Omricon, fear and crowd psychology. Jay Bhattacharya and the catastrophic errors of public health. Grieving memories of Stuart Macintyre. Szymborska on what matters. Paul Kingsnorth on fear, tyranny and the vaccine wars. Elena Shvarts on both hopelessness and hope.
Robert Lowell on George Santayana. The silence of the doctors and the rule of public health. Virus gonna virus. Jordan B. Peterson on saying no to tyranny. The exposure of the RussiaGate and Steele dossier hoax. On prophecy. Bhagavad Gita and the sacrifice of the soul in the fire of the Gods.
Wallace Stevens. COVID zero fanatics. The Novel is dead. Saint Galgano. Louise Glück. How democracies die. Solzhenitsyn.
Things are very serious here in Australia. There is a mental health crisis. We have endured a state of emergency since March 2020. Normal rules of government decision making have not applied. We have pursued a medical utopia of COVID Zero at stunning cost. It is really something that should never happen again, and hopefully, at the right time in the right way by the right people, will be deeply investigated and reflected on.
I am reposting this post from maybe May or June. In Melbourne now all the weeks bleed into one. Do not forget us, world - we were a people with soul once, and a few of us can still find the courage to resist. **** Dr Cogito, a persona I know who inhabits the ghost… Continue reading Dr Cogito endures Melbourne’s fifth … and sixth and seventh… lockdown
And again, now in September, I repost this act of refusal to submit to despair. ***** Alas three months later, another report from the besieged city of Melbourne - locked down, its people "fleeing the Qin." **** Today 12 February, Melbourne and all the citizens of Victoria have been thrown, with eleven hours notice, again… Continue reading Report from a besieged city (Melbourne)
Generals, Winston Churchill said, are always prepared to fight the last war. Their early experiences of combat, their intellectual training, the received wisdom interpreting the most recent conflicts - all shape how they read the battlefield. These decisions and the interests of the institutions, which were built during the last war - the war machine,… Continue reading Cease the endless war against the virus
And so it seems, the people of Melbourne again must endure this impoverished choice in their lives, as they endure another siege by public health. But such infinite possibility is there in those choices: of attitude, of gesture, of a last word.
One year ago posted the post below on the likely effects of the coronavirus on our lives, our health and our governments. Like most people I think I over-estimated the health impact of the virus, and under-estimated its social and political impact. I certainly did not predict the sapping of democratic culture by expert elites.… Continue reading The plague year
Today 12 February, Melbourne and all the citizens of Victoria have been thrown, with eleven hours notice, again into a futile, fickle lockdown that is not founded in evidence of effectiveness. The reason? Five people who have tested positive and are assumed to have acquired the traces of the virus locally when over 24 000… Continue reading Report from a besieged city (Melbourne)
The year of fear 2020 has been the year of the Great Fear. This Fear has locked us down in safety. This Fear has opened the gate to soft totalitarianism. This Fear has sabotaged the freedom, responsibility, associations and independent thought of hundreds of millions of citizens. This Fear has shed the aged liberal skin… Continue reading The year of fear: 2020 in review
Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200 pages or so. I have followed this practice for quite some years now, and when I write the first entry in the notebook will give it a title. This year's notebooks I titled , "The view from Thucydides Tower"… Continue reading Fragments from my diaries – the year in review
As part of my The Kaeleidoscope of 2020: Year in Review post I have updated with my reflections on the pandemic and lockdowns in this section, Viral Meltdown Viral Meltdown How could the year in review not begin with the pandemic and the virus? Since January I have followed the story of the coronavirus and… Continue reading Viral Meltdown – Year in Review
A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking through the desert, notes on my reading, the democratic rebuff to progressivism, and walking through the circles of hell. In 2018 I reflected on ambiguous… Continue reading The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review
2020 has proven a testing year for the culture and capacity of governments around the world. Many governments have failed. Governments far away and close to home have failed. The State of Victoria in Australia, where I call home, has failed more in proportion to the real spread of the virus among its resident population… Continue reading From here to immunity: charting COVID from pandemic to endemic
Historians (and I am one) will search for cultural archetypes that explain the strange delusions of power that have inflicted a captivity on the citizens of Melbourne and Victoria. In a state of 6.5 million people, there have been, on this day, 20 September 2020, a mere 14 positive tests for the presence of fragments,… Continue reading Captain Ahab and Lockdown in Melbourne
Today I am posting another poem from The Sleep Machine. Breathless Could it be the new coronavirus?Or just the old common cold? Should I get tested or resistThe reckless screams of data collectors? After all, chances are it is just hayfeverAnd my body is not about to collapse In the terror of the cytokine storm.Even… Continue reading Poem: Breathless
Curfew, Melbourne 2020 Unimaginable city, locked down in its dark tomb,Its streets masked for an uncommon cold. Now all movement and strangeness stopped at 8 pm.Some turn in in fear; we turn inward in defiance. We will not be interred within five kilometres of home,Not by the impatient doctors and erring statisticians Who mutter the… Continue reading Poem: Curfew, Melbourne 2020
The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 is now a forgotten and neglected conflict of the century of peace in the nineteenth century. Yet it was a surprisingly fertile conflict in its unintended consequences; moreover, this war between the two titans of the Russian and British Empires has an uncanny resemblance to the events of… Continue reading A very modern Charge of the Light Brigade
The way out machine I enclose my breath in a maskIn the distance we keep for fearPump hope into my lungs And begin to dreamOf the way out machineThat will free us from The dictatorship of the physicians. Melbourne, July 2020
