The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Infectious Disease Frenzy By  David Bell In our enlightened age the public seems tirelessly bombarded with warnings of existential threat from infectious disease. Another distant outbreak is spreading, this time it could be Disease X ! “…and there is no vaccine …!” How, one might ask, is our species still extant? A few decades ago, life was less torn by impending doom. Public health officials were investigating diarrhoea outbreaks linked to the local café. The Woodstock festival happened during the last large influenza pandemic, and no one really noticed, let alone wore a mask. They just listened to the music, lived as their ancestors had, and somehow managed to expand the species. Medical technology and biotech innovation have blossomed since Woodstock. If you had a heart attack in the 1960s, you got some morphine for pain and a firm mattress, a bit of nitroglycerin under the tongue or some basic drugs to steady an erratic heartbeat. Now you will be rushed into a maze ...

  The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Thoughts from the Shire Yes I know I am prone to exaggeration, that’s the fisherman in me. Yet the more I look around, not at one scandal, one policy, one migration wave, one economic betrayal, or one grotesque little episode of bureaucratic lunacy, but at the whole direction of travel that the UK/Ireland/Europe are on, the phrase begins to look less like exaggeration. The Assisted Suicide of the Nation Nations can die in many ways. They can be invaded, bankrupted, starved, conquered, corrupted, or simply exhausted by luxury, decadence and father time. But there is another kind of national death, stranger, and even more humiliating than all of the above: the death of a nation persuaded to cooperate in its own disappearance. Not beaten in a heroic last stand, not crushed beneath the boot of some foreign invader, but coaxed, shamed, bribed, distracted, indebted, censored, managed, and re-educated into believing that its own survival itself is vulg...