Monthly Archives: April 2020

Dr Daniel Erickson and Dr Artin Massihi dissent.

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On Thursday 23 April, in Bakersfield, California, two medical doctors held a press briefing. They are Dr Erickson and Dr Massihi. They tell us more about themselves in the briefing, but meanwhile I can tell you that they are co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care.

Also, in order that we might listen closely to what they have to say, let me first go over some interesting details concerning this briefing.

This video rapidly went viral (I have seen various figures posted – like 5 million!); YouTube took it down, claiming that it violated its rules; it was quickly reposted by numerous parties with copies. Time will tell how long they will last, so my link is to a posting on BitChute. I seem to be having embedding issues with it, so if it isn’t below simply click the link or copy and paste the URL that is.

The configuration of the audio is distinctly amateurish. If you happen to be listening on headphones you will find that the doctors speak only into your left ear. When questions come via the mic in the audience the audio clicks into mono. There’s a probable reason for this, but I won’t bore you with it. The room looks to be small enough for the audience not to need a PA system, so these microphones are simply for us watching the video. (Because multiple people have been reposting it, there are some versions online that are much shorter – therefore edited – and have had the audio glitch fixed. My link is, I believe, to the raw original.) At any rate this tech mistake strongly suggests that we are watching two medics with something they want to tell us, rather than a slick activist setup.

The doctors happily take and reply to questions while they are going along, rather than restricting them to a Q&A session at the end. I approve of this, and do it myself at seminars, because it provides invaluable detailed audience analysis. By the questions, and the body language of those who didn’t ask but heard the questions, you can glean really penetrating audience feedback on what really concerns them. You are also manifestly demonstrating that you have nothing to hide. It’s not practical for all presentations, but I commend it when it is.

They both shoot from the hip. This conveys sincerity and command of the subject. They read from notes only when quoting statistics or claims that others have made. This conveys accuracy.

Now let us watch the Dr Erickson Covid-19 Briefing

https://www.bitchute.com/video/v5A1B6KIvusv/

They (mainly Dr Erickson, but both are super-articulate) say what they want to say, and you are quite capable of evaluating for yourself their sincerity, so I think it would be impertinent of me to comment beyond a small autopsy on this briefing.

I came across a link to something claiming to be a refuting of what the doctors had said. It turned out to be a video clip from ABC of a few seconds of a local authority spokesperson saying that the head of the health department had denied, contrary to what you hear at 37:50, agreeing with what the doctors suggested. We did not hear this from the head of the health department, merely hearsay from a spokesperson. The ABC reporter said that further details had been sought, but no answer as yet received.

And finally, I suggest you consider why YouTube (owned, of course, by Google) are so eager to silence what Erickson and Massihi have to say.

I’ll leave it there.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had one job

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At this moment a huge proportion of the world is under house arrest, because of the advent of a virus for which there are insufficient data to justify apparently any recourse other than overweening precaution. A world pandemic, officially declared as such by the World Health Organisation (WHO), has triggered the first half of a global reboot.

China – or more particularly the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – has suffered huge damage to its reputation, not so much because the virus came from China but because CCP went to great lengths to cover up the news, persecuted its own doctors when they tried to warn the world, and then lied about it all. At least as much damage has been done to the brand of WHO, which has collaborated with CCP throughout this process.

The Director General of WHO is Dr Tedros. Here he is delivering the closing speech of the 71st World Health Assembly in May 2018. WHO comes under the umbrella of the United Nations.

Tedros occupies his first four minutes, presenting gold-packaged gifts to people who have chaired meetings of this assembly. Each comes to the lectern, receives his package, proceeds carefully to unwrap his gift before the audience to reveal that it is a gavel – not much surprise, as Tedros said at the outset that this is what they were getting. So this is why, although there are just three of them, it takes four minutes for this little ceremony to be dragged out. At 04:10 Tedros seeks permission to begin his speech, but there’s still more than twenty seconds before he has completed the Hierarchical Hello. Finally at 4:32 we get the speech.

It is not a speech, it is a reading. Tedros is a talking head, delivering ten minutes of platitudes that are so bland and bromidic as to require serious self-discipline to follow. I am therefore quite proud to have caught this at 8:09 –

The independent oversight and advisory committee has given its stamp of approval to our work on emergencies, and has recognised that we are better positioned to act with greater speed and predictability…

… greater than what? The world did not witness conspicuous speed in January 2020.

If you find yourself unable to sit through all of the speech, I don’t blame you, and yet –

I actually feel a bit sorry for this man. He is a walking embodiment of the Peter Principle, and is also a terminal sufferer from bureaucritis, an ailment I have explored before on this blog, most recently last week. He feels to me to be a puppet, no more responsible for his actions than – say – Greta Thunberg.

A certain amount as been made in the media about his not being a physician, his doctorate is an academic one. All his predecessors, apparently, were medics; but so what? Speciality is often the enemy of intelligence – we can all think of examples. He has been lifted beyond his ability by the vagaries of UN psephology that help activists to punch above their weight. In this case it appears the activist was CCP, and though miserably out of his depth Tedros owes to China this position that no doubt is swelling his Swiss account. This could explain his current championing of China over USA, despite the latter contributing ten times as much to WHO coffers.

In May 2017, just before his appointment was made, it emerged that in preceding years there had been, on his watch in his own country of Ethiopia, alleged coverups of three outbreaks of cholera which were wrongly categorised as “acute watery diarrhoea”. One of his early actions after taking office was to choose Robert Mugabe as a WHO Goodwill Ambassador, but the instant outcry caused the offer to be quickly withdrawn.

He’s out of his depth, but it’s a widespread phenomenon in bureaucracies that conspicuous failure is often a shortcut to meteoric promotion. It certainly happens in the British public sector. It’s almost as if devotion to a greater cause acts as a sola fide that obliterates all errors.

What keeps me awake is pondering what that “greater cause’ might be.

James Surowiecki: the Wisdom of Crowds

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In May 2016, at the CMX Summit East, James Surowiecki gave a talk entitled The Power of the Collective. Essentially it was a promotion of much the same message he launched in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, published way back in 2004.

I thought I’d explore it, in order to compare and contrast the message with Douglas Murray’s appearance on this blog on 19 March, and his latest book The Madness of Crowds. Are they contradicting each other?

No.

Let’s get the rhetor stuff out of the way quickly so as to get on to Surowiecki’s message. He speaks well, shooting from the hip as a proper speaker should. Voice projection is good, diction good, generous expressive gestures. Being picky I’d have liked him to maintain broad brushstrokes a little more, as he occasionally gets bogged down in detail. He should try to save the detail for his anecdotes which are excellent – particularly the last.

His only apparent stage-craft failing is a lack of light-consciousness because he too often drifts stage-right, putting his face into the gloomy penumbra of the spotlight-edge, and occasionally actually moving completely out of it into stygian darkness. That spotlight is not fixed, it’s a follow-spot, so a slap on the wrist is due its operator; but if Surowiecki had learned the actor’s trick of ‘loving’ his light in order constantly to be seen at his best advantage, he would never have gone into darkness.

The people are always smarter than their masters.

That’s an anonymous aphorism I first picked up on decades ago, and subsequent experience has always confirmed it. It’s not that the masters are thick, though quite often they are a little – that’s a result of the type of mentality that wants to obtain fame or power – but the main reason is well-described in Surowiecki’s speech. Breadth and depth of experience and opinion will always make a community’s judgement better than those who claim to lead it. That’s why I detest calling politicians ‘leaders’. They are not: they are representatives.

The way optimally to harness the wisdom of the crowd is by democracy, free speech, and small government.

Wherefore therefore Douglas Murray’s “Madness of Crowds” in all this? Murray clearly shows us the consequence of silenced dissent, no-platforming, the revolting bigotry of political correctness, hate-filled hate-laws, and so on. Surowiecki clearly shows us the brilliance of a community consisting of the widest possible divergence of opinion and experience. Murray and Surowiecki are on the same side.

Though small, there has to be a government. There has to be a group of representatives, empowered by the rest of us to take rapid decisions when – for instance – a deadly virus threatens us.

But for my money the most dangerous and widespread disease now threatening our planet and the people upon it is what I call bureaucritis. We are threatened by the inexorable growth of an international army of parasitic, unaccountable, self-perpetuating, self-regarding, and monumentally unimpressive pen-pushers. They are drones when they should be workers. They constantly fail in their judgement and urgently need to be brought to heel – or, in many cases, put out to grass.

How? Don’t ask me: I’m not wise enough to supply an answer to that. I’m not a diverse community.

Queen Elizabeth

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On the evening of Sunday 5 April, 2020, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth broadcast a special message to her subjects. (In passing, this was aired about one hour before Prime Minister Boris Johnson put himself into isolation.)

Judging by the comments on YouTube it was heard by many more than her subjects. Judging by subsequent comments on social media it was warmly received. It was interesting how many of them began along the lines of, “I am a republican, but …” It seemed to drive home to many the value of a resolutely apolitical Head of State, especially one as wedded to duty as this one.

Before we dissect the content, it’s worth registering the decorum (if you clicked that link to my Glossary page, you might be advised to keep it open). HM finds precisely the right mix of calm authority and affection. This is less surprising when we are told that she gave her first broadcast in 1940. She is probably the only person on the planet who continues broadcasting after eighty years.

A bald opening. This doesn’t surprise me: HM has, to my delight, opened her Christmas broadcasts baldly for some years. If I am really picky I’d have liked a half-second longer silence before she began speaking, but that is down to the editor.

She is straight into anaphora, “disruption …”, and the second element in that repetition contains a triad. These devices have these terms because they were identified and codified by orators in Ancient Greece.

She pays tribute to those working through the disruption, but also wonderfully to those forced not to work, and while that is sinking in she hits the Unity button –

Together we are tackling […] united and resolute…

Shakespeare has Romeo reassuring Juliet, “All these woes shall serve for sweet discourses in our times to come.” It’s a theme that has served speakers well over the centuries, and HM echoes Winston Churchill’s “This was their finest hour!” when encouraging us to enable posterity to hold us up as a fine example.

HM would be breaking her life’s habit if she neglected to include The Commonwealth, because she is their Queen too. She doesn’t break the habit, and the inclusiveness is expanded in the words, “of all faiths and of none“.

It’s a nice touch (as well as a reinforcement to the decorum) to point out the potential opportunities of being self-isolated – “slow down, pause and reflect…” And it’s another triad.

The Unity button gets more work when “… we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour“, but she is saving the strongest till last. Drawing once more on the wisdom of the ancients HM’s peroration is a symploce, “We will […] again.”

The final element, “We will meet again” echoes of course Vera Lynn, and those words have deservedly become the Face of the broadcast. But my personal favourite phrase in the whole speech comes immediately before the peroration. HM speaks of “our instinctive compassion to heal”.

Thereby lies my optimism, my faith in humankind.

Titania McGrath – Queen of Woke

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Comedy Unleashed very seldom hosts serious talks. In November it hosted a lecture from best-selling author, social media activist (her Twitter following is nearly half-a-million), and Queen of Woke, Titania McGrath. Among other things she was promoting her latest book, Woke.

Comedy Unleashed is run by Andrew Doyle, who also has a hand in Titania McGrath.

An opening pause is a well-tested device for conveying confidence and settling an audience. The Lord Hague of Richmond often does it, though I don’t think I’ve known his last more than twenty seconds or conclude with a sigh.

However, gestures (see 0:47) involving a hand on the back of the head is a nerve symptom. Psychologists tell us that it signifies stress or tiredness and that it is hard-wired into us. Even new-born babies do it. McGrath habitually flicks her hair with this gesture, suggesting to me that her hands are used to fiddling with the back of the head.

At 4:30 she moves stage right, and into darkness. My immediate reaction is to castigate her for such a basic error, but it quickly turns out that the stage management has failed to cue a lighting change to accommodate this move unmasking the centre-stage screen. Though the lights do eventually change she liberates an ill-mannered comment on the subject, and the lighting engineer takes revenge by pulling his fader back down. Lighting engineers enjoy pulling their faders up and down.

Now that the screen is unmasked we see a series of very moving slides. I found it deeply moving.