The focus of today’s post is China. More specifically the focus is China’s lies along with China’s reprehensible and morally repugnant behaviour is ending defective medical equipment and defective medical supplies around the world in an effort to manufacture a public image of China as a benevolent benefactor to countries stricken by the virus.

It would be fair to say that this is a very lengthy post covering a whole range of stories about China. The common denominator is the way in which China is seeking to exert its power and its influence in Australia for political, economic, social, cultural and technological gains.

I recently reported that we have 1,213,903 residents in Australia who identify as having Chinese ancestry with the group including 509,000 Chinese who were born in China. So we’re talking, according to the 2016 Census Figures, around 5.9% of the Australian population who identify with China in some way. According to a report from November 2019 – the Chinese born community in Australia has increased by 50% in 5 years. If the trend continues for the next five years, the report projects that there will be 980,000 Chinese born Australians. What sort of security risk does this pose to Australia?

China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) is a little known but highly ranked department of the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee that is likely very active in Australia. The department “monitors and engages with the Chinese diaspora” doing its best to push propaganda through Chinese media outlets in the Australian Chinese community and to sow the seeds of dissent in Australian Universities.

A while ago a I wrote a journal entry entitled “The Conspiracy Theorists Guide to the Covid-19 Virus”. As I sat in my garden this morning, drinking my coffee and smoking cigarettes, I reviewed today’s Covid-19 stories and was struck by the fact that my “Conspiracy Theorists Guide” now has far more of a ring of truth about it than I had ever imagined possible. For example questions are being asked about whether the virus actually originated in a research laboratory. Some have gone further and suggested that the virus might be man made.

One of my favourite management aphorisms is, “Hope for the best and plan for the worst.” The worst case scenario for the next pandemic is a virus that is as lethal as MERS with an infection rate considerably in excess of Covid-19. In other words, hundreds of millions of people become infected with, say, 40% of those people dying across all age ranges, not just the elderly and those with pre-existing health conditions. I have read sufficient research around pandemics and viruses to strongly incline towards the view that it is not a matter of whether this scenario will be realized. It is a question of when this scenario will be realized. So, basically, I am planning for a worst case pandemic scenario and this post presents my planning thoughts.

In this post, I take the time and the space to have a think about the significance of Covid-19 in my life. My broader point is that the existential import of the Covid-19 virus should not be lost upon us. Rather, this pandemic really ought to be a moment in history that leads people to life changing decisions. To put it a different way, the existential import of the virus will have been entirely missed should peoples lives remain unchanged once the pandemic is over.

A number of Chinese residents in Australia continue to exhibit the fact that they are subhuman, an argument that I have made before when daigou stripped Australian supermarkets of supplies such as baby formula to sell the supplies for profit in China. Another way to characterize these shoppers would be to say that they are shameless, a characterization which brings us back to referring to them as sub-human because shame is something we feel when our conscience is pricked. These shoppers feel no shame because they have no conscience which, again, makes them subhuman.

Perhaps the fact of my current writing is not so odd. Apparently I have a prodigious intellect which I rarely, if ever, employ and so I have found some direction through researching into the Covid-19 virus as this research provides me with a sort of academic pursuit that tires out my mind, at least to some degree. I might conjecture that tiring out my mind is almost my sole purpose in sifting through the multifarious, and often conflicting, “facts” that emerge in the dozens of news stories on Covid-19 that I read each day, more often in the early morning when I am sitting in my garden drinking coffee and chain smoking. By this I mean that, ultimately, I am not sure that I really have any concern with “the truth” of Covid-19. I just engage in an intellectual exercise of sorting, filtering and constructing arguments.