The contagion of confusion

When the barricades can come down, and sanity and commitment to reality can be ushered back in, along with some sense of national service, vision and purpose, then the pangs of pain being conveyed will at last be redeemed

So, another day, another “emergency” proclamation. After a very animated “hartal,” clearly the powers that be are properly spooked, as Parliament felt the immediacy and presence of the protestors, as did MPs at their homes – the nation palpably expressing collective outrage.

The ruling party keeps tap dancing, looking shell-shocked that they can’t “swagger” their way out of this, or “arrest” their way out of this, or “curfew” their way out of this, or strike sufficiently patriotic bellicose poses to sway a no longer gullible, incensed electorate, pushed well past too many extremities. 

The Opposition look like extras in a comic sketch, “harumphing” and “huffing and puffing” with nary a collective, decisive action mobilised, nor a viable game plan, animatedly moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. 

And while sophomoric exchanges abound in Parliament, Tamil Nadu steps forth with critical relief, and Bangladesh offers another $ 2.5 million donation (what a difference “management” makes!), and the EU steps up with another 500,000 Euro disaster fund for the most desperate. 

So, let’s see what is keeping us “stuck” and keeping us desperately doing the global rounds with the begging bowl, while the entire population tells a literally “deaf” ruling junta to literally “go”.

No vision and no strategy

Not one word have I heard, no visionary call to arms, no strategic bull’s eye, no blueprint for a better future. Why not? Surely, that has to break through the despair, the present-day bleakness, uplift our gaze, call forth visionary resolve, and create the drive needed to transcend the downward spiral.

A vision is to take a stand for a larger future, a future worth growing up for and growing into. A strategy gives us the critical “must win battles” by which we can leverage our capabilities and channel the support and resources being offered into decisive action. By contrast, right now, we are just careening from one bit of gerrymandering nonsense to another.

Focusing on the essential

The world awaits our progress. Repealing the 20th Amendment would be a very positive signal flare. Entrusting finances to Parliament would be next. Having then neutered Presidential caprice to a large extent, one could ride out an interim government en route to fresh elections, while providing enough political stability to start stabilising the economy.

The idea of independent commissioners remains compelling, answerable to Parliament, subject matter experts to address glaring issues like governance, donor negotiation and debt restructuring, exchange rate stability, prioritising expenditure, judicial integrity and reform, enabling key economic growth drivers, and so on. 

There are not infinite issues. The Government is bloated, far too expensive, far too inefficient and ineffective. That needs surgery, which will require a mandate.

We need income to get past IMF “austerity” as fast as possible, tourism and ramping up exports are the fast track. Therefore, we need to stabilise the essential quadrinity of fuel, food, power and medicines, to be “fit for growth” once more. 

This volatility is driven by a dire inadequacy of foreign exchange, which exports, and tourism would address, hence the vicious circle we are currently skidding through.

Again, we have no manifesto from the Opposition or Government that isn’t more generics, empty speechifying and that favourite varietal of global political dementia, “magical thinking.” 

So, without a gameplan (stability first, then anything else), if the President goes, and no other party has a clear majority, then what? Therefore, we go to fresh elections, which are hard to afford without a measure of fuel and food and medicines and lights staying on. 

Military expenditure will need reining in (as I wrote, we are second only to Israel in our outlay, while children’s health statistics are far from glowing), grand road and related projects will need deferring – particularly any grandiose infrastructure projects with vast outlays and uncertain returns. 

“Speed to solvency” has to be our national mania. And towards that, inevitably, taxes will have to be raised.

Difficult trade-offs have to be discussed. How to safeguard health services (real “health” not pandemic phantoms, more on this below), and making sure that every productive sector of the economy is stimulated, safeguarded, and given every possible support, advocacy and impetus we can offer it, so we can start to shore up and stabilise this besieged economy.

A Shakespearean tragedy 

Shakespeare often, with the beguiling musicality of his pen, presented potentially great characters undone by tragic flaws, succumbing to jealousy, or avarice, or hubris. And then, compounding errors until initially minor missteps stockpile and metastasise until the fates or the furies or the comeuppance lavished by life catches up to their folly.

Here though any initial greatness is suspect, as the kamikaze act started so swiftly upon political victory. The 20th Amendment is a shattering indictment, a masterpiece of national folly. The Presidency was given sweeping new scope, and everyone else, Parliament included, was disempowered accordingly. It passed with an over two thirds majority, and one wonders, at the feckless servility of these parliamentarians. What Constitutional toxin, other than “balance” did they think they were cleansing the nation of? 

And then the family “brotherhood” was infused into more of the Government, with the disastrous results we now contend with. The same immunity to reality that was to later show up in dealing with organic fertilisers or managing exchange rates or foreign currency reserves, first ran riot over “COVID management”, destroying the economy, and turning the social and economic functioning of the nation “on” and “off” with a whimsical mindlessness that is terrifying in retrospect.

And the army became a surrogate of the State, taking over more and more functions. There was some kind of reassuring chloroform in having that loyal, unquestioning, often unnuanced cadre, omnipresent. 

Expertise became secondary to loyalty, appearances superseded realities, and we are now reaping the whirlwind accordingly.

There are analysts that remind us that just before “organic fertiliser”, we opted out of palm oil, which continues to “lubricate” numerous expanding economies in Southeast Asia. 

Then on the fertiliser front itself, of course, agricultural disaster was heaped upon ourselves by shallow assessments, an inability to mathematically analyse evident consequences, and a terrifying capacity for that aforesaid “magical thinking”. 

We had already undermined already faltering reserves with tax cuts, destroyed the economy over a not particularly lethal coronavirus, amply demonstrated by the “non-news” of WHO trying even now desperately to cobble together larger “death” numbers through post-hoc and clearly spurious modelling – largely ignored globally and by a chorus of countries who contest these inflated numbers simply by studying their own realities on the ground. 

And we kept everyone in a doom loop of “tests” without symptoms and “deaths” with multiple co-morbidities and a fascination for self-immolation by lockdown and lack of stability or clarity or economic viability that is just remarkable. 

And yet the country is beloved globally. It has remarkable corporate players and has rebounded from disaster after disaster. It is full of spirit, and spunk, and edge, and humanity and expressiveness. All this though has to contend with the enervating, bloated and utterly inept bureaucracy that rules and stifles this otherwise enchanted island. 

Most of the political parties are family concerns, clutching desperately to power. The debt mounts, the bloviating grows more blatant and reality-detached, and the world evolves and industrialises around us. 

And yet Lanka has every capability to carve out its own niches of excellence, and position itself: its geography, its size, its diversity, its high education rate, its sense of aesthetics, its passionate sense of service. It is a country which has the wherewithal to blossom. However, we cannot have a political class uprooting the very things we wish to irrigate, nurture and have grow.

So, the public is done with the Shakespearean tragi-comedy. And we need if not the wisdom of Solomon, at least what Polonius in Hamlet, exhorted his son to do: “This above all, to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, thou can’st not then be false to any man.” 

We must locate someone, who like Lee Kwan Yew in the Singapore of the 50’s, will take on the mantle of leadership, instilling discipline first, relentlessly, without compromise, but focusing that discipline on the productive prosperity of the nation. 

It is a discipline that paved the way for excellence. We need someone who rejoices in rescuing the nation from decades of theft, grift, and gaslighting, leading to massive swindling and deceit. Someone who treats the current moment as an inflection point whose pain and pathos, we simply must not waste.

And then the Health Ministry

In the midst of all this, we have more pointless “COVID” announcements, about fourth booster shots being inflicted on above 60-year-olds and children getting “vaccinated”, reminding us of the sad, mad, reality avoidance that the so called “developed” world succumbed to, in blowing up the world we once knew.

If this is an attempt at desperate distraction, to get plaudits for some irrelevant bid for medical sanctimony, few are likely to be impressed. 

Let us, yet again, take this lunacy to task. 

It is hard to imagine anything more asinine than “boosters” at this stage. Leave aside the nominal numbers being flashed even by the aberrant PCR test locally. These boosters have never been updated. We are injecting what was formulated to deal with the Wuhanese original, a virus that no longer exists!

Therefore the “boosters” have been increasingly ineffectual, and any short-term suppression of symptoms wanes and then it seems you are even more prone to infection. Even worse, the “mildness” of Omicron somehow becomes more of a mortal threat than for those not having outdated spike protein confections repeatedly flooding their systems.

Let us get some data points. MDR, a public broadcaster in Leipzig reports, “The number of severe complications after vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 is 40 times higher than previously recorded by the Paul Ehrlich Institute.” This report comes from a study with around 40,000 participants by the Berlin Charite, which says: “One result: eight out of 1,000 “vaccinated” people struggle with serious side effects.” For an illness that threatens virtually no one, how is that tenable?

Speaking recently at the 92nd Street Y in New York, here even, is arch “vaxist” Bill Gates: “We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu, although a bit different than that.” Thanks a lot Bill, reading the data in month one would have revealed the same thing!

Relative to the German studies, these are strict criteria and only those with “symptoms” lasting weeks or months and requiring medical attention were recorded. The researchers believe that since this is based on self-reporting, the adverse effects were likely under-reported by a factor of 40 (a number that keeps popping up globally). 

This is further reinforced by the whistleblower for BKK (one of Germany’s largest health insurers) who provided medical data from medical billing codes to show the number of severe adverse events were under-reported by at least a factor of 13.86.

Israel’s Health Ministry further corroborates this. 0.3% of all Israelis who got pointless boosters (remember they kept having surges, soaring infections and even climbing deaths), reported being hospitalised within 30 days and 0.5% reported Bell’s Palsy, and 4.5% reported some degree of neurological side effects. This is far beyond the acceptable pale, unless you were dealing with something with skyrocketing fatality statistics, and we emphatically are not, nor ever have been here.

And these were cumulative numbers just for boosters. If you include all doses, the 0.8% that emerges from the new Berlin Charite study makes eminent sense. 

If you extrapolate 8 per thousand “vaccinated” people with severe reactions, in the US that would be close to 2 million people severely injured, and even here, to date, these are only injuries evident in the short term. In any world in which public health factored in ahead of profit, this would be too blatant to ignore. 

A recent study out of Cyprus (published in Cureus) observed a 9.7% increase in all cause mortality in Cyprus in 2021 compared to 2020, and 16.5% compared to mean mortality over the last five years. The pattern emerged in the third and fourth quarters of last year, coinciding perfectly with the timing of the “vaccine” surge in the Mediterranean island.

And we continue to see this pattern of all cause mortality and cardiac injury/mortality around the world. And correlating with time and age group, as distinct from anything ascribable to COVID “cases”, we have a clear pattern of increasing deaths in 2021.

The authors of the study from Denmark and Cyprus indicate, “The number of all-cause deaths in the third quarter of 2021 was more than eight standard deviations further from the mean of deaths in the third quarters of the years 2016-2020.”

Then, MIT and Israeli researchers have published data showing that COVID shots were “significantly associated” with a 25% increase in emergency medical services for both cardiac arrest and acute coronary syndrome in 16-39 years olds in Israel from January to May 2021. This, yet again, coincides with the administration of second dose “vaccines” there. Also, Israel has only one ambulance service in the entire country, so the researchers had uniform data to work from.

On the other side of the ledger, a recent preprint Danish study that appeared in Lancet, followed the all-cause mortality of the Pfizer and Moderna trial participants, found no all-cause mortality benefit whatsoever from the two mRNA shots. What they did find was an increase in heart related deaths clearly evident over the placebo group.

What does it take for the ethically lapsed public servants of the world to stop endorsing, marketing, distributing and even mandating an untested product, that doesn’t do what it was touted to do (stop spread or reinfection), and coincides with athletes “mysteriously” dropping dead and cardiovascular and neurological adverse effects surging? And that’s just a year in!

Surely, here in Lanka, we can demand more than the same ceremonial incantations about “vaccination” and demand actual data points before we mindlessly and uselessly keep “jabbing” with outdated formulations.

The Bill Gates confusion

And why citizens everywhere need to question reality is shown from the new book from Gates about “How to Stop the Next Pandemic”. Essential message? Let’s do everything that failed this time, harder, faster and even more comprehensively.

Gates, a software developer with unfathomable wealth, which insulates him from the vagaries of life, sidestepping the travails and charms of what most humans experience and value, fantasises WHO being the home of “pandemic shock troops”. It will be called GERM (Global Epidemic Response and Mobilisation Team).

These unsupervised “experts”, detached from people’s needs and indifferent to autonomy would jet around (oh that carbon footprint!), inflicting a “one size fits all” remedy on everyone (like this time), ensuring the same catastrophic mistakes are endured by all. A central depot dispensing COVID tsars!

He also loves pointless mass testing. Perhaps we can continue to perfect “non-diagnostic” tests like PCR, which we can fiddle with to inflate or deflate panic. 

As a commentator pointed out, imagine a mandatory swab is sent to some central data base when you awaken, and before your breakfast eggs are digested, at the door is the “virus police” to “save” the world from your 0.15% IFR (infection fatality rate) contagion.

This is how countries are destroyed, already mismanaged, then distracted by utter nonsense like this. Gates swoons, in these delirious pages over modellers, “forecasting” that one day “modelling” will do better than “weather forecasting”. Not an enviable comparison!

He even tries to defend Neil Ferguson, the persistently, consistently inaccurate UK prognosticator, by saying his models were only inaccurate because people DID shelter in place and wear masks! Except they didn’t do either in Sweden (which has far better results than the UK in terms of excess mortality and economic rebound) and didn’t do the first in Japan (where society and economy stayed open and even “ascribed” COVID mortality stayed zealously tame). 

Clearly Gates doesn’t read much, as Ferguson’s paper was wrong about virtually everything. At one point, Gates lets the cat out of the proverbial bag, conceding “Ferguson’s goal was to show how high the stakes were.” Okay, then we’re doing propaganda, not modelling. 

One of the vilest arguments is trotted out with glee. That if you follow “expertise”, numbers stay low, and then people say the actions weren’t needed. Of course, Florida staying open and maskless from September 2020 joined Sweden in showing otherwise. Most of the African continent, and most of Asia pre-vaccination, likewise.

Millions of lives destroyed by lockdowns are acceptable to a man living in a 6,000 square metre house, jetting everywhere, being inconvenienced not at all, consumed by fake charts as palliatives.

For real people with destroyed lives, educations, plunged into poverty, retarding development, and countries facing inflationary meltdown over literally “nothing”, he magisterially absolves himself and his cohorts globally, gorged on pharma payouts and the ability to consolidate state power.

Wrecking businesses, locking children inside sweltering homes day in and out, while ignoring that spread happens indoors and not outdoors, Gates still wonders if influenza could be eradicated. He clearly missed the high school biology class that would have explained that substantial animal reservoirs make that impossible as our history of viral management has amply demonstrated.

But at last, he is finally disillusioned by those mRNA “vaccines.” Leaving aside lack of efficacy, they decay at high temperatures (small mercies!). He says, “Masks have been more effective,” which since they aren’t at all (explained in an earlier article from overwhelming data), is a fairly hard-hitting death knell to mRNA claims to fame.

The book is awash in questionable anecdotes that are “spun” and if investigated more deeply, come apart at the seams. It is the self-reinforcing feedback loops that should worry us, Gates kowtowing to officialdom. 

We had best take our smelling salts and realise it is human enterprise, local creativity, and the blessed human immune system, augmented by medicine driven by human care and not corporate profits that we need. And the low brow elites who claim to know it all, can keep war gaming. But let’s elect leaders and constitutionally dethrone these nuts.

Back on the Lankan home front

Barricades around a Parliament barricaded from people’s legitimate aspirations, scampering for relevance. The heart-breaking outburst of a youth being bundled off to a police bus, “Tomorrow your family will need food too.” And perhaps already today it needs better hope.

When the barricades can come down, and sanity and commitment to reality can be ushered back in, along with some sense of national service, vision and purpose, then the pangs of pain being conveyed will at last be redeemed.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Let’s leave those blithe creatures be and take bites out of this morass. 

Constitutional amendment, purse strings handed over to some viable interim Parliament, and then let’s get our best people chipping away at our most intractable problems. Progress, not perfection is what we need most immediately.