lucrative commodity, overfishing has taken place. Not enough replacement. The result is that the very last sturgeon will be caught and cheerfully slaughtered for the last bit of caviar and the last bit of income for the fisherman, and then what? The market mechanism acts more quickly than natural replenishment cycles.
We’ve also got to be careful about freedom, what it is and how we do it. No-one has utter freedom; we all live in communities and must make allowances for each other. It’s a balancing act. In relatively peaceful times we all along quite well; times of stress and trials reveal the weaknesses and gaps.
I stumbled upon this excellent observation yesterday (emphasis mine):
Why would roughly 4% to 12% of CEOs be psychopaths (I’ve seen as high as 20% claimed, implying psychopaths might be statistically around 25 times as likely to become CEOs)? What is it about the human condition, or this era of civilization, that pushes the most potentially destructive people to the top of decision-making hierarchies? Is there some process inherent in the machinations of life on Earth that allows for this, and that we can deconstruct in order to prosper in a new era of happier, healthier, and less existentially dangerous living? Is there a way to decentralize power so as to limit the damage psychopaths might do, or better encourage hierarchies of competence and wisdom?
Is there a way? Sorry to be glum but under present circumstances, no. The lesson of history is that one lot of psychopaths is cleared away and another lot rise to the surface. Sigh.
What if the invasion of Ukraine does not place as advertisied? Another triumph of Western diplomacy! Can’t lose.
John day asked how the protests in Australia are doing. Thanks, Raúl, for posting that link. In the national capital where I live, it’s been big around Parliament House and the EPIC markets where they’ve been camping. Life in the suburbs has not been impacted at all unless you wanted to go to the markets. Unfortunately Lifeline’s vital fund-raising bookfair was cancelled, allegedly because of bad behaviour by some of the protestors making it “unsafe” to proceed.
A much-vilified MP, George Chritensen has some photos and a video on his website.
https://nationfirst.substack.com/p/you-should-see-these-photosHere’s some of what he wrote:
You see, yesterday I was at the Convoy to Canberra rally which was literally the largest protest I have seen in the nation’s capital in the 11 years I’ve been coming here as a Federal Member of Parliament.
You may have heard all the mainstream (fake news) media spin that it was violent, out of control and all the rest of it but, as someone who was actually there in the crowd, I can assure you it was anything but. In fact, I’ve never been to an event before where I saw so much hugging of complete strangers going on.
Far from violent, what I saw was the freedom movement breaking out into spontaneous acts of kindness. The only hatred on display was for all the vaccine mandates, division and restrictions, and those who have perpetrated that abuse on the Australian people.
You may have also heard stories about how small the crowd was. That’s nonsense. As I said, this was the largest rally I’ve seen in Canberra since I’ve been coming here. But don’t take it from me. Check out the photos and video below:
Yes, the ABC (government MSM) certainly alleged various levels of nastiness. Pity, because the ABC is usually quite prepared to criticise the government of the day — a major reason why successive governments, both left and right, have keen for decades to privatise it. They constantly fail because the public are protective of their ABC. It’s a real institution here, and often very good at investigative journalism. So sad that it can’t or won’t investigate certain topics.
Political orientation of truck protests: some say they’re left-wing, others right-wing. It’s the latter in Oz. This week’s Guardian describes the Canadian as right-wing in an article with carefully-framed photos showing only confused clumps of vehicles and nothing of the extent of the convoys.
I fear that resorting to violence will backfire hugely, unless the military refuse to hurt and destroy their own countryfolk. Battleship Potemkin again? Or have the protestors been adequately demonised by now to overcome moral qualms?
LURID article from ABC News this morning
How the Omicron wave smashed hospitalsThe message is both clear and confused: (a) omicron is absolutely terrible and bringing the Sydney hospital system to its knees; (b) and yet from the coalface we’re told this:
It’s pretty much back to where we were with the Delta wave. We are getting more people who need ventilation now, but not as much as before. They’re not as sick as last time. And there’s a lot of patients who are in our ICU now who are being treated for something else, and they incidentally also have COVID.
Now, about those unbreakable contracts with Pfizer et al. …
D Benton Smith writes that the Eighth Commandment is “You shall not steal.” Yep.
The Ninth Comandment is, “You shall not bear false witness.”
Australia has a PM who has let it be known that he is a churchgoer (Hillsong). To judge by his behaviour, he has never heard of either of those commandments. Neither apparently have the elites in ANY country.
Putin’s clip is chilling. He’s drawn a very clear line in the sand. Very clear. We would do well to listen.
The data from insurance companies is very significant. No doubt attempts will be made to ignore it or cover it up or retrospectively alter (i.e. falsify) it. It will be loudly proclaimed that “correlation is not causation” and the discussion will be deemed to stop right there.
But another possibility emerges. In Oz, owing to climate change some property insurance companies are close to declaring entire geographical areas as uninsurable. What if insurance companies in North America start to declare certain categories of people as uninsurable, especially for life and medical coverage? Insurance companies are not charities. What if, to keep their businesses going, they decline on a large scale to provide coverage? How would that look?
Australia’s mixed health care system, public and private, has preserved us from the worst excesses of the US system, but if the same statistics show up here, the private health insurers may start to back out of providing cover and push the burden back onto the public system. This is not what neoliberalism was meant to achieve, but it is how neoliberalism works: stop helping people when the profits vanish.
This is a very intriguing development. Add that to what the embalmers are discovering.
That letter from Marm McDonald M.D., assuming it’s genuine, gives me a new term to consider: fear addiction. I never considered that people could become addicted to fear. But there it is.
I don’t think the truckers in the Great Southern Land are having anywhere near the impact that those in North America are having. Possibly because we’re not as closely linked as the US and Canada. The only bridges we have are shipping routes and they’re not as easy to blockade. I suppose they could blockade the ports.
The MSM are treating our protestors with ignore. The general attitude is that they are deluded, conspiratorial ratbags. On the other hand, there is also an increasing number of people who see right through the whole thing.
I think what happens in North America will greatly influence what happens here, so I await developments with great interest and a measure of optimism.
BTW, it has now been officially decided that “fully vaccinated” means “up to date”. No national mandate; it’s up to the states and territories to decide on that.
Re Joe Rogan: this week’s Grauniad has an article about him. It’s not supportive of course.
Here’s a snippet: “Early last month, 270 scientists and medical professionals signed a letter urging Spotify to take action against Rogan, accusing him of spreading falsehoods on the podcast.” (Page 33; emphasis theirs, and included a blue background for the maximum possible effect.)
OK, but we’ve seen in times past that a list of scientists denying climate change turned out to have quite a number of non-scientists in it. This is the kind of statement that needs checking but I can’t do it for sheer lack of time.
At 11:59 this Friday night, it will no longer be required for Canberrans to check into most premises except for certain “high-risk” ones, e.g. night clubs and bars. (Let’s see how long this lasts.) Still waiting for these wretched masks to be made optional inside retail and other premises. They’re optional outdoors.
Nationally, booster shots are still optional, not mandatory. Nationally, Jabber the Nut & TPTB are discussing now whether to change the definition of “fully vaccinated” to “up to date” rather than “two jabs”. That’s a slippery slope if ever there was one.
Last Sunday the trucker convoy made itself evident around Parliament House. Still there. Only one arrest so far for firearms reasons, otherwise peaceful. Overall it isn’t making much of an impact anywhere else in the city. We went out on Sunday, nowhere near Parliament, and encountered a long procession or beautifully polished and tubbed up older model cars heading into the Arboretum. That was our destination too. We had a most enjoyable picnic. Plenty of other people taking the air and enjoying the day.
Autumn has arrived in Canberra about a month early after a cool, wet summer. This must surely give the climate change denialists plenty of ammunition: “a while ago we were told that the dams would never be full again, and now they’re overflowing.” One could suggest that climate instability is making itself felt here, but I don’t know how far that line of argument would go.
Beautiful, rare, ancient forest in Tasmania is about to be hewn down to feed the perpetual-growth machine. Along the way it will greatly harm the valuable honey industry. But the growth machine doesn’t care: trees have been financialised. They must be cut down and sold otherwise the workers won’t be able to afford honey to put on their toast.
On and on it goes. This is only one small example of a worldwide malaise. Governments everywhere seem to have lost patience with environmentalism. We are growing ourselves into extinction.
I was wrong yesterday in my prediction that we’d hear nothing from the Oz MSM about either of these truck convoys. The ABC had an article yesterday: “GoFundMe freezes $160,000 until organisers of Convoy to Canberra protests detail spending plan“. It mentions the Canadian convoy and GoFundMe’s reluctance to hand over the money it agreed to collect.
The article is about the money. And that’s it.
Today is 31/1. I live in Canberra. I have not seen a word in the MSM about the Freedom Convoy. I am confident that I will not see a word in the MSM when the convoy arrives or after it disperses.
I think it was one of the commentariat in a recent TAE edition who suggested we read Paul Kingsnorth’s essays about what lies behind the covid over-reaction. I took it up and what I read has great explanatory power. (Start here: The Vaccine Moment, part one.) It’s all about Population Control, using Disease Control as a stalking horse. We need to look behind the covid/vaccine narrative for the real motives. Some of what he writes seems hard to accept but I think he’s on the right track. For example:
… we have come at long last to the foothills of the future: an inverted version of The Matrix in which Agent Smith is the hero. A world both terrible and boring at the same time. As climate change bites, ecosystems continue to degrade, supply chains jam up, the social fabric frays, and mass urbanisation and mass migrations accelerate, it will become more and more necessary to micromanage, nudge and control the citizens of our mass societes just to keep the growth-&-progress show on the road. The pandemic has shown us how this can be achieved. Schwab is right that there is no turning back from the lessons it has taught.(Emphasis mine)
He feels some optimism, however:
Control: this is the story that the Machine tells about itself, and it is the story that we would all, at some level, like to be true. But control systems never last. The world is beyond both our understanding and our control, and so, in the end, are people. We barely understand ourselves. Perhaps Klaus Schwab’s desire to ‘improve the world’ is real and felt: but he will still never be able to grip it tightly enough to bend it to his will. Who can?
Passports were a introduced as a temporary measure after WW1, and it had been intended to abolish them, but the “Spanish” Flu of 1918 led leaders to retain passports for the purposes of health, disease control and national security. Now we have digital versions on the way spurred by another pandemic. It is only now that technology has made possible such a thing.
The real tool of the establishment is the mobile phone, better known as the cell phone, methinks. It is also the control system’s Achilles Heel. Most of the control technologies seem to be centred upon and concentrated into the handheld hypnotiser. Limit that and one limits so much else. How might we achieve that? Perhaps just wait? The degradation and mooted collapse of The System might do it.
Oops, “used” not “ousedld”. Where on earth did that typo come from? I’d edit it but the system acts strangely if I do.
A theatre nurse told me recently that in her experience masks should be changed every 20 minutes, otherwise they clog up from one’s breath and stop working. Also, NEVER touch the outside of the mask while wearing it.
That’s in the operating theatre, but I can’t see the 20-minute rule not applying elsewhere. We all breathe all the time, don’cha know.
So, 8 hours’ wearing @ new one every 20 minutes = 24 masks per day. See anybody doing that?
The mask manufacturers must really be enjoying the enhanced revenue stream.
How many ousedld ones have escaped into nature? 1.5 billion or the like, wasn’t it? Maybe multiply that by 24?
Slight unease in Australia
According to The Conversation today, that completely objective and totally impartial academic newsletter, momentum is growing for a Royal Commission into how the pandemic has been (mis)handled in general.
(If you’re not aware, a Royal Commission, a.k.a. Commission of Inquiry, can be very high-powered and unstoppable. For more details, go to Wikipedia.)
Good, but cynical me says that the terms of reference will carefully omit any reference to alternative treatments and why it may be argued that elements of the Australian medical establishment have deliberately withheld life-saving information from their own profession and from the general public.
But then this whole affair is such a tangled web of spaghetti that unravelling it could take years. Who knows what the state of public health will be like then. The government by then may well be completely different, and we all know how governments can and do ignore the findings of Royal Commissions.
Monoclonal antibodies withheld: in the US federation, aren’t the states paramount?
Can’t Florida steer its own course — at least to some extent?
Or are there no production facilities within the state?
British police in Austria? A newly borderless world?
Australia has a federal election coming up this year some time. In spite of ample and strident criticism of the incumbents from many quarters, including to an increasing extent the MSM (which surprises me), I gloomily expect the secretive neoliberals to be re-elected. Not only are there just too many who would vote for a drover’s dog if the party put one on the ticket, but also Her Majesty’s loyal opposition seem to have completely lost their mojo, their verve, their spark. Their silence is deafening. There are so many good, future-oriented ideas ready and waiting for implementation, but no. Baffling.
I read recently that Canberra is one of the most vaccinated cities on the planet. I think the figure is over 98%. So, in years to come, could that mean that Canberra will become one of the sickest cities on the planet? Or have we escaped the worst of the worst because for the over-50s we used AZ while reserving Pfizer for the under-50s? Time will tell.
And now they’re offering boosters. If we have made a vaccination mistake, there’s no correcting it.
Some snippets of the propaganda campaign in anti-Djokovic Australia:
1. The Saturday Paper, Jan 15–21, 2022, p7:
“Denial of the science of epidemiology is widespread, even among ‘experts.’ We are told repeatedly that SARS-CoV-2 will become ‘endemic.’ But it will never be endemic because it is an epidemic disease and always will be. … But what the past month has shown us that we cannot live with unmitigated Covid-19. Vaccinations will not be enough. We need a ventilation and vaccine-plus strategy to avoid the disruptive epidemic cycle, to protect health and the economy, and to regain a semblance of the life we all want.
Author is Raina Macintyre, who leads the biosecurity program at the Kirby Institute. She is on the WHO’s technical advisory group on Covid-19 vaccine composition.So I presume that ‘always epidemic, never endemic’ is the WHO’s official stance.
2. The Guardian Weekly, 14 January 2022, p29:
Article by Kerryn Phelps entitled, “The shambolic mess caused by the decision to just ‘let it rip’.”
“… The only example Australia is providing now is a warning about what not to do… Preventing transmission is the only way out of this.”
Phelps is a GP, past AMA president and member of OzSAGE.TPTB are most displeased with, inter alia, the covid parties being held by younger people who wish to catch the curative omicron variant. I guess this is part of the élites’ pushback.
Re Djokovic, recall that his visa was cancelled by Hawke on Friday. The notice was issued at 4:50pm — minutes before knock-off time for most AND on a Friday when most people are gearing up for the weekend.
In my book this was cowardly behaviour, so sadly typical of pollies who want to announce an unpopular decision and quickly sneak away.
Morrison said that the decisions was Hawke’s alone. Morrison and Hawke descibe themselves as “good mates.” We all know how that works.
One of my social circle is a retired theatre nurse. She told us that in her experience masks should (ideally) be changed every 20 minutes because they get soggy from breath. Also one should never touch the outside while wearing them.
So, if there are an estimated 1.5 billion of these things littering the environment, and assuming that these are discards from a day’s wearing, then 8 hours @ 1 mask per 20 minutes = 8 hours @ 3 masks/hour = 24 masks per day, times 1.5 billion = 36 billion discards.
I wonder what 36 billion look like in one place?
A bit more from an Antipodean regarding Djokovic in his “Land of Captivity.”
This issue is revealing more than a little incompetence or wilful ignorance or just plain short-sightedness on the part of the Australian Border Farce and/or the federal government. For instance, it should have been made perfectly clear on the visa application form what the requirements for issuance are. No good letting him arrive and then finding fault.
Or if the requirements were not made clear ahead of time, then that reveals bureaucratic ineptitude at least and possibly poorly-drafted legislation or legislation in need of amendment. Amendments are commonly made but they tend to be enacted in batches, so it is possible that a defect in the relevant Act is ready for amendment but it hasn’t happened yet.
Agencies commonly communicate with one another about matters like this to arrive at a decision, so if one agency was happy with him and another wasn’t, then this should have been made obvious in good time.
The Feds as usual are ducking and weaving, blaming everybody but themselves.
Djokovic is doing rather well to have got the Federal Court (second-highest in the land) to examine the matter so soon. Standards exist, and judges like standards. I do hope that the Feds are overruled. The bureaucrats have said that he is free to leave any time he likes. Of course; if he did that then they wouldn’t be drawn into a court case. I rather hope that he stays put.
For Djokovic and others, this affair is providing a wonderful amount of publicity. It’s shining a light in a murky area.
