Hi All, as you all probably know, it has been a long long time since I posted on here, but even I was surprised to see it was over three years ago. This is partly due to spending much of 2019 supporting Bettina in her battle against cancer, which thankfully now seems to be gone two years after chemo and radio treatment, albeit never completely gone from our thoughts. Then came the charade of a pandemic, and fanatical restrictions and measures to control it.
I accept that we have probably all had it up to the eyebrows on the topic of Covid, but in spite of that have decided to attempt to lay down my thoughts.
I wrote to my two children in April 2020, during complete lockdown here in Spain, on a sad note wondering if or when I would ever see them again. They laughed at the silly old bugger, exaggerating as usual. I wrote them a long letter in May 2020 explaining that I thought that this was the start of something quite big. The way that the whole world almost simultaneously reacted smelled of an orchestrated worldwide event. I told them in the letter that I predict vaccinations for everyone, even newborns, to be administered every year. Proof of vaccination would be required to do basic things and be able to take part in society. Bars, cafes, restaurants, gyms, theaters, leisure centres all would be only available to those who “did the right thing”. My son, now 42 thought that I was barmy and ridiculed me as a cranky conspiracy theorist. My daughter, now 48 was a little less direct, but I am sure had similar thoughts. Bettina didn’t want to talk about it, as she thought it would all be over by Christmas. I never felt so alone in my entire life as during 2020.
Perhaps it is the right moment to say that this is not an “I told you so” post, not at all. I would be the first person dancing in the streets if this whole thing blew over and I was proven to be a nutter. I have spent nearly two years asking myself, “why is something that is so obvious to me considered to be so outrageous by almost everyone I know?”
The vaccines came, the Covid pass came, the repeated vaccines (boosters) came and yet restrictions are still tightening and the life that up to 2019 was considered normal is slipping further and further away.
We are told we must follow the science, yet the science does not support many or all of the measures. We are told to get vaccinated to help medical services by not using up beds, which are needed by cancer or heart patients, many of whom are morbidly obese or chain smokers. We know that vaccination does almost nothing to prevent the spread of covid, yet unvaccinated are banned from many public places such as bars or restaurants. We are told masks are compulsory outdoors in the street, yet once inside a restaurant can take them of in a closed space. Is being sceptical of such nonsense a sign that I am barmy?
Now to the point of this post. More and more evidence is coming out which shows the dishonesty behind most of the measures related to Covid. We are surely being lied to on a very grand scale and I hope people are gradually waking up to the mass psychosis which has been propagated by governments the world over.
Is it now already too late for this to be reversed, or are we heading for a new world order the like of which is normally only ever imagined by science fiction writers? Are the masses waking up? Will they rebel?
My two children are now acting very differently. One is not vaccinated at all and says she will have to be held down before she will be vaccinated for what she considers “a bad cold”. She has seen her three teenage children slide further and further down as their future seems so bleak. Two of them seem to have lost all interest in any education or future career.
My son was vaccinated but was then tested positive in November. After a few days with a sore throat he was fine, but then in December began to be pestered by the NHS to get his booster. They were not interested that he had just tested positive a month earlier, which rang his alarm bells. He now says he won’t be taking the booster. The only slight positive in all of this is that neither of them think their old Dad was so nutty after all.
My next post will be to address the question of why?, why are they doing this? and what is the future?
Boadicea's Chariot 
I have a few thoughts on this. Well, OK, more than a few but I’ll try to keep a lid on things and limit myself to boring you with only two.
Gazoopi, I hate to say this because I see that you’ve had an “anavaxxer” in your own family but, for the life of me, I simply cannot understand the rationale of those who refuse to get vaccinated against a potentially deadly disease. Are such people really willing to risk their well being, perhaps even their lives, on the basis of Internet rumours rather than scientific fact? If they do have thoughts that can be defended with proof, I’d like to hear them.
Do they really believe that there’s some kind of conspiracy afoot, that the COVID vaccine contains microchips, that it will magnetize them, that it will render them sterile (I’d have thought that would be a Good Thing in helping to control population growth), that it will somehow alter their DNA, etc., etc.? Do they think it was produced too rapidly for proper testing (when in fact it’s a spinoff of work that’s been going on for many years)? Are they claiming some kind of religious objection (when even the Pope has come out in favor of vaccination)? If not, then what?
I may be seriously underinformed on this, but this is the first and only time within my memory that a sizeable segment of the population has reacted this way to a public health initiative. Did people ever turn out like this in opposition to previous vaccines such as (to name only the first two that come to mind) chickenpox and polio?
At least in situations where vaccination is mandated by some Gummint, my only guess (and I hate having to guess) is that all too many people see that as an invasion of their personal liberty. Goodness knows that I myself would never want to interfere with their right to die in considerable discomfort.
My wife’s pulmonologist, who has to spend a lot of his time dealing with COVID patients and often hears them admit with literally their last gasp that they should have got the vaccine, sums such behavior up in one word: “Darwinism.” My wife and I are, by the way, fully vaccinated and boosted and never go out in public unmasked.
My second point concerns Gummint handling of COVID countermeasures. To the best of my understanding (and, now that I’m forced to recall, in a previous life I was a microbiologist for a time), a vaccine should protect you, the recipient, against contracting the disease at issue. It is, however, still possible (although somewhat less so) for a vaccinated individual to infect others. Wearing a mask should protect both you and those around you, given that we breathe both in and out.
Yet here we are with officials at all levels requiring that proof of vaccination be shown for admission to various venues and promoting the value of masks only for reducing the possibility of infecting others. I can, however, see some value in requiring vaccination, if only to keep the number of taxpaying voters up and can understand that imposing restrictions may act as a distraction from or even an offset to the mandate.
For my money, they’ve got it dead wrong. Or perhaps, given that the underlying science is simple enough for even a politician to learn, they are trying to manipulate the public by spouting what they think people may want to hear and then changing it on a half-hourly basis, as might be expected if they are keeping a close eye on survey results.
But what do I know? Less every day, it seems.
Stay well!
Many thanks to both Gazoopi and Cog for both the post and response.
Gazoopi: I will, like Cog, concentrate on what I consider to be the most important points.
So, firstly I have to ask why you, Gazoopi, consider the outbreak of Covid-19 to be a charade?
I most certainly think that the W.H.O.’s initial response (clearly trying to cover up China’s culpability) and China’s ongoing refusal to be transparent about how the virus began to be a ‘charade’ – i.e. obfuscating and denying knowledge to the rest of the world which has lead to Governments everywhere being left totally in the dark as how to deal with this new ‘plague’.
And it is a ‘plague’ – in every sense of the word. That it has not wiped out many more people than it might have done (one third of the population in 1349) is due to the fact that we, in the 21st C, have the means and knowledge to deal with it far more effectively than they did.
But, even in 1349 and for many centuries thereafter people understood the necessity of ‘quarantine’ (from the Latin 40 which meant quarantining for 40 days). It worked – and people did what they could to halt the spread of the disease. And, I think far more considerate of their obligations to others than many are now. Eyam (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-derbyshire-51904810).
With so little knowledge coming from the W.H.O and China, many Governments did what they could to ameliorate the effects of this unknown plague.
There was no World-Wide ‘Conspiracy’ – simply Governments trying to do what they could to slow down infections on the basis of what they knew might possibly work until some ‘modern-day’ solution was found.
You are clearly unaware that for many years vaccinating against smallpox was compulsory in the U.K. Some of my ancestors were fined for refusing to get their children vaccinated. Here in Australia it is compulsory to get children vaccinated before they can go to child-care or school – and certain welfare benefits are withheld if parents refuse. There are no Protest Marches against those. It is clearly understood that such measures are designed to protect other children.
Cog is quite right – the parents of those of us who lived through the Polio crisis were more than happy to get our children vaccinated – like my mother, who agreed to allow the docs to give me the relatively new drug ‘penicillin’, she always said that I would not have lived to the age I now am had she not taken that decision.
The Federal Government shut our borders to keep us safe… the Government here in Queensland shut our internal borders, imposed lockdowns, and put in place a whole pile of restrictions… for a very few weeks. And then we gaily went about our lives as if nothing was happening. True we couldn’t go anywhere else in Australia or overseas. But we had only 7 deaths from Covid – an over-reaction from the Qld Government? I don’t think so.
The world has indeed changed – it has always changed after Global catastrophes. It changed after WW1 and even more so after WW2. That’s simply the way it is and always has been.
Hi Gazoopi, I am with you 100%. I hope that you will continue to post your thoughts on the subject, even if I am your only reader.
Hello again, Gaz. You may find this essay interesting. It is written by an American software engineer living in South Africa.
https://www.coryzue.com/writing/coming-clean/
He closes by saying this:
“If you don’t agree with me, that’s ok. I know that for many of you Covid is still (rightly) very scary, and that you may look at the complicated body of evidence and feel the case for vaccination and mandates is clear-cut. To you, I’d simply ask to try and seek out and listen—really listen—to someone who disagrees with you. Be curious. They might surprise you. And try to remember that just because you disagree with their choices that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are wrong or that they are bad people.”
And another thing…
People in the USA seem to be going crazy for COVID testing. Why? They act as though a test will protect them, when all it really does is tell you whether you already have the virus working in you. If you have symptons or have recently been severely exposed, then fine, go ahead and get tested. But here we are with people forming incredibly long lines at testing sites and our President going to spend yet more public money buying test kits and distributing them free by mail.
Such nonsense almost makes me want to deliberately catch the virus in order to end it all. Or maybe not. Instead, I think I’ll just stay locked indoors as I usually do.
Mumble, grumble…
Gaz: I knew something was off from the very start. Of course, I could understand the logic behind the initial lock-up. It was a novel disease. We knew almost nothing about it. China and their bumboys at the WHO weren’t doing anything to make life easier. The first time that we saw much about it was in northern Italy. The scenes, to be fair, were fairly awful. There were two things not so readily discussed. The first is that southern Italy, despite being much poorer and having vastly worse public services, fared far better than the north. The second is what the state of Italy’s medical system actually was. Northern Italy has sometimes been referred to as the “China of Europe” because it is a highly industrialised region with a history of poor air quality and cut-corners on environmental standards to this day. It is worth pointing out that northern Italy has a very, very high rate of deaths from lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases. Italy’s medical system is a shadow of its former self. Over a decade of EU-imposed budget cuts left the Italian medical system on the brink of collapse. My Castilian tutor, a Greek-based Spaniard, said that in her home community of Madrid the medical system is a complete mess. Madrid happened to be a hard-hit Spanish region.
I remember the winter of 2016/2017 when the UK faced a time of horror. Many people died in the hallways of hospitals. The NHS could not cope with the annual influenza season. New York’s medical system has been a basket case for decades. In those countries that fared best — Taiwan, South Korea, Norway, Finland and Germany a common feature was a highly functional, well-funded medical system. That gave time, or should have given time, to let people know how to respond. At least in the case of Germany, the government went in the opposite direction and slashed hospital capacity by 20%. When Germany proved incapable of managing the second winter season with the virus, it responded with the mass-incarceration of the entire population and blaming people for attempting to have something resembling a life. People were fined for doing things like riding bicycles with two other people or visiting a partner.
So now we’re in the third year of this. Lock-ups proved to be an abject failure. A disease, once endemic, remains endemic. It might wax and wane, but you can’t get rid of it. Smallpox is the exception. Smallpox is spreadable, but it isn’t as highly contagious as influenza or the lurkie. France went into sharp lock-up after sharp lock-up only for the country to be hit just as hard time after time. Italy had sharp lock-up after sharp lock-up and it was hit hard time after time. California and New York had long and (by American standards) sharp lock-ups, but they fared worse than states like Florida or Texas. This reveals another theme… Governments stuffed up gloriously. Rather than admit that they were wrong, they simply doubled down on the same mistakes. When that didn’t work, they just blamed people or a segment of the population for not complying with the ever-changing edicts falling off the lips of ever less credible “experts”.
I do not think that there was necessarily a grand global conspiracy. I do, however, think that far too many governments followed China’s line without much thought. What is the difference between, say, Victoria and China? Not nearly enough people have asked why, exactly, France has fallen several spaces in the global democracy index. Was it worth it? Can France with its precarious socio-political pact really afford that? To this day, media harpies continue to demand that we all live like we’re in a global Xi’an. Never mind that that strategy failed time-after-time.
I’m not sure if the Australians or New Zealanders can be used as a good example. They are relatively remote countries with their population centres spread further apart. No, this is not a swipe or an effort to dismiss their importance. It’s that you cannot compare two remote countries with small populations with a country like the United States with 330,000,000+ people and a breathtaking global and domestic travel network. You cannot compare them with Europe with its dense populations and highly interconnected urban centres. In many ways, both are sui generis. I should add that in the US, Hawai’i is in a similar position: sui generis. It has done better than many states because it could shut itself off relatively early and easily. Comprising islands, it could also more easily control travel between islands. It came at a huge cost to Hawai’i, however, and the state’s long-term brain drain is getting worse and it’s one of the handful of US states with a declining population.
I see just how easily and readily controls have been implemented. Want to go to a museum in Italy, France, O’ahu, Germany? Be prepared to show your papers. Want to sit down and have a cup of coffee in San Francisco, Lahaina, Berlin, Vienna or Luxembourg? Be prepared to show your papers. Want to take a long-distance train in Denmark, France, Italy or Germany? Be prepared to show your papers. This is Chinese-style social control. Do as we say or be prepared to be excluded. I don’t see it going away, either. Take the ‘flu jab or be marginalised, take never-ending “boosters” for the lurkie or be prepared to be excluded. I’m glad that I got to see as much of the world as I did when I had the chance. At this point, there are many places I do not think I can return to or see at all.
Seeing as how new life has been breathed into this post, I feel more inclined to respond to Boadicea’s assertion:
“And it is a ‘plague’ – in every sense of the word. That it has not wiped out many more people than it might have done (one third of the population in 1349) is due to the fact that we, in the 21st C, have the means and knowledge to deal with it far more effectively than they did.”
With the greatest respect, two words. Boll ox. Boadicea, I think you are a wonderful person but sometimes you appear to observe the world from a very narrow view point. Australia, unlike most of the world, is a relatively civilized country, though it appears to be on the road to totalitarianism. It does, as you say, have the means and knowledge to deal with Covid more effectively than 14th century Europe. However, the vast majority of countries on the African, Asian and even South American continents do not have those resources.
Zimbabwe has a population of about 15 million most of whom live in abject poverty, certainly by Western standards. Very many of them live in crowded townships which in some cases I suspect would compare unfavourably to the slums of London in 1349. There are frequently multiple families per dwelling and multiple individuals per room. Sanitation is appalling. With the best will in the world, and it would be presumptuous to assume that good will was abounding, it is simply not possible for such people to adhere to the precautions of social distancing, hygiene and mask wearing etc. such as were followed elsewhere around the world. The efforts that were made by the Zimbabwean government, were at best token gestures to appease the WHO and thus qualify for financial aid, which in any event was probably pilfered, if South Africa is anything to go by.
Were the effects of Covid even close to those of the ‘Black Death’, then vast numbers of Zimbabweans and other Africans would have succumbed. Instead, the numbers of infections, hospitalisation and death, have been considerably lower than most European countries. Okay, one could argue that hospitalisation is a moot point (is that a tautology) given that there is so little capacity that seriously ill people would simply not make it that far. Likewise, one could claim that African countries are less diligent and able in diagnosing and reporting infections, even though the WHO assists in keeping track of these numbers. (* See my personal experience below). But the crux of the matter is that there are very few deaths resulting from Covid. It may not be terribly apparent that people are infected by the virus, but it is pretty obvious when people start dying. And the fact is, they are not dying. I do not know a single person whose face I would recognise who has died of Covid, or even hospitalised for that matter, though I do know of, (emphasis on know of) only two older people, with co-morbidities, who are reported to have died from the disease. Nor do I know of others who have claimed to know of death from Covid. Official statistics are one thing, but anecdotal reports are another. Nobody is reporting that people are dying of Covid. And let’s not forget that it is one thing to die of Covid, it is another to die with Covid. If Covid was a real plague, I would know dozens who have died.
Here is an interesting, to me at least, fact that I have only just recognised. Many of the countries of Africa with highest per capita GDPs are also the countries with the highest per capita mortality rates. There are 54 countries in Africa.
GDP ranking in 1,000 US$: • GDP per capita in Africa, by country 2021 | Statista
Seychelles 9.67
Mauritius 9.64
Gabon 8.6
Equatorial Guinea 8.07
Botswana 7.82
South Africa 5.44
Namibia 4.37
Egypt 3.83
Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) 3.71
Tunisia 3.68
Libya 3.62
Cape Verde 3.56
Countries with highest death rates per million pop COVID Live – Coronavirus Statistics – Worldometer (worldometers.info)
Tunisia 2,147
South Africa 1,543
Namibia 1,460
Seychelles 1,370
Eswatini 1,151
Botswana 1,037
Libya 831
Cape Verde 658
Mayotte 657
Mauritius 598
Reunion 481
Morocco 398
The World 713
Zimbabwe 345
If one looks at the rest of the world, the same pattern emerges, the richer the country, the greater the death toll, Australia and New Zealand being notable exceptions. I know that correlation does not mean causation, but the link does seem rather surprising.
This site provides the death rate per 1,000 people. I have selected several countries to compare, but you can choose your own.
Death rate, crude (per 1,000 people) – Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, United Kingdom, United States, World | Data (worldbank.org)
It can be seen that the annual death rate in 2019 ranges from 6.7 (6,700 per million) for Australia up to 9.4 (9,400 per million) for South Africa. According to this site, 7,773 people per million die each year in Zimbabwe. But only 345 per million have died of Covid. That does not make for a plague. Nigeria, which has the largest population in Africa and includes the megacity of Lagos has only suffered 14 Covid deaths per million of the population.
You don’t like Africa? India, about which the world had got its knickers in a twist a few months ago when the Delta variant was ‘raging’, has a Covid Death Rate of only 347, less than half of what it is for the World as a whole.
As for Australia and New Zealand, they have of course been able to keep the number of Covid deaths way below those rates in other countries with similar demographics and economies. Both countries are by definition insular and thus they have been able to limit travel. Further, they have imposed what can only be described as draconian restrictions that far exceed those of most countries. While those measures seem to have kept a lid on mortality rates, the levels of infection that are taking place in Australia right now, tend to indicate that there was no way in hell that the country could achieve its goal of zero Covid. What, I hope, has delivered the country from a regime of perpetual restrictions, is not the restrictions themselves which merely delayed the inevitable, but the arrival of the Omicron variant. This of course fulfilled the prophesy of many who maintained from the outset that a virus will mutate so as to ensure its survival and that means not killing its host. Australians are unlikely to suffer vast number of deaths, government restrictions and Novak Djokovic’s presence in the country notwithstanding. But make no mistake, Covid is here to stay. It is endemic and it is nothing like the plague of 700 years ago.
* Above I suggested that reporting of Covid infections in Zimbabwe may not be entirely trustworthy. I suspect that this is quite likely to be the case. I have had Covid myself and many people I know have had it. Again, I refer to anecdotal evidence, which suggests that most of Harare has been infected. Certainly that is what people are saying to me. In most cases it comes across as a mild flu. I was not bedridden, but I did suffer from a persistent cough, I was tired, lacked energy and felt pretty fed up. The most obvious symptom was my loss of taste. I like my morning coffee with hot milk and sugar. While I was ill, I found that my coffee tasted like salty water. That particular symptom and the cough lasted only 2 or 3 days but I would guess that others including the feeling of being run down lasted more like 3 weeks. While I did eventually get a positive test result, the testing regime here is not nearly as rigorous as it is in other parts of the world. People who get sick self-treat, i.e. take 2 aspirins, but otherwise carry on with their lives as normal as far as they can. They generally only test if they are about to travel abroad. Other than that, there seems little point. So, quarantine is not really a thing here either. It simply is not practical, but even if it were, the attitude towards catching and spreading the infection is far more sanguine than it appears to be those countries where the mainstream media dominates people’s lives and where fear of illness and death rules supreme. As the cartoon goes: When asked by a reporter why the Amish community of Pennsylvania did not appear to have any cases of Covid, the farmer in his buggy replied, “We don’t have television”.
You will no doubt be relieved to hear that I have fully recovered despite the fact that I have not yet been “vaccinated”, nor do I intend to be if I can possibly avoid it.
I am not sure why my links did not show up. Trying again.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1121014/gdp-per-capita-of-african-countries/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN?locations=ZW-ZA-AU-GB-US-1W
Sipu: One thing that has troubled me is just how far China’s influence-buying spree has gone. Researchers, scientific magazines, medical journals, etc. have all been effectively bought up by Beijing. Of course, the Chinese haven’t actually bought them outright. What they have done, however, is effectively put pressure via research grants, access to Chinese scientists, laboratories and projects, etc. For those who’ve worked in academia, that tactic has been fair evident for some time. Universities have become increasingly hesitant to approve things that China would frown down upon. For example, instructors who hold lectures critical of China are met with “complaints” by Chinese students. These “complaints” are taken “very seriously” by universities and instructors are put under administrative pressure to back off. Even twenty, twenty-five years ago there would have been no chance of Tibetan resistance, of Falun Dafa, of those who questioned the CCP’s line on human rights being shut down on Western universities. Now, with so many universities reliant on the flow of funds from China, they are more than willing to either make it difficult or block it outright.
Much of the discussion of the recent medical issue has been warped by Chinese pressure. The WHO is a Chinese proxy. The CDC and NIH are punchlines. Two of the USA’s most senior “scientists” — Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci — actively covered up China’s role. Fauci actively funded the research behind this mess and lied to the former US president about it. The Chinese have also been instrumental in the lock-up model. That it has been an absolute, abject failure is moot. When you look at statistics, compared like-to-like, lock-up countries fared even worse than non-lock-up countries. When many so-called “scientific” journals were screeching at countries like Sweden or Florida for not locking up their populations, it was obvious that they were taking Beijing’s line. After all, Belgium with its severe lock-ups did worse than Sweden by a long mile. Florida which has been open for business since Spring 2020 has fared far better than prison-states like California, New Jersey and New York.
I should add that one reason why China has been so active in supporting the lock-up model is because it is so damaging. It destroys economies, it destroys lives, it destroys societies. For the well-off, for the pensioned, it’s more tolerable. It isn’t necessarily a never-ending party, but it’s more manageable because their income isn’t so directly impacted by it. For those on the bottom, it’s brutal. For those who’ve lose their businesses, the sanctimonious sneering from multinational corporations is too much. For those who depend on income from washing dishes, from working in hotels, from working in resorts being told to shut up and live with it by people whose greatest inconvenience is that their yearly holidays to Die Kaap and Melbourne are disrupted, it’s galling. Millions are reduced to penury, social divisions fester and much of the world is weaker relative to China. China will take hits, but China’s state apparatus is better able to maintain control. Then again, there are far too many people in the West who seem desperate to copy China’s social credit system and copy China’s approach to everything for comfort. Took my first Afrikaans lesson yesterday. Good fun.
Christopher, what you say makes sense. I continue to be amazed and hugely disappointed by the monumental lack of integrity and moral fibre in western society. Almost nobody seems to have any backbone whatsoever. I was thus hugely heartened by the stance taken by Dr Steve James the consultant anaesthetist who stood up to Sajid Javid, the UK Health Minister with respect to his stance on the so-called vaccine. Here is a man who not only challenges the authority in public and on main stream media, but is prepared to lose his job on a matter of principle. The antithesis of every other jobsworth out there, and there are too many millions of them. It does not matter whether if it is a question of kowtowing to the Chinese propaganda machine, “taking the knee” for black lives or subscribing to the covidiocy that is being propagated by governments, WEF, Big Pharma, the MSM and a host of others, the spineless will just lap it up. I am tempted to say to them, “If you have ever wondered whether or not you would have believed the propaganda of the 3rd Reich, now you know!”
“Took my first Afrikaans lesson yesterday. Good fun.”
I am afraid that I can only speak a little. It is quite a weird language, but it has some lovely expressions.
I was in Kaap Stad for New Year. It is still a beautiful city.
Sipu: The last two years have been like a mass Milgram Experiment. Neighbours dobbing neighbours in. Society getting pitted against itself. Participation in society being based on compliance to a nonsensical goal. In Canada, in Germany, in Australia, in Italy meaningful participation in public life is based on compliance with de facto jab mandates. Never mind that these jabs, though they might reduce severity, do not reduce the spread of the virus. After all, Australia now has far worse transmission than India per capita. Anyway… In Germany and Austria, compliance will be mandated. Never mind that Germany is set to overtake Sweden for deaths per million and Austria already has — even with their loopy, Hitlerian response.
You might have heard that a major Danish newspaper has formally apologised for failing to hold the government to account, for failing to question the government narrative. Denmark, as you might know, was among the first European countries to be locked-up and followed perhaps the strictest course in the Nordic countries. People want to believe that their institutions aren’t bumboys for Beijing, that their GPs are more than state-sanctioned narcotraffickers. Neither case is true in most instances. When Lithuania stood up to Beijing, the god-forsaken Germans tried to undermine them in order to keep the dosh flowing in to prop up their failing excuse of an economy.
Afrikaans… Seventeenth century farmer Dutch with all sorts of random elements sprinkled in. It is, however, simple enough and I’ll take that happily with Russian and Japanese being the complete opposite.
A beautiful city, still… You’ve clearly not been in Europe or North America recently. It’s all going downhill badly. I rather doubt there is much difference any more. If anything, the Americans seem content in turning into South Africa at best, Venezuela at worst.
This article in the DT sums up the idiocy of the Coronaphiles.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2022/01/18/pilloried-lockdown-sceptic-now-clear-right-quite-things/
I was in London just over a year ago. No fun at all. I have not been to the US for 20 years and anywhere in Europe for about 10.
Sipu: it has been my experience to note that when someone tells me I am ‘wonderful… but’ they are about to clobber me. So please excuse me if I didn’t read your comment with all the due care that you might have expected.
However to you, Sipu, Christopher and Gazoopi, I have to admit that I am more than a little annoyed that my Government enforced what should have been ‘temporary’ measures, which I supported, for a very long time – and has now lifted them with no forward planning whatsoever.
We are advised to take RAT tests – but can we find them anywhere? No. Are they free? – No. We’re told that businesses must flourish – to the tune of $100 per test.
We’ve just been advised that the masks we have been wearing for the last two years are ‘inadequate’ – can we buy any that are ‘adequate’ – No.
Now we are told that we must allow thousands of backpackers, etc into a country whose citizens were not allowed to come home to sort out our employment problems.
I don’t think that I’m the only person here in Oz thoroughly disillusioned with the present Government. The only thing Scomo has going for him and his fellow-politicians is that the alternative is worse.
In the meantime I’m going to stop putting my life on hold….
Boadicea: Because Australia was able to largely isolate itself early on and because Australia isn’t quite as overrun with people like Europe and the US, it could stave off the earlier waves of infection. That was good in some ways. Death totals were far lower per capita than almost anywhere, though as some officials have grudgingly admitted, far fewer people died “of” the virus than as a result of severe co-morbidities or even merely “with” the virus. Up to about 40% of people who were listed of having died of the virus in the USA and UK didn’t even die directly because of the virus, they merely tested positive. I know a few people who lost loved ones in the past few years in the UK and USA whose deaths were listed as being because of the virus. One had shot himself. Another had had a series of strokes dating back a couple years. He had another massive stroke and that’s what did him in. Another had suffered from congestive heart failure for years and he finally passed away. Another woman had stage four pancreatic cancer.
In Europe, we were put through ever more Draconian measures. They did nothing to abate the torrent of infections. I remember when France required people to wear muzzles outside. Infections were worse than ever. It was the same in Germany. I saw a lot of really horrible, negative consequences of the government responses but there weren’t any lasting benefits. I’ve heard that Australia isn’t doing particularly brilliantly in respect to infections — though at least it’s the omicron variant so the risk is low to begin with. I’m more than a little annoyed that Boris ripped my life apart and never really took his own measures particularly seriously. I doubt I’ll ever recover from the damage he caused. And… For what? I wish I could carry on. At this point, I only see my life getting progressively worse.
Christopher:
I find your comment re U.K. death certificates somewhat puzzling – from what you are saying the statistics are not being collected properly.
I have well over 500 U.K. death certificates – starting from when they were first compulsory in 1837 until 2006. As you can imagine the information they carry is much changed: one of my ancestors’ certificates gave Cause of Death as ‘Worn Out’…. no certifying doc would get away with that now!
As I understand it (after having spent some time talking to a real expert on the subject) all the conditions that the deceased had must be listed in order of importance… some of my certificates have 4-6 ’causes’ – with no.1 as the primary cause of death.
I guess we will have wait until some future historian / statistician gets to the raw data.
In around 1952 London suffered its worse smog – I do actually recall it when, quite literally, one could not see one’s hand in front of one’s face. The Government made face masks freely available – it transpired later that they knew the masks were useless – it was just a huge propoganda exercise to show that they were ‘doing something’.
I can’t remember offhand what the official figures for ‘deaths’ were – but it was later found that almost certainly it was 4 times higher than reported at the time.
As I understand it the numbers of people committing suicide during WW2 were well under-reported as well.
And then there is the shameful case of how many WW1 soldiers’ records were ‘accidentally’ destroyed.
You are preaching to the converted when you claim that ‘figures for deaths’ are probably skewed.
As a side comment: I love it when docs ask me ‘Is there any history of… in the family?’ My reply is ‘How far do you want to go back – I have the death certificates for people born in the mid-to late 1700s.’
Boadicea: You are quite right. What irritates me is the degree to which this pantomime has been taken. So many small businesses were destroyed. So many local fixtures were expunged. Pubs that were centres of community life for generations are gone. B&Bs are gone. Coffee shops are gone. The high street, already struggling due to poor council decisions and even worse planning, is moribund. The travel industry is a wasteland. I understand your reasons for not having much sympathy for a good many operators. You’re perfectly justified. I was also burnt a couple times. I do, however, feel a lot of sympathy for those small business owners who relied on holidaymakers. Many big companies had rather less in terms of ethics that a street cat, but they were not generally the worst hit.
I’m sitting here at my night job in rural California. I work at a hotel as an auditor two nights a week. I rent a small, 10’x 10′ room from an elderly widow I have known for some time. It’s the same room my mother rented after my parents divorced. I work a few small jobs and get enough money to get by. In that sense, I’ve been fortunate. I am not living in my car. That’s a good thing as a Honda Accord is rather less comfortable than a caravan. What galls is the fact that I had a job, a place in Bath that I had to give up. I had a life I could comfortably resume, a life that was my own in which my generally pitiful existence actually had a degree of meaning. It’s all gone now. It’s all gone and for no other reason than Boris Johnson wanting to look like he was doing something and taking things seriously. My possessions are in Europe, mostly the UK. I don’t know when, if, I’ll be able to return for them. I don’t even know when, if, I’ll be able to send for them. As it turns out, it was all for nothing. Honestly, I dislike living in the USA. I never particularly enjoyed the place. There’s much to commend it, of course, but everything comes at a tremendous cost. In this one rural county, life is still largely pleasant. I cannot, however, drive far across county lines without seeing much to dislike. Violence, theft, third world living conditions, people using streets as toilets in broad daylight. I went to Texas and did not like it in the least. It feels as if I lost my last real chance in life and it was all for nothing. It was always pantomime.
Christopher, I hope I am not being presumptuous, but I am horrified to hear of your straitened circumstances. I have what I think is an excellent suggestion. Come to this country and teach/consult. I think you would find it a relative paradise to what you are experiencing right now and have done for the past few years.
Have a look at my alma mater.
https://www.stgeorges.co.zw/.
It has a stunning campus. Check it out on Google Earth. And there is excellent staff housing and medical aid for those who qualify. I have no doubt that someone of your qualifications would have no problem finding a position.
There are several other excellent schools . Here is a list of the top 10.
https://nigerianinformer.com/top-10-best-secondary-schools-in-zimbabwe-2021/
In Zim we have wonderful weather, open spaces, comfortable living standards, a diverse community including long term and short term ex-pats, and despite a lack of democratic process, we probably have more freedoms than most countries that you have lived in (once you learn how to play the game). I am actually being quite serious.
I got to know this Danish-American fellow who had come out here to work on some logistical program for an NGO. He was genuinely very sad when his contract expired and he and his wife had to return to North Carolina. He said that he would seriously consider immigrating here as there was far more that appealed to him than he found in the US or Denmark. I can put you in touch with him if you like, to get an objective view.
Meanwhile, envisaging you working night shifts in a sleepy corner of California, brings to mind Bates Motel! Ha, ha!
Hi all, thanks for all of the comments and inputs. I expect that without writing a book, it is impossible to address all of the various aspects around the topic of Covid. I’ll try to pick out a few of the key points, and fear, even then, that this may turn into a long post.
The first point to address is religion.
It has been known for centuries that many religions, if not all, have spent much of their efforts on threatening, vilifying, even executing non-believers. Either you adopt the conventional thinking or threats or ridicule is the result. Extreme positions are adopted. The same seems to be true for Covid, vaccines and restrictions.
Arguments include such terms as “anavaxxer” (whatever that means), extremes such as “microchips”, “sterilisation”, or DNA altering science fiction as a means of ridiculing anyone with concerns about starting on a lifelong course of annual or biannual vaccines for a disease which is more-or-less harmless to a healthy person. Killer diseases such as Polio, Smallpox are used as comparisons when discussing Covid, which is actually far more similar to seasonal flu, than it is to the deadly diseases mentioned.
The UK has just published official figures for deaths due to Covid for 2020 and 2021 combined, which totals approximately 17000, comparable to normal figures for influenza. But no, comparisons with Polio (1000 times more deadly than Covid) or Smallpox (even higher) are thrown at us.
Why are these extremes positions used in such debates? Surely it can only be because those advocating serious restrictions, compulsory vaccines, etc. are lacking the confidence by using actual facts, rather than ridiculous exaggerations.
Boadicea, please let us know why you felt it more appropriate to use Smallpox or Polio as a comparison, which are over 1000 times more deadly, rather than Influenza, which is extremely comparable to covid?
Surely such extreme positions reduce credibility is an argument.
In response to the very valid question why I used the term “charade”, I think it is largely due to the deliberate misinformation and misleading methods that have been used by MSM and Governments all over the world when presenting the dangers of Covid and the statistics around deaths and hospitalisations. Even this topic alone would take a huge amount of detail to explain fully, therefore I give just a couple of examples from the UK.
1) Initially a covid death was recorded as anyone who subsequently died after a positive test. In May 2020 there was an outcry when it came to light that people who had tested positive but then died in road traffic accidents, or suffered stroke or heart attacks, were included in these statistics. Soon after the government changed the definition to “died within 28 days of a positive test”. Now, we know that the average age of a covid death in the UK is higher than the average life expectancy in the UK, especially for women. It is 82.5 years. It doesn’t take much intelligence to figure out that if tens of thousands of people are testing positive, a significant number will die within 28 days if they are mostly already exceeding the average life expectancy.
2) Many commentators have requested to see the covid deaths (which as shown above were massively exaggerated) presented in the daily death results against deaths due to other causes. Around 500 to 600 thousand people die every year, which would absolutely dwarf the covid figures. This is clearly why is was never presented.
There are literally hundreds of such examples where misinformation has been used in order to generate fear within the population. Being married to a German and seeing much german TV (and daily government press releases), living in Spain and seeing the same misinformation here, and seeing a pattern where many countries are using similar misleading tactics to generate fear and support for restrictions, I find it very difficult not to believe that this is in some way orchestrated.
Now we have the parties in the UK. While government was implementing hard lockdown, fining anyone out walking their dog in the company of another person, parties were being held by the very same people that made the rules. Why? Were they simply being irresponsible during a deadly pandemic? Did they think they were immune from covid? Or, did they know that the risk is so small that it didn’t matter? Either was it demonstrates a “charade”.
It seems to me that the population of the world has been prepared by its governments to get vaccinated. The science does not support the need to vaccinate healthy people, especially young children. Yet the madness continues, no matter that the vaccine only lasts 8-12 weeks, no matter that it doesn’t protect from catching covid, no matter that it doesn’t protect from spreading covid. The cost and effort that has been put behind this vaccination program, for a virus which is hardly more deadly than seasonal flu, is naturally causing many people to be suspicious.
The big question, for me, is not whether this is a conspiracy, but why? Why is this being done?
I’ll conclude with another point, which I consider to be interesting in all of this, and quite fundamental.
Traditionally we tend to think that conspiracy theorists think negatively.
“We didn’t land on the moon. It was faked”
“Dr David Kelly and Princess Diana must have been murdered”
The list is endless. Generally, all such conspiracy ideas are pessimistic, negative, accusing etc.
Let’s think for a minute about where mankind is heading. Most people agree that the world is overpopulated. Most people agree that the resources are being used up at an alarming rate. Most people believe that environmental catastrophes are running rife, such as plastic in the oceans, air quality etc etc. Most people believe that the climate change is serious and we are destroying the atmosphere.
The strange thing is that the people who tend to believe all of this are invariably the same people who think a conspiracy around covid is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone who thinks that mankind is racing against a wall, wouldn’t be trying to do something about it by implementing the kind of measures that covid has enabled.
Maybe the conspiracy theorists, who believe that this is the beginning of an orchestrated reset of mankind, are actually the positive thinking portion of the population, and see a future for us all. Maybe the real conspiracy theorists are those who bury their head in the sand, treat covid as a serious deadly disease, but expect mankind to just carry on as before until the lights go out.
Time to stop. Thanks for reading.
Sipu: I’m not at all against going to Zimbabwe! I have met a number of Zimbabweans of all colours and have found them to be remarkably well-educated and civilised. I’ve read a fair amount of contemporary writing from the country and find it far more interesting than the bilge emerging from “first world” Anglophone countries. Living in Amador County is pleasant enough, but there is absolutely no possibility of advancement and Sacramento is doing its best to make life in California unbearable. I looked at moving to states like Arizona (in spite of the heat), Wisconsin, Florida, etc. but can’t find much to truly interest me. Actually, I’m not terribly fond of life in the USA. It’s easier than life in Germany by any stretch of the imagination and Americans are far easier to get on with, but there is almost as much as I dislike in the USA as I dislike in Germany. For example, the general sense of reckless irresponsibility and entitlement that dominates American life.
I really don’t know what I am to do. I’m set to travel to Hawai’i in April and take a look at how things are there. From what I’ve heard, it’s not the way it used to be and it’s gone downhill like the rest of the USA. I’d prefer living in a saner European country, but I’m limited by language and the fact that there aren’t many sane European countries.