No Escape From Stalag Britain
Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday announced severe penalties for those not complying with the new border quarantine arrangements, including a 10 year prison term for lying about where you have travelled from. Kate Andrews in the Spectator has the details.
From Monday, all arrivals will need to take two PCR tests: one on day two and another on day eight of self-isolation. This will apply to everyone, regardless of where they are travelling in from or whether they are quarantining in a hotel or in their home.
This means anyone arriving in the UK will now be taking a total of three COVID-19 tests, as a negative test within 72 hours of travel is also required. Hancock announced that any positive result will require 10 more days of quarantine from the date of the test (notably not symptoms) and that all positive results will be analysed by genome sequencing to identify the variant and control the spread of any mutations deemed worrisome. Already pressure is mounting from backbench MPs to announce when these restrictions will be eased
Meanwhile, arrivals from 33 ‘red list countries’ (which are thought to be increasingly at risk of new variants) are expected to start mandatory hotel quarantine from next Monday – a policy that has proved to be a logistical challenge for officials. There will now also be increased fines for those who fail to quarantine – up to £10,000. Those who are found to lie about where they have travelled from (trying to skirt around the ‘red list’ to avoid hotel quarantine) will face a prison sentence of up to 10 years. These announcements are clearly designed to grab headlines – but also suggest the Government worries people think they are unlikely to get caught (and that hotel quarantine will require the co-operation of passengers if current systems struggle to easily identify who is lying).
The cost to the traveller of the mandatory stay in the quarantine hotel will be £1,750 for 10 nights, making travel all but unaffordable save for determined business users and those with a few grand to spare. Oliver Smith in the Telegraph is not impressed, noting that “the vaccine was supposed to herald a return to the wonderful old normal”. As far as travel is concerned, “our Government is in the process of fencing us in”.
Already, all arrivals – even those coming from a Covid-free tropical island – must bring evidence of a negative test. Even after proving themselves free from infection, they must self-isolate for up to 10 days. From next week, those returning from a growing number of ‘red list’ countries (in Scotland it is all returnees) will be required to complete their quarantine period under guard in a grim airport hotel (at a cost of around £1,750). And the latest wheeze from Matt Hancock? A prison sentence of up to 10 years for those who lie about visiting a red list country. For reference, the average term for convicted rapists in Britain is seven. (And how exactly is it fair to threaten travellers who have tested negative for coronavirus with jail time when the punishment for non-travellers who break self-isolation after a positive test is only a fine of £1,000?)
Such restrictions make travel extraordinarily difficult for everyone, and virtually impossible for families and those who cannot work from home. So will these rules be eased in time for spring and summer? The millions of Britons employed by the travel industry, and the millions more in dire need of sunshine after the bleakest of winters, are banking on it. But the noises coming from Whitehall, and its Covid-obsessed advisors, are deeply worrying.
Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, said yesterday: “The more elaborate your plans are for summer holidays, in terms of crossing borders, in terms of household mixing, given where we are now, I think we just have to say the more you are stepping into making guesses about the unknown at this point.” Fancy taking your car on the ferry to France? It might sound like a risk-free holiday to you, but if it involves crossing a border you can forget it. Far too “elaborate”.
Boris Johnson was even more alarming. “They are most effective, border controls, when you’ve got the rate of infection down in your country,” he said. “For border controls really to make that final difference, so you can isolate new variants as they come in, you need to have infections really much lower so you can track them as they spread.” They don’t sound like the words of a man about to loosen the shackles. Our reward for lower case numbers won’t be more freedom, but a doubling down on controls.
Worth reading in full.
Former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption thundered that Matt Hancock’s “connection with reality, which has been getting looser for some time, has finally snapped”.
Ten years is the maximum sentence for threats to kill, non-fatal poisoning or indecent assault. Does Mr Hancock really think that non-disclosure of a visit to Portugal is worse than the large number of violent firearms offences or sexual offences involving minors, for which the maximum is seven years?
The hotel quarantine rules are a form of imprisonment in solitary confinement. They are brutal, inhumane and disproportionate. They are economically extremely destructive. They are also of limited value because the virus is already endemic in the UK and spontaneously mutates all the time.
Unwelcome mutations are just as likely to originate in the UK. The so-called Kent variant probably did. So did several cases of the South African variant. At the moment, we are probably a net exporter of mutant viruses.
He diagnoses Hancock with a chronic case of tunnel vision.
As with so many of the Government’s COVID-19 measures, the 10-year jail sentence is important mainly for what it tells us about the mentality of the decision-makers. Laws like these can only be justified on the footing that nothing matters except keeping infections down.
They are the work of people who think that there is no limit to the human misery, oppressive cruelty, economic damage or injustice that we must put up with if it reduces infections.
Mr Hancock is on record as saying that he will “stop at nothing” to suppress COVID-19. Yet, however admirable their objectives, ministers who will stop at nothing to achieve them are dangerous fanatics. There is always a point at which even the best of objectives is not worth achieving if the cost in terms of human wellbeing is too high.
This balance is fundamental to intelligent policy-making. The main charge to be levelled at the present Government is not that it has got the balance wrong. It is that it is not interested in balance at all. It is not a natural tyrant, but it believes, like every tyrant that ever lived, that the end justifies the means.
Worth reading in full.
The Telegraph provides a handy list of offences with similar or lower jail terms to the new one of telling porkies about Portugal:
Offences with 10-year maximum terms
– Rioting
– Making threats to kill
– Indecent assault
– Firearm possession
– Burglary with intent to commit rape
– Indecency with children under 14Offences with seven-year maximum terms
– Child sex offences
– Carrying loaded firearm
– Racially-aggravated assault
– Incest
Stop Press: Kirstie Allsopp was none too impressed by the new tariff for lying about where you’ve returned from: “This isn’t the thin end of the wedge, it’s the whole thing.”
Lockdown Battle Lines are Drawn
Some of the Government’s scientific advisers on SAGE have indicated that the emergence of mutant variants will lead to a need for on-off lockdowns continuing for several years. The Mail has the details.
Britain could be trapped in coronavirus lockdown cycles for “several years” as it’s forced to wrestle with new variants that could scupper vaccines, top scientists have warned.
Professor Sir Ian Boyd, an infectious disease expert at the University of St Andrews and member of SAGE, said the emergence of potentially jab-resistant strains means the UK could be stuck in a pattern of “control and release for a long time to come”.
Evidence suggests the Oxford University vaccine – the main weapon in Britain’s arsenal to combat the virus – does not stop people falling ill with the South African variant, which is feared to be spreading in the community already. But No 10’s top scientific advisers believe it still protects against severe illness and death.
Professor Boyd and several other prominent SAGE members have warned reopening the current shutdown too early could risk allowing new, equally concerning variants to spawn.
Mutations randomly happen as viruses spread but most changes never change the way it looks or behaves. Very high transmission gives the virus more opportunity to mutate and, therefore, drives up the risk that one of the alterations could change the course of the disease.
Professor Boyd told the Times: “It stands to reason that the more people there are in the population with infections – the prevalence – the more virus that is replicating and the more chance there is of even highly improbable mutations happening.”
He warned even if Britain gets on top of the South African strain, there will be more concerning ones down the line. He added: “My suspicion is that we will experience a damped oscillation of control-release for a long time to come – perhaps several years.”
Professor Graham Medley, another SAGE member and infectious disease expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said “everything works better” when there is lower prevalence, adding that the emergence of new variants “strengthens that case”.
In the Belfast News Letter, Northern Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer Dr Michael McBride said:
I suspect that we will require some degree of the current restrictions, certainly for the rest of this year, and probably enhanced again towards the autumn and winter of this year, and I think it will probably be into the following year before we see things a little more normal.
Prof Andrew Pollard, the head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, was much more upbeat about the opportunity to lift restrictions provided by the vaccines. The Telegraph has more.
“If people have just got the sniffles then I think our job is done,” Prof Pollard told MPs on Tuesday as he looked ahead to the coming years during an event hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Coronavirus.
With scientists increasingly talking about an annual Covid jab and warning that the virus will not disappear entirely, MPs are considering how to balance the long-term needs of protecting people and rebuilding the economy.
Conservative backbenchers eager to see restrictions loosened as soon as is realistically possible have told the Telegraph they want Government ministers to make assurances that nationwide lockdowns will not be repeated.
The idea is that to kickstart the economic recovery – getting businesses to reopen and triggering a spending boom – company bosses and workers have to be reassured that the lifting of the rules will not be reversed weeks later…
In a separate appearance, Prof Pollard told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme: “The really important point though is that all vaccines, everywhere in the world where they’ve been tested, are still preventing severe disease and death.
“And I think that is perhaps the clue to the future here, that we are going to see new variants arise and they will spread in the population, like most of the viruses that cause colds every winter. But as long as we have enough immunity to prevent severe disease, hospitalisations and death, then we’re going to be fine in the future in the pandemic.”
Mark Harper, chair of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) of Conservative MPs, and CRG member David Davis, told the Telegraph there need to be assurances from ministers that lockdowns would be a thing of the past.
Mr Harper said he wanted the easing of lockdown restrictions to begin once all over-70s and frontline healthcare workers are vaccinated, which is estimated to be early March. He hopes something close to full reopening can be completed by May.
After that, with age groups most at risk of dying if they catch the virus overwhelmingly vaccinated, ministers should consider reassurances that future lockdowns will not happen, he argued.
“The Government basically has to say: ‘We’re not going to stop this by having lockdowns, we have other tools,'” Mr Harper said.
Both Mr Davis and Mr Harper accepted that a “no more lockdowns” promise could never be 100% binding, with the future course of the virus unknown. But they stressed it is essential that reassurances are provided to both employees and employers over the possibility of another national lockdown if the economy is to recover quickly.
The Times heard from other scientists pushing the suppression line, and more from Mark Harper.
Professor Robin Shattock, of Imperial College London, who is leading Britain’s most advanced effort to develop an RNA vaccine, said: “It would be very advisable to try to push the cases as low as possible to reduce the chance of additional variants. This would make sense alongside border restrictions.”
Mark Harper, head of the Covid Recovery Group of MPs, said: “The justification for lockdowns and the severe restrictions on people’s lives and freedoms was always saving lives, reducing hospitalisations and avoiding the NHS being overwhelmed. That must remain the position.” He said that “moving the goalposts risks never going back to normal, never reopening the economy, with a cost to people’s lives and livelihoods that simply isn’t acceptable in a free society”.
Stop Press: German news outlet DW reports on a draft Government document suggesting the lockdown in the country is set to continue till March over fears of virus mutations. “Considering the virus mutations, the steps to lift the restrictions must come carefully and gradually in order to avoid risking the successful curbing of infections,” it says.
Stop Press 2: The Telegraph reports that Public Health England has said there’s no indication the “dangerous” new variants are surging: “Dangerous coronavirus variants that may evade vaccines and the immune system are not increasing in Britain and people should be reassured that they are being kept under control,” the report says.
The Zero Covid Cult
Dermot Martin at Laboratory News has written a summary of the Zero Covid approach, which I thought was worth reproducing here in the spirit of Know Thy Enemy.
Vaccines are the great hope, but with the virus’s agility and ability to mutate, they can only be a part of the solution unless the infection rates are reduced to close to zero… A consensus is emerging among some in the scientific community that to breakout from this trap we need a fresh approach. It’s called Zero Covid and it is being discussed in Germany, Ireland and Canada. There seems to be little talk about it in the UK beyond an excellent comment piece in The Lancet.
Top German Virologist, Melanie Brinkmann, and physicist, Matthias Schneider, argue that it is time for a consistent containment strategy to avoid a permanent economic shutdown. It’s called Zero Covid. Instead of more passivity, they say, we need to design an active collective response and it needs to be a “bottom-up process” which embraces tangible and measurable goals leading to the termination of COVID-19.
“We have to move away from reactive harm reduction and towards proactive control of the pandemic, comprising all social, health and economic areas of our society, with a clear goal that enables a return to freedom and stability.”
This is what Zero Covid supporters want to see.
Zero Covid focuses on regional green zones
With Zero Covid there would be a firm regional focus. For example, in the UK, when the incidence of infection in a region falls to zero, that region should be declared a Green Zone. Intense, protective contact and travel restrictions should be imposed around this zone. Such a policy calls for robust test, trace, and isolate protocols which in the UK we have failed to effectively deliver locally – but we can improve.
Individuals and communities would be motivated to conform and support the plan as part of a social consensus – a collective objective for the regional populations. It would be assisted by local daily communication with the public.
The Zero Covid strategy takes a layered approach
The Zero Covid strategy would have several layers: an effective lockdown until defined regions reach below 10 cases per 100,000 people. Germany dropped as low as 2.5 cases per 100k last year. It is a doable target. In Melbourne, hitting this target only took four weeks to achieve.
The UK currently has 33 cases per 100,000 and with a Zero Covid policy the current lockdown would remain in place until the figure was below 10 cases per 100k. We might divide the UK along county lines with larger cities London, Birmingham, Manchester counted as counties in their own right. Once a region, county or city reaches near zero cases, it would be classified as a Green Zone. With this GZ status comes normal activity but only within carefully monitored county borders.
As other ‘adjacent’ GZs spring up, normal travel and interactions could take place, while protecting the hard-won successes and providing the rewards of Covid-free living.
The lynchpin of this system would be a rigorous test, trace and support system to ensure the spread does not resume and keeps Covid cases at zero. This would entail robust, sometimes painful, protocols and firm policing.
To cool any virus hotspots, locally based authorities could commit – as Australia and New Zealand did – to go hard and early in introducing new lockdowns and measures to tackle any new outbreaks. In a pandemic, we have seen that over reaction is the most effective response when it comes to stopping exponential growth.
Proponents of Zero Covid believe this new focus would be mentally good for the population. It might help reduce the passive daily consumption of Covid statistics on deaths, infections and hospitalisations.
Absolute fanatic.
Worth reading in full.
Playing With Our Theory of Mind
Today we’re publishing a new piece by Philosophy Lecturer at Newcastle University and Lockdown Sceptics regular Dr Sinéad Murphy. It’s an examination of how the Zero Covid crowd are looking to mess with our minds. Here’s the opening:
In an article on February 4th, Unherd’s Freddie Sayers reported on his attendance at an international conference that was held over three days during the previous week. Running under the title ‘Covid Community Action Summit,’ it was a forum for those interested in pursuing what is called ‘Zero Covid’.
Sayers was taken aback at the conference’s emphasis on communication strategies; it is as if they are planning a military campaign, he wrote, and this conference was their war room.
In illustration, Sayers quoted Tomás Ryan, an Irish neuroscientist employed by Trinity College Dublin. Ryan is a co-founder of Ireland’s ‘Independent Scientific Advocacy Group’, which aims to persuade the Irish Government to adopt a Zero Covid policy. Reflecting on the limited success so far of the Zero Covid campaign, Ryan told the conference: “You have to be playing with the theory of mind of your audience.”
This idea – that our “theory of mind” is to be “played with” – struck me as it might strike many who live with someone diagnosed with autism; a seminal experiment conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen over 30 years ago established that those diagnosed with autism lack a “theory of mind”.
For some time now, I have been suspicious of the extent to which this lack of a “theory of mind” is really disabling. In fact, I have begun to wonder whether it is having a theory of mind that is the bigger problem. And then, out of the blue, I find myself reading that one of the would-be architects of Ireland’s Zero Covid campaign has urged for more “playing with” our “theory of mind”.
So, what is it to have a “theory of mind”?
Worth reading in full.
Is COVID-19 Hysteria Driven by the Media? (Is the Pope Catholic?)
Professor Philipp Bagus, Professor of Economics at University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid and a Lockdown Sceptics reader, has a new article in a top journal entitled “COVID-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria”. He and his colleagues argue that “mass and digital media in connection with the state may have had adverse consequences during the COVID-19 crisis” particularly through driving “collective hysteria”. Here’s the abstract.
In this article, we aim to develop a political economy of mass hysteria. Using the background of COVID-19, we study past mass hysteria. Negative information which is spread through mass media repetitively can affect public health negatively in the form of nocebo effects and mass hysteria. We argue that mass and digital media in connection with the state may have had adverse consequences during the COVID-19 crisis. The resulting collective hysteria may have contributed to policy errors by governments not in line with health recommendations. While mass hysteria can occur in societies with a minimal state, we show that there exist certain self-corrective mechanisms and limits to the harm inflicted, such as sacrosanct private property rights. However, mass hysteria can be exacerbated and self-reinforcing when the negative information comes from an authoritative source, when the media are politicized, and social networks make the negative information omnipresent. We conclude that the negative long-term effects of mass hysteria are exacerbated by the size of the state.
This article is packed full of insights and well-referenced information about the crisis and repays reading in full.
SAGE Exclusive: PCR Tests With a Ct >25 Pick Up Non-Infectious Positives. No, really?
The SAGE minutes from December 21st contain a striking admission: that PCR tests above the 25 cycle threshold (Ct) are “not associated with transmission-type patterns meaning these people may be less infectious to others than those whose tests have a low Ct value”. This, they say, is a key reason why Lateral Flow Tests, though less sensitive, are no less reliable than PCR for containing the outbreak: “Lateral flow testing (which is more likely to identify cases which have a low PCR test Ct value) is better at identifying more infectious individuals than it is at identifying infected but less infectious people”. Here is the relevant section:
Use of household survey to measure infectiousness
39. Cycle threshold (Ct) values broadly categorise the concentration of viral genetic material in a patient sample following testing by RT-PCR (with higher Ct values corresponding to lower concentrations). Initial analysis from ONS COVID-19 Infection Survey (CIS) data up to December 7th showed that positive tests with high Ct values (>25) do not cluster with other positive tests (with either high or low Ct values).
40. This suggests that they are not associated with transmission-type patterns meaning these people may be less infectious to others than those whose tests have a low Ct value. Some caution is required with this finding, as higher Ct values were observed during the summer when other factors may have reduced within household transmission. However, it would be in line with expert opinion which suggests a Ct value of below 25 seems to be associated with viable transmission.
41. This also supports the hypothesis that lateral flow testing (which is more likely to identify cases which have a low PCR test Ct value) is better at identifying more infectious individuals than it is at identifying infected but less infectious people.
This is a vindication of an argument first advanced by sceptics like Dr Clare Craig, who saw the advantages of LFT over PCR tests in terms of avoiding false (non-infectious) positives back in November.
How Many Doctors Are Misattributing Covid Deaths?
A letter to the Telegraph yesterday raised this question once again.
Certified Covid deaths
SIR – My 94-year-old cousin died recently. Despite her having no symptoms, and negative Covid testing, her GP put Covid on the death certificate, even though he had not been to see her. At the family’s insistence, that untruth was removed and a more honest cause added. The GP rang to apologise.
How many more of these false certificates are being signed and what effect are they having on statistics?
Peter Welsh
Sale, Cheshire
Just How Many Forms Do You Have to Fill In to Become a Vaccinator in Scotland?!?
The retired GP who let us know he was volunteering to become a vaccinator has written with an update on the bizarre obstacles that keep being put in his way. Perhaps explains why Scotland is struggling to keep up with England in the vaccination programme.
I am a retired GP, and thought that with a lifetime’s experience (and being re-registered with the GMC) I would be able to quickly get involved on an unpaid basis and help with the initial vaccination campaign.
Nope. The only way in was to get a job as a professional vaccinator. Five weeks after applying I am now about to “start” which means start the online training. Hours and hours of slow grinding through modules with minimal new information, designed for brand new nurses training to be vaccinators. Despite accepting the post three weeks ago I have still not been vaccinated, so actually starting to vaccinate people is probably still two to three weeks away.
I am not certain about this, and am unsure how much is planned and how much cock-up, but I think there are two problems here in Scotland.
1. As I was retiring, a new Scottish contract for GPs was being negotiated. Due to a real shortage of GPs, our negotiators wanted to remove from our core role some services such as vaccination, which would be done thereafter by Board employees. Although it is possible to involve practices in the Covid vaccination effort a number of Health Boards (probably most or all) are choosing not to.
2. Our local Health Board seems to be creating a permanent vaccination force. That is fine for the longer term, but we needed an emergency response for the first few months, during which time we retired doctors and nurses could have carried the initial burden.
A retired English GP told me that he and his colleagues had been called by his old practice and asked to help out. Having been vaccinated in December (and having made sure that they were up to date with vaccines and responses to adverse reactions) they have been back working since the beginning of January.
General Practice, due to its small units, is flexible and able to react quickly to new challenges. In England, 75% of vaccinations have been done by practices, which I think shows why England is so far ahead.
Despite the sheer stultifying misery of renewed NHS employment, I will keep buggering on, at least for a few months.
Dear Harriet Harman…
Lockdown Sceptics reader Hugo Stolkin copied us into his email to Harriet Harman, his MP. We thought we’d share it with you.
I write to you as a constituent, born in King’s College Hospital, who campaigned in his childhood in the Lane Ward for the Labour Party, helping my father through the grim 1980s, canvassing for hours each evening against Bowden and Thatcher. I remain broadly left wing and liberal. I hate Brexit. I support the Rule of Law. And I still listen to my father, who continues, in semi-retirement, to teach medicine, as he has done for his whole career, originally at King’s London, and more recently at Guy’s/Thomas’s. I insisted that my children be vaccinated against MMR. And I have never forgotten two fundamental tenets of medicine that my father drummed into me from an early age: “first, do no harm”; and “damaging the economy damages people’s health”.
Lockdown is an obscenity. It will kill around 250,000 Britons in the coming years, from cancelled or delayed diagnoses and treatments and economic damage. Globally, the economic consequences will kill twice as many people as the number of those who died from violence in the whole of the twentieth century. Those people will die horribly, from hunger, poverty, cold, lack of shelter, and the inability to afford medical treatment.
Unpleasant as it is to recognise, on a normal day, in the UK, about 1,700 people die. Sometimes it’s 100 or 200 more. Sometimes it’s 100 or 200 less. But, roughly, it’s 1,700. In a week, it’s roughly 12,000, give or take a thousand, depending on the week in question. In a year it’s roughly 600,000, with a variation of five to ten percent. This has been the position for very many years.
2020 was no different. No more people died last year than in 2008. Yet, for no reason, and flying in the face of all the research and planning for pandemics done, over years, before Covid, we have destroyed the economy and the lives and livelihoods of millions.
No political party is speaking out against this. No mainstream media outlet is giving publicity to the absolutely rational position that lockdown must stop immediately, if far greater harm is to be prevented.
Please will you look at the objective data, that lockdown has saved few, if any, lives, and threatens to kill many more than will ever die with, or from, Covid? Please speak out against this government, which is cynically using Covid to hide decades of NHS underfunding, as well as the catastrophic economic impact of Brexit?
I think of myself as a resilient individual. I run regularly over the hills of South East London. I live in a large house, with a garden, in Peckham. There are parks all around. My children’s home-schooling is irritating but manageable. And, most importantly, the business I work in has continued to do well through 2020. But the moral obscenity of lockdown, the harm it is causing, and, perhaps most terrible of all, the failure of those in positions of authority to speak out against it, leave me shattered and despairing.
Please speak to Keir Starmer and your party and begin a new movement to bring down this murderous government and turn this catastrophe around.
Round-up
- “WHO’s rejection of Wuhan ‘lab leak’ theory leaves too many questions unanswered” – Ross Clark in the Telegraph is unconvinced by the WHO’s unseemly haste, poorly aided by lead investigator Peter Ben Embarek’s false assertion that laboratory accidents are “extremely rare”, to rule out one of the most compelling explanations for the origin of the virus. John Naish in the Mail agrees that the move it all too convenient for the Chinese Government
- “Christian liberty versus ‘lockdownism’” – Christian Concern‘s Dr Joe Boot on “the importance of liberty as an indispensable condition of life and human dignity”
- “Meeting others to worship is a lifeline” – Revd Dr William Philip in the Critic on why a group of Scottish clergy is taking the Government to court over church closures
- “Facebook extends ban on anti-vax misinformation” – Politico reports on the latest Covid censorship, as the social media giant bans content that claims “COVID-19 is man-made”, that “vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against” and that “vaccines are dangerous”
- “More bad faith” – Brendan O’Neill in Medium takes science writer John Gillott to task for his error-strewn criticism of spiked‘s Covid coverage
- “Hygiene Theatre Is Still a Huge Waste of Time” – Derek Thompson in the Atlantic on the strange obsession with scrubbing surfaces when the best current evidence shows SARS-CoV-2 spreads almost entirely through the air
- “Who Wanted Pandemic Lockdowns?” – Jeffrey A. Tucker on the AIER blog wonders who might have had a soft spot for locking down to fight the virus
- “The state is making a huge power grab, and it won’t be giving it up” – Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph asks why “salvation from the wretched virus is seemingly always just beyond the horizon, one last heave away from success” and what the world will be like afterwards
- “Rise in young women being hospitalised with severe Covid – but scientists are baffled as to why” – The Sun goes to Professor Carl Heneghan, who explains: “Given everyone who enters hospital irrespective of the reason is tested, then I’d treat this with caution”
- “Viral Myths: Why we risk learning the wrong lessons from the pandemic” – New report from the Institute of Economic Affairs on the “big story” that there is no “big story”: “Our long-standing ideological disputes about what the size of the state should be, how open our economy should be, or what type of health reform we need (if any) are not going to be settled by a virus”
- “Extending Their Claws: An Anarchist Analysis of the Pandemic as an Opportunity for State & Capital” – A radical Left wing view from the It’s Going Down blog
- “Government ‘gambling’ by keeping borders open, virologist tells James O’Brien” – The “virologist” in question is… Professor Devi Sridhar. Who is in fact an anthropologist by background and not in any way a “virologist”
- “No overseas holidays until October, says top scientist” – The “top scientist” in question is… Professor Devi Sridhar, who seemed to be ubiquitous yesterday pushing the Zero Covid agenda to all too willing broadcasters
- “Using political logic, quarantines, border closures and lockdowns may never end” – Professor Steven Schwarz in the Spectator Australia spots the flaw in the lockdown plan
- “The class of Covid will pay the price for years to come” – Ross Clark in the Spectator on a new report from the OECD estimating the long-term cost of disrupting children’s education
- “My Journey out of Lockdown (part 3)” – The final instalment on Left Lockdown Sceptics of Jo Nash’s attempt to get back to Scotland, focusing this time on the situation in India
- “The Only Thing To Fear Is Fear Itself – Dr Nicola Ridgeway Interview” – The Real Normal Podcast gang have their first guest, a Clinical Psychologist who talks about how mental health is being affected by the lockdown and how the Government has deliberately frightened a nation
- Mark Harper MP tweeted yesterday that Ministers are seeking MPs’ retrospective approval on measures that allow the sharing of health data with the police and a vote will take place today
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
They’re coming thick and fast. Ten today: “Hysteria” by Muse, “Living In A Ghost Town” by the Rolling Stones, “Under Pressure” by Queen & David Bowie, “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel (ft. Kate Bush), “Take The Power Back” by Rage Against The Machine, “Afternoons and Coffeespoons” by Crash Test Dummies, “Stop in the name of love” by the Supremes, “Ever Changing Times” by Aretha Franklin, “Forever and Ever” by Demis Roussos and “Crackdown” by Cabaret Voltaire.
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 as well as post comments below the line, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email Lockdown Sceptics here.
Sharing Stories
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Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, it’s the news that Historic England has followed the dubious example of the National Trust and carried out its own woke review of links to slavery. Allison Pearson has penned a searing critique in the Telegraph.
We are all guilty, ladies and gentlemen. You may think you live in a blameless village with a pretty church, a pub, a school, a newsagent and a duckpond. A village where the only thing of note to happen since the Norman Conquest was that time Gary, the postmistress’s nephew, changed the tyre on the Triumph Spitfire of Shelley from Bucks Fizz when she broke down on the B3199 in the summer of 1982.
Think again. You are the unwitting inhabitant of a festering sore on the nation’s conscience, a bastion of white privilege where the Ghost of Injustices Past stalks the High Street and gravestones weep remorseful tears for standing atop the remains of a 400-year-old slave trader whose very name strikes fear and loathing into every liberal heart. (Well, it would if the lettering on the gravestone weren’t obscured by a thick pelt of moss.)
That, at least, is the conclusion of Historic England, the Provisional wing of the Department of Culture which is given £88.5million of our money every year to teach us to be ashamed of our past and now, in an ambitious new move, the places where we live.
Inspired by the National Trust’s recent “Why Our Great Country Houses Secretly Stink” review (aka the Colonial Countryside Study), the woke busybodies of Historic England have tracked down evidence of the “transatlantic slavery economy” in an audit of halls, churches and pubs from Little Gidding to Great Snoring. Apparently, the strategy is intended to make heritage appeal to newly outlined “priority audiences” including “people with black, Asian or other minority ethnic heritage, and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer”.
And what a success it sounds. Why, I hear that hardly a day goes by in Tower Hamlets or Southall without the thwarted city dwellers clamouring to be patronised by a bunch of art historians from Historic England who live in expensively restored Georgian terraces in Hackney and have themselves visited the countryside on at least five occasions. Glastonbury, obvs, and there was that afternoon at Charleston, taking in the decorative art of the Bloomsbury Group until Guinevere found out that they were a bunch of snobs and fascists, and Fabien had to drive her to Brighton to have her chakras soothed.
A public body, whose job it is to preserve buildings and monuments, has helpfully drawn up a list of tainted places including chapels, where exploiters worshipped in centuries past, and the graves of slave profiteers and their relatives. All calculated to “better represent the diversity of England and our rich heritage”.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Seaford Head School in East Sussex has supinely dropped Winston Churchill and J. K. Rowling from its house names after some woker-than-thou students carried out a “consultation”. The students wrote: “Churchill was a figure who promoted racism and inequality, unfairly imprisoning and torturing many.” As for the Harry Potter author: “We no longer think that J.K. Rowling is a suitable representative, because of her recent words about the trans community.”
What are they teaching them?
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to obtain a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card – because wearing a mask causes them “severe distress”, for instance. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and the Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. And 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.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption. Another reader has created an Android app which displays “I am exempt from wearing a face mask” on your phone. Only 99p.
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 and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson’s Spectator article about the Danish mask study here.
Stop Press: US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr Anthony Fauci has said that masks will only go when “the level of virus is so low, it’s not a threat at all”. He told Fox News:
Then at that point, you can start thinking in terms of not having to have a uniform wearing of masks. But we’re certainly not near there yet. When do I think that would occur? It’s very difficult to predict, Bret, but if everything falls into the right place and we get this under control, it is conceivable that you might be able to pull back a bit on some of the public health measures as we get into the late fall of this year. But there’s no guarantee of that.
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 over three quarters of a million signatures.
Update: The authors of the GBD 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. Sign up to the newsletter here.
Stop Press: Facebook have deleted the GBD’s page because it “goes against our community standards”.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many legal cases being brought against the Government and its ministers we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
The Simon Dolan case has now reached the end of the road. The current lead case is the Robin Tilbrook case which challenges whether the Lockdown Regulations are constitutional. 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 and Runnymede Trust’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.
Scottish Church leaders from a range of Christian denominations have launched legal action, supported by the Christian Legal Centre against the Scottish Government’s attempt to close churches in Scotland for the first time since the the Stuart kings in the 17th century. The church leaders emphasised it is a disproportionate step, and one which has serious implications for freedom of religion.” Further information available here.
There’s the class action lawsuit being brought by Dr Reiner Fuellmich and his team in various countries against “the manufacturers and sellers of the defective product, PCR tests”. Dr Fuellmich explains the lawsuit in this video. Dr Fuellmich has also served cease and desist papers on Professor Christian Drosten, co-author of the Corman-Drosten paper which was the first and WHO-recommended PCR protocol for detection of SARS-CoV-2. That paper, which was pivotal to the roll out of mass PCR testing, was submitted to the journal Eurosurveillance on January 21st and accepted following peer review on January 22nd. The paper has been critically reviewed here by Pieter Borger and colleagues, who also submitted a retraction request, which was rejected in February.
And last but not least there was the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review on December 9th and the FSU has decided not to appeal the decision because Ofcom has conceded most of the points it was making. Check here for details.
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.
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
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Ten years’ prison for lying. And this is not fascism?
Darren Grimes: Why I Haven’t Been Posting As Much
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNkiYhXkwro&list=WL&index=35
“Darren Grimes confirms that he hasn’t been ‘Trumped’ by YouTube. He, like many, have struggled during this lockdown.
In pursuit of minimising one disease’s impacts, we have heightened the effects of others. I hope one good of this sorry saga will be that the shame circling mental health is exiled for good.”
Stop appealing to your captors for help Darren
What a pathetic young man.
“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” — Plato.
Oh, sorry, that wasn’t very nice. I take it back.
Can’t lie to the state.
But it can lie to you.
I was taught trust is a two way thing, which is why i’ve never trusted government.
And a fine decision I am of the same mind,I mean what is there to trust.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo4j8d6eEbs
Willie Dixon, I don’t trust nobody
Is Wankok more mad than he is evil, or more evil than he is mad?
Quem deus vult. perdere prius delirat.
He’s a wrong un either way. I had hoped Pfeffel might reshuffle the silly bastard with some hogwash that he is a war-time consigliere, but it appears they both want to go down the piano wire route.
When Boris and Nutnut shoot themselves in the bunker, will Wankok poison his wife, his children and himself?
Don’t tell me he and his wife have foisted more Wankcocks on the world?
It appears so, according to the video of him and brat(s) enjoying themselvesd in the park released a while back.
He possesses the sort of troubled ego that would. Kay Burley appeared to have him sussed and got him onside with lashings of over-the-top praise. He’s the type of fragile man we could persuade to get a tattoo that commemorates this special time and his role in it. Maybe that’s a bit too subversive.
Fingers crossed.
If only …. 😂
It was all bought up from music shops b4 the crisis hit… they foresaw the revolt.
Hamitup’s far too useful being the obvious patsy right now.
No one can be reshuffled.They all know where the bodies are buried.
Either way – the mere sight of his ugly, self-satisfied little face is enough for me to feel my blood pressure rising.
Me too. I really must stop spitting at the screen, it gets in such a mess.
I need a new clock radio in my bedroom after one of his announcements I er, turned the radio off in too forceful a manner and it er, fell apart. Don’t build them like they used to!
Glad to hear im not the only one.
‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad’.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Well,let’s hope it won’t be long then.
Issac Asimov’s best story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves
I honestly just don’t think he is all there. He seems to be on the aspergens/ autistic side of the spectrum. You only need to look at the video of him flopping in his chair in the commons or the creepy interview with the blond woman outside the hospital.
I suspect this allows him to remain dissonant to the devestation he is causing.
Yes, I’ve been wondering that. Johnson is clearly troubled when he speaks; Twitty and Van Tampax do to a certain extent also. Hancock just looks calm and composed, even faintly amused by it all. Can’t help thinking he knows a lot more than he’s letting on.
Matt practices his speeches in front of a mirror every night before bedtime.
Like Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p2ej4onSFA
Naaaaa he’s just a dick.
I think he is a sad sack
Who gave Matt the green light? Hmm?
It is absolutely ridiculous. Goodness knows I can think of someone locally that was only in prison for months for drink-driving and killing someone in the process. So longer prison spell for having a holiday than for drink-driving/resultant death on the one hand or rape on the other hand is ridiculous. Just because someone wanted a bit of sun and headed to another country to get it!
It’s high time the travel industry stood up for itself.
They will receive their payoffs, don’t worry, but the ‘travel industry’ for the lower middle classes is OVER.
Yep. Holidays for the foreseeable future will be like in the old USSR – overseas travel very difficult. Camping and hostels for the masses, heavily restricted and regulated hotels for the favoured few. We may not even be allowed that if restrictions on interior movement are retained. We may only get ‘holidays at home’ (restricted to local area) like in the war.
Not ridiculous at all. It is a staggered move to isolate certain populations. It is obvious given the island nature of the United Kingdom that harsher policies like mandatory vaccines will be tried out on a population that cannot escape. Possibly crowd control weapons that we haven’t yet seen used in public.
Hard fascism is coming fast. Enjoy it!
You know that something is massively wrong when REAL crimes such as rape and murder can get much less than that!!!
So the question arises as to what sort of way political prisoners would be treated in prison v. the actual criminals that would rightfully be in there. I know I’d certainly be calling myself a political prisoner if I were in there – to make it very plain I wasn’t a criminal/shouldnt be there.
Do you think Amnesty International would campaign on my behalf?
Unfortunately we can’t rely on Amnesty International as we don’t fit into their Messiah tendencies.
HA! Amnesty International is co-opted. And it NEVER gave a shit about white people like you!
In 1984 the normal criminals are treated much better than the political prisoners.
Don’t hold your breath.
More stalling for time.
I’ve read that it is the Fraud Act that would be used, which does have a maximum of 10 years imprisonment; however that would require a crown court trial by jury.
Well they did use the magic words up to 10 years.
Where did you read that? I wonder because it directly contradicts what Matt Hancock told parliament. He said that the law to criminalise lying about where one had been would be introduced this week. This means the law does not yet exist. Moreover, lying about where one had been would not be fraudulent.
Irony – a politician introducing a law to criminalise lying eg “three weeks just to flatten the curve”
So when will we pronounce sentencing on Matt H?
Not that I’m promoting rule breaking, but here’s my thoughts in rhyme on this new jail time.
Hancock shall never dictate,
Who of us shall be an inmate,
If I go to Peru,
What can Hancock do?
He is not in control of my fate.
We must seek a sound alibi,
If to the cops we must lie,
To escape quarantine,
And our freedom redeem,
Our records we must falsify
It’s fascism. Not “Marxism”, not “communism”. Fascism. And had the last month’s events in the United States happened in, say, Ecuador, or Azerbaijan, they would have been called out as what they were.
Just taking a glance over at the Marxist fist on the ‘Free-speech Union Advert’…
Hancock should be locked up for about 10,000 years in that case.
It’s Fascism Jim, and we know it.
Define ‘we’.
‘No Escape From Stalag Britain’ – title of the 1st article of the day.
‘Ten years’ prison for lying. And this is not fascism?’ – 1st top 140+ upvoted ‘community’ comment made at approx. 4pm in British-time morning.
Both comments deliberately driving opposition opinion away from describing this tyranny for what it is: communist.
No coincidence.
This is a false opposition website and it needs called out.
Edit: That was meant ‘4am‘ British time – pretty damn early…
The category that has most benefited from the coronavirus responses are the billionaires, who have seen their wealth increase by trillions of dollars. This transfer of wealth is not communism. Communists do not throw money at the capitalists.
Time to abduct some billionaires and hold them for ransom.
Quit saying that there is no escape. Fight back.
No, it’s hard core Totalitarianism. Matt is a deranged individual. Needs a straightjacket.
Handjob (before): “vaccines will solve all the problems”
Handjob (now): “vaccines might not solve all the problems”
Me: “STOP INSULTING MY FUCKING INTELLIGENCE!”
In January, the (fortunately very few) zealots that I know, were crowing about how close we were to the vaccine ending the restrictions, and so it was doubly important that we follow the rules 🙄. I am no virologist but I do know viruses mutate. From what I can gather there are thousands of strains of Covid. Now, the policy makers have admitted this fact and also admitted they have quarantined 100,000,s of non infections people because they have been running the PCR tests at over 25 cycles. So just WHEN do these zealots expect this to end???
We are living in an age where ‘here no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’ is the new mantra of the general public. Most people are aware that viruses like colds and flus mutate every year, just as they are aware it get colds in winter and warm in summer (mostly). But it seems the majority of people out there have lost all prior knowledge or life experience in favour of following ‘the science’. It is a master class in mental manipulation!!
You can’t point any of this out to these sheep; just as you won’t be able to point out the cycle rate, the fall in infections due to seasonality etc.
Yep…well I’ve been saying I’m doing a Three Wise Monkeys act of “hear no evil/see no evil/speak no evil” – but what I am referring to is I don’t notice (apparently LOL) any Lockdown rule-breaking and am not a Covid snoop.
Never
If the UK were applying the same rules to ” cases” as New Zealand the crisis would be over here as well.
NZ requires
1) A 2nd confirmation PCR test of a first positive.
2 )PCR tests run up to 23 x Ct.
Hey Presto – crisis over and a virus free island.
The current virus SARS-Cov-2 causes the Covid 19 pneumonia. 99.95% who get that disease recover. SARS 2 is 78% the same as SARS 1 – that’s why it’s called number 2 – and all these current mutations, instead of ‘Kent’ ‘Brazil’ etc, could be called SARS 3, SARS 4 etc. The good news is that basic virology tells us that mutations, though more transmissable, are usually less harmful so let’s tell these ‘our souls’ to Foxtrot Romeo Oscar.
You are going to need some bigger numbers. There were ~78,000 variation back in April 2020, with at least 300 in the UK. There are probably double that now.
Ferguson quoted today saying the Kent variant blindsided them. Its shows how much SAGE know about viruses and how desperately they need to have a lot of virologists advising them (AFAIK there are none on SAGE). They are fucking useless. The NN (I think) posted about Clades yesterday, I had never heard of them, so I looked it up. I was educated, viruses randomly mutate all the time, its not breeding, its just random because they are such simple organisms. It cant be contained, stopped, predicted or managed. Which is exactly why there is no vaccine for the common cold viruses. They aren’t smart they aren’t anything, they are just viruses, one of the simplest forms of life.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.30.402487v1.full
If anyone reads this they would understand this whole shit show is a vanity and money spinning exercise. No one in the civil service or government seems to spend a minute of their time educating themselves and as for Joe Zealot, they get their news from mumsnet and facebook and Piers Moron so it must be true..
They need more clinical scientists and doctors of medicine as well as economists. The people they have are ‘academic’ people with no medical training whatsoever.
Most of them are behavioural psychologists. The rest are merely their mouthpieces.
Most of them are vaccinators, so it is entirely unsurprising that vaccines, vaccines and even more vaccines are the answer.
Behavioural psychologists=social engineers.
What you say might have been true, if all this nonsense was really about combatting a novel coronavirus. It isn’t, so what you and some others are suggesting wouldn’t work in any event. The rabbit hole goes much deeper.
Their ignorance is just a facade for the public who know no better. It all feeds into ‘the myth of danegrous and unknown territory with the brave scientists valiantly struggling to cope with an Evil Virus. This nonsense would be over if the real medics/scientists had the guts to stand en masse. “All it takes for evil to succeed is good men to do nothing”?
The vaccines work.
Well we need to change the dose plan but they still work.
Well we might not be able to give this one to over 70s, but take this one.
Well we might need a booster in autumn.
Well we might need a mixture of vaccines. With boosters.
Yes you should wear a mask and lock yourself indoors.
Kerrrchinggg!
It’s all about the Benjamins baby, as some young female US politico from The Squad bravely said.
This is what Johnson & Johnson does with some of its profits:
https://rwjms.rutgers.edu/
They have finally set up shop in Canada. In New Brunswick.
Handjob has a brain the size of a gerbil.
Virus’s will mutate. So the risk can never be reduced to zero. The logical extension of this is that we should restrict travel to the immediate locale, be it city block or village. A country is far too big an area to allow unrestricted access and be able to contain a mutating virus at the same time. We should venture out in a hazmat suit, and then only for emergencies or to clap to the NHS gods once a week. The rest of the time should be spent indoors. We should spend the entire GDP on vaccines and daily PCR testing. This should continue for the next 10,000 years or so, longer if people do not comply. It may seem excessive but if it saves just one life it is worth it. Remember that we are all in this together and to please put a rainbow picture in your window. These can be purchased from Amazon.
so true – would have thought any virologist would know that
I wonder if any of these “scientists” are really who they say they are.
I have started to give the lizard theory more credence…
Who knows? Hancock is Health Minister yet he has degrees in philosophy and politics. A bit like me training as a hairdresser but seeking a job as a shorthand typist.
No. He has a degree in PPE.
… along with a disproportionate number of others in the HoC.
‘Nuff said.
And that’s not personal protective equipment
So he isn’t even up to being a dodgy secondhand car salesman? Wot is the woild coming too?
How about the film Being There with Peter Sellers? He was a gardener.
Matt Hancock is not a virologist, he’s a puppet.
Also death from disease will be illegal and anyone found guilty of dying will have to spend ten years in prison the selfish bastards.
Long since worked out how to walk to the (very nearby) next county on back ways – in case they put up county boundaries one isn’t allowed to walk over. I just won’t speak to any of those living just across the county boundary in a settlement there – because I know there’s quite a high proportion of Covidians amongst them and that, coupled with a big tendency locally, to ask exactly where one lives (and it is often asked in order that they can graciously make up THEIR minds how I should live MY life LOL).
I’ve been doing the same. Worked out the back routes around my area a while ago; which ones are useable by motor car, which ones accessible only on foot or by bicycle. Have been progressively doing longer and longer bicycle rides, the intention is to be able to do without a motor car if necessary, ie if movement outside one’s area is restricted (realistically that can only be done by ANPR, so a bicycle will not be checked).
Just carry a bit of paper saying “Can’t speak; valid reason for travel concerning mental health”. They will soon foxtrot including the unwashed.
The unwashed foxtrot. The new dance sensation.
The Great Reset wants you to live in a highly dense, vibrant city and save the countrywide for the animals.
Why does Hugo Stolkin spend so much of his email to Harriet Harman establishing his woke credentials and boasting about his wonderful life and in the process make sure that his email is far too long to be absorbed? Being generous, perhaps, as someone ‘connected’, he knows that Harman is as inhumane and power obsessed as the rest of them and only lashings of wokeness and pressing all the available buttons has any chance of penetrating her hide. The second paragraph is the only one that matters although a slimmed down version of the third and fourth might have been worth adding.
If any MP is unaware of what is going on by now then I doubt any letter is going to have any effect.I could list everything you are not allowed to do but it would take too long.Basically life consists of going to work,shopping in supermarkets and going for a walk in the park.And millions of people are unable to work by force of government edict.
Why is he even bothering to appeal to Labour/Starmer? The only criticism the Opposition have presented is the government should have been more draconian and have been quicker about it, and should have spent even more inflicted even greater harm.
Be’s bothering because to do something is better than to do nothing.
And it will help to prove, at Nuremberg, that these witless, spineless, pseudo-political poodles knew perfectly well what evil was being done in their name, and sent along with it, in many cases enthusiastically.
This is not a given. The very reason we are in this mess is because people (in government) have done something when actually they should have done nothing.
Time after time, in fact, ‘something must be done’ is the hue and cry from the media and the public. To which the politician responds, ‘well, this is something, so we must do this’, no matter how nonsensical the ‘something’ is. All because they conclude that, as you say, “to do something is better than to do nothing”.
First do NO harm
Agreed. The best advice to give the public sector is “don’t just do something, stand there”.
These days the clear statement of woke credentials are required before they will look at the content of the letter. Although to be fair, writing to the Labour Party was pointless. It’s not as if they’ve offered any viable opposition to government for the last ten years.
Just to put this into more detailed perspective :
The election of Starmer has put the Labour Party firmly back in the hands of pole-climbing establishment shills. The regime has ‘come out’ and tried to frantically shut down the active involvement of members through the established system of accountability and substitute diktat by unelected functionaries.
Meanwhile, the surge of know-nothing placemen/women as MPs that happened under Blair has continued to have its continuing effects in terms of the Commons.
… as we’ve seen vividly throughout this situation.
Continuing deleterious effects.
He’s a pragmatist. He’s doing anything he can to get her to see he is rational. MPs ignore most of our emails and send a stock reply because they’ve been warned an evil right-wing extremist group (driven by QAnon) is determined to infect everyone’s minds with conspiracy theories. Because, in the beginning, most of us who knew in our gut something was wrong but couldn’t show what, had no evidence. So we did all sound like conspiracy theorists. But sometimes a theory is TRUE. Sometimes there IS a conspiracy. The BBC conspired to hide Jimmy Savile, the police conspired to hide the truth about Hillsborough. Governments and tobacco companies conspired to hide the truth about the dangers of smoking. These things were covered up for YEARS! That is where we are. Except this time the harms are all worse and more wide spread. But you will never get the attention of an MP or mainstream journalist by saying, “the whole thing is a complete con and now people at dying from a hastily approved vaccine.” You HAVE to nudge the door open with, “Look what a rational person I am, I’m on your side, always have been, here’s a picture… Read more »
Hannah Arendt said that totalitarianism brings about, in otherwise intelligent people, ‘a quite authentic inability to think’.
https://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/attheintersectionoffaithandculture/2020/04/a-curious-but-quite-authentic-inability-to-think-the-making-of-the-flat-curve-society-and-the-corona-walkers.html
As witness the blank uncomprehending faces we are already finding when we tell people we know (even those we used to think of as friends) that we’ve decided not to have The Jab. It’s like it does not compute with them and they regard having The Jab as automatic/not to be even thought about as a decision to make for/against.
Exactly. They always look at me like I’m a cross between a psycho and leper. I’ve stopped telling the brainwashed fools. Very saddening.
So true.
‘Harriet’ spent her time in the late 70s and early 80s, along with Patricia Hewitt, providing legal assistance to an organisation called ‘the Paedophile Information Exchange’.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is fact. Harriet Harman tried to make fucking children respectable.
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/paedophile-rights-campaign-still-causing-stink-harriet-harman-40-years-1437152
Tell me more about what a decent woman she is.
Indeed. The pair of them were a disgrace. Harman claimed there was ‘no evidence that children are harmed by early sexual encounters’. She is quite a stupid woman – she gave her young sons girls’ toys to play with and was puzzled when they weren’t interested in them. So, we can see that inept and totally unsuitable persons being voted into parliament is nothing new.
Harriet Harperson.
I noticed that too. Subconsciously he is aware that the content will be totally disregarded unless it is made clear very early on the he hates Brexit. At least he knows his audience. These MPs are fascist, bigoted, moronic idiots masquerading as liberal human rights warriors. If she got a whiff of anything more conservative than Marx it would be binned or sent to the Stasi as a hate crime.
In fact I am wondering if we would be better off prefacing our MP letters with “I am a Brexit-hating, post-human, trans woman, identifying as a non-binary mixed-race unicorn, vegan (in January, except Chicken) who drives a Prius and an avid Guardian reader (Personal pronouns: Xe/Xim)”.
Pathetic
Excellent TBP, thanks, I’ll try your last paragraph on Whately. I think driving a top of the range Tesla might have more cut through in these parts amongst her voters.
Sometimes its easier to get an answer if you knock on the door instead of kicking it in. I’m the kicking in kind, but in life I have seen others get a lot more success than me by knocking.
So, to clarify….
The average rape conviction is 7 years. But your getting 10 years in prison for lying about travel destinations.
OTT punishments and extended restrictions are the beginning of Zero COVID policies. International travel is now unachievable outside of high level sports and the ruling classes. The government is positioning for the NZ/Australian model. ‘Variants’, ‘vaccine resistant’ are the buzzwords that will drive this policy.
On another note, did anyone work out what happened to the Flu? I noticed a heavily subsidised FB video appeared which seems to be saying that COVID has killed off the Flu in a biological sense. I also read it is down to social distancing and the use of unregulated, face masks . Either way, why isn’t there more of a fanfare for the elimination of this endemic disease that has been described in texts going back over 2500 years? I would expect this to be front page news.
Good new is not allowed.
Not that I believe the flu claim anyway. It’s part of the Great Covid Lie.
Me neither. Almost certainly misattribution. Small chance of out-competed. what say Yeadon?
Opinion is very divided.
It could be:
1) Misattribution.
2) Zealotry
3) The flu may have been supplanted in the host by a newer similar virus in the process alleged above and as detailed over 40 years ago in “The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza by R Edgar Hope- Simpson” which was also commended by Ivor Cummins in his podcast 104 on Vit D
So the last supplantion theory has serious credibility.
It is very unlikely that socialist distancing and muzzles have stoped flu dead and make no difference to Covid, the methods / vectors of transfer are alleged to be the same.
That’s one of the interesting things about all this. There’s never any real good news. There are hints and rumours and announcements about mights and maybes, but never anything concrete. If anything like that comes up, ie, ‘vaccines will save us’, the government quickly pours cold water on it with some new fear porn.
I am pretty sure that previous authoritarian regimes, eg the Nazis and the Soviets, did not do this – they knew that good news was important to keep spirits up. Even late into 1944 the Germans were claiming in newsreels that they were winning the war and victory was just around the corner.
This lack of even the slightest hope for the population may just prove to be the downfall of the government – even a prisoner in jail has a release date.
If you look at the ONS figures for deaths involving flu and pneumonia in 2020 they are at the same or a slightly higher level than the average of the last 5 years for the period after March.
Why does virtually nobody look at the COVID situation rationally, even accomplished statisticians who you would expect should know better. I have been looking at numbers from 4 countries, concentrating on the excess death count, the most objective of figures. Firstly, the UK. We have a very reliable analysis of excess deaths on an age adjusted mortality basis (AAMR – i.e. adjusting for differences in population and ages between the calendar years) from the institute and Faculty of Actuaries. This shows that there were 54,600 excess deaths in England and Wales over the period from the beginning of the pandemic (14 March 2020) to 1 January 2021. What is interesting is that 51,000 of those were in weeks 10-24 (14 March to 14 June), minus 6900 from 15 June to September 13 (i.e fewer people died than normal in that period), and 10,500 from 14th September to 1st January 2021. So the vast majority of the deaths last year were in March – May, particularly April when excess deaths were running at around 11,000 per week. But to put that into perspective take the oldest and worst affected population demographic, the over 90s. They have a 1 in 4.6 chance of dying in… Read more »
Why are our oppressors so innumerate, you ask?
It’s an old question, though its lethal consequences have only become fully apparent since the beginning if the bollox.
Somebody, I think it was John Allen Paulos, pointed out long ago that whereas to be illiterate in our society is thought to be shameful – or at least, a shameful condition that is somebody else’s fault – no stigma attaches to innumeracy, which many people admit to with a laugh, or even boast about. The abysmal standard of school mathematics is both a symptom and a cause.
Yet another abscess in the rotting body of British society.
l
From an Amazon synopsis of Paulos’ book Innumeracy:
“A humorous study which suggests that our inability to deal rationally with very large numbers, or the probabilities associated with them, results in misinformed governmental policies, confused personal decisions and an increased susceptibility to pseudo-sciences of all kinds.”
And how.
Last year I encountered a fourteen year old who asked me, ‘What is twice 43’, ‘Eighty-six’. I responded. He seemed very pleased to have his problem solved.
Endeavouring to teach him something I said, ‘So what is twice four’. ‘Six’, he answered. I frowned, ‘Oh sorry, five’, he said. He was being taught science! Probably has all the makings of an epidemiologist.
I am not sure what proportion of the population has ‘achieved’ this level of innumeracy.
About 149%. Or eleventy million in real terms.
Gosh, as bad as that.
Brilliant, best laugh all day
My daughter has a friend who is a primary school teacher. She’s probably quite a good teacher, BUT….. She needed a pass at GCSE maths in order to get into teacher training college. It took her 2 attempts to pass the exam, merely scraping the bottom grade the second time.
It’s people like that who are teaching maths to the very young. And you wonder why the nation is innumerate.
That doesn’t really make sense. The fact she struggled so hard to pass the exam might make her a better teacher who can understand how hard maths is for some learners.
Thats the optimistic view!
And then again it might make her bloody useless.
Numbers? I am numblexic so numbers are maths is something that is just a little broken with me. As a result I know I am really crap at maths and numbers. So I don’t really get a sense of the values involved, the relationship between values is lost on me somehow, an abstract concept, not innate, not a natural feeling.. I need to really think about it. I have never really managed to pin down exactly what the problem is with me and maths. I just had the idea that people who have a little ability in maths THINK they are much better at numbers than they really are. To a person who is really good at maths I would imagine its like being good at another language and its almost like philosophy. Most people are just OK at “maths”, adding up n taking away and that.. So here we have the infallibility of numbers and maths for them. A rigid belief in statistics and maths and numbers. They are SO GOOD at maths….That there can be no criticism or some numbers presented as credible from a source they see as really good with numbers and so, infallible. Perhaps in… Read more »
While still at junior school, my granddaughter was expected to do the sort of maths I did for o-level. So it was before her basic numeracy skills and grasp of arithmetic were firmly in place. I blame the national curriculum, which frequently puts the cart before the horse.
Some are indeed pretty innumerate and it’s just how it is. I’m one of them and, thankfully, I can work out figures enough to do basic arithmetic and keep on top of my finances. But gawdaloneknows how I got a good result in an official IQ test done on us all way back in my schooldays – as I try to remember just how much of that test must have been to test that aspect out. Yep – 130 IQ and I didn’t pass my maths O level LOL.
should of chalked up in darts more
It appears plainly obvious to me that the vaccine is having little-to-no impact on figures and may in fact be making things worse.
No better or worse, just a panacea for the collaborators.
Watch UK Column for Monday. Care home deaths appear to be correlated with vaccinations.
https://www.ukcolumn.org/ukcolumn-news/uk-column-news-8th-february-2021
The vaccines are having an effect, but regrettably it seems to be death.
that and improving the bottom line of Big Pharma.
Great post. Thanks.
Brilliant stuff! Thanks.
Very interesting.
There were many excess deaths in the US from dementia last year (tens of thousands I seem to recall reading), so your figure is presumably too high. As a starting point, however, it’s very enlightening.
Thanks.Great post again
“ the excess death count, the most objective of figures.”
Sorry – but it isn’t. ‘Excess deaths’ is a rubber ruler, stretched and distorted to suit.
In the present situation with the distortion of causes, the ‘most objective of figures’ is all-cause mortality placed in a meaningful context.
Yes, but many deaths are the direct result of lockdowns and refusal to treat.
It’s the great reset by the technocrats. Say goodbye to all freedom
Statistically literate people have been looking at the data and pointing things out from day 1. There was a time when Prof Spieglehalter would be giving his opinion to radio progs and things as often as sandwich board Ferguson. I have heard seminars and talks from real stats researchers that had more than a skeptic tone to them. But the fact is, only a small fraction of real researchers like the media attention, and many just prefer to toil away in private and only present findings to colleagues. Very few scientists are the absolute narcissists of the Ferguson type – so absolutely resolute in the importance of their own research that they indulge in the media circus as frequently as he does. I had an unpleasant experience of unwanted press for a paper I published about 5 years ago, and it is not something I would repeat in a hurry. It takes a lot of energy to continuously counter dodgy science pushed with the fervour that Ferguson does, and I would guess many statistical researchers just want to get on with their own work. Not an excuse as such, just reality. Everyone is trying to get through this in their… Read more »
Just scanned the headlines but must say I am very glad the zero-Covid nutters are firmly in the crosshairs. Even your average bedwetter is starting to turn against these clowns. This needs to be the thin end of our wedge that we ram home until they are chewing on the entire sceptic argument.
Also good to see SAGE minutes being scrutinised. Hopefully this site is finding its way again.
anybody that advocates the mass stripping of human rights should be declared a domestic terrorist. that includes the government, zero-covid and the majority of the public health weirdos
I genuinely think we can attain a very large foothold by very vocally and very visibly discrediting zero-Covid. It is (and always was) pie in the sky.
It’s a religion in NZ.
They are the global equivalent of ‘stay at home’ goons. Enjoying their imports and services that come from the toil of others whilst also lording it over the very same people that they judge so harshly. Horrible selfish country.
I know! VERY shocked when a formerly intelligent friend in NZ expressed joy at being “covid free”!
We don’t all follow it here – are you aware of covidplanb.co.nz?
Are you in NZ? We have to break this insane narrative. NZ is being used to “prove” you can achieve “zero covid”. Any country can achieve “zero covid” if they stop testing people!!
PS I just found this site. THANK YOU! It’s NZ’s version of HART. We need more international cooperation and coordination between these independent groups (PANDA is another one) to put pressure on governments. Anyone know any others in other countries?
PANDA is excellent. Richard Atlas on board.
They don’t all think it’s amazing, I know several Kiwis who think of life as now being in a permanent prison.
Yes; in that case, more fool them for tolerating it. As I often say about New Zealand, any country which actually has an official post of “Chief Censor” deserves everything it gets.
I am deeply saddened by the current generation of Kiwis, who bear little resemblance to the magnificent generation of WWII.
It is a one way street. Immunity comes through exposure to nasty things like germs and bugs and such. Over time, the will end up like the Martians in War of the Worlds when something nasty does break through their barriers.
100% agree. I caused some offence on Facebook the other day by stating that the country’s being run by ‘sociopathic academics on a power trip’. But it is.
If I was feeling optimistic, I would think they were offended by your use of ‘sociopathic’ rather than ‘psychopathic’.
According to YouGov polls the majority back quarantine etc. Over 70% back travel restrictions and over 83% think we should have to quarantine. I am amazed.
I wonder if more and more people are waking up to the fact that the government are taking the piss with their endless Teenage Mutant Ninja virus versions.
Is it news to them that viruses mutate? Who knew?
Time to exert more pressure on these clowns. The more they expose themselves the more the gullible will start to wake up and see how they’ve been played.
On yesterday’s ATL another quack was saying not to worry that the vaccine did not cover The SA mutation because your body could deal with the mutation. WHAT’S THIS? Our immune system can deal with the virus? How can this be? We need more jabs!! What’s that old joke more pricks than a porcupine!!
You obviously have no idea what is going on. Extreme positions are put forward, then false opposition or scepticism to them is the response and then later on those extreme positions are accepted.
It is a form of conditioning wherby the subject is more likely to accept something he is familiar with beforehand.
Yes. Psy-op!
You do not ‘write to your MP’ or ‘vote’ your way out of a dictatorship, but it’s going to take at least another 12 months for people to realise this.
The world as you know it has gone.
“What luck, for governments, that the people are stupid!” – Adolf Hitler
utterly gone. Only way out will be very violent….and may be in generations, not 12 months or so. So depressing. Any other conclusion, for me, is a denial i can’t keep up any more.
Very well said
I feel that too
There’s really only 2 ways out of this thoroughly corrupt system of (western) governance. Civil war in the west, an ideological war which in all practical terms has already started. (the other side is winning). A natural disaster that dwarfs the covid narrative. I’ve felt for a long time now that there’s no political solution to the way civilisation is evolving. The system now exists to serve itself, people are just the cogs that maintain it. The western system of governance has become to powerful to be overthrown by civil unrest. With every technological advance we impose greater slavery upon ourselves to the system. I think the only way to save our humanity is if nature in some way intervenes & we are humbled by a major natural event! I know that sounds exceptionally pessimistic & of course I don’t want people to suffer but I think that’s what it will take to save our species. Otherwise we are just becoming more & more like drones in an ant colony. Either way the future is bleak, nothing stays the same forever, forget the old normal its history its never going to be that way again regardless of how you feel… Read more »
Or
3. China over reach and start a kinetic war against Taiwan or maybe even Australia….
True I did not notice I was not living in a democracy until I needed a democratic answer to a problem. There have been too many “face saving” opportunities missed by this government. In the summer deaths were miniscule. They could have busted out the flags and boasted that they had it beat. Instead they ramped up testing to massive amounts and then mandated masks?? Now we reach another victory chance, hospital admissions down, deaths down, infections down. Do it now. We have it beaten, vaccines a success we did it. Thow away your mask, all praise the fat pig dictator. BUT! Still they dither, why? You can say your lockdowns worked, shut all us sceptics up and be carried off on shoulders. This just highlights to me they don’t have a dinky doo! They are just blustering along cherry picking other countries ideas. You have noticed NZ is the other side of the world. Did you notice the vast majority of the countries on that side of the world all had the same virus conditions and results? Italy are moving away from lockdown, France is teetering and you just totally ignore Sweden. I cannot wait to read handjob and… Read more »
Moolah and vaccine ensure they don’t waver.
It is very indicative that many mythic and cosmic cycles ,such as the Kali Yuga, point to 2025 – 30 as significant. The Hopi term Koyaanisquatsi, meaning life out of balance is just about where we are now. The film from 1982 by Godfrey Reggio, scored by Phillip Glass shows this well.
Yes its time those like Peter Hitchens realised that too. I have great respect for him but think his strategy for getting out of this is a pathetic joke.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-124394/v2
Hancock is done for now!
Hysterics in the extreme.
Hope this now gets used to bring perspective
He’s been unhinged for some time. I’m surprised our security services aren’t more concerned.
Could well be a cry for help. “What the fuck do I have to say before they cart me out and lock me up a nice, safe hospital?” I used to think trump was doing that, too, when he made his insane remarks on Twitter.
Every word he utters and decision he enacts is fully approved over his head. A minister is only a messenger for the PM.
I love the lockdown. Another lie to add to my charge sheet.
Hannah Arendt, contemplating Eichmann, noted that he could jettison one set of rules and moral concepts and espouse another, however evil, without difficulty and without being aware of any contradiction. This made notions of guilt, remorse, and moral responsibility irrelevant to him.
Wankok to the life. Could they be related?
Approx 2% of men can apparently kill without remorse.
It doesn’t mean that they do but maybe some just seek to use power and do it wholesale.
Have a nice day,everyone.
His non-verbal language gives him away – those facial expressions. So it’s not a case with him of “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”. He knows very well what he’s doing – but does it anyway.
He’s full-blown NPD. Zero empathy, narcopath.
Both sociopaths.
Good morning.
Not sure if it;s been posted but Oxford Uni to look at ivermectin about which msm seems to have gone quiet.
If Third World countries seem to be using it effectively then you would like to think even the fools and duplicitous so and sos in the msm here might push it more? God knows they push all the other, negative news.
Link here:https://trialsitenews.com/oxfords-principle-trial-bringing-ivermectin-directly-into-the-developed-world-in-the-battle-against-covid-19/
If I’ve learned anything from this epidemic it will be never to buy a newspaper again, nor to subscribe to them online and probably ( but only when SWMBO goes) junk the TV set.
It seems to me that if a quarter of the effort and money that has been ploughed into vaccines had been directed at treatments for serious covid we would be now have treatments in place that would have relegated this disease to an irksome nuisance rather than a cause for mass hysteria.
if we’d spent the money we spent on tackling this ‘pandemic’ elsewhere, we could have cured cancer and had a Mars base
She Who Must Be Obeyed.
I’ve got one of those too.
Yes got two. Wife and 21 yo daughter!
The Light Paper is your friend
“Already pressure is mounting from backbench MPs”
I read this phrase a lot and all it ever amounts to is the “pressure” of a wet fart in the wind.
Absolutely. Always the definition of controlled opposition
Do we think a subversive campaign to get Covid-nutters to ink themselves would work? Something that shows them up for the complete sausages they are. Like the Manchester bee one (which I don’t have a problem with btw).
Getting them to wear two masks at once is good enough for me.
I was thinking something more permanent. Something regrettable and that requires remedial action.
HE HE
Are we saying ‘red list countries ‘ because to say ‘bla*k list countries’ is racist?
Gross insult to ‘native Americans’.
But of course, you’re right. Woke Fascism.
Yes most of Africa is is on the red list
The 10 years/quarantine/hard borders is straight from the zero-covid lot. Devi Sridhar has been banging the drum for effectively permanently closed border for ages.
It seems the zero-covid fanatics are now running the show. So expect lockdown to move into regional tiers with travel restricted between them
I remember hearing someone say that whilst a successful company needs a good accountant it is important that the Chief Executive makes sure that the accountant never runs the company, they will run it into the ground with caution. It seems to me that Hancock and all the health tyrants are very much in the accountant category and with no effective Chief executive to take a dynamic pro-active approach they are like a bunch of accountants running the country into the ground with caution.
The fault lies with Johnson, a vacuous, lazy, spineless jelly-bag who is completely out of his depth. It should be him who is standing up and shaping the overall direction of our Public Health Policy and defining what it is for and what it can and cannot do.
As it is he is letting the accountants run the company into the ground.
good analogy. yes. if you let any special interest group run the country it would be a fuck up.
the zero carbon lot or the road traffic accident campaigners or anti-meat etc
any group would ban the thing they don’t like. The politicians should balance freedom with harm – always erring towards freedom
The current group running the country are trying to ‘ban’ covid and by the time they realise its a fool’s errand there won’t be anything left
I agree about Johnson. His initial ‘take it on the chin’ approach was correct. But he couldn’t stand up to the health fascists. It would have been easy to do – ‘show me the cost benefit analysis’, ‘we are sticking with the pandemic plan until you give me a good reason not to’, ‘anybody who advocates wide-scale human rights removal will be put in prison’ etc
and there’s no way back for him. he deferred to the public health oddballs – to overrule them now would be to admit the entire strategy was wrong
he needs removing
He was hit by covid (allegedly) at just the right time. Back in 2001, some US politicians opposed the introduction of the pre-written US PATRIOT Act as a response to the 11 September incident. They, and some like minded media people, just happened to receive letters containing military-grade anthrax. Unsurprisingly, they changed their minds.
Sweden coming to the end of their second season
A free liberal democracy with less ‘deaths’ than most of fascist Europe
Hi everyone.
HUGE NEW PODCAST TODAY!
https://therealnormalpodcast.buzzsprout.com/1268768/7768657-ep-19-the-only-thing-to-fear-is-fear-itself-dr-nicola-ridgeway-interview
This week we have our first guest – Dr Nicola Ridgeway a Clinical Psychologist who wants to talk to us about the current covid mental health crisis.
We talk about how mental health is being affected by the lockdown. How the government has deliberately frightened a nation. We talk about fear, comfort behaviors like wearing a mask, life and much more.
I’m really proud of this episode. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did making it.
Lord R.
Very good edition which explores our thinking etc – some nuggets for everyone here!
Brilliant episode. She gave very good advice. Open your business, don’t wear a mask, live your life normally. Very positive attitude, also optimistic. I can’t remember when I last heard anyone that optimistic about the long term.
So this is our hellscape of a world now. Those who exercise their right to freedom of movement get 10 years in prison, but the inhuman bastards who have deprived us of human contact and any sort of agency, forced people to lose their livelihoods, denied children an education and coerced vulnerable people into taking an experimental medical treatment are still allowed to walk freely among us.
They will pay. Stay strong, stay angry, resist.
Of course. ‘Twas ever thus. And on full pay, plus expenses.
Ah you see Poppy when they say we, they don’t mean them, they mean you. You stay at home, you lose your job, you wear a mask, you and your kids schools are closed, you can’t have holidays and you can’t see your friends. We however can do what we fucking like as this does not impact them.
Poppy,
I suggest we start a campaign to get you elected as PM with new party to back you.
Nuremberg trials #2 for those people
California lawyer, Jan 6, 2021
https://youtu.be/mllca8PkX-s
English at 4 minute mark
So the CDC (and the UK by extension) invent new reporting rules for a respiratory disease and possibly violate state and federal laws.
Oh the sauce.
https://jdfor2020.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/adf864_165a103206974fdbb14ada6bf8af1541.pdf
It would be nice if they had a follow-up with an update for whole year mortality and comparison of reporting standards….
UK will be similar – March 2020 changes to MCCD. Maybe not 16 x less, but at least half the dead count would not be CV related. This would put 2020 in the zone as a bad flu year for the elderly. There is no pandemic. Death rates are within the historical average (1 per 000).
This is a very interesting read:
https://www.juliusruechel.com/2021/01/bystander-at-switch-moral-case-against.html
I almost shared it on pointy-finger-rant-book but then realised I’d probably just get shouted down by people who only want to hear what they want to hear and can’t face admitting supporting lockdowns is supporting the deaths of millions of vulnerable people.
“The head of the World Food Program WFP has warned that the “equivalent of 400 million full-time jobs have been destroyed” by government mandated COVID lockdowns and that there are now “270 million people marching towards the brink of starvation” (full article here). “
Already? Is this a joke, ffs? MPs of all stripes have been propping up the New Corona Kingdom since last March, encouraged by 10K spending money for fake Zoom expenses and an above inflation pay rise. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if they didn’t whore themselves out so cheaply; if politicians are going to predictably corrupt, they surely owe it to us plebs to be really corrupt so we can string ’em up joyfully.
PS: A replacement flag and Thursday night sing-&-clap-along anthem is urgently needed for the N.C.K, so probably time for Boris to call in more Tory cronies.
Somehow we have to make people realise that the country is now intent on a policy advocated by Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.
…is being run by a bunch of incompetent, corrupt, ex-public school cretins intent on re-establishing feudal governance, demolishing hard won civil liberties, ignoring basic human rights, corporatising all economic transactions and re-allocating previously distributed wealth back up the food chain. Corbyn & Abbott were not in power when I last checked…
Spot on. DePiffle et al are far worse than c&a; same policies but with brazen betrayal and industrial lying/MIS-selling.
I think you misunderstand my point. Corbyn and Abbott are toxic, politically. If the narrative that they are behind the push for zero covid can gain traction there is a chance people will start to realise what this corrupt, spineless government are intent on doing. I am not absolving Johnson, Wancock and the corrupt advisors, I am saying we need to approach the argument from a different angle to try and shake people to their senses. Make them realise that the policy of zero covid is the policy of the hard left and the useless government are too stupid to realise the hard left are leading the country to ruinous collapse.
The myth of there being a ‘hard left’ of any credible sort has blighted British political commentary & decision making for far too long, and protected successive inept governments. Since the 90s we have been governed via convenient neo-liberal centrist administrations. Whether Blair-Brown-Clegg/Cam-Cam-May-Johnson (or should that be Starmer/Johnson?), there is not a Rizla paper width between them. The increasing narrowness of centrist parties and MSM supporters has forced it to invent a hard left and a hard right narrative, and populate it with straw panto villains like ‘Commie Corbyn’. Meanwhile it is this centrist hegemony that is destroying the UK in a way hitherto undreamed of, but the fact it isn’t a neo-Stalinist or neo-Francoist junta in power has led the populace to be convinced it can’t really be happening. After all we have a moderate TORY government; so NI hasn’t really been annexed by the EU, we are all free to move and socialise as we please, cultural events have not been forbidden, freedom of assembly and other inalienable human rights are still intact, our economy isn’t being deliberately decimated, education is sacrosanct, fines aren’t being handed out by a radicalised police force etc… But let’s watch out for… Read more »
I couldn’t give a flying fuck about any of that, I just want lockdown lifted and I certainly don’t want the country to go down the ruinous road of zero covid. If that means we have to scapegoat Corbyn and Abbott, because they are politically toxic and regarded as hard left, to try and shake some sense into people, then so be it. When lockdown is lifted you can get back to your Socialist Worker party meetings and sing your Jeremy Corbyn songs.
Your response illustrates precisely why this duplicitous Tory/Lab coalition government are getting away (literally) with murder. You don’t need Zero Covid hysterics to oppress a nation; just lies, incompetence and agenda driven advisors. Oh, and credulous sceptics…
I haven’t seen you posting here before and suspect you are here as a government plant to attempt to spread division.
Not my problem. LS should make previous comments easily accessible.
Are you serious? Didn’t you accuse me of being a SWP member in a previous reply? What would any ‘government plant ‘ be doing here wasting their time when there are so many credulous self-proclaimed sceptics prepared to buy so easily into the government (Tory btw) lockdown narrative?
Maybe you could highlight left wing politicians who are opposed to lockdown.
That would be difficult as there aren’t any left wing MPs, and there aren’t any right wing MPs. As previous stated they are all carefully selected government compliant centrists, despite what you might choose to think.
Both sides are financed (at top level) by billionaires. They do what their paymasters expect them to do. The Left/Right thing is there to give an appearance of democracy and the possibility of voting for change.
Did Poodle Parliament get to vote on Wankok’s latest brutal Fascist diktat? Do juries get to consider their verdicts? Remember that before Peel’s sweeping reforms, when you could be hanged for stealing a sheep, juries made the system unworkable by refusing to convict even on the most blatant evidence.
However, a jury of zombies would probably clamour for a death sentence for visiting Brighton.
Parliament? voting? democracy? juries? justice? what quaint antiquated ideas! We are taken aback when the military take over in Myanmar and yet the ruling junta in the UK have been running on a martial law system for some while. And it is addictive, now our ruling commissariat have tasted totalitarian authoritarianism they will not want to give it up.
The military took action to prevent a pro-US CIA-orchestrated regime change op from happening. The Kyii woman is a CIA asset.
Lucky Sweden followed the plan they had in place and advocated by the WHO
Number 19 in deaths per million in Europe
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The last free country in Europe
Lockdowns kill
“Individuals and communities would be motivated to conform and support the plan as part of a social consensus – a collective objective for the regional populations. It would be assisted by local daily communication with the public. “
That’s all Chinese to me.
Pure CCP!
The Oxford vaccine is ineffective against the SA strain. Luckily the researchers reckon they can tweak the vaccine and have a new version ready ‘in a few months’. So only a few months more of lockdown and then we can vaccinate our way out of this!
Haven’t I heard this before?
We aren’t getting out of this
Until the Icelandic strain arrives. Just ahead of the Romanian strain which was straining to race ahead of the Mongolian variant…..etc
“It would be a poor solution to the coming employment crisis to prop up Test and Trace as a job creation scheme or quarantines as a subsidy to the hospitality industry. Let’s use those resources to create real jobs in a functioning economy.” (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1359153633594662919)