At the End of the Day

The only vaccine humanity needs is a powerful dose of objective, natural reality

As the temperatures rise across Western Europe, deaths from Covid1984 continue to fall. The Times (which is become a mad dog with its teeth in the Boris buttock) grudgingly admits to ‘fewer’ deaths, but the rate of fall is accelerating…..such that last week, deaths fell by 56% from the previous period. Even these, though, the medical “experts” have finally had to admit are ‘associated with’ the virus – in that they include other pathogens involved.

Melanie Phillips – an honest Jew I have always admired for her courage in standing up to Islam – yesterday wrote a searing critique of Lord Sumption’s eminent common sense about the Establishment’s overreaction to C19. The piece is so woefully full of data ignorance, I truly cannot imagine what (or who?) persuaded her to write it. The header to the column charged that ‘libertarians’  were helping to put us ‘on the road to serfdom’.

When she gets – at long last – round to her rationale of why Sumption is some kind of mediaeval aristo supremacist, the argument presented is at best muddled and at worst contrived. Above all, however, it fails spectacularly to address these four very simple questions based on empiricism – as opposed to her obvious smear in using the term ‘libertarian’:

1. If people under 45 have a 3 in 20,000 of dying from the virus, why was 100% Lockdown ever recommended?
2. Which idiot in the NHS bureaucracy thought it was a good idea to ‘free up’ hospital beds by sending older patients to care homes where both prevention and management are at far lower skills levels?
3. Why were politically motivated Tory fears about damage to the NHS placed before the obviously far greater social damage likely to accrue from chucking away one third of British gdp?
4. Why is artificial immunisation against the virus preferred to herd immunity, when a vaccine won’t be ready and tested until late 2021 at the very earliest – whereas a successful management cocktail based on hydoxychlorocine is cheap and available now?

Across the British media today, the inevitable bullet-dodging has begun in earnest. Politicians are asking why the advice they were given was so stupid…..but they don’t want to answer the question as to why they accepted it. While the melodramatic donation-seeking “experts” say it isn’t fair to shift the blame onto them…..but they took the large bags of spondoolicks that went with their counsel – yet don’t accept any accountability for that. Both sets of reprobates are as irresponsibly gutless as each other.

But this (for want of a better word) post-mortem is going to turn very nasty indeed once the populace – egged on by the tabloids who caused half the problem in the first place – begin to grasp just how awful the consequences of Covid Virus Meets Fiat Money Meltdown are going to be.

British debt is going to balloon, banks are going to fail, State insurance on deposits is going to welch, and property assets are going to collapse in value. We shall not be alone in this: but our long-denied massive overdependence on financialising stuff is going to put us on the 70+ critical list for the Coroneoliberal virus, rather than the under 45s slight sniffle among more physically productive and eclectic economies around the world.

France is not only self-sufficient in mainstream foods and drink, it exports an enormous amount of both to many countries who are less well managed. Germany’s economy is 20.1% based on manufacturing, and 40% of its wealth comes from exporting. The two of them as trading partners are almost perfectly matched when it comes to the old adage of ‘guns and butter’.

The United Kingdom’s post Thatcher economy is bizarre in the extreme: just 1% of gdp comes from agriculture, and 8% from manufacturing. Over 80% involves banking, bourse and retail distribution services. If the world of commerce has become over financialised, then Britain has been overwhelmed by an obsession with money transmission, share valuation, service consultancy, and the supply of debt to individuals, globalist business and financial market traders.

During the 2008 near-miss, it cost lil’ ol’ Britain almost as much to bale out our banking system as the Americans needed for theirs.

Lacking the common sense to take agendad advice with a pinch of salt, running scared of a largely unremarkable virus, making a terrible judgement on relative socio-monetarist considerations, and turning one ‘s back on Man the Toolmaker are all different but connected symptoms of the same malaise. As a species, we are in denial about the reality of our existence as animals, and desperate to convince ourselves that we are Gods.

This displays itself in multivariate ways. The BBC was capable a few years ago of producing a suberb adaption of Evelyn Waugh’s sublime Decline and Fall, but earlier this year its head of Drama said that ‘adapted history’ must take account of the offence taken by ‘non-white ethnicities’ at TV drama series where they don’t feature. They don’t feature in The Forsyte Saga, for example, because they weren’t here. Are we now therefore to persuade Bollywood to make all white people involved in the Raj undiluted Goodies? Will the remake of Crocodile Dundee feature an Australian aborigine in the title role?

What we’re passing through is a delusional belief that we can alter history, defy death, and retreat further and further away from the business of Being.

We have the Satnav, we have the apps, we have the robots, we have all things virtual. But our survival instincts have atrophied in just one generation. The last forty years – and especially the last twenty-five, in which media has gone from being investigated information to being subverted evidence – have represented a concerted attempt to convince the great majority of citizens that they cannot trust their own primary senses.

The American adage that covers this one is, “If it waddles, flies, quacks and lands on water like a duck, chances are it’s a duck”. Today’s media narrative is, “If it gushes up, bears no relation to economic performance and kills 4 people in 100,000, chances are it’s a trickle-down, growth-accelerating, deadly murderous virus than only vaccination can stop”. It really is that silly.

I was disturbed during the early hours of last night by the sound of a predator killing something, and the victim not enjoying the experience that much.

This morning, I found a trail of feathers and the picked-clean skeleton of a young bird – probably a magpie chick. The existence nearby of a fox turd acted as a confirmation of what had happened.

My conclusion wasn’t a triumph for modelling, ideology, economic theory, monetarist certainties or half-baked media analysis. Rather, it was the end-product of observation based on how nature works.

I am not for a second advocating the adoption of a Hobbesian life that is nasty, brutish and short. I am merely pointing out that between Thomas Hobbes at one end of the spectrum of existence, and the equally extreme bods ranging from Owen Jones to Sir Mark Sedwill at the other, there is a place called pragmatic, contented liberty to promote a Common Good – where most of us would prefer to live.