Southwell's Word Emporium

Previously I tried to round up and summarise the main conspiracy theory(s) about Covid. A common lynchpin seems to be the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Klaus Schwab, who is the NGO's founder and executive chairman, when he isn't performing official duties as  President of the Intergalactic Federation .  I had previously only thought of the WEF as yet another hi-falutin' but basically harmless talk-shop, best known for putting on the annual Davos extravaganza of self-importance. This is where the richest and most powerful people on the planet fly their private jets into a luxury Swiss ski resort for a week to lecture the rest of us on being less wasteful and otherwise engage in a too-earnest orgy of mutual ego-gratification. It's seems the sort of event that if you are not extremely careful you might run into Kevin Rudd. What I wasn’t so aware of is the WEF  Forum of Global Young Leaders  , a rather sketchy training program that apparently has schooled a host of int...

For Covid panic panic pushers and their enforcers those wanting their pre-pandemic lives and freedoms back are “fringe far-right bat-shit crazy conspiracy nuts”. So I fall under that label even though I have always been very sceptical about conspiracy theories. Having worked in government I find it hard to believe they could orchestrate a intricate master plan flawlessly, quietly and with ruthless efficiency. There would first have to be months of pre-pre-planning committee meetings  where different sections argue about whose job is what and then basically ignore that and do what they want. Covert operations would have to abruptly cease at 4.51pm or risk blowing the secret off-the-books budget allocation on overtime. If SPECTRE was a government organisation Blofeld would press the button for the trapdoor to feed an underling to the sharks and it wouldn’t work as maintenance has a three-month backlog of tasks and the wrong form was filled out . The sharks would probably b...

As Age opinion-extruders go, Julie Szego is hardly the worst - that would be unabashed Andrews apologist  Jon Faine . On occasion Szego can even say something remotely sensible , which somehow slips through the production process, before defaulting to the usual tortured nonsense of left tribalist groupthink and partisan barracking .  However, last year as Melbourne winced under yet another interminable hideous lockdown, she produced a sentence so unmoored from any recognisable glimmer of sanity or even common humanity that I had to re-read it a few times to clear away the disbelief. "But – admit it – for a big chunk of us the fact we’re on track to be the longest locked-down city in the world is a source of perverse pride," she wrote . No source of pride could be more perverse than lockdowns. We will probably never know the full mental health toll lockdowns took in Victoria, especially on the young and even more specifically young women who took their own lives in unpreced...

The winner of this week's Twitter poll for a blogging subject was “How Scott Morrison can win the election” but I’m not going to write about that or at least not in the way I thought I was. I still think he will win the election, and have even put money on it, I'd like to say it was a lazy $50 but all my money has to work very hard to keep me in the lifestyle for which I am accustomed, Aldi pot noodles ain't getting any cheaper! The problem with predicting anything about Morrison is it almost impossible to say with any certainty what he will do tomorrow let alone between now and election time. To paraphrase Winston Churchill , he is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, neatly packed in an Aldi shopping bag"  OK, do I get my check from the Land of Chocolate now?. Morrison has been an MP since 2007 and prime minister since 2018 but he remains, to me at any rate, opaque in terms of what his beliefs and motivations are. There is, of course, his often profess...