“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
– Herman Goring, Nuremberg Diary, Gustave Gilbert, 1947
‘[W]e are in a war against this virus and all Australians are enlisted to do the right thing.’
— Prime Minister, Scott Morrison
“An exacting, intricate and exhausting job against a more wicked enemy than we’ve known before.”
– Daniel Andrews, Victorian Premier
“Because of the efforts of every Victorian – the sacrifices and the hard slog – we can be confident that slowly, and surely, we are driving the virus into the ground.”
– Daniel Andrews, Victorian Premier
“This is literally a war, and we’ve known we’ve been in a war for some time, but never to this extent”
– Gladys Berejiklian, NSW Premier
“We are in the fight for our lives”
— Jenny Mikakos, Victorian Health Minister
“This is a clear and present threat in Queensland and we need those reinforcements there to keep our border safe”
— Annastacia Palaszczuk, QLD Premier
“crush and kill this virus”
“…we have to continue to suppress with [a] vengeance COVID across Australia”
— Mark McGowan, WA Premier
Good to see the “authorities” in Australia still demonstrating their (not so) inner fascist. Goebbels would have been so proud.
Above all, the Australian political establishment knows it can rely on the news media to do its bidding with 24/7 fear porn about a disease that threatens no-one but the elderly.
It’s in the media business model: bad news sells and, if good news threatens to break out, it can be beaten up into bad news with some hysteria dressed up as concern for the public.
There is a war going on, all around us.
Our leaders are just playing, Look! Squirrel! with the virus.
They are at war with us.
* love the McGowan portrait. Caught his good side.
Indeed, Tom.
Eg.
WA has been at war for 18 months, so a post-COVID life could be a tough sell
For those that don’t get the joke:
Also, a little trivia on the “portraits”. That one of The StairMaster as Kahlo.
They have something in common.
Back injuries.
These leaders are engaging in a war against us. It’s got nothing to do with a virus.
Actually Calli,
I reckon a competition is in the offing here. I think I’ve been rather ‘cruel’ in my selection of photos.
If anyone has a more ‘complimentary’ one of any of the contenders, drop a link on here, and I’ll update them.
They are our
overlordsleaders, we should strive to enhance their images.Blessings upon the truckies.
“They are trying to build a movement to take back their countries from excessive governments and police who forgot that they were there to protect the people”
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/australia-oceania/take-back-australia-new-zealand/
If these fwits think it’s a war I’m on the other side.
It’s a shame we don’t have an artistic wag to represent our Fearless Leaders Soviet style.
Look at all those happy proles!
Palace Chook needs to worry more about having a heart attack on her way up the stairs to the Belco Macca’s when she visits Canberra in person.
These insane lockdowns simply do not work. They have been tried again and again. Why they do not work is not really the matter. The observable fact is that they do not, and insisting that they should is a matter of indifference.
Maybe it is a matter that every person must be hermetically divided from each other for them to work – which cannot be done. Maybe it requires that no object can be passed from one person to another, such as the packaging on the food we buy. Maybe the lockdown will not work while non-symptomatic carriers or even vaccinated carriers are about – they still pass the virus, and masks just stop you breathing it. Maybe it requires additional features like UV light and fresh air.
For whatever reason, the image of how the lockdowns work is not sufficient.
And yet they persist. Oh, and the ridiculous purple martial prose, fighting insidious enemies, enlisted to fight, etc. What a bunch of fakes.
And if and when we finally get out from under their clown shoes and start trying to rebuild lives they will be sitting pretty on their guaranteed government incomes and pensions, telling people their ‘war stories’. And if government finances get tight they or their political heirs will just increase taxes on the people already doing it hard, or put some more debt on the kids’ credit card – they will be paying. But those salaries and pensions must be preserved at all costs.
Not one of them deserves to be voted back in.
Right on cue today @ The Guardian:
“New modelling suggests 25000 Australians could die if we open up at 70-80% vaccinated.”
That’s the thing that grates me most.
This will pass. It always does, since the beginning of time.
The aftermath will be one of two things –
the “victors” preening themselves on their courage under pressure, aided and abetted by a fawning media, or
utter destruction, Mad Max style, where any “victory” is purely pyrrhic.
Either way, Australia’s stuffed.
Palaszczuk will jump on that modelling to keep QLD’s border closed in defiance of Morrison.
A hermit kingdom presided over from Fernberg (“a distant mountain”) by Governor Jeanette Young.
You can’t “Build Back Better” until you trash what is there first. It’s not called the Great Reset for nothing.
There is a third possibility.
The imposition of permanent restrictions on travel, vehicle ownership, meat eating, etc. to “save the planet”.
None of which will apply to the elites, of course.
Neo-feudalism, in other words.
Two years ago I would have said such fears were paranoid.
But today, with one study claiming 87% of the world’s population – including Australia -is living in countries whose regimes are deemed to be “repressive”, “closed” or “obstructive”, I think they constitute a rational proposition.
Roger
Right on cue today @ The Guardian:
“New modelling suggests 25000 Australians could die if we open up at 70-80% vaccinated.”
After climate change, that fool Ferguson from Imperial College with his succession of gloriously incompetent “model forecasts”, and the incoherent babble from modelers here, can even the Grauniad take such prognostications seriously?
PlayDoh? Balsa wood? Silly putty?
They used to execute False Prophets. Horribly.
Bloody Mongs desperately seeking a Churchill Moment over nothing.
“There is a third possibility.
The imposition of permanent restrictions on travel, vehicle ownership, meat eating, etc. to “save the planet”.
None of which will apply to the elites, of course.
Neo-feudalism, in other words.
Two years ago I would have said such fears were paranoid.”
Roger, I think your scenario is inevitable. A small but revealing example is here in Ashfield Sydney this week…we have been told that the hypocritical dwarfette and B-grade Isla Fisher is currently filming a new television series….whilst all residents of Ashfield are locked down. I never ever thought I would agree with a Green but Darcy Byrne, the Greens mayor of the Inner West, says….
“the army is deployed on the streets and just down the road a miniseries can shoot scenes freely in public,”.
“It’s a tale of two cities at the moment.””
He’s right….but it’s more a tale of the elites and the non-elites.
Roger, I saw your third possibility as part and parcel of my first.
I can’t see any good outcome.
Economic models that keep failing.
Climate models that feed on countless inputs to the nth degree of precision to output no results that match the real world other than ‘The last 3 decades have got warmer. A bit. Overall. We think.’
Now it is the epidemic modellers.
Scheisse.
I begin to think these modellers are not really prognosticators of any sort.
They are more like science fiction writers or futurists (although the former are the more honest). They imagine a future that serves as a metaphor for contemporary issues. That is why people are interested. If you wrote an account of the current age and sent it back in time 100 years they would probably not read it. Computers would not make much sense – they would appear as some deus ex machina to leap from one point in the narrative to another. The obsession with diversity absurd. The desire to lower living standards for climate absolutely ridiculous.
More importantly the story would not address issues of their time.
So all these modellers just keep churning out predictions that preach the current fixations. We hear that vegetarianism is necessary to save the planet from Climageddon. Diversity will create innovation. The ongoing fractal divergence of ‘genders’ will make us all ‘whole’.
Spiteful talentless spivs resentful of the fact they have no literary talent.
Both quotes ,the Austrian Corporal
To see horrors as inevitable is to be tricked into conceding to the horrors even when the horrors are not at all inevitable. Hope is a fearful foe, hence the concerted effort to steal it. Steal it, not destroy it, because, as someone somewhere at sometime noted, hope is one of only three everlasting things.
Yes, a fearsome foe.
Shame we let Howard take our guns.
..
I’m comfortable with that.
The alternative? Either an ongoing police state or civil war.
Figure it out, dickheads.
Shame we let Howard take our guns.
Anyone with a sense of responsibility and basic knowledge of history went out and brought more guns.
My top picks for Australian SHTF:
Remington 7615 Police in .223
Adler B220, this is the tube mag one, don’t buy the B230, box mag isn’t strong enough and as a consequence it has feeding issues.
Even if this were true, a bit of context wouldn’t hurt.
In winter, we average around 3,000 deaths a week.
Over 75% of those deaths are aged 70+ (the Covid demographic).
Meaning that even without Covid, we lose 2250 of them a week.
Of course this also means that without Covid, we lose 750 younger people (under 70 years) a week, too.
Neither maths, nor nature, gives a shit about double donut weeks.
https://wedgetailindustries.com/product/mpr308-pump-action-rifle/?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=pmd_aV_avTAysRQIdrPK03OKqGzVr7yKfljVy15DBoZZ8Ew-1629787930-0-gqNtZGzNAfujcnBszQil
My (pricy) choice for a SHTF gun. Might see if I can swing it with my tax return.
Palaszczuk heading to Tokyo and quarantining on return in a luxury suite was a turning point in their understanding of what’s going on for many Queenslanders.
And let me add to my list above the casualisation of employment and government polices (at all 3 levels) that make owning a home increasingly unaffordable for many younger people, meaning they will lead lives of permanent instability. You can’t build or sustain a nation on that.