Herd Immunity May Be Closer Than Thought
The idea that more people may have immunity to coronavirus than show up in standard antibody surveys is getting more oxygen by the day. It is what may explain why the epidemic often goes into decline when 10-20% of the population has antibodies, why the epidemic is now considered over in Sweden and why countries that are lifting restrictions are seeing no second waves, only the occasional ripple.
This week the British Medical Journal added its voice to those arguing that population immunity may be closer than was originally thought. The Times reports:
Tests for antibodies may be dramatically underestimating the proportion of people who have been infected with the coronavirus, scientists said. The claim, made in the BMJ, implies that it is possible some parts of the country are far closer to herd immunity than had been thought.
The original misdiagnosis, the authors explain, is because we’ve been testing not for the full range of human immune responses but for just one or two types of antibodies.
Dr [Stephen] Burgess [from the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge University] said that calibrating tests using people who had been more severely ill may mean that a lot of asymptomatic infections are being missed. “This might explain why, in cities such as London, we have seen the breakdown of widespread social distancing but infection rates have still not increased sharply,” he said.
Public Health England estimated London’s antibody prevalence at the start of May to be around 17.5%, not far from New York City’s 20%. Neither city has seen a rise in hospital admissions or deaths as restrictions have eased.
Eleanor Riley, professor of immunology at Edinburgh University, has some wise words on the subject which our politicians ought to heed:
“We need to think of the seroprevalence data as indicating that at least that proportion of people have been infected and it is likely higher. How much higher is difficult to estimate,” she said.
She added that it was important to consider who was susceptible to being ill as well as who was susceptible to infection: “We are learning that many people have pre-existing immunity which is likely due to prior infection with other coronaviruses.”
Dr Burgess said that he did not understand why more scientists were not questioning the seroprevalence data, as the extent to which it undercounts is critical.
“We’ve been asking ourselves the question of why this has not got more attention. It is clearly very important to our understanding of the disease,” he said. “I think scientists are cautious, and would prefer to say nothing if they are not sure, even when saying nothing also has consequences.”
Unfortunately, not all scientists are so timid with their views. Could it be the silence of too many sceptical scientists that has allowed more confident scientists like Neil Ferguson to become so influential? As Dr Burgess notes, saying nothing also has consequences. The BMJ deserves credit for publishing this paper, particularly as herd immunity is still being treated by some as politically toxic.
Kim-Jong Dan Versus Nic Sturge-on – Who’s Winning in the Authoritarian Olympics?
An Australian blogger called David Robertson has written an interesting post comparing Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.
Our political leaders, Dan and Nicola [Sturgeon] have the best interests of the ‘common good’ at heart. They are ‘moral’ people seeking to do their best. But the trouble is that because they have lost their moral anchor, their moral compass has gone astray. They confuse ‘the good’ with their will. And they have little time for heretics or those who would dare to blaspheme their absolutist certainties. That’s why they have to crack down on the poor souls who dare to question or challenge their absolute authority. Like all authoritarians they believe that if they get their way then we are on our way to a Better World – a Brave New World. But if they don’t get their way then we are descending into the Abyss. That explains why they feel they have to crack down so strongly. It’s not just a power grab. It’s a necessary power grab – done for the common good. That’s for as long as they remain true believers. When that ceases (more likely for their acolytes), they still use the same weapons. They come to see that it’s all an unworkable fantasy – but they continue to peddle the illusion – because they have invested too much in it. Their sense of worth – personal, financial, emotional and social; all depend on it.
The solution is more humility, less hubris:
I suspect that the virus of authoritarianism that is so infecting much of our Western democracies (all in the name of doing good – or at least preventing evil) will end up having a longer and more dangerous legacy than any left by COVID-19. Our only solution is the road of humility, not the highway to hell of hubris. But Chairman Dan and Queen Nicola seem to prefer the latter.
Worth reading in full.
“We Touched Masks Together in Defiance”: A Lockdown Wedding in Melbourne
An Englishwoman married her Australian boyfriend in Melbourne yesterday and has written to tell us what it was like:
Weddings in the next-door state (New South Wales) can have 150 guests to mark the occasion. Yet in Victoria, we are allowed just two. As my family are all in England it narrowed down the gold dust places to Matt’s parents. But there was to be no celebration with them. They picked us up on their way to the registry office, all of us in masks. There would be no fancy bridal car for me. At least we got a parking space right outside – the city was deserted.
On entry, we hand sanitised and first met the woman who was going to bond us for the rest of our lives. A Zoom call was thankfully allowed so that my family could watch the moment – no WiFi available though, so thank God my phone was up to the hot spot challenge.
The ceremony lasted around 12 minutes, with Matt’s parents sitting two metres apart in a room that could seat 50. We were allowed to hold hands for the duration, but no kiss. The key moment of any ceremony, a sort of rite of passage for husband and wife, was omitted for us. Our ‘you may now kiss the bride’ was replaced with a generic ‘congratulations’. But when our registrar’s back was turned, we touched masks together in defiance.
Keeping Schools Open in Sweden Resulted in Zero Deaths
Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU, has written a piece in the Epoch Times pointing out that Sweden’s decision not to close schools for under-16 year-olds had no impact on mortality.
The world should have followed Sweden’s example. That country never locked down and has even kept children under 16 in school the entire time. As Reuters reported on July 15th, the number of Swedish children between one and 19 years of age who have died of COVID-19 is zero. And the percentage of children who contracted the illness was the exact same in Sweden as it was in Finland, which locked down its schools.
As regards teachers, Sweden’s Public Health Agency reported that “a comparison of the incidence of COVID-19 in different professions suggested no increased risk for teachers”. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere refuse to enter a classroom that has students in it. Their disdain for their profession has been superseded only by that of the Los Angeles teachers union, which announced that teachers will not resume teaching until the police are defunded.
People who defend lockdowns and closing schools point out that Sweden has the eighth-highest death rate per million in the Western world. But, needless to say, this has no bearing at all on the issue of whether Sweden was right to keep schools open or whether our country was wrong to close them, let alone keep them closed now. The overwhelming majority of deaths from COVID-19 in Sweden were among people over 70 years of age, and most of those were people over 80 and with compromised immune systems.
Reuters reported that three separate studies, including one by UNICEF, “showed that Swedish children fared better than children in other countries during the pandemic, both in terms of education and mental health”.
For more than a month, Sweden has had almost no deaths from COVID-19 while the entire society remains open and almost no one wears masks. (In Holland, too, almost no one wears masks.) For all intents and purposes, the virus is over in Sweden.
Worth reading in full.
What’s Killing Americans?
Inspired by the news from the US that only six per cent of reported COVID-19 deaths mention no other contributing causes, Willis Eschenbach on Watts Up With That took a closer look and made the above graph. He explains:
The light blue area is all of the deaths that did not involve Covid.
The dark blue area at the bottom represents the deaths of people with one or more other diseases or conditions who had Covid as a co-morbidity. It goes from 0.2% of all deaths for infants, and steadily increases with age to stabilize at about nine per cent of all deaths for all ages over 65. Some of these diseases and conditions are the result of Covid, and some are unrelated to Covid.
Fun fact. A total of 4,758 of the deaths in the dark blue area are from “Intentional and unintentional injury, poisoning and other adverse events” with Covid as a co-morbidity. So this includes e.g. the guy in Florida who died from a motorcycle accident and tested positive for Covid… clearly the category shown in dark blue includes both deaths with Covid as well as deaths from Covid.
The thin red area at the top, scarcely wider than a line?
That’s all of the deaths from Covid by itself. It’s tiny because most of the time Covid either causes other diseases, as when someone presents with Covid and then gets pneumonia as well, or because Covid is often non-causally associated with other diseases and conditions.
The takeaway message? Even with the old and ill, deaths with Covid plus deaths from Covid are less than ten percent of all deaths. For those under 14 years old, it’s less than one percent of all deaths. For infants, 0.2%.
Worth reading in full.
Some Hope…
A Scottish reader has emailed to tell us of an unexpectedly good experience he had at his local gym.
I finally got back to my gym yesterday, Nicola finally having condescended to open them. It was very heartening to see that whilst they had bought lots of new gear they had made hardly any other covid changes and it all felt much like pre-lockdown. I fear they are breaking many rules, especially in the world of mad Nicola, but in the meantime all for the good. One thing they did urge was lots of hand washing which I accept as sound advice.
There was also a large sign asking folk to try not to use the changing rooms or showers, but to arrive in their gym kit and then shower at home. I was very pleased to see that lots of people simply ignored this and used the facilities as usual. None of the staff seemed even the least bit concerned and even asked every arrival whether they wanted a locker key.
Then, while I was in the changing room, several truly amazing things happened. First some chap arrived and, apropos of nothing at all apart from five months frustration I guess, starting describing, in very colourful terms, his views on lockdown. Clearly not a fan. Whereupon every other person in the changing room, six people, agreed with him. And they all started throwing statistics around in a very learned fashion proving the idiocy of all lockdown theory.
Finally, and I am still not sure whether to be appalled or pleased by this, a young lad entered wearing a mask. Whereupon all the lockdown antagonists begun questioning him about why he was wearing one. Again, they had all the data to hand and strove to prove, at some length, why he was deluded. On balance it was slightly intimidating but I was probably a bit pleased. Perhaps he learned something. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t seem inclined to argue.
I thought I must have just happened upon a rare caucus of Scottish lockdown deniers, but when I was chatting to one of them later he told me that all his friends feel exactly the same way.
What was most refreshing was that despite the lack of patronising bilge every person at the gym just worked out what made sense and took sane precautions. For example, one area got quite busy for a time but folk just saw that was so and went off somewhere else until the zone they were after had cleared somewhat.
Perhaps there is hope yet.
Round-Up
- ‘The Covid trap: will society ever open up again?‘ – Jonah Norberg in the Spectator points out that a ‘temporary’ expansion of government power is hard to reverse
- ‘How a lie becomes truth‘ – Rod Liddle in the Spectator on COVID-19, BLM and our dystopian post-truth society
- ‘The science behind masks is as flimsy as my see-through scarf‘ – ‘The Red Wall Rebel’ in Conservative Woman shows once more how empty the scientific case is for face nappies
- ‘Expert says coronavirus “as dangerous as having a bath” after calculating risk of dying‘ – Economist Tim Harford crunches the numbers in the Mirror to put the fear into perspective. (Harford assumed an IFR of one per cent so has over-estimated the risk of someone catching Covid and dying from it by four. It’s not one in two million, it’s one in eight).
- ‘To Destroy America‘ – Mike Gonzalez in City Journal investigates the radical neo-Marxist ideas driving the BLM movement and its offshoots
- ‘Young People Should Organize Against COVID Lockdowns‘ – Jason Garshfield on Real Clear Politics says younger people have been failed by the lockdown policies of the older generation
- ‘We have lost sight of what a positive COVID case means‘ – With the death and hospitalisation rate right down, a ‘case’ no longer means the same thing as it did in the spring. Are we now counting and panicking about tickly throats, asks Dr Waqar Rashid in the Spectator
- ‘Dentists could face “oral health horror show” as practices reopen, poll suggests‘ – The lockdown bares its teeth
- ‘Has the post-Covid future already been decided?‘ – Simon Marcus in spiked on the dubious ideology of the ‘Great Reset’ that appears to be the latest fad to enchant the minds of the clueless Davos elite
- ‘Coffee in the Time of a Pregdemic‘ – Jen Swann Downey imagines what if we treated pregnancy risk like we treated COVID-19, would you have to walk round with a bag on your head?
- ‘Hydrocortisone proven to save lives‘ – A cheap steroid that cuts mortality among the seriously ill by up to 20%. Great, can we go back to normal now?
- ‘Nicola Sturgeon Covid strategy “not going well”, expert warns as school transmission confirmed‘ – Turns out, “not going well” means “a small number of cases in school settings”
- ‘Downing Street denies existence of back-to-work campaign as office staff stay home‘ – It was merely a “press partnership campaign with regional and local media on a variety of topics to do with the coronavirus response,” said a spokesman. Not a U-turn, then. Nothing to see here. Honest, guv
- ‘Lockdown decisions should be made on numbers of hospital patients NOT “volatile” counts of new cases alone, Graham Brady says because flooding at-risk areas with tests inflates their infection rates‘ – If only Brady had won the Tory leadership contest…
- ‘Routine mass coronavirus testing hailed as path to greater freedoms‘ – Government splashes another £500m it doesn’t have trying to create a comprehensive testing regime for millions of healthy people everyday. The invasive, expensive, wasteful new normal
- ‘Portugal remains on England’s “travel corridors” list, despite rising cases‘ – Crikey! Boris must have missed Portugal in their Thursday night game of “Quarantine” when he and Matt Hancock take turns to try and hit a random country on a map of Europe with a set of darts
- ‘Matt Hancock is the Government’s doughtiest defender – but this time even he struggled‘ – The Telegraph‘s Michael Deacon writes about Handy Cock’s car crash interview with Kay Burley on Sky News yesterday morning
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
“Stay Home” by Activirus, “Ban Everything” by Woodbine, “My Life Is On Hold” by Southern Sound, “We Are All Prisoners” by A Bit Member Of The World, “No Talking” by Jay Cartier, “Suspended From Class” by Camera Obscura.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums that are now open, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We’ve also just introduced a section where people can arrange to meet up for non-romantic purposes. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Small Businesses That Have Re-Opened
A few months ago, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have re-opened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you.
Now that non-essential shops have re-opened – or most of them, anyway – we’re focusing on pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other social venues. As of July 4th, many of them have re-opened too, but not all (and some of them are at risk of having to close again). Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet – particularly if they’re not insisting on face masks! If they’ve made that clear to customers with a sign in the window or similar, so much the better. Don’t worry if your entries don’t show up immediately – we need to approve them once you’ve entered the data.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (now showing it will arrive between Oct 8th to Oct 17th). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £3.99 from Etsy here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here (now over 31,000).
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is a lot of work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending me stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email me here. If you want me to link to something, don’t forget to include the HTML code, i.e. a link.
And Finally…
My colleague Toby Young has written about The Wake Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It in his Spectator column this week. The book – by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge – argues that the reaction of most Western governments to the pandemic has revealed them to be inverted pyramids of incompetence, although disappointingly that’s not because the authors are lockdown sceptics.
There’s a good deal in the book to disagree with. The authors make no attempt to re-evaluate the threat of COVID-19 in light of evidence that it’s no more deadly than a bad flu. Instead, they regurgitate the WHO’s doom-mongering and chastise Boris and other populist leaders for not locking down earlier. This ‘failure’ to heed the apocalyptic warnings of public health panjandrums is one way the West ‘flunked the test’. The book even claims Britain’s death toll (which they overestimate by at least 10%) might have been two-thirds lower if we’d locked down a week earlier.
To be fair to the authors, they based their UK death toll figures on PHE’s original estimate and there wasn’t time to correct it before publication.
In spite of the fact that Micklethwait and Wooldridge are unsound on the big issue, many of their arrows find their targets.
It’s hard to dispute the authors’ central hypothesis: that the virus has exposed the governments of most western democracies to be dysfunctional and sclerotic. They were caught off guard, even though they’ve had decades to prepare for a flu-like pandemic, and proved un-able to source protective equipment for health workers. Their attempts to roll out test-and-trace programmes have been hampered by bureaucratic incompetence — even Germany bungled its contact-tracing app. And the death toll is higher than it should be thanks to a series of unforced errors, such as failing to protect care-home residents. If the Chinese Communist party had manufactured Sars-CoV-2 in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to test the resilience of our system of government, they’d be starting up the tanks about now.
Both the book and Toby’s column are worth reading in full.
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every dog has its day
Why Are Covid-19 Cases Soaring In NZ? PCR Test Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcONxyAJ8S4
Dr. Sam Bailey
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Dr Sam talks about what is happening in NZ in regards to COVID-19 and important information you should know about the COVID-19 PCR Test
That video from Dr Sam was very interesting. Thanks.
Agreed.
That would be because more tests are being done and more results are being fudged. But as long as the sheep believe “cases” means deaths, then grandmas are safe.
Latest From Fascist Melbourne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHuuSmjws8
Melbourne police break down a door over a Facebook post protesting government tyranny.
That behaviour by the Police is reminiscent of a spate of Police encounters with people filming and photographing them a few years ago.
The Police lost that argument in the end.
They lost because they didn’t understand the law and were abusing their powers, until put into check.
When I see stuff like that, it just reinforces my belief that the people really, really should be armed.
The female people only, of course. Maybe the aboriginals, as well.
All people. A .45 is the greatest equaliser of all.
P.45 for some government advisers.
Coming to a neighbourhood near you (if we don’t quickly stop them).
Ten Brave Australian Police officers
https://youtu.be/Svogj_qPL_I
Facebook Garbage
https://youtu.be/LFLhHN17J3w
More Brave APOs
https://twitter.com/newscomauHQ/status/1291267767522533379
APOs helping a Disabled man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A262DPeR34
If anyone ever wondered how”ordinary Germans” could have participated in the Holocaust, this shows how. The government introduces horrific, illiberal, totalitarian legislation, and the functionaries of the State happily go about implementing them. Do any of these police officers reflect on what, exactly, they are doing? Do any of them feel shame? If the legislation said, “the Jews are filthy and spread disease, round them up” do you seriously believe that these brave and noble upholders of the law would pause even for a minute at the door of Mr & Mrs Cohen?
Our idea that we live in a liberal democracy, where our rights are protected by the State is a mirage. We are not free, and have not been for generations.
We are the unfortunate ones who live in an age where our betters have discovered the perfect excuse to gain more power. And almost everyone is happy to go along with it. Including me. I’m starting a new job in a couple of weeks, so here I am anonymous still that my heretical words do not get me fired.
So sad.
I learned about unmerited power aged 14-15, I had a part time job with W.H.Smith & Sons.
One of my duties was to stand by the entrance at 17.15 and not let anybody else in before locking the door at 17.30 sharp.
I really loved that part of my job, the more they wailed and moaned the better I liked it because then was back to sweeping the floor.
Wow, yes, reminds me of when I was Saturday girl in Woolworths in the early 1980s. We were given certain powers like telling customers to put out their cigarettes, not allowing people into the shop near closing time, and on the bakery I could decide when to reduce the prices of items at the end of the day to the waiting masses ( I actually used to reduce stuff earlier for some regulars.) It was amazing how people did just as they were told, and how we are all taught to respect the tiniest amount of authority.
The word is NOT “respect”, it’s “obey”. Respect is earned.
Just as well I never visited your shop as there might have been a bit of an argument! 🙂 Stopping people coming in 15 minutes early seems excessive. It only takes a minute or two to buy a bar of chocolate.
Tough, one Mrs Bouquet phoned Head Office to complain, they told the branch manager to ‘congratulate that boy’.
Yes look at that scumbag of a British Transport Police pepper spraying a man refusing to wear amask becauuse of a medical condition.
Copper needs to be prosecuted and sacked without pension to show the other coppers they cannot break the law and assault the public with impunity.
(IN the Daily Wail if you are brave enough)
Weirdly we travelled on Merseyrail the other day, had our passes checked, no mention of masklessness, maybe it is because we are oldies?
It didn’t give them pause in the Channel Islands in WW2. Cards marked “J”, sent to Auschwitz, never returned.
Democracy never meant what people tend to think it means – some sort of enlightened political condition. Democracy is just a bunch of tools for solving problems. It doesn’t mean the problems go away. The tools of democracy don’t prevent bad things from happening, but they give one some sort of recourse if they do. That’s all. (And of course the tools don’t work if no one uses them.)(And even worse, the tools themselves [such as the law] can be abused.)
In ancient Greece the word Democracy was originally coined to mean ‘mob rule’, we should have some more of it.
My goodness, that is shocking. How easily we have descended into tyranny and just shows how fragile our civil liberties are, and thus even more reason to make a stand now before it gets to this stage and you can’t.
I agree, but it is the emphasis on rights rather than liberty that has masked the threat to, and loss of our liberty, over the last 50 years; you cannot measure the loss of often competing rights, but you can the denial or withdrawal of liberty. Our ancestors understood that innately, which is why such concepts as double jeopardy withstood the test of time until Tony Blair ‘modernised’ it away on the premise that modern methods of detection could turn up ‘new’ evidence, etc., etc. The point is that the principle of being tried twice for the same crime has been broken. Even though it is meant to be applied to ‘serious’ cases, who decides what’s serious? Posting a notice on Facebook? We can, however, measure the application of this power, and judge as a whole whether it is being applied as was intended when we crossed that particular Rubicon. Our contemporary fetish for rights has blinded us to the loss of our basic liberty in my opinion. Others may not agree. Nonetheless, what C-19 has amply demonstrated is that the words ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ are interchangeable with those of ‘repression’ and ‘dictatorship’. Our freedom is like an onion skin;… Read more »
That’s absurd.They just proved that person’s complaint. They are tyrannical. Imbeciles!
12 bore required
Congratulations!
thanks-it feels like my Birthday!
Looks like former W.H.O. director Margaret Chan during the Ebola outbreak.
Woof! Woof!
Amidst all the data and digging into the deeper truths about the Covid swindle it’s important for everyone to remember the basics that all of us, to varying degrees, are being completely abused by the policies that have put in place over these last six months.
How much longer are people going to stand for this? And what demands are people going to make to hold accountable those who made these devastating decisions that have and are destroying millions of lives?
This is truly amazing to see. Millions of healthy people have been held hostage by their own governments- demanded in various forms to self-isolate and bring their lives to a screeching halt. For what?
That is what is being mandated and sold as decisions for “public health.” Think about this. This isn’t madness this is control and coercion. These are criminal acts.
Just that which is being done to the kids all across these countries should be enough for people to rise up and unseat all officials who are abusing these children with these draconian policies.
The point about ‘Public Health’, which only became a thing a few year ago, is that it regards us all as a single entity.
If a policy designed to protect The Public harms some individuals as a result that policy can still be held up as successful so promotions and gongs all around.
In Quebec their latest campaign is titled #touscontreun. All against one, I guess. Who is the One? Covid? Anyone who disagrees? It also resembles The Musketeers motto ‘All for one and one for all’. The Collectivity. No more individuals. In sum, No more Diversity. They yell and scream about enabling and protecting Diversity but do everything in their power to stamp it out.
For some collectivity is the ultimate good, not a means justifying the end, but an end in itself. Sturgeon is an obvious example. Mao, rather than Lenin, was perhaps the one who got this idea going. Pol Pot its über enforcer.
You want to know how long they’ll put up with it for, let me think, oh yeas for fucking ever. I’m still the only one in the shops without a mask and a worrying trend is now almost every time i’m getting people saying shit to me. I think the plebs are tired of the mask but are to fuking stupid to take it off and i guess folk like me are gonna be the target
I try to talk Covid sense to people who take their mask off if they want to talk to me, most of them seem to closet Sceptics to varying degrees, none say shit to me but the off they go to shops putting their mask back on having just agreed that they are pointless at best.
I just point out that there are many exemptions
I would take the increased pressure from mask wearers on non-mask wearers as sign of the growing cognitive dissonance they are experiencing. They’ll eventually snap.
It’ll carry on for as long as people just want to keep their heads down.
19th September. Make it a million.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10221505113230817&set=g.190135865737618
There is another rally planned for September 26, 2020.
Many people want this to happen. Covid is the the means to drive their agenda and the fact that they’ve swept up the MSM is the stuff of dreams. They will not stop to distract away from the statictics, because the staticists aren’t important to them. They want the complete destruction of the economy, they want the education system to collapse, they want to ‘defund the police. They must be stopped.
As I said to an Extinction Rebellion loony who stopped me and asked for my support in them blocking the main road in my town (and led to a 2 mile – 15 minute de-tour)… your ideas may have some merit but your actions would cause the biggest genocide in history.
These people do not care about the millions of kids who would starve, or the billions of livelihoods destoryed, they just want to ‘stick it to the man’ and establish a world of chaos.
XR ideas have little merit.
They’re protesting against climate change, i.e. something that has always changed since the Earth developed a climate billions of years ago.
They might as well protest against the sky being blue.
If they want to protest about environmental damage, with some real solutions, I’d have a great deal of sympathy, but what they want, as you say, would cause the deaths of millions from starvation, and reduce living standards back to the stone age.
There must have been lots of moments in the past when the public health agenda was given precedence over individual freedom. Good subject for a book.
Dominic Frisby just wrote a book on the history of taxation:
Daylight Robbery by Dominic Frisby | Penguin Random …
http://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca › books › daylight-robbery-by-dominic-fris…
In Daylight Robbery, Dominic Frisby traces the origins of taxation, from its roots in the ancient world, through to today. He explores the role of tax in the formation of our global religions, the part tax played in wars and revolutions throughout the ages, why, at one stage, we paid tax for daylight or for growing a beard. Ranging from the despotic to…
Try telling this to people who believe. There are many who have bought into this whole-heartedly. (I know because I work with these types.) They’re busy preparing reams of guidelines, plans for returning to work (sometime or other), etc. The place where I work now has arrows on the floor to indicate the paths people should take in the main halls, signs on every door to indicate the maximum number of occupants allowed, and endless emails detailing new guidelines. It’s all quite mad – and these people certainly don’t see it as a program of “control and coercion”. In fact, knowing these people, I’m certain they think they’re being rational.
I just came across a list of all the members of SAGE and their sub groups. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups#scientific-pandemic-influenza-group-on-behaviours-spi-b About 95% of them are Prof, or Dr (not actual Doctors or Dentists) so they are all Academics. There are no Carpenters, Bricklayers, Labourers, Engineers, Architects, Waiters or Waitresses, Hairdressers, Supermarket workers, Truck drivers, Cleaners, Traffic wardens, Police, Lawyers, GP’s, Nurses, Hospital Consultants, Surgeons, Teachers, Janitors, self employed workers, homeless people or all the rest of the people who make life work yet all these people are the ones who have and will suffer more the effects of the decisions taken by SAGE. Every Man Jack of the Academics in SAGE has a grand salary with guaranteed job security and a very attractive pension package so their decisions do not affect them in the slightest (at least in the short term… their narrow mindedness may catch up with them too!). Anecdotally, I have had a run in with Academics before. I was doing an egineering project at sea and had measured data to hand. I did a talk to some university students and on the basis of my data challenged the validity of the accepted theoretical characterisation of sea waves. Two Professors approached… Read more »
Medics and Academics are always amongst the first to fall in line when totalitarianism comes along. Partly because they are quite vulnerable in post if they don’t but more because such regimes are more likely to allow them to pursue their own pet monstrosities.
Two immediately spring to mind.
Mengele for the Nazis
Lysenko for the Communists
How’s that for balance ?
Lysenko is more relevant. He caused the death of millions in Russia and China by starvation caused by his arrogance.
The Nazi guy was just an ordinary psychopath.
‘Just an ordinary psychopath’, not critising just noticing how our language has changed in these days of manipulation and lying by people who should, who are employed by us, to care for and protect us and yet they are willfully not doing their job. We are in big, big, trouble when our country’s leaders send our old people to die, alone, in their care homes.
It’s the dying alone that has bothered me the most in all this. I’m really troubled by it because I think you’re really on to something – when we lose sight of the sacred importance of death (and birth), we are indeed in big trouble. Well said.
Not much different than what was done in Germany in WWII.
Both positions give the holder the position of benevolent dictator over the general public
Lysenko isn’t a good example; he was never a real academic. In that episode the real academics ended up in the Lubyanka and the Gulag.
There are two major trading estates in my city.
One is for ‘working blokes’ in the car trade, light fabrication, warehousing, reclamation, building supplies and suchlike. It has been fully up and running for about 8 weeks now. Those people have a much firmer grip on reality than those in the media would have us believe.
The other consists of offices large and small, it remains almost entirely deserted as does the University district and very little is going on at the hospitals.
Hi KH! Been wondering where you’ve been.
Well, good to see you back. Glad business is going well, even if it’s tiring.
Surely all you have to do is to point them at the government guidance which states quite clearly that staff in shops are exempt from mask wearing. I wonder how many of those potential house viewers will dispense with their masks and gloves once they get inside, probably without even you prompting them.
They’re going to spray it with Mr. Clean?
Someone posted recently about an estate agent like yours, fortunately they had another who behaved normally and they got the business.
I am actually saying to my customers now, please don’t wear a face mask when you come round. Every time I say it, I can’t believe I am saying it.
Great idea! Actually, interviewing estate agents in order to choose one to give your business to (i.e., sell your house) is a good opportunity to do a little “enforcing” yourself. No masks if you want my business.
Anything you can do I can do better.
Glad to see you back here kh1485!
We were busy during the last bank holiday (which is good news) but its gone really quiet again with kids going back to school.
Hampton Court seemed to be doing a roaring trade on Tuesday as I passed, but that obviously was before the schools went back.
Nightmare.
The reality is these people have to go to work as they can’t work from home.The office workers and government employees have no incentive to go back as furlough/wfh is much preferable to them
Yes but they all drive into my city to go shopping about 11am together with those to scared to go to work at all.
had a similar experience -2 weeks into the lockdown-carbon monoxide alarm goes off at 1 in the morning. Called out the gas man who arrived an hour later. no mask etc. Turned out the chip shop downstairs hadn’t switched off the gas when they locked up
Most working blokes coming here see thru the bollox, we had drain surgery over a number of days , young lads very sceptical.
Steady on the Dr not being a Doctor. I get what you mean – not a practitioner- but the Doctor in the UK is often no proper Dr. A Dr is the highest qualification in your subject which means you’ve submitted independent work.
The title given to people with degrees is by convention. We don’t give architects the same title even though they study for the same time.
In Quebec and many other universities, you can call yourself a Doctor, with a PhD, after completing just one cycle (4 years) out of 3 (12 years) of a Family Medicine Degree and no one bats an eye. Most people are not aware that a university can confer on you this provisonal title. That impresses the ignorant public and gives you tremendous influence that you don’t deserve.
Great post and highlights the problems with academia and medicine. I’ve always been amazed that there were no economists and mental health experts on Sage and I think this is the reason why the economic and mental health damage caused by the insane policies we have at the moment is on a large (and even growing further) scale at the moment.
I also think that part of the problem is these academics and medics inhabit cloud cuckoo land. I mean, does the likes of Whitty and Ferguson do their own shopping? Do they socialise with friends? Do they go out on day trips with their families? I don’t think so.
And the Chair of this committee was pointing that out at the beginning of June, rather late, you might think: Science and Technology Committee, 5 June : Philip Duffy, Chief Scientific Adviser, Treasury: ‘As soon as the crisis hit, we could see that a high unemployment rate would be bad not only for demand and for the economy but for our fellow citizens. That was one reason why we pursued that particular policy. Doing a cost- benefit analysis of that would be a very interesting exercise… Q792 Chair: I understand that, and it is good to hear that there is that degree of sensitivity to these questions, but the dilemma is this. If that perspective is not represented and is not part of discussions in SAGE, going forward—and I understand that some of the early decisions may have been more broad-brush; in fact, the evidence we heard in the previous session indicated that some of the upcoming decisions require that more forensic approach—either that advice is available within SAGE, to be combined with different disciplines, or it is provided externally, perhaps by the Treasury. But the dilemma is this. If the Government continue to make a virtue of always following… Read more »
Please note that Rockefeller has totally taken over (bought) university medical teaching everywhere, discarding all the natural treatments and replacing them with man-made drugs of dubious value. So doctors follow treatments designed by pharmaceutical companies and never have to think about what they are doing and with no need to understand the real nature of the diseases they are “treating”.
For the past year or two with doctors appointments being harder to get I’ve used to Internet for alternatives to medication.
“mental health damage caused by the insane policies we have at the moment”
I see that unfortunately in my own family. One of my in-laws was alrealdy a bit of a hypochondriac and control freak (using a phantom illness to control others). The lockdown and ridiculous “rules” are heaven-sent for such a person. She keeps talking about the rules, and why can’t her teenage children just keep to the “rules”? That is, spend all their time with her, or at home, don’t go out on bikes to meet and sleep out on the beach, etc. She wants to totally clamp down on their normal behavior, cannot sit shoulder to s houlder with grandmother, etc.
This situation has quickly revealed just how many people there are out there who relish the opportunity, and implicit go-ahead, to control others by means of enforcing ridiculous rules. And others who will just go along and not even ask questions. I can see whypepole go along, because they want to get into a shop to buy groceries. But to do so without even asking, or feeling, obvious questions is disturbing.
I hope I never see another self-serving comment about Germans in the Third Reich.
Agree and have the same with one in my family, now living the dream that everyone elses lives are as miserable as there’s.
We are witnessing the beginning of The New & Improved Third Reich Blueprint.
Well said. I know people at work who are hypochrondriacs and one of them was mentioning the possibility of spikes in autumn and winter and a second lockdown. Given I almost came to blows with her, I simply replied “Gee….we won’t have a job to return to then when that happens.”
That exchange is symptomatic of what we’ve always discussed here – people who fall for the government propaganda and MSM hook, line and sinker and those who relish the feeling of control and ability to bully people via the”guidance.” Its reaching the point now where one becomes like Linus from the Snoopy comics – “I love mankind, its people I can’t stand”
I’m beginning to suspect that Pol Pot was on to something when it came to academics.
Yeah, then he hired his own.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/01/governments-initial-coronavirus-response-may-have-cost-additional/
I’m going to email each and every one suggesting that at some time or other they will want to make a run for the door and disassociate themselves from the whole process, as Mark Woolhouse did. As someone on here said of ferguson, their email addresses are often readily available
They can’t do their sums properly either:
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2020/09/04/covid-why-terminology-really-matters/
A brilliant article.
I am simply drawing your attention to what has simply been – probably the biggest single mistake that has ever been made in the history of the world.
Agreed, we need Toby or someone of influence to ensure this is widely publicised.
Not sure how myself as he is probably deluged with e mails already.
reminds me of that story of a Charity refunding a customer £90,000 instead of £9
I thought that only Black Lives Mattered?
All we need now are postcodes …
I agree wholeheartedly – I wrote this back in May: https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/cc-no-3-who-will-replace-neil-ferguson
Just remember in 1984 it’s the proles who offer hope by just carrying on & ignoring the crap. I think the common man has already seen through this.
My letter on Wednesday in BMJ on-line: Is the government suffering from Munchausen Syndome by Proxy?Re: Covid-19: Less haste, more safety Fiona Godlee. 370:doi 10.1136/bmj.m3258 Dear Editor Eight days ago I wrote here [1]: “To limp along like this in the hope that we will all be rescued by a vaccine (supposing we any longer need rescuing) is not realistic, and not the basis on which policy should be directed – quite apart from the harm that it is doing to every other aspect of civil life and of health policy itself.” I now note the publication of an article by Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson in The Spectator questioning whether the present rise in cases is an artefact of PCR testing, as hospitalisations and deaths continue to decline [2]. Bearing this in mind perhaps it is time the British Medical Journal itself began to move the narrative on. [1] John Stone, ‘ Less haste, more safety, certainly, but we could do with an end to the vaccine rescue narrative as well’, 25 August 2020, https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m3258/rr-0 [2] Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson, ‘ Coronavirus cases are mounting but deaths remain stable. Why?’, The Spectator, 1 September 2020, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/coronavirus-cases-are-mounting-but-d… Competing interests: AgeofAutism.com, an on-line daily journal, concerns itself… Read more »
Judging by the masks in Waitrose and the park today we are close to near total herd conpliabilty.
comment of the day
I’m just back from a week abroad – mask compliance and general anxiety, definitely up
I have heard that Southend is a bastion of non-compliance.
I hope so. It’s my home town.
Probably in the local lockdown queue then.
Dr. Burgess and Eleanor Riley explained their findings like interested scientists with no hint of taking a political position, unlike most of the compromised experts and politicians that we usually hear from.
I am sat having a drink of wine reading the latest and think and feel that we do need to be on the streets demonstrating all over the country and I include all of the UK and I totally dismayed and fed up about what is happening. I don’t want to say depressed because having experience through my work of people suffering from debilitating depression it isn’t what I am feeling. I feel like a bereavement, where you wake up and for a moment all feels well and within a very short time your brain computes that it isn’t and you realise that the world is skewed. How long does this shit have to gone before the masses are on the streets protesting. I have read this from the start of the site and all the comments and many other sites and Twitter feeds but never commented. I do ‘t want attend a rally or be involved in any demonstration that involves David Icke or talks about 5G. I want to demonstrate about the ludicrous lockdown, the continued restrictions of our liberties the face masks and the fact that our lives have been altered for no reason. I limit the… Read more »
There are people who know this is all nonsense but don’t want to admit it, even to themselves, because the implication is that we are in deep trouble. If they admitted it, they would have to face the fact that they are living in a dystopian nightmare, and that would damage their mental wellbeing. It’s self-preservation. They are tough nuts to crack – I don’t know how to deal with them. It seems cruel to try and drag them into the horrible reality, but they make me cross with their complacency – in some ways I would rather deal with the extremist lockdown believers who will actually try and argue their case. I sometimes feel like we need to run some surveys designed to tease out subsets of people we need to convert and have a Behavioural Insights team design a series of information campaigns targeted at the different groups. That sounds manipulative, but then people have been manipulated and are being very slow to come out of it.
Wankers like David Icke are there to discredit the protest. He’s a government stooge and if you think otherwise you’re a dumb motherfucker. I despise all these fuckers saying ice’s been right all along. He’s a total charlatan
He’s certainly a fool and a charlatan but why do you think he is a government stooge? I’m genuinely puzzled.
He always seems to know a bit too much, maybe.
he says nothing, i’ve not heard an original idea from his poor poor mind. It’s laughable that people believe it. We’ve folk here who support him, they’re either deluded or shills, a bit of both probably. I feel sorry for the believers and i despise the shills.
He was permitted his YouTube platform for many years before being cancelled immediately prior to lockdown, coincidence?
I say come one come all. Some of you are expressing the same intolerant views that the government and others are imposing on us. You are canceling people that you don’t agree with. Don’t complain about being cancelled then turn around and cancel someone that you disagree with. Not good for the cause.
Sorry Richard, was that addressed to me? I didn’t cancel anyone, nor did I express intolerance.
Still off down the pub for me, bye till Saturday am.
because he pops up with some theory alongside things have a genuine reason to be concerned and discredits it, plus he worked for the BBC, still does as far as i’m concerned
I think Icke is what most people would call a useful idiot: I prefer the phrase “unwitting agent of influence”. He’s doing the State’s dirty work without actually realising he’s doing it- much like Roger Windsor in the Miners’ Strike. In Icke’s case he’s allowing the State to discredit genuine Covid sceptics and civil-rights protestors by associating them in the public mind with someone who actually is a wacko fruitloop conspiracy-nutter.
There are some legitimate concerns about 5G, but they are being deliberately overshadowed and misrepresented by the whackos ‘it spreads the virus’ ones as soon as you mention them.
The governments are legitimately concerned about espionage, some are legitimately concerned about the masts being a similar health threat as high-voltage lines (harmless as per governments, but significantly more cases of leukemia in children in reality, if you live close to one), some, like RKjr, are very legitimately
concerned about them enabling the surveillance/social credit/digital health passport state, for example.
The latter issue has become a bit more mainstream, there even was a documentary about the need to sort out such ethical issues of 5G in the German ‘BBC’ (Scobel) yesterday.
But in general, I agree, it should not be in anyones Top5 list of concerns, yet.
Hi Sam I feel the same we need demo’s with sane people on the stage talking or we will just be wrote off .So i guess we have to decide what to do in the future regarding future protests ,my take on it is this If things don’t change and we don’t get sensible people leading the protests i think we should still attend but maybe have a sceptics block . By this i mean those of us on here who are not into the conspiracy stuff should meet and march together ,if we want to bring banners and leaflets keep them distanced from the conspiracy stuff. This i feel will have to be done carefully because we have many people on here with different views and we do not want to alienate anyone .As long as we can keep everyone united against the lockdown i don’t see a problem with this .Anyone who’s attended demonstrations before will know there are always different blocks with different ideas but at that moment coming together for the same goal .
Good sentiment. We need to make common cause with anyone who detests the current situation and wants to do something about – like Churchill on Russia joining the fight WW2: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil …”
Yes you are right, it does feel like a bereavement, that’s exactly what my life feels like.
Willl Jeeves be there too?
19th September. Make it a million.
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10221505113230817&set=g.190135865737618
…closer than thought?
Well, except us!
(meaning, we have thought so for a long time)
It is undeniable – and on record – that we were suggesting this (and modelling it!) back in April. Yes, we ‘conspiracy theorists’, ‘tinfoil hat brigade’, ‘gammons’, etc. etc. were months ahead of the real, actual scientists. How could this possibly be true? Answer: you don’t need to be a professional scientist to put clues together and think of plausible explanations. In this case we had the Diamond Princess and other enclosed populations that were topping out at about 15% antibodies, and we could listen to, and read, the research of real immunologists as opposed to ‘epidemiologists’ like Ferguson. Even an outsider could deduce that immunity is dynamically variable. It isn’t just a case of starting with heterogenous-but-fixed susceptibility (as modelled by Gomes et al.), but being open to the idea that people acquire variable levels of immunity as they are exposed to slight whiffs of a virus. A stronger dose of the virus may result in a different response from the body, maybe resulting in detectable antibodies, but there are several immune mechanisms in there, and they’ll respond differently in different circumstances. This factor was completely absent from Ferguson’s supposedly state-of-the-art model. And clearly makes a mockery of any… Read more »
And Cheltenham, Anfield, packed tubes, crowded pubs and offices, all at the ‘height of the spread’. With zero masks, social distancing or any other guff. Since then, illegal raves, BLM, Bournemouth beach etc. None showed a jot of evidence for the ‘we’re all susceptible, it transmits via touching surfaces, breathing in normally and amongst healthy people’ narrative that underpins all the nonsense of lockdown and the rest of the mystical thinking. This I worked out quite early based on this clear disconnect between narrative and reality.
Perhaps those you refer to as ‘real actual scientists’ are nothing of the sort. Academics for hire, political extremists, terrorists, etc there are many more suitable labels but they are about as far from being scientists as it is possible to get.
WHO 4.3 Billion
Imperial College 280 Million (Ferguson)
Oxford University 243 Million
Pro Chris Wittey 40 Million
BBC Media Action 53 Million
CDC 155 Million
GAVI 3 Billion
Johns Hopkins 870 Million
NIH (Fauci) 18 Million
the downgrade of Covid from a high consequence infectious disease 19th March on the gov.uk was the start point. Everything we have posted here since then corroborates this position. All that was needed was cost/benefit analysis
Commons S & Tech Committee, 5 June, taking evidence on Cost benefit analysis: Question to Prof Propper, Prof of Economics, Imperial College: ‘… traditional measures, such as quality-adjusted life years, are they appropriate in this context? We have talked about excess deaths and the issue about the timeframe in which you look at it. Do you think quality-:adjusted life years is the right metric to be looking at? Professor Propper: For those, it is basically about how soon you die. There are more societal trade-offs. Those are very useful for thinking about whether you should introduce a particular drug now. NICE uses them very nicely. I do not think they are designed for pandemics, where you are making all kinds of trade-offs between different groups. That has political and social aspects. People want to value some people more than others; people want to value their elders dying in dignity with people around them. This has almost too many tentacles to put them all in boxes. You can think about the trade-offs. Reducing them all to QALYs would be nice in theory but impossible in practice, and it requires political decisions that QALYs are not designed to make. Q784 Aaron Bell:… Read more »
I would say March. But otherwise, correct.
I agree, but this site only started in April…
From the roundup.
Tim Harford was on the Jeremy Vine show yesterday in full retreat mode to presenter Vanessa Phelps.
He told her that the Mirror had picked on the one thing he’d said that was a mistake (the taking a bath) and misrepresented what he meant.
She let him get away with saying “50-60,000 have died from this terrible disease, I’m an economist and it killed the man who made that possible . . .”
Vanessa asked herself what she should do if she was in a room with someone showing signs of the virus (ed wtf ?)
“Run out of the room clutching my hair and screaming…”
You know, as soon as I saw that bit of the round-up, I thought it sounded a bit too radical for a fully paid-up Radio 4 presenter like Harford. I’ll bet he’s been having nightmares about it, imagining all the nice people in Radio 4-land associating him with conspiracy theorists and the far right, etc.
Why Are Covid-19 Cases Soaring In NZ? PCR Test Update
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcONxyAJ8S4
Dr. Sam Bailey
87.8K subscribers
SUBSCRIBE
Dr Sam talks about what is happening in NZ in regards to COVID-19 and important information you should know about the COVID-19 PCR Test
Thank you for that, and will share. A voice of sense and knowledge in the current sea of hysteria and ignorance.
one small example of the damage this insanity has done and is doing … I’m an American and my fiance is French … she is in Paris I am in Pennsylvania in the US. We have maintained a long range relationship for the last 4 years by meeting on average for a week or 2 once every 6-8 weeks … (I work remotely from anywhere in the world so lets just say I’ve traveled alot over the last 4 years). We have not seen each other in person in almost 7 months. We had just begun our US K1 visa process at the end of Jan and actually have gotten the application all the way up to the final step, the Embassy interview, but of course those are on hold until the travel bans are lifted. As the US does not grant exemptions to the travel ban we have appealed to France and it seemed like the French government had created a process to allow couples in long term relationships to gain a “hall pass” to visit France to see your loved one. I say seemed because so far it appears the “process” was designed to look like something was… Read more »
Mr Hancock seems to think we have not thrown enough virgins into the volcano because the Covid God is still angry despite everyone wearing face masks to praise and adore him.*
Any volunteers?
* Covid God/Hancock, who knows ?
Maybe the lockdownistas and mask lovers should volunteer to sacrifice themselves for the “greater good” and “safety” that they keep on bleating on about.
Hancock would be a good place to start. Knowing our luck, the volcano would spit the bastard back out again.
Hahahaha…..he would be so bad that even the volcano would reject him!
Surely there would be a volcano that would accept him – Etna, Vesuvius, Mt St Helens, Mayon….I can go on.
Mount Doom is the only place that kind of evil can be destroyed!
They’d be more likely to insist that maskfree people be thrown in instead.
The trouble with sacrificing to the Gods is that none of them actually exist and therefore will never respond however many sacrifices you make – ask an Aztec, oh but you can’t can you.
NB Other beliefs systems are available so don’t bother writing in if you subscribe to one of these.
Maybe the volcano would prefer a Hancock instead?
Would rather line the politicians and their advisers up against that wall, Dark Lord! We’re going to need a very long wall as it is.
The shooting can be done in batches if the wall isn’t long enough.
The Great Wall of China would fit the bill.
Beware of mirages:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-phantom-win-election-1528948
Hawkfish, a data and analytics firm funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has warned that Trump could win a phantom victory on election night because of the time it takes to tabulate votes sent by mail.
An ‘entertainer’ on the radio yesterday telling us of his Covid themed Christmas Act, it includes appearances by
Sanitizerclause and Father Christmask.
I’ll spare you the rest.
Sounds like one of those acts where I’d rather spend my time pulling my teeth out with pincers.
I was cycling through the park last night, ahead a young lady with her young kids, I was thinking, ah great no face nappies, ooh they look happy, yer the kids look happy, humm perhaps things aren’t quite as bad as I think they are…
Then as one of the young boys came up to mummy from playing on the swings or something, mummy demands the boy holds his hands out then squeezes about half a bottle of freekin sanitizer on the lads hands, he was totally saturated with it, it was dripping of his little hands in huge blobs.
Yep thing are worse than I thought.
Mummy probably thinks the sun warms up the Covid stains on the metal and plastic swing to make it want to get her kids even more.
Evil Covid. Like a cyclone.
Too many to list?
Latest From Fascist Melbourne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHuuSmjws8
Melbourne police break down a door over a Facebook post protesting government tyranny.
Insane. Just watched that.
Bet they don’t do that in the vibrant areas of town!
I must remember that adjective … “vibrant”
It covers the same demographic as “man of no appearance”
I wrote a blog post which might be of interest – first of a series on Covid-19 and Fragility: https://medium.com/@civitasperegrina/of-antifragility-and-covid-19-part-i-f266a7dd609b
Good article! It’s always been obvious to me that this was the way forward. I still don’t get why other people don’t get it.
Great article. And absolutely right about Taleb – it’s amazing how ‘fragile’ some people’s intellects are. People whom you would expect to have a consistent world view based on philosophical insights which you, yourself, in part learned from them, end up losing it completely and showing themselves to be as hysterical as everyone else. Taleb, Liddle, Phillips…
Excellent article!
Does anyone know if there’s a protest in Glasgow on 5th September?
I’m sure I’d read somewhere that there is, but I can’t find any mention via a Google or DuckDuckGo search.
Contact people in Glasgow. Community groups, whatever.
100 million covers on Richi and still no spike in cases….. doubtless that will be put down to the masks through which people are eating…
You still can’t catch the Rona in pubs or restaurants, take-aways are a different story.
Kim-Jong Dan Versus Nic Sturge-on.
Cnut versus Canute!
Both (c)(a)nut(e)cases?
I posted yesterday about Londoners being pointed to the Brecon Beacons for Covid testing. I assumed this to be a local glitch but I’ve come across 2 locals who have been told to go to Newport, Gwent about 150 miles away.
One is a care worker who is now unable to work as she needs to test weekly. Go to Newport for a 30 second test that should have arrived in the post.
My informant is her colleague and she is HOARDING her own supplies of testing kit.
seen this video of the scum pigs in Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZHuuSmjws8
what an absolute bunch of scum. Coming to a house near you. Maybe me. Is it a crime to suggest a protest? i’m not dong the because if there is a virus going round i’m ready to die any fucking minute and i hope the cunts that are oppressing us catch it and die horribly. I am fucking sick up to my back fucking teeth of this whole shit. I pray to Jesus that he takes these people in charge and sends them to hell and i don’t even believe in jesus.
I do quite a bit of voluntary work with Devon Wildlife Trust and being outdoors work this is thankfully all getting going again but of course with Covid rules. Their rules talk about 2m social distance, when I queried this saying that I thought Boris had reduced this to 1m, they replied that it was not down to them, their Health & Safety person had had a meeting with their insurers who insisted that they say 2m or they would not be insured. Clearly a wildlife trust cannot run the risk of being uninsured and so this is all being dictated by the insurance industry. Mind you as volunteers we are responsible for our own travel and so we can and do share lifts with each other but then when we start work we must keep 2m apart! Similarly, the other day I went swimming at Chagford outdoor pool, lovely setting on Dartmoor and I was reprimanded for swimming backstroke! The lady seemed rather sheepish and apologetic for telling me this but the rules have come down from Swim England and have to be obeyed or they will not be insured. So I just swam on my front and smiled… Read more »
Yeah, the insurance industry’s role in all of this is something that needs serious digging. The government’s guidance, although daft, is often much less strict than what is appearing in our ‘lived reality’ and insurance plays a huge part in that.
Indeed, but it was the government that opened Pandora’s Box in the first place. If you have 2m, even briefly, it will immediately become the Gold Standard for safety. Those idiots didn’t think through any of the consequences of this. Or maybe they did and just DGAF.
The fact the 2 metre rule was just an arbitrary figure in the first place.
2 metres never had the force of law, it was only ever a guideline.
Sounds like the WT think they are doing you a favour and not the other way round
Easy answer, tell them to stick their health and safety, and their insurance where the sun don’t shine and that you won’t be coming back
Thanks for the report, it brings back good memories of Dartmoor.
On the 2m is insured deal I have a few questions. Is the 2m guidance or law? What is the risk being insured against? An individuals collection of a virus at a given point cannot be proved. So this leads me to think its an insurance against loss to the host company through closure or reputation. But how is an insurer going to prove the Chagford swim champ did not distance? From the insurers point of view this is full of holes. Not all at to suggest every else hasn’t spotted that already!
Banning back stroke – clearly you have to ban something to make it feel different and oppressive. We’ve been told (krankie gob) that if it feels normal something is awry and covids are about to pounce.
Trouble is rationality does not always translate in insurance. When I returned to the UK after many years in the Middle East, I had difficulty in getting car insurance because they insisted that having driven for so long one the other side of the road I was a risk. The fact, in travelling to different countries I was used to flipping back and forth, and 20 years no claims, was irrelevant- if it didn’t tick their box or model, computer says no.
Guidance only, but then so is the Highway Code.
How can anybody possibly prove that they caught the Rona from any particular facility or establishment for the purpose of an insurance claim against the owners or managers of that entity?
The whole concept is INSANE.
SM, this is completely bonkers. You’re all outdoors. As a volunteer, tell them you’re concerned about your own H&S and want to see the DWT’s H&S assessment (was it done in house? Or by an independent H&S consultant, some of latter were totally OTT in the beginning but have got more sensible as time has gone on). If they’re still relying on an early scary assessment, before govt guidelines for playgrounds etc were relaxed, tell them they need to reassess. Others may know better, but I don’t think insurers can quibble where an entity’s H&S assessment says something is not a severe risk and sensible mitigations are in place.
Even with measures in place the insurance won’t cover it. There was an article in Law or Fiction about this a while back. They don’t cover non-threatening ailments, non-threatenig in that you don’t develop an injury or have severe symptoms.
Plus they will not cover you if someone gets ill because of measures you have taken.
The County Council must use different insurers, they announced no social distancing required on school buses.
Latests news from Melbourne is the grim reaper’s toll of ” aged care facilities” last night was nearly 60 including a lady in her 100 s . Many of these were from weeks ago but desperate Dan the Fuehrer of Melbourne has a tendency to hide figures . Victoria is going to rival Peru for ferocity of lockdown and high fatalities …. might there be a link ? He is now extending his lockdown with curfews for another month. Oh and for St Jacinda fans bad news with the first covid19 fatality in NZ since March.
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/authorities-defend-discrepancies-in-the-number-of-reported-covid-19-deaths-20200904-p55scl.html
Not sure Kim Jong-Dan is actually trying to hide the death figures now. On the contrary, I think they’re happy to pad them out in order to justify their appalling confinement of the population. The Victorian Chief Health Officer straight out said the other day that if deaths are above the normal level in a nursing home and SARS-CoV-2 is known to be present then it’s reasonable to attribute any deaths to it. Is that loose or is it loose?
I got the feeling he’d been saving them for a rainy day when he wanted to try to ramp up fear.
So loose an elephant wouldn’t even touch the sides.
Who is this Victorian Chief Health Officer and what are his/her priors?
Hi, I think someone else ages ago pointed out that although Sweden is considered a control group with regards to it’s Covid-19 strategy, you could make similar remarks about New Zealand.
They shut their borders late January and Arden embarked on an extreme lockdown strategy to eliminate Covid-19, not suppress nor mitigate its effects.
And surprise, surprise … The Virus has found a way after months!
Reminds me of the following:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130424/
“An outbreak of common colds at an Antarctic base after seventeen weeks of complete isolation.”
Viruses will find away, if that’s its intent! You can’t defy nature forever – even if the consequences are unfortunately grim and nasty for a few.
Sorry Arden, but I have absolutely NO regard, nor sympathy, nor respect for your dictatorship-laden approach!
A so called Health Minister makes stupid decisions which causes the death of countless thousands in Care Camps Then he locks up everyone in the land without trial He then introduces a ‘law’ banning people from peacefully gathering to demonstrate their opposition to what he has done, and continues to do This ‘law’ is a diktat invented by the said Minister and not even mentioned in parliament Six hundred elected representatives and the leader have a meeting. Not one person even mentions the new ‘law’, let alone dissents It is said the country has a ‘free press’, but not one member of the ‘free press’ questions or raises a word of dissent. The ‘free press’ engage in a campaign of ridiculing anyone who dares to demonstrate It is said the country has ‘the rule of law’ but no lawyer challenges the new diktat in the courts and the courts will do what the politicians tell them anyway I’m told that psychiatrists often get their patients to write down their thoughts and feelings as a form of therapy. When the patient reads back over what they have written it sometimes gives them a new perspective on things that may disturb them… Read more »
I find the fact that all of these establishments are complying, really difficult to understand, they have the facts of the numbers of hospital admissions which are so low so as to be irrelevant in the pandemic mode, yet, still no backlash against the removal and disruption of freedoms.
Have they got some sort of immunity from prosecution so long as the declared Crisis remains in place. That would incentivise them to
Carry On Regardless.
Carry On Witless.
Fundamentally how can any of these politicians, human rights groups, in fact anyone who has supported with this nonsense (beyond trying to avoid it and make do)…how can they even talk about democracy and freedom anymore.
The politicians have just voided their jobs, sadly all of them. Human rights groups, what a fucking joke.
The most basic freedoms were taken away – we do not live in democracies – we live under a light form of martial law. Or Emergency Powers.
In the history of my country (the island of Ireland that is) oppression eventually led to revolution. Yet it was only the treatment of the revolutionaries that swayed public opinion. The daily executions publicised in the press turned the tide. The actual rebels were generally thought of as a bunch of dangerous idiots by the majority. Even with all that was going on in Ireland at the time.
The Public Health laws, from which Coronovirus legislation derives, was intended for use ‘against’ infected persons or people (eg Typhoid Mary NYC 1900) not against the entire Country or regions thereof.
This might be a starting point for prosecuting those responsible for the crimes that we witness daily.
Excellent point!
We need to find allies with deep pockets. Quick!
Spot on, would love to think this would be over soon, but cannot see it. The politicians showed how weak and useless they were during brexit. Now during this they are even worse. Terribly weak, unwilling to challenge, the opposition as deranged as those in power. Even when we have an election who could you vote for? Nobody. At least with brexit there was debate and a decision to be made, with this 600, I couldn’t stomach voting for any of them. Unless the Government of Sweden head to the UK…..I’m done with it. Snowflake pandemic.
Which country are you describing. With all the various dictators around the world, it’s difficult to tell….
‘…the virus has exposed the governments of most western democracies to be dysfunctional and sclerotic. They were caught off guard…..’
‘If the Chinese Communist party had manufactured Sars-CoV-2 in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to test the resilience of our system of government, they’d be starting up the tanks about now…’
Hands up anyone who can spot what might be dysfunctional and sclerotic about this?:
‘Military chiefs have drawn up plans to mothball all of Britain’s tanks under radical proposals to modernise the armed forces….’
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/defence-chiefs-face-battleover-plan-to-scrap-tanks-ws87tdgbg#:~:text=Radical%20move%20aims%20to%20cut%20costs%20and%20focus%20on%20cyberwarfare&text=Military%20chiefs%20have%20drawn%20up,heavy%20armour%2C%20The%20Times%20understands.
Kinda getting fed up with these crackpot comments on LS.
Starting to make me think about going somewhere else for my Sceptic news.
It’s not about Bill Gates.
It’s not about 5g
It’s not about China starting a world war.
It’s not about pumping us with a vaccine (which most crackpots fail to answer ‘why?’)
Its about incompetence.
Blundering.
Bad politicians who don’t understand the real world.
Fear porn hungry media and the rise in the health and safety culture and risk averse fools we’ve all become.
Anyway if you think the same, follow my podcast 👉 https://bedwetters.buzzsprout.com/
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Unfashionable as it is Kipling tells a great truth in this couplet, as did Frank Herbert:
Fear is the mind killer
There are cover ups, nearly all are covering up incompetence.
Panic has been far more infectious and damaging than CV-19.
Fear, and panic in the air
I want to be free
From desolation and despair
And I feel like everything I saw
Is being swept away
(Bellamy)
I mostly agree with you. I am 80-90% confident this is all incompetence and psychopathy. However, there is a small but very serious chance that this is much more sinister, and my assessment of the chances of that is increasing all the time.
If there is a sinister scheme it may have been a grand design. It may have been born by evolution of the madness of our psychopath leaders. Or it could be opportunistic attack by the mega-rich. Of the three of those, exploitation by the mega-rich seems most feasible and is still directly caused by the global pandemic of incompetence.
So we should focus on the incompetence but keep in mind the sinister possibilities. Best to keep an open mind and change it as the evidence suggests (lest we fall into the trap our incompetent leaders did).
I agree, Lord R. However I do think that some actors on the world stage would not miss the opportunity to milk that incompetence for their own ends.
And at a more local level: multiple crazy traffic schemes, the long opposed downgrading of a local A&E department, controversial planning applications nodded through etc etc.
At the start of lockdown road repair gangs made their sites safe and abandoned them.
When they came back 3-4 weeks later they set to work implememting various road closures, new cycles or buses only schemes all in the name of Social Distancing with shiny new signs that said so.
In fact all of these schemes have been on the books for years under ‘Greening The City’; unable to previously get these on the budget they were sneaked in during the harshest stage of lockdown.
Meanwhile the roundabout linking the city to the motorway remained stripped of tarmac and with raised ironworks so horrible buses swerved to avoid them.
This will have been done on the say so of paid officials rather than elected representatives, a local Coup d’Etat in effect.
Error
Well, I think there’s room for different views as to motivation. I have never been much for conspiracy theories, but a few things seem quite plausible to me: 1) Initial government incompetence and cowardice has been followed by a deliberate attempt to cover it up by keeping the illusion going. I simply don’t believe that the PM and others think we face an unprecedented threat any more. The same goes for “scientific” advisors, and the media. 2) The Chinese have taken advantage of this situation. They always say they don’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, but have been vocal in calling for lockdowns. Why? 3) People like Bill Gates and the WHO and others have milked this for their own ends. Anyway, as a matter of tactics, in order to appeal to as many people as possible I feel it best to leave the subject of motivation well alone, and focus on the problem and the remedy – there has been a damaging overreaction which needs to stop. We need to move forward. Afterwards, we can try to ascertain guilt of various parties. Obviously up to you where you get your news, but tend to think we should all… Read more »
They (the Chinese) always say they don’t interfere in other countries’ internal affairs…
but that’s horse shit, they are taking over Africa, South America. They are everywhere. They also tell us not to interfere with their internal affairs, but I think it is imperative that all countries push back on their nefarious schemes before they finish setting up the world’s biggest concentration camp.
I wonder how many air miles the Gates Foundation has racked up this year?
I would love to think it is all about incompetence, and mostly I do, but then there are actions that question that assumption, or suggest that initially it was incompetence, but has now been seen as an opportunity to install political powers and edicts they knew would be challenged in ‘normal ‘ times, as Shapps said when he commented that it was an opportunity to make lasting changes. However, continuing this farce challenges the excuse of incompetence, as there is plenty of scientific and medical evidence to show that there is no justification to continue the exaggerated response to this virus. Why would Hancock pass his diktat last Friday allowing the most basic law enforcement person to impose 10k fines on political demonstrations, to basically shut down opposition to government policies. Vaccines, why push for an untrialled vaccine, and change current laws to allow for this, knowing the fall out from the hurried swine flu vaccine. Hancock only the other day, was still making the vaccine as the only way out. I could go on … but just incompetence, I feel is too simplistic, though I wish it was just that. Have a look at Blair’s Institute for Global Change… Read more »
Ask The General Why?
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Very naive.Who knows if it was a conspiracy at the beginning,it doesn’t matter.It definitely is it now.That fact is not even up for question.There are numerous people/organisation who are actively using this crisis to further their agendas and are on record as saying so.
Those aren’t conspiracies but manifestos. Conspiracies are secret, manifestos open.
Secret or open, the game is on. Fight it or lose all your freedoms.
You seem to be very sure of your conclusions.
Its not about 5G? I would agree 5G almost certainly does not spread the virus or cause the illness known as covid19 – yet it is continuously being pushed and intertwined with every discussion that touches on other areas – it is clearly part of the effort to ‘contain and isolate’ all unwanted ideas and discussion. You take part in this by listing the absurd 5G theory alongside more credible theories.
I am glad its not about pumping us full of vaccine so I guess I can rest assured that the government is not going to make its experimental vaccine mandatory in any way for me or my family or at least if they do I can take heart that its just a big mistake and no harm is intended.
One Hopes? Not the Yellow Peril.. damn!
http://www.nycclash.com/CaseAgainstBans/OSHA.html
I will give it a whirl soon.
Denise Welch sharing an interview with Sunetra Gupta:
https://twitter.com/RealDeniseWelch/status/1301398415121747970
Good for her. She’s got a fan base that might need a good nudge.
Its rather telling that Gupta has alluded to how she’s having trouble getting her research published despite her name and academic affiliation. It’s like Trofim Lysenko all over again – the establishment declared that he was right and as a result other scientists were marginalised and even sent to prison.
Yeah, I noticed on the twitter thread, another scientist, who had struggled to get research published.
Been there, got the T shirt (or, more specifically, Mr TT). This is exactly the experience of Climate Change ‘science’. Once you established yourself and your research as questioning ‘the science is settled’ mantra in the early 2000s, you could not find a conduit for your papers. Once that has happened, you get booted off the funding tracks. Clearly the same is happening here, and it does not surprise me at all.
This is an interesting point you make TT especially so in relation to comments elsewhere on the page this morning. Do you have any suggest about how the scientific consensus is reached that begins the drying up of funding for diverse research? How is the trend set?
I hope you don’t mind me imposing this question on you. Thanks.
Basics, this is how it works from Mr TT, who has acted as an expert witness to government and corporates in energy markets since the late 1990s (prior to that he was in the corporate world). I can also cross-reference this from my own direct experience of some of the people involved in the process several years later: The decision that ‘the science is settled’ was taken at the highest level of the Blair government because it wanted to adopt the climate change strategy for political reasons. Then it was enacted by redirecting academic funding to those research groups who were deemed to be supportive of the government objective. Those that were not had their funding removed and it became almost impossible to get research published. There were academics who were ‘on side’ with the government objective, who then proceeded to force out other academics who were not. This process is reinforced throughout the university system by refusing to recruit young academics who do not support the Climate Change mantra and refusing to promote established academics. In the end, after 10 years of this process of attrition we ended up with ‘97% of scientists agree’. This is how ‘science’ is… Read more »
Thank you. Really appreciate that. Your description rings true to my observations from following snippets of information as any other person might. In Blair’s Government, yet it was in more recent Conservative years the BBC publicised it’s editorial decision that ‘the science is settled’ anthropogenic climate change is happening thry declared. The climate game has continued regardless of government. Obviously Blair’s circle was lobbied or advised of climate scientific study in order for the Government’s decisions to be made. Was this simply wrong data shown without contrary opposition? To my mind it would be fanciful to think our government decision making process does not seek to challenge its own advisors’ data. Yet this does seem to be the nature of things. Academics silencing others. I imagine forcing out a colleague requires teamwork – ethically this might be considered a conspiracy given that questioning is fundamental to science. The power of think tanks, royal societies, etc. informing governments appears to be central to the operational network of informed scientific government policy. Control the information and the options are limited to favourable outcomes for those who place the limits. Is the academic motivation purely financial? Intuitive perception of this situation is impossible… Read more »
Blair’s government saw the potential for climate change to be used as a tool for imposing socialist policies, and in effect, nationalising the energy economy. Up until the early 2000s the UN Climate Change conferences had been dominated by real scientific debate among meteoroligists and atmospheric physicists but there was no consensus emerging. Left wing politicians grew tired of this academic debate and simply declared ‘the science is settled’ and proceeded to push aside and defund any dissenting voices so they could get on with imposing the policy. The scientists who supported it were rewarded with promotions and funding. Moreover, they sat on the funding bodies, editorial boards and recruitment panels, so it became reinforcing. Now we have scientists whose career and livelihood depends entirely on supporting the narrative – people have to pay their mortgages and put food on the table. Dissenters either went elsewhere, kept their mouths shut, or retired (what Mr TT did). Interestingly, if you look at the attached, you will see some familiar names on here – Gupta, Gilbert, Hill and Pollard: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people The Martin School is closely aligned with the Blavatnik School, to which your friend Devi is associated. I suggest a pincer movement… Read more »
Very interesting, thanks for the insights TT.
Yes, hear, hear. Rings true from my own experience in unrelated science. Which is why I now have no income and look after the kids!
I agree thanks TT
I’ve been told many times that non-Academic/Scientific staff at the Met Office (security, office support, IT, probably catering) are well advised to keep their opinions to themselves if not on board about Climate Change.
Probably applies to support staff within lockdown enforcement.
Tony Blair is a Deplorable.
Thanks for sharing Mr TT’s experience and looks like this seems to be he norm now.
She is now on This Morning laying into the stats and the MSM ..
She’s really impressed me
Rules for thee but not for me – Irish MEPs don’t want to self isolate upon return from Brussels:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40043168.html
Self-interest, no doubt, but if they got their way they would be creating a very valuable precedent wouldn’t they?
Greet them all upon their return and create an impromptu rally. Or else.
Well at least it’s a blow to mask- wearing if Batman has succumbed.
But he’s been wearing his wrong for years – he uses it to cover his eyes.
The Covid can get you through the eyes, best not tell the mask mob or they’ll start wearing blindfolds.
The article in the BMJ indicates what we have known for some time. The theoretical model of infection, transmission and fatality does not match real data, available at least from May onwards.
I don’t blame the health professionals for the initial panic. But I do think they have been engaged in a deliberate deceit since then. I can only imagine that they thought, if we knew the facts, we would take more risk. Some of them have become so obsessed by the model that they have not stuck their head up to look around.
When 40% of all deaths are aged 85+ (as they normally are), and 25% have dementia or Alzheimer’s, you don’t need a PhD in epidemiology to know that this does not justify suspending normal social and economic activity.
I do blame the health professionals. There was a lot of evidence from China and Italy already in March showing that the virus only posed a danger to older adults with comorbidities. This was reflected in the advice provided to the UK government by SAGE in early March and released as a result of Simon Dolan’s lawsuit. There was never any justification for lockdowns.
Sure don’t.
BBC discovers lost Little Britain script
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54008495?at_campaign=64&at_custom4=E7C001DE-EE79-11EA-9103-AD454D484DA4&at_medium=custom7&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom2=facebook_page&at_custom3=BBC+News&fbclid=IwAR1d5pISMsWwvBVy3KZ7ZeaLzQHO_h_USl4SGAkAYuKBVJftIhTtnh1SXKM&fbclid=IwAR208t0g-YPH93imNSfxUTAIyounBRvu6Dea_0oYpfbg-dd1dFJhi0qxuO4&fbclid=IwAR1o2vR7m8Jxbwu-MMEXigrtglXImvE3n8kbi0STGnokkQk36lERlidxNfY
Head melting
Key cast and crew are being tested at regular intervals, Johnson and Pattinson won’t be the only ones who test “positive”.