Free Speech Union Overturns Ban on Bob Moran in Cartoon Competition
Telegraph cartoonist Bob Moran was originally excluded from this year’s ‘Political Cartoonist of the Year’ competition because the organiser, Tim Benson, disapproves of the fact that he’s a lockdown sceptic. But thanks, in part, to the intervention of the Free Speech Union, the ban has been overturned and Bob is now in the competition. Turns out, the company that sponsors the annual event, Ellwood Atfield, wasn’t aware of the ban and as soon as the FSU flagged it up to the owners they intervened on Bob’s behalf.
You can view the shortlisted entries here and anyone can vote. Bob has cartoons in two categories – the Political Cartoon of the Year and Covid Cartoon of the Year – but there are plenty of other strong candidates. I’ve voted for Bob, naturally.
Where’s That Pesky Virus Gone?
The lateral flow tests have struck another blow against the Covid hysterics. According to the BBC, the mass testing of students in the run-up to Christmas has so far turned up almost no cases.
The University of Portsmouth is reporting “very low numbers” of positive cases from its Covid testing.
“We are seeing fewer than two per day on average at present,” said vice-chancellor Graham Galbraith.
He criticised a “blame culture” in which students had been accused of spreading infections.
“Prevalence in students is now very low indeed,” said Prof Galbraith.
Edge Hill University in Lancashire says it has so far found zero positive cases in its end-of-term testing.
The mass testing of students, launched on campuses last week, has been screening hundreds of thousands of students preparing to leave for the Christmas holidays…
At the University of Portsmouth, an initial sample of about 4,500 students, showed a rate of 0.2% positive results, or about nine students.
This follows the recent news out of Cambridge in which zero students tested positive out of a sample of 10,000. Initially, some Cambridge students did test positive, but when they were retested every single one of them turned out to be a false positive. Needless to say, the test in the Cambridge case was the PCR test not the lateral flow test.
Hmmm. This is a head-scratcher. If not a single Cambridge student in 10,000 has the virus and only 0.2% of students at Portsmouth have the virus, does that mean… could it be… that the student population has achieved herd immunity?
Stop Press: In case you still have any faith in the accuracy of Covid tests, check out this story. An Austrian lawmaker tested a glass of Coca-Cola for coronavirus during a speech accusing his Government of medical tyranny – and the drink turned out to be positive.
Rumours of Covid Deaths Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
We’re publishing an original piece today by Neville Hodgkinson, former medical and science correspondent of the Daily Mail and Sunday Times and a sharper, more clear-eyed analyst of the Covid fiasco than many of his present-day counterparts. He has spotted that the number of critical care patients in hospitals was no higher in October than it has been for the previous five years (see above). Odd, when October was supposedly the peak of the “second wave”, when, according to Witless and Unbalanced, NHS trusts were so close to being overwhelmed that if we didn’t lock down immediately Covid deaths would climb to 4,000 a day. I’ll let Neville take it from here.
The October figure shows an increase in patients in critical care whose illness was attributed to Covid, but nowhere near that of the April peak. And it hasn’t continued to rise: latest figures show a decline in both admissions and deaths where Covid was involved.
Total deaths are running at about a fifth higher than the five-year average, though how much of that is attributable to the massive disruption of people’s lives caused by the lockdown, or to the virus, is questionable.
About 1,800 people die each day in England and Wales currently, and out of those about 430 are said to involve Covid. This is a far cry from the prediction of up to 4,000 deaths a day by this month, made in one of the slides shown by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance and Chief medical Officer Chris Whitty when they explained the necessity for a second national lockdown.
The figures have immense implications for Government policy. They call into question the value of the restrictions that are still in place, which are continuing to damage the wellbeing of millions.
Worth reading in full.
Schools That Close Early Could Face Legal Action
State schools in England that close a week early have been threatened with legal action by the Government, according to the Telegraph‘s Camilla Turner.
At least one council has already told some of its schools that it would support them to move to online learning only for the last week of term, and secondary schools across London and the South East are expected to tell parents that they will be closing early for the holidays.
Headteachers whose schools do stay open also intend to turn a blind eye if parents choose to keep their children at home, the Telegraph understands.
However, senior sources at the Department for Education warned schools and councils that it would be prepared to apply for High Court injunctions to force them to stay open.
Presdales School, an academy in Hertfordshire, is the first school in the country to be told it could be taken to court over its plans to move to remote learning at the end of term.
Good to see Gavin Williamson finally getting tough with schools that aren’t discharging their duty to pupils.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A reader has passed on a letter she’s received from St Marylebone CE School in London, notifying her that the school is going to shift to ‘online only’ for the last three days of term, meaning her child will be sent home. She asks: “Is this legal?”
You might know that recently the Schools Minister has suggested that schools can put an additional INSET day at the end of this school term, to finish teaching a day earlier.
At St Marylebone School, we are not going to do this, as we want learning to continue until the end of term and we have planned our INSET days for the rest of the year. But we are going to do something developmental for staff and students next week which you need to know about.
Monday and Tuesday at school will continue as usual. Year 10 and 11 students’ learning will continue online as it has been.
On Wednesday and Thursday, learning will continue online, via Google Meet, for everyone. Students will not attend on-site. This is a two-day opportunity for all students to adapt to learning online, which is especially important for students new to St Marylebone in Years 7 and 12, and for the many of our students from disadvantaged backgrounds who need the opportunity to check they are able to access learning via Google Classroom and Google Meet. Lessons will be live online all day both days and all students will be expected to attend, from registration at 8.30am onwards. Full attendance is expected, as are the usual high standards of participation and engagement.
Teachers will be using this as an opportunity for their own professional development and confidence with delivering remote teaching. In a sense, this is an INSET, but one which includes students.
Friday 18th December is our planned half-day. This will also take place safely online, with registration starting at 8.30am, planned form group activities, year group assemblies and the Carol Service. Full attendance is expected, as are the usual high standards of participation and engagement.
This plan means that students’ last day on site in 2020 will be Tuesday 15th December. Activities planned on-site after this, including immunisations for Year 9, will be postponed.
Having taken advice, we feel it is appropriate to do this in the context of our school in current circumstances, our students’ learning, staff development and the well-being of all. It is no secret that cases of covid are rising and that secondary schools are increasingly affected by this. We are making this plan in the context of the recent confirmed cases of covid in our school community and to promote teachers’ and students’ development and well-being.
This letter really does take the biscuit. It’s as if the school is sending all the children home as a favour to them. The author of the letter, who I won’t name to spare her blushes, even has the gall to say this will benefit children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Pretty extraordinary, given the overwhelming evidence produced by Ofsted and others that kids from poor backgrounds suffer far more than their peers from school closures.
Williamson, here’s your test case. Get on the phone to the Chair of Governors on Monday morning and tell them to raise their bloody game.
Stop Press 2: Rod Liddle pointed out in his Sun column yesterday that some heroes among frontline workers have emerged during the coronavirus crisis, but teachers aren’t among them.
Covid Marshals Patrol Pubs
A reader has sent an alarming email about an experience he had in a pub in Watford earlier this week.
Last night the local pub I was in was visited by two goons only one of which was wearing a hi-viz Covid Marshall jacket. The other was dressed head to toe in black with a huge mask and hat. You could only see his eyes. He must have been well over 6ft tall and built like a brick shithouse. He was obviously trying to intimidate everybody but didn’t have much success around the people I was near to. A couple of cheery “f*** off’s” which they both chose to ignore let them know how welcome they were.
The pub is struggling as it is but these actions are going to kill the place completely. They told the bar staff that they would be back a bit later to make sure the people drinking and eating had left. Presumably an empty pub would have suited them just fine. Then they left and started taking pictures of the customers through the pub Windows.
Do you know if this is even legal? As far as I can tell Covid Marshalls don’t have any powers at all.
I needn’t point out that they stood very close to each other and approached the bar, something that nobody else is allowed to do.
What has happened to the country?
Stop Press: A publican has written a piece for the Conservative Woman about the devastation that lunatic Covid restrictions have wreaked on the pub trade. Worth reading.
How Will the Fiction be Sustained?
We’re publishing another terrific piece by David Mackie today, Head of Philosophy at d’Overbroeck’s, Oxford.
It starts with a healthy dose of scepticism about the Government’s mass vaccination programme.
Wedded as it now is to the idea of the vaccine as the ‘solution’ to the coronavirus crisis, the Government will continue to exert all the pressure that it can on the population, through the media and other channels, to downplay any public concerns about the reliability or the safety of the vaccine(s). We already know the form that this pressure will, for the most part, take: it will consist largely of the kind of pro-vaccine propaganda masquerading either as news stories or as ‘myth-busting’ public information broadcasts that we are already seeing.
Mere pro-vaccine propaganda, however, will clearly not suffice on its own: not if the numbers of ‘Covid cases’ reported and ‘COVID-19 deaths’ fail to decline in line with public expectations. Yet it must be obvious to sceptics of my kind that, if testing continues at current or increased levels, there is no reason at all to think that the numbers of positive tests or COVID-19-related deaths will decline. If testing is as unreliable as we believe it is, persuaded as we are by the scientific analyses by Dr Clare Craig, Dr Mike Yeadon, and others, then continued mass testing of the asymptomatic must inevitably continue to produce thousands upon thousands of positive tests and deaths attributed to COVID-19. As Mike Yeadon has said, if the testing continues, then, given the false positives, the appearance of a lethal epidemic can never end.
Sceptics of my kind, of course, believe for these reasons that the mass vaccination programme is in reality just one more gigantic coronvirus-related waste of public money among countless others: it can serve no genuine, scientifically legitimate, purpose in bringing the epidemic to an end, or in justifying an end to lockdown-style restrictions. This is because its explicit aim is to bring about a result – ‘herd immunity’ – that has already been substantially achieved by entirely natural processes to which all deliberate interventions have been essentially irrelevant.
David then poses an interesting question: if the current number of ‘cases’ is a pseudo-epidemic produced by the shortcomings of the PCR test, as well as the testing facilities and the superlabs, how will the Government create the illusion that the vaccine is working? Will they test fewer people? Increase the number of cycles used in the PCR testing lab to identify fragments of the virus? Or finally admit that the test is unreliable and not to be trusted?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: A reader is pleasantly surprised by Public Health England’s new poster promoting the Covid jab.
The flu jab poster this winter was still written in new speak, i.e. protecting the NHS, not killing granny, etc. The Covid jab slogan is subtly “old normal”. Enjoy life. Protect yourself. Then look at the graphic. In reply to all those wondering when we will be allowed to stop the mask wearing, it’s in the poster. Once the over-65s have been vaccinated. Look, they’re not wearing masks below the line.
The other resources are here.
This includes the shiny new “green book” (the immunisation Bible) entry as Covid immunisation takes its place among the many other immunisations available with the quietly sane sentence “Symptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission (1-2 days before symptom onset), is thought to play a greater role in the spread of SARS-CoV-2 than asymptomatic transmission”.
It’s all so understated. This is THE VACCINE for THE VIRUS! It reminds me of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when they wheel an unmarked box containing the ark into a warehouse full of other unremarkable boxes.
Could this be designed to nudge us, with the help of the vaccine of course, out of the panic and back to a “personal responsibility” approach as hinted by Hancock last week? I really hope so.
Round-up
- “A victory for freedom at Cambridge shows the woke mob can only win if we let them” – Juliet Samuel in the Telegraph hails the free speech victory at Cambridge University. Led by Arif Ahmed, a member of the FSU’s Advisory Council.
- “PPE ‘Covidarchs’ awash with YOUR tax millions” – Gay Adams in the Daily Mail identifies a few of the ‘Covidarchs’ who’ve become multi-millionaires on the back of the crisis
- “Five genes often found in severe cases of COVID-19” – Interesting research out of Edinburgh on the five genes that render people particularly vulnerable to the virus
- “Risk of dying from Covid-19 in British hospitals has HALVED since the peak of the crisis in spring, SAGE papers show” – Kept that quiet, didn’t they?
- “London in Tier 3 for week before Christmas would help bring down ‘serious rise’ in cases” – More unutterable balls about cases going up in London
- “Town Hall Stalins Are on a Covid-Fuelled Ego Trip” – Good stuff from Giles Coren in the Times
- “Test and Trace callers worked just 1% of time as £22 billion was ‘thrown at’ efforts to stop second lockdown” – That’s five minutes in an eight-hour shift. Data based on a National Audit Office report. Alex Belfield’s YouTube jeremiad is worth watching on this
- “The damning verdict on NHS Test and Trace” – Ross Clark weighs in on the same subject
- “Coronavirus self-isolation cut to 10 days” – I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies
- “What would Scruton have thought about the Covid obsession? He’d have been appalled” – Great piece by Frank Palmer in the Conservative Woman
- “More than 10,000 patients caught COVID-19 while being treated in hospital” – A Telegraph investigation into hospital-acquired infection. Pretty sure I caught the virus in Charing Cross Hospital back in March
- “The ‘Expert Consensus’ Also Favored Alcohol Prohibition” – Good piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker for the AIER blog reminding us that public health experts have been wrong before
- “Can £3,000 make me as pretty as Emily Maitlis?” – In my latest Spectator column I confess to having spent some money on trying to improve my appearance when broadcasting from my garden shed
- Michael P. Senger has produced a fantastic Twitter thread for the victims of lockdown, which he describers as the greatest crime of the 21st century
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Four today: “Gimme Some Truth” by John Lennon, “Pub Feed” by the Chats, “How did it come to this?” by Take That, “Lacrimosa” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
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
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Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we’re bringing you the story of how Roedean, the £40,000 a year girls’ boarding school, has decolonised its curriculum. The Times has more.
With its view across the Channel from an East Sussex clifftop, the elite girls’ boarding school Roedean has always had an international outlook.
It will now become one of the first private schools to rewrite its history syllabus, abandoning the “island story” beloved of Michael Gove and challenging the “white western narrative” after this year’s Black Lives Matter protests.
The school, founded in 1885 by three sisters to help girls to get into the women’s colleges at Cambridge University, is transforming history lessons for pupils aged 11 to 14.
Girls will learn about black Tudors, Queen Victoria’s black goddaughter and how Africans helped to resist the slave trade. As well as the Norman Conquest, they will have lessons on the Song dynasty that ruled in China from 960 to 1279.
Pupils will be encouraged to see the Second World War in a global context, examining how it was experienced in countries other than Britain. They will also study global societal changes in the postwar era…
Oliver Blond, Roedean’s headmaster, said: “We wanted to challenge the predominantly western European narrative and to look beyond the limitations of Britain’s ‘island story’, to discover hidden histories both nationally and internationally.
“The question was raised as to whether everyone in the Roedean community saw themselves in the history they study at school and to this end more diverse perspectives have been incorporated within the existing programme, in order to challenge preconceptions and stimulate debate.
“We hope that some of this passion to rediscover the past both at home and around the world will inspire the pupils towards a deeper love of history.”
I’m delighted the school is teaching its students about Africans who resisted the slave trade. But will it also be teaching them about the slave trade in North Africa? Somehow, I doubt it.
Stop Press: Honours associated with the British Empire are “offensive” and should be rebranded, says Labour MP Kate Green, the Shadow Education Secretary. Ms Green is, of course, an OBE. Is she going to give it back?
“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.
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 my 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 over three quarters of a million 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 here. Alas, he’s now reached the end of the road, with the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his appeal. Dolan has no regrets. “We forced SAGE to produce its minutes, got the Government to concede it had not lawfully shut schools, and lit the fire on scrutinizing data and information,” he says. “We also believe our findings and evidence, while not considered properly by the judges, will be of use in the inevitable public inquires which will follow and will help history judge the PM, Matt Hancock and their advisers in the light that they deserve.”
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’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review yesterday, but the FSU may appeal the decision. Check here for updates.
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
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
Thomas Paine
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
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First!
And now for my acceptance speech…inspired by Father Ted at the “Priest of the Year” awards, I’d like to begin by having a go at all those bastards who said I could never do it…
See my final reply to finish off yesterday’s dialogues. Here’s to another day of sharing strong ideas at right angles to our society.
Well put. You’ve nailed that weird feeling of seeing the world from a different angle from that of the (zombie) majority.
As when the little boy shouts out that the emperor has no clothes, and the zombie crowd screams with one voice, ‘Yes he has!’ and sends the little boy to prison for spreading false information.
Thats a very good analogy ……I have the same feeling when I listen to ANY mainstream media TV or Radio programme….its as if I am living in a parallel universe. Yet there is no need for this…we could just live as normal as we did in 1968 etc….if people wanted that but they dont seem to.
A good description, Richard!
Turning out great value from the real estate again, I see. This isn’t wasted on you people, is it?
Government plans in disarray, spanner in works looks like delivered by NHS itself. Now GPs won’t administer the Pfizer vaccine.
Amongst Fear-Mongered Vaccine Rollout Anti-Climax, Old People Being Used As Guinea Pigs
Fear-mongering about mandatory jabs has been a constant feature of alternative media Covid-19 coverage for almost a year
and it’s being debated in Parliament on Monday!
This daily ritual annoys me almost as much as clapping for the NHS.
I do wish you’d all stop it.
Go away, then.
Reading that Twitter thread from Michael P. Senger… it feels like Jean Raspail’s “The Camp of the Saints” is about to become reality…
I’ve read the book twice
You learn things on this site – I’d never heard of this book but I’m going to buy it. Here’s a comment I made on an article in the National – more in hope than in expectation of changing minds in Scotland, but I thought you might be interested, wendyk, since I remember you ‘re one of Crankie’s subjects. Cancer -18 Dementia/Alzheimer -17 Heart disease/stroke -4 Respiratory – 43 Covid +182 Other + 34 Total + 133 These are the figures for excess deaths from week 45 starting November 2 on the National Records of Scotland. Notice that deaths from the usual causes like cancer are all less than the five year average. So covid seems to be killing people who would normally have died of something else during that week. Deaths from the sinister-sounding “other causes” (suicide?) are up on the five year average. Let’s do some arithmetic. The total of “negative” deaths is 82. Add on the excess “other” deaths that would not normally have happened. 82 plus 34 makes 116. Take that away from the total of 133 excess deaths. You end up with 17 excess deaths for that week. 182 people seem to have died of… Read more »
Thank you Jane; however, such is the grip of the Gauleiter and her minions that I fear that this will make little difference.
However, the Salmond Saga is not going away any time soon, and skeletons will be rattling in their SNP closets.
My area is now in tier3 and we are to be given a reprieve at Christmas, if we’re very good!
Masks are everywhere now, although, on a happier note, 3 of us were bare faced in a local shop this morning.
One had her mask under her chin, but even so, the most I’ve encountered in the dangerous world of buying groceries.
At the wider UK level, this mismatch (and the obvious explanation) has been remarked on for some time. A sudden decrease for one year in certain non-seasonal, non-infectious morbidities is pretty incredible.
A sudden decrease for one year in certain non-seasonal, non-infectious morbidities is pretty incredible.
It’s incredible and also a blatant lie.
Still evening for some of us. But good morning to you!
Morning, Judy, morning all.
Keep up the good fight; attend a march/protest/gathering today, if there’s one near you.
I would never do such a thing, I’ll be too busy having a nice stroll through
Hydethe Park minding my own business. 😉The Bob Moran cartoon awards story above the line may appear, especially to international readers, to be terribly small beer, but it speaks to the heart of where we are going as a society in such a significant way. That his work required the intervention of another private organisation (the FSU) even to be considered as a candidate is mind-blowing.
Desperately worrying times we live in, but I appreciate, and pay attention to, every waking second so much more than I ever did before.
So do I. I’ve never rejoiced more keenly in the mere fact if living. Living, not merely hiding away from death. Scruton got it absolutely right.
Voted for Bob but I did like this from the Independent
But… it’s a pro-lockdown cartoon..?
It’s suggesting that Rishi was irresponsible for encouraging the filthy public to eat out, spreading their filthy viruses in cafes and restaurants.
So ? it’s still funny, check the window signage.
Bob’s cartoons have been important to me, that’s for sure.
The snivelling, ignorant, cowardly, selfish decisions of the ‘good Nazis’ who live among us turn my stomach. Their little acts will lead us down a road to dystopia
Thank god Toby set it up…but terribly dangerous times.
Another day waiting for the insane to regain their sanity
Wait, wait, and wait again
I’ll continue to prod and poke them, in whatever ways I can that are appropriate to the recipients. Mother, sister, lifelong friends, decades-old colleagues, acquaintances, strangers. No effort is wasted, but each must be tailored with skill for maximum impact.
Will they ‘recover their senses one by one’, as Charles McKay wrote, or need to be told …it’s all over, by the same lunatics who created the mess?
https://www.aier.org/article/virus-avoidance-is-not-the-whole-of-life/
Another voice of sanity from the AIER
Every article I have read on this site, unknown to me until 2020, has been outstanding. Superb in their construction, succinct in their delivery. I believe they are considered by the “fact” checkers to be a far-right think tank.
Those 700 epidemiologists might as well spend the rest of their lives in bed before dying of bedsore induced sepsis.
And lethal blood clotting-pulmonary embolus-caused by immobility!
Exercise and fresh air are the basic essentials for bodily maintenance, along with a decent affordable diet and plenty of common sense and independently minded scrutiny of all so called data and edicts.
Exactly
It used to be accountants who were reputed to be sad, boring creatures with no social life.
They’re the life and soul of any party compared with the epidemiologists!
Back in the day, accountants were known as the Living Dead; not any more.
Oh we don’t exist. We don’t get Covid either…
Trilaterist Starmer, our Poundland Robespierre, spends yet another day in mutatis mutandis.
[trans. mute, pandering mutt from the snakepit of lawyers.]
Of the four groups of Nazi Einsatzgruppen S.S. deaths squads in Poland and later Russia three were commanded by lawyers, the fourth by a career policeman.
Absolute power over the life and death of the innocent corrupts absolutely, and makes monsters of men.
That’s what Starmer aspires to. He’s saving time by getting his corruption in first.
Starmer is just Bojo’s ludicrous butt plug. He doesn’t deserve to be taken more seriously than that.
Veering off piste here, but bear with me : the Poles and the Hungarians have seen off the apparatchiks in Brussels.
https://www.rt.com/news/509451-soros-oped-merkel-surrender-eu/
Grit and determination flourishing in two of the Visegrad nations; no doubt arising from their first hand experiences of repression, subjugation and occupation.
Poland and Hungary have known centuries of bullying, conquest, terror, occupation, oppression, snd (in Poland’s case) dismemberment.They survived.
Now perhaps they will show the new slave nations, like Britain, the way to resist.
We can but hope Annie; they put us to shame.
You have a point. The UK has always lived under an illusion of democracy, propped up by all sorts of historical myths – like the one about modern German incomers representing the pinnacle of the traditional British social hierarchy.
Eastern Europeans have their myths, too – but they have been close up to autocracy and totalitarianism, and have an insight which is lacking in the UK – and the techniques of dealing with it to some extent.
Hang on a minute Or bank in Hungary and the President in Poland have orchestrated Fascist totalitarian states. They have no independent judiciary now and Orban (Johnsons buddy) has crowned himself Dictator and cannot now be unelected in his lifetime.
They have also taken the free Press under States control. They therefore do not meet the criteria for EU membership as they are no longer democracies.
Anything that annoys George Soros surely cannot be bad?
I think the matter of civil liberties is primarily a matter for those countries and not something to be a subject for EU diktat….but I am wary of agreeing to curtail one person’s freedom when, in the future, it might be my freedom in question.
I seem to recall that Soros was the leading name during the Black Wednesday disaster?
‘Welsh Government bans domestic carpet in fight against virus’
The Welsh dictatorship has announced a ban on the sale of domestic carpet from midnight
In addition all carpet must be removed from homes by midday on 24th
December
A spokesperson said ‘ These new measures are introduced to protect the public. There is clear evidence that in the winter months people feel miserable if they have no carpets in their homes. If people are miserable they are less likely to socialise. Less socialising less spread of the virus ‘
The spokesperson added ‘ We know these life saving measures will be attacked by far right groups and anti vaxxers, but we will continue to follow the science ‘
I can think of quite a few people, starting with Dungford, that ought to be on the carpet. I’d willingly lend mine for the purpose.
Carpet beating,as done in days of yore, comes to mind Annie.
The Mongols knew a thing or two about carpet beating.
They rolled the last Abbasid Caliph in one and trampled him to death with horses.
We need a few Mongols down our way. Horses and carpets can be provided.
They’ve cracked it: hypothermia will result in zero covid, Drakeford will receive a gong from the WHO and the troublesome unruly citizens will all become comatose ,thanks to plummeting core body temperatures.
I believe that intense cold also reduces brain activity. If that’s so, Tortoise Stalin must be living in the cold store, alongside Pfizer’s snake oil.
I can recommend a few candidates for the cold store
And don’t forget recent warnings about lethal avocados! And just think what could be done with a malevolently aimed baking potato!
I think that was an ovarian cancer scare,along with crisps and burnt toast.
A particularly nasty claim, given that this cancer is a hidden killer.
These dodgy assertions just fuel the fearful obsessions which are ruining societies.
No, it was the mortal danger of helping yourself to a potato from the sane dish as another filthy, contaminated biohazard, aka human being. Applies particularly to Scotland.
I missed that one!
kh, you are obviously not aware of the mortal danger posed by the Flabby Crumpet, the Pale Brown Toast, the Uncremated Cookie, and the Soft Sally Lunn. You must register immediately for the online Covid Safe Baked Goods course.
Run it yourself, and charge a very large fee!
Catastrophic Carbon Contamination.
Should a ne’er-do-well stray west of Offa’s Dyke, thence shall come his undoing. For there be no pleasures in that strange excrescence o’th’ main Isle. Only mutton, and darkness. All Ye who venture near this pass hath been warned.
For lo, there standeth on the border a Posse with a flaming cheek, turning its Anglophobia this way and that, to guard the path to the land of the Cymruzombie.
And thus didst the guardians of Cambria welcome their end. ‘Twas a pitiful sight.
The only Welshman I know has lived in England for 40 years but is amazingly compliant with Covid regs and vocal about it when asked or even not asked.
He plans not to really leave his house except for the odd walk,it seems,until he’s had the vaccine.
Is he typical of Welsh people? I find it hard to believe but how does the Welsh government get away with itt’s hard core attitude to Covid? Is it because the Welsh NHS is poor and needs extra cossetting?
The Welsh NHS is notoriously dreadful. Our health centre in Tenby has been in chaos for years, and has no GP,
The Welsh zombies are worse than the English ones, and the Stalinist Politburo is worse than England’s Fascist junta. To all the usual cruelties, it adds hatred of alcohol, and rampant Anglophobia. And the useless Senedd has not a single dissenting voice. All parties join to sing the praises of Tortoise Stalin. Like those dreadful Russian films of ovations that went on for hours because nobody dared to be the first to stop clapping.
That is truly depressing to hear.
Good luck and ponder on the vagaries of democratic outcomes as I presume this shower was voted in.
By the few who bothered to vote, yes. Not one Welsh
person in fifty knows the name of his/her AS (Assembly Member).
Dungford is, of course, unelected. Nobody knew his name either until he suddenly morphed into Tortoise Stalin with absolute power to destroy our lives.
Very sad to hear this. I’ve always thought that Wales was better than Scotland, looks like that ain’t true.
What is it about the Celts? I’m reminded of Dave Allen taking the piss out of the fire and brimstone that comes out of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
The difference in attitude between your region of Wales , Pembrokeshire, and the Wrexham area is fascinating. What’s the key difference? Wrexham county, apart from the bits that slide past Offa’s Dyke towards Cheshire (very affluent), is working class – a former mining area. Tough, no nonsense but very friendly people, I find. Still quite a close-knit community.
Lots of retired numpties in Pembs.
It sounds like Scotland.
No. Not in my experience in North East Wales. Except for my mum who’s been driven hysterical by the bastard BBC. Most of my relatives and wife’s relatives, my friends, neighbours, and random acquaintances don’t take the Covid regs seriously. Most pay lip service to them for an easy life (I’m talking about the masks here). Maybe I’m just lucky. If I avoid all media for a week, apart from the masks in shops, I wouldn’t even know we were supposed to be in a pandemic.
“my mum who’s been driven hysterical by the bastard BBC.”
This is the point. It’s no good just berating ‘believers’ – many are genuinely scared by this wall of propaganda.
They can be berated for believing the Thinking Box; age is no excuse.
I don’t believe people in The Valleys are paying much attention to the rules either. They are made of stern stuff, having had to survive the devastation brought by Thatcher and all the deprivation that followed, and still does.
Apologies to TS, I accidently down voted this when I intended to give it an upvote, the site won’t let me change it
Upvoted Spingler on your behalf. There you go. Now I need to ask someone else to upvote for me…
Done
Has he addressed the conundrum of getting to the vaccination centre safely?
I actually had to read this twice to see if it was true or not. Satire has become ‘reality’, ‘reality’ satire.
Me too!!!!
Is this for real???
That Welsh Stalin wannabe is taking the mickey isn’t he?
One who should have the Code of Hammurabi thrown at him.
As that Code was written on a large lump of stone, I agree.
Piling on the agony?
Hellian-backed with a good dunderfelt..
When I first read it I thought it was true! Shows no matter how mad it sounds anything’s believable….
It shows how mad they are that I was nearly taken in by that first sentence.
“Pandemonium shall bestride the lands
Great contagion outwits all foolish progress of Europa.
A man Hannercuck doth arise to heal the nations with sly concoctions
He thinks he shall be King tho the Clown knows better”
Bozos’ mistranslation of a newly found Nostradamus Quatrain.
Didn’t he predict the rise of Simon Cowell?
Shouldn’t it read ‘Sky concoctions ‘?
From the main text, Schools to end term online only.
“This is an opportunity to allow students to adapt to learning online”
Adapt? There is only one reason why people adapt so it implies they mean it to be ongoing going forward*.
*’in the future’ for elderly readers.
I’m still waiting for the shock, horror from the mumsnet brigade, when they realise their kiddies screen time is through the roof.
Yes, exactly. Even the sore issue of too much screen time has somehow been airbrushed out when it comes to ‘education.’
Covid Really is God.
Agree. Funny how no-one is raising the alarm over the stunting of child development during this insanity,
All those concerns about too much screen time, the dangers of over sanitising, negative effects on neurolinguistic development, etc have been thrown out of the nearest airlock.
There will be hell to pay when these kids grow up.
There will. COVID Bollocks is really going to do some pretty significant things to young people. Things that as a human race we have never experienced before.
COVID really is transformative. As it is supposed to be. 1% virus, 99% global psy-op.
What the hell is wrong with people that can’t see this. This is terrifying
bastards
It baffles me frankly. My sister has two kids – aged 3 and 5 and seeing them from their mother’s anti-social media page makes me weep.
“Going” to school in front of a computer, muzzled and visored up, unable to see their maternal grandparents for 6 months, unable to see their friends; its a recipe for disaster.
Won’t be surprised if they do develop problems along the line.
….if they’re able to.
AG
Actually – a serious problem. What is going to fill a high proportion of the time for kids (even those with inventive parents) who have been deprived of the majority of their normal social interaction?
Won’t work.. without deadlines, discipline, punishment, and peers.. half the kids or more will flounder.
It won’t work with a lot of schools. My 12 year old grandson is in isolation because of someone testing positive. The school he is supposed to attend must be the badliest run school in the country. Two weeks later and he still has not been able to sign in online to get any of the school work. The school has been called numerous times with promises of a return phonecall, they never happen. I should have expected this from the start as I was the one who collected him from school on the day he and a few of his classmates were removed from class and put in the main hall with 2 other classes at 9.15 am. My grandson called his dad to collect him and when my son phoned the school to verify he was told on two separate occasions that they hadn’t received any information regarding this. His dad phoned him back and asked to speak to the teacher in the hall with them, to be informed there was no teacher in with them, someone pops there head in occasionally. I was the nearest so I was asked to collect him. I arrived home with my… Read more »
I am an NHS registered nurse and my hospital trust is now strongly encouraging twice weekly lateral flow tests for all its frontline staff (which I have politely declined). Interesting though how they use lateral flow tests for health carers (which has a low false positive rate) but continue to use PCR for the pubic (which has a high false positive rate). Its a win win for the government – less health workers requiring to isolate, whist still maintaining a casedemic that justifies tier 3 restrictions. Clever.
I was in Barnstaple the other day and saw they had set up a Covid test centre at the back of the car park by the swimming pool. It looked about as official and convincing as one of these pop up car washes and to add to that effect 4 members of the staff were outside having their smoking break. I would not have trusted that centre to wash my car let alone test me for a disease.
Swop you carpark useless looking test centres – I’ll take your Barnstaple one and you can have the one in Cardigan (Wales). Not sure the public would notice the difference either way – as there are darn all people visiting ours after the first day (just as well – as they do seem to be searching hard here for “evidence” to justify Having Things Worse in Wales).
We certainly have more testing in Wales. I understand that they are coming for the cola even as we speak.
I drove past the testing centre at the former Deeside Leisure Centre at Connah’s Quay mid-afternoon yesterday. Saw about half a dozen people in hi-viz jackets milling about but no sign of any private vehicles or pedestrians.
I bet your car would test positive.
Have you seen the social media videos e.g. YouTube where people test all kinds of objects (or test nothing at all) and the results come back positive? The Tanzanian government smelled a rat and so sent off swabs from a pawpaw fruit, goat and engine oil.. all came back positive.
Would love to have seen a photo of that!
The people who staff these centres remind me of the chain gang crooks you sometimes see out doing community service.
As has been said, we’re into the data being made to fit the narrative rather than informing it.
Me too – a box was left on my desk. It’s done in your own time at home, and you have to upload the results. What is the point of wasting time uploading negative results – surely they should only be interested in the positives? Funnily enough a whole tranche of senior management are off with, supposedly, the bug while we frontliners who are probably much more exposed to it through our pointless masks and develop immunity, have been fine…
Useful to know the number of -ve results as it would show the infection rate within the tested population. In a health care setting I would argue that could be useful for early identification of trends in nosocomial infection.
So if you want to have time off you mark your own homework. Only a publicly funded twit could have developed that system.
Clever? EVIL more like.
Yes, that one brought a lump to my throat. But for me, it was the desolate high street with the padlock decorations that brought out the real misery of the Fascist bollox.
Bib is magnificent.
Sorry, Bob! Astigmatism strikes again.
Or maybe even dyslocksia?
Anna Soubry, with a masked avatar, expects the gubment to cancel New Years eve…
https://twitter.com/Anna_Soubry/status/1337525740989009922
Citizen Khan cancelled New Year’s Eve in London back in July. The data sources for his confidence in such a magnificent decision were clearly….magnificent.
I was thinking more on the lines of complete bastard
‘Jupiter’ has already cancelled New Year’s Eve here in France – from 15 December the 20:00 – 06:00 curfew applies, the only exception is Christmas Eve (the main event), with a maximum of “6 at the table”.
During the occupation, Hitler’s curfew started at 21:00!
Interesting extract from Wikipedia article on the German military administration:
“…numerous regulations, censorship and propaganda made the occupation increasingly unbearable. At night, inhabitants had to abide a curfew and it was forbidden to go out during the night without an Ausweis… The experience of the Occupation was a deeply psychologically disorienting one for the French as what was once familiar and safe suddenly become strange and threatening.”
Sounds familiar?
Frankly in tier 2 or 3 there’s not much you can do anyway.
Sometimes. It depends on her intake of gin.
She can carry on wearing that mask for as long as she likes. The rest of us can be thankful for the small mercy of never having to see her face again. (Miaaaow!)
You know what we are up against when surely one of the worst,boring and twee songs (Christmas or otherwise) by M C tops ( whatever that means nowadays) the charts.
Is it any wonder that the majority of our people are compliant sheep if that is their taste in music?
Start the day miserable and you are set up for the whole day.
I was just thinking what soulless times we live in. Most people don’t own a stereo system now e.g. hifi, midi or mini system. It’s all crappy soundbars now or a cruddy wireless speaker. There’s plenty of great rock and metal and electronica and funk.. but noone knows what is in the charts or cares. right up to the 90’s our society was very musical e.g. mods, rockers, punk, metal, soul, hip hop, raves. But today even our young people all look the same. Same preppy instagram celebrity look check. Same skinny jeans check. Same fade haircuts check. Same pouty duck lips check. Same viewpoints check.
And even when they post photos of themselves, it the same pose all of them – same trout pouts, head of side, one hand on hip.
Now of course that they’re muzzled its the same dead behind the eyes look.
And the strange yellow make up the girls slap on. I don’t get that look at all.
Really odd agree.
And the bizarre eyebrows!
OMG THE EYEBROWS……
Young ladies eyebrows are now bordering on scary…..
Who on earth told them drawing on your eyebrows was a good idea.
They will look back at those photos in 30 years and wonder what hallucinogenic substance they were on.
I do actually think weird lady’s eyebrows are actually to do with something a bit like schizophrenia.
Almost that they hallucinating when they paint em on. I used to work in an old school mental asylum and one lady there, very schizophrenic, had the strangest make up.
I am sure it made sense to her when she put it on. Honestly it was very bizarre, I asked one of the nurses about it and they said it was due to her hallucinations and self image. Strange.
Ha! I had wondered about the marker pen brows. Mystifying.
Know what you mean, chaos; back in the 90’s we lived in Stourbridge and for a brief shining moment, Stourbridge music had its time in the sun.
The Wonder stuff, Pop will eat itself and Ned’s atomic dustbin all had chart success (The Stourbridge sound).
Clint Mansell of PWEI has gone on to be a successful film music composer in Hollywood.
I think that popular music went downhill fast with the advent of the Spice girls (do you want to be a pop star, if so, ring this number) and the god awful Simon Cowell and his trivialisation of music.
True music comes from the “street”; Paul McCartney’s kitchen (and before, obviously) onwards.
Aaah the eternal gripe of modern, auto tuned music. Yes if you lived in the 70’s 80’s our music was better, the groups more interesting and they were fashion icons too. BUT, please don’t think there is no good music being made now. For rock look up black stone cherry and rival sons and blacktop mojo, for pop go to the fabulous pretty reckless or paramour. For girl singers look at no sinner and halestorm. Then first a bit if country rock look at BlackBerry smoke. If you want to lose yourself in beautiful vocals listen to James Vincent Mcmorrow first album early in the morning.
No problem there, Spike, our teenage granddaughters keep us informed about the present music scene.
Radio One young person music sounds like something that gets played to Guantanamo inmates. Honestly I find something in it that I can’t quite put my finger on, almost a subliminal, something that really seems like musical propaganda, some common thread that I find really strange.
I honestly can’t listen to it, it’s like musical poison.
ALso this kind of music style is very formulaeic, if you listen to normie young person music from all over the world it sounds like this, auto-tuned bollocks in another language.
Honestly I think there is something about young person music that is actually weaponised….
Like my dad used to say ‘there’s no melody and you can’t hear the words’.
“The only reason you old people don’t understand our music IS BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIKE IT!”
“Rick” the Young Ones 1982
Didn’t he like Cliff?
It’s all rhythm at the expense of line and melody. And the rhythm is computer-generated, so no great talent required beyond self-promotion.
Agreed
From my point of view, one of the few good things to come out of the internet era has been streaming music.
It’s probably shit for the musicians themselves, but I do enjoy being able to pick from three hundred years of music at will. Only yesterday I was listening to early Poppies stuff, then some of Clint Mansell’s soundtrack work (the Moon OST is always good for making me sad), then some Mozart, then German new wave, then the Dead Kennedys, and so on.
When I think back to the 80s and 90s and the pathetic selection of music that was available in the shops, I really don’t miss it. In no universe would I have gone out and bought Five Leaves Left, but now it’s one of my favourites.
Then again, they could just take it all away from me at a stroke and then I’d have nothing. I’ll probably need to be vaccinated to sign in to Amazon soon.
There has always been some pretty dire pop music. Listen to a lot of the stuff from the 50s. Positively teeth-curling.
As Pevsner ruefully observed, bad taste is popular.
I loved Pop Will Eat Itself. ‘Sweet Sweet Pie’ is a tune and a half.
Seems old style rock became tame and lacking in the spirit of say ‘ Bullet in The Head ‘by Rage Against the Machine, the very old rockers are too rich to care anymore it all, leaves a vacuum for anodyne pop lite shite to manifest.
The Kevin Bacon film “Footloose” was about a small town Reverand’s ban on music and the main character’s attempts to overturn it.
Quite apt considering the situation we’re in.
3…2…1…
Everybody cut loose…
I’m afraid even Neville Hodgkinson is exaggerating the extent of the damage caused by this virus.
He says deaths are up around a fifth to the year to October compared to the last 5 years.
Up to 27 November, we had 554,919 deaths in total this year (England and Wales) compared to 490,182 average for the last five years, an increase of 13.2%.
However, this is not a meaningful comparison. There are 7,712,000 over 70s in the UK this year compared to an average of 7,120,000 in the average of the last five years. Once you adjust for this the excess deaths for the year to 27 November is 23,903, an increase of 4.5% – some pandemic !
That 23,903, is very close to the number of non covid excess deaths is it not?
Since emergency procedures are down by nearly 50% (about 80,000 per week) it would be amazing if the non- COVID excess deaths were much less than this. So how many have died because of the pandemic and not because of government idiocy ?!
Having regard to my wildlife and conservation work I would argue that when you talk about deaths you should also talk about births, by my calculations;
Total live births Jan – Sept 2020 England & Wales 464,437
Total registered deaths Jan-Sept 2020 England & Wales 453,803
Which means there were 10,634 more live births than registered deaths.
In wildlife conservation terms if a population has more births than deaths then you would tend to think things were doing well and the population was in an active healthy state. Plenty of new young dynamic lives coming into the population, all looking good, nothing too much to worry about.
The next few weeks will see the births of the first babies conceived since the beginning of lockdown.
I predict a collapse in the birth rate to lowest ever levels.
The next few weeks will see the births of the first babies conceived since the beginning of lockdown.
I predict a collapse in the birth rate to lowest ever levels.
That was the consensus on the Jeremy Vine show when they discussed it once or twice.
Remember JHB blubbing back in March that there was going to be a baby boom lol.
Now is the time that covid marshalls start prowling the maternity wards interviewing parents to establish that they were supposed to be together nine months ago. Unless they can prove they were cohabiting they will be issued with a £200 FPN for breach of regulations.
But puppy ownership has rocketed!
I know several people who have adopted cats and dogs since March. I’ve 4 cats already whom I’m grateful for.
The five year moving average is anyway entirely misleading as a baseline, since it covers a period of historically low mortality. Sorry to keep banging on about this, but the use of random short periods to define ‘excess’ deaths is nonsense – and is the reason I have used a quarter of a century to give some proper perspective. A really good insight into this is given by the 100+ years graph of Swedish all-cause mortality, which has appeared here again recently. One glance tells you all you need to know about trends. In terms of the recent UK trend in mortality, we have been (since 1993) experiencing a sine-wave, whereby, at the start of the period, mortality was relatively high, but declined to a minimum in the last decade, and now shows signs (pun intended) of an upturn through 2020 and possibly beyond – but within an overall downward trend over a longer period. The point is that short-term perturbations are beside the point, and that 2019/2020 is nothing unusual – NOTHING like the ‘Spanish ‘flu epidemic spike when corrected for population. Again – look at the long-term Swedish data to vividly illustrate the point. Another issue that needs… Read more »
I agree, this is nothing on a long term graph. However, the only reason for going back a shorter time is that medical advances mean expected death rates are in a secular as opposed to cyclical decline. However, since 2010 that has had relatively little effect.
Yes, Laurence – I agree. Which is why I (accidentally to some extent) arrived at 25 years as being a just balance in terms of time-span.
Certainly, the commonly accepted 5-year moving average is way too short to give a representative overview – in essence, it just gives a sampling of the immediate trend.
And more importantly it is not comparing like populations
Interestingly, as has recently been highlighted, the opposite is true in the US. There they have recently had year on year rises in both death rate and population, meaning that there would have been increases over the 5 year average regardless. When this is taken into account, it turns out there has been no significant increase in deaths this year overall.
That seems to have been the defining feature of the “once in a lifetime pandemic” this year almost everywhere – little if any increase over expected deaths, overall.
My guess is that it’s former. ‘Both’ cannot be excluded. . .
Local Live (mirror group news) at it again.
‘Covid cases In Nightingale rise in past week’
That is the headline which people will remember. The actual story is that Covid admissions in all other County hospitals are down because they are being sent to the Nightingale and overall hospitalizations are down 10%.
The media is the virus
We should put that on a t-shirt Ben.
Should put this in a t-shirt . From LS couple of days ago, I’ve shown it to a few people very effectively.
The Virus is a Mind Virus.
Free Speech Union – my heroes
What about politicians who’ve suddenly been given the power of Roman Emperors. How does Drakeford hold such power as to be able to impose tyranny over the Welsh people?
That’s not democracy
I think this is the underlying question when all the rest has been dealt with. What is true democracy – and how does it protect itself from usurpation by snake-oil salesmen (political and scientific) who manage to get hold of certain levers of power?
The western world has already conceded that all of the things we used to think of as “rights” were in fact only ever “permissions”. I see no obvious route back to a place where the population doesn’t feel it’s right and proper that the government should be able to tell us who we can meet, how many of them, when, where and how and what forms of economic activity we’re allowed to engage in.
The most fundamental problem is that an apparently overwhelming majority isn’t even questioning that governments are right to do this (much less that they _have_ the right to do this).
This is the reason that arguing about the data is, ultimately, hopeless. There’s no point in saying “things aren’t bad enough to justify the total destruction of society and removal or curtailment of every single one of our freedoms” because what we should be saying is “it could never be bad enough to justify this.”
A dramatic shift of basic attitudes is required to prevent the precedents set this miserable year becoming the established norms for future behaviour.
Nice to see you back around, matt (assuming you are the old matt, which I think you probably are based on that comment). Did you spend some time away, or have I just not been paying attention?
I think it’s just as salient to wonder how the dramatic shift in attitudes that allowed this situation to occur in the first place was shaped. If you’d asked people 12 months ago whether governments should be allowed to dictate our lives in this way – independent of the apparent circumstances – I’m quite sure that almost nobody would have said that they should. But I’m also sure that almost all of them would have been lying to themselves and they in fact were already willing to see it happen.
And thanks, glad to be back. I took some time away, because I was getting a bit obsessive about the site. It’s been a useful break and I’ve still been reading the daily updates and thinking hard. Nice to see the familiar names still here and the number of active new names!
Be grateful if you’d drop me an email, matt (see last pm). Something I’d like to run by you.
Mail sent. Apologies – I missed the PM as I hadn’t been checking (as you guessed). If the mail doesn’t turn up, let me know here or by PM (and I’ll keep an eye on them).
Decline and Fall is baked into any empire.Once a certain standard of living is reached then decadence follows.This pattern has been repeated throughout history.It is just our misfortune to live in such a time.
Because the zombies let him.
At some point, a devolved leader went from being “responsible for certain specified areas of the public sector” (1997) to being “responsible for the entirity of peoples’ lives within your nation/region boundaries” (2020).
We certainly didn’t get a vote on that
Ancient Greek city states would sometimes grant dictatorial powers for a limited period, to win a war for example. If the dictator abused his powers he could be prosecuted and exiled or put to death.
An excellent practice that needs to be revived. Urgently.
Did Drakeford pass an Enabling Act to rule by Diktat like bozo did copying Hitler.
By the gross misuse of emergency powers ando the use of Statutory Instrumentso which by pass parliamentaRyanair scrutiny.
My son pointed out that promising research into Alzheimer’s, that most horrific condition that is one of the country’s biggest killers year after year but destroys people even when they are alive, has been called off because of the concentration on COVID, which is no worse than a bad flu (see below).
How sick can our society and government get ? I hope the tiny number of people saved by the vaccines appreciate how many people have died to save them.
Saved?
Culled.
And your love light shines like cardboard But your work shoes are glistening She’s a PhD in “I told you so” You’ve a knighthood in “I’m not listening” (Beautiful South, Don’t marry her) The amount of erudite arguments, technical details and sound statistical analysis on this site is amazing and yet I find myself asking, ‘is anyone listening’? The sceptics and the zealots might as well be on different planets, they are effectively talking different incomprehensible languages, like a married couple in a dysfunctional broken down relationship. They are panicking in Wales and London about dodgy test results (cases) which we are all pretty much agreed are meaningless drivel, Angela Merkel is in despair that the same number of people are dying in Germany as normally die in Germany. People ‘en-mass’ have bought into this mind bending, barking mad covid cult. With Christmas in mind, the good book says, ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. But how is that going to happen with this current virus hoo-haa? ‘At that instant, something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes, and his sight was restored. He got up and was baptized,’ who or what is going… Read more »
The solution is to get on with your life. Don’t even engage the opposition at all. Play the game when you absolutely must.
It would help if people were interested enough to try and discover what is driving all of this. But that takes inquisition and many are intellectually lazy or too afraid to consider frightening possibilities
I’m convinced it’s a combination of economic collapse and pharma/tech/government opportunism. These two videos confirm for me that it’s never been about a virus (a virus so deadly that we have to be tested to see if we have it or not)
Ernst Wolff – Corona: The Collapse of the System
https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=8LYjOEib9iI
Reiner Fuellmich – ‘Crimes Against Humanity’
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4-CcXb0sA
This year has been like how I imagine living in a care home to be. Subject to bizarre routines and rituals that cannot be questioned, no matter how pointless they seem, because ‘thats the way it is done’. Failure to adapt will have you quickly labelled as someone who rocks the boat – particularly by your peers. Medical treatment delivered as/when, whether you want it or not. Severe restrictions on freedom, arguments over minor privileges being restored (eg. he/she got to watch the TV yesterday, it is my turn today). But worst of all the interminable, insufferable boring fuckers that you have to share your living space with talking about ailments 24/7.
A few years back I walked past a care home. I heard screams. I don’t want to be here. I want my home. Let me go. This continued.. I heard the sounds of staff, foreign accents.. trying to calm the man. The average length of stay in a care home is 2 years. These are the very last days of a person’s life. I am sure there must be good care homes. And some happy inmates. But I hope I am dead before I need one.
I’m going to make sure I am. They were purgatory before the bollox started.,Now they are hell.
My solution? Will buy a very fast motorbike when I reach 70.
My 91 year old aunt has told me she has a bottle of pills and if they come to drag her off to a care home the whole lot is going down along with something strong. I do not think she is alone in this thinking. The next generation of people getting old will have grown up singing along to ‘I hope i die before I get old’ I do not think there will be the same acceptance of being bundled off into a care home, especially after what has happened this year. Increasingly people will be more concerned about their healthy life expectancy rather than their overall life expectancy. When the medics tell people over 70 that they must stop drinking or they will die earlier, increasingly people are saying so what? I think this attitude might feed through to result in overall life expectancy falling as people seek to avoid the unhealthy stage of old age.
Here for a good time, not a long time
The problem with long life is that the extra years come at the end!
Atul Gowande wrote a very good book on this subject “Being Mortal” where he argues this very thing. Quality of life rather than prolonging it at all cost.
We do this with dogs or at least I do.
That’s what my grandad said, after a lifetime working in a provincial dockyard (and two World Wars) he was still enjoying his two bottles of Guinness and a packet of Capstan until he died in his 80’s.
A sound point. I don’t think this government, and other governments around the world, have done oldies like me any favours by making life decidedly less enjoyable just to ensure we have a slightly better chance of perhaps living another ten years – I’measily past three score and ten already.
I’m still healthy and fit enough to enjoy life pretty much as I have done for the last sixty years. I can’t expect many more such years – and this last year has been pretty much squandered courtesy of HMG.
Absolutely agree. Sums up the absurdity and tragedy of what has happened this year. The debate about longevity vs. quaity is a crucial one.
One underlying issue here is that there are economic interests at play here. Jared Diamond (in Collapse) argued there is an ‘overinvestment in end-of-life healthcare’. This is obviously a very morally tricky area. But one that should be discussed, I feel.
The way the State assumes ownership over our bodies and our lives is never challenged. But we have a right to end our lives whenever we choose without giving a reason. That dignified methods to do this are refused by society is an indictment of society
Francis Fukuyama has made the point that the increase in the quality of life has not kept up with increased life expentancy. Politicians have decided that rather than to tackle the issue head on, they’ve just carried on kicking it into the long grass and so on and so forth. I predict that after this current crisis is over, more and more people will take matters into their own hands. Especially as the likes of a good pension scheme is becoming a thing of the past.
It’s an informal discussion I’ve had with several medics over the years, they generally agree, in private.
The truth is that these days very few people should need to go into a care home. However it is a standard NHSBC prescription for elDerby people who are a bit frail or require regular District Nurse services. The NHS bully the older person and their family into going into a home purely so as not to have to employ more community nurses or expend any of their resources on the elderly. To put this in context prior to the NHS and communifty care act (1990) domiciliary care (social services) and District nursing services were running almost at the same level on the graph. Post the Act and it is visually stunning. The graph shows a massive increase in domiciliary care and a dramatic decline in D N services to the point of near extinction. That means the NHS transferred millions of pounds of their work to social services but never handed over the budget to them. Social services never got any increase in their adult care budget to accommodate this shameless transfer of responsibility. After years of fighting because carers were actually doing nursing tasks it was partially resolved by the Audit Commission. The same is true of Step… Read more »
I was surprised to learn that in Sweden, they try very hard not to put old people in care homes at all. The focus is always on making it possible for the older generation to live out their lives in their own homes.
According to A&E doctor Sebastian Rushworth in an interview with AdapNation published on 2020-11-04, it’s only when home-help is required eight or nine times per day that an old person is moved into a residential care home. This might help explain why Sweden had such a high death toll in their care homes: the residents were already in a really bad way even before any infection was introduced.
Exactly. There comes a time when the frail elderly need someone there 24/7.
My father had Parkinson’s and he actually asked to be put in a carehome because he no longer felt safe on his own at night, when he was pretty much paralyzed.
We’d suggested he could move in with us but he looked totally horrified at the thought.
Luckily we found a scruffy but very caring home and he was able to live a relatively independent life, watching his favourite choice of films, tv documentaries and quiz shows and listening to audiobooks.
He took several beloved pieces of his own furniture, reminders of his past with Mum and his kids. Also a bigbookcase on which to keep his many CDs that replaced the cassette recordings he’d made of his old Jazz records. Many of the homes we’d checked out said very generously that patients could bring one small item of furniture from home.
He was relatively lucky but Parkinson’s is a crap way to go and I too hope I don’t become very physically and/or mentally vulnerable before my time’s up.
I would rather have assisted suicide at home than to go into a care home
Too bloody right….my late stepfather said its an existence not a life. He died at 90 and never went in one.
My late brother in law died just over a year ago, in a care home where he had been for some years, of a terminal cancer. We visited him frequently, but he was sane enough to accept that he was just waiting to die, that life was never going to change from the simple regimented, admittedly quite comfortable, existence he was experiencing. He had been an active person, travelled the world. I said to my wife the other day that I felt that I knew even more how he felt, and that 2020 had aged me ten years. I am coming up to 72, fit and healthy. I have already had one wasted year in 2020. 2021 will be the second wasted year, as nothing much will change for the better.
Metro.co.uk: Firm ‘linked to Matt Hancock’s family’ wins £5.5m Covid testing contract.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/11/firm-linked-to-matt-hancocks-family-given-5500000-mobile-testing-contract-13737865/
See the following ‘My Little Crony’ interactive map for all the cronyism links:
https://www.sophie-e-hill.com/post/my-little-crony/
How does one go about establishing the exact false positive rate for the PCR test?
Is there some form of scientific experiment or research that would establish the false positive rate?
Is anyone conducting this experiment or research? If not what not?
If it could be proved the FPR is 1% then all the positives are false positives and this whole nonsense falls apart
Surely someone must be doing this?
If they are, we are unlikely to hear about it.
The term ‘false positives’ is keeping the fear level high among the zombies.
I have been assured several times “Ooo no, you can have it and not know it”. Sigh.
For every person that believes in false positives, there are two that are worried about false negatives.
They don’t know the difference.
Actually that’s interesting – because I can’t remember anyone mentioning false negatives.
I hear it all the time at work
I have heard the Establishment mention it to suggest that the figures are in fact worse than the already elevated levels of bullshit that they are selling i.e. there are people who received a negative test who are, in fact, postive, is the spin they sell.
You do it by testing clean samples and see how many come up positive. It’s a basic calibration test. You obviously need to have other procedures in place to make sure the samples are actually clean. You can also characterise the effect of changing procedures on FPR.
But yes, surely someone must be doing this? It would be the manufacturers of the PCR test. If they aren’t doing it then it would have to be the labs as the test is the whole process not just the PCR bit.
There would need to be a system whereby every so often the lab would have to have a quality control test run to ensure that the test process was working correctly. There should be one machine that is used only as a calibration machine against which all of the others are compared. The biggest problems are the number of amplification steps and cross contamination. If the machines were calibrated properly with known infected samples and known clean samples then the number of steps reduced until the known infection shows up positive.
What you are describing is typical and required in any large scale engineering firm that makes anything for people to use. It should be done by test makers otherwise how do you declare the accuracy of the test?
But also this is exactly why the scandal at Theranos came about. The calibration tests didb’t match and it was found that most of the blood testing was being outsourced.
On the cycles: this should be established at the outset. You don’t change the number of cycles just to get a result. This makes any previous measurements meaningless for comparison
“The current rate of operational false-positive swab tests in the UK is unknown; preliminary estimates show it could be somewhere between 0·8% and 4·0%.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30453-7/fulltext
Published:September 29, 2020
Mike Yeardon says its normally between .8 and 4%. Handjob in an interview with JHB said he thought it was .8% but that was when he thought this was a percentage of positive tests rather than total test and he now avoids the question. If this subject was debated by anyone in SAGE or the chuckle brothers with any competent scientist rather than compliant MSM the whole thing would fall apart in five minutes flat.
And it needs to be borne in mind that there are effectively two categories of ‘false positive’ when it comes to using the PCR test in the way it’s being used. First, there is the standard identification of a ‘handling’ false positive rate. Every laboratory test should have a carefully and thoroughly established false positive rate, usually somewhere (as you say) between 0.8% and 4%. The actual figure takes account of all sorts of factors: the type of samples being taken, the procedures for taking, storing and handling those samples, the experience of the staff carrying out the procedures and the likely sterilisation status of the machinery and mediums being used to evaluate the samples over a period of time (i.e. they cannot be cleaned or supplies replenished between every test so may eventually become contaminated). It’s clearly a very drawn out, stringent and expert process if it’s done correctly, at the end of which a specific false positive % is established. The Government has refused to say categorically what the FPR is for the Covid19 PCR test, even though there must be one if standard laboratory procedures are being followed. But there is also a second category of potential… Read more »
And to add, not having a controlled cycle rate means your positive is not the same as my positive. Which means you don’t have a “measurement” as there is no measure to benchmark against.
https://twitter.com/NickTriggle/status/1337666868912513025?s=20
Really nerve wracking being a teacher right now. Every day some idiot takes a test because they’ve got a sniffle, meaning we keep getting emails announcing which kids and staff must stay home isolated for two weeks. The latest last night would lock someone in their home until Xmas Day, and anything next week will wipe out xmas itself.
Whilst I would happily just ignore it, some in my family wouldn’t, for example my Dad would then refuse to let us in the house, causing no end of upset at home. My daughter would miss her final xmas week at school etc. It would be awful even telling her that all our xmas plans, after this terrible year, are ruined.
Yet people seem determined to test themselves, bringing this on, in ever greater numbers.
Was it Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels where he says, “Can everyone stop getting shot?”
Yes – the situation re. schools has become totally ludicrous – particularly given the lack of transmission from children, and the obvious conflation with the usual seasonal infections.
One of our grand-daughters is currently suffering from ‘bubble exclusion’ when all sense suggests the the LFT findings of minimal presence for Covid is the more accurate finding, anyway.
To be frank Danny the situation in schools demonstrates a woeful lack of understanding of science which said schools are supposed to teach the kids.
How exactly can schools proclaim to be providing education when they appear to be practising voodoo?
Alas there remains an insatiable desire to be gaslit senseless among much of the population.
Rumour has it that we are to go into tier 3 because of a surge in positive tests in our school children. Several of our schools are now closed. No doubt all symptomless or at most just a sniffle.
Having said that, if you all were kids right now, and someone said to you if you say you have these symptoms you can be off for two weeks. I absolutely know what I would have done. Been 100% in dying swan mode and off home in front of the tv. Also knowing all my besties are home too… YES! it’s not the kids fault, adults are supposed to be the educators and the guidance, fuck me, FAILED!!
Thanks. Does feel akin at times to being an atheist at the Vatican.
Listening all day to colleagues screaming at children to put their muzzle back on, whilst shooting me daggers for not wearing one myself. Whether I like it or not, to the kids I am part of the same institution.
It’s really nerve racking being a parent right now. Three grandchildren in three different schools from two families, one is already self isolating and his mother has decided not to send him back until after Christmas. She’s now considering removing her youngest because she can’t afford to take time off work as she doesn’t get paid. This has happened twice already. If they are off school they can be looked after by the rest of the family but if they have to self isolate, they then are prisoners in their home.
One of my children have already stopped speaking to their sibling due to us ‘breaking’ the bloody daft rules.
I’ve already posted this link but there’s a line that tells you everything. It’s practically an admission of fraud:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54932843
“Even if we had had the lockdown earlier, as some scientists had argued, we would have already been talking about the next one.”
You read that and you realise they are saying:
“Yes – it wouldn’t have mattered even if we did what was supposed to avoid the horror. The horror would have happened anyway and – WE WOULD STILL BE TALKING ABOUT THE NEXT ONE!”
Which also means:
“We’re making this up and we’re letting you know we’re making it up. And there’s nothing you can do about it anyway!”
Yes. Even a congenital idiot, looking at the graph of ‘cases’ on that BBC page, given the contrast between April and now, would twig that something doesn’t make sense.
.. so Nick Tiggle doesn’t even reach the ‘congenital idiot’ standard in journalism!
Also note the wording:
“Even if we had had the lockdown earlier, as some scientists had argued, we would have already been talking about the next one.”
Not “…we would still have been in this mess” or “…we would still have these dreadful figures” and not even “we would have been talking” but “we would have already been talking” i.e. “we have already made up our minds”
So we’ve had a year of the worst PM, heading the worst, most evil government in the history of Britain.Hope they put that on his tombstone.
Anthony Eden must be rejoicing in the afterlife because he’s no longer the worst PM Britain has had in the last 100 years.
John Major, what a guy! Churchillion.
It makes no difference who the government or the PM would have been. Every country is occupied
…very soon
Finished it for you 🙂
Can I please remind our Welsh customers that all stocks of custard powder must be surrendered to the government by 2pm
Good morning Cecil B!
I am glad to be educated vis-a-vis the custard powder situation, but quite anxious not to have been updated about tractor production of late
We have a 5KG bag of it, not sure why, does this make us uber crims?
Lucky enough to live in tier one, but had a few days off so went to a nice hotel in a big city in tier two for the night. Very nice, but we go every year to this city and I was amazed how quiet it felt to a normal year. Shops were a lot quieter, not dead but not like a normal visit at this time. Maybe people are put off by the staff on the doors and constant requests to stick stuff on your hands etc. The hotel was a bit odd. Bar closed and hardly anyone in any public areas. The life had been sucked out of it. Not far off Xmas and our government continues to destroy the hospitality industry. Managed to have a couple of drinks with a meal for lunch but again very quiet. Evening restaurant we always go to was busy but not packed. I wonder what percentage everywhere is down year on year this close to Xmas? Feel sorry for everyone in tier two as for tier three you cannot imagine the impact for people stuck with these restrictions for months on end. Our so called government are an utter disgrace and… Read more »
We stayed in a hotel in Ayrshire back in July, just after they briefly “opened up”. It was as close to normal as you could expect. No masks were expected to be worn. The bar was open and in the evening the bar and restaurant area were busy and buzzing.
Then the Puritans shut it all down again.