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Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Blind fear of death should not guide policy

Use me!” Miss Peycroft cried in ringing tones.  “I am absolutely ready.  Pure, so to speak, and unsullied, ready and waiting to be the heroine of your next novel.”
–to Alma Porch, writer


Blind fear of death should not guide policy | Catholic Culture… certainly there are some things worth taking a risk for. As much as we admire bravery in the face of danger, we despise timidity. No doubt you would be safer if you spent your life cowering at home, but what could you accomplish? “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once,” Shakespeare tells us. To risk nothing is to accomplish nothing


“As rain forest natives like to say: A man steps into the universe because he is summoned. The spirits call. Motion begins. Fate ravels. Once he is in, there is no turning back: He is the spark between no being and being, between vacuum and life—between the silence and the story.”

A pandemic is a time for rethinking everything, for changing one’s mind, for putting down books by fashionable theorists  


The Wuhan Virus Has Exposed Modern Americans’ Disconnect from Reality.







Shifting Ground: Are You Ready For A New Discourse For A New World?


“These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual, and we would do well to understand that not only is there room for a middle path between these, but indeed there is an absolute necessity that we begin our voyage down that path. To the squealing chiliasts and self-absorbed presentists, indulging themselves with phrases like “the end of the world,” I say: “Did it never dawn on you that all of human history has just been one partial apocalypse after another?” And to the business-as-usual mandarins I say: “Thank you for your service in the glorious battles of the past.” – The Point


Public servants accuse Government of not practising what it preaches to prevent coronavirus

Coronavirus: Department heads told public servants 'should' work from home

Australian Taxation Office chief operating officer Jacqui Curtis and the ATO COVID-19 Response Committee's Jeremy Geale told staff in an email on Friday there may be a need for tax officials to move teams and agencies, and change workplace arrangements, as the APS focused its attention on the pandemic.
"We have seen a significant example of this already through service delivery, with hundreds of staff mobilising to take on the high volume of calls we are receiving from the community," the email said.
More than 200 staff had already mobilised, and about 1500 people were in training to start taking calls in one week. More than 400 staff would be ready to take calls from the public in a fortnight.
ATO deputy commissioner Vivek Chaudhary told staff in an email on Wednesday that changes were coming to debt and lodgement work.
Public servants warned to take redeployment or disciplinary action


 Tucker Carlson: ‘We aren’t very good at talking about death’ | Spectator USA
… what bothered me, what enraged me, back in January was we had all these reports out of eastern China, out of Wuhan, that there was this kind of transformative thing happening. They shut down a city of 11 million people — bigger than New York. And they still couldn’t control it. And the obvious conclusion that anyone paying attention would draw is, if the most sophisticated authoritarian government in history can’t control the spread of this disease.

A Secret Service tactic normally reserved for bodyguards and elite security teams is being used by Gladys Berejiklian and her inner circle to protect them from coronavirus. The New South Wales Premier has appeared at media conferences over the past few days wearing a coloured lapel pin.


U .S. Attorney William M. McSwain Warns About Fraud Related To The Coronavirus Crisis And Provides Tips To The Public



Stop the $6 Trillion Coronavirus Corporate Coup! Matt Stoller, BIG. Incredibly, the Democrats are cheerfully enabling disaster capitalism in exchange for a few tattered fig leaves for workers. Fighting for! Fighting for!

Democrats Are Handing Donald Trump The Keys To The Country Zach Carter, HuffPo



The Selfish Revelers Rod Dreher, The American Conservative. Dreher is Dreher, but: “Christian friends, I am not a proselytizer, but if your church or tradition is not teaching you how to orient yourself towards bearing suffering…. then it is all but useless, and will chewed up by the dragon that has us in its jaws. I’m not kidding.

Coronavirus: “Agribusiness Would Risk Millions Of Deaths.” (interview) Rob Wallace, Marx21 (BK). Wallace is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu, recommended by Yasha Levine.


US was more prepared for pandemic than any other country, Johns Hopkins study found


WGBH’s Arun Rath hosts the new nightly news program, ‘In It Together.’ (Photo courtesy WGBH)

We’re all in this together, and the work of local news shows it