Essays in Idleness

When the Calgary Stampede is cancelled, one might begin to take the Batflu seriously. There were some preliminary indications in the international death tolls. As the overwhelming majority of victims have multiple “co-morbidities,” however, these counts are arbitrary. The meejah have been able to find a small selection of young, healthy people who were struck down, too, in order to improve the scare. That guvmints all over have locked down their populations might, at first, seem another clue, but the day is long passed when I took a political response to be evidence of anything.

Endure this for a moment. It is my general approach to the Red Chinese Batflu crisis. An open mind, if anyone had one, might postulate a general overreaction. The Swedes, and South Dakotans, to say nothing of others, have shown that if, instead of a Maoist lockdown, we’d simply asked the people to use their brains, we’d get approximately the same death curves on the charts that we get from letting the state bully them. What we wouldn’t get, is a way to appease the Nanny Statists.

They are long-practised in the art of going berserk when they don’t get their way. Our meejah are long-practised in the art of amplifying their holler. Citizens of the modern West are now practised in the art of being pushed around, and have mastered the complacency that is needed while watching their tax money being flushed down various progressive toilets. Our economies are based on massive transfers from those who earn, to those who whine.

Let me expose my own pointless indulgence in meejah reports, by the theft of another story. It appears that Prickles the Sheep has been recaptured, after escaping from a fold in Tasmania. This now-celebrated champion of self-isolation survived in the bush for seven years. Her fleece had grown considerably during this retreat, from the usual hairdressing routines. Locked down once again in her pasture, she will now be paradoxically restyled. I doubt that she will like that. If gentle reader can guess the weight of her woolly locks, I gather, he may win a prize.

Here I wish Mabel Henrietta née Jevon, my paternal grandmother, were still with us. I have a photograph of her winning a classic Kelvinator, for guessing how much frozen food it contained. She was a superhuman estimator of weights and volumes.

But getting back to Prickles, I propose to make her into a religious symbol. Let her stand for all those Catholics abandoned by the neo-pagans who now control the Vatican. Churches everywhere are now closed, but none tighter than those in Red China, where our pope has directed all Catholics to turn themselves in, to the Communist authorities. Some won’t. Some of those may succeed in hiding.

Many all over the world have already become “bush Catholics,” self-isolated from what is rapidly becoming a self-persecuting Church, under extremely contemptible management. Pope Francis hectors these people in vain, with his asinine “Amazon” and “climate change” homilies.

My piece in the Catholic Thing today (here), touches on one dimension of this phenomenon.