Notebooks

Peace-Mongering, Ukraine style

First published at NewCatallaxy blog, December 10, 2022.

News Reports and Analysis

Daily Mail, 30th November, 2021

The Daily Mail reported that three gatherings of some Downing Street staff had taken place during November and December of 2020. This was the lifting of the lid on the cesspool of cynicism that characterised the political response to Covid-19 all over the Western world, with the notable exception of Sweden.

In January and February of 2022, the lid was completely unseated. Up to twenty events involving Government staffers, most frequently Downing Street staffers, were investigated. These included two parties in Downing Street on the eve of the funeral of Prince Philip.

24th February, 2022

Russian commences “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.

The White House 16th March, 2022

President Biden today announced an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine, bringing the total U.S. security assistance committed to Ukraine to $1 billion in just the past week, and a total of $2 billion since the start of the Biden Administration.

Reuters, 30th March, 2022

In the most tangible sign yet of progress towards ending the war, Russia emerged from the talks promising to scale down military operations around Kyiv and the country’s north, and Ukraine proposed adopting a neutral status.

It’s a Vaccine, Jim, But Not As We Know It.

Published at NewCatallaxy blog on 20th September, 2021.

Who knew the term “non-sterilising vaccine” six months ago? If you did not, you are in plentiful company. Maybe the woke young, who know everything, knew about it, but for oldies like me, a vaccine was a vaccine was a vaccine. It protected you from the thing you were vaccinated against, and because you couldn’t catch it, you couldn’t pass it on.

That’s old fashioned. The CDC definition of terms includes [my emphases]:

Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.

These definition were introduced by the CDC…let me see… “Page last reviewed: September 1, 2021”…weeks ago. Before then, the definitions were (26th August, 2021; page last reviewed: May 16, 2018):

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.

Science moves so fast.

The Forgotten Vaccine

This article was published in Quadrant Online on 14th September, 2021.

A paywalled article in the BMJ begins,

…the US National Institutes of Health infectious diseases chief, Anthony Fauci, appeared on YouTube to reassure Americans about the safety of the…vaccine. “The track record for serious adverse events is very good. It’s very, very, very rare that you ever see anything that’s associated with the vaccine that’s a serious event,” he said.

https://youtu.be/hsXEgJqR_vY
This was written in 2018; the YouTube appearance was in October 2009, and the vaccine was the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine.

[B]y October 2009 the new vaccines were being rolled out … in the UK, with prominent organisations, including the Department of Health, British Medical Association, and Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, working hard to convince a reluctant NHS workforce to get vaccinated. “We fully support the swine flu vaccination programme … The vaccine has been thoroughly tested,” they declared in a joint statement.
Except, it hadn’t. Anticipating a severe influenza pandemic, governments…had made various…arrangements to shorten the time between recognition of a pandemic virus and the production…and administration of that vaccine… [An arrangement], adopted by countries such as Canada, the US, UK, France, and Germany, was to provide vaccine manufacturers indemnity from liability for wrongdoing…

By 2018, the incidence of narcolepsy in young people throughout Europe as a result of vaccination, primarily with Pandemrix, was sufficiently well established to give rise to lawsuits in which the manufacturers’ confidential concerns about the vaccine were brought to light.

Breaking News: Stairs sue Dan Andrews for defamation

Published at Catallaxy Files on 10/06/2021

A set of stairs today filed a defamation suit against Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, lawyers representing the as-yet unnamed stairs announced today.

“Dan Andrews called our client ‘slippery’,” a spokes-entity for the stairs’ lawyers said. “‘Slippery’ is an entity slur that stairs take very seriously, as the Premier is about to discover. Our client is not the slippery entity in this incident.”

No further details of the suit are available.

Hyper-Deflation

This document, like many others, could not find a home with the usual suspects.

Imagine that one dollar that you owned in February 2011, had six times the purchasing power by December, and over 12 times that purchasing power by December of 2012. Before the next year was out, that had grown to a thousand times, but had slipped back by next year end to eight hundred times.

By the end of 2014, your dollar was looking a bit seedy – not compared to 2011, but to the previous December: only three hundred times. Two years later, that thousand multiplier is within reach again. But two years! Continue reading “Hyper-Deflation”

The Urgent Need For Quotas

Published at Catallaxy Files on 30/03/2021

I was always opposed to the idea of quotas for women in Parliament. I operated under the delusion, not so much that selection on merit was a better idea, but that selection on merit could actually occur. Given the selection processes for the major parties, this was always a tenuous notion. But the revelation in Parliament over the past couple of weeks are so disturbing that it is no longer an option to be blind to the reality, and it can no longer be argued that the situation will correct itself through the good offices and goodwill of the parties, factions and people involved.

Accordingly, it is time for definite proposals for quotas for women in Parliament. Clearly, the necessary changes will not take place overnight, but ambitious targets are required. With sufficient will, the current parlous situation of Parliament can be corrected over the course of three Parliamentary terms. For maximum effectiveness the first opportunity must be seized: that is the next Federal election.

At the next election, I propose a quota of 25% of winnable seats to be allocated for women. At the following election, that should be 17.5%, and at the one after, 10%. More than any other conceivable measure, this would fix the current toxic environment in Federal Parliament. These are tough goals, but if respect for Parliament is to increased from its present lows, they are essential.

The Long Weekend

Published at The Orthosphere on Easter Saturday, 2021.

It’s Saturday. As Friday waned, the old world died. All of the old certainties were bound up with aloes and myrrh in linen, and laid to restlessness.

Now we wait. There are rumours of Sunday. I have heard, and I believe – as so many have, as so many have not. Some who have believed have made new worlds and all who have believed have made new lives; lives inconceivable on Friday. Some who have disbelieved have built fortresses of unbelief; all who have disbelieved have turned their faces from the east. But all who hear these rumours have been put the question extraordinary, and all have been obliged to answer.

This Saturday, empires have risen and collapsed. Hosts of hosts have lived and died. None of the understandings of Friday can be re-imagined, save the one stubborn link, and that one passing over Calvary.

When will night fall on this expectant Saturday?

The Virgin Birth

Published at The Orthosphere on the Solemnity of the Annunciation.

Nothing is impossible to God. Occam’s Razor cannot separate the works of God according to any principle of economy. What economy is evident in a cell, a tree, the biosphere, the galaxy, the farthest reaches of the universe? Irrespective of the models we construct to map and try to predict the behaviour of these things, all of them, in their concrete reality, are unfathomably complex, and each is a unique instance. What principle can place limits on the actions of the creator of all these wonders?

With this in mind, consider the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Accepting as an irreducible given that Mary, his blessed mother, “knew not man,” there is a minimalist scenario – Occam’s scenario, so to speak. On this view, the action of the Holy Ghost consisted in fusing a DNA strand of his own making with the DNA in a mature ovum of the Blessed Virgin, which at the moment of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, was making its way down one of her fallopian tubes. And with, “I am the servant of the Lord,” that fusion took place, and the Son became flesh as a single fertilised ovum. Continue reading “The Virgin Birth”

Debunking Dr Shiva

This document was prepared some time ago, but could not find a home.

Ever since I first saw the analysis by Evans, Smith and Shiva of vote leakage in the big Michigan counties, I have thought of it as the single most compelling evidence of electoral fraud, and one with much wider application that just Michigan. Michigan was selected because of the availability of straight part-ticket voting in that State, a bit like the above-the-line voting in the Senate here. That gives a demographic snapshot of the party vote on a precinct-by-precinct basis. (Polling booths are probably the nearest analogy to the precincts.) By comparing the specific Trump/Biden vote to the straight-ticket voting, a picture of the leakage to or from the party Presidential candidate can be constructed. Continue reading “Debunking Dr Shiva”

Practice makes Perfect

The mid-term elections of Trump’s presidency were held on the 6^th of November 2018, amid high expectations of a so-called “blue wave” of Democrat victories. All House of Representatives seats were on the line, but although Democrats won control of the House, they made little impact in the Senate, which remained under Republican control.

Florida was particularly sensitive about election processes because the result of the 2000 Presidential election, which hinged on the result in Florida, was effectively settled in the Supreme Court of the US. Broward County has 1.2 million voters, a similar number to Miami-Dade county. Unlike Miami-Dade, however, Broward officials did not expect to complete the count by the deadline for sending preliminary totals to the State. Continue reading “Practice makes Perfect”