A Note from France

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular correspondent from Florida and France, now in Normandy tending his spring garden and planting strawberries and vegetables, has been musing since a hurried flight in March from the USA, catching one of the last international flights available. His comments challenge the consensus of health professionals but make for interesting reading. - GNH

The Covit-19 Issue

by Terry Field

 Covid 19 is NOT what we all were told it was. Accepting this will be the challenge.

Where did the initial perception of Covid 19 come from?
  
Below, Terry in his magnificent vegetable garden during a summer in Normandy.

The operative point in this story is the G7 discussions a couple of months ago. There, the governments were presented with two sets of projections, one from the CDC and the other from a London based university.  Both suggested an apocalyptic death rate, with accompanying COPD for many survivors that would partially disable a good proportion of the population, perhaps permanently.

The governments hit the panic button.  The British government, a little later than the rest, was forced to fit in with the consensus.
Given what they were told would happen based on the then projections, that was understandable.

Other policy options were employed in panic mode.

Hospital ITUs were converted to dead with Covid 19. Theatre wards were converted. General hospitals and teaching hospitals were used for Covid as well as a reduced load of other treatments.
A gigantic wave of mass deaths was anticipated.
  
How to test if the virus is there - test only for the living virus infecting the host.

Then only one form of test was available, a test of the presence of the virus infecting the host and the only one employed - the test for the disease. This test was so rationed it was for most part only used used on the sick. A tiny subset of the total population. 

None else were tested. Except for Germany, where more were tested, but until the sero positive test was employed, health professional could only look at those carrying the live virus.

The data gathered was composed of two elements, one rational – the numbers of dead, the other a pointless statistic to use as a denominator.  The latter used as a denominator produced the impression of a horrifying death rate, and the hysteria engendered by the initial models became the backdrop to reinforce this observation. 

Absurd and wrong. But now believed.

It is important to understand that, in all this, the nature of the disease itself was not known, and there was not a memory of the old 'isolation hospitals' we had always employed for communicable diseases with no effective treatment.

The TB isolation hospitals, always remote and isolated, never part of the general hospital, were long forgotten.

In the place of the rapid creation of isolation centres of treatment, with discrete teams of clinicians who never interacted with other patients, the Covid patients were in in general blended into the general hospital centres. 

Cross infections amplified the death rates since the old, the frail and the very ill are disproportionately represented by their presence in the general and teaching hospitals.  Obviously, the disease is more dangerous for some of them.

The  exposure of patients in hospitals suffering from non-Covi-19 maladies led to the inadvertent spreading of the virus within the general hospital and teaching hospital setting.

Two regions in Italy approached the treatment of their Covid-19 infected patients very differently, and the different consequences of the different approaches are stark.

In Lombardy, the numbers of deaths have been very large indeed. AN Italian epicenter of suffering and death, where, in some little villages an entire generation of older people have died. There, the noble intention was to offer the best possible treatment to Covid patients, offering rapid treatment in a hospital setting. The good intentions in Lombardy produced a perverse and dreadful result. Large numbers of medical staff were infected in the hospitals, many died, and in addition, significant numbers of non-Covid patients within the hospitals contracted the virus. 

In marked contrast, in the Veneto, (which itself created the concept of the quarantine in the Middle Ages, keeping ships offshore for 40 days to prevent the plague entering the city) , the approach was very different, keeping the Covid patients separate from the hospitals, often treated at home.

Because of this approach, the lack of a similar concentration of treatment of infectious disease and also diseased and cross-infected patients, prevented a similar density of disease transmission, and the number of deaths were sharply less.

Lock Down – Shelter in Place.


Right, Terry shelters for a time in his
French wine cellar, no doubt checking on his calvadous supply.


The policy prescription of lock down was intended to slow down the rate of transmission of disease, whilst clinicians got to grips with understanding the virus, tested possible treatments from re-purposed drugs, and whilst capacity to treat the disease was ‘ramped up’ in the countries affected. 

The imperative that galvanized governments was the modeling projections that suggested there would be a particular very high level of morbidity and mortality should there be no lock down, and a very significantly lower death rate could be expected if lock down was enforced.

Until the last week or thereabouts, there has been no estimation of the total level of penetration of the viral disease into the general population . It was assumed the penetration was still light, and lock down, or shelter-in-place would avoid a widespread infection spread, thus avoiding the hospitals from being overwhelmed.
  
So what data did the British government access concerning the spread of the virus? 

The only testing available was the test of the presence of the virus, and that from tiny numbers of available tests.

Because of this, the estimation of infection by testing could only identify some of the infected- the ill who were selected to have the rare tests used upon them. In consequence, the data simply counted some of the sufficiently ill to warrant testing.  There were few tests to discover the currently infected and asymptomatic, and no capacity to identify the numbers of the population where the virus had infected, but the infected person had beaten the virus, the virus was no longer present, sero-positive status in the previously infected person was present, and the condition of the infected person, when infected, had been either symptomatic or asymptomatic.

In other words that data from tested ill was useful for medical treatment purposes, but of no value and very misleading indeed as any sort of estimate of total infection in the body of the population.
The testing of the ill was an extremely bad indicator of the reality of the infection however, and that is coming to light now.

Yet that figure has been used as the denominator to calculate the estimates of mortality rates; and of course such a tiny denominator suggested to so many that the mortality rate is much greater than influenza, and warrants this extreme interruption in business and the immense debt now being incurred to support the population no longer working. This inadequate, incorrect and highly misleading mortality calculation supported the initial horrifying model projection calculations; the terror appeared to be reinforced, as has been the approach of total lock down.

But all this has now been shown to be an illusion. The projections of death rates have not been experienced in reality. The numbers simply do not begin to correspond to the numbers as projected. This is not in any way to diminish the dreadful reality for the people and their families so affected. But the projections, and the reality are entirely different.

So why? Because so few were infected and the lock down worked?

Well that could have been an explanation, but illuminating new data – this time of actual total infected persons and post infected persons in the populations puts to such a possibility. The University of Stanford department of epidemiology, in the person of Dr. Ioannidis has conducted an investigation in Santa Clara to see not what only the live infected ill numbers were, but what the total infection in the population had been, including the recovered with no virus remaining and antibodies present, and where the people so infected had been ill, or entirely asymptomatic.

Thus the full picture in population infection was identified for the first time.  What was the result of this data? The data shows a total infectivity 100 times the level of the tested-for-the-live-virus-and-ill. 

So: 100th of the mortality rate previously estimated!

From which Dr Ioannidis identifies that the virus is, for the whole population carrying a mortality rate and risk similar or less than influenza. Only for specific require small population subgroups is the Covid-19 virus a significant risk of severe illness and death. He is quite clear that the real risk bears no relationship to the risks suggested in the models that propelled the governments to their present restrictions and controls.

I repeat, an overall mortality rate no higher than the flu.

To repeat, since this is vital to understand, he identifies that the disease is safe for the vast majority of the total population, who have and if not yet infected then will have the disease completely symptomatically, as the virus enters the body and is killed by the immune response.

This data has been supported by very similar methodology, now used in Germany, where in the area described as the ‘German Wuhan’, the total infection penetration of the population there is a massive 15%.

Dr. Ioannidis of Stanford University is clear from this data that mortality and morbidity risk is only significant for specific groups, including old people over 65 and those with serious pre-existing conditions.

It is dangerous for them, but not for the generality of the populations of the world.

 The virus, it was originally suggested, would attack the immunocompromised, yet the experience suggests the picture is more complex, It is not certain that it attacks the immunocompromised, since many deaths seem to be coming from a cytokine storm, where the immune system attacks the lungs and organs, causes blood to clot all over the body, and precipitate strokes and heart attacks.

This is not the action of the virus itself. Accordingly it is not yet certain that the immunocompromised are at significantly enhanced risk. Similarly, asthmatics, originally stated to be in particular danger, are shown not now to be statistically significantly in danger from Covid 19.

In sum, the original expectations of the scale and nature of the virus are not born out by experience. 

A disturbing number of doctors nurses and other medical staff  have died and been infected, but again, the specific method of treating a concentration of the virus infected in small areas may be the cause by drenching the medical staff in virus, where, in additon to sometimes inadequate PPE, their immune systems are overwhelmed.

Treating patients with a highly contagious disease for which, if the patient is made very ill here is no effective treatment in the midst of general hospitals, taking over ITUs, taking over hospital theatre facilities and not using remote infectious disease centres for such treatment has greatly added to the death rate.

Sending recovering covid patients to retirement homes is a policy beyond the imagination for any rational responsible plan. The deaths in retirement homes have been scarring for all. They should have the highest possible protection. That policy did not offer such. 

The reality of policy failure, even where instituted with the best of intentions, but born of a lack of understanding.

The Stanford work identifies the need to be run by data. But now we are run by terror.

Terror caused by three things:

1 The absurd science fiction projections of mass death and disabling illness. This is now described by Stanford epidemiologists as being 'science fiction'.

2 The absurd denominator of tested people positive with the live disease AT THE POINT OF TESTING producing a ridiculous mortality rate to support the original, absurd projections.

3 The incapacity of governments to alter course after an initial, truly disastrous set of policy decisions have been adopted, thus continuing to drive the economies of the west into collapse.

The consequences of the comprehensive policy failures:

- the lock down, 
- the concentration of disease in the body of the general hospital system,
- the acceptance and continued support of wrong data,
-  and now the refusal to respond to the new sero positive data of TOTAL infection history in the population, where the disease has appeared, been killed by immune responses. 

In China it now appears that the virus has 'been and gone' and where asymptomatic experience is the reality for the overwhelming majority.

The refusal to respond to this new situation is ruinous, as the lock down continues on a false premise.

The Chinese were not successful in suppressing it, it is suggested by qualified people, but it ripped through the population so quickly it had peaked before any idea of lock down happened, and then the disease collapsed naturally. As pandemics do. They were not cleverer the the rest; they just caught the curve when it was about to collapse anyway.

The distorting effect of time preconceptions and false expectations.

The virus replicates at lightening speed compared to flu and most other experience. The result is a rapid appearance of large numbers of the ill, and the dying, in hospitals.

This is part of the illusion. We instinctively expect that rate to continue as it would for flu, but flu infects over a long period. This, left to itself, flies through the population very quickly, then collapses. Thus the appearance of large numbers of the sick only makes any sense if the level of infection in the general population is understood. It was not. Now it is becoming so.

In Santa Clara, Germany ,and now in China via the work of Scandinavian epidemiologists using proper testing with resultant data, the depth of the infection that has produced the cases of the ill is becoming known. 

The reality is that this disease is present throughout the populations, in very large numbers, and the death rates that we see are in fact comparable to or perhaps less than seasonal flu. The truncation of the effect in time is what gives the false impression of something far worse, but that is all it is, a subjective impression.

Why this matters.

From the beginning until now, all are terrified, locked down and see TV images of the dying in ITUs everywhere. That reinforces the illusion of high total-population death rates and massive personal risk.

The reality, shown by Ioannidis of Stanford, and now also by others in Germany and China, shows something very different, and for nearly everyone save the very old and frail, is a disease that is, quite simply, not dangerous.

The learning curve of the disease suggests some treatments may be effective, but the policy choices taken, even for the best of reasons , are inappropriate, and now are pointlessly disastrous to the economy. They impoverish the tax base, cause huge suffering and death from the non or inadequate treatment of all those suffering from other diseases whose treatment is stopped, and/ or who are cross infected with Covid 19 in general hospitals and die where a policy of isolation hospital treatment would have save them.

The lock down also has another, very dangerous effect.

This disease is proceeding through the population, infecting all these working in the general economy, maybe slower because of social distancing, a sensible policy, but when the economy is released from lock down, it will accelerate, and, for nearly everyone, infect them and be defeated by their immune systems.

Since the death rate expectations are fantasy projections, there is NO justification for the lock downs.

None. The co-morbidities of such as kidney disease and the need for dialysis made difficult given the spike in demand and the inadequate supply of dialysis machines for these Covid patients is no justification for lock down.  It is an argument for building many dialysis machines now, or trans-shipping them from areas where they are in surplus. Nothing more.

This disease has been grossly mis-characterised, initially by modelers, from which panic decisions were taken, then by the inadequacy of data, limited only to the tested 'live'-infected.

The failure to isolate recovering patients and sending them to convalesce in retirement homes has in all probability had the result of introducing the disease, in a number of occasions, into the concentration of the most vulnerable patients, many of whom have died.

This disease has been comprehensively misunderstood, and the infection rate in the community, until the last few days, not tracked.  

We have only now begun to see, by the use of appropriate testing of whole populations the extend to the infection. Now we can see it is not at all what we feared.

The politicians in Britain and elsewhere do not yet see this. Why?

Well if I had advised government of 'science fiction' projections 
(Dr Ioannidis of Stanford's description, not mine), and if I had even an inkling of the reality were I to have to sharpness of mind to read the Santa Clara data and now the German data, I would very probably keep my head down!

Now the question will be raised – so where are the vast numbers of the dead; are we to believe it was simply the lock down that stopped it????? The answer to that will come when the economy is opened up.

And if I were a politician and I had comprehensively smashed the economy, and I now knew it was based on science fiction projections, and it was actually done for no good reason, and the reality shows the death rate for the infection levels is modest, I would have the biggest political problem I could begin to imagine. As they now have.

So here we are – populations utterly terrified for not sufficient good reason, paralyzed to continue with ruinous and absurd policies, and no sign of even building isolation hospitals for infectious disease, as our wise ancestors did. The TB hospitals only closed after Streptomycin was discovered and used. 

The problem now is acute – if the mortality rate did not justify the full lock down, then releasing its grip on the population will inevitably see a rise in the daily death rate after a short period. That death rate will not be sufficient to justify the lock down since the other ‘side of the coin; will be the high level of asymptomatic infection in the general population, but relatives and media will scream that government policy has resulted in increased deaths. As an illustration of the political problem, and the inability to modify policy, today this was the statement of the British Prime Minister:

‘In a surprise statement outside 10 Downing Street - his first public appearance in weeks - the PM said we are now 'wrestling' Covid-19 to the ground but ending restrictions now would cause 'a new wave of death'.

Policy should be driven by data, as Dr Ioannidis has rightly stated. I sense Johnson may know some of the data by now, but he is not driven by it. Indeed he refers to death, not data. No surrender to the terror yet.

Johnson refers to ‘a wave’ of death. Well, there is a ‘wave‘ of death from flu. From driving vehicles, from male suicide, from a any number of things, and such is accepted as the framework of risky life and death. The new data for Covid 1119 suggests it should join that group of background realities that stalk us particularly in old age,  but does not overwhelm us as was originally feared. Ioannidis is, in my view, correct in suggesting that we should do the same with Covid, whilst seeking effective treatments and appropriate isolation of the very vulnerable. 

As does Lord Sumption, looking at our ‘terror of death’ as the driver of irrational behavior.

There is a ‘wave’ of death from not treating old people with antivirals in winter. We choose not to because it is unaffordable. And yet is destroying the totality of the economy ‘affordable’???

With the unimaginable death rates that social and economic collapse across the world would bring in its wake????

He is representing the emotional response. The one that drove the original policy fueled by terror and horrific projections.
Johnson is a populist who appeals to emotion, not reason. 
The west has indulged in an orgy of inappropriate emotion concerning ‘rights’ and candy-floss attitudes to the realities of human life for well over fifty years. Johnson is milking it today. That will have to end, but he is in a hole and he refuses to stop digging.

This will not end without economic impoverishment if he and others continue like this.

Time for sanity, truth, policy born of good data, and a rapid dumping the manufactured terror and hysteria. IN other words real leadership. - Terry Field

An Opinion on Covet-19 Challenges

by Glenn N. Holliman

Terry Field, our deep thinker, has migrated from Florida back to Normandy, France where he has found the country under a stay-at-home order due to the coronavirus.  The governor of Florida belated issued a stay-at-home order for his state today, April 2, 2020.  With the world greatly changed in just a month, Terry has been mulling over the world's response to the pandemic and shares some insights. 

He wrote these comments a few days ago before the British government issued a draconian stay-at-home order and before President Trump faced the possibility of 100,000 premature deaths in America. - GNH

The Paradox of Containment

by Terry Field (above with wife, Fina, about to skip the light fantastic before social distancing)

Lord Sumption suggested today that what we are seeing is mass hysteria. Actions taken by governments at the behest of terrified populations are now willing to surrender their freedoms for protection by the highest authority they know of. He has a point. A powerful point. And one which has subterranean depths of the soul that also deserves to be brought into the light.

The head of a respected French institute concerning itself with epidemiology suggested that there is a hidden reality to the pandemic. She identifies the mathematics of the pandemic simply; the doubling rate and the time from initial breakout and global spread. 

She suggests that the disease, as identified by auto-diagnosis – those self isolating because they consider that they are possessed of some symptoms, and those sent to hospital, and some to intensive care  - to be but a tiny fraction of the entire population of the infected.

 She suggests that, prior to lockdown, the numbers infected to be at least three million in France, and similar or more across the European countries. The rate of infection doubles in three days, perhaps slowed by the draconian measures. But her point is a simple one. 

This disease is deeply in the general population, the vast majority unaware or hardly touched in terms of conscious illness or lack of normal ease.

From this she suggests the rate of morbidity and mortality is far lower than the reported - tested, infected, treated, recovering and dying ‘stories’ suggests it to be.

From this one must confront the reality of our responses; why we demand them, what satisfies us in the responses, and what does not? 

Further, what deep seated inheritances of the mind cause us to think, act and demand as we do?

The threat of invisible pestilence is deep in us. From an origin story of Jews, the killing of the first born of the Egyptians in Egypt, and the protection of the Jews by a blood-sign on their doors, cuts deep both in terms of terror, and in terms of deliverance.

Nothing produces a sense of fear more than an invisible ‘pathogen’. I sense it every time I go to buy food. Where is it? Does it blow on the wind? I touch a piece of metal    - am I now to die? 

My fear is the same fear known by all our ancestors, be it the terror of being caught, ripped apart and eaten by a beast when we left our caves or little huts tens of thousands of years ago, and very similar to the horrors of the black death, the viral pandemics of the seventh century that ripped the old surviving Roman civilisations apart across the Mediterranean, ushering in the whirlwind if Islam.

 Our long, conditioning history is one of frequent terror; of the deepest insecurities, of the hope for release, and the beneficial ‘discovery’ of what we hoped for  – and many of us still hope – a Creator of all things which still ‘cares’ for our frail souls, during our lives and beyond our own deaths.

Thus context and primal responses condition what happens now.

The British Cost-Benefit Analysis

Britain is an unusual country, in that there is an administrative ‘folk memory’ of the then dispassionate government of a billion people across the globe, in the period of empire. That period  is still in quite recent history (and some remaining real memory), and the dispassionate initial conclusion was that the virus could not be stopped,  

British ministers took the view that it would rapidly infect almost the entire population, and that no exiting infrastructure could hope to contain it.   

The ministers considered that no existing infrastructure, even enhanced by what would be quite marginal emergency measures could hope to contain it, and the losses of the very old and the very ill would be experienced in large numbers and would be unavoidable as the policy was 'rolled out'.

There is a unique, malign, British context to all this. 

Britain has a National Health Service governed by NICE ( national Institute of Care Excellence) designed specifically to ration supply. The system is by design inadequate as to finance capacity and adequacy of clinical staff even in 'normal' times. 

This model is unique in the world.

Because of this, rationing is explicit and is explicitly formed into protocols determining treatment options and levels.

A form of cost benefit analysis is applied to 'justify' a limited level of spending per capita, and that spend declines radically as the person subject to the spend control ages. The 'price' of an aged  life in the British rationing system is routinely explicitly devalued by the National Institute for Care Excellence, the body that among other things determines the 'shape' of care in England, and the pattern of 'rationing' also. That powerful entity values, in the cost benefit analysis, an old life as worth half a full younger ‘well’  life.  For example, the latter has a drug price ceiling of pds 30,000 in its ‘cost-benefit’ calculation justifying the cut off point for treatment of that patient group. An older life has a year-value of pds 15,000 as its cut off point.

Because of this, the approach by government to the virus had a built-in relative disinterest in sustaining the lives of older people   

Thus the initial decision, as Sweden has taken and is now prosecuting, to continue normal life with social distancing.

The global reaction to this? Horror.

The response was that this was callous and brutal. It must not happen. Why? Fear of the reality of death visiting those who would die shortly anyway? An altruistic sudden love of the old? No. It was what it has always been in all of modern history, the sense of the protection of all gathering together in common, not differentiated or individually exposed to any peril.

At no point in our know memories has there been a decision to gather together all the ill and to push the old outside the lager to be eaten by beasts – for we all know one day we will be old, and were we to do that, the beasts would one day eat us as well. 

But this is a western view. Not in China, where the old have routinely been consigned to death houses when the family abandons the unequal challenge of caring for their frailty. Similar in Africa. There, even the strong young males, in excess numbers, were ritually and very respectfully slaughtered after they achieved the honour of manhood in some societies. That may indeed still happen in some places, but of course it is not advertised abroad.

The point here is a simple one. The civilised advanced would has tried not to consider groups of people as possessed of different value. In the post war period that has been the American approach that has driven us in England, thus the analytical coldness of the ‘let it rip’ initial approach was condemned by the G7 and many in Britian including, at the time, the writer here. The G7, who forced Britian by draconian threats, made the country adopt what it now does.

The consequences we see now of the suspension of economic life by describing what is happening as the containment of a biological crisis are not yet clear, but already many will die because, for example,  their dialysis is interrupted, their cancer treatment is delayed or cancelled, their treatment for a myrid of other diseases where prompt attention is needed stopped, or if one lives on the streets then death is far closer than before. So much of the fabric of sustained life is now ripped away.

And why? To save someone we do not know? And in what numbers? Nobody knows.

The data so far gathered is junk; simply worthless. Testing is as rare as can be in most settings. Only Germany tests in quantity. Infection rates? No epidemiologist gets close to agreeing. All use models presently suffering from ‘garbage in, garbage out’

Testing the hundreds of millions for antibodies to see the true scale of this pandemic? Unavailable and likely to remain so. Some, key workers, will be tested. But the vast hordes constituting the ‘sink’ of infection and recovered? No. Of course not.

 So what is the social reality here? Well it seems to me to be close to the experience of the faithful who bought indulgences from the Roman church before Luther and the subsequent counter-reformation cleaned up the money – induced hysteria across the peoples of Europe. Irrational actions, based on no good information,

We are terrified, hang the concern for the old out as a shield to force governments to protect us each and every one. We fear as they feared the devil, witches, the black death, the invading armies of Persia.

All is terror. Governments in the West do what they are bidden.

Save for one man. A man we all, if we are educated, dislike with a real intensity. And that man is called Trump.

What does he say?

He says the cure is worse than the disease; he is forced to go along with the CDC, but he does not believe it. Why not?

Because he is immune from the concerns I have described above. His very lack of ‘empathy’, of any sense of personal vulnerability, of real concern for the social condition, and his dispassionate reference always to money as the final arbiter of all human actions – the thing so many hate him for – perversely allows him to free himself from the neuroses that I have described above. He is a juvenile egomaniac, perhaps a psychopath, and entirely disconnected from the ancient fears.

Thus he would act differently, allow the condition of society to continue as was with minor adjustments, and see the virus do its work quickly.

He, through dissociated egomania, may have come, by completely different mental pathways, to the same conclusion the patrician English administration came to, and the conclusion social democratic Sweden is operating today.

The death rate as a percentage of the total numbers infected and recovered from this virus may be vastly less than the rubbish statistics of recorded illness and deaths suggest. The French epidemiologist sounds to me as though she has it right.

I believe I had the disease from 8^th February in Sarasota. I had all the symptoms and was very ill for the whole of February and much of March. How did I get it? I attended an audio fair in Tampa on the 8^th of the month – people flew in from all over – and there were hordes squashed into 60 hotel bedrooms listening to audio. I have circulated amongst friends. Many will probably have been infected. No sign of malaise, save for one, ill for a week then slowly recovering. There were no tests. Doctors knew nothing, and could do nothing, even if I presented myself at a hospital Nothing could or would have been done.

 I self-isolated to some degree, largely because I was so comatose I could do none other, but there was no such protocol then. My point being that only four weeks later did two - just two people – become slightly ill in two counties north of Sarasota County. Well that is plainly ludicrous. The data that exists is valueless at present, and will be so until antibody-testing is done in a large statistically significant population randomly designed. Not even on the horizon now.

From this, stripping away the ancient driving neuroses, Trump, Sweden, the original British approach may be far less damaging, in all fully measurable senses, than the approach now being taken. Flattening the curve begs the question – how will the old be protected when any form of normality returns? No answer seem forthcoming. Japan, today, suggest there is no answer there.

Pandemics, as they do their work, often weaken as the most virulent elements kill fast, cannot replicate as the less virulent variants can, and thus the mechanism eases as it must. Lock down may prevent that from happening.

All this describes a human condition where we are far closer – psychologically - to the man looking at the landscape in the fourteenth century where corpses littered the landscape and the living could not bury the dead – than we could have previously imagined that we were.

And my terror of the virus lurking on every piece of plastic, cardboard, human being or sole-of-my shoe is a sign of lunacy that will smash our wealth for fifty years to come, if there is ever to be a full recovery.

Dying in Florida

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular writer, Terry Field, a retired English businessman who lives in Normandy, France has wintered in Florida for the past three years.  He and his wife have made numerous friends and now some are passing.  Here are some very thoughtful reflections by Terry.- GNH

Violence Done to the Conditioned
by Terry Field

My sojourn in America during the winter months has been a revelation. Of course, superficially, the immense wealth of the continent, the potent distribution of that wealth through the ruthlessly beautiful economic system offers personal pleasures available here that are all but impossible to experience elsewhere. American friends illustrate what we overseas know; a friendliness and openness on meeting that is rare in the ancient settled societies of the old worlds overseas. 

SO far, so pleasant. But more and more, other, previously unseen things rise to the surface. At the group level, the amusing lunacy of the contrived bitterness of the ‘debates’ of the Democratic Party ‘contenders’ leaves one aware that brute anarchy now reigns there (as it does in England). The things bigots who loathe America from the left in Europe are easy to observe here. Yet for me, I feel no such hatred or any kind of contempt - rather a depth of sadness and commiseration. I feel that I would be as they are had I not been born in different soils and under different skies. Nothing more than that. 

My sadnesses are not tinged with even the slightest sense of arrogance, and I have no feeling that the world that made me is in any sense safer of better. These are simply differences that illustrate the almost unlimited ability to fashion unique ‘social minds’’ dependent upon the laws of economic circumstance, and the fluidity of opportunity.

Firstly, the vulnerability of Americans should be addressed. These people are in general hot-house plants, fearful of the cold of dangerous life they see outside their borders, and within, they are saturated with the fear of death. The exultation of the individual removes the protection of knowing your life is simply an element in the totality. Other civilisations have lived with death as routine, in all ages of their populations, in great number until preventative medicine, but also, in other societies, lives are lived unsegregated by age. 

In America, and more and more in its psychologically colonized mini-copy England, life is lived by segregated age groups. This produces odd delusions that carry over as the seven ages of man are experienced. From infanthood through to adulthood, all manner of beneficial preventative interventions guide the body on its journey to perfection as it grows to middle life. The deficient neonates simply do not make it to see the sun, so the pool of the imperfect is tiny indeed before medicine acts to polish the cut stones to their shining glory.

Then decline sets in, as it must, but in America, ‘all can be controlled’, and the same promise of beneficial intervention is offered to the rotting bodies as was offered to the young bodies. The promises are offered by the most absurdly revered, and in my view the most deeply corrupted social sub group in America, the ‘doctors’. Those always pictured smiling in long white coats and never without a sphygmomanometer round their necks. The marketers dream mini-godlet. 

As the aging accelerates, the mechanical, chemical and cellular offerings proliferate. All with the promise that is so very seductive. ‘We may be able to help you’. For the old aging consumer of future joys, this sentence is all they need to hear. All their lives they have been upsold and the ‘winners’ have enjoyed the most ‘upselling’. So they are putty in the ‘doctors’ hands, and they always acquiesce and buy the hope. Remember that America is NOT a European civilisation. Here the democracy of unlimited self- help, unencumbered by class and structural constraints applies to all matters and that includes ‘healthcare’. They really should remove the word ‘care, and add the word ‘offering’. 

The consequences of this life-by-hoping’ can, to a European’s eye such as the writers, bespeak not simply tragedy close to murder, but also the degradation of what it always has been to be human. Three examples of direct experience need to be offered in summery form here. They happened to our friends, we saw it done, and my wife and I are shocked and much reduced at experiencing their consequences. 

The first example; an 83-year-old gentle man who ran our gardens in our ‘community of condominiums’.  Like all fair skinned who live in the sun, he had skin cancers that were removed from time to time. Had the worst happened, at his age, the tumors would very probably have been slow in forming and he could have expected some years more and he certainly did NOT need what the surgeons sold to him. 

IN short, they removed the top 7 inches of his scalp – in its entirety – and replaced it with a similar massive graft from his leg. The dear gentle fellow, grey and ashen on his little electric cart afterwards tried to recover and garden, but of course he was done for. In such a shocked and weakened state he contracted a fungal infection of the lungs, entered hospital very shortly afterwards, and as I sat at his bedside holding his hand as he was dying, all I could see was the dollar signs in the business managements’ eyes. 

The second example. A gentle, quite lovely person in her early mid-nineties who, when we first met, and she had hobbled over leaning on her wheeled-frame to greet me said ‘Nice to know you; anything you want doing, call me and I’ll be there’ – I nearly cried on the spot. Well, on returning to the condo in November, I walked past her home, and her disabled 73 year old son came out in his wheelchair, and I asked after his mum. ‘She died a horrible death last summer, those bloody surgeons butchered her for money. It would never happen in Europe’ he said.

Shocked, I asked how. ‘Well, she had infections in her teeth and gums ( to be expected at 94 years old I would consider). They took the teeth out to stop the infection, but it didn’t work, so rather than being kind to her, they offered her jaw reconstruction. They took out her jaw bone, left it to heal for some months and offered jaw reconstruction surgery but she died before they could do it. They earned thousands out of it, Bastards’. That is what he said, and I believe every word, particularly the very last one. 

The third and last example is current. It had its conclusion yesterday. My dear wife and I are not yet close to getting over it. A good friend, a sophisticated French Jewess who fled Nice after the rise of antisemitism a few years ago and came to the ‘safety’ of America contracted a blood cancer. She went to a treatment centre in Texas. They were clear, at 73, and quite frail, she would not survive the radical treatment, which involved the destruction of the bone marrow and its re-seeding with new marrow from a donor. She went home, and continued to research other possibilities. She was driven, a professional woman of education, intellect and great sophistication. An admirable French woman. And keen to live.

SO she visited another cancer treatment centre, also offering the same treatment. ‘Yes we can do it for you, there is an X% total population failure rate but we can do it. Success is a possibility'. Note the repeated word ‘possible’. That was enough for her. Her treatment began in January; we attended a New Years eve supper before she entered the clinic and friends surrounded her with good wishes. She was coquettish, happy as a girl and keen. 

She entered the hospital. She had the chemical cocktail administered followed by the ‘infusion’. Her own bones where stripped clean of her DNA. We waited for a good outcome. I was not greatly hopeful. No such outcome happened.

Her kidneys were overwhelmed, her heart struggled, her bowel began to die. We were called to go to the hospital to speak some French to her, since she was barely conscious in the intensive care unit. On arriving I went ahead of my wife; I have seen much death and wished to pre-warn her if the sight would be dreadful. Which it was. 

Clearly the lady was dying. But of course, the staff, being American, were dreadful in their inappropriate happiness. “She has had a new birthday with a new blood DNA" chirruped a nurse to me. Kafka could have been surprised. She declined, the doctors called her family from France, they advised the procedure had failed, she would be removed from the ITU per her ‘living will’ terms and left in a palliative ward to die. 

The process was long and hard. The observation of the French family was that a humane intervention would have eased the passing had she been in France, but they assumed the doctors and lawyers are terrified of litigation ‘this being America’. Our friend died four days later. Her funeral was yesterday. Now she chose intervention; she positively sought it out. BUT the certainty, not the suspicion remains that the advise that ‘recovery is possible’ is given because morality and actions in American medicine are fatally contaminated by money. 

Wealth here is a curse. Add to that unending lying about the undesirability of our beautiful decline to certain, desirable and dignified death is an invention of a novel society cut off entirely from human experience that supports stronger social structures in ancient civilisations. In Europe – as of course in most other parts of the world - we know about ‘fate’. We know that ‘Alla fleish ist grasse. ’ Knowing that would produce different offerings, choices and endings. 

ON a personal note, I am seventy now. Oldish, shorter by an inch, and changing quickly. What I was I no longer am. I knew this was my fate. I am happy with it. I wish not to be saved by radical interventions from what it will bring. I ask only (as a concession to living in ‘civilised times) for an easing from pain if it is needed. I accept my fate and smile kindly at it.

I want my step grandchildren to enjoy the space I vacate, and the meager resources I pass to them via my most dear wife, and whom a fervently hope lives in close communion with her family after my soul goes to my unfathomable maker. I am humbled and grateful at being allowed to exist. I do not want, in life, my body blended with the remnants of dead others to see dawns others should enjoy for me. More could be written, but the fear-induced violence of the society I pass winter-time in is now at such a crescendo that the sound of it is deafening, and enough is enough. – Terry Field

Wintering in Florida with Thoughts of Coleridge

Our good friend and dynamic observer of human race, Terry Field, Englishman and summer sojourner in his villa in Normandy, France, has removed himself and lovely wife to central Florida for the winter.  He has time to reflect on the contrasts between Europe and North American, and with many literary allusions, once again shares with us his view of the time and space which we occupy in the early 21st Century.

His words are read best perhaps in small doses, a paragraph or two at a time, and then to ponder a bit. He has given us titles for various subject matters and one might best rest the brain a bit between word bites. A master's degree in history and literature is recommended. - Glenn N. Holliman  

Something has got to Give

In Xanadu there Kublai Khan a stately Pleasure-Dome did build. With that good-old-boy Kublai must have hung around the New World recently as well!

I very much enjoy my sojourns in the United States. In part because I like new experiences, new civilisations, new geography, new minds. In part because it is a relief from the boredom of – now - the experience of seven decades of a common European civilisation. 

Left, a portion of Terry's American 'Pleasure Dome'.

In Eurotica the same compressed ‘tribal’ concerns, the same outlook on life, the world and time; the same sense of the dolorous reality of the loss of all after the collapses following on 1945. Such is  replete with sniffy but compensatory dissociated superiority, the (probably justified) sense of cultural entitlement, an abandoned and evacuated beauty everywhere largely replaced with ugly modern functionality, and hope for the best of the best to somehow arrive again, whilst expecting only less tomorrow than today.

By contrast It is fun in America. The place is still virginal and being enthusiastically torn to pieces for human advantage. Here in America, a merry disconnection from the constraints all other peoples on earth labour under still informs the wonderfully flabby and comfortable cheerfulness. 

Happily I have no difficulty in jettisoning the wearying dog-in-the-manger jealousy-couched-as-superiority exhibited by the great majority of Europeans. In America I drive a fine Lincoln motor car propelled by a capacious V8, drink V8 for breakfast to engender North American levels of vitality and Eat Red Meat. 

When here I enjoy the golf-course view from my winter home along the Gulf Coast of Florida. 

 Above a portion of the unisex golf course adjacent to Mr. Field's reality home where he is a member of the Lawn Mowing Society.

The unisex octogenarians seen ‘teeing off’ provide a jolly hope for me that my still stout frame may yet achieve a happy mindlessness which my wife so looks forward to. where the fate of a little white ball may replace all else I presently consider significant.

 The Multi-Cultural Lawn-Mowing Society

When the remote thought of hunger suggests itself, I like and enjoy the wonderful fish, glorious meats, tropical fruits, vegetables and such, all helpfully gathered by the labouring classes from the nether-regions of Central and south America. When some of their number rest, exhausted, their faces covered against the sun and heat outside my home after striving to cut the grass and trim the burgeoning  jungle hereabouts, I greet them with a cheery phrase in Spanish (Hola Hombre!!!) and an encouraging wave of my patrician hand.

That they growl at me and look for all the world as though I am the reincarnation of Cortez worries me not at all, for I am now associated with the Conqueror of the Word  - the nation that is the inheritor of Messrs Oppenheimer Fermi and Einstein’s fertile minds, the explosive results of which makes all war other than satisfying skirmishes in  comfortably remote foreign parts  a terminal foolishness so far mercifully avoided. Thus, here, war has been replaced with pleasure, and God as Modified by Amazon reinforces the pleasure. No longer does the Holy Spirit pour upon me, rather the pouring occurs when the doorbell rings and the Amazon Van pours out its Holy Contents as ordered.

All seems well in this Empire of Joyful Irresponsibility. As entertainment consumes lives, vocabulary, thought-capacity and comprehension to the point where, in a recent review of literacy and comprehension, only 13% of American school-children could distinguish between fact and opinion, and in this soup of happy almost-universal confusion I thrill to the theatre of the absurd that is The Democratic Party and The Republican Party.

Of course they are not what they pretend to be, nor are they what the inmates of this wondrous sandbar -dreamfest social construction imagine them to be. In truth, they are simply centres of cathartic unhappiness.

Such a valuable resource of frustrating and constructed-frustrated misery is extremely precious in a world where all unhappiness is turned into ‘process’, to be flushed down the thought-toilet as soon as is possible.

‘Process’ defines in stages the totality of human emotional life here, as though we are all machines subject to simple servicing and ‘tuning up’(she is ‘going through the grieving ‘process’ after poor Joel ‘passed’).  Here all experience is defined as being capable of ‘satisfying’ the urge for ‘completion’, with nothing remaining to disturb the pond of calm future selfishness. 

Personal calm and contented happiness is ‘lived’ here (Terry resides in a gated community), and for this contentment to persist throughout their long lives, all psychological perturbations require to end with ‘closure’. One coupled are searching for ‘closure’ after their dog Rex was unintentionally eaten by that pesky alligator at the lake by the seventh tee when Nancy and Rock let him loose to concentrate on the ball.  So they are ‘in therapy’ with a New Age Shamen from Jersey who connected with his Inuit ancestors after an uplifting and inspirational visit to Alaska care of MSC cruises and the All-Inclusive Bar Experience).

SO there you have it; they are not ‘political parties’ at all, since such does not exist; and have not existed since around the time that Jaqueline Bouvier and Jack decided that it was too tiresome to carry on sustaining the tedious acknowledgment of the reality of violent difference. They manufactured The Great Society with the help of Lyndon and Ladybird.

Now nearly all work is done by computers, automated factories, the Chinese abroad and The Great Undocumented stateside, so pleasure is the only game in town now. In a sea-to-shining sea world where the bomb has removed the healthy rapid and final deconstruction of dead political ideas within society known as nations, tribes federations and confederations and their all-but instantaneous replacement and  reformation into new relevant vitalities, the ossified, ‘pickled-in-aspic’ social organisations that survived the final re-organisations of 1945 and Bretton Woods grind on and on, seemingly eternal, with the inhabitants shorn of any sense of reality. 

Thus manufactured non-problems are ruthlessly identified by the computer-programs that are the Two Main Parties. Thence brutal disagreements as to how to solve these non-problems consumes the mini-minds of the Post-Kahn generations after they are manufactured by the ‘political-class’.

Mutually Assured Reduction

Herman Kahn, that wonder of the Hudson Institute, so clear in insight and clarity, well saw our present condition, when he described a future society shorn of education, capacity to think and formulate ideas, shorn of comprehension and with the administrators of nations performing the functions not for wealth but for the otherwise unavailable privilege of knowing ‘the truth’ He was correct, save for the bit about ‘the truth’ Even that is not on offer at the highest levels of government. Now only fantasy satisfies.

The Men with Turbans are Scary!!!

I read that Americans are ‘more fearful’ as a result of the recent assassination of an Iranian General whose business seemed to have been to range across the Middle East, and further beyond, as well as within Iran, controlling the futures of peoples with violent coercion and no sort of responsive ‘accountability’.

Yet the country I enjoy periodically is itself of such predominant power, wealth, military reach and technological prowess that it can still order all but the entire planet as it wishes. Why then should its stupefyingly comfortable, fortunate, grotesquely rich and wealth-modified humanish life-form inhabitants NOT feel a little discomfort as a tiny price for their previously unimaginable advantage?

Butter-Kegg and  the Wine Bottle

Once  upon a time a presidential candidate went to a winery raising funds to fight against the Man with Small Hands; he thought he could do this by drinking a bottle of wine that cost 900 dollars.

This dreadful behavior was ‘called out’ by an Indian woman who was identified as a squaw by the Man with the Small Hands so other citizens would know that her forked-tongue would not catch them all unawares. She said that Butter-Keg was less pure and good than she is, and that he was a very naughty man for drinking the 900 dollar wine and said he should stick to  supermarket merlot for the sake of his soul and to Purify All Democrats.  

He said she could afford more 900 dollar bottles than he could. That made her Unhappy, so after dark she danced around her teepee, ‘whooping a hollerin’ to vent her frustration and Nobody Saw Her do that.

Then the New York Times said this conversation between candidates was an uplifting sign of Robust Democracy at work.

Watching the Antipodean Barbecue.

Outside the local funfest I have been transfixed by the horror that is the Australian New Condition. From another life I have a very strong affection for The Lucky Country, the land of Gough, of ‘My Brilliant Career’, of Breaker Morant, of wonders and light and matey friendliness.

Yet I know that this is coming to a dread finish. I know, since I have made it my business to know, that the drought will now never end there; that heat will consume the country, grain production will cease entirely, cattle and sheep will be slaughtered without mercy until none remain, and the Murray and Darling will dry to streams and then nothing at all.

And all this is not known to the majority of the inhabitants, led by a gross absurdity of a marketing man who Knows Nothing save for Coal.

I could weep. Indeed I do weep. For my friends there, for folk there I have loved, for the happy inflection in their pronunciation to be forgotten in not too many decades, for the girls and boys who will have to leave as refugees to go to God-Knows-Where. And we have done it all to ourselves.

As the incomparably wonderful Judith Durham so heartrendingly sang, ‘I am, you are, we are Australians’. I know I am.