Simon Sheridan – Page 47

Garden Update: 6 year Anniversary

I realised just last week that this autumn is the 6 year anniversary of my attempt at establishing an edible forest garden. Honestly, I thought it was much longer. It feels like a lifetime ago that I spent the summer devouring the book Edible Forest Garden by David Jacke, marking out the dimensions of my yard and drawing up intricate plans for the different guilds of trees, shrubs and ground covers. Since those heady days, my grand designs have tested themselves against that pesky fellow known as the real world. What better time to then to do a garden update post and see how they fared.

How it started

How it’s going

Espaliered dwarf Fuji, Gala, Court of Wick apples 2016

No longer espaliered dwarf Gala apple 2021

Hojiblanca Olive 2021 (it’s in there somewhere)

If there is one thing which separates the photos on the left with the photos on the right it’s the lack of shrub and ground cover layers on the right. That’s right, the edible forest garden concept did not work out. There were two primary reasons for this. Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, was the failure of a number of the shrub and ground cover plants. This wasn’t just the failure to survive (that was a relatively rare problem) but the failure of the plant to ‘take over’ the niche and keep out weeds. This was mostly my failure in understanding how the plant would grow. Most of my problems were in the ground cover layer where you need a variety of plant types including spreaders, clumpers and a few others whose names I forget. There are niches within niches. If you plant only clumpers, a spreader weed will find a niche and take hold. Once the layer of cardboard and mulch had disappeared, weeds became a major problem. If I had one recommendation to people starting new edible forest gardens, it would be to over-plant. Of course, that costs money if you are not propagating the plants yourself. But if you don’t do so, you’ll end up with weeds galore.

The second problem is a problem with the edible forest garden concept here in south eastern Australia. Thick plantings tend to attract rodents and rodents tend to attract snakes. Although I have never seen a snake in the garden (I have seen rodents), there have been sightings of the eastern brown in this area and stepping on one while tending to a fruit tree is not my idea of a good time. The risk is magnified if you have young children. For this reason, I think the edible forest garden concept doesn’t really work in a suburban setting unless you are planting only one or two guilds and keeping them nicely separated from the rest of the garden.

So, a couple of years ago, I abandoned the edible forest garden concept. The fruit trees are still there, however, and I have opted either for grass as the ground layer or a mulch/chicken manure combination which makes a lot of sense now that I have chickens free ranging in the garden and which will both fertilise and reduce water requirements. These are both low maintenance options (especially with the help of the chickens in keeping down weeds and grass) and also allow room for children to run around and climb trees as well as lazing about on the grass or enjoying the cool shade of a tree in summer; all activities that don’t work in the edible forest garden concept.

The garden is now converging on its final design and it’s going to end up as an old-fashioned orchard with separate vegetable garden. How very traditional! Maybe the old folks knew something after all.

Along the way, there have been a number of fallen soldiers who either couldn’t handle the Australian summer or just don’t like the soil in this area. Among them are a number of avocados (oh, how I would have loved to have avocado trees but it just ain’t happening), a cavendish banana, two figs, a lisbon lemon and a washington orange. Fortunately, the only fruit tree that was here when I arrived is still going strong; a eureka lemon which has had a bumper year. Given that lemon prices at the supermarket here often exceed $1 a lemon, that tree really is an economic boon which probably explains why back in the day if you only had room for one tree, you planted a lemon.

The fruit trees I planted are only five or six years old but the yields so far have been impressive. The pears produced heavily last year and the apples this year. I also got some very nice grapes this year. The olives are growing well but, olives being olives, it will probably be another five years at least before I get any decent harvests. The almonds are growing slower as they are in the more difficult conditions of the north facing the front yard and I have not irrigated them at all. Considering that, they are doing very well. They do produce fruit now but the cockatoos clean the fruit out in mid December well before it is ripe. One day, if the yields get big enough, I might attempt to net the fruit but at the moment it’s no great loss.

This autumn I’ll be adding one more olive and one more pear to finish off the orchard in the back yard. I’ll also be turning the side of the house into vegetable beds. I have room for one more tree in the front yard and have dreams of a beautiful big elm tree to provide shade in the summertime. Still tossing up between that option or perhaps a couple more olives which will enjoy the heat and provide more food (in another ten years!).

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

In my previous post in this series I noted that the corona event has a lot of parallels with the world wars and in particular WW1. War and pandemic are two of the oldest stories known to man. Just like the plague story, the war story has a fixed structure that everybody knows at some level. War ends when one side wins and this is almost always done when the other side surrenders. However, even this requires agreement by the parties involved. In WW1, Germany surrendered and so the war ended in the ‘correct’ fashion. However, many of the troops on the German side believed that the surrender was an act of betrayal from their leaders. They wanted to keep fighting and it was that desire which in large part drove WW2. Arguably, WW1 didn’t really end until 1945 and so the Armistice of 1918 was a false ending.

If WW1 is an example at the nation state level of not ending the story properly, there’s a fascinating equivalent tale at the level of the individual from WW2. It’s the case of Hiroo Onada.

Onoda was a Japanese soldier sent to fight in the Philippines in 1944. He was a guerrilla fighter on the island of Lubang and spent most of his time in the jungle separated from direct chain of command. He was in a unit of about four soldiers whose job was to pick off civilians and generally demoralise the enemy in the usual guerrilla strategy. Because of his status as a guerrilla fighter in the jungle, when the war ended, Onoda received no formal communication from his superiors. He and his fellow soldiers continued to shoot and kill local civilians and then retreat back to the jungle where they survived largely on coconuts and bananas. The locals left notes for Onoda and his fellow soldiers to tell them the war was over but the soldiers didn’t believe the notes. Over time, the other soldiers died but Onoda kept on doing his job. Amazingly, he kept on doing his job for the next 29 years until a Japanese traveller heard of the crazy Japanese soldier in the jungle in Lubang and decided to visit to try and convince him the war was over. The traveller met with Onoda who said he would only give up if his commanding officer ordered him to do so. The Japanese traveller returned to Japan and tracked down the officer, Major Taniguchi, who had since become a bookseller. Taniguchi went to the Philippines and met with Onoda who, eventually, accepted that the war was over and surrendered. The President of the Philippines pardoned Onada on the basis that he really did believe he was fighting a war and therefore his killing of local civilians was justified.

Onada’s story is incredible for many reasons but what is relevant to this series of posts is that it reveals the power of stories. Onoda was still living the war story 29 years after everybody else agreed that the story was over.

Sometimes, stories don’t end because of weird situations like with Onada. Sometimes they don’t end because they were never started properly in the first place or because circumstances don’t allow it. The Vietnam War is one war story that didn’t end properly but there’s another that I think is more relevant to the corona event and that’s the second Iraq War. Some might remember George W Bush appearing on the aircraft carrier with the big banner “Mission Accomplished” behind him. Although Bush would later deny it, that was an attempt to bring the war story to an end and claim victory in the usual fashion. But, of course, the war was not over. Most of the casualties in Iraq came after Bush made his premature declaration and US troops are still in Iraq to this day (under the guise of NATO). In the meantime, there was the whole business with ISIS. A similar story has played out with the war in Afghanistan. Even if President Biden follows through on Trump’s decision to remove all US troops, it certainly won’t be a standard end to a war story. It won’t be a ‘victory’. It won’t be “Mission Accomplished” because who even knows why the troops are there any more?

I would argue that both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were unwinnable wars because they were violations of the war story right from the start. This is most obvious in the case of Iraq where the US made a big song and dance about WMDs held by Saddam and used that as the pretext for war. Of course, there were no WMDs and so the story fell apart from there. War stories imply a way to ‘win’ but if you can’t win then you set up a dynamic where the story cannot end and that is exactly what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Can the corona event be brought to an end or will it drag on interminably like the Afghanistan and Iraq wars? In order to answer that, we need to revisit my analysis from part 10 of this series and see how the plague story itself has undergone change since WW2.

Once upon a time, the plague story ended all by itself. Without fancy scientific tests to know who was and wasn’t infected, the general public went via the old fashioned method of seeing who was sick. In the case of really bad plagues, this also involved dead bodies in the streets. The plague ended when the number of sick and dead went down. Once this started to happen, there was jubilation and partying often before the ‘real’ end of the plague. Daniel Defoe noted in Journal of the Plague Year that the celebrations began while quite a number of people were still dying. He also noted how quickly life returned to normal shortly thereafter. That’s what happens when a pandemic is allowed to run its course naturally.

In the new plague story as told by Hollywood, the plague story ends when the experts save the day. This is the story we have been telling ourselves since almost the start of the corona event and it’s crucial to note that the corona event is the first time in history where this version of the story has been the official public story of what is going on. Never before have we expected to be rescued by experts. We are now into the vaccine part of that story. In the movies, the experts come up with a cure, the public takes it and everybody lives happily ever after. That is what many people expect to happen now. That is how the plague story that is corona is supposed to end. The question is: will it?

There were some developments this week that cast doubt on the matter. In Australia, the Federal Health Minister ended up in hospital just two days after receiving the vaccine for what we were told was an ‘unrelated infection’. Meanwhile, several European countries halted the Astra Zeneca vaccine rollout on fears of blood clots. In the USA, the living ex-Presidents – with the notable exception of a certain man called Trump – were preparing to do a public service announcement encouraging people to get the vaccine (presumably because they expect take up rates to be a lot lower than they want). None of these things is a slam dunk event that will break the plague story. Rather, they are just little things that nibble away at the narrative. In the real world (but not in the movies), cures and vaccines have side effects and some people die. In the normal course of events, news of these events doesn’t reach the public but in the age of social media and with the most high profile vaccine program in history, they will. The same dynamic of instantaneous information sharing via the internet that led to the initial corona hysteria will also play out with the vaccine. It won’t reach the level of a hysteria itself because it will not have the support of the media and government, but it will lead some people to disbelieve the narrative and decide not to take the vaccine. How low will vaccination rates be? is going to be a big question going forward. The vaccine is supposed to end the story. But if not enough people take the vaccine, has the story really ended?

Then there is the awkward fact that case numbers are dropping like a rock globally but especially in the US. We look to be well on the other side of the curve now but the vaccine rollout is not far enough advanced to be able to take the credit for ending the pandemic. That’s even in rich Western countries. If the pandemic ends before other countries even start the vaccine rollout then the story will really break down.

At the beginning of the corona event we had a choice between the plague story and the flu story. The plague story won but the problem right from the start was that the story was invalid. It was invalid as a plague story in the same way the second Iraq War was invalid as a war story. Just like the US fabricated data about the WMDs, Western governments deliberately exaggerated the threat of corona. This was revealed most clearly in Germany where internal government documents were leaked showing communications where it was explicitly discussed about how the government must, for example, talk about hospitals being overwhelmed and people suffocating at home because suffocation is a primal fear etc etc. Here in Victoria, our Premier stated you could either have human rights or wind up on a ventilator. There are countless other examples. Of course, this is business as usual in politics where a decision is made and then propaganda is crafted to justify it. But propaganda is a story and you need to be able to get out of the story.

When you get into a story that doesn’t match reality, reality is not going to help you end the story. You can declare Mission Accomplished all you like but that won’t change facts on the ground. For that reason, the corona story is almost certainly not going to end ‘properly’. If that’s true, we can ask how will it end? I suspect we may see a variation of Mission Accomplished at some point. It would probably be the WHO making an announcement that the pandemic is over. But by then I doubt anybody will be listening. After all, the WHO came out last year and said lockdowns were not a good idea and then a bunch of western governments promptly went back into lockdown. Corona started as a quasi-global story led by the WHO but quickly devolved into a myriad of different stories as each nation went its own way. What the people in China or India will tell themselves about corona is going to be radically different to what western nations tell themselves. This fracturing of the story is itself a big problem. Perhaps we will see a situation where individual national leaders announce ‘victory’ when their vaccination program is finished. But, that’s unlikely to provide closure especially if various geopolitical cans of worms like vaccine passports get opened. All this assumes the vaccination program itself doesn’t cause a massive problem such as has been warned about in relation to risks like antibody dependent enhancement and ‘leaky’ vaccines. If any of those turn into reality the story will blow wide open.

In conclusion, I don’t see how corona can be ended in the form in which the public expects. The ending of the modern plague story is make believe and has no basis in historical reality. That was always the main problem with it. We overturned our society based on something without precedent. So, it’s not going to be a clean end; a ‘proper’ end. I predict that, much like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the corona story will drag on for a while then simply be abandoned. The only question now is how long that process will take. There was more than thirty years between the start of WW1 and the end of WW2. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars are almost twenty years old. Let’s hope the corona event doesn’t take a similar amount of time before the story ends.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

Propaganda School Part 11: Revenge on the Nerds

There were some goings on in the Australian media landscape this week that I think are worth reflecting on in this series of posts as they shine a light on the dynamics involved in the modern propaganda apparatus.

I’ve spoken already in this series about the catastrophe that hit the mainstream media with the rise of the internet. Once upon a time, the media had a near monopoly on certain kinds of information. This included news and current affairs but also advertisements. If you were in the market for a house or a new car, you had to buy a newspaper to find out what was for sale. The media organisation got paid by the consumers buying the paper and also by advertisers paying for print space. It was a very profitable business that allowed powerful and financially independent companies to pay for professional journalists to go out and find the news. This is what was called The Fourth Estate. The media wielded significant power. Senior journalists were often household names. They would be the ones who would receive leaks of secret information or do some piece of investigative journalism that would see a government minister sacked or perhaps even topple a government.

That all changed when the internet came along. Newspapers in particular saw their revenues decimated. Real estate and car advertisement were taken over by online players and consumers turned to online news rather than the print edition of newspapers. Despite their best attempts to get people to pay, newspapers have never found a very profitable business model online. They limp along just a shadow of their former selves. As a result, there is no longer any money to pay for quality journalism anymore. All this is Economics 101. The internet allowed information to flow freely. Wen you increase the supply of something without a proportionate increase in the demand, the price goes down. The price of ‘news’ in the modern world is essentially 0. Why buy a newspaper or wait for the evening news when there’s probably a photo or a video online 5 minutes after the event?

Not only did legacy media see their revenues cut by the internet, they became increasingly reliant on the big tech players for both content and traffic. We have already seen in this series how social media content forms a large part of mainstream news articles these days. But mainstream news also gets a lot of referrals from social media sites. Sometimes, they even pay for those referrals. Take a quick look at Twitter’s ‘news feed’ and you’ll see it’s sponsored content. Users on twitter and facebook also share articles freely. Thus, legacy media became dependent on social media at the same time that social media (and the wider internet) destroyed its revenue base. A pretty tough pill to swallow, no doubt.

This is all old news, of course. It’s also old news that google, Facebook and other big tech players have monopolies which are not in the public interest especially when you consider their enormous power to decide what information people are exposed to. There’s also the matter of how much (or little) tax they pay tax to national governments. There is no shortage of public policy issues to tackle if governments are willing.

Again this backdrop, we saw the Australian Government announce a policy last year which supposedly touched on all these issues. The legislation that eventually passed required google and Facebook to pay (certain) legacy media companies for their content. It seemed on the face of it quite a ridiculous piece of legislation. Google put up a good public relations fight which included links on their search engine and youtube where the CEO of google Australia explained why they were against the legislation. Facebook simply said it would pull out of Australian news if the legislation was passed. As the date to enforce the legislation approached, google caved in and did a deal behind closed doors while Facebook did what it said it was going to do and pulled Australian news from its site. In doing so, it took out a number of other pages including Australian government departments and services. This all went down last week. The news made global headlines but it was in Australia where the squealing was loudest as both sides of government and media were unanimous in their condemnation of the move.

A lot could be said about what happened but I want to stick to the theme of this series of posts. What happened is that the Australian government passed legislation to offer protection to a local industry. Let’s put that in context. Over the last few decades, the Australian Government has let the clothing and shoe wear industry go broke, it has let much of Australian manufacturing go broke, it has let the car manufacturing industry go broke, it even seems set to allow all local oil refining capacity to disappear too. The Australian Government has shown a great willingness to embrace globalisation and free trade and yet it is prepared to prop up the media. Why? Well, one obvious reason is that the media and the government are in a symbiotic relationship. This is especially true now that the media has greatly reduced power to hold the government to account. Nowadays, the legacy media now functions as nothing much more than a public relations department for the government. They provide a valuable service for government and it’s therefore in the governments interest to ‘save’ the media. Government propping up an already moribund industry is going to make the media even less likely to be critical of government policy and to act as a proper Fourth Estate.

Ironically, Facebook’s action showed what it looks like when there is no symbiotic relationship between a corporation and a government. They simply told the government to go jump. For a few brief days it was a joy to watch as both government and media in Australia lost their collective shit over Mark Zuckerberg who had the impertinence to betray the fact that he couldn’t give a damn about the Australian media. And why should he? Isn’t the whole point of social media that you connect people with other people not with boring government departments or legacy media channels. Facebook clearly doesn’t care about Australian news and yet many Australians apparently get their news from Facebook. Maybe it would be better if they got their news from a service that does care. Facebook pulling out of Australian news probably would have been a net win to all concerned. Of course, Facebook caved in and came to a deal with the government which means they are back in the news business even though they clearly don’t want to be.

Where does this leave us? I would argue we are now worse off on all counts than we were before the Australian Government passed its legislation. The business model of the legacy media is still in tatters. They will continue operating but we won’t see a return to proper journalism and a proper Fourth Estate. Facebook and google’s monopolies haven’t changed. They will almost certainly find a way to write the new costs off on tax and will continue doing as they please. Worse than that, the new government legislation creates a barrier to entry to both new media players (who won’t get the generous google/facebook subsidy) and new tech players meaning their market dominance is less likely to be challenged. The only outcome here is to slightly increase the revenue for media businesses whose business model has already been superseded. Better to let them go broke and open up opportunities for new players to enter. But that won’t happen because the government needs the legacy media.

So, a bad outcome all round. But for a few glorious days we got to see what happens when government and a large corporate’s interests are not aligned. That’s a rare sight in the modern world where corporations are in bed with government to such an extent that disagreements barely even see the light of day. And we got to see what happens when the propaganda machine sets its sights on a single target and opens fire with all guns blazing (although I suppose the entire Trump presidency was the same dynamic).

All posts in this series:

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

Way back in the very first post in this series I stated that my position right from the start of the corona event has been that it is a mass hysteria on a global scale facilitated by the internet. I was not the only one to make this analysis. Several psychologists also came out with the same conclusion. They noted, and this is something to bear in mind for those wondering when all this is going to come to an end, that a mass hysteria would take years to sort itself out. Certainly 2021 looks like a write-off. Whether corona will extend beyond that is anybody’s guess.

This week I came across a very interesting scholarly article which examines the notion that corona is a mass hysteria but with a focus on how the actions of governments contributed to it. It’s one of the best articles I’ve read on corona and backs up a number of my guesses about what’s going on with scholarly references. It also ties in with an idea I’ve been thinking about recently which is that, politically and psychologically, the corona event is a lot more like war than pandemic in the sense that most western governments (with the exception of Sweden) have been egging the population on rather than trying to calm them. It seems to me that the closest event in recent western history to the corona event is not previous pandemics like Asian Flu or Hong Kong Flu (both comparable as public health problems) but rather World War One. The correspondences are there. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? Those kind of promises happened at the start of World War One too. Kaiser Wilhelm told his troops they would be home by the end of autumn. In Britain, it was assumed victory would be had by Christmas at the latest. Of course, it was four years and millions of deaths later before it all finally came to an end.

The bill for the corona event is going to be similar to that for the wars. Australia already has $1.5 trillion of national debt baked into the cake but that’s only the start. I would guess it will be many trillions by the time all gets counted. Like with war debt this will create massive inflation and we have already started to see that in soaring property prices and ridiculous stock market valuations.

Then there is the mass hysteria part. In a mass hysteria, people do things that look crazy in normal times. In WW1 this involved telling young men to jump out of trenches and run into machine guns. The corona event can’t compare to that for sheer madness but things have happened in the last year in western societies that nobody would have believed possible prior. This week here in Melbourne we saw Australian citizens wearing garbage bags being hauled out of quarantine hotels. We have seen pregnant women handcuffed in front of their children over social media posts. We have seen grandmothers pushed down the aisles of the Queen Victoria Market by baton-wielding stormtroopers (errr, police). State borders have been closed at days or even hours notice while governments welcomed in Hollywood movie stars and sports players. In the middle of all that, the Prime Minister decided to change a line in the national anthem to read “we are one and free”. Really? We have never been less ‘one’ or ‘free’ since the Federation of the country. Probably not the most appropriate time for that change, mate.

In many states in the US, it looks like children and teenagers will go two years and maybe more without in-person schooling while many elderly people in nursing homes may also go years without being allowed to see their loved ones in person. The list could go on and the whole thing is not over yet. Who knows what else will come especially the biggest unknown which is the long term effects of a mass vaccination program.

Like the events of WW1, our response has been radically disproportionate to the initial problem. Also like war, there is a big geopolitical element to corona. Once governments went with the plague story interpretation they needed a vaccine to end the story. But that has big implications for international travel and commerce. Any country which decided to break ranks and deny the importance of corona would set its citizens up to be excluded from other countries on the basis of vaccination status. How exactly all that gets sorted out is going to be something to watch carefully. Presumably countries will have to recognise each other’s vaccines as valid so that, for example, Chinese citizens can take a Chinese vaccine to travel elsewhere and vice versa. Will that actually happen or will countries make foreign citizens take ‘their vaccine’ to enter?

The idea among some that we can take the crisis and use it renew our society also harks back to the post WW2 era. A nice little Marshall Plan (Great Reset) to rebuild shattered economies this time with a green energy agenda. Sounds nice in theory (actually, it sounds horrible in theory as anybody who has read about the Great Reset would know). But the future that awaits us is almost certainly much more like the post-WW1 era: political instability (already there in the USA and Europe), inflation (already here), massive debts that can’t be repaid perhaps leading to currency collapse (Germany had a hyperinflation and reset its currency in the 1920s/1930s). Oh yeah, and the great depression.

Most importantly, if both government action and the internet have contributed to this mass hysteria, there is no reason why other hysterias will not break out. We have the WHO there to identify ‘new’ viruses. The technology is there to create PCR tests and distribute them instantly. Big Pharma is there waiting to make billions from vaccines and testing. In short, there is nothing stopping this whole thing from happening again unless governments put some safeguards in place. Safeguards like defunding the WHO. But we know what happened with that idea. If, as the authors of the paper cited above note, bigger government makes mass hysterias more likely and mass hysterias create big government (by shrinking and curtailing civil society) then we have a positive feedback loop. Just like WW1 made WW2 more likely (some might say inevitable). Another reason to bunker down and buckle up.

All posts in this series:-

The Coronapocalypse Part 0: Why you shouldn’t listen to a word I say (maybe)

The Coronapocalypse Part 1: The Madness of Crowds in the Age of the Internet

The Coronapocalypse Part 2: An Epidemic of Testing

The Coronapocalypse Part 3: The Panic Principle

The Coronapocalypse Part 4: The Denial of Death

The Coronapocalypse Part 5: Cargo Cult Science

The Coronapocalypse Part 6: The Economics of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 7: There’s Nothing Novel under the Sun

The Coronapocalypse Part 8: Germ Theory and Its Discontents

The Coronapocalypse Part 9: Heroism in the Time of Corona

The Coronapocalypse Part 10: The Story of Pandemic

The Coronapocalypse Part 11: Beyond Heroic Materialism

The Coronapocalypse Part 12: The End of the Story (or is it?)

The Coronapocalypse Part 13: The Book

The Coronapocalypse Part 14: Automation Ideology

The Coronapocalypse Part 15: The True Believers

The Coronapocalypse Part 16: Dude, where’s my economy?

The Coronapocalypse Part 17: Dropping the c-word (conspiracy)

The Coronapocalypse Part 18: Effects and Side Effects

The Coronapocalypse Part 19: Government and Mass Hysteria

The Coronapocalypse Part 20: The Neverending Story

The Coronapocalypse Part 21: Kafkaesque Much?

The Coronapocalypse Part 22: The Trauma of Bullshit Jobs

The Coronapocalypse Part 23: Acts of Nature

The Coronapocalypse Part 24: The Dangers of Prediction

The Coronapocalypse Part 25: It’s just semantics, mate

The Coronapocalypse Part 26: The Devouring Mother

The Coronapocalypse Part 27: Munchausen by Proxy

The Coronapocalypse Part 28: The Archetypal Mask

The Coronapocalypse Part 29: A Philosophical Interlude

The Coronapocalypse Part 30: The Rebellious Children

The Coronapocalypse Part 31: How Dare You!

The Coronapocalypse Part 32: Book Announcement

The Coronapocalypse Part 33: Everything free except freedom

The Coronapocalypse Part 34: Into the Twilight Zone

The Coronapocalypse Part 35: The Land of the Unfree and the Home of the Safe

The Coronapocalypse Part 36: The Devouring Mother Book Now Available

The Coronapocalypse Part 37: Finale

The Diogenes Chicken

Over the past year I have inadvertently become something of an amateur ornithologist. When the corona business arrived, I was on a break from paid employment while I worked on my second and third novel. That break ended up lasting a lot longer than I thought and also included the writing of my book on the corona event. Nowadays, I’m back in a paid job but am working from home. I live about half a kilometre from the Werribee River with a major bird wetlands only about ten kilometres from my house so the area is rich in bird species. As my work desk overlooks my backyard, I get to watch as they come and go. Birds seen in my area on a normal day include, in rough order of size: sparrows, New Holland honeyeaters, willy wagtails, starlings, Indian mynas (grrrrr!), rainbow lorikeets, blackbirds, spotted doves, quail, wattlebirds, magpies, cockateels, galahs, crows and sulphur-crested cockatoos.

One of the things I have learned about birds in the last year or so is that mimicry is a big thing and not just within the same species but across species. For example, I put in a bird bath in the early summer of 2019. It was a very hot summer that year but not a single bird looked at the birdbath for more than a week. One day, an enterprising blackbird landed a took a drink. Within ten minutes, all kinds of other birds were drinking and the bath has been a hit ever since. The same dynamic played out with my pear tree. Again, a blackbird was the initial culprit who learned that the fruit was mighty tasty. Another blackbird joined in. That was ok because there was heaps of fruit on the tree and I noticed that if I just threw a pear on the ground the blackbirds would bicker all day over it and the damage was mitigated. The real problems began when the New Holland honeyeaters saw what the blackbirds were doing and decided to copy. The wattlebirds then copied them and I had to take defensive action to save the remaining pears (fortunately it was mid autumn by that time and I had already eaten a majority of the fruit anyway).

As I posted about here, I have recently added another species of bird to the garden: chickens. It’s been fun to observe their behaviour. Like the other birds, copying is a big thing for chickens. A week ago I was eating a bunch of grapes off one of my backyard vines. I threw a few grapes to the chickens assuming they would eagerly devour them but they showed no interest. Then, just yesterday, one of the chickens tried a grape for herself off another vine. The others saw her and instantly rushed over to see what this new discovery was about. All of sudden, the chickens were mad about grapes. Fashion seems to be a thing in the bird world as much as the human.

Another thing that birds and humans share in common is a social hierarchy. The human one is far more complex and there are multiple hierarchies across different domains. Nevertheless, we also have the equivalent of a pecking order which is why the behaviour of one of my new chickens reminded me of an old story about the Greek philosopher Diogenes. But, before we get to that, let’s meet the chickens.

First up is the top hen, a black Australorp. She’s a beautiful bird with shiny black feathers who is noticeably larger than the others and doesn’t mind throwing her weight around especially when food comes into the equation. She’s especially hard on….

The number two chook: a blue Australorp. Blue is a moody bird who is clearly the smartest of the group (by contrast, the black Australorp seems quite dumb). What she receives from the top hen she dishes out to the next hen down the line:

A rhode island red. Also a very attractive and smart bird. She’s actually a little bit bigger than the blue Australorp but just doesn’t have the fire in the belly and backs out of any engagement.

Which leaves the fourth hen who, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, I have named Diogena.

A floppy comb is sometimes thought to indicate sickness but with Diogena I have a feeling it’s a fashion choice. A little bit punk rock.

Diogena is an Ancona breed. Originally, I had assumed Diogena was the bottom chicken in the pecking order. When I got the chickens home the first time, she seemed to integrate the worst. In fact, I was worried she was sick as she didn’t seem to eat and wasn’t socialising with the other chickens. But she slowly integrated with the group and began eating and everything settled into a nice rhythm. Diogena is clearly the smallest chicken of the group, another reason why I had assumed she was bottom rung on the ladder. Then something interesting happened.

I was giving the chickens some zucchini as a treat (they love zucchini and I don’t). As a good chicken owner, I try to apportion the treats geographically far enough apart that every chicken gets at least some. But as the treat gets devoured and supply runs short, inevitably the pecking order is asserted and the top chicken hoards whatever is left. The black Australorp ruthlessly enforces this rule at such times and on this occasion had successfully chased the blue Australorp and the Rhode Island Red away. Diogena, in her normal fashion, hadn’t contested the treat. She will eat one if thrown her way but otherwise stays out of the fray. However, on this occasion she decided to wander over to the Black Australorp and help herself to some zucchini. I watched on expecting her to get the same nice hard pecking the others had got but was amazed to see that not only did the Black Australorp not peck Diogena, she forfeited the zucchini to her. This got me thinking and I realised I had never seen Diogena either peck or be pecked. She seemed to be outside the pecking order.

Apart from food, the other main way the pecking order is enforced is over who gets which roosting position in the coop. Higher is better and, in my coop, closest to the wall on the higher roosting bars is the most coveted position. Once the hens had learned to use the roosting bars, inevitably it was the two Australorps on the upper bars and the other two below. This was the way it was for the first few weeks. Occasionally, the Rhode Island Red would get above her station and jump up top but the blue Australorp would kick her off down below where she belonged. Until the day in question, Diogena had done her usual thing of casually roosting at the bottom and avoiding any disagreements. But not this day. This day Diogena decided she was going to roost on the top bars. Not just that, but in the coveted wall position. I thought for sure that she would be booted back to her place but yet again, the black Australorp just ceded the ground and took up a position below.

It was at this point that the story of Diogenes the philosopher came to my mind. Diogenes is the best known member of the Cynic school of philosophy. The word cynic meant ‘dog-like’ in Ancient Greek and the Cynics, Diogenes in particular, were known for living on the streets or in the woods or wherever they pleased. The Cynic philosophy is a fascinating one and was a prelude to the Stoic philosophy. It eschews social convention and encourages people to live according to their own nature in whatever way they see fit. One of the most famous stories that encapsulates this is the one where Diogenes was lying in the sun and Alexander the Great, who had heard about the great philosopher, came to visit. He asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him and Diogenes replied “step to the side, you are blocking the sun.” It is said that Alexander later asserted that if he was not Alexander, the most powerful man on earth at the time, he would rather be Diogenes.

These stories might be apocryphal but they do reveal something very important about social hierarchies which is that the most ‘freedom’ (in a very general sense of the word) is found either at the top or at the bottom. Interestingly, it seems that Alexander knew that and respected Diogenes as an equal. I am probably massively anthropomorphising the situation, but I think the same dynamic is going on in my chicken coop right now. In any case, I am pleased to have Diogena – the Cynic Chicken – in my backyard.