Shaftesbury's epistolary essy on 'Enthusiasm' applied to Covidology (from his 'Characteristics' 1709)

 With all the panics that we have had here, what Shaftesbury would probably have called ebullitions of enthusiasm, I haven’t seen any reference to his epistolary essay on the topic of enthusiasm its genesis and his proposed remedies.  Enthusiasm from the Greek en theos - the god within refers generally to the excesses of religious fervour which can overwhelm individuals and groups causing them to become detached from their normal sober selves.  One thinks of Holy Rollers, snake handlers, and the ecstatic devotees of the ancient forms of religious fervour.  Shaftesbury would include all sorts of mass psychosis which can be spread through mimesis. He also refers to it as a form of panic having its origin in melancholy or black bile which may affect the body politic as well as the human body.  

“ may with good reason call every passion ‘panic’ which is raised in a

multitude and conveyed by aspect or, as it were, by contact or sympathy. Thus,

popular fury may be called ‘panic’ when the rage of the people, as we have

sometimes known, has put them beyond themselves, especially where religion

has had to do.”

“For vapours naturally rise and, in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions hap￾pen in nature, storms, earthquakes or other amazing prodigies–––at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it.”

The major panic which we have had recently due to Covid follows precisely the pattern observed by Shaftesbury in his epistolary essay ‘On Enthusiasm’.  The arguments put forward for its grave nature were of the solemn foolery type which he called ‘formalist’.  This is the presentation, by very serious people who follow the science, of a chilling message which may not be trifled with.

“Perhaps so, but let us see first whether they are really grave or no, for, in the manner we may conceive them they may peradventure be very grave and weighty in our imagination, but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature. Gravity is of the very essence of imposture”

Now the normal way or the wise way of dealing with such societal vapours is ridicule and persiflage.  In other words ‘don’t be silly, you are imagining things’.  The problem with Covid though was that the ‘magistrate’ instead of letting it go or having the black bile vent itself and thus be exhausted rather chose to amplify the panic.  Moving more than 5 km away from your home was restricted and entry into a cafe or public house was on the basis of a QR code which assured your vaccination status.  The remedy of ridicule was voided by the fact that you had to remove your mandated mask to eat and thus open yourself to the certainty of contagion.  Shaftesbury saw what would happen when heavy handed remedies are applied by the legal system to stem the excesses of panic enthusiasm.

“For to apply a serious remedy and bring the sword or fasces as a cure must

make the case more melancholy and increase the very cause of the distemper.”

The mention of fasces brings to mind the close union of the great corporations with the Fascist Italian government.  In Ireland too our tax bonanza from the multi-nationals that avail of our tax haven, the pharmaceutical industry being most salient during the time of Covid, made the government very attentive to their needs.  We are after all home to 19 of the top 20 pharma giants.  Sententious assertions of the wisdom of ‘following the science’ became a quasi religion, a melancholy that lay on the nation like a miasm or ‘pestilential exhalation’.  The proposers of those nostrums such as vaccination which did not prevent infection but somehow magically lessened its effects, Ashley-Cooper, the 3rd. Earl, calls formalists.  A footnote to my text defines this species of jobsworth:

“In Shaftesbury’s vocabulary, the formalist was the person who sustained his views through self solemnity and what Shaftesbury regarded as the imposture of gravity”.

Babes we have been here before.  It is likely that at any time in the history of any individual country there may be festering a pustule of pus gathered round a mental obstruction, a malign fidget that becomes contagious.  The saurian watchful grasp the moment to launch a factory reset towards the fata morgana of transhumanism, transgenderism or any transformation that draws us away from the image and likeness of God.

My Boring Life

 

As a domestic hero I am called on to hang shelves from time to time.  ‘No problemo’, I talk  in the argot of cheerful mechanical.  ‘Where do you want it then?’  I went to my stores and looked for plugging rod,/rawlplugs but none did I find therein.    Fine I think I can get some after my dentist plugs another hole.  It’s just a small shop in the village near us with a good range of hardware where I have bought odd things like chain oil, screws, scythe stone, seeds etc.  During Covidology this shop devised a table with a screen across the door behind which stood the proprietor.  You gave your order and he or she went back into the shop to fetch it.  When today I went up there to get rawl plugs I could see the same set up.  I asked ‘Are you still running the Covid setup?’  Yes was the reply.  ‘Good luck with that’ I said and turned on my heel.

Since Feb. last mask mandates and all the rest of it have been removed in Ireland and now there is a steady flow of information about the misinformation that was fed to the public back in 2020.  The 95% risk reduction of infection promulgated in the msm was not accurate.  In fact the paper by the New England Journal of Medicine that underpinned the emergency usage of the vax actually showed a .84% absolute risk reduction which means that out of 119 persons inoculated one would be protected from Covid.

Check out Dr. Malhotra on this video. min 2:31

Dr. Malhotra

'The Psychology of Totalitarianism' by Mattias Desmet

The thesis of Desmet’s (Prof. of Psychology at Ghent University) book is very simple and easily stated.  The general official  reaction to Covid was an instance of what he calls mass formation.  Given the right social conditions which he points out are manifestly available in modern society namely alienation, high levels of anxiety, anomie, meaningless jobs, lack of a firm moral scaffolding, and the numberless worries generated by the agitations of social media, a significant proportion of the populace are ready to become ensorcelled by a single threat and form a crowd, an aggregation of headless chickens that devolves to the intelligence of the most stupid in the mob.  Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book ‘The Crowd’ and Hannah Arendt’s ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ are precursors to this line of analysis which M.D. lays out with splendid clarity.  Of the two earlier books Le Bon’s is the more readable, Arendt’s is turgid with footnotes flourishing like scholastic weeds.

To get a good resume of the book’s main thesis your best resource is to view one of the many youtube videos in which Mattias Desmet appears.  There is much more detail in the book particularly about how the logico-empirical vision of science enables technocratic authoritarianism.  In the end chapters of his book he maintains that even this version of scienctific method is wrong, science is as much an intuitive process as an empirical one.  To discover the protophaenomenon (cf. Coleridge) 

Coleridge on Method 

is not a matter of diligent searching but alertness to its presentation or knowing where to look.  To alter Pater’s dictum about art, all science aspires to the condition of music.  Desmet uses examples from Chaos theory to illustrate the inevitable harmony and beauty that underlies any apparent disorder.

Some readers may find this philosophical coda to be an add on and unnecessarily elevated compared to the practical aspects of the earlier chapters, hovering as it does in the thin

air of panpsychism.  I think that it is a demonstration of the general need for a metaphysical superstructure that is resistant to the frenzies of popular agitation.  Everyone needs something like this though it may be unlike the speculations of Desmet.

This is an excellent book.  The central idiocy of Covidology is still going on and in one of his videos Desmet remarks that Totalitarianism always ends badly and worse may be on the way.  The German health ministry reports that serious adverse reactions may have occurred in 1 in 5,000 injections (note not people, injections):

adverse reactions to innoculation

Dr. Doshi in a study conducted by the British Medical Journal found that the adverse reactions exceeded the reduction in numbers requiring hospitalization due to Covid.

Professor Morton's Optimism Gap

 

More recently, a survey from January 2022 in the United States showed the gap between personal and collective outlook at a record high, with 85 per cent of American adults reporting feeling satisfied with their own lives, and only 17 per cent satisfied with the direction in which the US is going. This gap between how optimistic we are about our personal lives and how pessimistic we are about our collective future is known as the ‘optimism gap’. There has been much debate among psychologists and economists about what fuels the gap but, whatever the reasons, pessimism about our collective futures has potentially dire consequences.

(From an essay in Psyche by Professor  Jennifer M. Morton

optimism gap 

This is an odd observation from a professor of Philosophy.  Have philosophers had nothing to say on the matter or do they await the ‘hard data’ before they can ply the trade of analyzing its concepts and road testing them by the use of thought experiments.  Is this a problem or harmless intellectual fun?  In the past philosophers had much to say on the matter of gloom, doom or bloom; now indeed we must follow the science and accept whatever is offered us however baffling to common sense.  The covidology appears to have been swallowed holus bolus by the Professor which is not remarkable if you live in a technocracy and breathe that air. (con spirare again: conspire )

Excess deaths in Ireland in 2020

The central statistics office in Ireland figures for all causes deaths in Ireland show a 2% increase between 2019 and 2020.  Recollect that the first case of covid death was in March 2019 and that there was a massive spike in deaths in April of that year mostly in care homes and that vaccines were not rolled out until December 29th 2019.

I wondered why the average of the previous 4 years was not given.  Excess deaths are calculated on this basis generally.  Then I remembered that 2017 was a bad flu year so there was likely an ‘early harvest’ which would account for a drop in all causes deaths in  subsequent years.

Does 2% (with qualification) sound like a pandemic of such extreme danger that  normal societal interaction was shut down for two years? 

I concur Dr. Strangelove

 

Dr.  Strangelove:

 -  Don’t you think that you would have had more of an impact by being deadly even if in the end that led to your self-elimination?

Dr.Virus:

 -  That is the dilemma, a single glorious episode of carnage or being a persistent nuisance.   But if there is a way between the horns of the dilemma it could be that hanging about harmless seeming leaves the chance of a virulent mutation occurring a live possibility.

Dr. Strangelove: You appear to be adopting a point of view which is not something available to a virus which is a simple molecular machine whose only strategy can be expressed as ‘I want to live, I want to replicate’.

Dr. Virus:

 -  True, yet there is help from humans such as yourself who can create the conditions  that make Covid great again.

Dr. Strangelove:

 -  A message of hope indeed.

The pure drop of Omicron

 

‘It’s like a bad hangover for a couple of days’.  Omicron.  In ‘Grace’ by Joyce Mr. Cunningham gravely remarked - ‘It happened that you were peloothered'.  Here the toxicity which produced a dull ache to the frontal lobes was due to the viral potation imbibed I know not where.  After those two days there was another short time of a vile taste in my mouth and muscle twinges.   Now that’s passing.  You could say I had the pure drop never having had any inoculation and that leads me to ask - what is going on in those countries that are still insisting on masks and mandates?  They have pushed the game on well past the credence of the people.  It’s over.

Covidology de Jour

 There’s that American expression - ‘what just happened’.  An event, baffling, deep, inscrutable, has occurred and we require explanation.  What precisely were the forces at play?  It might be useful to know and vital for our future safety.  Bojo’s birthday bash has released Ireland from its thrall to a ‘narrative’ that was thin as grocer’s bacon and like it also in that the various slices are difficult to separate.

Was there a ‘they’, dark forces of malign intent or a convergence of profound mismanagement?  Corona was recognised by clever people as being of artificial origin indicating lab leak which was followed by denial and implications of tin foil toppers by those who had lots of connection to Wuhan.  There was a ‘they’ there forming a nucleus of catastrophe manufacture and saving themselves by a creation of diversion.  Very early in the pandemic the gradation of risk was known but only the Swedes made the correct choices.  Incompetence was a factor and mediocrity and a political system that was like a steam engine with a defective governor.  Pressure kept building up without the journalistic valve and it was the exhaustion of the viral fire that saved us and Boris saying ‘party on dudes’.

What of the panto villain Klaus der Schlub, behind you, behind you?  Mockery is the remedy for Davos applied topically and liberally.  The unvaxxed will not forget.

P.S.  Now I understand Neil Young’s line:

When you’re young enough to repay

But not old enough to sell.

Thank You Boris Johnson: No Better Man

 We’re very happy in Ireland that Boris Johnson declared an end to Covidology.  How do I know that?  Because we are not talking about it.  In our own quiet humble way we have been waiting for direction from a higher power to whom we give the name of England.   The man has spoken and we are released from the magic chalk circle which trapped us.  Here I think the words of Hilaire Belloc are a comfort and a counsel:

His Father, who was self-controlled,
Bade all the children round attend
To James’ miserable end,
And always keep a-hold of Nurse
For fear of finding something worse.

 

 (Cautionary tale about Jim, the boy who slipped his nurse, and was eaten by a lion)

Jim's Fate

Bye Bye Covid: It'll be nice not knowing you.

 The prophets formerly known as tinfoil topee wearing right wing conspiracy theorists are enjoying a major ‘I told you so and you wouldn’t listen’ moment in the history of chagrin.

Vaccine Passports - check

Wuhan Lab Leak - check

Greatly Exaggerated Deaths. - check.

In fact over the two years of pandemic only 17,000 people died of Covid who had no other co-morbidity.  Now that Britain is putting covid behind them this emerges.  Why?  A nudge towards optimism?  In 2011 644 deaths are recorded from falls down stairs.  Dangerous things stairs.  Ought to be regulated.  (British Statistics from Office of National Stats)

Average Age of Mortality from Covid - 82.5 years which is greater than average age of mortality generally (Britain).  Death should be abolished.

Pfizer CEO admits that first two jabs were of little utility.  The third was the charm.  Can we have our money back please?  Twice as good as Ivermectin then.

Lovers of Control who won’t let go Award goes to Dr. Sam McConkey member of Ind. Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG)  advising the government on Covid (Ireland).   He was an enthusiast for Zero Covid and lockdown who predicted 100,000 deaths in Ireland.  In a radio show discussing the murder of a young woman in Ireland by an attacker he proposed the idea that men might need a licence to socialise.  New hashtag: #not all scientists are idiots.

Report of Conflict of Interests between ISAG and Gates Foundation etc.

conflicts

There’s more but remember what I said...

Oh yes, watch the journaliars begin to re-position themselves as Covid recedes.  ‘I was always agin it’.

Le Bon and the Russian Flu

(Professor Luke O'Neill in  a protective bubble.  Unfortunately he escaped crying 'I am not a number, I am a free man' )

 

 “Whatever strikes the imagination of crowds presents itself under the shape of a startling and very clear image, freed from all accessory explanation, or merely having as accompaniment a few marvellous or mysterious facts: examples in point are a great victory, a great miracle, a great crime, or a great hope. Things must be laid before the crowd as a whole, and their genesis must never be indicated. A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together. The epidemic of influenza, which caused the death but a few years ago of five thousand persons in Paris alone, made very little impression on the popular imagination. The reason was that this veritable hecatomb was not embodied in any visible image, but was only learnt from statistical information furnished weekly. An accident which should have caused the death of only five hundred instead of five thousand persons, but on the same day and in public, as the outcome of an accident appealing strongly to the eye, by the fall, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower, would have produced, on the contrary, an immense impression on the imagination of the crowd. The probable loss of a transatlantic steamer that was supposed, in the absence of news, to have gone down in mid-ocean profoundly impressed the imagination of the crowd for a whole week. Yet official statistics show that 850 sailing vessels and 203 steamers were lost in the year 1894 alone. The crowd, however, was never for a moment concerned by these successive losses, much more important though they were as far as regards the destruction of life and property, than the loss of the Atlantic liner in question could possibly have been.”

(from ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’ by Gustave Le Bon pub. 1895)

Le Bon was of course writing about the Russian Flu of 1889/90 which killed one million out of a world population of 1.5 billion.

russian flu

As Le Bon wrote if you want to create a crowd you need proper staging .  It helps if you have highly infectious images of the corona virus looking like a mini sea mine.  Think of that going off inside of you!  Masks and plague mavens and the absurd plastic bubble of Prof. O’Neill that could allow you to attend music gigs assist the general dread.   Boosters with the suggestion of rocketry that will get you above contagion and the constant repetition of phrases such as ‘flatten the curve’, ‘save the health service’ , ‘the real plague’ (of the un-vaxxed).  Yeah, Keep it going Shanie, don’t stall the digger.

Gustave Le Bon's 'The Crowd' and Covidology

 In these times of Covid and Covidology the work of Gustave Le Bon is apposite.  We should all cultivate our garden, our inner Voltaire and become, if we are not already, a touch contrarian holding to the adage ‘what everybody knows is (frequently) wrong’.  I have ommitted  the ‘frequently’ - that leaves room for the crowd to be occasionally right.  By Le Bon they have dropped rationality to the level of ‘not even wrong’ so right/wrong does not apply.    Is it the case that the increased alienation, atomisation, and anomie of modern society has enhanced the natural tendency to aggregation?  It is curious that a favourite American ‘genteelism’ (Fowler) is the word ‘egregious’ without reference to what herd is being surpassed.  It’s just bad to do that.  Odi profanum vulgus et arceo said Horace.

This very fact that crowds possess in common ordinary qualities explains why they can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence. The decisions affecting matters of general interest come to by an assembly of men of distinction, but specialists in different walks of life, are not sensibly superior to the decisions that would be adopted by a gathering of imbeciles. The truth is, they can only bring to bear in common on the work in hand those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual. In crowds it is stupidity and not mother-wit that is accumulated. It is not all the world, as is so often repeated, that has more wit than Voltaire, but assuredly Voltaire that has more wit than all the world, if by "all the world" crowds are to be understood.

.......... 

It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced by hallucinations unrelated to them. As soon as a few individuals are gathered together they constitute a crowd, and, though they should be distinguished men of learning, they assume all the characteristics of crowds with regard to matters outside their speciality. The faculty of observation and the critical spirit possessed by each of them individually at once disappears.

(from ‘The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind’ by Gustave Le Bon pub. 1895)

in all formats available at

The Crowd

Augusto Del Noce and Scientism

 I have been reading in, or letting my mind dapp (fishing technique with dry fly) on ‘The Crisis of Modernity’ by Augusto Del Noce.  How right he is on scientism and the denial of transcendence but it is ironic that the agents of stupidity Marx, Freud and Reich that he castigates are now utterly exploded.  Was it that they had their work to do and having done it they and their works and pomps were dragged down to Hades among the gibbering shades that require footnotes?  Scientism is still dragging its sullen explanations around but during Covid their inadequacy became patent.  True Science should be full of contrary positions but the Follow the Science sort of Science with its one true position must now be seen as foolish.  Of course those clothed in the alb of scientism will never admit that they were wrong and it may be the case that they haven’t realised it yet.  Even philosophers, those village explainers, have been duped or else rendered fatuous by the fear of death.  When this crisis has passed the rump of the mandate friendly thinkers will find their other hand.

Epsilon, Zeta, Theta

Now we have the Botswana ‘omicron’ variant which can only be cast out by a fully qualified witch doctor.  What happened to the rest of the Greek letters between Delta and Omicron eg. Epsilon, Zeta, Theta etc.  It’s all bone pointing now and the culprit is the unvaxxed.  We are invited to kiss a red hot axe and follow the science of voodoo.  Reason and logic have left the building when the vaxxed who can go anywhere are as contagious as the unvaxxed who can go nowhere yet they are the evil spreaders of pestilence. 

Common Sense on Covid

 Common sense consensus on covid  is that complete elimination is a mirage and moreover it will be a new recruit to the hazards of life to which some will succumb.  It is odd that now at this time the utility of mandates should be urged.  Even philosophers are climbing out of their burrows and shaking their tiny fists at anti-vaxxers and the hesitant.  These are people that are famous for the devising of complex thought experiments which tease out all the facets of moral problems who yet have failed to see what is patent.  Bari Weiss on her ‘common sense’ substack has a range of views on the mandate.  The medical people are dubious about it particularly Vinay Prasad whose cogent analysis breaks the population down into  various groups.  (Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. )

Bari Weiss common sense

For the philosophers in the academy who want to eke some moral maundering out of covidology: some texts.

Lament for the Makers by William Dunbar

The stait of man dois change and vary,

Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary,

Now dansand mery, now like to dee;

Timor mortis conturbat me.  (extract)

Lament

Aes Triplex by Robert Louis Stevenson:

THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  (opening lines)  (find at: Aes Triplex

‘To Philosophise is to learn how to Die’. by Michel de Montaigne. (no. 20)

His last and very apposite paragraph:

Children are frightened of their very friends when they see them masked.  So are we.  We must rip the masks of things as well as off people.  Once we have done that we shall see underneath only that same death which a valet and a chambermaid got through recently, without being afraid.  Blessed the death which leaves no time for preparing such gatherings of mourners.

Professor Murphy's Covidology Class

What was that movie that where there was a crowd standing round a man stricken by god knows what lying on the ground?   Then a fellow bustles through saying - make way please I’m a doctor.  He bends down before the man loosens his collar and calls for brandy please or whiskey.  Somebody hands him a flask out of a back pocket.  Our doctor takes a swig out of it and declares - ‘He’s dead’.

Such allopathy is a great way of steadying the nerves in a time of crisis and Richard Murphy is the doctor.  cf. :

covid's question, do we want to survive

Murphy is not a useful idiot for the Great Reset, his inutility is far more comprehensive than that though there is something of the same do re me about it with gentle grace notes of Marxist curse of capitalism, and pale Greenery in addition.  Covidology is an incipient science and you might say marks the alchemy stage preceding the full bloom of pseudo-scientific fatuity.  Mark this and you didn’t hear it first from me, society at large is coming to its senses after a period of enchantment.   The mixed messages that are coming from the bustling docs are being seen for what they are - decerebrate flailing.

Professor Murphy is an Englishman but his response is no different from that of our unique public intellectual Fintan O’Toole of the Irish Times.  With Gramsci sprinkles.  Society is to be remade and AC (after Covid) we will own nothing and we will be happy.  Sorry, that’s the other movie.

How many extra ICU beds did we get in Ireland?  Are there enough to deal with the ordinary flu in an ordinary flu season.  In 2009 the Health Service said 579 were needed, in September 2020 (last figures I can find) there were 280.  This was in answer to a parliamentary question and not one from the media who are now generally seen as the psi-ops division of the current administration.  Never mind, in a couple of years the present coalition will be gone and Sinn Fein will be along with their brand of fantasy politics.  Don’t cry for me Venezuela!

John Waters, Gemma O'Doherty, and the Bermuda Triangle of the High Court

 Cases brought to the High Court in Ireland run the risk of costs for the appellants which can be substantial. In cases where the matter to be decided on is deemed to be of public interest those costs are remitted.  John Waters (cf. Give Us Back the Bad Roads

bad roads) and Gemma O’Doherty brought a case questioning the legality of emergency provisions in relation to Covid.  The Wikipedia article on John Waters high court and his career sum up the result of this action:

"On 2 March 2021, the Irish Court of Appeal dismissed an appeal by Waters and Gemma O'Doherty of the High Court’s refusal to permit them to bring their challenge, and its award of costs of that hearing against them. Counsel for the state in the appeal argued that some of the applicants' submissions were Bermuda Triangle stuff."

All accounts of this result mention the Bermuda Triangle, and there is a generic quality to the reports as though all journalists, in the safety of their homes, were working from the report of a single intrepid member of the Fourth Estate.  Costs were awarded against Waters and O’Doherty.  Estimates put it at a five figure sum which is a severe range of financial pain.

What made John  and Gemma lose their bearings and challenge the world wide consensus that this virus was so supremely dangerous extraordinary measures needed to be taken?  Only one result was possible: disappearing off the radar.

In time this covidology will come to be seen as an amplified version of the Y2K problem that was going to cause massive disruption but didn’t.  The technocratic mind cannot abide uncertainty and wants no truck with negative capability.

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. (John Keats)

To live with risk is to live a human life.  It was a series of mutations that brought us from the big bang to now. Let’s get on with it. In fact we are getting on with it and doing up a 70‘s bungalow that our son has bought.  New plumbing, wiring, stoves, tiling and no shortage of tradesmen to do the work since the construction sites are closed down.  Don’t tell the government.

Ending the Covidology

   At some critical point a leader will have to emerge that can steer us out of rolling lockdown, someone with the courage to say what is obvious to anyone with common sense - covid and its variants are here to stay; the cordon sanitaire around little islands of health won’t work and a level of risk will have to be accepted.  You will catch it.  The present level of disruption is unacceptable.  Can EU bureaucracy manage to move away from the instinct of control which is natural to any bureaucracy.  I think probably not so it will be up to some one of the central powers to bell that cat.  My bet is on France but the British may go first to demonstrate their independence. 

Anti-Mask

 There are people I like that have gone off on a tangent about mask wearing.  On that issue they may be following the science but science isn’t everything.  The cartoon I saw recently about the man who erected a chain link fence to keep out mosquitoes has a point.  I wear a mask, as an amulet, to show I care.  The fearful get some sense of security though a general adoption of face coverings though its medical efficacy may be dubious.  I do not feel cowed into submission by doing so as some of the anti-mask crowd claim is its purpose.

When the vulnerable are vaccinated the government should decide that the rest may take their chances  and get the shot/s if they wish.  Get back to the old normal.  There should be no arm twisting.  ‘Go easy nurse’.

Covidology IX

Hence, this thought will never attain to a vision of the real, that is at the same time complete and crystal-clear. It will have to resign itself to plodding along the tedious and painful path of abstraction and of discursive reasoning in order to throw a bit of light on the data of experience. Never is the ego of the man in the world and exclusively thinking ego, for it is not in his power to strip himself of the complex of his sensations. These latter too, go to make up an opaque image, which clouds the vision of the mind and resists perfectly transparent intellection.

(from The Philosophy of Being by Louis De Raeymaeker pub.1954)

Even the very intelligent are led from the righteous path of evidence based reasoning by the way they carve up the world. Bemused butchery is patent in this interview:
Dr. Cahill speaks out

Outside of the science which I am not qualified to asses there occur those wood notes wild of conspiracy theory which my lay ear can catch. She doubts the fact of excess deaths. So then we are supposed to believe that the pressing of an ice rink to serve as a morgue was a device to further the narrative and the array of freezer trucks sheer theatrical ebullience.. Dr. Cahill was fed the line that the focus on meat plants as centres of contagion and infection was part of a plan by Bill Gates to promote his cultured protein factories. She did not demur.

Lacing up our sensible shoes and tying a double knot we plod along 'the tedious and painful path of abstraction and of discursive reasoning'. I love the Gregorian chant cadence of Raeymaeker's prose as translated by Edmund H. Ziegelmeyer.