Scotty the marketer cannot help himself. Trump had to find somebody to blame on one particular day – the WHO was a convenient target. As with so many organisations of that ilk, they are inefficient but located in a nice part of the world as multiple senior Australian bureaucrats such as Jane Halton have demonstrated by visiting repeatedly at government expense. In other words whatever the WHO is Australia has been complicit in how the organisation is managed. Presumably senior bureaucrats like Jane Halton, now a member of the Power brigade, could have given an insight into the WHO and her role in recommending efficiencies, given how frequently she visited Geneva.
Prime Minister Morrison, as distinct from his instinctual marketing Scotty persona, is inexperienced in the world and, being surrounded by his clapperati, he has decided to play the international role, flush from our apparent success in containing the virus.
Evidently he has been contacting a number of seasoned political leaders, still up to their necks in death and destruction, to enlist them to his cause. Now, if there was one thing I found out when I was reforming an international organisation it was the negative reaction of the Europeans in senior positions to an Australian running the show; and the more you demonstrate your QED, the more quickly you can alienate the European audience. However, once committed Prime Minister, you must know precisely what you want to do in reforming the organisation – and then make sure you let somebody else share the credit. Hopefully you have a clear idea for a course of action and it was not just an instinctive Scotty-from-marketing bubble.
Trump does matter in the short term because if you become one of the emissaries, then you are also in his line of sight. After all, there are a great many tweets to go before November; many and much to blame.
I am sure that you are not going to crow, but remember the Chinese are fuming. Marise Payne is shrewd; but please put Dutton back in the shed. One fact is that like the poor, the Chinese will always be with you, whereas Trump is an old man with deteriorating faculties.
Reform of the WHO may yield to tactical Australian influence, especially with people like Kelly and Coatsworth as an impressive vanguard for this to be achieved; but political bluster won’t cut it.
However, because this is an era of instant gratification the clamour to return to the ancien regime grows louder in Australia. Neoliberalism – how has that benefitted the ordinary Australian?
Before this cohort upsets the careful public health response, please look at the recent Singapore experience, and do not accept at face value the Taiwan experience. It knows how to regulate information as well as the Mainland – just better attuned to occidental sensitivities.
I was once an aperitif
Years ago I was in a Carlton restaurant to hear Peter Sarstedt. I enjoyed his droll songs, and there was one song speculating about the career of a lady. The voice has remained in the brain, getting louder and louder with a slight change in the wording:
So look into our face Ann-sherry
Remember just who you are
Then go and forget Ruby forever
‘Cause I know you still bear the scar, deep inside,
Yes, you do…
When prologue and epilogue collide
The researchers enrolled two groups of COVID-19 patients in a public hospital in (the Brazilian city of) Manaus; the high-dose group was assigned a total dose of 12 grams of chloroquine over 10 days, while the low-dose group took a total dose of 2.7 grams over 5 days. All participants also received the antibiotics ceftriaxone and azithromycin.
After 11 patients died across both dosage groups, the team halted the high-dose arm of the trial on day six, citing more heart rhythm problems in the high-dose group, and “a trend toward higher lethality”.
“Preliminary findings suggest that the higher chloroquine dosage (10-day regimen) should not be recommended for COVID-19 treatment because of its potential safety hazards. Such results forced us to prematurely halt patient recruitment to this arm,” as reported by the “researchers”.
In a later update, the “researchers” noted that they experienced even more deaths in the high-dose group than were documented on day six. And it doesn’t mean the low-dose group is safe, either.
“The major difference between the high-dose and the low-dose group occurred during the first three days and the actual toxicity – two patients in the high-dose chloroquine arm developed ventricular tachycardia before death…”
This is the price the world will pay for having to deal with Trump’s thought dysfunction. Chloroquine and its less toxic analogue, hydrochloroquine have been spruiked by Donald the Quack. So what is the Doherty Institute doing wasting money on experimenting with this drug? Because a couple of Trump friends are providing funding?
After all, the drugs had been tried in the MERS outbreak and found not to work. A trial in France was also aborted because of the fact that it killed the patients. The Manaus experiment has elements of Dr Mengele – but then he did die in Brazil.
As a portent of the future, if you go up the Amazon from Manaus, there a number of abandoned luxury resorts on along the River – a Trumpian portent?
Yet Manaus does retain a beautiful opera house, where listening to its orchestra from high in the “gods” in this ornate house, itself the legacy of the rubber barons, was a sublime experience.
A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
While I agree that there are many law enforcement officers who could be considered good there are an awful lot of them who abuse their authority. I live in a particularly red area of Michigan and since our sheriffs are elected, here they landed to what is clearly the base. Laws up here are selectively enforced on a routine basis as it is, and since the stay at home order has been in effect it seems worse. I agree we need them, but we also need them to not take the law into their own hands.
This was a post among the twitterati which, unlike so much of the bird song that emanates from cyberspace, was sensible and caught my eye.
This tweet was prompted by an onlooker. To her, a Michigander, members of the Trumpian “lumpenproletariat” egged on by his inflammatory tweets were threatening the Michigan governor, Gretchen Witmer. What this response alleged was that Trumpian supporters were being elected as law enforcement officials at the local level. The tweet cited a number of places in Michigan where this has occurred. It is unsurprising given the attention paid by Trump in subverting the whole legal process, as typified by his approach to judicial appointment at all levels.
Trump mischievously sends these tweets invoking the Second Amendment and then, like all instinctive cowards, backtracks and obfuscates. The Trump strategy is to be consistently inconsistent; but it becomes easier and easier to work through. I presume the Democrats have now got someone studying the Trump persona as honed through “The Apprentice”.
Like all grifters, the fact that he does not want his taxation returns released suggests he is treading water; that he is in fact broke, with the Presidency providing his négligée. His strategy depends on a booming economy where, under cover, he could pillage sufficient sustenance from the American people by the end of his second four-year term to maintain the fiction of business success.
However, this virus has been somewhat inconvenient, and it will be interesting to see what next bit of quackery Trump invokes to keep the public interested; if not the public interest. After all, the virus spread across the United States has disobeyed Trump at every turn. How dare it disobey the President. Build the Virus Wall, he screams.
I wrote about a month ago:
Social media has been a godsend to Trump, enabling him to perfect the tactics he employed in “The Apprentice”. It is a medium that is understood and accessible to his constituency.
However, Trump is an old man, and his dissolute lifestyle has challenged the resilience of his gene pool. While he has hinted at a dynastic succession, this is one of the few themes that he seems to have dropped. Yet if he is elected he would be 78 at the end of a second term. The question is, can The Planet afford it, whether he is elected or especially if the electoral college does not return him? One scenario has the Old Man brandishing the Second Amendment calling up a militia drawn from his alienated constituency energised by ethnocentric hatred.
Nevertheless, Trump wants to use the tweet-executive order combo to keep the attention on him. He knows that legality and enforceability does not matter in his new order, because legal processes move so slowly and ergo he tries to do what he likes; and if the media do not cower then he brings out his lumpenproletariat. If one reads the Federalist Papers, I do not believe the Founding Fathers envisaged such a lumpenproletariat as a “well regulated militia”.
Globally we live in very dangerous times, especially as the pervasive senses of immediate solution, entitlement and me-tooism echo around the community.
The main point of anything Trump does now “to make America great” in his own image is to outlast the virus or create the illusion that the virus “has left the house” leaving him triumphant, having saved the world from a “Chinese” virus.
Where did you come from, smallpox?
I have been reading a monograph about an alleged occurrence of a smallpox pandemic among Aboriginal people. The author was South Australian doctor and anthropologist, Ted Stirling, and it was published in1911. Interpolated in his discourse was an account of her land by a Narranyeri woman (Köntinyeri), born before “whitefella” invasion.
Stirling’s review of smallpox in Australia must be cast against Jenner’s vaccine against smallpox being available from 1798. So this vaccine, or at least its variolation predecessor was known to the first white settlers. In his review the author goes to great length to indicate that none of the First Fleet or the French ships under La Perouse, which turned up five days later, had any smallpox sufferers on any of the ships.
However, according to Stirling, over a year later four Aboriginal people turned up in the Port Jackson settlement with smallpox. The two adults recovered; the two children died. Stirling then mentions the NSW epidemic among Aboriginal people occurred in the central west in the 1830s and continued spreading to Victoria up to 1845.
Stirling came upon the Narrinyeri woman called Köntinyeri, who had been born about 1830, but remembered stories of the great wind that had come and which had then been followed by the outbreak of this disease which killed many and left those who recovered severely pockmarked. This epidemic’s start is disputed. To Köntinyeri the disease appeared around the time of her birth, but there was the suggestion that the epidemic began as far back to 1814. Whatever the actual date, there had been so many deaths that the traditional burial procedures were modified – they normally would put the body on a platform until all the soft tissue was gone and then bury the bones.
Köntinyeri believed that epidemic advanced from the East down the Murray River almost depopulating the banks of the river for 1,000 miles. The Narrinyeri nation inhabit the lower reaches of the Murray River and along the Coorong, but there was a neighbouring tribe very adept in the use of the mungo, the bark canoe. So the virus would have moved swiftly along the river.
Yet Stirling, in tracing this smallpox epidemic, suggests that it had originated in Malay Koepangs who first visited northern Australia to harvest sea cucumbers (trepangs) – an Asian culinary delicacy. They had visited annually for the harvest since 1783. The Malays were certainly the source of an epidemic of smallpox among aboriginal people in the north-west between 1860-1870. Your acceptance of the wider implication of these Malay “trepangers” being the source of other epidemics depends on whether you believe the evidence of the First Fleet and the French squadron being free of the virus.
Much of the controversy of “when and why” has gone, not just because there was a pre-existing vaccine that has proved remarkably effective, given that smallpox has been eradicated from the planet.
The Koepang “trepangers” serve as a reminder that an infected Indonesia is an ongoing challenge to border security. Over the past few years publicity given to people smugglers means that the Timor Sea remains a tenuous barrier, especially given that Australians are wedded to Indonesian travel, especially Bali. In other words there is a two-way flow both by sea and air which inevitably will present Australia with a problem. Indonesia will not like to be stigmatised and a great many Australians will not like having to abandon Bali as a holiday destination.
In this regard, it would help if Australia’s border security restructured to have less emphasis on the direct police role. The police are there in this context to enforce the quarantine power. The whole Department needs an injection of health expertise into its future role. Ted Stirling may have drawn too long a bow in relation to solely attributing the genesis of smallpox among Aboriginal people to the Malays. However, who knows how far the Malays ventured.
Nevertheless it is a lesson in what can happen, even considering that in the NSW colony vaccination must have been available by 1830 – for whitefellas. Variola material, derived from smallpox scrapings, was brought on the First Fleet, but there is no record of its use in “variolation”.
Overall the challenge to Australia now, without allowing Indonesians to unnecessarily lose face, is assuring what is potentially an ugly and untidy viral situation in Indonesia does not spill over into Australia. Therefore, important to get the narrative right now.
Nico Louw
Now there is a name to contemplate Lion of the Northern Cape Senior adviser to the Prime Minister Of a country under threat from COVID-19 Kids in queues lining the streets Unemployment rising Louw, close to the beating heart of Authority A Hillsong chorister Response to crisis? Distributing pirated copies of Turnbull’s memoir You’re kidding No for real! So what does this joker get? Nearly 200 grand plus expenses Now I know you’re joking No mate, that’s what you get for distributing pirated copies.
His expenses? Barely enough for the odd bottle of single malt while with furrowed brouw Master Nico constructs yet another “gotcha”.
Which got me thinking. Most people around Australia are doing it tough, but what about the politicians and their flunkeys like Louw? Why haven’t they taken a cut in their entitlements, given that the feather-bedding they get in the way of contributions to their superannuation and then their ability, after they have left Parliament, to rort the system as “consultants” may be construed as a sense of entitlement rather than enlightenment.
The national cabinet, this ad hoc response to the virus, is confronted by a number of serious questions but there is one matter that seems to have slipped its notice. This is the question of their income; yet it does not seem to rate a mention in the talks. While the unemployment queue grows and the masses of people on struggle street grow, the New Zealand Prime Minister Ardern has taken the lead by reducing her annual salary from NZ$470,000 to NZ$376,000. This 20 per cent salary cut extends to Opposition leader Simon Bridges, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, all 25 cabinet ministers and 34 key public service chief executives, including the Director-General of Health.
We know that Prime Minister Morrison has dismissed the idea of a pay cut for government ministers in Australia. In a radio interview, “We’ve already said there won’t be any pay rises right across the public service and this is not something that’s currently before us … it’s not something that’s being considered.”
Well, Prime Minister, that constituency you ostensibly run is locked down and struggling to pay its way; kids with poor prospects may beg to differ when they see what your senior adviser, Mr Louw gets for being un furbo. Do these qualities fostered in the bosom of the politician’s office deserve him being paid such a salary, which inevitably cascades upward to yours?
What is the value in a politician?
Let’s test that question with the electorate. At the next election let it consider voting for a Haircut Party devoted to recommending a 50 per cent cut in all politicians’ salaries and a serious pair of shears to pare back all the entitlements, including those of staffers. Instead there would be the abolition of the remuneration tribunals and linking of all future increases in politicians’ salaries to the unemployment benefit.
The policy is a bit rough about the edges – but this is not just a one-trick pony Party. The savings achieved by the Haircut would be put towards paying for a National social housing policy.
Morrison, mate, in the interim there is one aphorism for you to consider “Austerity begins in your parliamentary office.”
Maybe these officers in their sancta of the various parliament basilicae should wonder whether they should continue to stoop so Louw.
Join the Haircut party – look out for our barber poles!
In the prosperous time, the outrageously bloated political staffers can go unnoticed, but not now. Roy Masters, with whom I vie in the longevity stakes, made a serious comment about the bloat in the NRL administration, with some mediocre pie-eater, now terminated, getting over a million dollars as salary. Sport like politics has this similar sense of insensitive greed.
In some ways, the description of the Mafia condottieri as 95 per cent hanging out and 5 per cent ultimate brutality has relevance. Members of the Bloat can fill in their particular 5 per cent like distributing pirated copies of other person’s property any which way.
La cucaracha; la cucaracha
One the challenges I have enjoyed is turning on the light and being confronted on the floor by a cockroach – you know one of those robust cockroaches. It stands still, and then the battle begins. I am indebted to a study undertaken in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for the information.
I advance to squash it. The cockroach can generate a speed of a metre per second, or 3.6 kilometres an hour. Seeing it scurrying away from my vengeful shoe, it seems faster than that. However it has the ability to turn and twist at 25 times a second, which improves its chances of evasion. It does this because of its antennae, which are very sensitive to changes in the environment. Cockroaches are guided by a superb nervous system of giant neurons, ready and prepared for leg muscle action with an equally efficient sensory system. As has been said, cockroaches have had several million years in which to hone their reflexes. Makes it very much more satisfying when you win the battle and the cockroach lies squashed. Adieu, mon cafard. Arrivederci il scarofaggio.
Mouse whisper
I love the aptly named Queensland Minister Dick who has labelled Queenslanders the Bazookas and the New South Welsh the Pea Shooters in the wake of the wrestle over Virgin. Better than Cane Toads and Cockroaches? But given that I live in Mousehole NSW, I do love the Italian word for cockroach – Scarafaggio. It has a certain swaggering mouseketeer ring about it.
I believe my mice relatives over the border resent being mocked as cane toads at the best of times. A mouse has a certain dignity, and Rospi di Canna? Really, I ask you.
However, I know that among them there is quite a dispute about being relabelled Dick bazookas. However the squeakeratti are still debating Bazooke with or without the Dick.
Watch this tap.
