If the title of epidemiological czar were to be created, its first occupant would have to be Sweden’s Anders Tegnell. He has held sway in the face of sceptics and concern that his “herd immunity” approach to COVID-19 is a dangerous, and breathtakingly cavalier approach, to public health. Tegnell T-shirts featuring him as a medieval liberator are available for purchase; fan pages can be found on Facebook abuzz with encouragement. Tegnell’s point, throughout, is that his approach is less than radical given the global lockdown formula that has perpetrated, almost overnight, the worst economic crisis in generations. This is not to say…
Author: Dr. Binoy Kampmark
“If we want to preserve strategic stability using arms control as a counterpart of that, as a tool in that toolkit, then China should be in as well.” US Defence Secretary Mark Esper, Defense News, Feb 26, 2020 For a person keen on throwing babies out with their bathwater, only to then ask for their return, President Donald Trump risks doing giving that same treatment to the New START treaty. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, also known as the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, a creation of the Obama administration, is due…
“Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it,” urged the Earl of Chesterfield in a letter of advice to his son penned in 1749. “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” This has not tended to be the view of university governors the world over, notably in the field of ethical investments. The elite heavyweights have shown their flabbiness in the area, dragging in their approach to matters of environment and the climate. Money is just that; where it goes, in terms of investment, is of little…
“Australia is always there, making trouble. It is a bit like chewing gum stuck on the sole of China’s shoes. Sometimes you have to find a stone to rub it off.” Hu Xijin, Global Times editor, April 27, 2020. Disasters always invite blame – divine, natural, human – and the current calls of blame being directed with vengeful spleen have one target. The People’s Republic of China is being accused of everything from having shoddy and irreverent diplomats to having dubious and duplicitous scientists wickedly unleashing viruses. Australia, in China’s heavy debt for keeping its fossil fuel industry boosted and primed, is…
“Mr Assange will be facing a David and Goliath battle with his hands tied behind his back.” Edward Fitzgerald QC, lawyer for Julian Assange, April 27, 2020 Julian Assange must have had time amidst cramped and hostile surrounds, paperwork, pleas and applications, to ponder what circle of Dante’s Hell he finds himself in. Ailing but still battling, the WikiLeaks publisher, through his lawyers, made another vicarious appearance at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court on Monday to delay the next stage of extradition proceedings slated for May 18. He would have appeared via video link, but medical advice suggested it would be unsafe for…
Illness can often fall into the category of the obsessive, becoming a sport for mugs, sufferers and observers alike. The following often feature the hypochondriac, the speculator of disease, the gossip about how far gone a person is who has contracted something or rather. When it comes to tyrants, such speculation becomes a thrill of sorts, with rich lashings of Schadenfreude. Rome’s notorious consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla and despot of the Republic was one who perished to phthiriasis, that lousy disease of antiquity characterised by stubborn lice, lesions, itching and death. His demise brought cheers from Pausanias, while Pliny thought Sulla’s victims…
They have been struggling to keep their membership numbers healthy, but the latest antics of the executive that make up Australia’s National Tertiary Education Union suggest why. For a good period of time, Australian unions have been losing teeth, and not all of it can be put down to the measures of the federal government to pull them. In the university sector, where unionism should be intellectually vibrant and committed, the issue is one of corporatist accommodation. Do not rock the boat of management; give executives vast, byzantine powers of disciplining staff; do little to criticise the obscene remuneration packages…
War commemorations nurse a dirty secret, though it is one displayed with a peacock flourish. The victors bring out the celebratory paraphernalia and talk about noble ideas; the defeated, quite simply, do not. We won, we celebrate and we, somehow, got things right. You, defeated, eat it, beat it. This does not quite work well with the ANZAC tradition, born, as it was in a defeat. The Australians, along with their often forgotten New Zealanders, lost in their effort to invade and knock out Turkey in 1915 during the Great War. The Australian New Zealand Army Corps was part of…
They are rather good at raking in the cash; rather poor at sharing it. Google and Facebook have radiated, strafed and shrivelled hundreds of news outlets across the globe with their information sharing platforms while celebrating choice, advertising revenue and traffic. The idea of whether such content is news is irrelevant: what is shared, be it news, rumour or supposition is what matters. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission had been tasked with something verging on the impossible: draft a voluntary code of conduct covering the interaction between digital platforms and media outlets. In so doing, the evident asymmetry between…
Things are getting dizzy in the White House on what, exactly, is being done to “open the economy”. Cranky advocates for the financial argument over the restrictions of public health have been attempting to claw back some ground. As Jonathan Chait puts it, “The anti-public health faction either believes the dangers of the coronavirus have been exaggerated, or that the cost of social-distancing requirements is so high that the economy should simply be opened, regardless of medical danger.” Officials such as US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and White House economic advisor Larry Kudlow have been busy pushing the line…
The US president is in a warring mood. Having declared himself a president at war, a meaningless gesture given that the US is always, somewhere in the world, at war, finding necessary enemies in distraction was always going to be a priority. Donald Trump already had the “China virus” in his artillery, attaching nationality to the pathogen. Now, and it took some time in coming by his standards, is the World Health Organization, a body which has, as its utopia, an idea of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or…
The intemperate volcano that is the US President has done much to burn its way through prominent appointments. As the title of former GOP strategist Rick Wilson’s book goes, Everything Trump Touches Dies. There seem few more important individuals in the United States than Dr Anthony Fauci, and that, for the White House, is a problem. No burning bushel can distract from the orange tufted centre of power that is Donald Trump, and Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been giving much to distract. Over the weekend, the disgruntled anti-Fauci clan started buzzing with…
In No Exit, the translated title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos, three deceased characters find themselves in a room, ostensibly in Hell, in what transpires as a permanent wait. Locked after being ushered in by a valet, with quite literally no means of escape, they are confronted with each other’s moods, lies and eventual confessions. Sadism, cowardice and mendacity figure. The torment each character subjects the other to leads to that famous observation: L’enfer, c’est les autres (Hell is other people.) Humans are inventive, and tiringly so, in ensuring that torture or physical requirement need not be necessary for inflicting enduring…
Tories worshipping Britain’s National Health System are akin to fanatical carnivores who suddenly extol the virtues of vegans. Has the grave response to COVID-19 signalled a change of heart? In the case of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, it was all heart, quite literally. It might have stopped beating and that scruffy, buffoonish essence of a man, a compulsive hand shaker with those who had contracted the coronavirus, might have been snuffed out. But in a message on social media, he was grateful. His health had gradually worsened after contracting COVID-19. Three nights were spent in intensive care before returning…
It should not be a matter of distinction, but Julian Assange is a figure who is becoming the apotheosis of political imprisonment. This seems laughable to those convinced he is an agent without scruple, a compromiser of the Fourth Estate, a figure best packed off to a prison system that will, in all assuredness, kill him. That’s if he even gets there. Having spent a year at Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison, the WikiLeaks publisher faces the permanent danger of contracting COVID-19 as he goes through the bone-weariness of legal proceedings. Even during the extradition hearings, he has been treated with…
It’s all about the lever of balance. Laws made for public protection, within which public health features prominently, provide grounds for derogation authorities can exploit. Like plasticine, the scope of power during times of an emergency extends. But at what point does a state of public health become a police state? In time, we may find these to be not only indistinguishable but synonymous; the body will be the site where liberties are subordinate to regulation, movement, medical testing, and directives made in the name of health. Across countries, the “lockdown” as a term has come to keep company with…
Champagne corks will be popping in the Trump Empire, for good reason. Whatever happens, come November, the exit of Senator Bernie Sanders from the US presidential race will be a relief. The fractured republic can be reassured that the Democrats have not moved on, stuck, as it were, in the glades of vengeful melancholia and supposedly safe bets. Divisions will not be healed; suspicions will continue to foster. A bitter society, ravished by pandemic, will cast an eye to incumbency. On Wednesday, Sanders delivered the news to his supporters. “If I believed we had a feasible path to the nomination, I would…
“I don’t trust glib reassurances from satellite operators without precise details.” Alice Gorman, space archaeologist, May 26, 2019. Astronomers tend to have their eyes, and minds, not merely in the clouds but beyond them. The dream of unimpaired vision tends to come with the territory; the better the uninterrupted line, the better the data. But the increasing incidence of clutter above the earth’s surface is becoming more than a point of minor interest. It preoccupies those keen on clarity and pollution, both in terms of actual space debris, and the issue of light disruption. A good portion of this lies…
Scribes of the Julian Assange case must surely gawk with a sense of horrified wonder at each proceeding unfolding at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London. Assange is in a battle that can only be described as titanic, seeking to avoid the clutches of the US Justice Department, not to mention its legal system, and convince District Judge Vanessa Baraitser about the merits of that argument. The gigantic canvass confronting all participants in this squalid tale of vexation and oppression is the nature of journalism itself, and the central point of sharing confidential state information that sheds light on impropriety,…
When capitalism screeches to a halt and starts its old business of killing off the adventurous but weakened, the enterprising but foolish, those who initially benefited, shed tears. Losses mount, accountants tally up current and future losses. Huge profits somehow do not matter now, as the diminishing balances bite and impress. As this happens, the corporatocrats start to search. Options usually end up at the same spot they always tend to in the last few centuries: the state treasury, the public purse. Despite the dogma of neoliberalism, one that worships the market that miraculously orders and delivers goods and efficiency,…
In a set of stable circumstances, funding higher education should be a matter of automatic persuasion. If you want an educated populace, the taxpayer should muck in. In some countries, however, this venture is uneven. In the United Kingdom, the system remains divided, an echo of class stratification. In Australia, which took so many of its behavioural and policy cues from ancestral Britain, investment in public education as a measure of Gross Domestic Product does not stack up well, in real terms, with other countries of the OECD. Its school system is also something of a mild perversion – wealthy…
It has become a source of pride. Highly salaried executives – often, it should be said, receiving pay very much disconnected from the value of their work – making voluntary pay cuts and telling everybody else about it. In sport, celebrated figures such as Lionel Messi and Christiano Ronaldo have chosen to reduce their enormous pay packages for the sake of the game. Both play for football leagues in Spain and Italy, countries ravaged by COVID-19, and both earn amounts reputedly coming in at $100 million a year. Such sums are scandalous to begin with, but it enables a sort of virtue…
The global effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic has been one of stutters and staggers. There are go-it-alone instances of severity, and cases of blasé indifference. State ministers and leaders have not escaped the chance to demonise and point accusing fingers. Each crisis will garner its share of demagogues. In the United States, the sense of confusion and disunity on how best to respond to COVID-19 is palpable. On the domestic front, President Donald Trump has proven to be a constant shapechanger on the subject, minimising risks with rhetorical abandon, finding culprits with some eagerness and suggesting off the cuff…
“To expose another human being to serious illness, and to the threat of losing their life, is grotesque and quite unnecessary. This is not justice, it is a barbaric decision.” Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, March 26, 2020 Social distancing is not a word that seems to have reached certain parts of the British legal system. Granted, it is an odd one, best refashioned as an anti-social act for the sake of preservation. Marooned in some state of legal obliviousness, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser had little time for the bail application made by counsel for Julian Assange. The WikiLeaks publisher…
The legacy of the coronavirus pandemic, at least in so far as responses are concerned, is thickening by the day. Behavioural changes are being urged, language is rapidly evolving (spot the “covidiot” amongst you) and the policy of health surveillance is being pushed. Another field where the virus has triggered interest is the very idea of incarceration. Prison may be a school for crime, but it is also the concentrated incubator for disease and infection. Social distancing, one of those oxymoronic terms uttered with little care to what it suggests, would tend to be a misnomer when it comes to…
In anticipation of the post-COVID-19 world, bold statements are being made on how we will, as a race, be wiser, even kinder; cautious, and reflective. If history is ever a lesson on anything, such statements are bound to be the fatuous utterances of a moment, soon forgotten. What is left, instead, are the policy legacies, the detritus of bad decisions made on the long march of folly. The Second World War was a catastrophe that gave a grand kick-along to human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was one of those rich fruits, a document drafted and endorsed with…
Hoarding as a moral aberration and ethical breach: the term has recently become the subject of scorn in coronavirus chatter. In terms of mental disorders, it is “characterized by persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions”, though the Coronavirus Hoarder is a breed that adds the urgent bulk acquisition to the shopping equation. If you part with it, take advantage of making a buck along the way. Hoarding products in times of crisis is condemned by those in power as unpatriotic, against the community and just plain rude. The empty supermarket shelf is considered the devilish outcome of this. Yet, shelves still…
The rush to elevate self-isolation to Olympian heights as a way to combat the spread of COVID-19 has gotten to the celebrities. Sports figures are proudly tweeting and taking pictures from hotel rooms (Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton being a case in point). Comics are doing their shows from home. Thespians are extolling the merits of such isolation and the dangers of the contagion. All speak from the summit of comfort, the podium of pampered wealth: embrace social distancing; embrace self-isolation. Bonds of imagined solidarity are forged. If we can do it, so can you. The message of warning varies…
Epidemiologist William Hanage was more than perplexed by the plan. “When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan,” he reflected in The Guardian, “I thought it was satire.” Much public policy, foolishly considered and expertly bungled, tends to succumb to satire; having Prime Minister Boris Johnson leading the show provides an even better chance of that happening. Herd immunity, as a policy, would involve easing off risk and preventive measures, allowing what would effectively be a mass infection, and focusing on recovery from younger members of the populace. Doing so would provide the assurance of immunity to prevent the…
It threatened to disappear under the viral haze of COVID-19, but February 29 saw representatives from the US and Taliban, loftily acknowledged as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, sign the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan”. After two decades of conflict, the agreement sets in motion the process that should see American troops leave Afghanistan within 14 months. Initially, 8,600 troops will leave over 135 days; the balance is set to do so after 9 months. The Doha ceremony was attended by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Taliban deputy leader Mullah Baradar, a person said by former CIA Operations Officer…
