This blog entry is partly intended as a public service to the sane. I’ll first provide links to alternative takes on the So-Called Coronavirus Pandemic and then I’ll simply state some beliefs I already tentatively held about the likely fate of the West, beliefs reinforced by the current happenings in the various public spheres of the West, happenings which Evelyn Waugh or even Groucho Marx could relate far better than I could. The So-called Coronavirus Pandemic might be a pivotal moment in the collapse of the West, whether it be some sort of coup d’etat or merely an exuberant expression of the decayed and undisciplined Western mind.
Here is a video from a highly regarded infectious disease expert: Corona-Krise: Offener Brief an die Bundeskanzlerin von Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi.
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John Ioannidis from Stanford U and Stanford Medical school, was described—as the Wikipedia article tells us—in The British Medical Journal, (2015), as “the scourge of sloppy science”. With a simple Internet search, you can find some recent writings by Professor Ioannidis as well as some press interviews he gave which deal with the sloppiness of much of the Coronavirus reporting and expressed thoughts.
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At the website of Off-Guardian, there is an article: 12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic.
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At the website of the government of the United Kingdom, Guidance: High consequence infectious diseases (HCID), you can page down to a section titled Status of COVID-19 which has an interesting first line: “As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.” The next paragraph includes the sentences: “Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall)…” Yet, the UK governments at all levels are maintaining the `temporary’ totalitarian methods for fighting a crisis they now admit doesn’t exist.
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At A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19, there’s a mother-lode of information on the so-called Coronavirus Pandemic in Europe; a Swiss doctor has been recording a daily diary of sorts, providing information such as:
- summaries of actual data from the authorities in Italy and France and Spain and other countries which are allegedly being hit by the so-called Coronavirus Pandemic,
- links to the actual reports by government agencies in some countries of concern in Europe, and
- links to commentaries by various, highly regarded medical researchers and medical clinicians who have simply questioned or actually denied the public story on Coronavirus.
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The only viewpoints which are readily found in the mainstream media are the viewpoints which support the idea of a new Black Death and the idea that we need to adopt freedom-reducing laws and regulations for fighting it. The above links might help to restore some balance to our discussions of the current season of viral lower-tract respiratory diseases. `Might’ is sometimes an overly optimistic word and I have little confidence that Americans or Europeans will respond to the assault upon their freedoms, and probably their assets and future incomes, until it’s too late. These are some of my tentative thoughts on the events in which we are embedded:
- representative government, in its variations on republican and democratic forms, has failed in the modern West,
- those who are likely exploiting this crisis to establish greater centralization of the Western political and economic systems don’t understand the true nature of complex human societies and, as a consequence, they will succeed in destroying the current systems in the West and then fail to establish new systems, and
- we might well enter a cycle of blood in the streets, violent revolutions, coup d`etats inside the decaying centers of power, and…
Only God knows for sure, but anyone with a knowledge of history and a sensitivity to changes in the foundations of the West, should be scared, very scared. I will take this time to remind my readers that, in From Dawn to Decadence published in 2000, the late and great Jacques Barzun went out on a limb and predicted that some people reading that book would live to see the American public school systems shut down because:
- American students are no longer educable, and
- their families would need to send them out into farm-fields and factories because of the impoverishment of the common man.
I doubt if the school systems fail to open within a year, though it’s possible we’re seeing a permanent shutdown, but I doubt if that permanent shutdown is many years away. And I would expect a variety of economic and political and cultural and moral problems to intensify and to significantly reduce the population of the West. (See Barbara Tuchman’s book A Distant Mirror for a narration and some intelligent analysis of a similar period—the 14th century which followed upon the collapse of the High Middle Ages period.)