abroblog

Sometimes when happiness comes you don’t recognise it – isn’t that right?

It takes a while to understand what’s going on and then it dawns on you that you’re simply feeling happiness.

That’s true I think. So I wonder just how widespread it is? And it means you’ve not been happy, though you thought you were and you’ve forgotten how it feels to be happy.

I wonder if whole populations can be struck with that amnesia and that sorry condition?

Many travellers report on the happiness they find in different locations in the world – typically totally impoverished primitive native villages.

I have seen it in New Guinea, in the Solomons and in Aboriginal communities in Australia.

Perhaps they are last outposts on earth of natural human happiness?

This recession is by design, of course, the design of the knee jerk and out of proportion and inappropriate covid response.

It would be better if the nation were seen as a collection of ‘cells’ with each cell populated by people who volunteer to be part of it.

Within that cell they live and work as usual, mixing and mingling without onerous and restrictive, debilitating covid restrictions, just as we do at home.

This enables work to continue as usual. Building projects, housing, is a main contender for inclusion in such a programme.

In the event of one person in the ‘cell’ being infected with covid then every person in the cell immediately has to be subject to the same restrictions as that person and that all infected persons are restricted to.

That’s the natural concomitant of being part of that cell, of any cell.It is precisely what happens in the case of our actual present day ‘cells’ – our family homes. If one member of our family gets infected the whole family is subject to the same processes.

The current approach is to see everyone of us as infected and demands that we take precautions against every other one of us, all against all.

It has killed and is killing and will kill the whole nation.It is very largely wasted effort.

It is obvious, it is a matter of record, that Australia has had a minute level of covid contagion in the last couple of months. this means, of course, that over the vast preponderance of the country the measures have been not necessary.

Wasted effort. Wasted loss of production. Wasted loss of jobs. Wasted failure to create wealth.Waste.

Massive waste.

If a granular approach were adopted then the nation largely returns to full on performance, natural life.

The assumption being that we are all healthy until proven not to be. At least within our working, productive environments. Which is the guts of the matter.

And when an infection breaks out then it is immediately contained within a ‘cell’.

The mechanism springs into action and we all know what we’re doing and where the danger is.

The actual danger to those within a cell can also be assessed on the basis of information now available.

It becomes very clear that the vast majority of infections of young healthy people are asymptomatic.

Hence if you get infected within a cell your chances are heavily weighted in that direction.

The actual death rate amongst infected is down around 0.1% and if you remove the elderly and infirm from the equation it is even less.

The elderly and infirm, of course, would be removed from such ‘cells’ not permitted for their own sake to participate in such cells unless they were clearly aware of the risk and volunteered for it.

The death rate for the elderly and infirm can get as high as 15% it is said in some reports.

So a real danger for them.

But for the rest a much less danger and an avoidance of all the danger of a destroyed economy, a crippled country.

If we just adopt a military type strategy and assume our ‘cells’ to be healthy and use them as they are intended to be used for the benefit of the larger body while ever we can.

Our human bodies do not cripple the arm or the head because there’s an infection in the foot and neither should we.

Our current policy is almost an insult to us all inasmuch as it bespeaks an apparent attitude that we’re incapable of devising anything better than slow suicide.

I recently saw a child change his mind about the computer game he was making.

Small children can apparently make computer games nowadays with little or no programming skills. I imagine some kind of template and select and order components thing. Very good whatever it is.

The child witnessed a reconciliation between warring adults. Doing their warring in front of, within earshot of, the children as they so often thoughtlessly, carelessly and dangerously do.

As, in fact, to look for a second much further afield to a closely allied area, the ‘child protection’ agencies up to and including militant police do – astonishingly. Self assured and self justificatory to an astonishing degree and glowing with righteous indignation and as prepared to wield instant power and inflict damage on a hapless parent or family as any trigger happy terrorist they think nothing of demonstrating, manifesting their awful presence right there in front of children.

In fact they seem to prefer it.

Perhaps believing they are manifesting in a child’s mind a rescuing ‘super man’ ( or ‘superwoman’ ) coming to save them from the clutches of these awful parents.

I think such self deceiving ego centricity is more than merely possible, I think it probably.

They are sadly – very sadly – criminally sadly – mistaken in many, many instances.

They in fact strike unnamed terror into the hearts and minds of children is what they do.

So back to this child. It witnessed in numb silence an exchange of adult psychodrama power which in this instance concluded on a happy note.

The child, unprompted, came forward after the event and without mentioning the event, of course, as is the norm, announced he was making a game and had suddenly thought he could make a game without nasties in it, without bad and evil things, but a game that was happy !

Imagine the dynamic. Imagine what might have happened within that child. To be set like a stone in a sea of apparent hurt and violence and pain and anger and injustice with a heart and mind in anguish because of how that environment was the whole world to that child – ‘acting out’ as the psychologists say, mimicking reality as he knew it, by devising computer games which – as so many today – all ? – were full of violence and hatred and hurt – and hunched over and head and trying desperately to ignore and avoid the ‘war’ , the conflict going on around him, which involved him so much.

Numbly set in a sea of darkness.

And then a light broke through. Came peace. Came a little ray, a little example, a little of the presence of kindness, understanding, forgiving: love.

Just a tiny.

And the child’s heart rushed to meet it and his whole world changed in a moment….

Here we in what – the fourth day ? – of ‘heightened tensions’ and ‘worsening relations’ and ‘trade war’ or whatever, between the USA and China.

And the media follows it all with relish, eagerly, salivating as it goes.

Clearly prepared to follow it to where they are reporting on troop movements, military actions… death.

You can almost see them panting at the leash wanting to be first to report the first casualties of this ‘situation’.

But to my knowledge at any rate not a word as yet about the Chinese People of the American People.

It is not they who are doing this. It is just they who are and will suffer.

But they never get a mention.

Strikes me as wrong.

I was unaware of this excellent source for information.

https://lockdownsceptics.org/

I don’t think anyone is listening. Is the trouble.

Here’s an extracted paragraph from an excellent little article I will link to, later:

As usual, the politicians don’t admit their shocking mistakes. Had they done so they might at least have ensured this disaster won’t be repeated during the next inevitable pandemic. Instead they are now prescribing increasingly demented restrictions, such as a maximum of ten diners in all restaurants whatever their size, ten worshippers in vast cathedrals, and schools not immediately re-opened. On top of which they refuse to admit the obvious, that sun and fresh air have always been the enemy of the virus.

Isn’t it totally true? Isn’t it totally condemning in the awful truth of those simple examples it gives? Totally condemning of our political and media establishment and – this is the really awful bit – our own complicity in their crime inasmuch as we don’t speak out, don’t object, don’t put a stop to it, don’t demand better behaviour?

It is an article in the Spectator by a Mr David Flint who I’ve been unaware of until now.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/05/comfort-the-comfortable-afflict-the-afflicted/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OZWH%20%2020200523%20%20Back%20to%20Brexit%20%20AL&utm_content=OZWH%20%2020200523%20%20Back%20to%20Brexit%20%20AL+CID_517511bdc5c51e25ab5812d5304d2256&utm_source=CampaignMonitor_Australia&utm_term=Comfort%20the%20comfortable%20afflict%20the%20afflicted

That’s known as the IFR. It means the chance of dying if you get the illness.

It shows the percentage of infected people that consequently die of that illness.

A very important number.

That generally we are not told. In the beginning because it was not known – in the middle because the media didn’t care, being more interesting in whipping up the fever and the hype and promoting panic lockdowns and now – I don’t know. Shame perhaps. They (media, politicians, et al) don’t want the truth to come out until they’ve prepared some ‘ass-covering’ stories.

Well here’s an authoritative report – Mr John Ioannidis again, a much ignored authority from the very beginning – mentioned in an article from the Spectator magazine.

He estimates the true figure to be in a range always below 0.5%

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.13.20101253v1.full.pdf

and this is the Spectator article:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/stanford-study-suggests-coronavirus-might-not-be-as-deadly-as-flu

Here’s an article saying things I like to hear:

Seems to me that nowadays therapy doesn’t begin until you get into the Doctor’s room.

I mean it is not out there in the waiting room. Is it? Ever sat in a hard chair with nothing to do and can’t go away for even five minutes and with some physical discomfort – for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half?

In a doctor’s waiting room? I have. And I know, of course, many others have. Why ‘of course’ ? Well they were all around me, waiting, as I waited.

And many is the time I’ve seen them waiting and declined to join the queue, gone away till another day. My illnesses not being so immediately critical.

Yes. Not ‘therapeutic’. Not at all. Quite the opposite if anything.

And that’s not to mention the queue before the encounter with the ‘receptionists’ and the actual encounter. Intimidating, wearying, annoying and downright aggravating as they can often turn out to be.

Why not? Why not therapeutic?

It seems the attitude the medical profession nowadays believes that their Hippocratic oath to dispense therapy is satisfied by dispensing a ten minutes (timed, planned ‘consultation’) face to face with a patient.

The conditions the patient waits in, the environment the patient comes from, goes to, is none of their concern apparently. Today.

I just found today’s ‘modern Hippocratic Oath’ . Apparently there’s a number them.

A Modern Version of the Hippocratic Oath

I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and judgment, this covenant:

I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as is mine with those who are to follow.

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism.

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will not be ashamed to say “I know not,” nor will I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a patient’s recovery.

I will respect the privacy of my patients, for their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will prevent disease whenever I can, for prevention is preferable to cure.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.

If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.

The modern version of the Hippocratic Oath was written in 1964 by Louis Lasagna, Dean of the School of Medicine at Tufts University.

I particularly like these paragraphs as they seem to me to point to what is missing in to day’s waiting rooms and general attitude of the medical profession :

I will remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife or the chemist’s drug.

I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the person’s family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.

I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.