fahrenheit451:374

In times of trouble and incipient hysteria,it's worth checking out the still small voices of reason and common sense.
Peter Hitchens,Laura Perrins,Ron Paul and Matt Walsh.
Tgere are many others but these are the ones that I follow on various social media.

fahrenheit451:373

This is seriously pissing me off.

The wholesale reintroduction of popular and populist superstition ,the cretinous depths of which would've embarrassed the thickest Medieval peasants imaginable.And yet here we are 21st.Century industrialised advanced democracies wallowing in a ruling metropolitan elitist contrived wave of existential panic that comes straight from the script of " The Crucible "

Quasi-martial law restrictions of civil and human rights have already been implemented or are about to be in countries across Europe.Germany,Italy and Spain of course are getting out and dusting off their tried and trusted totalitarian playbooks from the 1930's. Nothing reassures their citizenries more than the comforting echo of jackboots parading in front of the Reichstag.

If CoronaVirus were only a revolutionary political movement then global corporate capitalism would actually have something better to replace it almost overnight.

All of a sudden thrusting,dynamic capitalist free marketeers -survival of the fittest - are whining and bawling like spoilt little brats tugging on mummy's pinny screeching for attention because it hurts.

And of course waves of panic buying are breaking out faster and wider spread than the coronavirus itself.And it's grasping, middle class materialist conformists doing the wholesale pillaging of supermarket shelves -you need plenty of dosh to go on a panic buying spree.

The same people panic buying are of the same social class as the publicly funded
academics,experts,scientists,official shroudwavers of the usual Greek Chorus of the NHS.

 Herewith journalist and commentator nonpareil   Peter Hitchens from the mail on sunday.

" Yes, you are right. We have gone quite mad. I know that many people are thinking this, but dare not say so.

I will be accused of all kinds of terrible things for taking this view – but that is another aspect of how crazy things are.

Yes, coronavirus poses a risk. No, our response to it is not intelligent or useful. In fact, I think it is increasingly damaging and will soon become more so.

The key word here is proportion. There is nothing wrong with simple, practical precautions.

I have for many years believed that door handles pose one of the greatest threats to health, and try never to touch them with the naked hand. I was taught from my earliest years to wash my hands before eating.

I am a health faddist. I work at a standing desk. For many years I have walked and bicycled wherever I can. I often take the stairs rather than the lift. I can’t understand how anyone in my generation or younger can smoke, given what we know about it.

I regard sugar as a delicious poison to be avoided as much as possible. I drink little. I get up early and go to bed early. I believe cars are heart-attack machines, noisy, smelly, ugly devices, which depreciate in the gutter while they are not stopping us from exercising and wrecking our lower backs.

Yet our country is so badly planned that few families can manage without them nowadays.

For these reasons, I reckon that my risk from coronavirus is quite small. If I catch it, and I quite possibly will, I doubt it will trouble me all that much.

The truth is, people with what are called ‘underlying conditions’, many of which follow decades without exercise, are in danger not just from coronavirus but from almost everything.

If the Government is so worried about them, why has it followed transport and housing policies that have made it hard and dangerous to walk or bicycle, and so devastated the health of the people?

Why is the sale and possession of cigarettes still even legal? I wouldn’t normally raise these questions quite so fiercely, but the ever-increasing panicky bossiness of the authorities is annoying me.

I must ask them: are you really worried about our health, or are you just afraid of being blamed for a small number of the deaths that your policies are causing?

And are you just anxious to try to demonstrate how good you are? In such matters, we fuss where we do not need to, and do nothing where urgent action is required.

If a train crashed tomorrow and ten people died, it would be huge headlines for days, even though railways are, in fact, extremely safe. An inquiry would be held.

But each year more than 1,700 people die in road crashes, and another 25,000 are seriously injured, and it barely registers, because their lives are ended or ruined in ones and twos.

Governments distil fear into power. In a way, they are right to do so. We fear foreign invasion. The State builds a navy to protect us. We fear crime and disorder.

The State hires police and builds prisons. But they have become less and less good at these basic tasks, and perhaps they now seek other fields, where they can show how much we need them.

I have serious doubts about whether our Government has any idea how to slow the spread of this virus. I suspect it quietly reached these shores long before anyone noticed.

But I am quite sure that many of the current panic measures do far more harm than good. They create the idea that we are in the midst of a terrifying plague that will kill us all, when the truth – though disturbing – is far less frightening.

Their worst effect is to savage the economy by scaring people away from normal activities.

I went to the cinema last Sunday evening and there were six people in the theatre for what ought to be a successful film.

A florist known to me has just lost hundreds of pounds in business from cancelled events this weekend.

We have all seen the staggering, tottering behaviour of the stock markets, possibly triggered and certainly worsened by virus frenzy.

No doubt it will soon become impossible, under some frantic Emergency Powers Regime, to make this point.

I’ll be accused of giving aid and comfort to the virus, or of spreading Alarm and Despondency.

But before the roadblocks go up, and you need a pass to go to work, I thought I’d say it anyway. "

  Amen to that.

fahrenheit451:372

The global corporate finance-capitalist system and great swathes of its social superstructure appear to be undergoing some kind of existential crisis at the moment.

The culprit is a new type of virus ,Covid-19 aka Coronavirus. And it has set the proverbial cat amongst the pigeons.

Millions of once supposedly educated and sophisticated citizens of late industrial 21st century society have succumbed to the kinds of rumour and superstition that even  medieval peasants would've been ashamed to have been taken in by.

Stock markets are taking a battering with mendacious financial-capitalist speculators and chancers doing what they do best ;making money out of a perceived "crisis". And the global market price of oil has plummeted to around $30 a barrel.

None of this is sustainable over any length of time.

People are not falling like flies to Covid-19 and yet major ,especially western governments are ramping up their rhetoric that seem to ineluctably point towards imminent declarations of states of emergency if not martial law itself at some stage.

Which frankly would be insane.

Well,at least we got Brexit done.

As for the rest ,never have so much total bollox been aired over so small a matter as this,at least not since the EU funded seditionist Remain campaign tried to induce mass anti-government hysteria over the UK leaving the EU.

And yet here we are, back in the 15th Century.

fahrenheit451:371

It's deja Vu all over again! as one footie commentator famously once said. It wasn't so long ago that Russia,Turkey and Iran had arrived at a realpolitik accommodation over the Syria imbroglio.

A workable modus vivendi that isolated the US and its militarily rapacious NATO satrapies from inflicting further chaos and carnage on an already near-cataclysmically volatile area.

It remains a matter of fact in international law that the Assad government ensconsed in Damascus is the internationally recognised legitimate government of Syria.The forces of Russia and Iran and its clients are assisting Assad to restore its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

All other countries and their armed forces (covert and otherwise ) on Syrian territory are in gross violation of all precepts norms and rules of International Law.They are de facto committing war crimes. That's the US and all its NATO allies even including Erdogan's Turkey who are on their own idiosyncratic mission from Allah.

Turkish armed forces blasting Syrian Arab Republic aircraft out of the skies over Idlib province in Syria is a war crime and wanton violation of one UN member state's territorial integrity by another UN member state,leaving said aggressor liable to punitive action by the UN Security Council and General Assembly.

Not that any of that's going to happen,with the Big NATO 3 on the security council.

Propped up by a plethora of World Bank ,IMF and EU ECB loans ,hobbled by impending national bankruptcy,massive structural unemployment ,the Turkish state is diving kamikaze headlong into an unimaginable maelstrom;

taking the rest of us with it.