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Words Fail Me. Well, Hardly.
So there I was this morning, laughing uproariously at a YouTube video of a sheep having fun on a trampoline:
And noodling around looking for other amusing animal videos because I don’t want to go out and put on any more house siding today….
I ran across the Australian news site. (Not sure how I got there; you know how it is on the Internet. Probably had something to do with looking at sheep which somehow led to …. Australia.)
Anyhoo, there was a link which looked interesting, so I clicked on it and up came this article: Coronavirus: WHO backflips on virus stance by condemning lockdowns.
It’s pretty dispositive:
Dr. David Nabarro from the WHO appealed to world leaders yesterday, telling them to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” of the coronavirus.
He also claimed that the only thing lockdowns achieved was poverty – with no mention of the potential lives saved.
“Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer,” he said.
And:
“We in the World Health Organisation do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Dr Nabarro told The Spectator.
“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Dr Nabarro’s main criticism of lockdowns involved the global impact, explaining how poorer economies that had been indirectly affected.
“Just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry in the Caribbean, for example, or in the Pacific because people aren’t taking their holidays,” he said.
“Look what’s happened to smallholder farmers all over the world. … Look what’s happening to poverty levels. It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.”
Glory be.
While not quite bereft of words, I can only think of two things to say:
- What happens to all those poor souls who’ve been cancelled and suspended from Facebook or Twitter for spreading “unsubstantiated information” and “misinformation,” by contradicting the diktats of the WHO, because, you know, science, now that science is catching up with the reality the rest of us live in every day?
- It’s my fond fever dream that this will play to Donald Trump’s political advantage, and that he’ll find a way to get some mileage out of it. But for any number of reasons, I’m not optimistic that will actually happen.
So I think I’ll go back to planning my trampoline installation. I’m already halfway there:
* I wonder if I can get a grant from the NIH, and sell it as “performance art?”
Published in Humor
Biden is going to follow the science. He tells us that every day. And he is doing exactly what he said he would do. That is why one can often see him down in his basement running around in circles. Some claim he is exercising. But we can’t be fooled, because we know he is following the science.
Lovely.
You’d think that all those 180° turns would make the WHO dizzy.
Dizzier.
And they could not predict these consequences six months ago? Good grief.
The strangest thing is that I saw this video for the first time appear on my youtube channels home page yesterday,
Yeah. It’s funny, really. Because when I look back at the history of science, even just using the Oxford dictionary as a starting point
it strikes me that science has never been well-served by “followers,” and that advancements in the discipline have almost exclusively been at the hands of those willing to ask questions, and challenge (you might say, “experiment”). The idea that science is “settled” is a very twenty-first century and (I think) Leftist concept, designed mainly to prevent interference with and alteration of, a political agenda that isn’t “scientific” at all.
In fact, the history of people who “followed” is usually told in terms of “blind followers,” usually those of one or another religious sect or denomination who rejected the advancements of science, because they were too short-sighted and constrained by their religious beliefs to observe and question the natural world as it actually and obviously is. (That’s not an opinion I share, just an observation (perhaps even a scientific one) that I think can be borne out my a bit of research and reading.
Religion is typically portrayed as having “followers,” the world of the timid, the fearful, and the magical thinkers.
Science is typically (or was until very recently) portrayed as the domain of the adventurous, the leaders, the inquisitive, and the bold. Now, all that being inquisitive or bold gets you is cancelled from Twitter on a regular basis, as you’re routinely chastised and told to start following (the science, of course).
Welcome to the Looking-Glass World.
Hey, The Who Won’t Get Fooled Again.
But the WHO is doing the foolin’
I am suddenly envisioning a satirical political novel in which there is a Science Party, and every time a new study comes out, they get up in arms to ban/unban something. “Study shows coffee causes X malady. Science Party moves to ban coffee.” A few pages later: “Study shows coffee cures Y malady. Science Party moves to unban coffee.” It could just be the background as a character reads the paper each day, with a real plot on top of it.
I want my response to this comment to be analogous to the sneery “you’re not talking about climate, you’re talking about weather,“ riposte one gets from the Left when one questions the ability of the climatologists (some of whom work for WHO), to claim uncannily precise forecasts of the effects of global warming on the Earth in 2035 or so, but who can’t get the meteorological prognostication for tomorrow afternoon even remotely correct. Not sure what the proper vocabulary is, but I think it’s more or less the same syndrome.
Brilliant. Have at it!
WHO, or at least Dr. Nabarro, must have seen the same BBC article I saw about the only countries in the world that have no cases of covid-19: ten islands in the South Pacific.
There, dear WHO, is your living laboratory.
I may, although rather than just unbanning, I think the things will go from banned to required.
You don’t remember the 70s, where any substance “ingested by or injected into a lab rat produced a report?”
Of course I do. That is exactly what I am referring to. Science!
Schmucks.
That is how they sold it to us the first two weeks. Most of us were like -“well okay” at that point.
They probably ought to go from banned to wurst.
With zero incidence of illness. And zero income.
The UK has bought into lockdowns in a massive way, and will be implementing draconian ones for large parts of the country tomorrow. I think their premise is as follows:
Buried in an article I read in the Telegraph yesterday (it’s behind the paywall) is this little nugget:
The new approach seems to be more lockdowns, meanwhile, those with other ideas are begging Helen Whateley, the Health Minister, to stop insulting them and insinuating that they want people to die:
This image of the UK, taken from a Sun article,
shows the three-tier, traffic light approach that is supposed to be instituted tomorrow. It’s widely expected that the new restrictions for the red-light district (a not insubstantial part of the country) will include the following: 1. Pubs and bars closed
2. No leaving the local area. Stick close to home
3. No mixing with other households, indoors or outdoors4. Non-essential businesses closed (again)5. No sports
6. Salons closed
7. More testing and tracing, and more “power” for “authorities”
8. More government payouts (“sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”) and “safety nets” for businesses and individuals
In addition, the British Medical Association has called for a mandatory face mask mandate, indoors, and anywhere outdoors where a two-meter distancing cannot be maintained, and for free medical-grade face masks to be given to those age 60 and older. It also wants to tighten the existing “rule of six” (only six people can meet, indoors or outdoors, right now), so that a maximum of two households can participate. (Note that there is no mingling to be had at the proposed “red” level going into effect tomorrow. The BMA is talking about at the yellow and green levels.) The actual levels of financial support to closed and failing businesses and employees has yet to be determined. (“Sooner or later you run out of other peoples’ money.”)
It has occurred to me, given the definition of “science” I referred to in comment #6:
that the sheep in the YouTube video at the top of the OP has both the “observation” and the “experiment” components nailed and is therefore deserving of the title “Scientist.”
Are you sure this didn’t come from a XXX web site? I find it oddly provocative . . .
Furthermore, a few months back WHO announced that three feet apart was quite adequate for social distancing. Nonetheless, the world seems obsessed with six feet or, in some cases, as much as 13 feet as evidenced in the vice presidential debate the other night. It’s difficult to know who to believe these days.
Great post.
I especially liked the opening video of Dr. Fauci.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, @stad. Far be it from me to meddle or to judge . . .
I’m sure YouTube will apologize to Scott Atlas now.
I think the sheep’s rigorous application of the scientific method is something that Dr. Fauci should aspire to.
OTOH, I don’t expect Sally Quinn to be writing erotic FanFic about the sheep anytime soon. (I don’t expect she named her novel, in which she acknowledges that the NIH scientist hero is modeled after the good doctor, Happy Endings, by accident.)
Maybe @stad would like to give it a whirl? He seems to be in the right frame of mind (see comment #21). 😉
Well I guess it’s not really an exact match, but this reminds me of a Monty Python bit from the 1970s. I’ve found videos of it before, but apparently they’ve all been taken down, so all that’s left is the script, it starts like this:
And later:
How soon they forget…
Apparently, a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t such a… well, whatever…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLHhEiV_9tk
The only thing that I could figure as to why they called it “The Man Show” is that someone must have registered “The 13-Year-Old Boy Show” before they could get to it.