Month: August 2022

Denial, not a river in Egypt or India

Billy/ / Australia; Frontier Nation, China Flu, General, Incentives Matter, Religion, Too much government

I have been travelling extensively for the last two weeks. My travels have taken me through various Asian hub airports and around the Indian sub-continent.

Through observation, I can confirm the petty bureaucrats and rule-givers across Asia are as illogical and stupid as their counterparts in Australia.

In a message exchange to a good friend I expressed the sentiment that I have accepted the lunacy. He congratulated me on reaching the fifth stage of the Kubler-Ross rubric.

The fact that I may have reached acceptance still doesn’t make any of this madness right though.

For example, I must wear a mask on the train to Sydney airport. I can remove it in the airport. I must replace it on the Malaysian Airways flight, except whilst sipping on a drink or eating (I can nurse a drink for a loooong time).

The mask must remain on at Kuala Lumpur airport unless I am in the Business Class Lounge. It must go back on the moment I leave the lounge, of course.

I must also wear the mask on the Indian domestic flights. The pre-flight announcement requests us to maintain anti-social distancing between our fellow passengers, seemingly oblivious to the sardine-tin we are sharing. Officially, we must wear our masks in the airports, unless proving our identify but the local security staff nearly all use theirs as chin-warmers so are not enforcing the rule on the public anyway.

The day prior to a visit to a supplier’s office, a test kit was delivered to my hotel room with the request that I use it and bring the negative result with me the next day. This wasn’t requested at all during the visit.

Trying to make any sense of this results in a headache. Questioning why this still is going on is a fool’s errand; there is no consistent thread of logic holding any of this together.

In the meantime, my colleagues chuckle behind their hands at the ineffective and leaky Indian airport security checks as we remove shoes and belts, take laptops out of bags, display our power adaptors for inspection, etc. and make disparaging remarks about how silly it all is.

We don’t comment on the inconsistency of the masks though. There’s a code of silence as we put them on, take them off, rinse, repeat.

This is either a deadly disease that can be prevented by the addition of a knitted woollen barrier over the mouth and nose, or isn’t and it can’t.

That we are all continually living like this makes me wonder if we have become fully house-trained. What else might we quietly and compliantly accept now in the future?

Bill’s Opinion

I can think of only two possible reasons for this bio-security theatre to remain in place;

1. The process to remove the rule has far more steps and gatekeepers than the process to impose it. We must participate in the Holy Communion to the god of Covid until eventually a person in authority decides we can stop, or

2. It’s about the love of power and control. The gatekeepers preventing the removal of this ridiculous charade from our lives know it serves no purpose. They know we know it serves no purpose. They know we know they know we know it serves no purpose. But yet they keep the rules in place.

Aaaaand exhale.

You could have just thrown a big party

Billy/ / Climate Bollocks, Economics, General, Incentives Matter

William of Ockham’s Law of Single Issue Activism; if the main goals of the lobbyists or charity are achieved, the infrastructure will not be disbanded but will be redirected, usually to a corrupted facsimile of the original purpose.

The spark for the idea for this theory is a vague memory of hearing the history of the charities set up to eradicate smallpox. The memory hasn’t stood up to the test of Google but my recollection was, once the goal of eradication had been achieved, several charities continued but engaged in fraudulent activities.

We have a perfect present day example with the organisation, Stonewall:

Originally founded after the Stonewall riots in New York to fight for decriminalisation of homosexuality and equal rights for that demographic, the campaign is arguably the most successful single issue civil rights movement ever. Homosexuals have exactly the same rights as heterosexuals and are excluded from no profession. They can marry and are able to adopt children. Well, everywhere except certain countries, but Stonewall doesn’t seem too interested in taking that fight on.

If one could go back in time and tell the founders of their success, a big cheer and massive closing down party would seem the most likely response.

But the 2022 version of Stonewall is instead operating a shakedown scheme, “advising” organisations on how to use pronouns at £2,000 a time. Rather like, “that’s a nice company you’ve got there, would be a shame if someone started accusing it of bigotry and hate”.

A similar model was successfully used by Rev. Al Sharpton long after the USA Civil Rights organisations achieved their key stated goals.

The Suffragette movement and first wave feminism were similarly very successful in achieving their goals of votes for woman and equal access to the professions.

It’s been over two generations since women were required to obtain their father or husband’s permission to take out a mortgage, for example. As for equal access to the professions; most people reading this will currently have a female boss further up in the hierarchy, several dozen if you work for Wokepac (absolutely none of whom got there through just redefining the noun, “manager”. No, not at all).

But just like our other corrupted campaigns above, feminism has been warped into a poor facsimile of its original purpose. Today, feminism looks more like a desire to copy all aspects of being male, with little discussion about the negative consequences.

Women are told the lie they can have a career and delay finding a life partner and childbirth. Or that hook up culture is equally fine for both males and females.

The cold reality of our inability to dramatically extend the female fertility window or the asymmetrical biological and emotional consequences of hooking up as if they were male are not mentioned so much, however. You go, girl!

Antifa is another case study that springs to mind. When was the last time you met an actual Fascist who wasn’t Premier of the Australian state of Victoria, or Prime Minister of New Zealand or Canada?

Our final example is the environmental lobby. Those old enough to remember the campaign to remove CFCs from aerosols and fridges to reduce the hole in the ozone layer might wonder what happened. Tick, successful.

Remember the campaign to reduce acid rain? Tick, successful.

What do you think happened to all those employees of the not for profit organisations and non governmental organisations built to achieve these two goals? What about the thousands of people working on the fundraising campaigns?

Do you think they looked at the ever-improving data and decided it was a job well done, called a few venues and chucked a massive party?

Or, do you think they segued in to a new campaign, resulting in autistic teenage Swedes lecturing us about computer models that have yet to reverse predict the observed temperature at any point in their use, while your fuel and heating bill is rising daily.

Bill’s Opinion

The key to being a good party guest is knowing when it’s time to go home.