Masks to Continue into 2022 – Vallance
The Government’s Chief Scientist, Sir Patrick Vallance, has said that people should still expect to be wearing masks next winter. The Telegraph has the details.
The public may have to wear masks for another year, despite a “watershed moment” beginning Britain’s national vaccination programme, Sir Patrick Vallance has said.
As hospitals across the country began administering jabs to the most vulnerable, the chief scientific adviser suggested that restrictions may remain in place long after its full rollout. …
Sir Patrick said: “It may be that next winter even with vaccination we need measures such as masks in place; we don’t know yet how good all the vaccines are going to be at preventing the transmission of the virus.”
The Government scientist also said it would take “quite a long time” to make sure everyone in priority groups receives their jabs, urging the public to “stick to the rules”.
Sir Patrick said that the public could not afford to “let our guard down” as the vaccine is rolled out.
What he doesn’t explain is why, once the vulnerable who wish to be are vaccinated, it is so important to prevent transmission of a virus that will hardly kill anyone or make them unwell. Begs the question: At what point will the scientific and medical advisers recognise that it is more important to let people get on with their lives and jobs?
Mark Harper, chairman of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative MPs, yesterday urged the Government to set out how freedoms would be restored to those who were vaccinated.
“It’s really positive news that those most vulnerable to Covid-19 are now starting to get vaccinated,” he told The Telegraph.
“They will be wondering, once they’ve had their second doses and are fully protected, how quickly they can start seeing their children and grandchildren and getting back to normal. It would be a real benefit if the Government could set that out as soon as possible.”
Harper put similar points to the Health Secretary Matt Hancock in the Commons, who replied:
The House might be relieved to know that (Mr Harper) and I agree with each other on the need to ensure that as the vaccine is rolled out to vulnerable groups, so we therefore monitor the impact of the vaccine on reducing cases, reducing hospitalisations and reducing the number of people who sadly die from this disease, and taking that basis for the judgment of how soon we can lift the restrictions. He and I want to lift the restrictions as soon as is safely possible and the question of that judgment of how safely is one that we will have to monitor and debate in this House over the coming weeks and months.
This is similar to what he said on talkRADIO in the morning. He told Julia Hartley-Brewer that the Government could ease Covid restrictions once all of the most vulnerable people have received the vaccine, rather than waiting until everyone has been vaccinated.
So which is it? Lifting restrictions once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, or keeping it all going just in case? Given how it’s all gone since March we can probably guess what the Government will be pushed towards by its over-cautious advisers. Do we have any confidence ministers will have the courage and presence of mind to resist their “reasonable worst case” whisperings, backed up with shonky models and dodgy data? At least we can be grateful the CRG can bring something stronger than persuasion.
More Dodgy Data For Lockdown II
In another embarrassing revision of the data that backed up the Government’s lockdown case in October, the ONS infection survey which at the time indicated a spike in infections has now had its modelled estimate for the period revised to show an almost flat line. Ross Clark in the Spectator has more.
Each week, the ONS has produced two graphs: one showing the ‘officially reported estimates’ for the number of new daily infections per 100,000 people over the past seven days. Beside that, it also publishes a graph of ‘modelled estimates’ – which are adjusted for such things as false positives and false negatives and show a smoothed-out line of how the ONS thinks infections have changed day by day. Until last week, the two graphs broadly agreed with each other, as you can see from this edition published on October 30th.
I choose this edition because it is the latest one which would have been available when the Prime Minister and cabinet made their decision to place England in a second lockdown, a decision made the following day.
Both graphs show the infection rate doubling in the two weeks to October 17th, the latest date for which data was then available. The government has been criticised for basing its decision on the ‘dodgy graph’ which claimed that deaths could rise to 4,000 a day by December – an estimate which was already out of date by the end of October. But the ONS data could, on its own, have been used to justify a second lockdown.
However, look at the latest edition of the ONS’ infection survey, published last Friday, December 4th, and something very off seems to have happened. The two graphs – the ‘officially-reported estimate’ and the ‘modelled estimate’ no longer agree.
In fact, they show a very different picture. The modelled estimate now suggests that infection rates in October were much lower than previous thought – indeed, it suggests that the infection rate hardly changed throughout the whole month.
While the graph published on October 30th could be used to argue for an immediate lockdown, that published on December 4th suggested there was no emergency and that the Tier system might have been given more time to work. As it happened, the next edition, published on November 6th, showed that new cases had begun to fall even before lockdown was enacted.
Ross notes that this shows “modelling can be just as unreliable when it is used to try to tell what has already happened” as when predicting the future.
The new estimate may still be some way out, however, as it disagrees significantly with the King’s College ZOE app, which is perhaps the most reliable of the surveys, being the only one to rely on reported symptoms and not just PCR tests. The ZOE app shows the infection peak on November 4th, just before lockdown, and falling since, unlike the (current) ONS modelled estimate which puts the peak a week or so later.
Hard to follow “the Science” when the compass needle never stops moving.
No Excess Deaths in Sweden This Year – Study
A team of researchers from the Clinical Effectiveness Research Group at the University of Oslo in Norway has looked at all-cause mortality for Sweden for the past five years (July to July) and found that it barely increased in 2019-20 despite the coronavirus epidemic in the spring. The pre-print study compared the no-lockdown country to its neighbour (and home country of the research team) Norway.
Our study shows that although Covid-19 associated mortality rate was almost 15-fold higher in Sweden than in Norway during the epidemic, all-cause mortality was not higher in Sweden compared with three of the four preceding years. An increase in all-cause mortality was only observed in comparison to the immediately preceding period (2018/19), because mortality was lower than in the previous years. The excess mortality was confined to individuals older than 70 years. In contrast, mortality rates were lower than expected for all ages in Norway and individuals younger than 70 years in Sweden. …
Our study shows that all-cause mortality was largely unchanged during the epidemic as compared to the previous four years in Norway and Sweden, two countries which employed very different strategies against the epidemic. Excess mortality from Covid-19 may be less pronounced than previously perceived in Sweden, and mortality displacement might explain part of the observed findings.
Most significantly they found that the mortality rate among over 80s in Sweden rose only slightly in 2019-20 on the five-year average, from 201 to 204 per 100,000 people, which is a ratio of just 1.01. In other age groups it was at the average rate or below.
1.01 mortality ratio among the over 80s – that, my friends, is all the difference Covid made in a country that stayed open and free with few restrictions on daily life. And in a way that’s the only number that matters in this whole debate. Not exactly worth crippling an economy over and destroying millions of lives and livelihoods.
Read the full study here. News Medical covered the findings here.
More Evidence of a Pseudo-epidemic?
The latest ONS figures out yesterday show total deaths in England and Wales in week 48 (ending November 27th) down by 79 compared with the previous week. However, Covid deaths are up by 343. Meanwhile, non-Covid deaths are right down at 941 below average. This mismatch between Covid deaths (up) and overall deaths (down) and the sharp reduction in deaths attributed to other causes are classic signs of a pseudo-epidemic resulting from mass PCR testing, as described by Dr Mike Yeadon for Lockdown Sceptics here.
It’s important to appreciate while digesting this counter-narrative which, unlike the official line, is at least internally consistent, that the only data suggesting a ‘second wave’ is upon us are PCR results. Everything is dependent on this. A “case” is a positive PCR test. No symptoms are involved. A “COVID-19 admission” to a hospital is a person testing positive by PCR before, on entry or at any time during a hospital stay, no matter the reason for the admission or the symptoms the patient is presenting. A “COVID-19 death” is any death within 28 days of a positive PCR test. If there is any doubt about the reliability of the PCR test, all of this falls away at a single stroke. …
The pandemic was over by June and herd immunity was the main force which turned the pandemic and pressed it into retreat. In the autumn, the claimed “cases” are an artefact of a deranged testing system, which I explain in detail below. While there is some COVID-19 along the lines of the “secondary ripple” concept explained above, it has occurred primarily in regions, cities and districts that were less hard hit in the spring. Real COVID-19 is self-limiting and may already have peaked in some Northern towns. It will not return in force, and the example again is London. Even here, certain boroughs, e.g. Camden and Sutton, have had minimal positive test results. I’ve explained a number of times how this happened – the prominent role of prior immunity is often ignored or misunderstood. The extent of this was so large that, coupled with the uneven spread of infection, it needed only a low percentage of the population to be infected before herd immunity was reached.
That’s it. All the rest is a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic.
What’s the evidence for this?
The key sign of a PCR false positive pseudo-epidemic is the relative paucity of excess deaths equal to the deaths claimed to be occurring as a result of the lethal infective agent. This key sign is present.
It all comes back to the questions sceptics have been asking throughout this epidemic: How many “Covid” deaths are actually caused by the disease? How many “cases” are genuine infections?
Read Mike’s brilliant piece here if you missed it last week.
US Senator Rand Paul: Why Aren’t We Using Proven Covid Treatments?
At a US Senate hearing yesterday on “Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution” before Senator Rand Paul and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee a number of doctors advocated the use of various treatments that studies and clinical practice have shown to be effective. They included Vitamin D, Ivermectin and HCQ.
Fox News posted this video from the hearing showing Dr Pierre Kory, Associate Professor of Medicine at St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Centre, titled “‘I CAN’T KEEP DOING THIS’: Doctor pleads for review of data during COVID-19 Senate hearing”. A report on Dr Kory’s contribution from Newswise is here.
The resistance to the use of cheap and proven safe and effective therapeutics such as Vitamin D, Ivermectin and HCQ in this epidemic has been one of numerous mysteries that has cost many lives. Still the Government is not following the evidence on this.
A comprehensive overview of the scientific and clinical studies relating to Ivermectin, Vitamin D and other treatments can be found here. The Swiss Doctor’s page on recommended treatment is here.
Round-up
- “Scaring Ourselves to Death” – Keith Gandal on the AIER blog explores the evidence on how panic and stress increase deaths in an epidemic
- “V-Day must mark the beginning of the end for controls on people’s behaviour” – Telegraph editorial that argues “once the elderly and vulnerable are vaccinated, limiting fatalities and pressure on hospitals, there can be no justification to continue with controls on people’s movements and behaviour”
- “Oxford vaccine results leave regulators with ‘dilemma’, warns scientist” – Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph on the continuing challenges and disappointments with the Oxford vaccine now that the results have been published in the Lancet
- “The Vicar of Dibley taking the knee for BLM makes one thing clear – the BBC has lost the plot” – Good comment from Allison Pearson in the Telegraph on the latest knee-taking shenanigans
- “Covid blood test can predict patient survival chances” – Guardian report on a remarkable blood test for proteins that has so far correctly predicted the outcome for 18 of 19 severely ill patients who survived and five of five who died. Sounds very much like confirmation of the importance of pre-existing immunity…
- “Effect of internationally imported cases on internal spread of COVID-19” – New Lancet study showing that restrictions on international travel “have little effect on COVID-19 epidemics if there are many more cases resulting from local transmission compared with imported cases”. Be warned though: it is a model
- “FDA announces deaths of two Pfizer vaccine trial participants” – One was immunocompromised, says the Jerusalem Post. The FDA Briefing Document states one died of a heart attack 65 days after the second dose, while the other died from arteriosclerosis three days after the first dose. Both have been deemed unrelated
- “People advised to put off Christmas get-togethers” – New advice for the people of Wales from their killjoy scientific advisers, in BBC News. They are “strongly advised” to consider “postponing celebrations until later next year”. So, next Christmas then?
- “Why Did the U.S. Copy China on Virus Control?” – An excellent question from Stacey Rudin in AIER
- “Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya on the Lockdown Fiasco” – Tom Woods interviews the Great Barrington Declaration co-author in his latest podcast
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Four today: “Come And Get It” by Badfinger, “You Can Have Mine” by Augustana, “Someone told a lie” by Steppenwolf and “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” by Manic Street Preachers.
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 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.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
You can follow Lockdown Sceptics on our social media accounts which are updated throughout the day. To follow us on Facebook, click here; to follow us on Twitter, click here; to follow us on Instagram, click here; to follow us on Parler, click here; and to follow us on MeWe, click here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we bring you a branch of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which tweeted on Sunday (and subsequently deleted) a tweet that read: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Breitbart has the story.
Director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation Corey DeAngelis noted Monday CTU “filed a request for an injunction to stop in-person instruction that is supposed to start January 11th” – the day after it deleted its tweet condemning the reopening of schools.
DeAngelis further observed the “reopening” scheduled for January 11th in Chicago is “only for ‘students in pre-K and cluster programs.’”
Elementary and middle school students are scheduled to return to in-person instruction in February.
He continued that, while CTU quoted Dr. Anthony Fauci in its request for an injunction, it omitted Fauci’s quote in which he stated, “The default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school […] the spread among children & from children is not really big at all.”
On this issue at least the CDC appears to be taking a sensible line.
On Wednesday, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also repeated his call for schools to open for in-person learning, stating that schools are not a major cause of coronavirus contagion.
“[W]e now have substantial data that shows that schools’ face-to-face learning can be conducted in K-12, and particularly in the elementary and middle schools in a safe and responsible way,” Redfield said.
The CDC director explained infections that do occur among teachers and students are largely due to the spread of the virus within communities or in homes.
“We’re not seeing intra-school transmission,” Redfield affirmed, adding: “I just think it’s healthy for these kids to be in school. That said, they got to do it safely and they’ve got to do it responsibly. And when this was started over the summer, no one really knew for certain. They thought that these public health measures would work.”
“But now the data clearly shows us that you can operate these schools in face-to-face learning in a safe and responsible way,” the CDC director said.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop 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 (takes a while to arrive). 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. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face masks in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
If you’re a shop owner and you want to let your customers know you will not be insisting on face masks or asking them what their reasons for exemption are, you can download a friendly sign to stick in your window here.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry. See also the Swiss Doctor’s thorough review of the scientific evidence here.
Stop Press: A sharp-eyed reader spotted that in the Scottish Government’s fatuous “COVID Guide to Etiquette” that we highlighted yesterday the woman shown on page five isn’t wearing her mask over her nose – contrary to official guidance.
Sloppy graphic design and an own goal from the mask zealots.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched in October and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it ever since. If you googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and Toby’s Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now well over 700,000 signatures.
Update: The authors of the GDB have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: You can watch Sunetra Gupta set out the case for “Focused Protection” here and Jay Bhattacharya make it here.
Update 4: The three GBD authors plus Prof Carl Heneghan of CEBM have launched a new website collateralglobal.org, “a global repository for research into the collateral effects of the COVID-19 lockdown measures”. Follow Collateral Global on Twitter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many JRs being brought against the Government and its ministers, we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
First, there’s the Simon Dolan case. You can see all the latest updates and contribute to that cause here.
Then there’s the Robin Tilbrook case. You can read about that and contribute here.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
The Night Time Industries Association has instructed lawyers to JR any further restrictions on restaurants, pubs and bars.
And last but not least there’s the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. You can read about that and make a donation here.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Quotation Corner
We know they are lying. They know they are lying, They know that we know they are lying. We know that they know that we know they are lying. And still they continue to lie.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.
Charles Mackay
They who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions…
Ideology – that is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.
Sir Winston Churchill
If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
Richard Feynman
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants.
Albert Camus
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Marcus Aurelius
Necessity is the plea for every restriction of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt the Younger
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Joseph Goebbels (attributed)
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken
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. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
And Finally…
Stop Press: The polls are now open for the best political cartoon of the year. But one cartoonist found he’d been left out of the party: the Telegraph‘s Bob Moran, a lockdown sceptic whose work regularly features on this site. He took to Twitter to highlight this injustice.
Toby has already been in contact to ask Bob if he’d like the Free Speech Union to take up his case, but he is too gracious to pursue it. Shame. If he was allowed to enter he would surely win the competition hands down.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
First, i suppose.
So the MPs had a chat today about the vaccine rollout. You can watch it here:
https://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/74eaa3df-fdae-42a3-b9bf-21a63dad3604?in=12:41:00&out=13:46:42
But spoiler alert, it’s a circle jerk.
I’m glad you called it a chat and not a debate. Not been much debate in the HOC for the past 9 months. 🙁
Mutual back slapping, under the headline Urgent Question.
Dear
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqdvawSUmlA
PCR Vs Rapid Antigen – Safely Opening Up Society – a Rational, Technical Approach
Ivor Cummins
‘Circle Jerk’? Is that a euphemism for mutual masturbation?
Careful William, someone will start talking about the biscuits next and there are ladies present👬👬👬
Only if all participants attended Public School, old boy
Or if they work for the Fire Brigade
Yes. It is.
I don’t have six hours to waste on those tossers. Anyone care to highlight the points of interest, if any.
Pride: Britain first in the vaccination league; wonderful achievement; questions about local hospitals becoming vaccination hubs; protection of vulnerable; couple of mild inquiries about restriction easing; Hancock emoting, bla, bla,bla.
Pride ? Seems more like hubris.
Exactly and a mutual smugfest
In which case Nemesis is ringing the doorbell even now.
Catharsis coming up the path with luck.
Hubris is exactly the word of which I was thinking…
There’s been a lot of it about this year.
Just more puerile bragging.
The question will be how many succumb to the side effects versus how many more would have died of the virus, and the reduction in influenza deaths indicates to me that many of those deaths are shunted over to covid, especially with PCR tests which often show false positives.
Something usually comes after ‘pride’.
Quite sickening really ‘our common enemy’! What a load of nonsense!
Puerile.
Our common enemy is Whitehall.
The Enemy is this Government! I object to that ar$e talking as if we were all in this together, we know we are not!
I tried to read the summary but didn’t get very far. It was just a lot of smoke being blown hard up Handycock’s and the Nanny State’s arses. Very Soviet-esque.
Guess I’m 2nd. 🙂
Anyway, I’m off to bed, but I’ll leave the night shift to consider something that really bothers me about this whole thing.
There are far too many very intelligent people who “believe” all this. I can’t figure why this is, other than to think they have either been paid, or threatened.
Discuss! (Use both sides of the paper, if required. 😉
Courage?
There are far too many intelligent people who are in on the scam and as per the main text quotes, some think it is for our own good.
The thing that puzzled me is why ‘they’ would want a society based on mistrust and suspicion and how this whole mess appeared out of nowhere yet is so pervasive.
I refer again to the BBC Documentary ‘The Trap, What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom’, 2003.
Us oldies will remember how the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction saved the world from nuclear war.
John Nash (mathematician in The Beautiful Mind) at the Rand Corporation won a Nobel prize for a series of equations for extending MAD to organising the whole of society.
(Episode 1 @14 minutes) Using the scenario of The Prisoners Dilema he proved that it is in everyone’s interest to behave selfishly and that this would result in a stable societal outcome.
But the price would be a world in which everyone was suspicious and distrustful of everyone else which is exactly where we are today.
John Nash ended up in an asylum but his followers have been penetrating the organs of public life for 17 years.
Exactly, democracy is sub-optimal just less so than the alternatives.
I think that what happened is that in the ’90s the power structure figured out that with controlled opposition, i.e, one party in reality despite the continued existence of the shell of the multiparty system, that they could set up a permanent regime. The present day results are easily visible. The criminals are Tony Blair with the present henchman Starmer as the controlled opposition, and the Clintons, with the disgusting corrupt democrat regime now seizing control in the yankee imperium.
Absolutely. Once again the socialist want to control people. First by bureaucratic government, then by taxation and stealing labour, then by fear inducing health scams. It comes down to the greed and avarice of those who do not want to create their own wealth. Who do not want their nations and their citizens to aspire to greatness.
we allowed a deeply sinister regime to change our way of life, our values and take our future away. It happened because the few Marxists at the top of the tree, the lizards waiting in the wings saw their opportunity to deceive when Soros, Clinton and Blair all came on the world stage together. The ignorance and stupidity of people like Hezeltine, Clarke, Major and indeed Ted Heath opened the door to globalism.
The BBC documentary makes it clear that it not a left-right issue. It is the economists, academics, statisticians and public health experts presuming to know better with a hefty dollop of financial corruption thrown in.
The takeover of the State by these people was facilitated by all governments equally.
Indeed, those still playing the right vs left card, just haven’t got to grips with what is really going on. Another explanation is that the right vs left posts are not naive, but are deliberately meant to be divisive and emanate from the paid traitors in 77th Brigade.
This. So much this.
Presuming to know is the basis for errors that are then protected from exposure to correction.
The documentary sails as close to the wind as can be, by framing out or underplaying some of the key parameters. I don’t suggest this would necessarily be intentional in such terms.
And I appreciate Curtis’s work – which I followed back even to the revealing of a ‘Grenfell’ prediction as part of a critical exposure of a corporate housing ripoff when high density housing was sold to ‘progressive’ councils by firms that could disappear with profits to evade consequence. I expect the same in a vaccine gold rush. The pattern is the same – ‘Milk the Vacca’.
The globalisation of capital was well underway long before Clinton and Bliar. It would be natural for politics to follow.
It didn’t appear from nowhere. It has been building for a number of years. Drip, drip, drip. Many of us started to ask questions but were shouted down as conspiracy theorists. I remember reading an article almost 25 years ago about Russia kicking Open Society out of their country and trying to arrest Soros. However, USA gave him protection. Then Hungary did the same. Then NHRN started talking about loss of freedom of speech but all the journalists closed the door on him. Don’t forget the grooming gangs, immigration, surveillance cameras, changing laws to stop governments helping their own people but sending billions to Foreign Aid, even the education. Education. Education farce where the grammar schools were taken away from those who benefitted most (the under privileged). Everything you know however small is the drip feeding of a nation too lazy to change their politicians. Too busy trying to put food on the table to have time to question their councils, teachers or MPs. It opened the door to worldwide corruption. The journalists were deeply complicit as they were too frightened to question and investigate. We now have a situation where a democratically elected USA President has been hounded for… Read more »
Jeremy Corbyn was personally responsible for taking my Grammar School education away from me, I passed my 11 plus but by the time I got there the Grammar had become a Second Class Modern called a Comprehensive.
Some years ago, Labour took away the scholarships granted to poor but able children giving them access to top private schools. Equal mediocrity for all the workers.
yet Labour blame grammar School closures on Thatcher
I got one of those grants (paid for everything) but hated it! I felt so out of place with all those privileged girls, although I met my “best friend” there as she was in the same boat! I never felt I could invite any of them back to my place with a mere 3 bedrooms and barely a quarter acre garden…and my parents didn’t speak Latin at the dinner table, etc etc.
John Nash (mathematician in The Beautiful Mind) at the Rand Corporation won a Nobel prize for a series of equations for extending MAD to organising the whole of society. That’s not really right. Nash won the Nobel prize for a general theory of games and the ways in which a balance point could be struck among competing interests. Game theory was taken up by nuclear strategists among others. The “Nash equilibrium” is of importance in theoretical economics as illustrating how Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” might work. It’s far from being a principle on which to organise anything, more of an explanation of how things work out under conditions of competition rather than central control. There’s a lot to be said about how the schools of mathematics popular in the USA and the USSR during the Cold War reflect their political and economic systems. Soviet mathematicians did a lot of work on optimal planning and control of complex systems, for example. John Nash ended up in an asylum No, he didn’t. He spent time in mental hospitals as a young man but, unusually for people with his condition, recovered sufficiently to resume a productive mathematical career. It’s fair to say, I… Read more »
Does being a mathematician make you wise?
I would not make that claim.
Unlikey.
Good response for a ‘narrative refinement’. Ideas are taken up and repurposed – or as I often say weaponised and marketised by opportunism driven by perceived need or called forth by true desire. Adam Curtis makes ‘docu-stories’ to show how ideas hijack the mind, replicate contagion and mutate as ever new twists to the narrative of possession and control. Persons and events are thus shown as agencies of the ideas rather than as pathogens. Though in order for him to set a drama key persons and events are used to sketch out – and this leads a personal moral judgement to fall into blame and shame reaction – rather than address the whole terrain within us. I see mutual self interest operating as an invisible left hand of darkness when self is defined by fear to operate as the masking over and hiding of fear and thus protect the fear by following its directive as a power of protection. If this reads insane, that is because brought out of a compartmentalised dissociation, it is insane. The golden rule operates the equilibrium of ‘balance points’ in support for Life as a result of all as brought to communication. But if fear and… Read more »
I was trying to be brief
Intelligence is not the same thing as common sense. The absent-minded professor, who is an utter idiot when it comes to anything outside his own field of expertise, is not a mere literary invention.
I would agree. I consider myself “intelligent” and a lot of people, not everyone, would agree, but people have also told me I lack common sense.
Whatever, I have found the Covid stuff bizarre and suspect from the very start.
They say that because they’re jealous. People say that to me too. Yeah, sure I lack their kind of “common sense”, but the who the hell needs that?
The AI and biogenetics leads a very few to think they can discard or replace the many.
Even in fact their own biological consciousness (sic) into a virtual machine.
This is simply a reworking of the original theme of temptation to ‘become as gods’.
Yes, you’re right. I work in a boys’ school where the teachers are so obsessed by the number of press ups, laps and bench presses they can do that they literally know nothing about what’s going on outside.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. It’s lack of common sense. I know plenty of people with degrees and higher who have zero common sense.
In my 6+ decades on planet earth, it seems to me that common sense is disappearing fast as time passes. I wonder why?
Intelligence is the ability to reason and disseminate. Just because you have an education doesn’t mean you are intelligent. Indeed many people in the higher education system are not intelligent. Neither do they have common sense. What they have is a mind easily able to absorb knowledge. Which usually means they are very good at one subject or one form of programme. These are dangerous people because they don’t have the intelligence to disseminate.
Teachers teaching one subject only is a modern phenomenon. It creates mediocrity on a grand scale. It enables mind control. When 70yr old today went to school they had already been at home with mum for five years, who taught them alphabet, numbers and a little reading. They knew their address, they socialised with other children and the usually understood a bit about growing food and looking after house. Not today.
when they did go to school their teacher taught a range of subjects. Not least the history of our land. My grandchildren come home with drawings, picture books with one word on a page, with gold stars for being kind. I am often silently surprised at the basic level of teaching.
And we also had teachers, in our grammar schools, who had served in WW II and thus had a real understanding of what was really important in the world. But by the time we graduated from University there were a lot of graduates who didn’t want to work in a competitive, commercial environment and went into teaching as an easy option. I
Looking at most of the ‘issues’ we currently face as a society; the root cause is the crap education provided by the socially aware teaching ‘profession’
Drakeford – a prime example of a moronic mediocre social studies teacher.
the most un Welsh name in Wales
I have often observed (from people I went to school with, or know personally) that (most) people who become medical doctors are those ones who absorb “knowledge” but without questioning any of it – presumably because they aren’t capable of lateral thinking or that actually there may be some faults in what they’re being taught. They also seem to be those who weren’t the brightest in the class, but were the “plodders”. Then, when they pop out of medical school, they just regurgitate that which they’ve been taught again, without question. Thankfully there are several who aren’t like that, but they are few and far between…
I was listening to a very young sounding professor guy on the bastard BBC this morning. I thought how young he sounded. He couldn’t have been more than in his mid to late 20’s and he was advocating locking us all down harder and for longer and not doing Christmas. The usual bollocks.
It seems like most of the professors who are driving corona bollocks are very young. Fresh faced beardy young dudes trying to add gravitas to their demenor with a bit of facial bum-fluff.
I was thinking how is it that just because somebody has professor in their title means that they are infallible, they have to be right. Unquestionably.
I don’t want to denigrate people who can get that fabled title but seriously…Why are we allowing babies to make such important pronouncements that have such profound effects on so many people and why do we listen to them?
It seems like every person and his dog can get to be a professor these days.
I determined some time ago that listening to ANY news/commentary etc on the BBC, no matter how much I want to know what’s going on, is deeply harmful to my mental and spiritual health. I just dont do it any more.
I can manage about 10 minutes every 3 or 4 days
I gave up the BBC years ago…
It’s a good life being a professor, for as well as your monthly pay cheque, you get a nice little pick up from Bill Gates, if you make the right noises.
Unless you happen to be Professor Chris Exley, who happily busied himself for decades studying aluminium toxicity in living organisms…until he proposed a possible problem with the aluminium adjuvants in vaccines. Then – all his funding dried up! He made the mistake of mentioning autism…just saying that more research should be done, which seems like a good idea, given his research findings…but too late. He’d committed the cardinal sin!
Anyone who has got a Ph.D can call themselves ‘a professor” quite often these are people who have done 5 years of university without ever having a job in the real world.
Lol – I think I saw him somewhere too! But my 22-year old daughter has landed a funded PhD in psychology so in 3 years’ time she’ll be a “Doctor” – but I do try and play devil’s advocate with her and give her a reality check whenever I can. I think it irritates her but hopefully she’ll see the benefits one day (hopefully while I’m still alive!)
My brother tells me that the professor of physics at his university returned from an overseas convention and had forgotten where he lived and had to ask the department secretary! True, I promise.
Fear, just because you are intelligent doesn’t mean you aren’t susceptible to scaremongering propoganda.
I left school with a C in history O grade and fell foul of the propaganda for a couple of weeks, then started questioning and looking, which was difficult, for an alternative and asking myself more questions.
However I know personally 2 people one was a secondary teacher and the other has 2 degrees one in maths. Both of these people have been a major disappointment to me, as both of them believe I’m a loon ball and they are right and the government are right and the Sunday Times, the BBC and radio 4 do not tell the audience lies or spout propaganda. Not once have they questioned the narrative.
I do however believe they’re enjoying this, both pensioned, both sitting pretty financially and they both live in the middle of knowhere and actually joyfully told me how they clapped every Thursday night on the doorstep for the NHS!!!!! Why? No one saw them! So why????
My theory is they lack imagination, I may not have had wonderful report cards nor lots of qualifications but all of the teachers I had agreed that I had a wonderful imagination.
Yes, spot on!! I have worked in schools for nearly twenty years. I have only ever met one or two teachers who had any imagination.
I know some pensioners like this. Once hyper inflation kicks in and they can’t afford to eat/keep warm/travel/eat cake etc as before, I suspect that they’ll change their tunes sharpish.
By that time it will be too late to change tune.
The real impact on how everyone lives has still to come. Sheeple will be too confused to realise their unquestioning compliance had anything to do with the coming economic & social catastrophe. The disconnect to those with livings to earn, businesses to run, homes to keep is huge.
They will have been vaccinated by then, so yes far too late.
People who remain very much in the public sector tend never to understand the world around them. By that I mean twenty years of their lives are spent in institutionalised education. They then move on to a public sector job either in teaching, nursing, police etc. By this time indoctrination is deep. They just do not understand that their salaries are not paid by the Government, but by he private sector. The divide has now become so wide because the public sector have lost their sense of service to the country.
Simply put bureaucratic government has destroyed the fabric of our society. We are now close to becoming a fully socialist country but we have the ghastly inbetween which has driven mistrust and snobbish dislike of anyway who makes their own way and earns their own living by creating the salaries of those who are indeed the socialists.
One problem with this analysis is that in the UK taxation does not fund public sector spending. The government creates new money when it spends. The role of taxation is to create demand for the currency, cool the economy in times of excess inflation or to meet other social ends.
Having intelligence and being a grade A scholar are not always compatible.
that’s what i think too is a lack of orignal thinking , and a lack of thinking for yourself. i ‘ve lost most of my friends over this and anyway have lost respect for them if ever are friends again , not very good for a friendship!
Hilarious! Very sad though that such people are responsible for educating (or brainwashing) the next generation…I think if I had young children these days, I’d be home-educating for sure
It’s a thing that’s been puzzling me too. I am intelligent myself (so the official IQ test said) and I very much took it as read that others would see straight through all this Lockdown nonsense. It only took me a few weeks to realise it all just didn’t add up. Yet, if anything, it seems to be the more intelligent people I know that are more likely to believe all this rubbish. I think a large part of it is they often tend to be “sheltered” from the economic effects more than most – decent homes, more secure jobs etc and so can literally afford not to look into all this. Well – I’ve also got a reasonable home (finally) and my income is secure (ie pension) and yet I think otherwise. I personally think that one possible cause of them being ostriches (head in the sand) might be that, at a personal level, they’ve probably often suffered less in their lives to date and haven’t had to fight their way through bad situations as much as the more cynical of us. Having always been single/low income and from a dearer area – then I’ve had no option but… Read more »
Yes exactly, Eliza.
It may perhaps also be that “intelligent middle class university educated people” (or thereabouts; I am such) are likely to conflate “reading and understanding material presented about a subject with “being informed about a subject”. Because that’s been the format or underlying assumption of their life and career to date. So if they’ve watched the news and read the articles, they know all about it (they think) and can smugly and confidently dismiss those who don’t share “their” views. People who’ve had to engage with life more directly are less inclined to operate this way: they’ve encountered the messiness of real life, with its scams and players and tricks, and so take note of the integrity of the messengers as well as the message, and of the way the message is being delivered (the “angle” basically). This, by intuition based on everyday experience; they don’t have to think it through to persuade themselves. Now, fear can derail this intuitive attention just as much as it details critical reasoning, but the former recovers more easily because it is always “present, now” and dynamic, overturning misconceptions are any time, whereas reasoning tends to proceed from its last conclusion, which now has become… Read more »
so well thought out well said eliza. i agree.yes my was very close friend spends all day watching the news on tv .
I work with the police as a civilian so my job should be secure but I have been out of work in the past which means I am totally against measures which deprive people of their livelyhoods for no reason as I know what is like to have no income and be on the dole. I find it sad if people don’t question lockdoown. The economy has been shut down for long periods, there are severe restrictions on what people can do, our civil liberties have been eroded and lockdowns have done enormous social and economic damage. In view of this it is vital to ask are such extreme measures justified. This is why have researched coronavirus as much as possible to see whether lockdowns are justified. For instance, lockdown laws apply to the whole population including healthy people who display no symptoms. I have asked on this website and numerous forums if asymptomatic transmission can occur and I have sent an FOI request to the NHS. A key justification for lockdowns is that covid is highly infectious and I sent an FOI request to the NHS to the NHS which was passed to Public Health England as to how… Read more »
It’s because they’re normies. We all know them. Their lives have gone reasonably smoothly up to now. They have no reason to think they should doubt either the Government or the media. They either laugh at or despise the people they think are conspiracy theorists. Nothing in their lives has ever given them cause to look behind the curtain. For them everything is normal, normal, normal . . . . . However, like the proverbial boiling frogs they have absolutely no clue what is going on. I think they’re in for a little bit of a shock. Don’t you?
They will. Economic Armageddon will find a way of catching up with them.
That’s also what’s baffled me throughout this crisis. As someone who did an education & history degree in a third world university, we were always taught that aspects of education in the developed world were superior to ones in the developing world. Of course this was in the mid to late 1990s. Fast forward to when I moved here in 2004, I gradually realised that what I was told about education in the developed world was only true up to a certain point. Not to mention that having spoke to a lot of people here, the general consensus was education had began to deteriorate from the 2000s. So we see that with many of the millenials especially who gravitate towards soundbites, simplistic binary thinking, lack of knowledge in the basics (because they’ve not been taught) and lack of over all curiosity. Hence why they bought into all of the propaganda wholesale. However that doesn’t explain the older people who swallowed the propaganda whole. With their “superior” education, one would have they would have been better placed to be in Vernon Coleman’s words to “distrust the government, avoid mass media and to fight the lies.” However I don’t really see that… Read more »
Great post. So true
I’m a cynical git too
Fear of death. It’s a pretty base instinct. I’d say it’s also the main reason we have religions and look at all the otherwise intelligent people that have faith in them still?
You have faith in your own opinion but otherwise have some intelligent ideas. If you meet fear of death, you may refine and grow new perspectives. Basic instinct serves the physical response to serve the function of supporting your life. But the subordination of life to base instinct is living from a fear defined and determined sense of self and world. Faith in the body as a means of protection from Intimacy unmasked is so normalised to equate life exclusively with the virtual adaptation to the body’s needs and appetites as the function and fulfilment of life – that of course is no more effective than a vaccination – but once invested you have to further invest unless the absolute failure of such a racket reveals in pain and loss. Because the mind can mask in anything, be it rationally presented scientific theory, presumed fact, or symbolically expressed mythic narratives, (that held the living cultural intelligence of your forbears within any current living generation) – I don’t regard your edict of judgement upon religions as anything but a declaration of ignorance. However, there is no shame in our starting place, in the context of a genuine desire to know the… Read more »
I think we’re looking along the wrong dimension.
The issue isn’t about intelligence, it’s about locus of control.
People with an internal locus of control believe that they own actions control their fate, whereas people with an external locus of control believe that their fate is controlled by the actions of others.
I suggest that the government-believing, pro-lockdown contingent have an external locus of control and so allow other people to make their decisions for them. They love the restrictions because it frees them from having to decide for themselves.
The visitors to Lockdown Sceptics vary by education, academic intelligence, and political affiliation, but the thing that unites us is that we all have an internal locus of control. We make up our own minds and don’t just follow the official diktats. It doesn’t take much academic intelligence to realise we are being conned, it just requires a predisposition to taking responsibility for your own life.
Just my two Britishistan kopeks.
Like it. Makes a lot of sense.
Yep, totally agree with that analysis. Those who have always questioned things, followed their own path, done their own thing, have not drunk the Koolaid.
Our problem is the locusts of control
a fucking plague of them
Locusts of control. Like it. 😀
Agree with this. Hence why there’s authoritarianism because people are simply programmed to get along with everything that’s decided for them for an easy life and a way to weasel out should things go wrong.
makes a lot of sense to me.
I think those with an ‘external’ locus of control will have a different opinion of their masters (i.e. government) with their tax raids of their savings and pensions to pay for this extravagant show!
The masters will keep kicking the can down the road as long as possible, but eventually something will crack.
I guess that most of us understand the Robert Frost poem: ‘The Road Not Taken’ which ends with the lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
i’m so glad my wonderful mom always told me ‘ you make your own luck’
So true Mabel. I don’t know anyone who is truly a sceptic, they seem quite content to be locked down and be masked. It’s something I find astonishing and worrying. Way back in Feb/March I said it was a scam, so you can imagine the reaction I got way back then.
Or the focus as control which is coercive.
The action reaction of inner and outer can set up another division from what I might call the Cartesian split – though it runs way back when.
Command is the nature of a true decision. No need to invoke will-power to coerce yourself to think or do what is your true will.
But in principle I agree except I use different terms and see responsibility for our conscious experience as key.
Blaming our life on ‘It’ or ‘Them’ gives power away and sets the ‘answers’ in external terms, that only multiply the problem we may temporarily believe will ‘save us’ from what is ultimately ourself.
Absolutely right.
I am stunned by the number of my friends I thought were intelligent rational thinkers who are so resistant to any conversation about lock-downs, the virus, masks or vaccines. Any hint of the conversation turning in that direction and the shutters immediately come down,
Its irrational and very worrying.
Perhaps there is something in the water supply?
‘More than my job is worth’ running directly on existential fear. Peer support or social inclusion is so much more than we like to think – because we like to think we are independent, in control, thinking beings, and even ‘free’! Lies that we SEEM to live by, can only run in place of true relationship by being ‘shared’. This by definition generates an exclusion, pact, clique or segregative agreement NOT to openly say, know or accept the disclosure of the lies that are effecting a cover story for mistakes that grew out of all proportion to become hidden sins. Most have little or no rational sense of this, because most are using rationalisations to mask over and evade directly knowing what they need to turn a blind eye to, in order to ‘live with themselves’. If you do not align in such a directive, you break the pact, contract, clique or hidden set of mutual conditions that set the terms under which life is allowed to move or communicate or share. As those conditions have been openly tightened or contracted to a new set of commandments, the pretences have to be openly asserted and masked in – no matter… Read more »
I have found it’s not really intelligence it’s more where you get your news and how much of a believer you are in that news. It all sounded wrong to me because of the over reaction on the BBC and MSM. WE have had viruses before so why lockdown. This made me curious and I started investigating other news providers. I heard Delores Cahill, and thought mmmm! I started looking for other like minded people and found Toby. Then I heard Peter Hitchens on talk radio and thought, hmmm, these people are saying what I am thinking so I can’t be bonkers. Then I found all the other sites LS heard the GBD, saw Mike Yeardon. I started spreading the word and turned the vast majority of my friends except one. My wife’s best friend who I am not allowed to preach to as she is a confirmed bedwetter. It will end up with her not liking me!! Hey ho! So I don’t think it’s intelligence, I think it is mistrust and curiosity.
The Israeli Intelligence had or perhaps still has a process of 1 in 10 acting devil’s advocate, as a means to avoid groupthink which is a dissociating blindness leading to failure of intelligence and negative consequence. The instilling OF groupthink to captured assets and proxies is the denial of freedom of thought under a narrative dictate, demand or crusade. This takes the targeted profile of guilt, shame, fear and masking defence, into a marketised and weaponised systemic control. (Welcome to the Machine) All elitist control structures set narratives by which to protect their interests – that their own narrative justifies as in the nations, corporation, group or relationships interest. This is the reversal of mind to predate upon rather than participate within, relational existence – from an alien-ated and exclusive sense of self-interest set as if a mind set over and apart from a life denied and dissociated from – and yet entirely dependent on. A story can also be seen as a spell or offer of entrancement. Invested identity runs in the frame provided. “Give me the storyteller to every central banker’s mind and I care not who runs the world” – to adapt an already adapted phrase. Perhaps… Read more »
Many interesting and thoughtful replies on here to this central and deeply baffling question. But I still cannot really get my head around the phenomenon. It frequently makes me wonder about my own sceptical position (though rationally I am pretty sure I am right). Some thoughts: In reply to Burlington. This ‘shuttering down’ may indicate some kind of cognitive dissonance on their part, which is a good sign for us sceptics. I have a feeling many are adopting stances purely on what they see as ‘moral’ grounds (saving just one life, protecting vulnerable, etc, etc) and then simply using their ‘intelligence’ to find arguments for their stance. In a sense this merely restates the problem, but the response on the part of student (when faced with ‘inconvenient’ info) at the end of this piece is interesting. https://web.archive.org/web/20201126223119/https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2020/11/a-closer-look-at-u-s-deaths-due-to-covid-19 Certainly, people in the West generally are not sceptical enough. My wife grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, so — as she says — it comes quite naturally to her to distrust the authorities/media, etc/ She is deeply disappointed with the West, but she is much better psychologically prepared than me to deal with PTB lying to her. The historical betrayal of Munich also… Read more »
fluoride !
It isn’t added to much of the UK water supply. Must be something else?
you a re very lucky there . american here, they like to posion us here . i too don’t understand how so many people can believe all this . don’t know what i’d do without lockdown sceptics
Still pondering this question a few hours later. I think maybe many intelligent people are getting the income one would assume they are (ie a decent one) and chances are in a more secure job and they just don’t come across people suffering the bad effects of Lockdown (ie job loss/lack of necessary health care/etc) and so don’t quite believe it. It’s maybe a case of “I’m all right Jack/Jill”. Can’t speak for other countries – but Britain is very much a country still of people moving very much only within their own little circles/”birds of a feather flock together”. I know I would have struggled to believe unemployment, for instance, was something that could happen to someone like myself until it came to the 1980s and it did and I still couldnt/cant understand it – because those were the days of dole queues and I had to line up to sign on and I never ever ever spotted anyone in those queues that “looked like me”. Don’t know if there were others like me signing on – but I looked less likely to grab for “any job regardless” (as I was single/paying rent at the time/etc) and perhaps they… Read more »
A lot of sense in what you say!
Intelligence is predicated upon what? Intelligence can be assigned to those considered insane or possessed of evil intent. The issue then is not the capacity or ability of the mind, but its assigned and assumed active purpose. Garbage in; garbage out doesn’t just apply to Ferguson’s modelling career! But if garbage is needed as a pretext for private gain or evading private loss, then, intelligence is assigned the task of presenting such a masking agenda and fronting it out. If the private agenda equates itself with the public good, then all lies become noble or necessary leverage towards a perceived good or lesser evil – relative to an ongoing situation of impending threat to private agenda, that is perceived as the greater evil against which all resources and abilities are aligned, but which cannot be openly acknowledged, for disclosure of the true account is the greater evil associated with fear of pain of loss of power as both ‘face’ and ‘control’. A corrupted and dissociated sense of self is masked from self-honesty, as the attempt to control the results, so as to hide the conflict by redefining its world as the justification for persisting as narratives of controlm evasion and… Read more »
Are you a real person?! Your preachings sound like one of those AI systems programmed to sound like they make sense but don’t actually mean anything!
Perhaps it’s just a ruse to make us think that your critical reasoning is on an even higher plane than a bunch of seasoned skeptics.
I’ve given up trying to understand Binra’s posts. I’m sure they’re meaningful, but they make my head hurt. They remind me of the books I and my peers were told to read before starting our Architecture degree…
me too cant understand it ,maybe they arent actually intellgient after all, or else have no morals or are somewhat intellgient but are sheep and never think for themselves [i like real sheep better ]. i found one more friend who is a sceptic so am happier than had been but most are still sheep
Thank you all so much for an extremely interesting discussion. I rarely see this anywhere else on the internet.
I’m immensely grateful for your replies. 🙂
Yes, I feel like I’m in a room with “like-minded” people – which makes a change these days!
The ‘very intelligent people’ will consider themselves as ‘experts’ in their own fields and will expect to be listened to and believed. Therefore when another ‘expert’ says something, the ‘very intelligent person’ will believe them without question. In their view anyone who dares to question an ‘expert’ is not very intelligent.
However, the “very intelligent people” who are SAGE members (there’s an oxymoron if ever I saw one) aren’t prepared to debate with those who, to me, are more “very intelligent people” such as Dr Mike Yeadon, Dr Carl Heneghan, Dr Clare Craig etc…why is that?
They may be intelligent, but they’re low information actors. They have no interest in spending hours reading what there is to read on the subject, listening to experts. What they see is a government faced with a crisis, with tens of thousands of people dying, and high profile doctors and experts predicting thousands of deaths a day if we don’t do something. Which is all true, actually. A quick glance and papers, and society, and people’s testimonies will confirm it. Most people would stop there, calling the evidence overwhelming. But they don’t dig further to see that while the government is facing a crisis, it’s a crisis of their own doing. They don’t dig further to see that even though tens of thousands of people died, very few of them died of this thing, and tens of thousands of people die every year of respiratory diseases anyways (and they won’t hesitate to call you insensitive for saying that). And they won’t spend a moment at all the other high profile doctors and experts that prove the government wrong. As Hitler himself said, build a lie big enough such that no one believes anyone “could have the impudence to distort the… Read more »
This is not a mystery at all. Clearly it is being done to prolong the “pandemic” and prop up the demand for a vaccine. The virus already is barely deadly enough to warrant a vaccine, especially an untested one. Cheap, effective, therapeutics would certainly make a vaccine moot. None of the measures enacted since last March have been about saving lives but about pushing the vaccine on us.
There is no need whatsoever for a vaccine. The creation of a ‘pandemic’ is simply evidence of the extent to which Big Pharma has corrupted our political class and the civil servants who are supposed to give them impartial advice.
HCQ was available over the counter in France until February when it was quietly withdrawn.
In March, Dr Malcolm Kendrick said in his blog that he’d tried to get some supplies for the GP practice where he works, but was told that they weren’t able to get it as they didn’t want supplies to run out for those with RA and lupus who took it routinely!
These things are too cheap compared to pharmaceutical drugs it is all about the money and NOTHING to do with health
On that point about vitamin D, why is it that other countries have been promoting it to their citizens and yet our darling Matt Hancock told us porkies a few weeks ago about there having been studies done on it here, and it didn’t show any benefit? They really must think we, the public, are utterly stupid!
An overlooked fact about vitamin D is that BAME people are more likely to be defficent as the body produces it in the precence of sunlight and people of non European heritage have darker skin that blocks out sunlight. Not the whole reason why deaths amoung the BAME community are higher than average but possibly a factor. No one wants to investigate this because they can’t use genetics to make a political point. Far more woke to blame systemic racism and much easier because you don’t need to provide evydence to back up claims that are woke.
Another mystery surrounding HCQ is why in March the British Government (and others such as India) placed it on the list of drugs that it doesn’t grant export licences for. http://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/comment/parallel-export-covid-19. Presumably they were stockpiling, so why wasn’t it used. My theory is that at the time the evidence for it’s effectiveness was good but not conclusive. Once Trump said that it worked nobody wanted to be seen to agree with him, so researchers didn’t do more studies and journals wouldn’t publish papers that showed it’s effectiveness. At the time papers such the guardian ran stories claiming that it was ineffective, and certainely no media organisation would dare to campaign for it’s use and be seen to agree with Trump. Lack or research meant that regulatory body didn’t have enough evidence to licence it’s use, plus there was the aticle in one of the top medical journals that showed it didn’t work that was trumpeted by the media. It was later withdrawn when it turned out that the company that supplied the data was run by a sci-fi writer and a porn star. Basically, by saying it worked Trump prevented it’s use. The fact that researchers etc. put their hatred… Read more »
We are told that yesterday there were a further 616 covid deaths
How can that possibly be so?
In a ‘normal’ year there are about 1,700 deaths a day
Are we to believe that there were 2,316 deaths yesterday?
When the figures for the total deaths yesterday are eventually announced will they be around the 1,700 mark?
If the total deaths are about 1,700 then there is no pandemic
What we have is a fraudemic
But I guess we knew that all along
If course it’s a fraud. But the Covid corpse count is the H-bomb of the Fascists’. campaign against humanity, and they have no scruples about dropping it.
You hit the nail on the head
The spike in excess deaths in April was manufactured by clearing hospitals and sending CV19+ patients into care homes. That’s the only data point that matters to the powers-that-be.
Dr Malcolm Kendrick said that care home workers where he practised were told specifically NOT to use PPE back then. Seems strange, unless you start to believe it was part of the plan
AND they are going to get rid of an epidemic of a disease that practically shows no symptoms with a vaccine that doesn’t stop infections but instead – get ready for it – reduces the symptoms.
What a con job.
Indeed we do. But the majority are still asleep and it makes you wonder what will it take to make them realise that they’ve been had.
Sadly, they may find out post-vaccination…
I’m too lazy to look closely but I’ve got the feeling that deaths on a Tuesday are always numerous. It might be an artefact of data collection, given that some figures are not reported over the weekend.
5 were reported for the County on Monday but it turns out they died on various days going back to mid November.
Deaths in England and Wales on Week 48 (most recent data) were 26% above historic mean levels for the time of year. Normally in Week 48 we would see about 9900 deaths (10-year range was 9203 to 10958). this year we saw 12456. That’s 1498 more than the previous highest value (214/day) and 2556 more than normal (365/day).
Most people don’t seem to realise how many people die in a normal year in the winter. As for the “Covid deaths” we keep hearing about on MSM, we all know that they may just be those with Covid mentioned on the death certificate, not necessarily that they died of it, or they had a positive PCR test (for what that’s worth!) in the previous 28 days. Whenever I see them announce, “xxx people have sadly died today of Covid” I really, really want to smash the TV
A (mRNA) vaccine against a cold/flu virus that is not tested properly for years is a bit dangerous wouldn’t you say? All (pseudo)-vaccines made for the computer modelled Covid are in fact forms of gene-therapy. CanSino, Johnson, Oxford and Zeneca uses a living GMO virus bearing the Covid-spike gene. Pfizer and others uses messenger RNA. ALL are forms of gene-therapy. Sorry folks but this is a “live-trialed” human experimentation that has been launched done by some of the most devious profiteers to ever walk the earth. The social engineering and mental/emotional manipulation that has been applied to humanity over the last 9 months is as diabolical as anything I have seen. The physical damage that is going to be done to people over the next 6 months is going to be significant. The damage, both psychologically and physically, to millions in these last 9 months is beyond measure. The vaccination campaign is irrefutably constitutive of a medical experiment, since its innovative character means that strictly no one can know the consequences for the populations that would be subjected to this experiment and that it is widely scientifically documented that many vaccines produce multiple effects secondary and disabling or fatal vaccine… Read more »
Is Vaccinated Margaret still with us ?
If the vaccine is harmful.
But if it isn’t, it’s merely a giant con job.
I’m terribly worried about some elderly relatives, people I love, having this rushed indemnified experimental vaccine. I hope people do their research first
A depressingly surreal and anxious time
https://twitter.com/SueC00K/status/1327900689041928198?s=20
https://twitter.com/simondolan/status/1336297332124561409?s=20
https://2020news.de/en/dr-wodarg-and-dr-yeadon-request-a-stop-of-all-corona-vaccination-studies-and-call-for-co-signing-the-petition/
thank you allen for this so well said and written. i love reading about world war two and this is like being back there . the medical experiments, the brainwashing . churchill is my hero. wish he was here now
Since the vaccine has undergone short term testing and been shown to be safe in the short term, the physical damage it may do to people won’t start to show up for at least 6 months and it will be at least a year before the evidence becomes conclusive. Presumably by the time it turns out to be unsafe everyone in the country who wants it will have had it.
Life in Saor Alba: we’re being moved into Tier3 on the 11th: whoopee! House arrest-lite, all thanks to Holyrood.
A maskademic is spreading here; now worn in the fresh air, along with plastic space helmets.
Gags are now to be seen pulled down below the nose as the faithful balance the need for O2 against public obedience.
Being the only obvious lanyard wearer, I’m now treated to glares, stares and swerves.
What a depressingly mindless cultish dystopia we now have here, and as for the etiquette guide! How much did this latest piece of self righteous mind numbing guff cost?
To add to my dismay and alienation, rumour has it that the SNP now operates an opponents list, some MSPs apparently now refusing to represent heretics.
Verily, we are soon to be cast into outer darkness by the Independence Inquisitors; time is running out for the opposition to build an effective and cogent movement. Appeasement merely feeds the beast.
One’s mind simply boggles.
However, on various visits to Scotland before the bollox, I was struck by the big-brother cult that was already evident in numerous small details. Like the notices in public lavatories exhorting people to phone the police if they could smell cigarette smoke coming from another cubicle. Or the absolute prohibition on drink-driving that made me so popular with friends, because I don’t drink alcohol in the evenings.
Maybe it’s the lingering legacy of Calvinism. In a Calvinist community, rigid surveillance was the norm, and dobbing the neighbours a way of life.
It’s control creep Annie and seemingly unstoppable. I still can’t understand why so many folk just go along with it.
Many whom I’ve spoken to since the madness started ,have confided their loathing of the cult and The Leader, but they’re reluctant to speak out:( worries about enforced redundancy and cancelling understandable, but we need opposition to manifest at next year’s ballot box).
The Hate Crime bill poses a real threat to even the privacy of one’s own home.
The fact that all this is done in the name of equality and social justice renders it even more distasteful.
As to the £500 pay out shenanigans; senior doctors have displayed some backbone, dismissing it as an embarassment which they do not need.
But the Nats pick yet another utterly pointless unfounded fight with Westminster over taxation of said bonus, which turns out, on balance, to be regressive, rather than progressive, as with the sanitary towels and tampons free for all.
Why let fiscal facts get in the way of another confected grievance?
I think it is Calvinism.
Why not? It gets blamed for most things.
Alba sounds about as “saor” as Eire, which is completely un saor.
Quite right; I use it ironically,as it is now favoured by our rulers
And Alba from the same root as Albion from the old name for the island of Great Britain. I think Neil Oliver pointed that one out
If its true that some MSPs refuse to represent constituents who don’t toe the line then that’s disturbing.
I keep saying that Mr Bart & I always give thanks everyday that we have moved out of Scotland. And looks like its getting worse and worse, the likes of Adam Smith and David Hume must be rolling in their graves now.
I agree with Annie here, a lot of this is explained by Scotland’s ruthless conformist society back up by the Presbyterian/Calvinist ethos and small town mentality.
Who will eventually succeed St Nicola in Kim Jung style, please?
Hasnt Mhairi Black been tipped? LGBT and a Gaelic name. What more could you want?
O Friend and mentor of Flow Job; what more could we ask for?!
A brain, perhaps?
Not yet;we live in dread/hope. Michelle Ballantyne is an excellent MSP; formerly Conservative but now Independent,following her removal from the leadership contest.
We need a strong opposition; now. I wish Neil Oliver and Andrew Neil would stand,as they have the popularity, the reach and the influence.
Listen to James Delingpole’s interview with Scot Jamie Blackett. He, too, is interested in changing the situation in Scotland.
Refusing to represent heretics? That’s discrimination, isn’t it? We’re a “minority group!”
I’d like to think so, but an example has surfaced in Glasgow:
https://themajority.scot/2020/12/07/vote-snp-or-else/
The stance of the CDC is not reasonable, in spite of that statement. They say “face to face” learning, but it is nothing of the sort. Per their guidelines, full masking, strict distance, cancellation of virtually all activities and interaction. That’s not a school, it’s a trauma factory.
We are well and truly fucked. A national suicide.
Make that international suicide, with the exception of China.
My teen grandson is well balanced but continually being told to hand wash and mask up in case he kills his granddad is getting to him and disturbing his sleep.
What does his granddad thunk about it?
The psychological toll of the BS is immense but unfortunately also hard to quantify. I bet suicides are going up, though.
Someone here posted a heartbreaking article about many farmers in India committing suicide because they can’t earn a living and have gone into massive debt trying to stay afloat.
Monsanto selling them GM seeds.
There’s a petition on Change to allow a schoolboy to be taught at school with a mask on. Apparently, the school won’t let him attend if he wears a muzzle. I had to read it twice.
Good for that school.
Yes, I thought that. I hope they don’t give in and let him wear a muzzle. I also felt sorry for the boy as he’s been brainwashed into believing the COVID rubbish.
Sir Patrick Vallance can f***right off with his satanic mask wearing. I apologise for the profanity but this is getting a bit wearing.
But it’s not just masks he is talking about
ALL the restrictions will remain
Toby is going to look awfully silly when he starts commenting on the great reset. Even Delingpole is now properly one of us.
In that case I am not one of us.
Greed, hunger for power and mind-boggling stupidity on the part of rulers, and disgusting, cretinous cowardice on the part of the ruled, have got us where we are.
Yes, that’s about it.
I agree with you about alcohol in the evening by the way – best during the day, especially late afternoon, but mornings too if I have a cold.
yeah yeah.. build back better and ban cars and gas boilers and destroy jobs not deemed climate friendly.. vaccine id.. you are deluded, like Toby.
It struck me there is an inconsistency here re the idea of banning gas boilers – as I live in a more remote area (ie there’s lots of houses here heated with oil or calor gas and no-one has said a thing about banning that to my knowledge). But there’s no way I’m swopping my (pretty new – and I’m the one that paid for it) gas boiler central heating system over to an electric one. Reason a. They’d expect the cost of swopping to be borne by me b. Who would pay the extra costs of running an electric heating system? (Clue – it wouldnt be me and I’d refuse to be cold).
You don’t think there’s a teency weency bit of nudging from certain mega influential people, some of whom might have a first name Bill, pushing for their vision of how the world might be better?
You have to ask why Belarus was offered a huge loan in exchange for imposing lockdown and restrictions and why every country is reading from the same script
You might ask why indeed, but then again we already know the answer. We are in the midst of an epic global scam, against which only a handful of countries have shown firm resistance.
The long cherished dream of the global elites is for elimination of the great masses of the global population and the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines is the engineered opportunity of a globalist lifetime. They will use it to their full advantage and we are now in a desperate fight for our very lives.
By 2022 the economy will have collapsed. If shops are being closed (three in my small welsh hometown) due to false positive results and social isolating, what’s happening to critical infrastructure like power generation? What is going to happen, particularly if the cold weather persists for a longish period of time?
I’ve been raising the very same point for many weeks :the neglect of the many services and infrastructure necessary to maintain complex modern societies is beginning to show.
Fuel poverty is spreading, while the powers that be obsess about vaccinations and -up here- independence.
The SNP wields its magic wand while removing our freedom of speech, thought and movement.
Well paid secure movers and shakers blithely assure us that all is for the best in the best of all possible dystopian worlds, while Boris and fellow travellers make mad ,financially ruinous moves towards decarbonising the UK’s economy by switching off gas supplies.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/09/the-lie-of-the-green-industrial-revolution/
That’s exactly what the trillionaire shadow government globalist whackjobs want. Get rid if 90% and enslave the rest
Neil Oliver made that point last week, the economy will suffer even more because people will go what’s the point of opening a new business or expanding an existing one if the government can decide at will to shut you down because of some crisis? This year sets a bad precedent and that’s why we have to keep fighting at all costs.
Otherwise there will be nothing left.
And ALL the restrictions will be ignored in this household.
The masks are merely a symbol of all the other controls.
So he hid away for three weeks plucking up the courage to announce this.
Haven’t worn them this year and won’t be wearing them next. Sorry to disappoint Pat.⛔😷☠
Same here. They can fuck right off with their foul face nappies.
Carry on the Campaign for Real Human Beings.
“Campaign for Real Human Beings” – I like it.
Love the slogan, we should get badges made, I would wear one proudly.
Once the 60+ cohort get the jab I think (hope) it’s over. Where there are no fines or goons on the door, lockdown is as good as done where I live and that’s in a town of retirees.
It will never be over.
And, if it ever is, they will just increase the cycle threshold used for the PCR scam and re-start the fear pandemic!
I just hope you’re right and this madness stops at that point. Me – I’m over 60 and obviously won’t be having the jab – and am taking the precaution of making new friends from amongst younger people (gotta make sure I still have some friends – when my own agegroup start keeling over from the effects of the vaccine…).
‘Begs the question: At what point will the scientific and medical advisers recognise that it is more important to let people get on with their lives and jobs?‘
Begs the question: when will Valance and Whitty be charged with whatever criminal offence covers causing unnecessary suffering and death for no good reason other than personal gain and be brought to trial?
Begs the question: what can be done to ensure that petty tyrants with known links to Big Pharma can never again bully a weak and incompetent Prime Minister into running the country for their benefit?
Not begs. Raises.
Pedants rise early.
Thank you. I wanted to say the same. 😉
Exactly: “The fallacy of begging the question occurs when an argument’s premises assume the truth of the conclusion, instead of supporting it. In other words, you assume without proof the stand/position, or a significant part of the stand, that is in question. Begging the question is also called arguing in a circle.”
You shouldn’t rely on Wikipedia and should avoid quoting from the site, otherwise you risk showing yourself to be less clever than you want us to believe you are.
why, if it;s good enough for SAGE modelling it should be good enough for anything.
Well, I appreciate the quote. Thank you, StevieH.
Here’s the article for those who want to read more.
Apart from the blindingly obvious, that I was playing on the form of the quote and I am happy to stick with ‘begs’, which is more than adequate and not incorrect, to be a pedant requires some relevant knowledge, which you clearly have not.
I should go back to bed sweetie, were I you.
In an attempt at out-pedanting, I’d have to raise the question of whether the usage applied is not actually just as well established, and perfectly acceptable in itself.
We all know that using “begs the question” probably arose in English from misapplying the original translation of the logical term, but I’d say it’s pretty likely it’s far more frequently used as here, with its apparent meaning, which in itself seems perfectly legitimate, than with it’s original meaning.
And because it’s actually inherently a legitimate use of “begs” as an intensifier of “calls for”, anyway, we don’t necessarily have to descend into the mire of prescriptive or descriptive.
And now I can post one of my favourite little cartoons again;
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/12/08/day-two-world-firsts-patients-received-pfizer-vaccine-mps-praised/#comment
CCHQ and/or 77th Brigade busy in the comments. Report every such comment as SPAM.
How can the taxpayer funded Vallance be allowed to push a line which is palpably untrue and results in personal financial gain for himself?
How can someone who is unelected and unaccountable have so much influence over the `Prime Minister?
Because he’s saying what the Prime Minister wants to hear?
Because they are all “the government” and in different ways are forwarding the government’s policies? Any apparent differences between them are down to varying opinions on presentational approach, are them jostling for prominence, or are just pure theatre.
https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2020/11/12/the-betrayal-of-the-clerks-uk-intellectuals-in-the-service-of-the-biosecurity-state/
He is that bloke in a crowd of clever people who does not want to be made to look stupid by asking a question he thinks they will laugh at. Like, what if we just stopped and went back to normal or if there is a pandemic, why are there not more dead people.
Fascists? Whenever I see anyone mention this as the motivating ideology on here I switch off and get angry…….those who think this scam is fascist couldn’t be more wong. It’s the opposite and blaming fascism is just what they want you to think.
Just out of curiosity: what is the opposite of fascism?
Edit: just looked at some discussions on the WWW, and one of the defining elements of fascism, apparently, is ‘national chauvinism’. But… if you take it to its logical conclusion, the nation in question wants to take over the world (“nothing outside the state…”). Therefore, isn’t it true to say that fascism is ‘globalist’ rather than nationalist? Nationalism is just the stepping stone to world domination.
and the melding of corporations/institutions and state e.g. WHO/UN/Davos members such as Goldman Sachs, Gates/Gavi.. techoncracy is fascism.
Most forget that nationalism was originally a liberal ideal in favour of nation states rather than multi ethnic European Empires.
“National chauvinism” is a tautology.
It is fascism. The definition of Fascism is governmental roles being carried out by quasi private companies. That’s it. Nothing more nothing less. Fascism doesn’t have to mean goose stepping leather booted mass murderers with a snappy dress sense and having a good flag designer.
The current regime is a totalitarian fascist dictatorship. Nothing more nothing less.
These smear terms have no clear and certain definition.
“The current regime is a totalitarian fascist dictatorship“
Not a dictatorship, clearly.
As for fascist, well as I noted you’d have to settle on a definition before you could debate that, and it would have to be a lot more detailed than the one you gave. Governmental roles have been carried out by private companies in every regime in the world except formally communist ones throughout history. Why it makes much difference who runs the immense organisations that crush the human spirit – a “capitalist” or a state apparatchik, I’ve never really understood.
Fwiw, I’d say this government’s philosophy is a lot closer to eco-socialist, in historical context, than any kind of opposite.
Totalitarian – now you have something think. Restrictions on speech, soon extending into the home, collectivist restrictions extending into every part of life, no effective limits on the power of the state.
Our government is not currently a dictatorship? Looks like one to me.
Then you’d have to explain what you mean by a dictatorship.
For me, it requires individual power not subject to constitutional controls or genuine election. There’s no evidence those conditions apply today. Johnson could be booted out tomorrow if enough MPs decided to do it, and notwithstanding dark claims often made here, there’s currently no reason to suppose elections won’t continue as before, in future.
That’s not to say I don’t have criticisms of the present situation, of course.
The longstanding British system has been described as an “elective dictatorship” because the PM has considerable power, provided he has the Commons behind him, but that imo is rather a rhetorical device. In any case, it’s certainly nothing new.
So how about the current rule by the cabal of 4, the closing of parliament empty most of the time with business being done on zoom or teams. How about having no recourse to anybody to complain about corona bollocks, how about all those 400+ Si’s brought in with no debate.
It looks like Boris the dictator to me.
I know what you are saying anyway. The academic approach.
There is no Commons – in case you haven’t noticed. There are usually about six people in there and there is no debate whatsoever.
The first thing dePiffle did as PM was an attempt to prorogue Parliament. This year he effectively achieved his aim.
You could call it liberalism or neoliberalism unmasked but most people wouldn’t understand that. When corporations have the power to control and repress us, as we’re seeing now, it is closer to Mussolini’s description of fascism
In the handy print-out-or-save-on-your-phone-to-use-as-guidance Scottish government pamphlet on pandemic etiquette (a fine use of Scottish taxpayer’s money for sure), I noted that most of the cartoon-ish characters had dark skin.
Which is interesting considering that around 84% of Scots are white.
In the pamphlet there are only two “white skinned” characters. The “woman” working the checkout and the “woman” doing the virtual hug.
God, it is revolting.
In some Covid adverts I saw the other day, the impetuous people always wanting to break the rules were light-skinned, while the responsible ones who observe the rules (and politely remind the impetuous ones about this) were dark skinned. It echoed the famous Gillette anti-masculinity (and anti-light skin) advert.
It’s not hard to understand the decision in Scotland to minimise the visual significance of white people.
Here’s the Cabinet Secretary of Justice in Scotland, Humza Yousaf, spit venom at the fact that in a country where 88% of the population is white, many public sector roles are held by white people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikOlqqdGZBU&ab_channel=NordicWarrior
Of course, in his father’s homeland of Pakistan, or his mother’s homeland of Kenya, the facts show public roles are demonstrably more diverse than in racist Scotland, a country that only gives top jobs such as Cabinet Secretary for Justice to white men.
I refuse to use the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’ because I think a bait-and-switch (or is it motte-and-bailey) is in operation. Sure, the words are ostensibly simple, literal descriptions of skin colour and used by many innocent people in that way. But the words have a dual meaning, being used to denote fundamental difference, a systematic power imbalance, etc. The aim is to keep people divided.
Nobody has a wholly white skin. Nobody has a wholly black skin.
Indeed. But if we acknowledge that but still use the terms ‘white’ and ‘black’, what do we mean by those words? I suggest it means we think there is some sort of permanent, inevitable, irreconcilable inequality in operation between two classes of people. It walks straight into the hands of those who wish to perpetuate this idea.
You make a good point. This identity political evil should be rejected fundamentally and linguistically.
When BLM started I was baffled as to why the anti-racist “industry” wasn’t furious at the very idea of a “black life”. But no-one seemed bothered.
The latest movie about county lines dealing called ‘county lines’.. the county lines dealer and his crew are white. They are rarely white. Most are black, some asian.
I’ve heard not a few are from eastern europe mind.
I’m so glad you pointed this out. I was talking about this the other day.
Apparently Scotland is more than 90% white, which means that ofcourse it must need some DIEversity. The same way that the middle East ‘needed’ freeing by the west, it’ll go the same way; civil war.
Then again that is the plan behind all Marxist regimes. Make no doubt about it, Scotland appears to be far-left but the Scots are not. Years of poor education, Marxist indoctrination, and a radical communism loving party has led to this.
Humza is a tit. The same with all so called BAME politicians, all they have and all they offer is a huge chip on their shoulder that we all have to eat whenever they so choose.
Funnily enough the word ‘diversity’ means to divide and what’s the famous saying; United we stand….
Yes the wonderful jobs Priti Patel and Dishy Rishi are doing.
All of the visuals in these pamphlets are very childish, SNP really do treat us like children, they seem to want to take over parenting and be the parents.
Very sinister IMO.
Nicola Sturgeon refers to herself as “Scotland’s chief mammy”. A childless former solicitor who views Scotland as a cabal of children over whom she is installed as their chief corporate parent.
Want proof? From the horse’s mouth, so to speak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeoNCP98ASI&ab_channel=BeReasonableScotland
The males are interesting …. one is making the revolting ‘heart shape’ emoticon, the other is also feminised in his body language.
And the 2 females (can I still say that?) are gawping at their phones; all perfectly normal. 😉
https://www.theequianoproject.com/equiano-project-statement
The Equiano Project is worth checking out. ‘We are a wide range of people taking a stand against the divisive obsession with people’s racial identity.’ It is partners with The Institute of Ideas and with the Free Speech Union and is affiliated with dontdivideus.com
They look odd, more like aliens.
And the men look like soy boys.
clearly this was done a few months ago when all the native scots had been out in the sun and got their normal sun tans.
oh wait a mo… scots in the sun start white, then go blue and then go red . so maybe i got it wrong
Skin colour aside, Carl Vernon absolutely rips the piss out of this vomit-inducing propaganda fest, on his YT channel.
It’s like those Nork Korean propaganda poster, the only difference is that these are shit and not well designed .
At least the North Korean ones show proper human beings, these ones don’t
That is repulsive, does it contain a special hand sign for a cockroach hiding under a stone?
We are 99.9% white where I live, but a new Aldi branch sent every local household a flyer which showed 4 photos of ethnic people and 2 photos of white people!
Oh dear!
Plus ‘ponytails’ mask is below her nose
A zealot friend and follower of Nicola’s every utterance has said she doesn’t want it, so, one very small step in the right direction.
For once we agreed.
Has Turdgeon had it yet?
Nothing has been said as yet. No doubt she’ll make a very loud point about waiting in the queue, while the ‘vulnerable’- how I loathe this word- are duly jabbed and saved.
The latest Sturgeonism revealed that witnessing the first jabs brought a lump to her throat.
She’s challenging Shuttlecock for pole position in the emoting stakes
It’s what the people want.
Not people. Zombies.
I knew Society was doomed after witnessing our collective response to Princess Diana dying.
It disgusts me,kh; it’s mendacious,spurious and ,I suspect, adopted in response to coaching by costly PR Consultants: keep the plebs onside by showing your feelings!
I do not vote for representatives to blubber in public! It’s the legacy of the Diana Derangement Outbreak, when Blair did his ‘The People’s
Princess’ routine.
I was shocked and dismayed then and even more repelled now.
I was nauseated too, at the Dianafest.I realised then that there was something fundamentally wrong with the British people. I should have paid more attention.
In fairness, the great unwashed didn’t have a hope in hell against the media. I forgot. My first real experience of mass hysteria. I was embarrassed at a nation, my nation. Now I know for sure what the Queen’s tears are for every 11th November. She knows we’re fucked, whether she dissolves this bollocks or not. Perhaps we really do reap what we sow.
Jesus wept.
Yet more of Nicola’s “anything you can do I can do better”
Yes, Bart, she’s on a roll and becomes more dictatorial by the day.
https://stephendaisley.com/2020/12/02/queen-nicola/
Unhelpful use of language in today’s update from the writer and from Mark Harper
Talking about masks stopping the spread of the virus
Covid deaths
Getting back to normal once you’ve been vaccinated
I think it requires considerable effort to think, speak and write completely free of the ridiculous narrative that’s been pushed. The power of propaganda.
So the CRG ask how freedoms OF THOSE WHO ARE VACCINATED
will be restored. Therefore, no vaccination no freedom. So much for a ‘recovery’ group, that is creating a new lower class.
Ciu bono ?
This from Off Guardian
7th Dec. The Past Lives On
Edward Curtin
What is never discussed is the March 2020 bail out of the banks by the government.
Remember that? Remember how the government gave the banks billions with the instruction to then “lend” that taxpayer-funded bailout back to the taxpayers? Remember how the banks then often choose to instead offer loan packages not backed by taxpayer money, secured loans at high rates of interest?
What happened to those billions? Are they nestling in the same cupboard as the 25.000 laptops the Scottish Government said it had purchased for disadvantaged school kids?
From sept 2019 to January 2020 the us Repo market was bailed out to the tune of 6 Trillion dollars. Hope this scam wasn’t invented to save the wankers again sorry meant to say bankers.
It turns my stomach every time I come here that when I flick down the page I come across those 2 moronic imbeciles kneeling on the carpet for their photo op.
Truly galling stuff, sick making.
And those revolting legs in the bed…
Yes I would like a change of image there – it’s got stale.
I agree. Could be multiracial and/or heterosexual for a change.
If you have Adblock Plus installed in your web browser, you can right-click on the image and select “Block element”. That will prevent the image from ever being shown again.
There seems to be a lot of tension in the air right now, more so than previously during this shitshow.
But I have a laugh – at the absurdity of it all. Humour is a powerful weapon against hubris, and stupidity. That’s different to having a dismissive laugh about it all though.
I do sense a definite tension in the air though, or at least a different sort of tension – as if people are feeling lost and are concerned about it. Maybe it’s just me reading too much into things.
That last comment about getting back lost trade is not nice.
When I eventually get around to my necessary Cambridge visit from down here in faraway Devon I will call in at your cafe!(If that’s ok with you of course.)
Just don’t ask ‘how are things?’ 🙂
I laughed out loud at the cretinous rules in our library. The nappied librarians were shocked. I think I was close to getting a ban. (There was nobody else in the library apart from me and the Nappy Twins.)
I know exactly how you feel. I’ve had friends and family laugh patronisingly at me when I’ve tried to raise the bar above their MSM controlled thinking. It makes me just want to howl at the moon sometimes.
Don’t worry about lost trade kh, think big. Open up a nationwide chain of ‘Freedom’ coffee shops and you will soon have more trade than you know what to do with. Hell, in a few months time you will be so rich you will be able to afford to buy shares in Pfizer!!
That is extremely funny. 🙂
Calling him a tosser is far too polite!
No sure I agree. It is indeed a dystopian shitfest – but some, including me, respond via humour.
Keeps spirits up, enables ridicule of the bad guys, and is very healthy.
(Catch me asking ‘How are you ?’ anytime soon, kh. I’d be too terrified ! 🙂 ).
Masks until 2022. Of course, the dickheads who have granted the lucrative contracts to their mates have to sell the bloody things to get even richer.
Too good an opportunity!
It’s a scam!
They should just tell us how many vaccines the pharmas need to have sold before we can be set free. Just tell us the ransom amount.
BBC R4 Today Programme is saying that ports are blocked up because of pre Brexit stockpiling. No mention of the reported 11k containers full of PPE with nowhere to go.
They could turn the Nightingales into useful PPE warehouses.
This shower are to science what priests fiddling with boys are to religion.
Today both Jonathan Sumption and “yours truly” celebrate our 72nd birthdays and of course, we are both sceptics but that’s where the similarity ends.
When this nightmare ends (IT WILL)
Jonathan Sumption will earn his place in history as one of the heroes of our struggle.
Happy birthday, Jonathan.
Hear, hear. Is there an address where we can send him an e-card! Or a real one, cone to that?
Happy Birthday to you, too, F.P.!
Many thanks, Annie.
I’m sure that one of our fellow sceptics will know or find out a way to contact JS.
Happy birthday both! He certainly will be.
Ta.
KEEP THE FAITH!!!X 72 TIMES.
I assume this is lord sumption – i heard yesterday that he is fully in favour of the vaccine – you may want to verify this. So he may not be such a hero.
But a very happy birthday to you both.
Possible to be in favour of any vaccine – as long as it’s strictly voluntary.
Of course.
Thank you, Sue.
Thank you.
And the stupid adverts from the National Lottery – a scratch card the ultimate present. Why give a relative something that is almost certainly worth nothing at all.
This was posted on the site yesterday but it bears repeating.
Hancock tweeted: ‘When the NHS contacts you for a vaccine … please step froward for your country’. The comments are choice and will cheer you up.
https://twitter.com/MattHancock/status/1336355293995933697
Mad Wankok can go jump off a tall building.
Listening to music on free spotify I have to put up with nauseating Covid adverts, in fact there are so few other adverts that I wonder if it is only Covid advert money that is keeping free spotify going at the moment?
But anyway, the latest pseudo science in these ads is that now we are indoors more we should open all the windows to let fresh air blow the covid away! I gather this idea has taken hold in schools and some children are being taught wearing their coats and hats with the windows wide open so as to blow the covid away!
Miasma: “I’ll be back!”
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
Apparently that’s partly how they have managed to spaff £13bn on track and trace, and gain effective control of the MSM, massive advertising campaign, importantly, all at full price, the media are loving it…
Preparation for fuel shortages.
The vaccine works, so wear a mask
The vaccine doesn’t work, so wear a mask.
Immunity works, so wear a mask and get a vaccine.
Immunity doesn’t work, so wear a mask and get a vaccine.
Bit like man-made climate change. Everything attributed to a one trick pony.
It is a load of pony!
More of the same old, same old that its become a broken record.
The mask turns you into an abject slave.
We love that.
The vaccine makes us money.
We love that.
You are our fodder.
We devour you.
We love that.
All lie down like corn before the scythe.
They love to see us writhe.
Writing to MP is not a total waste of time
Liberty 2019 has started a campaign to demand that MPs commit to returning ALL our civil liberties. On liberty2019.org the names of all MPs are displayed on two lists. Those who support returning all our civil liberties and those who don’t. All MPs started in the “don’t support” list.
Thanks to people writing in, MPs have started to write back saying they do support a full return of freedoms and to please be taken off the “don’t support” list. It’s still a trickle but it’s only been two days.
The website has a standard text that can be copied and pasted.
Please help us writing to your MP – many of them don’t want to be seen as standing against our freedoms, but they need to be unambiguous about it and feel as much public pressure as possible.
Freedom, like, when?
Good question. Step 1. Get them to agree on the principle. Step 2. Argue the timeline.
As things stand right now, the risk of never returning to where we were pre-crisis in terms of civil liberties seems rather big.
Better late than never Liberty…….
Not sure Liberty2019 is anything to do with Liberty ? I could be wrong though …
Huge difference in supporting something and voting for something.
MPs, the military, civil servants, the media, celebrities, the police are in the employ of the World Economic Forum and the Pharma, Gates, tech, banking buddies it represents
There is no United Kingdom anymore. It is occupied
That’s just made me chuckle. Thankyou for that.
And that is really sad, knowing you will never spend another Christmas with the elderly members of the family. as you grow old you realise time is running out and all you want to do is live what is left, but these b’stards have stolen what time we have left.
Only if you grovel and obey.
It takes two to tango, so both parties have to be on board.
Someone needs to check this out.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EovX6-ZXMAMRr_p?format=jpg&name=large
I can’t bring myself to watch the news channels (or most TV for that matter).
There don’t appear to have been the usual interviews with gushing sons, daughters, or grandkids, of Mrs Keenan?
What I also found strange was this: https://westbridgfordwire.com/family-of-first-covid-vaccine-patient-margaret-keenan-issue-statement/
No family named! Why would they ask for her privacy to be respected? She’s the most famous person on the planet!