Tweet [1]
When push comes to shove, Aussie rulers also showed their authoritarian streak: snatch away everyone’s (temporary) life any time there’s an inevitable breach in the outer walls; harass [3] people [4], including old ladies [5], and let infants [6] die [7], all under the auspices of “protection” and “responsible government services [8]” against the mild danger that is Covid.
What does “eliminating” Covid mean for ordinary people? Basically, it means Stalin on steroids.
It means endless internal and external border closures – mean, shameless and dictatorial. It means truncated interstate trade and travel. It means lockdowns on a whim, without notice. Mask mandates. Bans at worst and curbs at best on normal activity. Enforced incarceration. Threats of prison. The stifling, joy-draining bureaucratisation of everything. Reporting in doorways before masked officials in order to have a pint or to worship your God.
It means endless, metastasising calls on the budget. It means the loss, possibly permanent, of any sense among both politicians and voters that budget deficits and debt matter. Witness the drunken sailor budgets in Australia and the UK, where Tory governments are spending like there is no tomorrow. (The USA’s Covid related spending is routinely measured in the trillions). No day of fiscal reckoning. Doing the Labor Party’s normal job of screwing the economy for it.
Evisceration of the government-schooling system might not make the lockdowns worthwhile, but such an outcome would be a very wide and shiny and welcome silver-lining around the cloud. Fortunately, as Matt Welch reports, many “teachers” (so-called) are doing their best to ensure that such an evisceration occurs [10]. A slice:
This kind of poisonous rhetoric [11], while cuckoo-bananas on its face, is nonetheless routine [12] in reopening debates, and not just in New York [13]. Gee, I wonder what message Harlem public school parents glean from teachers who warn about corpses and education leaders who call reopening racist?
Michael Deacon’s report on an actual recent news conference with Britain’s P.M. literally reads as if it’s from Babylon Bee [14]. A slice:
No one could ever possibly have seen it coming – least of all the man himself. Thanks to the pandemic, Boris Johnson [15] – the playboy of politics, the Don Juan of Downing Street, the Conservative Casanova – found himself having to make casual sex a criminal offence.
Thankfully, the virus now seems to be in retreat, and more than 35 million of us have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Chastened by the horrors of the past year, however, the Prime Minister is still preaching caution about the dangers of physical intimacy. From Monday next week, Mr Johnson is finally going to permit members of the public to hug each other [16] – provided, that is, they proceed with due care and attention, and don’t get carried away.
“We can’t suddenly throw caution to the winds,” he declared sternly, at a Downing Street news conference this evening (Monday). “We all know that close contact, such as hugging, is a direct way of transmitting the disease… I know there’s going to be a lot of people thinking about the guidance on hugging… Do it if you think it’s appropriate, but exercise care and common sense…”
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) [17]
Philip Thomas asks how Covid modelers got it so wrong [18]. A slice:
Fundamentally, Prof Ferguson and his team – and the other Sage modellers – have overcomplicated their modelling, which is inappropriate when the data we have on the virus is very limited, as it always will be with any new disease. The additional complexity of the Sage models might be academically satisfying and might, indeed, seem impressive to politicians. But it has not brought greater accuracy.
Chris Bullick calls on businesses to stand up against lockdowns [19]. A slice:
The data [are] in – lockdown-type mandates that have imprisoned most of the developed world don’t work. It’s about time we the business community started talking about this and stood up against the harms being caused. This is a heart-felt plea to change to my fellow LinkedIn users.
On Sunday, a church service in Nova Scotia was busted up by goons from the Covidocracy [20]. A slice:
The province of NS is currently under another two-week complete lockdown [DBx: i.e., what some call “a straw man”] where any type of religious service has been banned. In fact, NS’s lockdown is among the strictest in the whole world [21] as of this writing.
“Peak hysteria.” This development alone proves the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome [22]. [DBx: Here again, we have from the real world an actual report that reads as if it’s from the Babylon Bee.