It is fast becoming mainstream that we are seeing another Great Depression, the exception being that there is now a social welfare net to break people’s fall a little bit, so that they do not die immediately from their economic fall, but perhaps from starvation waiting on the streets to get in the doors of Centrelink, which has become life itself:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8140855/Queues-people-line-stress-outside-Sydney-Centrelink-office.html?ito=push-notification&ci=11130&si=1326534

     It has been suggested that a debt jubilee is the only way of preventing this Great Depression:
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubilee-is-only-way-avoid-depression/

     Will this be another, what was his name case? Epstein, now I remember, but the MSM has forgotten:
  https://pagesix.com/2020/03/22/harvey-weinstein-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-report-says/?_ga=2.9493237.1971282481.1584917532-1895132077.1565563639

“Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has tested positive for the coronavirus in prison — and most likely contracted the disease at Rikers Island, an official briefed on the matter told The Post on Sunday. Weinstein, 68, is being held in isolation at the Wende Correctional Facility near Buffalo, where he tested positive on Saturday, the official said. The state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision wouldn’t confirm or deny Weinstein’s condition, citing federal health-care privacy law, but said that two inmates at Wende had the coronavirus. Weinstein — who was sentenced earlier this month to 23 years in prison for sexually assaulting two women — is believed to have been infected at Rikers, where he was briefly locked up before being transferred to Wende on Wednesday, the official said. New York City has experienced the nation’s largest jailhouse outbreak of coronavirus, with at least 38 inmates — including at Rikers — testing positive, the Associated Press reported Sunday.”

     There is beginning a trend in the West of emptying jails, because, well, the poor dears might catch the bug. This started in the US, and now is being called for here in Oz:
  https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-20/calls-for-australian-prisoners-to-be-released-due-to-coronavirus/12074182?pfmredir=sm&fbclid=IwAR0-OsTSBu6HExHQN6f5X4LA9K-wgA1yI9gKZX8fPIizIw2-_SWFT7ZZvc4

“Lawyers and prisoner advocates are calling for measures to reduce the nation's prison population — including releasing inmates early and loosening conditions for bail — in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
•    The measures include releasing inmates who are elderly, unwell or who are likely to be released in the next six months.
•    The concern is that prisons will become coronavirus hotspots leading to inmate deaths, riots and further spread into the community
•    The Victorian Government says that processes are already in place for dealing with communicable diseases in custody
A group of more than 370 lawyers, academics and advocates Friday released an open letter which calls on Australian governments to follow the lead of jurisdictions such as Ireland, the United States, Iran and the United Kingdom, where authorities have either released prisoners or flagged it as a possibility in response to the pandemic.
The letter stated that during disease outbreaks, prisons — where people live in close quarters and are often unwell — can become a breeding ground for viruses which spread to the community.
It calls on state and territory governments to support bail and non-custodial penalties for all defendants who did not present a very high risk that could not be managed in the community.
It also calls for the early release of prisoners, including those at high risk of harm from COVID-19 and those detained for summary offences.

25 March 2020

The Virus Slowdown was Successful

     There is a new book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Dutch critic of Islam, The Challenge of Dawa. The book argues that Islam has a political ideology, and outlines what the West needs to do to survive. I will not be buying her book, as we journalists are all too poor to buy anything, but, not to cry too much in our empty beer mugs and soup bowls, I found a summary of the book by the author herself, so you don’t have to read the book either unless you really want to. Just prepare, as these are wild times, and some food trumps reading material:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx2hEc7Dlcg
  https://www.hoover.org/research/challenge-dawa-political-islam-ideology-and-movement-and-how-counter-it

“Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, on August 15, 2016, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a speech on what he unequivocally referred to as “radical Islam.” He declared: Nor can we let the hateful ideology of radical Islam—its oppression of women, gays, children, and nonbelievers—be allowed to reside or spread within our own countries . . . [W]-e must use ideological warfare as well. Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of radical Islam. Our administration will be a friend to all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East, and will amplify their voices. Since Mr. Trump’s election victory and inauguration as president, much attention has been focused on hurried and probably temporary restrictions on refugees, visitors, and immigrants from a number of majority-Muslim countries. Almost no attention has been paid to the broader goals outlined in the Youngstown speech. I argue that the speech heralded a paradigm shift away from President Obama’s doctrine of focusing solely on the violence committed by “extremists” to a more comprehensive approach that seeks to undermine, degrade, and ultimately defeat political Islam (or Islamism) as an ideology and a movement seeking to infiltrate and undermine our free society. A narrow focus on Islamist violence had the effect of restricting our options only to tools such as military intervention, electronic surveillance, and the criminal justice system. This approach has proved both costly and ineffective. Moving beyond the controversy over his executive order on immigration, President Trump now has the chance to broaden our strategy. Instead of “combating violent extremism,” his administration needs to redefine the threat posed by political Islam by recognizing it as an ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with our freedoms and a movement that is working insidiously but effectively to achieve its stated utopia.

     This is a line of inquiry that we should keep or eyes on, the rewriting of history by China and its servants:
  https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6143711080001

“China’s “dishonesty and negligence” unleashed COVID-19 on the rest of the world, Outsiders Host Rita Panahi says. Ms Panahi questioned the decision of China to “destroy evidence” when it became clear there was an outbreak on their hands. “China's initial cover-up included destroying lab samples that established in December the cause of unexplained viral infections in the Hubei province,” she said. “How many lives would have been saved if China had listened to experts instead of silencing them?” Ms Panahi said it was imperative we do not allow China to rewrite history as it emerges from the other side of the crisis. “The Chinese communist regime has through its ineptitude, dishonesty and negligence unleashed a virus that will leave tens of thousands dead and likely cause a global recession,” he said. “We must not allow this totalitarian regime to re-write history.”

     I once loved the James Bond character, but with Daniel Craig, that took a dive, as we saw the new politically correct Bond, so distant from Sean Connery, that it might as well be another world, which it is. But, what is the guy like in real life? Worse.
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8135603/Bond-star-Daniel-Craig-insists-wont-leave-125-million-fortune-children.html

“Daniel Craig has insisted he won't be giving a penny of his £125million fortune to his children because he believes 'inheritance is distasteful.' The James Bond actor, 52, revealed his 'philosophy is to get rid of it or give it away before you go' and says he has no plans on passing down his wealth to his daughters, including the two-year-old he shares with wife Rachel Weisz, 50. In a new interview, the 007 star, said: 'I don't want to leave great sums to the next generation' – after earning a reported £18million for his final James Bond film, No Time to Die. Speaking to Saga magazine, he continued: 'I think inheritance is quite distasteful. My philosophy is to get rid of it or give it away before you go.' Daniel is a father to daughter Ella, 28, who he shares with ex-wife Fiona Loudon, 51, and a child whose name hasn't been confirmed with current partner Rachel.”

     I have assembled below a mass of articles and news items which I think have a common thread. Rather than put extracts from all of them, I think that the URLs are pretty self-explanatory. We have the new social distance rules, that have closed down gyms, restaurants, you name it.  I was told off by an ethnic gentleman in the post office today for being a few nanometres too close. Soon people will be carrying tape measures, and electron microscopes, to settle disputes, and in America, guns, of course. This social distancing stuff is right throughout the West, with Germany, for example going to the next step and banning public meetings of two or more people. Question, will this eventually apply in private households and make sex impossible? This a restriction on civil liberties greater than anything ever seen before in the modern West, and the powers that be want even more power, and more social control, with no public debate, it just happens:
  https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/doj-seeks-new-emergency-powers-amid-coronavirus-pandemic/ar-BB11vJvl?ocid=spartandhp

“The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States. Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions. A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the documents. The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. Already, he has cited the pandemic as a reason for heightening border restrictions and restricting asylum claims. He has also pushed for further tax cuts as the economy withers, arguing that it would soften the financial blow to Americans. And even without policy changes, Trump has vast emergency powers that he could legally deploy right now to try and slow the coronavirus outbreak. The DOJ requests — which are unlikely to make it through a Democratic-led House — span several stages of the legal process, from initial arrest to how cases are processed and investigated. In one of the documents, the department proposed that Congress grant the attorney general power to ask the chief judge of any district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation.”

     This is disturbing. This morning I read that one big supermarket was not taking cash for payments, for fear of the corona bug being on the money, but when I hobbled to the store, that policy was dropped, why, I do not know, perhaps an act of God? Yes, this was never a problem before with poo getting on the money  and they did not care then, but I suppose this is different, eh?
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-20/will-coronavirus-kill-off-cash-in-australia/12065860

“The coronavirus pandemic has spread to many aspects of life. But one of its early and unexpected impacts seems to be on cash — or, more specifically, cash transactions. Though it does not reference cash specifically, Department of Health advice says the COVID-19 virus can spread through "touching objects that have cough or sneeze droplets from an infected person" on them. So when managers of The Knox cafe, in suburban Canberra, met to discuss how to protect staff and improve hygiene, refusing coins and banknotes was one of their first decisions. "We've stopped using keep cups and we've stopped cash transactions," front-of-house manager Madeleine Clarke said. "Our boss wants us to minimise hand-to-hand interactions and, obviously, cash carries a lot of germs." Peter Barclay, who runs city pub King O'Malleys, has started to ask drinkers to do the same. "Already, very few people use cash in the economy … it's probably 10 to 15 per cent of our patrons," he said. "When they come to the bar, we just say, 'Look, do you have a credit card?'" These cases are not isolated. Merchants across the country are responding to the COVID-19 crisis by avoiding touching money. Others, such as McDonald's restaurants, still accept coins and banknotes, but instruct staff to wear gloves while doing so. A spokesperson for McDonald's said the chain had also advised employees how to give and take coins from customers in a way that minimised contact.”

     Comparisons have been made with the present coronavirus pandemic, and the 1918 pandemic. But really the present situation does not compare to what happened then, where corpses were put out in the street, in some parts of the world much like rubbish is put out today. And, both were from China, even though the 1918 flu is called the “Spanish flu”:
  https://thehill.com/changing-america/opinion/488429-the-1918-spanish-flu-ravaged-the-world-what-can-it-teach-us-about
  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/1/140123-spanish-flu-1918-china-origins-pandemic-science-health/

“For decades, scientists have debated where in the world the pandemic started, variously pinpointing its origins in France, China, the American Midwest, and beyond. Without a clear location, scientists have lacked a complete picture of the conditions that bred the disease and factors that might lead to similar outbreaks in the future. The deadly "Spanish flu" claimed more lives than World War I, which ended the same year the pandemic struck. Now, new research is placing the flu's emergence in a forgotten episode of World War I: the shipment of Chinese laborers across Canada in sealed train cars. Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic. Writing in the January issue of the journal War in History, Humphries acknowledges that his hypothesis awaits confirmation by viral samples from flu victims. Such evidence would tie the disease's origin to one location. But some other historians already find his argument convincing. "This is about as close to a smoking gun as a historian is going to get," says historian James Higgins, who lectures at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and who has researched the 1918 spread of the pandemic in the United States. "These records answer a lot of questions about the pandemic."

     The Deputy leader of the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party Beatrix von Storch has strongly criticised the Turkish government for opening its borders to Europe, and he has said that the country be removed from the NATO military alliance. It is about time someone said something about this, but really action needs to be taken if anything is going to survive in Europe:
  https://www.jihadwatch.org/2020/03/germany-afd-leader-demands-turkey-be-thrown-out-of-nato-for-migrant-aggression?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_2020_03_19_jihad_watch_daily_digest&utm_term=2020-03-19
  https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/15/exclusive-von-storch-turkey-removed-nato-migrant-aggression/

“Ms von Storch commented on the situation along the Greek border, where thousands of migrants have gathered, in an interview with Breitbart London this week, stating that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government had committed an “act of aggression” by opening the border. “First of all, what is our approach to this situation? We stand with Greece. This is, I think, the bottom line. We have to strengthen the Greek border and border police and we should do everything we can to help them keep the border clear,” von Storch said. On the actions of President Erdogan, Ms von Storch said: “It’s an act of aggression, what he is proposing. It’s the fight of an Islamic country against a small Christian country and he did it with purpose. He uses it as a weapon.” The AfD deputy leader went on to note the multiple times that Erdogan has threatened the European Union, including as recently as last December when he stated that migrants displaced by military activity in the Syrian province of Idlib could go on to Europe.”

     The position of most of us writers on the coronavirus, and we have read much of the alternative coverage, is that it is too soon to say for sure whether of not this is a manufactured crisis, a bioweapon gone rogue, or just a natural evolutionary development, with a virus species jumping. Therefore, it is wise to cover all the bases and to give voice to a much information and points of view as possible. One thing to keep in mind is that many have noted that there will be severe economic ramifications, which could be a crisis, manufactured or not, more severe than the GFC. And, the world will never be the same:
  https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/after-coronavirus-things-wont-go-back-to-normal?utm_source=breaking_push&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=push_notifications

“National borders can be expected to harden where, for decades, they had become increasingly porous. Nations facing contagion from abroad sealed or semi-sealed their borders. This, I suspect, was not simply health quarantining but animated by a turning inward, a desire or instinct for national identity. Governments that recently fostered the idea that their citizens were Europeans rather than members of distinct nationalities drew a line around the people who knew they were indeed a people. Italians in lockdown didn’t sing the EU anthem on their balconies; they sang patriotic songs about Italy. For worse and for better, this pandemic will stoke suspicion of foreign peoples and lands and will give extra force to increasingly persuasive arguments that nation-states are the most effective bulwarks against arrogant encroachments on self-government. COVID-19 will also change the way we regard China, which since the Clinton presidency has been treated less as a strategic rival than as a trading partner. Now we will see it as a tyranny responsible for a scourge laying waste to our economy, jobs, wealth, and well-being. We will be less tempted to subordinate recognition of its malignancy to wishful thinking and commercial desire. Others foresee revolutionary change. It certainly seems likely that some of what is to come will be shocking. The phrase, “things will never be the same,” is usually either a truism or an exaggeration, but on rare occasions, it is apt. We may be at such a moment now. No one has ever seen an economic slowdown as quick as this, nor a behavioral volte-face as sudden as the whole world’s switch to social distancing.”

     We are all tired of reading and writing about the coronavirus issue, but this is dominating all the news cycles, and it is our duty as journalists to deal with all of the big issues of the day. We are trying to cover all the bases as Brian puts it, and here is one possible longer-term consequence, the “hybrid war”:
  https://www.globalresearch.ca/china-locked-hybrid-war-us/5706687

“Among the myriad, earth-shattering geopolitical effects of coronavirus, one is already graphically evident. China has re-positioned itself. For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the US as a threat, as stated a month ago by Foreign Minister Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference during the peak of the fight against coronavirus. Beijing is carefully, incrementally shaping the narrative that, from the beginning of the coronovirus attack, the leadership knew it was under a hybrid war attack. Xi’s terminology is a major clue. He said, on the record, that this was war. And, as a counter-attack, a “people’s war” had to be launched. Moreover, he described the virus as a demon or devil. Xi is a Confucianist. Unlike some other ancient Chinese thinkers, Confucius was loath to discuss supernatural forces and judgment in the afterlife. However, in a Chinese cultural context, devil means “white devils” or “foreign devils”: guailo in Mandarin, gweilo in Cantonese. This was Xi delivering a powerful statement in code. When Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, voiced in an incandescent tweet the possibility that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan” – the first blast to this effect to come from a top official – Beijing was sending up a trial balloon signalling that the gloves were finally off. Zhao Lijian made a direct connection with the Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, which included a delegation of 300 US military. He directly quoted US CDC director Robert Redfield who, when asked last week whether some deaths by coronavirus had been discovered posthumously in the US, replied that  “some cases have actually been diagnosed this way in the US today.”

     If Trump has the noodle he will be able to make mince meat out of Joe Biden, given things which he said in the past about racial issues, which at the time was sensible, and still is, but nowadays, in this weird world of the Great White Replacement, remains politically incorrect:
  https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-said-desegregation-would-create-a-racial-jungle-2019-7?r=AU&IR=T
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/politics/biden-busing.html

“Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing increased scrutiny over his record on busing and racial issues, and this week old comments resurfaced in which he said, in 1977, that non-"orderly" racial integration policies would cause his children to "grow up in a racial jungle." The quote was originally discovered by University of Southern California Law School professor and scholar Daria Roithmayr and first reported by The New York Times, which published a lengthy story on Biden's record on busing and school de-segregation on Monday morning. In the quote, which appears to come from a congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Biden emphasized wanting to "insure we do have orderly integration of society," adding he was "not just talking about education but all of society." He then said: "Unless we do something about this, my children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle with tensions having built so high that it is going to explode at some point. We have got to make some move on this."

     I hate “my generation,” the 1960s boomer crowd who still listen to Beatles music, and think that Bob Dylan, deserved a Nobel Prize, a spoilt rotten bunch that have wasted the social capital of the West and led us into the present crisis of survival. No wonder the younger generation hates us so.
  https://theprint.in/opinion/pov/covid-19-a-boomer-remover-why-millennials-are-angry-and-done-with-older-generation/381223/

“As the world grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, the words ‘Boomer Remover’ featured prominently in Twitter trends the past couple of days. It is, of course, a mean yet on-point joke about how the majority of the COVID-19 pandemic’s death toll are the elderly. What is the reason for this pushback and anger against Boomers across the world, and in particular, against uncles in India? ‘OK Boomer’ and ‘Uncle, please sit’ are now popular catchphrases to signal that young people have had enough of the policies and politics that have got us to this point. Boomers have handed younger generations a broken economy, an ailing planet, and nuclear weapons – but won’t stop with the lectures. And as many pointed out, the Boomers’ response to the admittedly off-colour joke has been far more proactive than their response to all the actual problems for which younger generations blame them: their political choices that have now led to lack of jobs for the current generations around the world and their inability to buy a house, a growing climate crisis, rising depression and anxiety among young people, poor healthcare facilities, rampant gun violence in schools and even their ostrich-like response to coronavirus. Many Boomer-run offices can easily allow employees to work from home in the gig economy until this pandemic is over, but they simply won’t. Young people are now telling them that their time, more specifically, the time of their ideas, is over, and they should stop trying to run the world.”

     As I usually preface these articles, we are lacking rock solid evidence about the epidemiology of the coronavirus, and this is making it difficult for public health officials, and even Right-wing fringe dwelling conspiracy theorists like me, to get a handle on things. However, one study has presented evidence that the death rates are over-blown:
  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8130815/Death-rates-coronavirus-HALF-initial-estimates-world-health-chiefs.html

“The death rate of coronavirus may be half of what world health chiefs expected it to be, according to a study. International researchers compiled data on coronavirus cases in Wuhan, the Chinese city of 11million people where the deadly disease emerged in December 2019. They found that, overall, the number of people who died after getting sick with the coronavirus was 1.4 per cent. In comparison, estimations by the World Health Organization in early March said 3.4 per cent of diagnosed patients had died. And the true figure is likely to be even lower because so many people are believed to be going undiagnosed. By comparison the death rate of flu is around 0.1 per cent. Coronavirus patients often don't know they're infected – as many as eight out of 10 could have no symptoms in the early stages of an outbreak, according to one study –because they get such mild signs that they don't think anything of it. The study, which has not yet been reviewed by scientists, comes as more than 9,300 people around the world have died and more than 224,000 have been confirmed to be ill. The study, led by Professor Joseph Wu of the University of Hong Kong, was focused on the city of Wuhan, where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported. Professor Wu and colleagues from Harvard University used published data on 425 early confirmed cases and 41 fatalities in Wuhan. But they wanted to get a bigger picture of how many people in the city, which is in the Hubei province, had the disease but showed no symptoms. Hospitals had been overwhelmed in Wuhan and milder cases were unlikely to have been tested. The team used a range of global data sources to estimate the full number of cases within Wuhan by taking into account the location and timing of cases outside of the area to work out how many people could be expected to have had it. By studying real-life patients they found the average time from the start of symptoms – a fever or a cough – to death was 19 days, on average. It ranged between 16 and 24 days.”

     Ever wonder why Hillary Clinton, the global superclasses’ pick of the crop, is so smug? As if she is already the puppet leader, eagerly doing the biddings of the Dark Satanic Lords of the Universe? I imagine that Joe Biden, the senile choice, will have her as running mate, added late in the day, then he will drop off the perch, then she will do a Game of Thrones, rise to power and then 666 and all that. We will go to sleep, uneasy, one night, then wake up in a fiery hell the next day: apocalypse cometh. Think about it. So much is going down now, so quick that unless we start thinking more radically we will always be behind the 8 ball, and lose.

     There is still no settled opinion from our side of politics about the true nature of the coronavirus pandemic, with views ranging from catastrophe, Mike Adams, right through to the bug is a type of false flag conspiracy, and may not even exist. I don’t know about the last one, but some influential tin foil hatters have proposed it, but, then again, after every disaster there are some of us to say: no, it did not happen as you thought it did. We need open minds, gathering information, just like on the issue of China’s responsibility:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/health/what-our-country-going-look-if-millions-americans-start-dying-covid-19
  https://summit.news/2020/03/19/study-global-pandemic-could-have-been-avoided-if-china-had-acted-sooner/
  https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2020/03/covid-19-china.page

“A scientific study has found that had China acted sooner to combat the spread of their coronavirus, then the spread could have been almost entirely avoided, and it would not have become a global pandemic. Research out of the University of Southampton in the UK, based on world population mapping funded primarily by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, discovered “that if interventions in [China] could have been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent respectively – significantly limiting the geographical spread of the disease.” Study author Dr Shengjie Lai, of the University of Southampton, comments: “Our study demonstrates how important it is for countries which are facing an imminent outbreak to proactively plan a coordinated response which swiftly tackles the spread of the disease on a number of fronts.” Director of the University of Southampton’s WorldPop group, Professor Andy Tatem, adds: “We have a narrow window of opportunity globally to respond to this disease and given effective drugs and vaccines are not expected for months, we need to be smart about how we target it using non-drug-related interventions.” “Our findings significantly contribute to an improved understanding of how best to implement measures and tailor them to conditions in different regions of the world.” Tatem continued. It has become clear that the first cases of the Chinese virus were reported in mid-late November and early December, with scientists even estimating that the first jump of the virus from animals to humans probably occurred in October in the city of Wuhan. Instead of acting immediately, the Chinese government waited until January 23rd before issuing quarantine orders to the 11 million people living in Wuhan. The communist state was also actively working to suppress and punish doctors and scientists who tried to get warnings out, and  lied to the world by claiming there was “no evidence” of human-to-human transmission.”

21 March 2020

     24 million Australians are told to wash their hands thoroughly several times a day. Imagine the water demand – say 25 litres per person per day just for hand washing, taking total household usage to maybe 60 litres per person per day. For 24 million of us that could amount to 1,400 Ml per day - enough to empty the giant Lake Eucumbene in a few days. Greens celebrate Sunday 22nd March as World Water Day. Let’s make it “Build More Dams Day” and announce new dams and weirs NOW, with guaranteed money and start dates.

Sent to Advertiser and Country papers

Dear Editor
The impact of the Covid 19 virus has reached every corner of society’s activities.  It has revealed some practices which could be changed to provide a benefit even beyond the current dilemma. A good deal of office computer work can be done at home.  The employee can receive work to be done and return it by email to the office.  This would reduce the need for travel to work by car or public transport providing immediate relief from traffic and parking problems. Another gain would be less emissions.  One day per week at the office would allow for personal interchange if necessary. The virus and subsequent economic implications have also emphasised the need to be independent and this applies from the individual right through to the State and nation.  We have become too dependent on foreign countries in all areas.  Problems have arisen when we depend on them to supply our needs and when they can no longer access our products.  The remedy will involve reconsideration of Australia’s commitment to schemes like the Lima Agreement (Agenda 21 etc) where we agree to allow our industries to go off-shore to assist developing nations.  Trade Agreements can have a similar effect. The negative side of globalisation has been clearly exposed.  Will we take heed?

Yours faithfully
Ken Grundy
Naracoorte  SA  5271