ONS: Flu and Pneumonia Have Killed More People Than Covid Since June
That’s the headline finding in the ONS’s latest release, as far as the Telegraph is concerned. But there’s another pretty striking finding in the second paragraph too.
Influenza and pneumonia has contributed to more weekly deaths than COVID-19 since the middle of June, new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.
Just 78 people died of coronavirus in the week ending September 4th – the latest for which death registrations are available – the first time the figure has fallen below 100 since lockdown began in March.
Just one per cent of deaths now mention coronavirus on the death certificate compared to 12.8% which mention influenza and pneumonia, making those conditions nearly 13 times more deadly.
The numbers of overall deaths has also plummeted well below the five-year average for England and Wales, with 1,443 fewer deaths in the most recent weekly figures.
This is a bit awkward for the Government. The day after its new draconian “Rule of Six” regulations are introduced, the ONS reveals there were fewer deaths in the week ending September 4th.
Worth reading in full.
Noel Gallagher: Sceptic of the Week
The NME has written a furious piece about Noel Gallagher, the rock star, who has said he refuses to wear a mask in shops.
Noel Gallagher has said he refuses to wear a face mask while shopping, in defiance of laws which were introduced earlier this year.
Appearing on The Matt Morgan podcast, the former Oasis singer described the use of face coverings as “bollocks”, after they were introduced in an attempt to curb the spread of coronavirus.
“The whole thing’s bollocks. You’re supposed to wear them in Selfridges, yet you can f***ing go down the pub and be surrounded by every f***ing c**t. Do you know what I mean? It’s like, ‘Oh actually, we don’t have the virus in pubs but we have it in Selfridges?’,” Gallagher said.
Wearing a face covering over your nose and mouth is mandatory by law in all shops and supermarkets in the UK, although exemptions are in place for children under 11 and people with health issues.
They are also compulsory on public transport, with Gallagher recalling how he refused to wear a covering on a recent train journey to Manchester.
The podcast is well worth a listen. The bit when Gallagher explains why he refused to wear a mask on the train is gold. He makes exactly the same point James Delingpole did on Sunday in his piece about why the mask-wearing rules on planes are such nonsense.
Like I was going up to Manchester the other week and some guy’s going, “Can you put your mask on?” On the train. And he said, “Because the Transport Police will get on and fine you £1,000, but you don’t have to put it on if you’re eating.” So I was saying, “Oh right. So this killer virus that’s sweeping through the train is going to come and attack me but is going to see me having a sandwich and go, “Leave him. He’s having his lunch.”
The podcaster he’s talking to tries to justify the policy, but Gallagher just says “bollocks”. “The science says they’re pointless,” he says. When the presenter disagrees and says he “read something earlier” saying masks are effective, Gallagher cuts him off: “F*** off. You only read things that reinforce your own opinions.”
A worthy winner of Sceptic of the Week.
Stop Press: The podcast is no longer available on YouTube – but of course.
A Nation of Bedwetters
Unfortunately, Noel Gallagher is an outlier. YouGov has just published some depressing polling: a whopping 69% of Brits – and a majority of all age groups – say they would support a 9pm curfew on pubs and bars to help reduce COVID-19 cases.
As Julia Hartley Brewer asked on Twitter, what the hell has happened to this country? We used to be in favour of… you know… fun.
You can see the polling here.
An MP Writes…
A reader wrote a letter to his MP, Sir Gary Streeter, questioning the scientific basis for the Rule of Six and saying he wasn’t minded to follow it, or to wear a mask. This was the reply he got. Bedwetting MP of the week?
Dear Mr Martin,
Thank you for your email which I am afraid wins the prize for being the most irresponsible communication I have had this year.
We have suffered over 42,000 excessive deaths in this country due to this virus and no doubt it is partly being spread by irresponsible people such as yourself. I urge you to reconsider as the second spike threatens another wave of serious illness and death as we approach winter. You will be aware that the police have increased powers to ensure that social distancing is enforced.
Kind regards,
Gary Streeter
Stop Press: Another contender for Bedwetter of the Week has hoved into view: David Nabarro, one of the WHO’s special envoys on Covid, who testified before the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons yesterday. The summary on AOL is quite something:
The world is still at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, and it will take some time to work out how to deal with it, an expert has told MPs.
David Nabarro, who is one of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) special envoys on COVID-19, told the Foreign Affairs Committee the present situation is horrible and grotesque.
He said the outbreak is worse than any science fiction movie, and appears to be getting nastier as cases reemerge in Europe.
Worse than any science fiction movie? So worse than Contagion, in which a rogue virus wipes out the human race? Sorry for the spoiler, but come on!
SAGE Knows All About the False Positive Rate
We got an excellent email yesterday from one of the regular commentators – DocRC. He was an NHS GP for 25 years and now works in sports medicine. He’s done some sleuthing and discovered that SAGE knows all about false positives, although it isn’t clear whether the information has been shared with Matt Hancock.
I read the letter in today’s update written by the Trafford GP to her MP Graham Brady. In it she said she had been trying in vain to get information about PCR false positive rates and cycle thresholds out of the local health bureaucrats. I too have corresponded in vain with a local (Cambridge) Pathologist who couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the same questions. Then this morning a friend who used to be the Medical Director of a biotech company reported drawing a blank from a contact in Oxford’s Immunology Department. The twin questions of false positive rates (especially at low prevalence levels) and cycle thresholds (the number of cycles they run the PCR tests before deciding whether it is positive or negative) are absolutely key to understanding the published figures of “cases”. Actually, I could add a third one which is the percentage of those tested who are symptomatic.
My friend, the ex-Medical Director has just come up trumps. He has found a paper by two people who work for NHS England which says:
“The UK operational false positive rate is unknown. There are no published studies on the operational false positive rate of any national COVID-19 testing programme. An attempt has been made to estimate the likely false-positive rate of national COVID-19 testing programmes by examining data from published external quality assessments (EQAs) for RT-PCR assays for other RNA viruses carried out between 2004-2019 [7]. Results of 43 EQAs were examined, giving a median false positive rate of 2.3% (interquartile range 0.8-4.0%).”
The paper is here.
So we know that The Government, or at least its scientific advisors, know that the false positive rate for the Covid test is in the range of 0.8-4% with a median of 2.3%.
This of course confirms what James Ferguson was saying in his analysis a couple of days ago, that the vast majority of so-called “cases” are the result of false positive tests, i.e. on people who don’t have the virus.
Let us look at the Government statistics, the latest of which I could find is to August 26th:
So to take the week ending August 26th, the total tests were 452,679 out of which 6,732 were positive. The positives were 1.487% which is well within the estimated false positive range of 0.8-4% so they could all be false positives!
Then I found another paper by said Carl Mayers of NHS England which was apparently submitted to SAGE meeting 41 (June 11th)
There is a table on page 6 of the document (see below) which shows that at low prevalence of Covid the majority of positive tests are expected to be false positives. So at a prevalence of 0.1% they expect 209 positives of which 200 will be false positives and 1% prevalence 288 positives of which 198 are false positives.
This blows the whole test and trace program out of the water and of course makes operation moonshot even more ridiculous than it ever was – if you test the whole UK population of 67 million you will get 1.5 million false positives! Go figure, Hancock!
I wonder if we could get Carl Heneghan to comment on this?
Unmasked
My friend Roger Bowles, with whom I made a 15-minute film about Brexit in 2016, is making a documentary about Covid called Unmasked: The Virus and the Disease. He’s looking to include stories from ordinary people – like you and me, dear reader – about how they’ve been affected by the pandemic. Message from Roger below.
Unmasked: The Virus and the Disease will be a feature-length documentary that will follow the progress of Corona from its sensational debut in January as the only player on the world stage, through those salad days of early Lockdown and clapping the NHS, and into the autumn as we try to navigate our way through contradictory rules and ranks of “Covid Marshals” towards our doubtful economic future. The narrative will be told through contributions from experts, footage from the mainstream and alternative media, and – crucially – through the stories and experiences of ordinary people.
We are seeking contributors who are willing to speak on camera about their experiences, particularly the impact that Lockdown and other measures have had on them or their loved ones. All submissions will be dealt with in strict confidence and if it is necessary to protect identities we will do so.
We are also looking for material – video, photos, letters, emails, recordings – that evoke the strangely heightened experiences of this socially distanced year.
The film’s tone will be reflective and, where possible, lighthearted, seeking to balance the seriousness of the main theme, so we are looking for uplifting stories too.
As we move around the country filming over the next few weeks we will be putting out calls for certain kinds of stories or material, or announcing that we are visiting particular places. It would be hugely helpful if you could follow us, like our posts and tweets, comment, and share them if you can.
Website: https://unmasked-doco.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UnmaskedDoco/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/UnmaskedDoco
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9zh2-e15WDRC9mTXXeJiSQ
Finally, like many others, our industry is decimated and we are time rich but cash poor. If you are able to make a donation to support the project we would be very grateful.
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/unmasked-the-virus-and-the-disease
Government Responds to Vaccine Petition
The Government has responded to a petition asking it not to impose any restrictions on people who refuse to have a Covid vaccine. It has over 125,000 signatures. You can read the full response here, but one reader has drawn my attention to the following paragraph which she thinks is very sinister:
We believe it is everyone’s responsibility to do the right thing for their own health, and for the benefit of the wider community. There are currently no plans to introduce a COVID-19 vaccine in a way that penalises those who do not take up the vaccine. However, the Government will carefully consider all options to improve vaccination rates, should that be necessary.
Should we be worried about this? I’m not an anti-vaxxer, but I certainly don’t think people should be penalised by the Government for refusing to be vaccinated, particularly if said vaccines are being rushed out during an episode of mass hysteria and the manufacturers have been absolved of legal liability. From the wording of that paragraph, it sounds like the Government hasn’t ruled that out.
Covid Death and Taxes
I was forwarded another penetrating analysis of the Covid crisis by a financial researcher today – this one by Louis-Vincent Gave, who runs a firm called Gavekal Research with Anatole Kaletsky, the much-revered financial journalist. I thought it was so good I immediately emailed Louis-Vincent (his address was at the foot of the document) and asked if him I could publish it on Lockdown Sceptics. Turns out, he’s a fan of the Spectator so he said yes. Not only is he a brilliant analyst, but he’s also the Chairman of the Biarritz Olympique Pays Basque Rugby Club and is engaged in an ongoing negotiation with his local prefet (unelected regional official) to allow the fans back into the stadium. So an all-round good egg.
Here’s the section in which he speculates about why Governments across the West are continuing to vacillate over lifting restrictions when political leaders must know that the virus only poses a mortal threat to people in their 80s and 90s with co-morbidities.
So, given that death rates are now at long-term lows, and that the disease only seems disproportionately to kill folks coming to the natural end of their lives, why are policymakers still bickering about the reopening of schools (the UK), whether restaurants should be allowed to welcome patrons (New York), whether kids should be forbidden to go trick-or-treating this Halloween (Los Angeles), whether organised sports should even take place (France), and over the resumption of a dozen other everyday activities?
The first possible explanation is that policymakers are consciously making the choice to protect the old, even at the economic expense of the young. And they are doing this out of political calculation, because old people are more likely to vote than the young. However, this explanation runs counter to Hanlon’s razor, which states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
The second possible explanation is that policymakers, having stumbled into this crisis, have now seized on the Rahm Emmanuel dictum “never let a good crisis go to waste”. For the last decade, lacklustre growth across the Western world has led to events as unfortunate (for policymakers) as the Brexit vote, Donald Trump’s election, the rise of the French yellow jacket movement, and the rise of the AfD in Germany and of Matteo Salvini in Italy. In other words, the sort of “pre-revolutionary” grumblings Gavekal warned of almost a decade ago are becoming ever-louder.
Disconcerted by this increasing roar, a number of policymakers have concluded that western economies are suffering from a lack of government intervention, combined with a shortage of fiscal spending, and insufficient money-printing. But cometh the crisis, cometh the moment to embark on the sort of Keynesian orgy my business partner Anatole Kaletsky has lately been applauding (see Why I Was Wrong To Turn Bearish). If to a hammer every problem looks like a nail, then to a large section of western policymakers, the answer to every problem increasingly seems to be more money-printing and more money-spending.
Of course, the real problem may not be Covid, but something else entirely. But then policymakers will use the pandemic as the pretext to embark on policies to fix the “something else”. This means they need to keep Covid humming in the background. How else could they justify the gradual introduction of some form of universal basic income funded by Modern Monetary Theory or MMT (the magic money tree)? Combine this with a healthy dose of Parkinson’s Law at work, and governments have little incentive to walk back on any of their panic-mongering. After all, now that government commissions have been formed and funded to deal with the pandemic, are these commissions going to be in any rush to declare the pandemic over? Or are they more likely to insist that Covid remains a major threat, and that they need more funding to counter it?
Finally, the third and most likely explanation is that western governments were panicked into taking dramatic decisions. This panic was likely driven partly by the increased weight of social media in decision-making. Not that the absence of social media in the early years of the 21st century helped the US government take the right decisions in the aftermath of 9/11; the invasion of Iraq was one of the greatest policy failures in a generation. Now it is likely the Covid lockdowns will rank alongside Iraq in the policy failure “hall of shame”. And from there, the important question is at what point do repeated policy failures start to take their toll? We know from Adam Smith’s remark that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But still…
I wasn’t familiar with Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This, I realise, is virtually the motto of Lockdown Sceptics and one of the reasons I’m sceptical about conspiracy theories.
Louis-Vincent’s analysis is great – worldly, cynical and wise. Worth reading in full.
Gary Lineker Takes a Pay Cut and Agrees to Tweet More Carefully – Then Fires Off Rude Tweet
I decided to have a poke at Gary Lineker, the Match of the Day presenter, when the newspapers reported he’d volunteered to take a 25% pay cut and agreed to be more careful in his use of Twitter. I sent the following tweet.
To which Gary replied:
To which I replied:
Couldn’t help noticing Gary’s reply to me got over 20,000 likes, while my reply to him got 120. But bitter? Moi? No. Of course not.
Stop Press: According to the Times, 250,000 fewer people bought TV licenses last year compared to the year before.
New NHS Tracing App – Now Even Worse
Our dedicated NHS tracing app correspondent – a well-informed techie – has sent us his latest update. One day, this app will be studied in the Kennedy School of Government as one of the biggest administrative cock-ups of all time
Christmas might be cancelled but as compensation Matt Hancock has the latest incarnation of the gift that keeps on giving – the NHS COVID-19 app. Like all the other failed contact-tracing apps around the world, this one tries to work out how close you are to other app users by the strength of a bluetooth signal. If the app reckons you have been within two metres of another app user for 15 minutes or more, regardless of circumstances, then it makes a note of an identifier broadcast by the other phone. This is the Apple/Google system which is entirely anonymous, so as the user you have the responsibility for telling the app if you are positive, in which case it uploads its anonymous identifier to Apple or Google’s cloud where other apps can see it and check against their own list of phones they were near and alert their users. Apple and Google handle all this and the NHS is not involved. But they would very much like to be so if you do receive an alert the app butts in and asks if you wouldn’t mind awfully contacting Public Health England to “complete a form about who you know you’ve been in contact with recently”. A form, not in the app.
As an aside for those involved in the mask debate, the app instructions say that tracking can be paused if the user is “wearing medical grade PPE, i.e. a surgical mask, in a health and care setting”. So not just a face covering at the shops then.
Exposure alerting is not all this app fails to do. Indeed, its big selling point is the QR code business check-in function. Alerting might be useless but this function is worse as it can lead to you breaking the law. It appears to be in support of the Government’s announcement on Sept 10th that businesses and venues are required by law to record contact details of all staff and visitors and store them for 21 days to be shared with NHS Test and Trace if requested. There are fixed penalties for organisations that don’t comply. The Government has provided a handy service which can create posters for your business or venue displaying a big QR code that can only be read by their app. The problem is as a venue owner if you only use the government’s app and posters you will be breaking the law because the app only knows which business you checked-in to and when, which is not enough to comply with the law. Even that data is not shared from the app to the venue owners who are required to collect your name, phone number and make a note of which staff were working there at the same time. So if you just put up the posters and ask everyone to use them, when NHS Test and Trace come calling you won’t have anything to give them and that is illegal from September 18th. Another winner from Matt Hancock and team.
Carl Heneghan Strikes Again
In a development that was reported almost nowhere, the Scottish Government announced yesterday that it was changing the way it counts Covid hospitalisations. Previously, it counted all patients who had tested positive for COVID-19 in its hospitalisations data, even if they’d made a complete recovery from Covid, left the hospital, resumed their normal life and were then readmitted for a completely different reason. Now, only patients who first test positive in their current hospital admission (or in the two weeks before admission) will be included in the figures.
There’s an explainer here from the Office of the Chief Statistician. He says the reason for the change is because the Office of the Chief Statistician carried out an audit of the 384 hospital patients who were designated as having Covid in the official data on August 26th and found that 87% of them were in hospital “for a condition unrelated to COVID-19”.
But is that the real reason? I suspect it had more to do with this September 2nd blog post by Carl Heneghan, Daniel Howdon and Jason Oke entitled, “Is Scotland overcounting the number of patients in hospital beds?” They pointed out that In England 7.7 per million of the population are supposedly in hospital with Covid, but in Scotland 46.8 per million are in a hospital bed with Covid – a rate that is nearly six times higher. They more or less nail the reason, as you’d expect.
This is similar to the problem with the PHE issue with deaths in England, which meant previously that everyone who has ever had COVID at any time must die with COVID too…
The problem matches the pattern of poor quality data whereby COVID analyses have overestimated the true extent of the problems. It is, therefore, essential that we have data that we can trust, data that is verifiable and reported in the same way across the devolved nations to permit comparisons.
Poor quality data! That must have stung the Chief Statistician (Roger Halliday). I expect someone in Wee Krankie’s office called him up and gave him a rocket. Can’t have the Scottish Government producing poor quality data, particularly when the hated English tidied up their own Covid data a few weeks ago – again, thanks to a Carl Heneghan blog post.
Keep it up Carl.
Round-Up
- “I will not be undertaking unconscious bias training – and call on my colleagues to take the same stand” – Great piece by Ben Bradley MP for Conservative Home
- “The Lamonby Case” – Thorough and well-researched article about Stephn Lamonby, the lecturer at Solent University who was fired for praising the Jews
- “Families ‘mingling’ would be breaking rule of six – home secretary” – Will the Bodysnatchers please give us the old Priti back? I don’t like the new one
- “Shopping in Sweden” – a nice video of what it’s like to go shopping in Sweden in their beautiful, Covid-free country. Btw, Sweden is allowing care home visits from October 1st
- “Victoria Doubles Contact Tracing Capacity With Purchase Of Second Fax Machine” – Amusing article in the Shovel, a satirical Australian magazine
- “Archbishop of Canterbury voices fears over impact of ‘rule of six’” – At last, Justin Welby says something sensible. I suppose a stopped clock is right twice a day…
- “Federal Judge Rules PA Governor’s COVID-19 Restrictions Unconstitutional” – A legal victory has been won against the Democratic Governor of Pennsylvania. Hooray!
- “Parliament must stand up to an executive bent on restricting us” – Solid stuff from Philip Johnston in the Telegraph
- “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route” – Shshshsh. Don’t mention this “conspiracy theory” on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, even though the authors of this paper are research scientists
- “A tighter lockdown could be two weeks away” – Robert Peston delivers some bad news in the Spectator
- “I supported the lockdown – but the Rule of Six treats us like toddlers” – Julia Hartley-Brewer joins the growing ranks of sceptics
- “The cancel culture mob targeted these three professors. They all agree on one thing – don’t cave.” – Inspiring story about some brave professors who refused to abase themselves at the feet of the woke mob
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Just one today: “Ain’t No Turning Back” by Prime Minister.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We’ve also 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.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. This latest one – from the University of Chicago, no less – is a doozy.
Statement from the Univerity of Chicago’s English Faculty (July 2020)
The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialized and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.
For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies. We understand Black Studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black Studies page.
English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalizations for colonization, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why. And while inroads have been made in terms of acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective histories of racialized and colonized people, there is still much to do as a discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality, and power.
So does this mean every faculty member in the Chicago English department who is a white male will immediately resign his position to make room for a person of colour who can then teach Black Studies?
Didn’t think so.
One of the curious things about statements like this, in which middle-aged white men genuflect before the woke mob and engage in a sort of ritualised self-flagellation, is how similar they all are. At the height of the BLM madness, when university vice-chancellors were pumping out this gobbledegook by the bucket-load, I hawked an idea around to various media outlets which I thought was quite funny. I would create a website called “Plagiarism Watch” that purported to be maintained by a group of Wokesters that pointed out the similarity between the BLM solidarity statements issued by heads of universities and accuse them of plagiarism. I would run the statements through the plagiarism-detection software that’s used by universities to ferret out cheaters and, presumably, each would be flagged as blatant plagiarism. My hope was that after, say, the President of Princeton’s statement was identified as plagiarised by “Plagiarism Watch” – “Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies… etc., etc.” – he would immediately issue a grovelling apology and then publish another 1,000 words of gobbledegook (no doubt written by the same beleaguered drudge in Princeton’s Office of Communications). The point, of course, isn’t that these statements are literally plagiarised – although some may be, I suppose. No, the reason they’re all the same is because they’re the product of group think. And because anyone saying anything remotely thoughtful or original about racism will immediately be targeted by a woke mob for being insufficiently pious. (“Just one knee? Why not two? Why not hurl yourself to the ground and rend your garments? How dare you, you racist bastard.”)
Needless to say, no one was prepared to commission this piece of mischief.
Please send Lockdown Sceptics any examples of woke gobbledegook you come across.
“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 17th to Oct 27th). 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 £1.99 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 32,000).
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).
Stop Press: We got a nice email from a non-masker yesterday.
I don’t wear masks and the natural contrarian within me makes me less likely to do so when it’s been mandated. So, throughout this whole debacle I’ve been quite staunch in upholding my right not to wear a mask. I’ve not made a big song and dance about it – I just simply go about my normal business, breathing the lovely fresh air Suffolk has to offer.
I’ve always been a bit worried about how I might react if challenged by a shopkeeper or fellow citizen. But wouldn’t you know it – I’ve never been challenged. I’ve been going about my normal life, doing the things I would normally do, being greeted the whole time with warmth and a sense of normality.
But actually, normality isn’t quite an accurate description. I’ve actually received more warm-heartedness from shop keepers, folks on the checkout, the chap at the builders merchants and the lady that runs the post office, than I had before this whole nonsense started. And I’m not wearing a mask the whole time.
The result is that I reciprocate this warmth, spark up conversation, and all at once it feels like a throwback to merry old England when the shopkeeper would greet you on first-name terms. Perhaps these folks on the coalface feel a rare sense of ease when seeing an un-muzzled face? Maybe it’s just my own experience, but going out maskless has been great for morale, and seemingly for the people I’ve come into contact with. I urge others to give it a go – spread a little joy.
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 hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us 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 us here.
And Finally…
In this week’s London Calling podcast, James Delingpole and I indulge in the usual rants about the lockdown, the Wokesters and our flailing political leaders. At one point, James and I discuss what it’s like to have been effectively killed by an online outrage mob (as I was) and then to have resurfaced with renewed vigour (as I have) – like Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. I said to James, “We should come up with a name for these people” and he immeidately suggested “Obi-Wankers”. Hence the title of this week’s episode. Please do have a listen and don’t forget to subscribe.
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I won… yay!
2nd
It is clear that the Prime Ministers decision to go into lockdown in March was the worst decision ever made by a British Prime Minister. It was not done based on any science but on pure panic based on press hysteria. The consequences for the economy, people lives (cancer deaths don’t seem to matter), and freedoms have been disastrous. The reported deaths from Covid have risen and fallen in much the same way around the world, whether or not lockdowns have been on place. Peru has been on strict military lockdown since March but has a far higher death rate than no lockdown Brazil. What is shocking is the policies have been copied directly from the Chinese Communist Party, the most murderous organisation in history. Every new lockdown policy is cruel and unnecessary. They based not based on science but based on loaded questions in opinion polls and focus groups. “Would you stand on one leg and fine anyone who didn’t stand on one leg if it stopped a deadly Second Wave?” From the start there have been large number of reputable doctors talking out against the Lockdown for example Dr John Lee in the Spectator. (Dr John Lee is a former professor of pathology and NHS consultant… Read more »
Why do you always tag your posts onto someone else’s despite being completely unrelated ?
It’s hard to aim the mouse at this time of day.
It’s one way of getting your post near the top of the page 🙂
“It is clear that the Prime Ministers decision to go into lockdown in March was the worst decision ever made by a British Prime Minister.”
Well … there’s a few other contenders. But it’s certainly up there, and arguably surpassing in its domestic effects, events like Suez, the Poll Tax and Iraq.
Sadly he’s not finished yet – Lockdown 2 The Sequel is just around the corner. The cabal that passes for a Government has passed the stupidity threshold into the lunacy zone. Little redemption from there.
No more masks! No more keeping the elderly confined. Love it!
https://twitter.com/maggmountains/status/1305670769402245120?s=20
Needs a 2,000 strong flashmob doing that outside Parliament.
Your café ought to be named ‘The Sanity Café’!
Woohoo!!! Agree with Annie about changing the name of your cafe!
Like that name!!
Agree. It just goes to show how even ordinary, every day stuff has become such a faff that any sign of sanity and normality is now seen as a small victory.
Like the Ice Cube song: “I have to say it was a good day, I didn’t have to use my AK”.
When something horrifying doesn’t happen and it becomes worthy of note and indeed celebration.
*Sigh*
Where, roughly, is your establishment? I hope it is in the East Midlands because I would love to pay you a visit.
Killing a gran or grandad? go figure ! .. brilliant
For your convenience I’ll leave this here so you don’t miss it. It is from from Toby’s excellent Roundup section. Research Scientists – “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route” https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X2FXFi2ZPOT “[…] Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus. In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory. The evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 should be a laboratory product created by using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 as a template and/or backbone. Building upon the evidence, we further postulate a synthetic route for SARS-CoV-2, demonstrating that the laboratory-creation of this coronavirus is convenient and can be accomplished in approximately six months. Our work emphasizes the need for an independent investigation into the relevant research laboratories. It also argues for a critical look into certain recently published data, which, albeit problematic, was used to support and claim a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. From a public health perspective, these actions are necessary as knowledge of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of how the virus entered the human population are… Read more »
As a none Scientific type I’ll wait for someone to make sense of that for me.
It is bolloxspeak masking the idea that the novel behind the pretext is a bioweapon – leaked, injected or escaping all by itself from ‘gain of function’ research (which means developing bioweapons under pretext of your enemies will do it, so you have to get there first so as to develop a defence…
But the ‘whole’ virus mapped out is reconstituted from fragments of who knows what using computers.
Corporate-led Science – or rather technologism in a mask of science, is going off-planet as it retreats into computer models and novel novels rather than face empirical fact. – or is that lose face to the evidences that do not support the invested (control) model of what is actually happening.
The circular reasoning of a revolving door sets up systems that DO the thing they are supposed to defend against.
Toxifying the body – and mind – DOES the breakdown of immune function and DOES the conditions that the body tries to clear through what we call ‘sickness’ and attack.
Is that an assesment after reading the paper or just a generalisation?
It’s from the abstract.
As does locking yourself indoors to hide from the Covid, breakdown the immune system.
Well said.
Certainly the premise that the ‘natural theory’ is mysterious and incomplete is true. It has not been described adequately – we all know it’s a foggy beginning. Perhaps we are already resigned to never know much about the orgin SARS CoV 2 – I find that surprising, our thoughts have already formed on the matter. Within the body they make the claim that RaTG13 being found is probably fraudulent, bat’s have not been found welcoming hosts to it. Further, they say that it is likely to have been used to hide the presence of ZC45/ZXC21. They give three lines of main evidence. 1. The genomic sequence of SARS CoV 2 is suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military labs Chongqing, China and Nanjing Gina. 2. The receptor binding motif RBM within the Spike protien of SARS CoV 2 that determines host specifity, resembkes thay of a 2003 SARS CoV epidemic in a suspicious manner. Genomic evidence suggests the RBM has been genetically manipulated. 3. SARS CoV 2 contains a unique furin-cleavage site in its Spike protien – this site is completely absent in this class of coronavirus found in nature. In addition rare codons associated with… Read more »
Well I’m not a biologist either. But the 3 authors all claim to have PhDs from something called the ‘Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation NY’. So apparently no scientific qualifications. Anyone else heard of these authors, are they scientists – maybe disaffected Taiwanese? Or is this fake news/propaganda?. The ‘Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation NY’ has a website:https://rolfoundation.org/en/ Stated aims are:: Vision To permit the people of China to live under a national system based on the rule of law, independent of the political system of the People’s Republic of China (“China”). Mission To expose corruption, obstruction, illegality, brutality, false imprisonment, excessive sentencing,harassment, and inhumanity pervasive in the political, legal, business and financial systems of China. Core Values To practice high ethical standards of integrity and accountability; To bring justice to the people in China; To protect and assist individuals victimized in China, particularly those penalized for speaking out against injustice; To promote freedom of speech, media and general public’s supervision of the government activities. And if you go to the FAQs page, you find: 1. What is the corporate nature of the Rule of Law Foundation? Similar to many other… Read more »
So that is that dealt with. Wonder why it made it to LS.
Interesting background thanks. I think they have Taiwanese names. Yan can be pinyin (the word for colour for example) but the name is a different character (苑 possibly) and would probably be written “Yuan” if you were from PRC.
Are you aware of the comments of Yves Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize-winning virologist who dicovered the HIV virus)? He stated that the virus could not have arisen naturally, and that it was created in a lab. And that the virus included a sequence from the HIV virus.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/2tDEncHfbGvc/
I don’t think anybody from the scientific community believes the Wuhan fish market story.
They dont believe the HIV from bushmeat hunting, either.
Thank you
It means if CV was made in a lab, then the ‘second wave’ is just coming off the production line….
Hence Gates’ giggle!
It basically says that the official line re the origin of the virus is a big lie which needs exposing.
A couple of things stand out as a bit bogus in what they’re claiming. First, it is alarming but true that Ren and Shi and others were successfully genetically modifing bat viruses in the Wuhan lab by inserting bits of the SARS1 spike to see if it made them better at sticking to human ACE2. It did. This was in 2008. You can read the paper (it’s one of the references in the Yan Report). But when they did that they used a “codon-optimized” spike gene from SARS1. A genetic code is a sequence of nucleotides (GATTACA that kind of thing). Each sequence of three of those letters codes for 1 out of a possible 20 amino acids. But there are 64 ways to make groups of 3 nucleotides (these groups of 3 are called “codons”), more than the 20 you need, and the way it works is that there are two or three different “synonyms” for each amino acid. Some of those synonyms are used more in particular animals than others. It’s like inside a human the code usually says “large” rather than “big” but in a bat “big” is more common. They mean the same and you get… Read more »
It’s an elaborate piece of propaganda nonetheless. I speculated on the Taiwan connection without knowing Chinese (Mandarin I presume), interesting there may be some sort of corroboration. Thinking back, I recollect this, or a very similar, paper some time ago, emphasising the furin cleavage issue, and it being rubbished (probably by you!) back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan Ha ha, actually could have saved time by consulting Wiki first: ‘…Later in September, Yan co-authored a pre-print research paper named “Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route.”[27] Three other researchers were listed as co-authors, but the SCMP was unable to find any prior work from them.[28] The paper was uploaded to the Zenodo website, an open-access repository where anyone can post their research.[29] The paper is affiliated with the Rule of Law Society, founded by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui.[27][29] The Rule of Law Society had not previously published scientific or medical research.[29] Yan had previously appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast.[28][29] According to the paper’s abstract, “SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus” and that it could have been created in a lab in approximately six months.[30][31] According to Newsweek, several experts in evolutionary biology and infectious disease, including Jonathan Eisen and Carl Bergstrom, said the paper did not include new information, contained multiple unsubstantiated claims and had a weak scientific case.[27] According to Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, the paper was “basically all circumstantial… Read more »
“Yuan” is the standard transliteration of Mandarin. “Yan” may be the same thing but in a different dialect that was/is used in Taiwan. People stick to those spellings in their surnames sometimes even if they don’t use the actual dialects they come from much any more. The communists in PRC of course officially banned anything that wasn’t Mandarin ages ago.
The other paper I remember is the withdrawn HIV one, which I didn’t find convincing, as the genetic similarities with HIV are practically non-existent (and can be explained by chance– HIV has as much in common with pretty much any virus).
This is the scary paper from 2008: https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899
They were hacking bat viruses to make them infect human cells (just to understand better how that works). But they weren’t actually making fully-fledged coronaviruses that could have escaped by mistake but “pseudoviruses”, which can’t replicate, and would look nothing like SARS-CoV-2 if for some reason they could.
Without having read the paper, the brief publicity of it seems to me to chime with other academics who have also pondered on the likelihood of labs manipulating a bat originated virus. Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin: Did Covid-19 leak From a Lab? was a particularly interesting 2 hour deep-dive here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug
I for one, am definitely open to persuasion that an accident occured where studies were being carried out.
A Survival Guide For Decent Folk pt.1 of 3 (From former blogger Inspector Gadget who told of things within the Met Police before being capriciously outed by a Times hack. It presumes that your belligerent is a member of the underclass but serves just as well for s confrontation with the Police themselves.) “I thought it would be a good idea to give out a bit of general advice to those law abiding types who find themselves under suspicion or under arrest. Complain First. Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you think the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops and allege for all you are worth. If you can work in a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better. Make A Counter Allegation. Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter Allegation against them. Again racism and homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture. . the… Read more »
There is a useful piece of advice on the LaworFiction website. Never accept a caution because if you do you will have a criminal record. Let the case go to court. There is a current backlog of more than 10,000 cases and it will take decades to hear them all.
And in the end they will have to drop many of them. Look at those fines for breaking social distancing guidelines – they have been rescinded by the courts.
There was some chat about that yesterday which is why i put this up.
There is more which I’ll try to put up later my, copy is windows notepad so it’s time consuming typing it manually on Android and just now I’m out and about.
I was trying to remember that earlier – useful info – thank you.
Funny how the masks and social distancing doesn’t seem to stop flu…Luckily, the 100 billion dollars (to quote Austin Powers) track and trace scheme is off to a good start, and now people have to wait till January to get tested to see if they have a killer virus that is harmless 99.9% of the time, and without the testing is barely noticeable. You couldn’t make this stuff up…meanwhile, someone please give Noel Gallagher an OBE for saying it exactly as it is…i love the sandwich quote. And thanks to all on this site (and Peter Hitchens blog too), for keeping me sane in an increasingly insane world, and for the Irish times, for this article and the following sentence:
“The occasion was graced by the Taoiseach and Tánaiste and in the middle of them the Minister for Health, who looked a little flushed. The third leg of this increasingly rickety coalition stool – we used to mean that in the furniture sense, not so sure now – was absent.”
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/miriam-lord-not-so-splendid-self-isolation-for-hapless-cabinet-1.4355838
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8736693/Matt-Hancock-reveals-plan-RATION-swabs-admits-testing-shambles-WEEKS.html
Noel Gallagher is not exactly at the top of my hit parade but hopefully some of his legions of admirers will take note.
Nor me. Was looking forward to hearing it but podcast has already been censored /removed
See here.
and this is really what swear words are for
The DM article is worth reading. Shambles reshambled. So are the comments. Two questions repeatedly asked: 1. Why can’t they do more tests? 2. Why are people so keen to be tested?
Both are valid: the first because of the stupid rules that you can’t do xyz until you’ve been tested (but if you test ‘positive’ you and all around you will be incarcerated and unable to do xyz anyway), the second because testing
is not just pointless but actively harmful, in that it produces musleading results that lead to more zombie panic.
By the way, the moon is made of green cheese and green cheese is notorious for harbouring coronaviruses, especially when shot at.
I believe the shortage of tests is imaginary, similar to new build blocks of flats with signs saying ‘Almost All Sold’.
Trying to create a wave of demand from fomo types.
And when it’s in Caerphilly.
Caerphilly cheese isn’t made in Caerphilly any more, but it’s still full of Greencheeseovirus. Be very afraid!
I’m devastated. 🙁
I never thought I’d big it up for one of the Gallagher brothers, despite being an Oasis fan. But that man has dispelled all the irritation I felt about him before, after saying EXACTLY what needs to be said. He needs to be given the “Balls Of The Week” award (hope I don’t upset the mods with that!)
The other one’s the same: https://mobile.twitter.com/liamgallagher/status/1305205618962313217
He’s a legend. Always speaks his mind, no matter what anyone thinks.
It’s about staying real over all of it. I always find it’s a healthy mix of confidence, aggression, to not suffer fools easily and ultimately love. Because they want you to just say what you feel and respect you for it. Regardless.
Love this Liam nugget about people who say ‘Let’s go for one beer’
https://youtu.be/AMyecNSz4Uc
I’m not really an Oasis fan, Noel has written a few decent songs but my tastes are less conventional. However it’s good to hear him speak his mind at this time.
With Covid/of Covid which tbtb pretend not to mean different things.
On Monday afternoon Radio 2s pet Dr. Sarah Jarvis was explaining at great length to a caller that from what she had said it sounded as though her relative had died With pancreatic cancer rather than Of pancreatic cancer .
“it’s important to know that these are two very different things”
So they do understand the concept after all.
So if somebody shoots you through the heart you die with a bullet?
They might say you died of a bullet ?
With Covid and a bullet.
Of heart failure?
ah you’ve met my ex too
Now that you mention it, I think the concept is pretty common in cancer circles. I certainly heard it when I did lots of research when I had cancer, although it wasn’t applicable to what I had. Some cancers are slow growing and the medics will tell you that you will most likely die with it (it not having killed you), rather than of it.
Tony’s stop press from The Maskless One completely matches my own experience but yesterday was slightly different.
I went to the convenience store a little later than usual. While at the counter I became aware of 3 masked karens behind me muttering and twitching in disapproval, how (shop owner) should sort it (me) out.
I’ve caught the school run and their sprogs are running around ignoring social distancing !
What they don’t know is that because I do some shopping for my infirm neighbour 3 or 4 days a week (40 fags to start with) I frequently spend more than fifty quid a time in that shop which far outweighs any number of lollipops and raffle tickets they might buy.
On my way out something rather odd happened. Despite not being decrepit and with just one shopping bag, one of the sprogs walked towards the door and opened it for me.
“Thank you very much”
‘that’s alright’ he replied.
I have no idea why he did that, maybe he thinks mum is embarrassing him with her face pantie.
“Face Pantie” Yes! That’s exactly what they look like, especially the preety, flowery ones, like knickers across your face! On the subject of us non-maskies getting positive reactions from shop workers, I find this is very much the case (once past some of the door harridans.) They actually look relieved to be engaging with someone with a face. Christ knows what damage this is doing to shopworker’s psyches in the long term. In fact I’ve had some really nice mini chats whilst the farce marskers behind huff and puff – out of anger, or because they’re out of breath?
Unmasked till workers always greet us with a big smile – and look at us, and hold eye contact and engage with us beyond the call of duty. There is no doubt that our own smiling faces are a tonic to them. Win-win!
AG
Masks are very unusual in that shop, must be a school gates thing and yes, they were all preety, looked like they had been cut from flowerery curtains.
yes, very pretty: polka dots and all sorts of wild flowers and stuff. The message is: my other panties are just as nice
I took a drive around the University district yesterday, to my surprise there was no display of Covid Safety signage at all. I had been expecting hoardings announcing ‘You Are Entering A Covid Safety Zone’ listing the usual bullet points but none of it even though there are numerous posts that usually have flags boasting “University of The Year” or whatever. There is a marquee and a few gazebos on The Plaza but that is normal for Freshers Week. Only a few students are have arrived but none are yet venturing into town. Those wandering around campus are about 75% unmasked. I did see one group of about 20 unmasked girls walking down the hill together in much the same way as usual. I’m told that the occupants of a student house with 10 residents count as one household so they can legally be together outdoors, including on the highway, but may not make contact with anybody else unless they splinter away from the group. Can see problems for Covid Marshals there. Local Live online has a report of complaints about a student party in a Hall Of Residence (wrongly named) accompanied with photo of about 40 students gathered round… Read more »
So glad to have discovered this site: it’s superb, and I wish I’d found it weeks ago. But how is it still up?! I’m amazed WP haven’t nuked it.
Lots of great articles today, but the bombshell is the boring-looking one with the table of figures.
TL;DR:
The incidence of positives in the government’s new testing drive (~1.5%) turns out to be less than the government’s own estimated rate of false positives (~2.5%). So according to government’s own data, the positives which are being reported are likely all false.
This is dynamite. Every MP in the country should be told this.
Not much point if their level of understanding is that of Sir Gary Streeter MP. (Toby’s text).
“We have suffered 42,000 excessive deaths”.
Whatever that is supposed to mean.
Deader deaths than other deaths?
or excessively sad deaths
An excessive death, I thought, was one conducted in a melodramatic fashion.
Oops, sorry, forgot to say welcome aboard, left, right, inbetweenie, we don’t care.
‘Left, right, inbetweenie’ … they’re all the same. Vote Lab/Lib/Con and get the same thing. They’re in it for themselves; trained by Common Purpose and in thrall to a world where the rest of us don’t matter.
That is the nightmare with our politicians, not just that they do not understand things like statistics and science but they then ridicule them, ignore them until they are forced to use them and then go with the most blinkered ‘wild eyed; crazy scientists they can find and accept all they are told without trying to evaluate it.
I have always struggled with statistics and in this hoo-haa have been grateful for people like Tim Harford (More or Less) and Carl Heneghan for some guidance but I still try and do a reality check on what they are saying.
The worst of this problem is with the PCR tests used for this crazy test/trace programme. The politicians think they have found the back/white speed camera for SARS-Cov2 and the pure scientists just go along with this and nobody thinks to examine the practicality and suitability of using the test in this way. How do we stop this cycle of testing insanity?
I got an ‘0’ level pass in stats which h is enough to make sense of graphs and charts but it’s good to be here where folks can spell out their significance.
Tim Harford was on Jeremy Vines show yesterday, pretty insipid interview but he did say
“I’m not sure that there will be a second Wave’.
A wispy washy response from the BBC fav celeb statistician. Enough doubt that they will let it through their acceptable programming filter. Don’t bite the had that feeds you mentality
More or Less is another programme from the pedophile BBC, why the fuck would you believe a word these fuckers say?
More or Less is usually fairly good at getting the statistics right . Unfortunately it does suffer from having to follow the BBC stance and so often the comments and editorial is on message
They were talking about how far people were having to go for tests. Johnson was quoted as saying 20 miles yo wancocks 6.6, the weasel used ‘mean’ so excluded very long journeys.
Both excluded those who couldn’t
Or didn’t bother to go at all but the whole ‘crisis’ is manufactured bullshit anyway.
Ah, my Lord Biker; glad to see you again. I was missing your words of encouragement.
By refusing to be tested.
I yield to no man in my disdain for politicians but his reply shocked even me — when did politicians start openly insulting (in print, no less) the people on whom they rely to elect them? MPs always used to write insincere but emollient replies even to their harshest critics, yet now it appears even that pretense has been abandoned. The mask is truly off.
Welcome! We are all incorrigible sceptics here. And teeming with graphs, tables, and other useful data, not to mention anecdotes, jokes, cries of grief, screams of rage, and the occasional bit of Deathless Verse.
It all helps.
you forgot the shills, we love them too.
Of course!
Thank you, Annie!
Welcome to this oasis of rationality and sanity. As many others have eloquently put you will find lots of useful info in here should you wish to spread the Gospel of Lockdown Scepticism together with the following:
Cheers, Bart!
Killer fact # 2 was that:
Pillar 1 tests (accurate tests conducted in hospitals) had 0.45% positive.
Pillar 2 tests conducted in the community have 1.7% positive.
So, odd bods getting tested out & about are 4x more likely to be tested positive than those having a kosher test in hospital! Or, could this be false positives?
Looks like the Noel Gallagher podcast is gone from YouTube already 🙁
Removed by the uploader rather than by YouTube. NME clearly doesn’t believe in freedom of speech. Sad times for what was once a publication with some standards.
Are they now ‘woke’ too then?
Not NME.that removed it. The article just quoted them . This was a podcast done by Matt Morgan for Radio X.. It was them that removed it .
But if you want to listen ,,,
Ah, thanks
Thanks
Excellent, thank you. Noel knows the difference between rights and Liberties.
Bleedin’ hell! whatever has happened to the anti everything rebel fuck you stance of rock music? if it is still called that. I wonder what ace curmudgeon Mark E Smith would have made of coronabollox?
You can find it here:
https://mobile.twitter.com/mainlyoasis/status/1305808842756968448
Just posted the following comment under the BBC article on Pritti Horrible’s encouragement to dob blasphemers against the Holy Rule of Six:
“Read this quickly before it’s removed.
The above debate about doctors is clearly off topic, but the drift is not sceptical.
The topic is the rule of six.
Am I OK so far?
Now I call the rule of six draconian, cruel, and wrong. I’m sceptical.
Bingo! My comment is censored.”
It’s survived ten minutes, but then, it’s very early in the morning, when almost nobody will be reading .
Some underpaid junior media analyst sleeping on the job there.
Apparently it’s also not OK to compare the UK gov approach to restrictions with Germany in the 30s and 40s.
I captured this yesterday:
1. Posted by The view from my window
on 4 minutes ago
Wikipedia says:
Under Hitler’s rule, Germany quickly became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government.
It needs to add the following:
Under Johnson’s rule, the United Kingdom quickly became a totalitarian state where nearly all aspects of life were controlled by the government.
And then:
1. Posted byThe view from my window
on2 hours ago
This comment was removed because it broke the house rules. Explain
So the BBC consider that comparison of the behaviour of the UK Government to Hitler’s Germany breaks the “house rules”? Seems like a fair and honest comment to me.
It is interesting how it was entirely reasonable to compare Johnson to Hitler last year.
Check his CV:
“After university, Hancock briefly worked for his family’s computer software company and for a backbench Conservative MP, before moving to London to work as an economist at the Bank of England, specialising in the housing market. In 2005, he became an economic adviser to the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, later becoming Osborne’s chief of staff.”
Most modern politicians have a similar background. It explains so much.
They’ve turned something that has been no worse than a bad flu season into the worst economic, cancer death, suicide, personal liberty crisis we have have seen.
I presume he only made the tea when he worked for the family company – I seriously doubt he’s got the capacity to develop software.
Or type on a keyboard.
I think making tea might be too difficult for him
He certainly doesn’t have the capacity to develop software. He’s a Computer User (Non Technical)…..
I see what you did there 😉
He’s capable of making tea?!
‘specialising in the housing market.’
Just before the housing market crashed and the sub prime mortgages came to light
Couldn’t make it up
I bet he gets on with Ferguson like a house on fire…
They’re all crooks
He’s not. You think that unless twat has the power to do this? He’s doing the work of people you don’t know because we don’t live in a free country any more and haven’t done since the day of the coup against Mrs Thatcher. Britain was occupied the day she was got rid of and are now nothing more than a piss poor island full of fat braindead fucks and savages from 7th century countries allowed here to destroy us.
It makes my heart sing to see my feelings so eloquently described by your piss and vinegar soaked quill
There is a job which requires no experience and no qualifications: Member of Parliament.
When i had the chance to accost my mp about the child abuse problem in parliament (and elsewhere)
She was busy yelling, “i’m a criminal barrister” (presumably to impress the small number of people present)
With some internal restraint i managed to refrain from bleating out, “indeed most barristers are criminal, how refreshing to meet an honest mp”
<broad smile>
A few of us were discussing Handsy Hancock’s CV yesterday (the discussion revolved around the usefulness or otherwise of PPE degrees). His CV is ‘unusual’. Although he is not of my generation, I would proffer, based on what I know about PPE and Oxford graduate prospects, he went to work for his family computer business because he could not get a job – the timing of the move to the BoE is odd, unless he literally worked for the family firm for a few months between June and September just after graduating. Was he employed by BoE, or was he working as a contractor on behalf of his family’s computer firm? He certainly seems to be pretty well connected, and has moved effortlessly into advisory positions for various Tory MPs.
Wancock’s background is symptomatic of MPs and many in the Establishment today.
Never has been there such a greater disconnect between the government and its people today than it was in the past. Of course many people will say that it was always thus but one can argue that in the past the aristocracy in the government had more dealings with ordinary people and stared at poverty in the face due to their duty to their estates and their dependents. I don’t see that today, in fact I seriously doubt if the likes of Johnson, Wancock or even Starmer know what its like to face redundancy or live in a bad neighbourhood. Or live with the consequences of their policies full stop.
I was told by a retired solicitor that his son had recognised Hancock as a fellow performer from his time on the London standup scene around the turn of the century. It would explain a lot.
Well done to Carl Heneghan. Caught them lying again. Lovely to see Krankie squirming. When will it dawn on people that their ‘unfortunate calculation methods’ always seem to overestimate, rather than underestimate Covid, whether it be deaths, hospitalisations or tests? How odd, always one way? Why is that I wonder? To be fair they don’t really report this stuff in the MSM, far too busy with hysteria to have any interest in facts and the veracity of data that Government agencies spew out. So most people don’t even know about it.
Daily Covidgraph
“Fears for Europe’s hospitals as Madrid death toll grows. Hospitals in Europe’s Covid-19 hotpots are close to saturation point, with admissions to intensive care units increasing”
Sweden – only 4 reported Covid deaths yesterday
100% proof that lockdowns don’t work.
I had a brief read of the article and it appears that 1 hospital is nearing max ICU capacity but it doesn’t seem to say that all those beds are being used by patients with covid… however that was a late night read though so I may need to read again to check I’m not spewing out nonsense.
The striking things is how they extrapolate to ‘Europe’s hospitals’ based on what is happening in one city.
(And no thought given to the potentially worse outcomes that many may receive over winter because of the mentally and physically damaging policies of the spring/summer!)
‘ A matter of weeks’ We know handy cock is not very good with numbers, so pick a number, any number 10 weeks? 57 weeks? 172 weeks? 522 weeks?
Moonshot? I have a large rocket left over from last Guy Fawkes night, and I know where I would like to insert it before lighting the blue touch paper and retiring
He is taking the Political International Standard System of measurement as a convenience
are guy fawkes celebrations ‘allowed’? or bit close for comfort, for them
The difficulty will be in deciding who to burn on the bonfire, we are spoilt for choice this year
Two leading Lewes bonfire societies (Cliffe and Commercial Square) have said they will not be present on the 5th this year.
They’ve been druv.
What reason did they give for this decision?
Safety, what else ? 🙂
Slightly off topic but kind of related I went to the hospital a few weeks ago, and they had developed a new bus lane, sign saying “not operational we have listened” I believe there was chaos a few days before. I think the council had some sort of a grant back in June/July The comment below from a local resident sums up how well thought through the scheme is. (I believe it has been put on hold) Will not be going that way till the end of the month so will see check. 23 DAYS AGO Utter total stupidity. Do decisions like this install confidence in our local government? If they can’t get basic things right like the roads right, just think about the more complicated services like health, education and welfare! [shudder] These new bus lanes have been installed on roads that are already at maximum capacity during morning and evening rush hours!! The tailbacks are already horrendous on these stretches. All they have done is narrowed capacity so that every 5 mins a single Stagecoach bus gets a free lane for 1/2 mile is tantamount to reckless endangerment. The council must think people are idiots when they throw… Read more »
Part of the plan bro. Everything they are doing is making it impossible to live. It don’t matter what it is but they are a slime oozing into every aspect of your life with the mantra of “the environment” and “safety”. Some of us know they are evil and it’s all being done to destroy everything we’ve built over the centuries others ignore that and attack folk like me for pointing it out. It’s not getting any better anytime soon. Within ten years if these lunatics are stopped dead you’ll be applying on line to use your car, giving details of the the roads you’ll use and why you need to go there. 20 years time no one will have a car. You won’t need one anyway because most of us will be dead from a combination of the Chinese made lab flu and the Chinese made Vaccine. It’s not a new political party that’s need it’s the army that needs to step in and get rid of all these traitors in Government.
Thanks Bro! Enjoy the open road while you can!
It is related because they sneaked in these long laid plans, all over the country, under the cover of fighting the Covid, out of sight and out of mind because done under cover of strict early lockdown.
Meanwhile all the normal roadworks that had been abandoned March 23 remained mothballed
It’s largely because of the growth of parasitic administration. Every large organisation gets it, universities in particular. The admin department grows until it takes up more room and demands more resources than even the main activity that the organisation exists to do.
The Covid idiocy gave meaning to useless jobs. When in fact all of these people should have been furloughed on minimal pay. It doesn’t help that the government is doing it too.
As has happened to the NHS.
Part of agenda 21/30.Despite London being deserted they still have manufactured traffic jams with mass installation of cycle lanes and closure of roads.Covid gave them the excuse to intensify a process that has been going on since TFL was instituted,although it picked up steam when Johnson was mayor.
Do the stress tests applied to the British Banks since 2008 factor in an economic shock of the scale that they are are likely to face between October and March?
Is the dictatorship in a financial position to bail out the banks even if it wanted to?
The Bank of England can always support them like they did the Government.
Banks went bust last september
https://www.cadtm.org/Another-look-at-the-Federal-Reserve-s-panic-in-September-2019-and-solutions-to
Just like 2008 but bigger. Hence coronavirus and the police state.
No doubt after some legal advice, NUI Galway has backed off on requiring a pledge from students and staff: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/nui-galway-drops-behave-responsibly-pledge-requirement-1.4353962
GREAT NEWS. That demand was appalling. They wanted your body, mind and soul.
Under the guise of “kindness” they will gag and bind you.
Brilliant. The lad who took this up with them will be a future leader for sure.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=168682254746810&id=102086338073069
Hopefully university students in other countries will follow his lead. I’ve read reports of very bad situations for students at American universities.
I cannot stop thinking that the government just uses its newly got greater power and control on much more money to extend this period and trying to get even more power and control over more money. They simply use bbc and all the resources they have. It must be difficult for them to realise that the period is over when they got this extraordinary power. I hope they don’t use this power to push back their political opponents.
They already have.
The original lockdown only worked because of overwhelming public support and goodwill. They must surely know this no longer applies.
They no longer have the power we lent them on March 23rd.
Two key mistakes:
1) Cummings “field trips”
2) The Rule of 6
Goodwill leaking away from even more of the public after the latest nonsense.
They don’t have any political opponents.
No, the existing parties are as one. Nevertheless, there still won’t be elections in May. I suspect the reason is that the parties have seen how little support they are getting in response to their rounds of begging letters and emails to their own mail lists. Predicted results of a 2021 election round: Tories crash and the rest go backwards, huge number of spoilt ballots. As we found in 2019, large numbers of spoilt ballots have an impact, they delegitimise the system, and our rulers will want to avoid that.
Paradoxically, I think the only chance of getting elections is if a credible LS party is formed which can press for them. It becomes much harder to cancel elections if the consensus in favour of doing so is punctured.
I would agree with your view that we need a credible opposition to the current political parties (and Lockdown). There was talk on here about using an existing party structure (such as the Libertarian party). A good choice could be The Monster Raving Loony Party. Firstly, it is widely known. Secondly, it would be relatively easy to take over. Thirdly, the publicity that might arise by changing tact and advocating sensible policies against the lunacy in the other parties would be priceless; and finally, voting for them would appeal to people who liked the new policies and also to the large swathe of disaffected voters who are not too interested in political parties but want to stick two fingers up to the existing politicians.
My thoughts on “Government Responds to Vaccine Petition”
People are right to be suspicious. This is like telling a prison inmate that their stay is voluntary, as long as they don’t try to leave.
The message is pretty clear. “Volunteer to be vaccinated, or we will force you to be.”
I want 67 million volunteers, you, you, you….
Virus was made in a Chinese Lab and released on us as an act of war
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFlqXPl_hZQ
Johnstone and the rest of the westminster people have shown us that they are part of the conspiracy. We have no rights, free speech and are at the mercy of lunatics who want to control the world. They know what they are doing and its you and your families death they want. And no one gives a fuck. Still think i’ll go out for a ride on my bike and wait for the stormtroopers to come round my house and forcibly inject me with the vaccination ( for my own safety you understand). I wonder what will it take for people to fight for their lives or have we all become spineless wankers. I know the answer to that question already, unfortunately. Off course one of the big brains will pop up like he shill he is and say they’re incompetent and don’t worry it’s no ones fault. They’re part of the deception too.
I bet the Chinese can’t even believe how well this has spun out
I imagine that whenever the CCP higher-ups discuss the West, they spend the first five minutes in uncontrollable laughter.
Chinese vaccine ready by November as announced yesterday.
Seems to fail pretty hard when it comes up against Hanlon’s Razor. Also seems to me to presuppose levels of governmental competence not really in evidence.
Also seems likely we are going to be subjected to plenty of propaganda pushing us towards confrontation with China, as it takes top dog position from the US, without any need for this level of blood libel. I don’t think you need to worry about there not being a Cold War with China in our future, if that’s what you want. That’s pretty much baked in. What imo should concern us more is the possibility of it turning hot. Because if that happens, we’ll likely look back fondly on the damage done by the coronapanic, as “the good old days”.
It is not the Chinese ffs – The Wuhan lab was funded jointly by the US and CCP.
Fauci gave the Wuhan lab 4.7 million dollars the year before the virus “escaped”
It is difficult for normal people to understand just what the recent advances in technology have allowed the powerful to do. Nanotechnology bio-engineering and new materials technology have introduced a new future the technocrats are forcing on us. Thinking in the old norms is no longer be relevant but most people cannot catch up.
More Moonshit than Moonshot
Article by Philip Johnston in the Telegraph this morning saying MPs need to hold the government to account over what is going on. Pretty obvious stuff.
He states the oft-quoted principle: ‘the basis of English liberty is the rule of law, under which everything is allowed unless specifically prohibited’.
To my mind it would be more accurate to say ‘the basis of English liberty is the predilection of its people to disobey senseless laws foisted on them by an overreaching and arrogant executive’.
I am wondering if anyone can give me a city:city comparison of Covid deaths. Whenever I try to argue with anyone, using Sweden as an example, they always bring out that “Sweden is less densely populated so of course that is why”. However, if you look at the concentration of the population of Sweden, many of them live in the south in a few cities. The population of Stockholm is around a million – the same as perhaps Birmingham, give or take. So how do cities compare? I’m struggling to find data these days with everything I have to read and the way governments are making it difficult…
Greenland is a huge ice-sheet surrounded by a few towns dotted along the coast. I don’t think raw population density is a particularly useful measure for Greenland or Sweden. Urbaanisation is a better metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country
Does population density have anything at all to do with COVID-19?
Surely if it did then we would see masses of death around these areas in the UK of working age people. Virtually all deaths come from the elderly and those with serious illness that were in hospital, in it moved into care, in hospices, or confined to there homes and seeing out their final days at home.
Correct. Population density of very ill, elderly people is the key metric here. Nursing homes and hospitals are very dense in those people. Wherever you are in the world. Sweden’s deaths like ours and France and the US etc occurred overwhelmingly in those settings, and overwhelmingly to people who caught it in those settings. Community cases leading to death are very rare. Which is why lockdown, masks, Social Distancing, ban on mass gatherings, ‘the rule of six’ and all the other stuff is ALL absolute bullshit and totally pointless.
Sweden has a higher urban population percentage than the UK (88%) compared to the UK (83.9%).
These may help:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1103949/number-of-coronavirus-covid-19-cases-in-sweden-by-region/
https://citypopulation.de/en/uk/covid/
Population of the cities are only similar if you look at the Metropolitan area of Stockholm (2.4m)
Inproportion2 produced a good article on this way back at the beginning of July, and some of the stuff is still useful:
A ‘Nordic’ comparison: Sweden has lower overall mortality than Finland – and Scotland!
Denmark is a huge outlier there. Population density was not a factor there at all.
It’s all to do with age and underlying conditions
It would seems that Matt Hancock knows all about false positives (from Hansard (https://bit.ly/2E3LuVZ):
Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)
To what extent is there a possibility that it is the exponential increase in testing itself, in identifying genuine new cases, and the very significant possibility of false positives, that is giving a distorted impression of the trajectory of the disease?
Matt Hancock
I like my right hon. Friend very much and wish that that were true. The reason why the Office for National Statistics does the surveillance testing is to ensure that we are constantly looking, on a national representative sample, at what the case rate is, as well as, of course, using the tests, and as we increase the testing numbers, we will inevitably find more of the cases that are there. The ONS survey published on Friday shows a rise in the numbers commensurate with the rise in the numbers of tests that have come back positive, and that does take into account the point about false positives, which is an important one.
Did Matt Hancock actually say anything?
I wish he didn’t say anything.
Whoever it was who got that reply from Gary Streeter: over the coming months and years as the appalling consequences of the government’s response come home to roost, you can email him repeatedly holding him responsible. Let him and his ilk be accountable for what they have supported.
Then again, I suppose Streeter is one better than his neighbour Johnny ‘Johnny’ Mercer MP who, in his own tweeted words, thinks that people who questioned the wisdom of the police down here in Devon to set up roadblocks during the lockdown are ‘kn*bs’,and people who don’t wear muzzles are ‘c*nts’.
My MP, Geoffrey Cox, meanwhile keeps his head well down on all this – wiser than Streeter and Mercer, but hardly more credible.
I seriously wonder whether Parliament can survive this. And I’ve no idea what the alternative might be.
We have a dead Parliament unfortunately. More and more are exposing themselves for what they really are – how they hate the ordinary Joe and are in it not to serve the public but to feather their own nests and to gratify their egos.
What I don’t think they know is that the feeling is mutual and when the day of reckoning arrives they will get their comeuppance – either in the ballot box or something else.
They can’t escape Karma.
My worry is that it will be something else.
For all Parliament’s faults – or rather the type of person we elect there – I can’t see any way we can rebuild our society on a sure footing without one.
Maybe in the same way as there was an Interregnum of the Monarch in the 1650s, there will be an Interregnum now. Johnson and co. have form on wanting to shut Parliament.
If they shut it,at least people could see that they are living in a dictatorship
Yes, I sometimes think that we will have to go right to the very bottom, with all the suffering that entails, until people wake up and we can begin the climb back out.
Looking at the wasteland that is central London we shouldn’t have to wait too long
And if they don’t want the something else then they need to roll back this insanity instead of doubling further the mistakes they’ve made.
Its not long to go now before any rioting or civil unrest unfolds.
Maybe they do want the something else?
As Lord Sumtpion said a couple of days ago, the Johnson administration is power mad.
Then they have a death wish.
Any rioting and civil unrest could turn violent. Look at the Revolution of 1830 and 1848 where angry crowds did turn on ministers and civil servants.
Yes, history shows that no matter what happens now it’s very ugly times ahead, and I don’t mean just economically.
My MP, also a Devon one, is, I think, probably dead. We haven’t heard a peep from Kevin Foster since this all hit the fan. Perhaps the Covids carried him off?
More likely covid has carried off his brain.
But like Geoffrey Cox, he may be possible to work on. On the comments for 8 September I posted a (long) email I sent to Mr Cox saying that he had to come off the fence, one way or another, and couldn’t just sit there and say nothing. No rise from him yet.
Our MP has been MIA. Wrote him an email back in April and nowt a peep.
I have received no acknowledgement of my brief, courteous snailmail letter to my MP.
After a few days, I used the WriteToThem website to email the same text to him, receiving an automated acknowledgement of receipt.
Nothing else.
AG and KH,
The government response to covid is the most important matter to affect our lives since the Second World War. MPs have no legitimate right merely to sit back in silence. They have a duty to make their stance clear, whatever that stance may be.
Well you write just fine on here. And an emotional rant is maybe better than the semi piss-taking passive-aggressive stuff that I write.
Mine would end up like that. A case of reading between sarcasm.
HI Alan and kh1485,
Unfortunately this has led me to the conclusion that there are too many MPs and given that many companies are having to restructure in order to survive then maybe they should as well.
In my darker musings, Bart, I think the Parliament buildings should be razed to the ground and all their denizens sent to the Brussels they love.
I agree that there are too many MPs.
Although it’s important to have a revising chamber, I also think there are far too many people in the House of Lords.
My MP had at last replied (today) to my July email about masks in shops. I’ll presumably have another long wait for a reply to my email of 9 September opposing the renewal of the Coronavirus Act. The replies I get are usually quite long but simply state the standard government line with little evidence of independent thought.
Not a peep for 6 months from my usually media friendly Socialist mp.
covid killed 51,818 so far this year (ONS – covid mentioned on death certificate)
other respiratory diseases killed 46,929 (ONS stats)
‘other’ will overtake covid in a month as covid has all but disappeared.
covid is overestimated as ‘mentioned on death certificate’ whereas ‘other respiratory deaths’ is ‘underlying cause’. I think if covid deaths were measured as ‘underlying cause’ you’d be down to a few thousand. It was a complicating factor in deaths of old age
i thought it was 41000 dead of the chinese man made lab flu not 51000.
Basil Fawlty goes in search of Handy Cock
https://images.app.goo.gl/GZJj1e6c9q5qczgCA
Peston in the Spectator saying that a lockdown might be only 2 weeks away.
I really can’t do this much more. Why do people still believe a word of what they are saying?
Wasn’t it Peston who got the ‘scoop’ on the rule of 6? Worrying if so… especially if I’m remembering correctly that James Delingpole had heard months ago of a planned new lockdown in October, which is now 2 weeks away..
Another bloody (uk) holiday down the tubes for half term then. I will make them pay for this stolen year.
2020 will someday be remembered as the good times when they were still maintaining illusions.
I’ve seen October mentioned in many different publications. It’s gone viral, so to speak (sorry!)
I’m hearing rumours of that happening.If it does it will be to forestall any civil unrest.The economic chickens are coming home to roost
It won’t forestall it – it will make it happen – I’m done with this now.
I’m with you.My livelihood is almost gone.Bankruptcy to follow.Nothing to lose
“Whatever you do, never take away too much from a person, otherwise you will leave them with nothing to lose” – Solzhenitsyn.
If that’s true then instead of trying to stop any rioting or civil unrest, it could trigger it.
They should be careful what they wish for. With jobs and businesses already on the line, no sane person will accept this and this could wake up the sheep as well.
furlough is ending too isn’t it?
I read that, he said all the medics he knows call the former Health Secretary by cockney rhyming slang.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of-a-mass-hysteria-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-a-682613.html
This investigation (from 2010) into the 2009 swine flu hysteria has so many parallels with the current situation it is unsettling. Can it be a coincidence that there is almost exactly a decade between the two hysterias?
There is also a channel 4 programme on the pharmaceutical scam of swine flu from 2010. I mentioned it the other day, if it is still on YouTube
I watched it, then did a bit of digging. Who do you think this relates to?:
‘In 2006, in his mid-40s, he joined GSK as head of drug discovery. Four years later he became head of medicines discovery and development and in 2012 he was appointed head of research and development at GSK’
None other than Sir Patrick Vallance!
Drop her as a friend, You will quickly realise that you haven’t lost a friend, but that she wasn’t a friend in the first place
I’ve dropped a couple of people after a few back and forth email exchanges. The gulf is simply too wide. I don’t see how we can single-handedly bring people back from psychosis, especially just relying on words and explanations.
You’re either on the bus or you’re not on the bus, as some hippies used to say (Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters reference for those old enough to remember).
Or even Firesign Theater, “We’re all bozos on this bus.”