The press is having fun today about the apparent “confusion” in Boris’s exit plan, with some papers flagging up new rules which weren’t included in his speech on Sunday. For instance, he originally said we could play sports from tomorrow, but only with members of our own household. That’s now been amended to one person from another household as well. Matt Lucas did an amusing impression of Boris getting in a bit of a muddle that went viral. (Are we still allowed to use that word?)
Boris’s response to all the noise about this, as set out on the front page of the Telegraph, is to urge people to use their common sense. This plumber interviewed by Channel 4 News last night seems to have got the point. “Boris is leaving it up to us a little bit,” he said. “What do you want, a full handbook to tell you what to do?” The editor of the programme must have spat out his almond milk latte when he heard that.
Needless to say, much of the mainstream media thinks Boris is being wildly reckless, accusing him of putting our lives at risk. He’s running down the mountain like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, not inching his way down like an experienced climber. (If only!) The Mirror, for instance, urges the Prime Minister to “protect the workers”, although doesn’t explain how destroying the UK economy would achieve this. The Guardian has a piece by David Hunter, Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Oxford, flagged on the front page, that predicts “the virus spread will increase, there will be super-spreader events and local or regional lockdowns will have to be reconsidered”.
Much of the criticism focuses on the risk that the sacred two-metre rule might be breached, particularly on public transport. Worth bearing in mind, then, that the distance we’re supposed to keep from each other varies from country to country:
- WHO recommendation – 1 metre
- USA – 6 feet
- Germany – 1.5 metres
- Australia – 1.5 metres
- France – 1 metre
- Italy – 1 metre
- Sweden – Use your common sense
As William Sullivan points out in American Thinker, social distancing rules are snake oil, not science.
The same “we’re-all-doomed” line was taken by Anthony Costello, ex-Director of the WHO and a member of the ‘alternative’ advisory group shadowing the Strategic Advisory Group for Emergencies that’s due to publish its first report tomorrow. As Guido Fawkes pointed out, this group is packed to the gills with pro-Labour boffins and Costello is no exception. in a long long Twitter thread posted last night he poured scorn on the Boris’s exit strategy, predicting a second spike in infections. “In short, the Government plans will lead to the epidemic returning early, cases rising, further preventable deaths, and no guarantee that herd immunity will ever occur,” he concluded.
He urges the Government to instead follow the advice the WHO has issued, which he quoters as follows: “governments refocus the whole of government on suppression and containing COVID-19”. By “suppression” I think the WHO means keeping the lockdowns in place, although given how hugger-mugger the organisation is with the Chinese Communist authorities it’s hard to be sure. Does this mean the WHO has now decided the Swedish approach was wrong after all? Readers will recall that a senior panjandrum at the WHO gave a press conference two weeks ago in which he praised Sweden as a “model” that the rest of the world should follow. This was after the WHO said exactly the same thing about China a few weeks before that. Makes you feel almost sorry for the moderators at YouTube, given that the company’s CEO has said any content dissenting from the WHO’s official recommendations will be removed. Must be a full time job keeping track of the WHO’s constantly-changing positions.
It’s quite helpful that these lockdown zealots are nailing their colours to the mast, predicting armageddon if we emerge from under our beds and venture outside. It means that when they’re proved wrong, as I suspect they will be, any future advice they might have for the Government can be safely ignored. Then again, the reputations of various climate change alarmists haven’t been damaged in the slightest by their failed predictions, many of them based on similar computer models to that used by Professor Neil Ferguson and his crystal-ball gazers at Imperial. A quick reminder of what some of these soothsayers got wrong:
- Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. “We must realise that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,” he told the New York Times in 1969. Ehrlich also predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. Ehrlich’s “bomb” failed to explode, but his career didn’t. He’s now the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and the president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology.
- Peter Wadhams, Cambridge professor. Interviewed in the Guardian in 2013, he predicted Arctic ice would disappear by 2015 if we didn’t mend our ways. It hasn’t, obviously.
- Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister. He announced in 2009 that we had just 50 days to save the Earth.
- George Monbiot, Guardian columnist. He predicted a “structural global famine” in as little as 10 years’ time if we didn’t start eating less meat — this was in 2002. No such famine has materialised, although it probably will now thanks to the global lockdowns.
- Prince Charles, future king. He predicted we had eight years to save the plant 11 years ago.
In foreign news, the Times says on its front page that single French women are happy with the lockdown – the headline is ‘No hook-ups, Merci!’ “Not only have they discovered that they are able to survive on their own, but many have come to the conclusion that they are better off than their counterparts lumbered with menfolk and children at home,” reports Adam Sage.
The always-reliable Professor Carl Heneghan of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine has just finished a piece of work showing that the coronavirus crisis is not technically an epidemic. The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that just 0.24 per cent of adults – approximately 136,000 people – currently have the virus and the Royal College of GPs puts it at even less – about 0.037%. The official definition of an epidemic is a disease that infects 40 per 10,000, but the new figures suggest it is between four and 24 in 10,000. The Telegraph has more.
The ONS also released data this morning about registered deaths in England and Wales in Week 18 (April 25th – May 1st). All deaths are down, including those involving COVID-19. You can see the year-to-date trend lines in the ONS graph below:
The total number of deaths in Week 18 – 17,953 – is lower that the previous week but still 8,012 more than the five-year average. 6,035 of the deaths mentioned “novel coronavirus”, meaning 1,977 excess deaths in that week weren’t from COVID-19, at least not according to the doctors who signed the death certificates – and, remember, they don’t even need a positive test result to write down “novel coronavirus” as the cause of death.
So why did these people die? When he appeared on Marr on May 3rd, Sir Ian Diamond, head of the Government’s Statistical Service, said the ONS had looked into the cause of non-Covid excess deaths since the beginning of the year and would publish its findings “in the next few days”. Evidently, he was nobbled because that piece of work has yet to see the light of day. Here’s a transcript of what he said on Marr:
The last week we had records for the excess was approaching 12,000 deaths of which, I would suggest, between eight and 9,000 were Covid and the rest were what we call indirect deaths. Those could be for example people who would normally have gone into hospital for some reason but the beds were not available. Just give you an example: in my late mother’s last couple of years of her life she went into hospital and back out again a few times. Had she not been able to go in one of those times she may well have died a little earlier than she did. So I think it’s important to recognise there are indirect deaths as well as the Covid-related deaths. We have a piece from the Office of National Statistics that we’ve done jointly with the Government Actuaries Department, the Home Office and Department of Health coming out in the next few days which will show also a third group which will come out over the next few years where changes in the prioritisation of the Health Service, for example, reductions in cancer screening, will lead to deaths over the next few years.
One reason the publication of this data has been delayed – indefinitely? – may be because the Government doesn’t want to face the kind of scandal that’s currently blowing up in Germany about the disastrous impact of the lockdown on public health. Roland Tichy, the editor of Tichys Einblick, a right-of-centre German magazine, has obtained a leaked impact assessment from the Ministry of the Interior saying that the lockdown is causing more more harm than good. The author of the paper is identified as “K”, reminiscent of the central character in The Trial by Franz Kafka. I couldn’t find any stories about this on any English-language mainstream media sites, although there are a few on the fringes, like this one. So I’ve published one myself. I got hold of the Tichys Einblick press release about the story, which someone has kindly translated into English, and you can read the whole thing here. This is the opening paragraph:
The lockdown and the measures taken by the German federal and central governments to contain the coronavirus apparently cost more lives, for example of cancer patients, than of those actually killed by it. This is the result of an internal analysis by the Protection of Critical Infrastructures”unit in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which has been made available to members of the Ministry’s crisis team and leaked to Tichys Einblick magazine. The 86-page paper with its critical evaluations for example of the data submitted by the Robert Koch Institute, has in the meantime already been dismissed by the Ministry as the expression of an “isolated individual opinion”. According to information from Tichy’s Einblick, the paper’s author, a senior official at the Ministry, has by now been suspended.
The same German-speaking reader who helped me do a bit of digging yesterday on Widerstand2020 Deutschland has flicked through some German newspapers to find out more:
The official reaction to the story has been damning and defensive – the author is reported in some places as having massively overstepped his brief, and the paper is alleged to contain the author’s private view, rather than an official one. The author is seen as having acted particularly irresponsibly because the report is on official headed paper, giving it what the Government is saying is spurious authenticity. I don’t think there can be any doubt that the report is genuine, and the real issue is how damning it is, and the obviously pretty cack-handed cover up that is underway. The report apparently criticises the Robert Koch Institute data and other data sources as confused and inaccurate.
Tichys‘ view is that there was a massive failure to understand the situation in a clear and sober way and the leadership failure extends to the Chancellor who relied exclusively on flawed data. Couldn’t see anything in Bild about it. Was surprised to see nothing in the Sueddeutsche either.
This won’t come as a surprise to readers of Lockdown Sceptics because we’ve already crunched the numbers twice and come to the same conclusion: the ONS has confirmed that NHS workers, listed below as “Health Professionals”, face a lower-than-average risk of dying from COVID-19 than other workers. The BBC ran a story on this, pointing out that the most vulnerable group in the UK are, in fact, security guards.
There’s a great little guest post on Hector Drummond’s blog by Andrew Mahon, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Crimson Tide. As he points out, the plot of this film is extremely relevant to the predicament we find ourselves in now, involving a fight between a panicky submarine commander (Gene Hackman) threatening to over-react to incomplete information about a potential disaster and his more sober-minded second-in-command (Denzel Washington) who wants a few more facts before – literally, in this case – pushing the nuclear button. I recommend you read the entire post, but here’s the kernel of the argument:
The formula is as follows: a real but perhaps exaggerated crisis demands a response, but the information upon which decisive action can be justified is incomplete, so the dilemma becomes either to take action based on incomplete information, which may be premature, or to delay that action in favour of seeking out more information, which could come too late. Delaying action may mean catastrophe, but on the other taking action too quickly may mean a wholly different catastrophe.
In the current coronavirus lockdown this basic formula has just unfolded globally, although very little time was spent on the dilemma before Gene Hackman got his way in almost every country in the Western world. Coronavirus poses a crisis to be sure, but it is and has been exaggerated. The chosen response of lockdown – admittedly not quite a nuclear holocaust – has been based on the worst case predictions, notably those out of Imperial College London, which Nobel Prize-winning biologist Professor Michael Levitt of Stanford has claimed were off by a factor of ten. Other scientists, including those out of Stanford and Oxford Universities offered alternative findings, all of which ought to have been taken together to yield a comprehensive assessment of the threat. But instead most governments have ignored Denzel Washington’s caution, taking instead the incomplete and unreliable apocalyptic modelling as the justification for a premature and disproportionate lockdown.
Good news about Simon Dolan’s lawsuit. His crowdfunder has now raised over £100,000 – pretty good, considering it was only launched 10 days ago. Apparently, donations surged after Boris’s speech on Sunday night, which doesn’t surprise Dolan. “Boris Johnson has flapped and fumbled instead of leading Britain out of the disaster of lockdown,” he says. “Just two days after we celebrated VE Day and the freedoms it secured, millions of families tuned in on Sunday evening hoping for the Prime Minister to deliver decisive action – instead we got more garbled messages of surrender.” Anyone who wants to contribute to the crowdfunder can do so here.
Got an amusing email from a dissident academic who’s finding life under lockdown a bit of a struggle:
I’m a Senior Lecturer at a UK higher education institution currently stuck doing remote working amongst a group of typical identitarian, fair-trade, falafel-munching academics. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that my colleagues really don’t want this magic-money-tree-fuelled piss-about to end. They chirrup along quite happily to each other on Microsoft Teams about how it might bring down the “Tory Scum” Government and thus also cancel “racist Brexit”. Part of the ongoing appeal of the lockdown for them is the opportunity to spend all day safe at home baking Nordic-inspired loaf cakes, knocking out virtue-signalling blogs about sustainable living (whilst simultaneously planning their next foreign holiday, of course) and angrily taking to social media to demand more white deaths from COVID-19 as a form of reparation for colonial injustices. Okay, I might have made that last one up, but you get the idea. This has become a middle-class wet dream of what the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would look like.
No doubt these wastrels will be delighted to learn that Rishi Sunack has extended the furlough scheme until October.
My correspondent attached a short essay about the use of the word “impatient” across various media outlets to describe those who want the lockdown to end. Boris used the word in his speech on April 27th and the BBC have also picked it up recently – see Jenny Hill’s ‘analysis’ here. It’s a way to position sceptics as childlike or unreasonable, one of the more subtler methods of sidelining us. I have published the essay on this site and given it pride of place on the right-hand menu under ‘Are Sceptical Voices Being Suppressed?’ It’s called ‘COVID-19 and the infantilisation of dissent‘. The byline is “Wilfred Thomas”, but that’s a pseudonym for obvious reasons. “As you probably know, higher education is a genuinely scary place if you’re thoughts are non-orthodox,” he says. Sounds like he should join the Free Speech Union.
An expat living in Spain has been in touch to ask if I’d be interested in publishing a short piece he’s written about life under lockdown which has been even more severe than ours. It’s evidently been quite tough-going, with this Spanish study estimating that the mental health of 46% of the population is at risk. I have published his ‘Postcard From Spain’ here.
A reader has emailed me to say he thinks my correspondent in Bexhill-on-Sea, whose message I published yesterday, was very wise not to publish a sceptical post in his local Facebook group. He incautiously did just that and reaped the whirlwind:
I’ve just read the latest newsletter and was pleased to note the comments by the reader from Bexhill-on-Sea. His wife and daughter were right to restrain him from posting on the local Facebook page. I live in the Forest of Dean and this morning responded to a post from a man in which he railed against concessions for exercise because it would mean folk coming to the Forest from elsewhere. I mildly enquired whether he was concerned for the loss of the peace and quiet we’ve been enjoying recently or worried about plague-bearers, suggesting that the threat of the virus was a little exaggerated. Having just read the hate storm I unwittingly called up I am now literally shaking – good grief! No doubt you get more than your fair share of abusive comment but I was a naive virgin. I checked my post again and no, I hadn’t inadvertently suggested selling off the village children as sex slaves!
Another reader has asked whether there’s any Lockdowns Sceptics merchandise he could buy, like a T-shirt or a face mask – although it would take a brave soul to publicly declare his allegiance to this cause in the current climate. Having said that, the tide will turn and we might as well get out ahead of it. I’ve had a brief look and there are lots of merchandise companies that will do the heavy lifting. All I have to do is submit the designs. Any designers out there who might be able to help? Might be able to pay you a modest amount. If so, please email me here.
Yesterday, I asked what had happened to the much-ballyhooed Porton Down antibody survey. Today, a reader has forwarded an email from a friend of his about an official survey. This may provide a clue about why the Porton Down results have been delayed:
We are one of the 20,000 household supposedly being tested for Covid 19 by Government scientists because we took part in a national ONS study last year and agreed to take part in future studies. We had to register by phone by April 29th – after about 47 phone calls I managed to do that by April 27th, and was offered an appointment on April 30th, with the promise of a phone call in advance of the visit. Guess what? No phone call and no visit. Numerous attempts to call them – got callbacks – carrying two phones around the house 24 hours a day so as not to miss a call – finally got through – to be told they hadn’t received the testing kits!!
I received a press release from the V&A this morning informing me it has put out a call for people to donate homemade signs and rainbow drawing celebrating “our NHS” so it can add these artworks to the Museum’s permanent collection. “The V&A is seeking signs that have been created by individuals and communities in response to the current isolation measures,” it says.
The possibilities to have fun with this are almost limitless, but I thought I’d confine myself to this photograph sent to me by a reader in Birmingham. It’s located outside the Art Department of Birmingham City University.
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Escape From Lockdown – Episode 4‘ – Sceptical podcast series. This episode features arch-sceptic Dr John Lee
- ‘Air Travel Is Going to Be Very Bad, for a Very Long Time‘ – James Fallows has some bad news for us in the Atlantic
- ‘We should be very wary of the R value‘ – Tom Chivers argues that the R going up shows the lockdown has worked. Clutching at straws?
- ‘Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?‘ – Thoughtful piece by Saloni Dattani in UnHerd. Can’t all be attributed to lack of Vitamin D, apparently
- ‘Elon Musk Says Tesla Is Restarting California Production, Defying Local Order‘ – Engineering wunderkind Elon Musk is defying California’s lockdown rules to reopen his company. Memo to Elon: If I make you ‘Sceptic of the Week’ will you send me a Tesla?
- ‘The expert opinion of the shaman and the caveman’s search for truth‘ – Part three of an excellent series of blog posts on lockdown madness by financier Barry Norris
- ‘COVID-19 is a frightening dress rehearsal of the climate agenda‘ – Ben Pile in Spiked on the all-conquering power of the precautionary principle
- ‘Icelandic Study: “We Have Not Found a Single Instance of a Child Infecting Parents”‘ – More evidence that children don’t spread the virus, this time from Iceland
- ‘AIDS, TB And Malaria Set To Get Deadlier Due To Coronavirus‘ – Article in Forbes confirming the dire prognosis of my friend Aidan Hartley about the impact of the lockdowns on the developing world
Yesterday, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as to help people find out what has opened in their area. But we really need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have reopened near you. Should be fairly self-explanatory – and the owners of small businesses are welcome to enter their own details. Please visit the page and let us know about those courageous entrepreneurs who are doing their bit to get the country moving again.
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: ‘Just Keep Me Hangin’ On‘ by The Supremes, ‘Bedsitter Images‘ by Al Stewart and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again‘ by The Who. Keep ’em coming.
Thanks as always to those who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It’s a Sisyphean task, let me tell you. If you feel like donating, you can do so by clicking here. (Every little helps!) And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
I’ll leave you with the latest episode of London Calling, mine and James Delingpole’s weekly podcast. Only one topic, obviously. And apologies in advance for the fact that we both get a little overheated at times.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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My give a shitometer now fully reads zero. Boris will always be the man who took away the right of an English man to have a pint, because he’s a cowering bed wetter. We lockdown and climate change sceptics, those in favour of free speach and empirical evidence need a new home. What’s say we take Antarctica when the ice melts? Oh, maybe not.
Yes, like Blair on Iraq, Johnson should never be forgiven for this. No Conservative PM should ever have considered confining the British people in their homes and having policemen telling them when and where they can walk as a legitimate policy. It should have been anathema for him, and he should have been prepared to go down fighting against it, if necessary.
Far from all guns blazing, as far as can be told there was barely a whimper of brief resistance from him.
There is no excuse.
Or from Labour who let him do it and then campaigned for poverty.
Indeed, as with Iraq both main parties were ultimately complicit. But the buck stops with the PM, imo.
Totally agree. And quite rightly Blair took the blame for Iraq, and BoJo will with this. BTW I’m uneasy of lumping climate change and lockdown in the same category, or at least our argument. I’m all for rigorous evidence, and factual debate, and think most climate activists are misanthropic fascists who loathe humans, particularly poor ones, but still anxious we are broad church, lockdown is bonkers on its own merits (sorry that last bit directed at the thread generally, not you).
I agree about other issues. I’m climate disinterested really, myself, although if pushed I’d come down on the sceptic side.
I just don’t want to scare people off, we’re right about this, why make it more difficult by having to win two arguments not one? I’m worried about biodiversity, think there’s stuff we urgently need to do there. I just find climate activists don’t pass the ‘sniff test’ and get the uneasy feeling something’s afoot that isn’t entirely what they say it is. They are distinct from the entirely sensible people I’ve met working in conservation or whatever. But don’t want to conflate that with this, it’s a rod for our own backs in our current straightened circumstances I think, why alienate people who’d otherwise agree with you?
I am a climate activist and, while the lockdown may reduce emissions in the short term, there is much about it that worries me. It stops any form of political activity to hold governments to account. Trump and Bolsanaro have both taken advantage of it to weaken environmental protection legislation while there’s no functioning opposition. Greta and her school strikes have been forgotten about now that no child can go to school. It is killing public transport, so when life does get back to “normal” more people will travel by car, increasing congestion, fuel consumption and emissions. Money that was earmarked for Northern Powerhouse Rail, reversing Beeching cuts will be needed for salvaging something of existing networks. So please let some of us come on board.
Even worse, this deluded lockdown has held up production of the nuclear and renewable nergy facilities which we desperately need so we can move away from oil. And it is going to give a massive boost to car ownership and cause public transport to become a second-class citizen and hence kept at woefully inadequate levels and not receiving any funding in the near future to expand and improve service. The lockdown, overall, is harming the environment much more than any shrot term reduction in pollution can ever help.
Renewable energy is not the answer. There were days in December that I noted where wind power supplied less than 8% of the total electricity generation in the UK. Solar provided nothing. Both require huge amounts of energy, mining, and toxic rare materials to manufacture, and both are unreliable. There are major issues in the decommissioning in both.
Plus, they are trying to generate energy from diffuse, weak energy forms, i.e. wind and solar. Both take huge amounts of land that should be used for food production or left for wildlife, or housing.
Nuclear is a concentrated energy form but there are obvious issues with waste storage for centuries.
Oil and natural gas are also more energy concentrated and reliable sources.
There isn’t a climate emergency that we need to worry about. There is environmental damage that we need to worry about and the renewable energy scam is part of that.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w
Why renewables can’t save the planet | Michael Shellenberger | TEDxDanubia
Michael Shellenberg is an environmentalist who realised that renewables cause more problems than they solve.
Read up on Professor Michael Kelly as well:
https://www.desmog.co.uk/michael-kelly
https://www.thegwpf.org/prof-michael-kelly-energy-policy-needs-herds-of-unicorns/
Prof. Michael Kelly: Energy Policy Needs ‘Herds Of Unicorns’
Date: 11/11/19Press Release, Global Warming Policy Foundation
Utopian thinking is putting the economy at risk says Cambridge professor
Welcome! On a micro scale my machiavellian local authority have backed off our greenbelt (been fighting them for 18 months, insane development, very environmentally damaging, and more to the point economically crackpot) but whilst in lockdown have announced plans to dump it somewhere else – also pristine countryside, just a different planning designation – all local democracy is suspended, our MP is awol with all this, parish councils hiding at home. No residents paying attention, and they’ll steam roller it through, there is so much money involved, barrister told us they are the most corrupt authority in the country, it’s been an education, they do all their Strategic Environmental Assessments, it’s all bobbins, it’s money, and he who has the most expensive lawyer wins. I am not anti the environmental argument, nor do I lack sympathy or worry about it, I am a bit leery of some of the more fringe activists, but I don’t see why we need to conflate it with lockdown, if you’re down with this argument, you are on our team as far as I’m concerned.
What has Trump done exactly in the past two months to weaken environmental protection?
There is a functioning opposition in the Democrat-majority House, if they were the slightest bit interested in being a real opposition instead of trying to impeach him on made-up charges, or in getting the U.S. $trillions into debt with policies that have nothing to do with the current WuFlu infection and everything to do with encouraging illegal immigration and taking permanent power in the US.
‘Trump and Bolsanaro have both taken advantage of it to weaken environmental protection legislation while there’s no functioning opposition.’
Nice to see that some good has come of this, at least.
The climate activists do not pass the sniff test. The founders have said that they want to end capitalism, and this is the way they mean to do it.
https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/extremism-rebellion/
Policy Exchange: Extremism Rebellion
Jul 16, 2019
Extinction Rebellion has mainstreamed the politics of a radical fringe
“The people behind Extinction Rebellion advocate a political agenda with ambitions that reach far beyond environmentalism. It is a campaign that seeks to use mass civil disobedience over climate change, to impose full system change to the democratic order. Yet, the underlying extremism of the campaign has been largely obscured from public view by what many see as the fundamental legitimacy of their stated cause.”
You can download the pdf document from this site, which goes into detail about them.
Stuart Badsen, XR founder:
https://medium.com/extinction-rebellion/extinction-rebellion-isnt-about-the-climate-42a0a73d9d49
Extinction Rebellion isn’t about the Climate
While they’re all freaking out about negligible man-made global warming, they ignore the real and present damage to the environment from the manufacture of so-called green energy solar panels and wind turbines; poaching and the endangerment of wildlife, not least of which is to supply the Chinese and Far East markets for “medicines”; the list is endless.
Yeah I concur. Honestly, out of all the ‘issues’ I have opinions on – which is most of them lol – climate change is the one I’m most ambivalent about. One minute I’m totally on board and thinking the world is going up in flames, the next I’m thinking it’s all a big nothingburger. Someone needs to really convince me to a side – it just hasn’t happened yet.
One difference is that right now there aren’t many epidemiologists coming out to support Ferguson, except one or two in the pages of the Guardian not in actual academic publications.
If this goes on for as long the climate saga (heaven forbid) a whole new generation of scientists will no doubt spring up wherever the money hose is pointed and any experts currently in the field without very good tenure arrangements will become ex-experts. Let’s hope it doesn’t go on that long.
There are plenty of comparisons with climate science here but some are misleading.
Epidemics are actually very predictable, not in every detail of the timing but they reach a stable equilibrium and follow the models in the end, unlike the climate. The death forecasts of Ferguson are not model outputs anyway: they’re just assumptions that go straight into the model and come back out of it.
The climate is fundamentally much harder to model because it’s hugely more complicated, in many areas chaotic, and the signals people are looking for and predicting are tiny compared to the natural variability. There is some warming of course, and some of it is because of CO2. The debate is all about how much and how much it matters. Long ago it reached the point where nothing reality could do in the foreseeable future would settle the matter.
With Covid there clearly are excess deaths. There is some argument about how many but it’s really a sideshow. The important question is just how close different places are to their herd immunity level. Once lockdowns are lifted and second waves fail to materialise it should all be clearer.
Excess deaths at the moment, yes. And of course that is not good. But Professor Giesecke points out that over the course of a year we will see that even out. Basically he said many people are dying a few weeks or months earlier than they would otherwise have done. So after a year or so, the mortalities will be exactly the same as they would have been anyway. And that is regardless of whether you lockdown or not. What a nightmare this all is.
What Giesecke said there is clearly correct as far as it goes, but in this country we have incurred a lot of excess deaths as a result of the lockdown itself. These deaths will show up as an increase in the overall mortality for the year.
I think he did go down fighting this, and they pushed him aside and carried their pre-planned agenda through. BJ is libertarian, like Trump it was clear they didn’t want these lockdowns. You can almost see the hands up their backsides operating them at this point.
Not convinced. He had the support of the so-called Hawks but did not use it. He could have thrown Ferguson on the bus and said that the numbers were wrong (read all evidence of his lame modelling software and previous major mes ups) and lifted the lockdown, getting children back to school and businesses going.
The fact Ferguson was even in the position he was in should tell all you need to know about who’s deciding lockdown policy. They were going to lockdown no matter what. Everything since then has been about justifying it through fear.
Schools need to be fully operational before any semblance of normality can resume. Not everyone has family who can look after children whilst they go out to work.
I have seen one education union has been campaigning for the lockdown to remain in place until it is safe to reopen schools. Sounds like this union would like to keep schools closed for the foreseeable future, blow the economy of Lesser Britain.
Funny how all these committed and caring teachers, these paeons of educational virtue, these passionate advicates of learning….. don’t want kids back at school.
He’s the British PM. If he opposed this lockdown, where were the ringing speeches calling for an alternative policy? Where was the division of the house on a confidence motion laying his job on the line over the issue?
It’s simply impossible to have implemented any lockdown policy without the PM’s nod. He clearly gave that approval without having to be pushed hard, because the alternative would have required an open test of support in the House, which never occurred. At the least there would have to have been fraught confrontations and evidence provided that he would lose a vote on the issue. None of that happened, because he never gave the slightest indication of wanting to call such a vote.
Clearly, if he really was opposed to it (evidence?), he allowed himself to be meekly persuaded. Which is enough, more than enough, to condemn him.
Your logic makes sense only if the PM is more than a figurehead position. Do you think the course of events would be any different whatsoever if it were a different PM or different party. His actions haven’t exactly been consistent with the principles of his party or his personal ideals.
Doesn’t help Johnson I don’t think. If he’s just a puppet then he could still have gone down fighting publicly. What would he have to lose but an empty mercenary position? If he’s only there for the salary and the perks, s*d him anyway.
I’m not sure that it is just coincidental that the PM got the virus and badly too. Although he made the decision to lock down before getting the bad symptoms, it has clearly changed his perspective and also took him out of action for a while. There is definitely something strange going here, but I am still very disappointed and angry at what he has done.
An interesting theory – but it seems rather like the ‘it’s turtles all the way down’ theory. Who then is in charge – and is (s)he really in charge or just standing in for the real leader?
We have had Prime Ministers who were capable of changing the course of events. I doubt whether Margaret Thatcher would have looked across the world at a totalitarian communist state suppressing the virus and said “we must do the same”. Not even if the rest of Europe did the same.
*Especially* if all of Europe did the same….
I’m really, really, really, not a fan of Maggie (or Tony BLiar her bastard son in disguise) but even I have to concede you are correct.
I definitely believe that Mrs. Thatcher, as a trained scientist, would not have been fobbed off with dodgy modelling predictions and would have asked for a lot more hard evidence before committing to a policy of national house arrest. But I can’t think of any other recent prime minister who would have held out against the mob.
Most of the PMs since Thatcher would have joined in with the mob, if not leading them.
That’s the key point: she’s the only scientist Prime Minister we’ve ever had – and boy does that show.
I agree it all sounded like coded messages saying forget about all this but I don’t want Matron to notice. But he’s the Prime Minister FFS, he should stand up and say it straight.
You may be right. Certainly from being optimistic and full of energy, he suddenly began to look like a stressed, beaten man. Then inevitably he became ill – stress always affects the immune system – and that was it. What we have at the helm now is not the Boris Johnson people voted for. On the other hand, maybe there is yet hope. These new rules of lockdown seem to be deliberately blurry. I usually spend many months of the year in Greece. There, everything is done through legislation now, and people have had to send a text for permission to leave the house. There were six numbers you could send, each one relating to what you needed to do whilst out. I’ve spent the last 6 weeks listening to formerly intelligent friends asking each other which “number” they should send if they want to walk their dog, or go to the vet! At least we never had that sort of nonsense.
‘What we have at the helm now is not the Boris Johnson people voted for. ‘
Yes. Somehow he’s been nobbled. This is the problem.
The only things standing between Boris and retiring to enjoy his young new family are his colossal ego and his hunger for posterity.
A shame then that when the test came he chose the path of meek surrender rather than the one of glorious defiance.
I doubt he’ll get another chance.
I rather suspect he still hopes to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and that he always will.
Sweden?
So BoJo is not going to be remembered as the Churchill of the 21st Century.
Heads held high, keep the faith all, forget politics, we are fighting for our freedoms now. Whatever colour we followed in the past they have all mingled together into a sh*tty brown colour.
Absolutely, they’re all acting the same. Apparently dissent is silent.
Just saying I think it’s a huge mistake to lump in lockdown skeptic with climate change skeptic. Climate change actually contributed hugely to the pandemic starting and spreading. And these statements are what make lockdown skeptics seem fringe-y.
“Prince Charles, future king. He predicted we had eight years to save the plant 11 years ago”
LOL! Is this some kind of meme joke about Prince Charles talking to plants, or is it a fortuitous typo? Either way, I enjoyed it…..
Well, maybe – but 30 years ago he said we had ten to save the planet. It is a great insult to our Royal Family that we are still here!
They keep banging on about about the point of no return. Infuriating when they move the goalposts, latest being 2030. I want to reach the point of no return because then it’s pointless worrying about it, and we can crack on with some long haul flights,
To be fair, the great Bowie suggested we had just “Five Years” in 1972…
My wife is a church bell-ringer, and has just received advice on Covid-19, which has been circulated to the 40,000 ringers in the UK from their central organisation.
The advice (from two doctors) seems generally sensible and explains why bell-ringing can’t resume yet (eg social distancing is not feasible in a closely confined bell-tower), but the following paragraph caught her eye:
“Sadly, the mortality rates are significant (the worldwide case fatality rate was 7% on May 6th) with most being in men over 55-59 and in women over 65-69 years old.”
These stats run counter to everything I have read about mortality rates and at-risk age groups; if they are wrong or capable of misinterpretation, I need help to provide her with a factual rebuttal to send to her local bell-ringers’ group. Can anyone help?
The age group data seems plainly wrong (unless they mean “men over 55 and women over 65”, in which case the wording is disgracefully misleading, akin to ‘all Covid deaths occur in the over 20-25 year old age group’).
We have both tried to search for info on CFR’s, or even a current definition of CFR, without any success.
Any help or links appreciated.
I think they have used the misleading wording to mean people over that age.
Whether intentional or not that’s nonsense.
Surely the easiest way to get a quick and dirty idea of overall case fatality worldwide would be to check the latest WHO update and divide the number of deaths by the number of cases?
As of yesterday’s update they have (worldwide):
4,006,257 cases and 278 892 deaths
Giving by my calculator a current preliminary cfr of 0.07, which seems pretty plausible, albeit a few of those cases probably will die and increase the CFR a bit. By now most of the epidemics have been in decline for a while though.
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200511-covid-19-sitrep-112.pdf?sfvrsn=813f2669_2
So their 7% looks about right, but case fatality is of little use when (as with covid19), most infected individuals are not identified as cases because they are asymptomatic or very mild and not reported. So it’s the infection fatality rate that really matters – how many of those who get the disease actually die of it. And that’s tricky to find because it’s hard to know how many people actually have caught a disease as generally mild as this one.
There’s no authoritative figure you could point to. Someone could always cherry-pick a study of their own showing a worse or better ifr estimate to suit their own case, at the moment. Good discussion of ifr and cfr here:
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
There’s a breakdown of case fatality by age here, showing the sharp increase with increasing age that absolutely does not peak in the age groups mentioned, but it might just be that the population distribution they are referring to has more people in those age groups than older and so more deaths:
https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid#case-fatality-rate-of-covid-19-by-age
geez , all you need to do is go to the Oxford university site . Don’t use WHO !
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
IFR Taking account of historical experience, trends in the data, increased number of infections in the population at largest, and potential impact of misclassification of deaths gives a presumed estimate for the COVID-19 IFR somewhere between 0.1% and 0.41%.*
I suggested WHO because presumably they want maximum credibility for putting a case forward to a church organisation. When it comes to a global current cfr estimate I can’t imagine it makes all that much difference where you go, does it?
Oxford study of 17.4m people – biggest study in the world – https://opensafely.org/press-releases/2020/05/covid-risk-factors/
See page 11 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1
If you are under 60 and healthy your risk is ZERO.
Statistically it is literally zero. I tried to explain this to a fanatic in my family but they said it wasn’t true as the government wouldn’t be doing this if it was.
Oh dear, it’s the whole models vs data thing. Oxford Uni and a cohort of 17.4m is pretty convincing, it’s baffling isn’t it? People seem obsessed with anecdotes, which isn’t surprising as we have no ‘news’ anymore, just rolling anecdotes. I had that today, people talking about kids going back to school. I said, there are 15m under 15s, of which TWO have died, both of underlying conditions. 10 children die every day of other diseases, accidents, cancer etc. And all I get is ‘yeah but it might be dangerous, I’m not taking any chances’.
Every time I walk past a TV with ‘news’ on it I scream GROW SOME BALLS at it
Yes I’ve found a lot of people won’t believe this otherwise we’ve gone mad. Actually the world has gone mad.
Now there’s a circular argument if ever I saw one.
The weekly ONS update has the breakdown of all Covid deaths by age group.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19roundup/2020-03-26
40% of all UK deaths are in the 85+ age group. Another 35% for 75-84 year olds. Less than 1% for under 45s. The case fatality is would be under 1% for all age groups other over 75 I would think.
Try this
“Today’s“ Media death rate includes People who died back on March 17th
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
She probably saw a figure like 0.05% and thought it meant 5% ?
Yes I thought that, because 0.07 is not 7%
How old are your bell-ringers?
” Over 81% of Covid-19 deaths occur in cohorts >= 70 years old. The comparative figures in respect of males and females are respectively 79.1% and 84.8%.”
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/11/robert-watson-week-17-to-april-24th-update-on-age-and-sex-cohort-deaths-per-1000/
Thanks to you all for the helpful responses to this.
I’m sure we can now reassure local ringers (who tend to be over-50 but fit enough to climb a bell-tower and pull bell-ropes for 30 minutes – not an at-risk group, I would say!).
I particularly like this table from the CEBM site:
Mortality by Age per 100,000 population
• >85s: 155/100,000
• 75-84: 43 per 100,000
• 65-74: 2.3 per 100,000
• 45-64: 0.15 per 100,000
• 15-44: 0.02 per 100,000
I’d don’t think I’d have the nerve currently to wear an overt anti lockdown t shirt so how about one with something cryptic only recognisable by other sceptics?
Other than that thanks, a little sanity is well received.
How about an elephant… as in: the elephant in the room. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room = a broken economy, mental health issues due to lockdown etc etc Print one out and hang it in your window or a sticker in your car or just be creative with this…
How about a rhinoceros, as in the play by Ionesco, in which humans beings turn one by one into horned monsters, as a metaphor for facsism?
Haha brilliant. Why don’t we email Toby with some suggestions and make a pick, and we can start secretly identifying ourselves to one another in public etc.
Is asheep too obvious?
Elephant is good, they have long memories, when sheeples have returned to new normal, we elephants will remember.
I have thought about that . What about a tee shirt with the famous quote of theologian Martin Luther ” Here I stand, I can do no other ” . We know that the truth and evidence is on our side . Grey with black test , medium please !
I thought about a Spitfire design. Instead of the Battle of Britain we face a battle FOR Britain. (The only problem is you might bump into an aviation enthusiast wearing something similar who turns out to be a rabid lockdown zealot.)
We should start small and attack this nonsense 2m rule somehow. Fed up of awkward encounters out and about due to it.
I’ve become quite strident toward pavement etiquette, I assume that the person coming the other way is a fellow sceptic. Occasionally I do get a knowing nod as we pass each other with just mere inches between us! I’ve also had outright abuse.
When I see someone approaching on the pavement I start thinking are they one of us or one of them ? !,is this a bit weird ?.The other day as I was going into a shop I met an older lady coming out,she very kindly stopped and reached back to hold the door for me even though it meant she was only inches away,this small but normal human act raised my spirits enormously,I thanked her and she gave me a lovely smile,god bless her.
A very frail old friend of mine went shopping last week – she’s not one to be told what she can and can’t do. A woman asked if she could help carry her shopping to the car. There’s a glimmer of hope …..
I’ve recently stopped jumping into the road when passing someone. I now let the others do that if they want – most do. I’m thinking of starting to point out that you can’t catch anything from passing someone outside on a pavement.
Last week I had a lovely chat with a wonderful 86 year-old who trundles her dog and zimmer frame up and down the hill a few times every day. She’s a star!
This happens all the time,
Passed in the opposite direction today, by an apparently fit looking couple )well fitter than me) , I stood my ground, they swerved into the road traffic.
I am waiting for someone to be clobbered by a road vehicle & the death be reported by the BBC as a CV19 death.
Its what they would have wanted…
D
Abuse ’em back. They can’t give you a slap, for obvious reasons.
2 metre “rule” is actually farly sensible, as long as you don’t try to stick to it at every second and don’t panic when someone sle momentarily violates it. An anti-lockdown t-shrit might actually encourage zealots to keep more distance from us.
No, it really isn’t remotely sensible, as evidenced by the admitted fact that there is no scientific basis for it.
The only possible justification for it is the one the government effectively applied: “better safe than sorry”. That obviously assumes you take their inherently irrational ideas about the supposed dangerousness of this virus seriously.
But the simple fact is that this rule has huge costs. If enforced (and the government and unions between them seem determined to impose it (because they are insane, stupid or evil, evidently), it means dramatically reduced productivity and therefore ultimately lost jobs.
And outdoors there should be no distancing rule whatsoever. It just makes no sense. No touching combined with leaving people to use common sense is the only sensible “rule” for outdoors, and in reality common sense alone is far better.
The green shoots of recovery coming into view…?
Do you remember how after 9/11 the trolley-dollies on airplanes transformed from smiling angels into Sky-Nazi’s overnight? All the Karens working in B&Q are like that now. As if they think they’re the thin blue line between you and certain death.
Lemmings jumping of the cliff edge
What about a broken key or an open barred door to symbolise a broken lockdown? And instead of just a t-shirt, how about a lapel badge, or even just a badge?
A padlock in a circle with a diagonal line through it, like the Ghostbusters Logo or an anti-smoking sign.
T-shirt and badge. And all the rest.
Personally I’d be up for one of these with the antilockdownist symbol (whatever it turns out to be) on the pommel:
http://www.armourclass.co.uk/Data/Pages/Medieval_4.htm
OH yeyeh. Now that is right up my street.
I’m kidding, but ‘How to Lose Friends and Alienate People’ is apposite as a slogan.
I’ve been wearing my ‘Creeping Death’ Metallica t-shirt. Thought that was quite funny, if in poor taste. Not that anybody has taken notice or said anything.
Can we have a sort of secret salute or signal as well?
Be seeing you.
A handshake of any kind would be apposite.
Funny isn’t it, how capitalism has basically lead us to “hold an opinion, better buy into it by purchasing something”. Still capitalism just about works, unlike lockdownism. Will see if overt anti-lockdown t-shirts are available anywhere, so long as the overtness is done politely, no point being rude about it when we shold be aiming to convince others not merely offend them.
Yesterday I saw a great pic of a herd of sheep all wearing blue surgical masks. Wish I could find it now, it would be perfect. Maybe it was on here?
A discreet logo would work. How about “Fold” – the “L” and “D” referring to “Lockdown”?
I have t shirt “NORMAL NOT NEW NORMAL”
and there’s this one
This with a mask:
(but probably copyright, I guess)
I posted this yesterday. How about ‘I do not suffer from CDS’. Meaning Corona or Covid Derangement Syndrome (someone else coined this) and if anyone threatening asked you could explain it as ‘Cognitive Dissonance Syndrome’ in an ironical way and leave them to work it out.
Just CDS with a line through it (perhaps in a red circle prohibition sign-style) would be enough.
Deniable, but enough to give a signal to those in the know.
The leader of the German Widerstand party ( resistance ) wears an aluminium sphere on his lapel with a ribbon as a sign to others . Here he is in at a demo in Stuttgart . He is an ENT specialist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk2lFBLX7cY
I honestly love the fact that the Germans – given their track record – are leading the charge for freedom
Lol look what happened to France. Liberte, Egalite…….. Papers please!
Is that actually just a bit of crushed up tinfoil?
After Matt Hancock’s latest lunatic pronouncement I have ordered this
I have a similar hoodie, nobody’s actually commented on it yet.
My suggestion:
Or maybe even this:
Just riffing now:
How about this:
LOL
With: Professor Ferguson ate my Future!
Some lions led by a donkey?
the lions in masks
Last time, I promise. Then I’ll shut up.
Fluorescent yellow vests, although first thought of by the French, are surely the way to go.
Most people have one or two already; they’re non-confrontational; highly visible; and once sufficient numbers are reached, would be a large scale statement.
I just don’t think the lockdown zealots have quite figured into their extended holiday that society is collapsing. It’s like they can’t see it. They seem to think it’s like they’ve paused live tv and when they press play again we will continue where we left off. Under the so called removal of lockdown the requirements will make it impossible to make a living from any kind of business. I don’t think they realise that. If this doesn’t end soon they will kill us elevating the need for the virus to do it. Nothing less than a return to what we considered normal will do, anything else is a global fascist super government that wants to confine you to house arrest, forced work programmes and hunger. If business can’t provide what we need the state will need to and we all know how that will turn out. Look to any communist country to see how poor you will be. I’m sure then the lockdown zealots might just see what they’re done then. Loads of them will still claim it was worth it though because they all seem to be utterly hypnotised and incapable of thinking straight.
First inklings are appearing – Sunak on news tonight accepting that jobs will be lost.
Have I missed the latest govt borrowing figures? They will be interesting.
I love how they keep saying “We can’t save every job” like only 1000 people will be out of work.
No, Rishi. You can’t save the MAJORITY of jobs. SAY. THOSE. WORDS. OUT. LOUD.
Hi Biker,
Last week you mentioned the possibility of food shortages in supermarkets – how’s this situation developing?
in my store the totes that i am used to seeing stuffed full of all the normal amount of products are down by about a third. We have no brown sugar, we’ve not had any tea or coffee delivered this week, same goes for cleaning products, ready meals. It’s not like we’ve run out but there’s less stuff being delivered. We’ve even been told that we’re only gonna get one brand of toilet paper. If one of the worlds largest retailers are rationing too it’s stores it can only be a matter of time before you start to notice it yourself. This booklet with all the products on it they were telling us were gonna be scarce is still at the desk in the store and is still what the company are preparing for.
Can really see it on the fresh stuff, lettuce and salad in particular, and lots of gaps for things like corn flour (tried two stores) and did you say tea?
PS, this monopoly thing, how are suppliers faring? Are they being hammered on prices? I’m rural, we’re hearing dairy herds being culled due to lack of demand for milk due to offices, cafes, restaurants closed?
Been trying to get some dried bakers yeast since middle of March, nothing. Possibly due to the brewing industry reducing production? Flour is just a rare. Powdered egg & bully beef anyone?
Some bread-baking friends were in the same boat re yeast, Dave. They eventually found some in a small rural general shop.
JohnB I will go for a drive tomorrow, anything is worth a try.
Is trying to local yeast a valid reason for being in the car, if so how far can I travel from home?
So many questions, plenty of time to find a solution.
Morrison’s are doing fine
Mostly back to normal in West London, apart from flour, which seems to have disappeared entirely.
I think the trouble is many of the lockdown zealots are cushioned by their wealth and lifestyles that the current situation doesn’t really impact them. To them this is a long holiday where they can do zumba, take pictures of their lovely neighbourhood to put on Instagram, post their latest baking creations and to show off how they celebrated VE Day. Try telling them that many people are losing their jobs or businesses; rise in mental health issues, DV, child abuse and they accuse us of being unfeeling and only concerned about profit. It’s like trying to get blood out of a stone.
It was announced yesterday that taxes will go up to pay for the money the government is currently spending. Maybe the Treasury should propose taxes that would hit these lockdown zealots hard. Then don’t be surprised if they start screeching that everything should go back to how it was before 23 March.
On Spanish TV they have a slot during thr comercial break called Balcony Stories that shows people in lockdown from all over the world doing zany things in their homes. At first I thought it was harmless, just people trying to relieve the boredom and keep their spirits up. Now I find it intensely creepy and clearly a part of the propaganda effort.
Many people who do zumba, take pictures of their lovely neighbourhood , post their latest baking creations, and celebrated VE Day, are strongly opposed to this rabid lockup nonsense.
No point causing even more division, there’s plenty of that already.
Probably some of the lockdown zealots were also the ones complaining about the economic impact of Brexit, but now think it’s okay to create a much bigger impact on the economy and lives in general. When the dust settles they’ll be moaning if we have another ten years of “austerity” because of all the extra debt we’re racking up.
It’ll be a lot more than ten years. It could be decades.
We paid back the loans from the U.S. for WW2 in 2006.
We finished paying off the money to end slavery in 2016, I believe.
Indeed. I have a small patch of land as a smallholding in what looks to be a very wealthy area – barn conversions, beautiful homes, countryside. This situation is still affecting them badly financially. Just as an example, one lady who lives there was furloughed from her job but now the extension has been announced, the firm has made her redundant. Her mortgage is high, she has no money, and because of the drop in property prices it is likely she will have to sell for less than the mortgage owed. She is terrified. Her husband died 2 years ago and she has 2 children. This is what lockdown is doing. It’s disgusting.
I don’t think in many cases that they haven’t figured it out. It’s that they actively want it to happen. Remember that McDonnell said a year or so ago that an economic shock like Brexit was the best basis for a revolution to take place. Well, he’s got something much more potent now, and the Tories are helpfully making it worse for him.
Tuesday is the day when the ONS publishes its statistics in the UK . We once again see a large number of deaths especially in care homes which are non covid related and my main thought on this is as I have mentioned before the large number of elderly who are revolving door patients with the local hospital They are now not going with acute infections for a few days of treatment at the hospital which might keep them going for another year but are left to pass away in their care home.
It would be interesting to see how many are dying with ” old age ” in part 1 of the death certificate now . Usually a doctor writes this when they are over 85 and for some reason they have collapsed at home and you have no idea why they died.. You can usually find that they had a myocardial infarct a few years ago to back it up and it spares the family the need for the deceased to have a post mortem . . I suspect a few GPs are using ” Covid19 ” on the death certificate in the same way now .
Incidentally I remember writing a couple of ” old age ” down in February of this year when covid19 was rapidly spreading in the UK largely undetected as we only could test those from Wuhan . On reflection they could have been Covid19 deaths as covid19 could have been the straw which broke the camels back.
Anyway peak insanity seems to have been reached with Matt Hancock’s assertion that no hugging of strangers until a Covid19 vaccine has been found. I doubt if Aldous Huxley could have imagined the insane world we are living in now.
Hmmm, human sex drive versus Hancock. Difficult one.
Given that a Covid vaccine, should one be developed, may only be partially effective like the flu vaccine, it just goes to that people like Matt Hancock should be nowhere near any kind of power and responsibility. I despair at the state of the country in normal times, but now we seem to be surrounded by a collective madness.
Has there been any analysis of the distribution of mortality by sex in the UK? The difference in total deaths, covid19 or otherwise in England and Wales became available this morning. The publish the breakdown by sex and age group, but don’t sum those groups, making some comparisons difficult. Manipulate the spreadsheet a bit, though and the following comes to light.
w/e Male deaths minus female deaths (all causes, all ages)
6th Mar 24
13th Mar 123
20th March 150
27th March 320
3rd Apr 1201
10th Apr 1380
17th Apr 539
24th Apr 459
1st May -239
That is to say, from 25th Apr to 1st May, when there was an overall excess death total of about 8000, and 6035 death certificates registered mentioned covid19, a disease which has consistently been observed around the world to kill roughly twice as many men as women, 239 more deaths of women were registered than of men.
If the 2:1 ratio of male:female mortality was reliable, the discrepancy should have been in the region of 2000 the other way. Indeed, the observed discrepancy could serve as a crude estimator of the actual direct death toll, being theoretically 3x the difference. The aggregate disparity in male-female mortality over the whole two months was around 4000, suggesting in the vicinity of 12000 direct deaths as of 1st May. The official figure was well north of 20000 by that date, and likely double.
The early weeks up to early/mid April seem to mirror the 2:1 expected fatality ration quite well, but something very concerning seems to kick after the 10th April.
Clearly the weekly death registrations lag current events by a few days, and the totals including many overlapping effects. But the very existence of these overlapping effects should alert those in officialdom and academia that something very big besides covid19 might be going on.
If anyone knows of any explanation or consideration of this phenomenon, in the UK or abroad, I’d be very interested to hear of it.
Isn’t it because there are far more women than men in the age groups that are most impacted by covid? I think they’re about twice as many women as men aged 85+. So, women are half as likely to die of covid but there’s twice the number of them ergo the actual number of deaths is broadly equal?
But wouldn’t adding up over all age groups would circumvent that issue? The women who die of covid19 would indeed be older on average than men dying of the same cause, but their deaths would still carry the same weighting. Otherwise what does the widely reported 2:1 ratio mean? The death of a woman from covid19 is counted equally as a man’s, regardless of their respective ages.
The only circumstance in which male vs female age-weighting would be relevant would be where the likelihood of men contracting the disease the disease was greater than that of women. I’ve not heard that that is the case – men and women get infected with equal chance as far as I am aware but suffer the symptoms differently. To infect more women than men, and therefore even up the in-built tendency of corona virus to kill men disproportionately, you’d have to protect women from exposure to the virus less well than men.
In addition, the clear imbalance between male and female deaths in the first few weeks after lockdown suggests something, presumably covid19, was indeed killing men preferentially until some other effect kicked in.
Thinking about it a bit more, you’re right. My model works on the (incorrect) assumption that men are twice as likely to die as women. The evidence suggests that twice as many men die as women. So the ratio of men to women is irrelevant and there should surely be significantly more male deaths than female deaths.
“you’d have to protect women from exposure to the virus less well than men.”. Simple. A majority of elderly care home residents are women. So when hospitals were told to clear their decks and dump their “non urgent” patients into care homes, women were disproportionately likely to catch covid19 from incoming residents who had contracted it in hospital.
That’s certainly a possibility. The only other explanation I could think of is if women on average linger longer by several weeks between infection and succumbing than men. Do you know what the relative proportions of men/women in care homes typically is? Not sure why there’d be a huge imbalance, it’s less how long had than how long you’ve got to go I’d have thought.
Theres an ons report from 2011, puts the ratio at over 3 women to each man in a nursing home, dropping to 2.8:1 by 2011.
There’s not much conclusive recent data. I found a report relating to Scotland showing 2:1, but that included a minority proportion other other types of care. Looks like the ratio has been narrowing slowly, but is still 2.6-2.7:1 most likely.
Ye gods. If we’d put half the effort into keeping covid out of care homes as we put into stopping people sunbathing.
Have you read the Oxford Study, that breaks down risk factors by age and sex (see page 11). Massive cohort, 17.4m. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.06.20092999v1
I hadn’t. I will now. Thanks.
I’ve been looking at the COVID alert system/Nando’s chilli scale and thinking about it in the context of influenza. So apparently with COVID we’re currently moving from level 4 (‘a COVID-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially’) to level 3 (‘a COVID-19 epidemic is in general circulation’). Because the government are being so opaque, we can’t ever be sure of the data or ‘The Science’ which informs what level the UK is at any one time, but we know that every winter we have to deal with a flu epidemic.
Surely flu would fit into the definition of level 3, 4 in a bad winter, maybe even edging into bottom of level 5 (‘as level 4 and there is a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed’) because we have had instances in the past where the health service has been overwhelmed due to flu cases and cold weather in winter https://www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opinion/nhs-on-the-cusp-of-collapse. The 2017 – 2018 season was particularly bad for flu I seem to remember, especially in conjunction with the inclement Beast from the East. And yet we have tolerated flu epidemics for years without locking down.
I know we have a vaccine for flu but it is only 30-60% effective on the whole so widely varying effectiveness https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/seasonal-influenza/prevention-and-control/vaccine-effectiveness. I would have thought the vaccine would be factored into the transmission/the R, which is believed to be around 0.9 – 2.1 for seasonal flu strains https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2715422/. I can see there being hysteria as soon as the media reports the R of COVID going a whisper above 1, as it has supposedly done for those countries unlocking. I worry that the alert scale may also become misleading, and people may not understand it in this context – they might expect us to go right down to level 1 for COVID, but even flu is not at level 1 because it’s endemic.
I know that COVID is not comparable to flu in all ways but I just thought this was an interesting comparison in the context of the COVID alert scale.
“So apparently with COVID we’re currently moving from level 4 (‘a COVID-19 epidemic is in general circulation; transmission is high or rising exponentially’) to level 3 (‘a COVID-19 epidemic is in general circulation’). ”
This is of course a flat out lie by the government, because as we’ve just been informed, there is no epidemic at the moment:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/
Indeed, so we may even be reaching level 2 on their trite scale. This really goes to show that this ‘plan’ is all a smokescreen to give the impression they’re in control
I said to a friend today, “Britain has not faced a more serious threat since the summer of 1940, on the eve of a possible Nazi invasion.”
This time though, we do not face tyranny from a foreign government. We face tyranny from our OWN government.
In 1940 we were saved by the Battle of Britain. Now we citizens face a battle FOR Britain.
We face tyranny from our own government in collusion with other WHO compliant governments. The others have gone their own way and mostly had better results.
Also interesting how many citizens easily rolled over to become very Nazi in approach (believing the nonsense and snitching on neighbours). Very sad.
Ive never taken a vaccine for flu. Im basically never sick either. I know plenty of people who take the flu shot every year and often is sick nevertheless more or less a month or two. I wonder how they estimate the effectiveness of the vaccine.
I actually got the flu vaccine back in November because it was offered at work so I thought I may as well, because flu sounds pretty nasty and I wanted to avoid it. I’ve never had it in my life before (aged 21) and I didn’t get it this flu season either, but I did get a rather ‘persistent cough’ for around two weeks after having the vaccine. Not sure if it was a side effect or if I caught some other virus.
I came across with an article a couple weeks ago that compared nations with higher flu vaccination rates to nations with lower ones. High vaccinationrate nations like UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands are among the highest deaths per million of covid. Lowest vaccinations rates are in countries like Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Slovakia. These countries have very low deathcount so far.
Might be nothing do with vaccination rates but found it interesting stats anyway.
A study was done a couple of years back using the military as subjects and they found that those that had a flu shot were 34% more likely to contact a coronavirus.
Yeah, ive heard of that. Was it 36% actually…? =)
There was a similar study among children in Hongkong.
“a randomized placebo-controlled trial in Hong Kong children found that flu shots increased the risk of noninfluenza viral ARIs fivefold.”
Direct link. Those that had the flue vaccination became more affected by COVID
https://unlockthelockdown.com/vaccine-mediated-viral-interference-this-is-truly-shocking/
Christ, I hope they don’t make the Gates vaccine mandatory, I know he’s a ‘health expert’ (his words) but I believe he may have just a tiny conflict of interest.
Why this isn’t disclaimed every time he’s on the news basically selling his product is beyond me. The media have a lot to answer for.
Paul Weston is definitely not a fan of the media..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcUNeKe6PtA&list=PLOuYoiKDSMgCa12cyXIIxPl4niXOXIcrX&index=2&t=0s
Not to mention his disgusting fake meat products.
What’s scary is that in Australia they are mandating the flu shot now for anyone who visits anyone in hospital and for all the older people going back to day centres. It’s just criminal.
Wow. So. Maybe the 2/3 times I’ve had the flu jab and then er…. got flu, it was probably actually a cold that the flu jab made me more susceptible to? Wow. Those were some bad colds if this is true. The more this goes on the more I feel vindicated in not having it this year.
Actually I think the flu jab is quite good at protecting against a couple of the flu strains but it can’t protect against one of them and that’s the one that has been floating around the past couple of years.
However a peer-reviewed study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in March 2016 found that people who were vaccinated against the flu three years in a row were actually at higher risk of being infected with the flu. https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/63/1/21/1745238
Also the respected Cochrane Review that analyses all the studies said in 2018 that it “shows no appreciable effect on working days lost or hospitalization.” https://www.cochrane.org/CD001269/ARI_vaccines-prevent-influenza-healthy-adults.
I’m wary because my sister was vaccine injured and it ruined her life. Apparently there are certain families that need to be careful. However they seem to be trying to rule out any exemptions.
Always advisable to familiarise yourself with the ingredients and side effects of any drug/vaccination before having that.
That’s interesting because I’d wondered if there was a link between the covid stats and the flu jab.
I have noticed in recent years that employers are pushing the flu jab, first it started off with we can offer you a discount if you get the jab at an High Street chemist, last couple of years it is becoming a free offer.
I hate needles, so even as a tight Yorkshireman, I don’t take up the free offer, had flu years ago and it was nasty, but I came through it.
D
I wonder if you could sue these ‘well-meaning’ employers if you are the unfortunate one suffering from a debilitating side effect as a result of the vaccination.
Always ensure that you check the ingredients and side effects of every vaccination/pharmaceutical drug and then make an informed decision whether to take it or not.
It was Corona!
Last year the flue vaccine was 17% effective (not sure how they calculate this number). As we heard it seems as if people who had the flue vaccine are more compromised when getting COVID.
If you haven’t already, you might want to add Stanford professor Dr. Scott Atlas’s remarks on the lock down in the US. This was on Fox news last night:
https://www.foxnews.com/shows/the-story
And greetings from sunny Pasadena–I’m enjoying this blog. Loved the link to Lionel Shriver’s interview. And especially Toby’s columns. Thanks for the community. Bob
Bob, I tune into Fox because I think it’s a lot more honest than other news outlets (hope I’m right!) I also listen to Dr Steve Turley on YT and am interested in his view that the left is losing in the US. Is this a fair assessment in your view?
Best wishes from the UK!!
Well, Fox is fairly biased to the right and that needs to be taken into account. But it’s pretty much the only TV option to all the other stations, like CNN, MSNBC, etc–that are just as biased but to the left. And they are all supremely anti-Trump. So Fox is a good antidote and it also covers stories the other networks ignore if it doesn’t suit their agenda. Though FOX does the same sort of omission. I don’t know Steve Turley–did you mean the left is losing on the lockdown issue or in general? And best from the Pacific West Coast!
Hi all, just a reminder I’m planning to drop a big Twitter-bomb this Thursday evening (basically it’s a mass spamming of Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Matt Hancock’s Twitter accounts). Here’s how it works:
On Thursday, 14th May at precisely 8.02pm (the second the clap ends):
Step One: Tag @BorisJohnson, @DominicRaab and @MattHancock on Twitter.
Step Two: Type, “This lockdown is destroying our lives and our economy. There is no scientific justification or legal authority to allow it to continue. We demand our freedom be returned now.”
Step Three: Add the hashtags #EndLockDown #WeWillBeFree
It only works if thousands of people do it at the same time. If you want further details, visit my Twitter page here: https://twitter.com/WeWillBeFree82
If it proves successful, I am going to make it a daily event. I am contacting lots of various groups on Twitter who have agreed to share and support this campaign. I have no idea if it will work, but I think it’s worth a try.
More info on how Tweet Bomb’s work can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_bomb
Thanks all
R Dawg
PS Keep fighting the good fight, and remember that famous old adage: “This too shall pass.”
Well done for coming up with this idea. Hopefully it’ll be a shitstorm for them.
If it works, I will make it a daily event. The main thing is it gets the hashtags trending on Twitter. But it only works if thousands of people all do it. I guess we shall see. Only 48 hours to go…
If this site promotes it, it will definitely be able to recruit thousands, It will at the very least get some M5M traction. Although they’ll likely call us right wing Nazis nut jobs,,
They can call us what they like. I just want us to live in a free nation where people can use their common sense to make their own decisions. Basically, pretty much what Sweden did/does. We will get there.
I will ask Toby if he can include in Thursday’s blog…
I’ll have a go, though I’m not a Twitter tw*t myself. I have a virtually unused account somewhere….
Hi Mark
Make sure your Twitter account is still active before Thursday, if you have not used the account for some time, it may ask you to verify who you are.
D
I’ve only used it a few times in total but I did use it a few days ago to ask someone a coronapanic-related question. So it should be active.
Must reactivate my Twitter account, want to be ready for the big day.
omg I love your Boris Jong Un
I definitely think we should have merch and identifying symbols, for those bold enough to wear them.
Here’s my long term plan. We set up a religion of antilockdownists and organise as an oppressed religious and cultural minority. Then we can campaign for equality and rights. Like Sikhs being allowed to wear their ceremonial dagger, we require exemption from lockdown restrictions, though obviously only amongst our own people. So anyone who is an antilockdownist can run a business (bar, restaurant, hairdresser etc) freely, provided it only caters to other antilockdownists while lockdown is in force.
Another advantage is that anyone who criticises us can be freely abused as a bigot, de-platformed and cancelled, and probably threatened with prosecution, and anyone who gets annoyed enough to attack us physically gets slapped with a hate crime charge on top of the usual punishment.
Can we have blue hair and a flag?
I guess we’ll have to have a Prophet to decide that sort of thing.
I’m available, but most folk might prefer Toby, since we’re on his turf here, after all..
As long as neither is mandatory
As long as it’s HL Mencken’s black flag, eh?
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/31549-every-normal-man-must-be-tempted-at-times-to-spit
I’ve noticed that one of the only ways to gain traction these days is to become a victim. There’s power in fragility. What we need, though, is a bunch of leftie do-gooders with a twitter following to take up our cause, but sadly I think they’re all firmly ensconsed at home.
Liking this, please start it so I can sign up?
This could frankly do rather better than hoping for a political solution, politics would require us to somehow get a majority (impossible under the first ast the post vote ignoring system in this country), but a religion could let us get right on with living our lives and futureproof us against further crises of authoritarianism whether they are triggerd by responses to a petered-out pandemic, crackpot counter-terrorist legislation or half-witted health and safety policies. May I suggest “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” by Heinlein as a holy book for us, it goes into great details about how RH thought a libertarian state could be run.
Hmmm… so is this really a cultural page. The core argument is in today’s post finally! What are the costs versus the benefits of the lock down? Many here argue that the benefits are nil which I don’t believe. I think the costs are high. They aren’t discussed by the politicians or our journalists or many here. So we have Toby laying in to all and sundry about “being wrong” – surprise, surprise people do get forecasts wrong. I don’t remember Prince Charles saying the world would end. Even if he had, so what?
Toby looks like he wants to group together “the left” and “experts” as unreliable and wrong. This is not then about lockdown. I doubt SAGE support the move by Johnson – lift the lockdown without giving clear rules or guidelines. Now we don’t know the SAGE remit. Is it to advice to minimise Covid deaths. If it is then we cannot point fingers at them. Who is looking at the whole welfare of the UK? It is very unclear to me.
The figures quoted in today’s post are pathetic. Take the ONS stats and divide by the population. Come on. Read the FT today which has a better analysis that estimates 2% ish. Still not huge.
Yes. I’m frustrated. There is some good stuff here. It’s where I found out about the surprisingly low health worker mortality rate.
There is obviously a sliding scale of scepticism, moderate questioners like yourself, and full blown deniers like me. Buy you’ve still ended up here, and over time many more will start to realise that something isn’t quite right, And the point of this site is to drive the conversation forward. It’s also an invaluable resource for information the mainstream is completely ignoring, which should raise serious questions in itself,
Yes it’s a diverse group. We even have a sprinkling of those that like a nice conspiracy.
Oh lord, you’re back.
Hey, I never left.
Heh :O)
Sorry, can you just clarify what you mean by the “figures quoted in today’s post are pathetic”. Which particular stats. are you talking about? The FT is behind a paywall so I don’t know what the 2% is that you are referring to. Thanks.
This is the segment from the FT. It is an article based around what a CEO of a testing company has said. Testing is not easy, high cost and low capacity.
“Estimates of infection rates vary widely but, according to research by the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) based on figures from European governments, Belgium has the highest percentage of citizens with some degree of potential immunity in Europe: 6.4 per cent of the population has contracted Covid-19. In Italy, the figure is 4.4 per cent, in the UK it is 3.8 per cent and only 0.7 per cent of the population has had the disease in Germany.
In Sweden, where the state epidemiologist estimated 40 per cent of the population would be immune by the end of May, only 2.5 per cent of the population has come into contact with the virus, according to ISPI.”
There is a great deal of uncertainty around these estimates because wide scale random testing is not being done yet.
I don’t share Toby’s politics, I do share his abject horror at lockdown. In terms of the people who are here, we are a diverse crew, a ‘broach church’ and seeing as no one else is collating this information, and I’ve got virtually no one around me willing to talk about it, I’m here. In fact I’m sure if I went with a pint with most folks here and we got onto politics, we’d disagree about most things but this one. I’m also not a climate change sceptic in the true sense, I am deeply sceptical of the climate change agenda, as most activists seem to hate humans, particularly poor ones (which has its parallels to what’s going on right now, all well and good to talk about saving lives, just depends which lives you are talking about!).
Well said!
I don’t think you can avoid politicising this, even though I don’t think Toby has, at least today. The Prince Charles quote – it’s witty, pure and simple. This forum is serious, but if Toby can’t try and add some humour I wouldn’t come here. I also can’t see a, single benefit from lockdown, as is illustrated by the daily suffering of my elderly parents and young daughter.
I don’t think you can avoid grouping left or anti tory politics and lockdown advocates, their opinions and hysterical revulsion at Boris Johnson’s beyond minimal lockdown lift is glaringly political. There is also a significant % of experts with left wing political ideals, or non Conservative ideals, e.g Ferguson, David King, David Hunter and I guess a few more.
The outcry at Johnson’s so called vague 50 page plan on a political level was hysterical point scoring from all his political opponents, however non vague (to me at) least it was. America is following suit and the lockdown there is severely politicised.
I’m with you and I’m not particularly left at all. Never voted Labour. I too find the Punch & Judy aspects awful. It makes me think that the agenda here is to trash “the left” rather than debate the issues.
Hmm, sorry poppet but most of us sceptics are naturally right wing. State control of the populace, economy and adoration of the state tend to be found on the left rather than the right.
I thought we’d beaten communism and now we have a tory chancellor paying people to be unproductive, the sheep are out clapping the NHS and we can see who the state mandates we can.
Socialiam is shit.
OK love, I’m not a socialist very, very far from it. I am pro-evidence based decision making and like many here wanting a far wider perspective on what needs to be done around Covid.
But hey, why not imply I am a “snowflake” and some how wrong for not being naturally right wing. I would describe myself as naturally right wing in fact.
Speak for yourself. Social *democrat* here (socialism goes a little too far for me lol).
I did the biggest U-turn of all and voted Lib Dem in the last election and was delighted when we got rid of Anne Main, an appalling human being who should have been sacked after the expense scandal.
This isn’t the time or place for in-fighting.
Totally agree that this isn’t the time or place for partisanship. I’m someone ‘of the left’ because I believe in freedom for everyone, not just those that can afford it and I also believe we should support those fallen on hard times. (My reasoning may be challenged, that’s not the point.) Up until recently I’ve found this forum to be very tolerant of many points of view so getting a bit disappointed now that people are being defined according to their political affiliations. Always a bloody mistake. I’m a sceptic and am not ‘naturally right wing’, so please ditch the generalisations. If 80% support the lockdown and we elected a Tory government then the sheep (as some have put it) are not going to be all left wing are they?
Good point. And not all Leavers were the metropolitan elite. Many people have views on a topic that are driven by that issue – not how they voted. So many voters are in fact swingers or abstain.
Interesting to read in today’s blog about the differences in ‘social distancing’ rules in various countries. I Don’t know if anyone has mentioned this before but in case not, here is the definition of ‘contact tracing’ from public health england before it was redacted by the ministry of truth:
“When we talk about “close contact” it’s important to point out that we’re not looking for people the person may have passed on the street or in a shop, as the risk in these situations is very low. A close contact involves either face to face contact or spending more than 15 minutes within 2 metres of an infected person.”
It has now been altered to conform to the new reality of course, but you can still find it on the ‘way back machine’ here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200308110424/https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/13/expert-interview-what-is-contact-tracing/
I wouldn’t bank on it staying there for ever though – it is clearly too subversive to remain.
We are still waiting for Public Health England to tell us that Vitamin D levels are critical in protecting us when getting COVID-19 (and lots of other health benefits). Lots of research confirming this but they would rather let people die and the lockdown continue. Shocking!
When last did your GP tested your Vitamin D levels?
No idea, gave up trying to see one since Blair privatised them they seem to do nothing but employ several receptionists who are there principally to prevent you from seeing one.
Vitamin D is important, but don’t overestimate it. It won’t make you immune to viruses. There is a lot of things that contribute to the functioning of a healthy immune system. We don’t need PHE to start an aggressive campaign promoting vitamin D. We need PHE to tell people to eat real food (unprocessed, fruit and veg), drink less, exercise and loose weight. People need to understand that there is no magic pill that will make them healthy.
There is, Bill Gates will sell it to you.
Well, Boris could certainly do with shedding a few (actually, a lot of) pounds. Surely his ordeal would have been much less had he not been putting the pounds on since the general election! Somehow noone seems to be prepared to say so in the MSM!
There’s no money in vitamin D, that’s why.
In case anyone doesn’t know, the maximum safe dose is 4000 IU a day. Some people recommend the pills which also contain K2 – I take these myself. It’s a good idea (for your immune system) to make sure you get enough vitamin C, zinc and magnesium as well. If you eat lots of leafy greens, citrus fruits, and similar goodies you should be OK for these, otherwise a supplement may be in order.
In theory most of our vitamin D comes from the action of sunlight on the skin. UV-B is the active bit; it is blocked by glass and most brands of sunscreen. Older people (say 65+) have trouble manufacturing D and should supplement as above, as indeed should everyone in winter in northern and far-southern climes. At such latitudes black and Asian people should supplement all year round.
There is widespread vitamin D insufficiency/deficiency, because we spend most of our time indoors or in cars, and wear clothes; this is not how we evolved. Moreover, our obsession with hygiene doesn’t help our immune system either. When I were a nipper we used to go out to play, got filthy, caught tadpoles in ditches, all that, and only came home for tea. George explains the science (NSFW):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29lF43mUlo
Hello Simon. I take a combo pill containing D, K2 (MK7 from natto) and magnesium. The three work together to boost the immune system and regulate calcium.
Interesting that they have linked the risk of getting Covid to blood types. Most at risk type A, least at risk type O.
https://www.newsweek.com/blood-type-coronavirus-covid-19-1492890
Here is the breakdown of blood typs per country can’t see major correlations yet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type_distribution_by_country
By this logic I could be indestructible. I have O negative CMV negative blood (and therefore get to donate to little premature babies aaaahh)
They tested thousands so you probably are!
Wait a minute – couldn’t this also feed into the BAME people being at higher risk? Isn’t there a higher proportion of BAME people with A/B blood ?
Not sure but I would have thought they would be looking at this. The complete lack of proper analysis is breathtaking.
Great and reliable Vitamin D resource https://vitamindwiki.com
[Not linked to Wikipedia that is notoriously unreliable as the content can be changed by anyone]
If you were to take away laughing at lefties they’d be absolutely no point to them whatsoever.
And that to me seems to be all it is most of the time, it’s not like any of you wished death on anyone, the full blown red hot labour activists I know, shared post after post wishing Boris dead, it truly shocked the hell out of me. We can all take a p*ss take, but that was something else. I know these people too, they meant it. The more middle class they are, the more militant about lockdown / PPE / the teaching unions / fill in the blank they seem to be. You can’t even have a conversation, like we at least can here. If I say anything I’m told to ‘vote Tory’ or I’m ‘right wing’. They’ve truly gone properly mad (or maybe were always totally mad, but I’ve only just noticed).
That said, I supported Simon Dolan’s legal case, I’ve been reading his twitter, I support his legal arguments, I do not support his political views, that man and I would not get on! And that’s OK, I just want his extremely erudite QC to win the case, and it’s the law not him I’m interested in.
Strange days make strange bedfellows I think.
Toby, you say
“It’s quite helpful that these lockdown zealots are nailing their colours to the mast, predicting armageddon if we emerge from under our beds and venture outside. It means that when they’re proved wrong, as I suspect they will be, any future advice they might have for the Government can be safely ignored.”
In this informative and heartening interview:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Avc6_ftzk3w/
Professor Dolores Cahill makes the point that the “second spike” our leaders and betters hope for will indeed materialise. Those dying will comprise the people (cancer sufferers, etc.) whose health has been so badly neglected during the present lockdown that they become critical in a few months’ time. Their deaths will no doubt be attributed to Covid-19.
Biggest problem of all of course is how do you get MSM to TELL THE DAMN TRUTH??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcUNeKe6PtA&list=PLOuYoiKDSMgCa12cyXIIxPl4niXOXIcrX&index=2&t=0s
They can’t. Have you seen who owns them?
Lockdown helps a 2nd peak/wave/spike – whatever – isolation keeps the less virulent strains from circulating more freely
Reading about the “independent” SAGE committee, set up by David King, does anyone know who these self appointed gits are? Am I mistaken and were they appointed by anyone? If not, who the hell do they think they are? How exactly can they question the real SAGE, they have no access to the scientific data/formal debate of government advisors so how the hell can they say how shit the real SAGE is?
If they’re self appointed, and by the looks of it they’re a bunch of lockdown loving twats, can I set up my own committee to review their review? I have a sneaking suspicion their recommendations, to whoever gives a shit (MSM, devolved governments, Labour) will be even shitter than Sage’s, which is hard to imagine
From what I can see, Professor King has assembled a group of largely ‘also rans’ who were not good enough to have been invited onto the SAGE committee as external advisers. Several are quite bitter – there is nothing like an academic scorned! Given the quality of the work of the external advisers to SAGE, and the inability of the government members to interrogate the Imperial model that has driven the lockdown strategy, you can draw your own conclusions.
I think Guido’s place at order-order has covered the credentials of the alternate-SAGE, many of which are, shall we say interesting…
Agree, they all seem terribly pro lockdown. A complete waste of time.
Don’t be put off by it. I’m left leaning, and I didn’t come here for political views, but for facts about covid. I’m absolutely embarrassed that most lefties seem to be suffering from corona derangement syndrome (I just love that term, been using it in conversations all day). Put your political views aside – this is bigger than that.
I’m left leaning as well, or at least I was before this debacle. Our jailers know no national or ideological boundaries and neither should we who resist them. When all this is over we can go back to being the racists the Guardian say we all are.
But….. are these people even lefties? I’m convinced they’re not, actually. Think of all the positions they seem to naturally adopt. They’re all repressive and er…. pretty right-wing. Hate speech laws. Safe spaces. Etc. Etc.
Spot on. I don’t recognise the vapid, sloganeering virtue signalling these hypocrites spout as in any way left wing.
You could resort to a two-axis system and class them as left authoritarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Political_Compass
True. But then that wouldn’t correlate with their love of large corporations and private assets….. (unless maybe they were Chinese ;p)
Although having said that they don’t *admit to loving corporations and assets (yet they all still have Amazon Prime and rental properties) so your point still stands.
Agreed, I’m usually quite left wing but appalled at all of this, enacted by a right wing government and supported by Labour. Left and right are never absolutes, best to make up your own mind on what you think is right. Remember Sweden is leftwing and hasn’t locked down. I’m glad to be here, whoever anyone votes for.
I think we’d all be a lot happier if Boris’s was a right-wing government. Unfortunately, it’s turned out to be as centrist as the rest.
The results are in from Dr. Jay Bhattacharaya of Stanford Medicine’s COVID-19 antibody survey of Major League Baseball employees. The survey tested more than 5,600 employees across all 26 Major League Baseball clubs throughout the US to see if they’d had the virus.
The study found that only 0.7% of those tested showed evidence that they’d had the virus. They’d expected it to be a lot higher. He states that this probably means that the epidemic has along way to go yet and they’re a long way off achieving herd immunity in the US. The other thing he suggests from his results and other studies is that the poorer you are then the more likely it is that you’ve had the virus,
The Dr is still anti wholesale lockdown though. One standout stat he mentions is that another study has suggested that there could be 75,000 suicides US as a result of the Lockdown. A number of US health care providers are apparently going out of business through lack of normal demand caused by Covid fear. Healthcare for the poor throughout the world will also go significantly backwards he says.
He admits that Lockdowns must have had some impact but all they are doing is delaying the spread of the disease. He says that eradicating the disease through lockdown isn’t possible. He argues that contact tracing isn’t a feasible approach for this virus either. Instead, he believes measures should be more targeted on areas/populations that are at higher risk.
Definitely worth a watch of his interview with Peter Robinson. Lots of other super interesting snippets of information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=289NWm85eas
In other news. It was definitely busier out and about in rural Notts today. The postie also told me that most of the people she knows went back to work 3 weeks ago.
The survey is interesting. I think his comment on the downsides of the lock down is the real and pressing issue. We are all need to work out the lessor evil. It’s not obvious but so far I see no attempt to do so by the press or our politicians or clinicians for that matter.
One other possible explanation in the case of sports players, they would tend to be at the peak of their general health and on the young side. There seems to be some evidence that the ‘Rona doesn’t induce a heavy immune response in the healthy young.
song suggestions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBojbjoMttI
Sex Pistols – Anarchy In The UK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS33yAqMeCc
The Jesus and Mary Chain – In a Hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXNnxoWOa1E
The Smiths – Stretch out and Wait
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6N24PyyUIQ
Butthole Surfers – Graveyard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuO3wwLuF0w
Big Black – Kerosene
Kirsty MacColl made some now appropriate songs, how about: “can’t stop killing you”, ” a new England”, or even the one about the guy working down the chipsshop…
I’m sort of in the same boat, I’m a middle class sort of left of centre softie, but have been disillusioned with the left for a while, I voted remain (but now don’t care, because of how working class people ended up getting treated both with that, and particularly after the election, there sure is a naked contempt for ‘poor’ people when they don’t do as they’re told by the left which really turns my stomach), and because I’ve tangled with proper lefty activists on a women’s campaign I’ve been involved in, which brought me up short in shock and horror, and now this.
Erstwhile sensible Labour activists I know, wished death on the prime minister with glee. I mean, I think he’s a mendacious narcissist, but really? He’s got kids, and a mum, and a girlfriend. I’ve never seen a Tory do that, take the p*ss yes, be politically ruthless yes, wish death on their political opponent. Never. So whilst I share your unease, where would we have been with no ‘right wing’ voices asking questions about this, as Labour certainly didn’t? I’m learning a new appreciation for how necessary the yin yang of left right is, we kinda need each other to rein in the excesses of either side, and it’s not like the left aren’t doing it about people like us is it? And, final bit of my rant I promise, middle class lefties need to get in the sea right now imho, they are so blinded by their hatred of the ‘evil tories’, and yet most cushioned by their affluence, they have weaponised this to the degree that the Government had literally no wriggle room at all and they are now fervently campaigning for poverty, the world’s gone topsy turvy!
So my current status is: a plague on both their houses, and I’ll take my critical thinking where I find it.
I do agree though, why not just win one argument, rather than create another one or two for ourselves. We can sort out climate change and academic lefties who bake their own bread, and militant vegans at a later juncture, I just want this darn thing over with, and for that we need as many people on board as possible.
“I’ve never seen a Tory do that, take the p*ss yes, be politically ruthless yes, wish death on their political opponent.”
My dad (an old fashioned Liberal) used to say that (as generalisations obviously) the right tend to be motivated by greed, the left by hatred.
They are frothing it with it now, it’s really shocked me (when I say I’m left, I’m Blair left, I’m not a signed up member or anything, take an interest, and after this, even that’s under rapid review!) but I’ve honestly had more earnest conversations with Tory voters (and one chairman) sick with worry about the impact on the poor and vulnerable. Literally not a peep out of them. When I said something about job losses, I was told those people could get a job at Tesco or Amazon (or go and work in a dark satanic mill???? That pays no tax???), it’s baffling.
I like one nation tories, the old school gentleman and a scholar types, who understand the messy compromises necessary and are pragmatic, and I think it’s the dearth of them at the helm that have got us into this mess. And I for sure don’t hate anyone, and don’t want to be associated with anyone that does.
I respect all you have posted here BecJT but you are kidding me that you’ve never seen a Tory wish death or something vile on a political opponent? So where did all that vitriol for Jeremy Corbyn come from for five years? It wasn’t just from the PLP. The PLP doesn’t own The Mail, Sun and Times (to name but three). The readership of the same organs aren’t the PLP. The most reviled man ever in British politics, and that hatred didn’t come from some Tories? Sorry, have to take you to task here. I have spoken to many Tories who wanted him dead, as I spoke to many Tories who wanted Nelson Mandela executed.
Please show me evidence that anyone on the right wanted Corbyn dead (as opposed to calling him out or laughing at him).
Not going to deny that you come across the odd overwrought type on the right that might call for Corbyn’s death, but I honestly can’t say it’s been very common. Certainly my experience has been that wishing people dead for their politics is much more common on the left than the right. Thatcher, Tebbit, Reagan, Bush, Farage, Trump, all the left’s favourite demons seem to be fairly routinely targeted for death fantasies, usually justified by explaining that they are a legitimate target because they are “fascist” or “racist” or whatever.
As for Corbyn himself, I’ve seen more really vicious vitriol generally aimed at him from Blairites than from Tories (though there is plenty of the latter around, especially in the pro-Conservative media, mostly for straightforward political competition reasons).
Mandela is in an entirely different category, and there can be and is legitimate disagreement about him, ranging from saint to Gerry Adams-like terrorist or terrorist accomplice.
I came across this article today… LOL:
https://www.naturalblaze.com/2020/05/suspicions-raised-over-covid-19-tests-after-a-fruit-reportedly-tests-positive-for-virus.html
I shouldn’t laugh but cry. A goat and a paw paw test positive for Coronavirus in Tanzania… President had ordered secret experiment giving plant and animal samples human names and ages to test accuracy of the test kits. (Clearly the test kits aren’t working then, are they?) Meanwhile a man in Georgia tested both negative and positive for Coronavirus within the course of four hours…
Reuters also had the news by the way…. so it isn’t just a hoax: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tanzania-idUSKBN22G295
It was also on ZeroHedge yesterday:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/we-sent-them-samples-goat-papaya-pheasant-tanzanian-president-catches-who-epic-lie
Maybe it’s still on the tests?
How ingenious evil plan it would be to rig the tests. This pandemic would last as long as we keep testing, And that is obviously exactly what WHO has been telling us to do, test and test even more. Let’s even test the people with no symptons at all…
Has anyone looked at the YouTube feed for David Martin World? He implies just that in one of his videos. Very detailed journalism connecting the dots. Stick with him. Explains what’s going on very clearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2CsNqHFx68
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDHAF4HLZYw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUNVXROwzPY
First of all let me reassure readers not all academics are lockdown lovers – in my science group and institute we are primed to return to work. In fact I’m a bit worried that some people who should really shield are keen as mustard to get back in. That said, we had a back to work planning meeting today and the ‘new normal’ sounds atrocious. One way systems around our building, allocated bogs (if we are even allowed to use them at all!), restricted in which labs and buildings you can use, no socialising in work… Give me strength. This will kill off innovation in a lot of work places, promote silo mentality and an atomised workforce. To be fair, our senior management share these concerns. And the idea of public transport at 10% capacity, on the buses round here, good god… Who are they paying for this??
BTW, any academics getting excited about lockdown and promoting the end our social and economic system, will be laughing the other side of their faces soon. I’m aware of large scale redundancies in the offing at all the major local universities, and I’m led to believe Oxford have laid off a lot of their college tutors/lecturers. It’s that lack of non-EU students and their large fees…. And even home students are getting restive about full fees for online teaching, which I am told is going down like a cup of sick… I count myself lucky (at the moment) that I work in a part of academia not reliant on students….
“This will kill off innovation in a lot of work places, promote silo mentality and an atomised workforce. To be fair, our senior management share these concerns. And the idea of public transport at 10% capacity, on the buses round here, good god… Who are they paying for this??”
We really are talking about significant drops in productivity and in competitiveness for those nations stupid enough to take this kind of stuff seriously.
This is something that our private sector clients are concerned with, the feedback I’ve had suggests a move towards outsourcing to more sane countries or taking more of an ‘actuarial’ risk based approach with their insurers.
I’m surprised someone of Dominic Cummings’ alledged intellect is condoning this farce.
Yes, agree with your post. I have links into academia – anyone not going into REF 2021 at 3*/4* is toast (assuming REF going ahead – last communication was mid-April). Lots of noise from VCs and special interest pleading to protect their ‘property empire with a bit of light teaching on the side’. Perfect time to rationalise and sell of brownfield sites for much-needed housing.
I think the last I heard was that REF was cancelled for now – we don’t have to participate in this being a bit more core government than a university is. I’d agree a lot of early career people are toast, especially as there may be less ‘teaching fellow’ positions available for those whose research is not deemed good enough. We live in interesting times..
REF hasn’t been cancelled. The submission date has been postponed until April 2021 but the census date for publications remains the same. It’s a tough time for universities. I’m head of a big research lab that is currently closed. My German colleagues have been operating normally through their lockdown. Each day this continues we are losing competitiveness and opportunities. The plans for re-opening are not practical in any sense and I suspect we’ll just assess the risks ourselves, as we always do, and carry on as we have always done. That is once the doors are unlocked!
As far as teaching goes the worry is fewer foreign students, students intercalating for a year and a lower take up of university places by this years A level cohort.
Thanks for the info re: REF!
If I am wrong please correct me, but as far as I can see now Westminster is allowing house buying to recommence. People that were about to move before lockdown can now start planning to move and people can go view houses that were already on the market before lockdown started. So hang on was it not Matt Hancock this morning saying you can’t go visit your parents in their own garden as it may involve you waking through their house to gain access to the garden but now its OK for complete strangers to wander about your house, nosy in your bathroom and measure up your bedroom.
Don’t get me wrong, I am so glad the light is appearing at the end of the tunnel regarding lockdown but I just can’t get over how bonkers some of the rules regarding the relaxing of it is.
Basically they don’t want any social contact whilst allowing er…. social contact in workplace or economic settings. Batshit crazy.
The cynical conspiratorial side of me is whispering that they just want to repress any possible social unrest by not allowing any mass gatherings indefinitely…….
We are living through a pantomime. When this is looked back on in a couple of years, the utter clusterfuck will be glossed over by a quick ‘we saved x lives’. There is no voice for reason in this argument.
I hope tomorrow is the start of getting back to normal. I will visit my park with interest. I’m glad that one of my usual lunch places, and a local coffee shop both reopened on Monday
How thick is Matt Hancock really?
Thicker than his name would wish.
I think lockdown scepticism swings both left and right, and extremists on both sides have a dark agenda with it and the dreaded ‘new normal’. I think the current problem stems from the champaign socialist wing of the left…. I think the lockdown fight needs a towering figure of the left to come down on our side to shut down the ‘evil tories want you back to work’ mentality..
“Towering figure of the left”
*looks around* *squints* :o(
That made me LOL. We do need someone sensible that the lefties will listen to or at least respect. I’ve seen the twitter latest, big campaign to get people to refused to work. I’d imagine behind closed door Kier must be surely feeling a tiny bit of dread?
I once interviewed Kier once you know (back in 2015 when he was…. actually I have no idea what he was, but desperate to talk to student journalists apparently). He’s the slipperiest m’fr I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to extract a straight answer from. He’s the most Blairlike thing I’ve ever been in a room with.
So….. dread? I dunno. Not sure he feels anything really except a desperate need for power.
To be used in future definitions of ‘contradiction in terms’.
I think this whole left or right wing identification is meaningless and causes division. I was a ‘leftie’ guardian reader for years until the Guardian was bought by a Saudi and turned into MSM. I always voted Lib Dem or Green and like Tony Blair until we went to Iraq. But since I believe that individual countries can be more dynamic without centralised control I voted for the Conservatives and Brexit. Now I’m kind of nowhere and the Lord Buckethead party is starting to look attractive…
Yes, this. Increasingly I find ‘left’ and ‘right’ means nothing these days. Mostly because the terms have been corrupted and somewhat flipped (as I said above there are an awful lot of ‘lefties’ who hate working class people and want to throw you in jail for saying things they don’t like). There seem to be a lot of very sensible and moderate ‘right-wingers’, I find myself drawn towards them more these days because they don’t have that sneering, judgemental tone about everything. However we still disagree radically on how best to run the economy – but likewise I disagree radically with ‘lefties’ on that one too because they seem to think the economy doesn’t matter, because they’re goons. It’s all very confusing and dementing if you let it be. Alternatively, you can see it as a blessing that these traditional ‘labels’ are being eroded and people of sense, whatever their supposed affiliation, are coming together in the middle.
I’m hoping we do come together but polarisation seems to be de rigueur – along with very strong feelings that lead to unpleasantness and division. It’s time to wave the white flag.
Ah yes The Guardian. Did anyone spot their recent headline which read How to get great service in restaurants, or some such bollocks. This was the point I decided I’d never look at the vile, ridiculous propagandist rag ever again. I’m sure what the article didn’t say was the few restaurants that survive the immediate aftermath of the insanity that they so enthuiastically whipped up will have virtually no customers. By the way this gem of a story was in the most shared most viewed section.
It’s a great tragedy what happened to the Guardian. I think it coincided with PM Cameron reading the former editor the riot act after they published the Wikileaks stuff. Then it was sold to Saudis and other interests. I used to really love the independence of that paper but now it’s just a mouthpiece like other MSM.
“a senior panjandrum at the WHO gave a press conference two weeks ago in which he praised Sweden as a “model” that the rest of the world should follow. ”
More attention is due Sweden, now that the epidemic there is coming to an end we can get a fuller picture of what a No Lockdown Reality looks like:
Stay-Open Sweden set to lose 0.02% of total population to Coronavirus, in line with usual peak flu years; 2020 may equal 2018 in total mortality; why did we destroy the economy over this?
I will send a donation when you add a Bitcoin option.
Interesting analysis using excess deaths as a metric:
https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infographics/understanding-excess-mortality-the-fairest-way-to-make-international-comparisons
(My thoughts are that there will be a rebound in the other direction at some point)
And so it begins, hope they enjoyed their government sponsored holidays – https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/12/exclusive-treasury-blueprint-raise-taxes-freeze-wages-pay-300bn/
Bloomin’ heck, that’s bad!
Did we all catch Lord Sumption being terribly patronised, and still gracious on BBC Radio 4? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86P7EEJeNKM
He was excellent once the interruptor in chief Evan D finally shut up
A friend had mentioned this to me, but I couldn’t find it, so thank you for sharing the link! How sensible Lord Sumption sounds and how irritating is the interviewer (and rather rude, I thought).
I see that the porn channel that is the BBC, and a breeding ground for Baron Munchausens, is now saying ‘x thousand number of deaths LINKED to Covid19′ not ‘died of’. Small mercies
Time to get shot of the license fee and make the BBC stand on is own knees, the way they are pandering to whoever is pushing the CV19 agenda is shocking. The puppet masters will not be financing this shoddy show of non journalism , we the British public are.
I used to trust the BBC, but all trust is now lost.
Totally agree. Go support some of the small outlets with real journalism instead… for a few bucks a month you get really good journalism.
I clocked this last week.
It went from ‘of’
to ‘covid related’
to ‘covid linked’
I haven’t watched a live tv channel in many months and certainly not BBC ones. I lost interest in their propaganda quite a while ago, during the Brexit days, and nowadays the rolling 24 news channels have their own agendas. BBC News is one of the worst. If I watch tv, I stick to Netflix or Prime and choose my entertainment. Time to give up the licence fee now I think. Their handling of this situation has been appalling.
Coronavirus: Second wave of deadly virus described as ‘very unlikely’ by Professor Hugh Pennington
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/politics/scottish-politics/2175148/coronavirus-second-wave-of-deadly-virus-described-as-very-unlikely-by-expert/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
So, just to put the nail in the coffin of British small business, I read today that the Govt. have allocated more funds to the Health and Safety Executive so that they can police businesses on their implementation of measures to protect employees from the virus.
Apparently, businesses will have to compy with social distancing, mask wearing, disinfection, cleaning and other silly measures to protect their employees. They are also required to carry out a Risk Assessment. How on earth can an employer assess the risk of infection of his or her employees when even the WHO, Govt. experts or the medical establishment do not know what this risk is?
A reporter asked what would happen to businesses which were not in compliance and the reply, gleefully given, was that HS&E have and will use their powers to prosecute offenders. In other words if someone in the employ of a small business gets sick from or dies from the virus, its managers or owners can end up with big fines or in Jail
In the past I have run a small business in the UK and I found the regulatory climate stifling, especially for innovation. I can just imagine the little Jobsworths having a party.
If I were presently the owner of a UK small business, closed down by the lockdown, knowing that HS&E were going to hound me and potentially put me in Jail I don’t think I would bother reopening.
My prediction, employers will start sacking now, particularly small ones, why put yourself through that if you don’t have to?
If that’s the case then that will also be the nail in the coffin of small and regional museums. As I’ve mentioned in another comment here, social distancing is nigh on impossible with museums and heritage sites while mask wearing is both unwelcoming and inappropriate. The latter also impedes communication as I was reminded of a run in I had with a post office worker a few days ago who was wearing one and was rude to me when I asked her politely to repeat what she was saying to me.
I won’t be surprised if more and more businesses will close and put more people out of work.
Exactly. it’s basically a huge drop in productivity, which ultimately means job losses.
Reminds me of a few years ago with our business,a government agency insisted we did a risk assessment for a bizarre situation,the chances of which happening were vanishingly small,we wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out but we were stumped,we went back to them to ask how they would do it and they said,’oh,we have no idea,but it’s you that has to do it not us’ !.
Prosecution would have to prove that they got sick because of the lack of provisions made which is all but impossible
Wouldn’t they just have to prove they broke whatever stupid new laws are created?
Wow tonight’s Newsnight was an education in propaganda. I’ve never seen such a full court press (pardon the basketball analogy I’m deep into netflix “The Last Dance”) against challenge to the orthodoxy.
I suppose it should be e expected as we near the end game where more people realized this is the biggest hoax of modern history.
The challenge now is how many of us will stick our neck out and resist.
I’m getting very close to extending my neck.
I have already told my indoctrinated friends that I’m a panic skeptic and when they are ready my door is open for a BS BBQ.
Completely confused reactions.
It’s going to be interesting to see how people’s views change as the scale of the costs incurred gradually dawns on them, and how long the anger can be postponed and where it ends up being directed. I imagine most politicians at the moment are either salivating at the prospect of blaming their rivals or sweating profusely at the risk of getting any blame themselves. Or both at once.
I think the Conservatives think if they can get into the position of being the ones seen as trying to reopen faster and leave Labour seen as the ones dragging their feet then ultimately that will benefit them, provided people are so stupid as to forget that the whole thing was their fault anyway. And Labour seems up for going that way.
But I’m not sure either party is really ready for what’s coming. The people of this country simply have not been prepared for the price they are going to have to pay, when the bill comes due.
I get the feeling we need to get out of the closet soon and start getting visible.
If we wait to long they will spin this as “if we hadn’t locked down, we would never have been so SAFE”
That bloody word.
Agree. Plus have any of them read a history book? What happens when we have crushing depression + inflationary spiral + bitter political recrimination and a need for a scapegoat? I am now increasingly worried about the politics of this. The accusation levelled at people like us is we are extreme right wing, in actual fact I am more worried about the extreme right wing (and the extreme left wing, which seems to be gathering pace as well).
Amazing to be called extremely right wing when I’ve only just resigned from the Labour Party because I wasn’t interested in Blair Mk 2
There’s a big need for some new parties at the moment, I think! Lots of people on the left will be alienated by the Labour Party’s coming reversion to Blairism under Starmer, as well as some like you and Bec who have seen past the covebola panic. Where will they go do you think?
And on the right there surely must be a lot of disillusionment with the “Conservative” Party over the covebola panic, and if leaving the EU goes ahead so the Brexit issue isn’t revived the Brexit parties won’t be a factor any more. Nowhere to go at the moment.
A German-style anti-lockdown party would be good, though perhaps one on the left and one on the right would be wiser if long term viability, turning into broad “populist/reformist” parties of left and right on the Italian/Greek models, is wanted.
Agree. Labour is going to pay heavily for failing to support the opening of schools. The Conservatives are going to pay heavily for this mess, they are making matters worse by fumbling through the easing of the lockdown. Most of their regular supporters (including those over 70) are not going to forget.
Because they want to be ‘popular’, it’s unforgiveable really, we have data now, it’s not what they said (of if we’re being kind, thought) it was. Surely, there’s one grown up among them who is willing to point this out? I’m just trying to have a good faith discussion in my town’s facebook group, it’s been two months of photos and naming and shaming lockdown ‘breakers’, finally there is some discussion, but even then, doesn’t matter what I say, or how carefully I say it, I’m just a heartless murderer. We have got to turn this narrative around if we’ve got any hope whatsoever of salvaging this situation before this political vacuum sucks in some really unpleasant consequences.
Tackling to be banned in training and pitches disinfected in Premier League’s plan for Project Restart
https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/12/tackling-banned-training-pitches-disinfected-premier-leagues-plan-project-restart-12694102/
Every time you think you’ve plumbed the full depths of this insanity, the nation sinks a little lower, and some new nonsense is unveiled.
This idea of spraying disinfectant around outdoors is just pathetic. It’s what we used to call, back when semi-sanity used to prevail, polluting. And the idea that disinfecting a football pitch is going to prevent even one transmission of this disease, is basically implausible, not that preventing a few transmissions would in any case be remotely worth polluting 2 acres of even grass monoculture.
This is all completely divorced from reality. It’s people in the grip of delusion desperately trying to think up ways to make it look as though they are doing something.
This is beyond insane – I can’t believe this.
What’s coming next? Majority of sports will face similarly stupid rules. Tour de France with 21 stages of an individual time trial – how exciting, I can’t fucking wait to watch it.
So this is it, the end of humanity. Not another ice age, not a giant asteroid, but this – a virus with a mortality rate below the seasonal flu. Are we sure that it’s not some brain-eating amoeba that’s causing this?
That’s a good explanation, mo wonder brains seem missing!
Maybe we just need to wait a few decades. All these people will stop reproducing since meeting a new partner won’t be safe, let alone having sexual intercourse. They will become extinct like dinosaurs. The world will be free again.
My brother-in-law is an avid cricketer in his spare time. His team travel regularly for local and regional matches .
Since he also does the accounts, presumably he’ll have to set aside funds for disinfectant and protective measures.
Imagine a fast bowler resplendent in PPE.
Will the fielders be allowed to pick up the ball?
Recall Jeffrey Dujon’s magical catch back in the sensible 80s when the Windies delighted us all with their skill: would such a move be banned by the Elf and Safety cops now?
https://youtu.be/CPUKy0u6rVY
Since we’re currently exhorted to reduce plastic waste, how will the new rules compromise this?
Same here; so much for recycling!
Footballers aren’t renowned for their intelligence.
One day someone will sit them down and explain the wonders of sunlight on genetic material such as RNA viruses.
“Once upon a time there was a wittle virus….”
I’ve just posted this, all I’ve got is hahahaha the Telegraph, I can’t find it in the other papers yet, but I think THIS scenario, explained in health and life expectancy terms (that’s what I do for a job) might wake a few up https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/12/exclusive-treasury-blueprint-raise-taxes-freeze-wages-pay-300bn/
Sigh! Just when I thought it was impossible to get any more ridiculous! Have you also seen that the Blackpool tourist board has changed its slogan to Do not visit blackpool! How quickly we have degenerated into complete madness!
I’d upvote you twice if I could. Your story beats this one, by quite a margin, which is saying a lot:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8312379/Judge-questions-CPS-decision-charge-homeless-man-breaching-coronavirus-rules.html
I’ve had an idea to make some memes for social media. I was thinking of sourcing very hard hitting images of totalitarianism and then captioning them.
So for example..
We don’t follow China’s (or fascist) justice policies
Why would follow their health policies?
Thoughts?
Gleichschaltung :
the enforcement of standardization and the elimination of all opposition within the political, economic, and cultural institutions of a state
I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but idiocy prevails
https://www.scrapbookpages.com/DachauScrapbook/KZDachau/DachauLife.html
The images won’t appear but worth looking at them to see the first dissenters at Dachau.
Hi has anyone else been posting antilocked/sceptical articles on Facebook? I have and am getting zero comments or views, whereas if I post something else i get lots. Are people not seeing them? A friend asked why I’m not posting, but I am. Anyone had similar experience?
It’s a common censorship method. The poster can see the content but no one else can. That happened to me on the FT.
Takes a long time to figure it out.
Yep, if I post a cat picture, it’s a flurry of heart emojis, if I post ‘economic armageddon’ zip.
I’m not so sure about censorship – I think people may be getting pissed off but are frightened to say so. Our local FB page used to be full of posts by the lockdown zealots. These have all but dried up and those that are posted are mostly ignored. A post about dog turd will get many, many more comments than a CV post. My view is that a lot of people are enjoying the pandemic – what’s not to like, free money, long lie ins and evenings spent boozing and watching Netflix. However, that’s not to say they believe some of the nonsense spouted by MSM. Only when it hits them that they will be out of a job in a couple of months will They start agitating. Even the Guardian reading university types are starting to see that redundancy beckons.
Great article about social media censoring. https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/05/youtube-censorship.aspx
If you prefer to keep your data (and thoughts) private also reconsider your gmail or yahoo email accounts or corresponding with people/business owners with these accounts
They are deliberately reducing the exposure. Has anyone seen those ‘official’ government Covid notices where the hashtag trends are? Big Brother making sure we know the ‘right’ way to think.
Interesting, me too. All I said in the post was that people might find the link interesting and informative. I don’t use Facebook a lot but thought that at least one or two people might acknowledge it, but nothing.
Apologies if this has been posted before.
Today’s Sun editorial contradicts everything they have been striving for over the last couple of months:
“We understand how nervous many Sun readers will be today heading back to work. Do try to remember that most people’s risk from Covid-19 is still relatively tiny. Even if you were unlucky enough to catch it, coronavirus becomes serious overwhelmingly among the old, sick or obese, of whom the vast majority survive… life involves risk. Covid-19 has made it a fraction riskier still. We will do ourselves MORE damage long-term by refusing to venture back.”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11609294/coronavirus-years-must-get-back-work/
I suppose we should be grateful.
I really do think they’ve only just realised they were busy destroying their own futures. Perhaps they’re feeling like ‘Covidiots’.
Well, that’s a start! Hopefully the rest of the dreadful MSM might start to follow suit.
Thank God! I dislike that rag but it’s the highest circulation and most influential paper in the country!
This cheered us up tonight. I hope it does for you all too! Kevin James is one of us… https://youtu.be/wfGAktuU93s
Very good, thanks.
Sod ‘Run’ though, take the guy who dobbed you in with you !
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/13/a-short-step-from-contact-tracing-to-mass-surveillance/
We are being managed now, not governed. Expect more nudging in the months to come.
This is an interesting article that compares surveillance methods used by different governments
https://link.medium.com/hV2M14T2h6
Thank you
In an earlier thread, I wondered flippantly whether ankle monitors might be employed,as used for ex prisoners on probation. having read the article, it doesn’t seem so far fetched.
Where is Liberty or other human rights groups? Or have they been captured too?
Cowering in terror along with most of the rest of the chattering classes. The were always pretty useless, but when the push came to the shove in this crisis, most of them bottled it in the most open and obvious way.
One has only to notice the progression of former ‘Liberty’ leaders into the corrupt arms of previous governments, to realise they were ‘captured’ long ago.
As in “The best way to control the opposition is to run it yourself.”.
Why did so many SE Asia countries get away so lightly with covid-19?
I find it disturbing that it is so often stated as FACT that it was because of their test-track-trace (TTT) procedures. Of course, this ‘fact’ then becomes full justification for the implementation of such measures here in the UK – which I fear might be one of the most insidious consequences of the covid-19 pandemic.
But is that ‘fact’ actually correct? Personally, I find it (literally) incredible. I can see that for a disease such as SARS1, which as I understand it was infectious only after symptoms had developed, that a TTT strategy may have some benefits. But covid-19? It is infectious for some five days before symptoms appear, a large number (the great majority?) of carriers are asymptomatic, and until some form of herd immunity appears it will be present at a very large scale within the population. So how on earth can TTT work in population centres?
Which brings me back to those SE Asia countries. Did TTT actually bring any appreciable benefits? But if not, then how did they get away so lightly?
To stray into pure speculation, for which I have absolutely no evidence. Could SE Asia peoples have already had some wide scale immunity? Perhaps through having been exposed to previous coronaviruses? Perhaps peoples with European descent have less immunity, and peoples from BAME backgrounds less again – which might in part explain why such peoples were more seriously affected?
I’m not trying to make points here, just ask genuine questions. If anyone can shed any light on this, or has seen it discussed anywhere, I’d be grateful to hear.
Fundamentally, I just can’t understand how TTT can be of much, if any, benefit with covid-19.
MSM right now will tell you that it’s because East Asians wear masks. I don’t believe that; the evidence on masks doesn’t support it.
You could be on to something with respect to existing immunity. A recent German study suggests that there may be cross-reactive immunity to coronaviruses and it mentions the possibility of regional differences:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20061440v1
Another factor often mentioned is the lower rates of obesity in those countries and better overall health. I guess that could be part of the answer.
In addition, it is difficult to make international comparisons without knowing exactly how much testing is going on, how deaths are being coded etc. Most Western countries seem to be tripping over themselves to find as many Covid-19 deaths as possible. Perhaps they’re more sensible and pragmatic in some of these Asian nations.
Thanks for that link – I may have seen it, I’m not sure (it’s too medically technical for me!). But it does imply that the immune response to CV is very complicated, and as yet little understood.
Just as with TTT, I can’t believe that the relative absence of the disease in SE Asia can be explained by face masks or general health (after all, I assume they do get the flu and colds, and they do have old people). And unless they are being deliberately misleading, I can’t think the difference with the west is owing to testing/reporting strategy.
There must surely be something else going on, and the only thing I can think of is some inherent immunity – but I would be happily corrected or enlightened on this.
I come from a country in SE Asia and one of those who was lucky not to have had Sars. The received wisdom is that the heat/humidity would kill the virus and that’s why we were spared by it.
I have lost track of what is going on in my home country but given the rampant corruption and overall inefficiency that’s common there I won’t be surprised if the figures coming from there are suspect.
Mask wearing is more common in East Asia however experts have long questioned their efficiency and I think wearing them is more of a placebo effect and to make people feel better about themselves even if its not really doing anything.
My son has been in Thailand since the beginning of January. In February, while covid19 was supposedly raging in Wuhan, he and his friends travelled to Cambodia, no problem. It was only much later that Thailand instituted a curfew. You can wander about Bangkok in the daytime but you can’t go anywhere else. There are people taking everybody’s temperature at the entrance to shopping malls and you have to wear a mask or you aren’t let in. Yet the virus must have been circulating in Thailand since at least the beginning of the year. People were moving around. There have been about 50 deaths attributed to covid so far, yet in 2017 over 80,000 Thais died from respiratory diseases. What is going on?
Any ideas?
100 % agree. There most be some form of cross immunity at place. Japan has extraordinary low figures and no escalating epidemic. The infection seem to be 95% transmitted from asymptomatic to asymptomatic. No other way to explain the high antibody level detected together with thousands of asymptomatic carriers found worldwide every day hidden in the numbers of cases we see on worldometer every day.. TTT seem to be theatre for the masses. This is a futile task TTT so why are South Korea doing it? It could be political points of being seen to be effective but also more sinister explanation of control mechanism.
If there is indeed some form of residual immunity then this would be consistent with in western populations the apparent decline of the disease at a point where around 20% of the population tests +ve for antibodies. Which in itself would be a massive hole in the argument for a lockdown.
And yet we are still citing TTT as a way to deal with this, with all its cost and Orwellian potential. TTT just doesn’t make any sense to me in controlling this disease, either in SE Asia or here – but I’m happy to hear counter arguments.
A statistician has done a short analysis (link below) showing correlation on an international level with flu vaccination and covid. He is absolutely not anti-vaccine and points out that it problem remains more important to protect against flu but it might be part of the eventual explanation. He also has earlier blog posts looking at rates of metabolic disease and issues with blood sugar.
https://massagehealth.co.uk/covid19_41/
As someone who lived in Asia for over a decade, I certainly observed a healthier general relationship with food and nutrition. Family meals are still a social focus and are a high priority.
Autocorrect! Probably not problem.
Possibly there is a link between previous vaccinations (I’m also thinking MMR here) and susceptibility. And clearly there is an important link between healthy life style and how badly the disease attacks an individual.
Yet I can’t think this accounts for what we apparently see in much of SE Asia, even in combination with other factors.
Really interesting article ; being utterly hopeless at stats and mathematically challenged, I read it in trepidation, but was able to follow the author’s reasoning and data.
Is there any longer a reason why NHS staff are allowed to bypass queues at some supermarkets, and also have a designated hours solely for them when the rest of us have to queue up. As a non NHS keyworker, I could immediately see it was a populist move by the supermarkets. They clearly knew reduced opening hours and restricted numbers in store would be problematic for all key workers who were working the same hours their supermarkets were open yet chose to play to the gallery, knowing any dissenters would be pounced upon by the NHS worshipping masses. Now more and more people are returning to work this has to stop. Every customer should be treated equally.
They also get 20% discount in some stores and free data on their phones. Friend of ours is NHS nurse, she’s really embarrassed as they are all standing around at work with no patients.
As a liberal minded centrist, I have been horrified by how the pple have reacted with irrational panic and accepted the denial of rights and freedoms hard won over a hundred years. Thank you for your tireless research in bringing the truth to light.
Sadly, though I prefer logic to fear, I suspect we are now in a situation where the public need to be scared into seeing the truth before they or the government will change course.
The truth? That the lockdown claims more lives than it saves, that it risks muhh worse in the future and that, apart from thedirect health costs, Furlough free holidays at home are actually government loans and they’ve spentour pensions and future wages on them.
The MSM and government have been successful in instilling irrational fear in the public through their relentless coverage of individual cases. This was the intention, and surprisingly it worked. I never thought so many people would fall for it.
“Sadly, though I prefer logic to fear,”
We are living through perhaps the greatest object lesson on the central importance of that preference in history. Most of those who would have paid lip-service to it beforehand fell headlong into panic themselves.
Fear overwhelming reason has been the core driver of this whole situation.
I haven’t heard a thing from my daughters school this week. No plan, no recognition of the fact that they’ll all be off on full pay while my daughter self educates alone at home until September. I have no idea how she’ll sit her GCSEs next year. She’s been such a good student all these years, fully committed to the system and they’ve dropped her like a hot rock. Why can work places open up, people like me go to the hospital every day (no social distancing) but teachers can’t teach? Kids rarely get symptomatic covid19 and teachers can easily distance or wear a mask if they can cope with the Co2 retention. I mean, I only wear a face mask when providing personal care to a suspected or positive patient, so the risk to teachers is tiny. I just don’t understand why no one cares. How will people no longer furloughed go back to work if the schools stay shut? At least one parent must stay at home which will lead to job loss and poverty. Why are teachers a special case? I haven’t a great respect for them as a profession anyway but this is a complete abandonment of their duty as state employees at the expense of us all.
i feel the same way about how our children have been dropped like a hot potato but i totally agree about your views on teachers. I have no doubt the people who want to stay lockdown and isolated haven’t the slightest care about children, even their own children. Mind you maybe a few months away from rabid lefty progressive teachers and their “common purpose” weird education might be a good thing. My son can do the work set for him each day in about half an hour and reckons it’s not much less than he’d normally get at school. I’m lucky my son is wise and has an interest in making something of himself despite the piss poor education he is being subjected to by the weird cult that seems to have taken over education. I’m thinking maybe i should just keep him off for ever
This touches on a point I have been wondering about. How much social distancing is taking place within the hospital work environment? If, as you say, there isn’t much, then why all the fuss about it in other work settings? What is good enough for hospitals should be good enough elsewhere…
Most teachers have continued to go into work on a rota basis for children of key workers. (D-i-L is teacher, as was I once). As with many jobs, it’s the unions that are the key to unlocking schools and some of the teachers’ unions are very left wing and will do anything to cause havoc.
I have been amazed how supposedly “educated” people haven’t read/ listened to anything other than MSM (and particularly social media) to research what is actually happening. Independent thinking has virtually disappeared.
I am an SBM in primary schools. We want to go back, I am in work today. The unions and parents are the ones fighting opening. When we “closed” we stayed open for pupils of key workers etc. We should have had up to 50 pupils a day, on average we have had 7.
My daughters school actively dissuaded key workers (a term I loath) from using the service provided in lockdown, explaining that it would be little more than private study with minimal supervision. Both my neighbours are teachers, one primary, one secondary and they both bitterly resent having to go in to supervise children (both are avid pot bangers). My daughter doesn’t need childcare, but schooling (I won’t use the term education) in preparation for qualifications that the state have insisted are essential for her future. The schools and their staff are demonstrating a breathtaking lack of care and commitment to those they are paid to support.
To answer the question – the reason social distancing is defunct in hospitals is because you can’t care for people from 6 feet away and because the space won’t allow it AND because we abandoned the ancient theory of miasme as a cause for epidemics in the mid 19th century favouring germ theory. All of which allows us to use normal infection control policy for the care of infected patients except for when we undertake aerosol producing procedures. As to why what is good enough for hospitals isn’t for other sectors…. well, when you’ve convinced a nation of the need for something you have to follow it through, right? God forbid you look like a bunch of massive, toothy wazzocks.
Just a final point, the risk faced by health care workers in the treatment of this type of viral disease has been increased not only by a failure to provide PPE (although I’ve always had what I need) but also by the health, weight and demographic of the workforce. Once, nurses and doctors would of had fewer ailments and been fitter than their patients, not so anymore.
Anyway, must pop off now, that iced bun won’t eat itself.
The Unions are just using it as a stick to beat up the Government, am sure if it was Labour in power they would be bending over backwards to help, though I am sure they would be after ‘hazard pay’
Schools reopened in France on January 12th yesterday. I have just seen the school bus go up the road and stop as usual outside the council flats. I waited and watched till it left again. Usually there is standing room only after the bus leaves that stop, but today not one single person got on. These kids have been stuck in tiny flats for two months; if it was me I would be clamouring to get out. But no. Maybe they’ve all turned hikikomori like the Japanese. Before we were unlocked the government could have put out messages to the effect that young people in general have nothing to fear and they don’t pass on the virus. You would think a government would want the country to get back to normal as soon as possible. Instead of which, between every programme, right up to last week, they bigged up the R0; one person can infect three others and each of those can infect three others and so on. They must know that’s not true and in fact elsewhere they say that over eighty per cent of people infected will have either mild or no symptoms. So now schools are back and the bus is running, but there aren’t any pupils.
By the way, the person who runs the French covidinfos.net site says that it is doing well and has 10,000 visitors a day. Out of a population of 66 million. The school buses won’t be busy any time soon.
It’s sad, isn’t it
It’s rather frustrating trying to apply reason to a situation that is entirely based on irrationality.
All this talk of “new normal” is actually depressing me more than this pandemic is.
I wouldnt be bothered of this talk if I didnt know that majority of the people buy this crap and will accept the new “normal”. I live in Finland, city of 200 000 people and we have had 90 confirmed cases during these 2 months. Still people are in full panicmode, streets are empty. We will open schools again tomorrow and many people are too afraid to let their kids back there. People think it means pretty much automaticly that the kids will get sick, some of them die and if not the kids their parents most certainly will. It is beyond crazy how things are here (aswell).
…and we were thinking of moving to Finland…is there no sane country left in this world?
Germany, apparently.
A question for the Lockdown Sceptics: why are the UK’s borders still open and why are illegal entrants crossing the Channel allowed to enter for processing,as the Home Office puts it?
France is a safe country and the French have no real interest in preventing these increasing departures from Calais and elsewhere,despite the various accords signed between the UK and the French government.
A family member lives on the south coast and sees the Border Force cutter, now known locally as the pleasure cruiser, waiting off shore. Locals are not impressed.
Where is the logic in sanctioning/condoning illegal entry when the lockdown runs on and on; when many many people are facing a very uncertain future-loss of income, reduced employment and educational prospects if any, and we are constantly told that we must cooperate for the sake of all.
As a former Immigration Officer, I have a very cynical view of what seems to be a tacit operation of a double standard.
Opinions and comments would be welcome from the many contributors here.
Sounds as though you’re expecting integrity, transparency, and coherent functioning from our government !
I agree, it’s a quite blatant operation of a double standard.
I abandoned that hope some time ago, but was hoping to expose what another facet of official doublethink is doing to us
Remember all those fruit pickers they were flying in from eastern Europe?
Good morning!
I just wondered if you could help with an analogy that’s been running through my head as I consider those who were told to self-isolate for 12 weeks as nothing seems to have been mentioned about them.
I was thinking that if you get diagnosed with a serious illness and the doctor says the only way to cure it is to, for example, remove an arm, and that this is an immediate cure. Wouldn’t you normally go for a second opinion? If the second opinion says, yes, that would be an immediate cure but there is another cure that would save your arm, but in the short term it will involve some suffering, yet you need to persevere and you’ll get through it. Wouldn’t you go for the second option? My point is, is this what the government has done? They’ve only had one opinion and they’ve chopped off the arm of the economy, the NHS, etc., yet if they’d have persevered with the mitigation measures, enduring the wrath of the media and those baying for a lockdown, they would’ve preserved the arm? I know it’s not a great analogy as the ‘arm’ of the economy, etc. will slowly grow back, but does it make sense? Can it be improved?
Back to my point of those advised to stay home for 12 weeks. Given that the advice and knowledge of the virus is constantly evolving, would it be unreasonable to suggest that a second opinion may be advisable since things are changing so fast and could this analogy be used somehow?
Anyway, thanks for any help!
You are right; someone, somewhere, should have the guts/honesty/integrity/moral courage to acknowledge that alternatives, being in short supply, should now be considered as a matter of urgency.
And your analogy is spot on.
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. Franklin D. Roosevelt
With the leak of possible treasury solutions to the HUGE levels of debt from the current crisis, it shows just how much the Government has painted themselves into a corner.
Looking at a bill between £300bn (best case) to £1.2trn , with an average around £5-600bn.
The Unions are more than happy to keep their workers at home on 80% pay (without needing to strike), many of the privatised businesses will hit the wall, no such problems when it is UKPLC paying the bills.
Taxes may have to rise, which will inhibit growth, with many workers having taken payment holidays, their need to pay these off will be hit, and most won’t be getting any bonus/ pay rise in the coming year.
Pay Freeze for public sector works…..just imagining the headlines…all the ‘key workers’, nurses especially (teachers also playing the martyr at the moment), after their ‘sacrifice’, they’ve guaranteed inflation busting pay rises for themselves for the next 5 years through the media as it is.
All the stuff that has built up over the last couple of months: operations, cancer treatments, mental health appointments etc etc etc etc….. the next battle is they are going to need huge investment to get waiting lists down….
a complete sh**shower whichever way you look at it.
The road to hell is paved with daft intentions…
I’m pretty sure those public sector workers will be out in force, striking like Arthur Scargill, if they have a pay freeze for x number of years. The worst of them will be teachers, who no doubt will do everything in their power to not go into work due to the slightest whiff of a risk, at the behest of the unions. We’ve already seen, despite scientific evidence that children are not a serious risk to them, that they are painting the image that they are doomed to die if they so much as look at a child. My wife is a key worker, but my daughters school has effectively begged us not to send her to them – they offer nothing but a shit version of a holiday club, in their own opinion – so we have accepted their offer to not send her. It is possible to teach the limited number of school attending children during lockdown, but they don’t offer it. I wonder why.
I imagine if coronavirus disappeared tomorrow that the level of resistance to work would still be astronomical, just for unions and politicians to keep scoring political points. I’ve never had much respect for public sector workers, who from my personal experience seem to think those in the private sector are lavished with world beating pay rises and final salary pensions and union representation (not that I want it). My average pay rises are embedded the low level noise when compared to any public servant I’ve ever met, yet I still perform a role equally as important as key workers for the economy and society.
As a key worker helping to keep supply chains running , but one who works for the private sector (my neighbour does basically the same job for the sainted NHS and gets paid AT LEAST three times what I do), I concur.
Public sector workers now have quadruple layers of protection from being fired, plus higher wages than the rest of us.
1) cast iron furlough, on full pay
2) job security (at least for the next year anyway)
3) unions and lawyers and god knows who else frothing at the mouth to defend them and keep them in a job even if they’re terrible at it
4) lovely pensions and payouts if they eventually do get fired
So basically we find ourselves in a situation where state employees are sat there on our dime, whilst we all get fired ?!
The other sad thing is I don’t rate any of them. A lot of them, doctors and nurses aside (although there are many truly diabolical medical professionals), are utterly shit at their jobs, or not qualified to perform them. Modern teachers are a classic example, in my experience and almost everyone who works for a council. In fact, I’m being generous those are just two examples from a huge list of shitness.
*claps like a seal*
And still they claim we will have a V or U shaped recovery. Idiocy is under-stating the case.
Some Arriva buses in my area (still on Sunday timetables) have taken to displaying “bus full due to social distancing” on the front. They are limiting the amount of passengers on. This message rotates with a “thank you key workers” message which must be a real tonic for those keyworkers stood at the bus stop with their hands out to no avail as the bus sails past. They do realise that some people who then have to wait half an hour for the next bus (or infinitely in theory) will be “our NHS heroes” needing to get to work?? Oh dear. Haven’t thought that through have you, Arriva? Additionally, early indications are that this measure has unsurprisingly gone down a treat with pro lockdown acquaintances who have no need to travel. Oh, if those travellers who took photos of a packed tube were so appalled then why were they on board? Surely it would be their moral obligation to alight in case they spread their filthy germs to so many other commuters.
They are using the Harry Potter World buses as special NHS only transport around me, I shit you not.
Magic !
I found this page on contact tracing from PHE.
https://publichealthmatters.blog.gov.uk/2020/02/13/expert-interview-what-is-contact-tracing/
“When we talk about “close contact” it’s important to point out that we’re not looking for people the person may have passed on the street or in a shop, as the risk in these situations is very low. A close contact involves either face to face contact or spending more than 15 minutes within 2 metres of an infected person.”
Isn’t this a clear contradiction to the 2 metres advice?
Am I missing something?
i.e. the 15 minutes bit seems to have got lost in the public messaging.
Totally, I pointed this out to someone the other day, they went very quiet, then started going about them coughing and sneezing in your face…
The message has certainly got lost round here. I went for a lonesome walk yesterday and met just one man. He looked at me in horror, asked me which path I was taking as he wanted to avoid passing by other people, and then dived into the hedge as I just smiled politely but didn’t stop walking. He then fell into the drainage ditch (I kid you not) and refused all offers of help, even If I wore gloves and held out a stout stick for him to grasp and pull himself out. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic!
Bet he was wearing a magic mask as well. If masks provided any protection, surely there would be no need to go to such lengths to avoid passing another human being on the Street. Noticed more of those welder type visor things recently. The only protection these could possibly afford is if someone came right up to you and spat or coughed in your face. Ludicrous.
Being worn by staff in 2 local shops. The bomb disposal look.
The lady selling cheese at the market this morning had her mask on hand just in case. Now hygiene is not this lady’s strong suit. If you eat her cheese on a regular basis nothing will get you. The mask was lying among the cheese, she picked it up to show me and it has to be said it didn’t look particularly clean. I shudder to think what she would give herself if she wore that all day long, though as I say, her cheese probably makes her immune to anything.
An elderly man came to a confused halt as I approached him this morning; he was trying to work out where I was likely to go, before going for broke and stepping into the road.
Having assured him that I’m not a danger to public health, I waved and carried on. He looked embarassed and raised a hand.
I had this stupid virus at the beginning of March. The day before symptoms appeared I had a drink with a couple of friends, then a cup of tea with a couple more (see the social life I used to lead), this is in France, so we kissed each other, so there I was in close contact with four people when I was already affected by the virus and not one of them fell ill.
I have an idea for a t-shirt design. We take the familiar KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON design and append the words WITHOUT SOCIAL DISTANCING.
Could someone with the software/expertise create this and send it to Toby?
I think it will help promote our thinking in a polite and appealing way to the not-so-sceptical public. And it will allow us to mingle with each other in public confidently knowing we aren’t offending anyone.
I came up with this idea while making a non-essential 100-mile trip down the M6 this morning, but that’s another story.
How about a Covid-19 2020 Tour T-shirt. Dates on the back, e.g. April 3 : Local Park; April 7 : Local Park; April 9: Supermarket; April 11 : Local Park, etc. etc. ad nauseum
Come on folks. Is there anyone out there who can help get this t-shirt idea going, at least with the graphic design bit?
I think it could be a game changer if there are people wearing the t-shirt and they are going about their business like normal human beings (i.e. without any social distancing), and the rest of the public see that they can do normal stuff without fear, then surely the rest of the public will have to say “I want to do that, this social distancing is bonkers”.
75k is their middle of the range forecast, if there is a slow recovery it could be as high as 150k
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-covid-pandemic-deaths-despair.html
Average annual UK deaths is what, around 600k ?
Doesn’t a bad flu season get 80k?
This is 75k deaths from suicide, drug and alcohol abuse during this pandemic
Oh ok. Wow. It They said 150k in total.before they might wanna revise that up.
Funny isn’t it. The covid deaths were overestimated. (And are now being inflated with false reporting)
The lockdown deaths were UNDERESTIMATED and are still being downplayed
French school kids having to sit in boxes marked out in chalk, hope this is fake. Depressing seeing this
https://twitter.com/lioneltop/status/1260125365990756352?s=19
I was a foster carer for 20 years working with young traumatized children ,many of them had been socially isolated from birth until they came into the system, the emotional and mental damage this causes is huge obviously they had other issues that most children fortunately don’t experience but socially isolating children even at this level is cruel and borderline abuse
Where are the children’s charities who should be advocating on their behalf?
Good to see those “in charge” of parks and public spaces telling us to not travel any distance to them and also that people will be told to move on if things become a concern. This despite the government giving us carte blanche to now go where the hell we like, sit where we like, and for how long we like for exercise and leisure purposes.
The jobsworth UK gestapo just cant resist it. Its a pity then that if I go to a public park and anyone tells me to move on or that they think I’m too close to someone else, they haven’t got a leg to stand on. I’ll try and eek out as much fury from them as possible as I simply pretend that they don’t exist or I politely tell them to f*(k off.
I really do hope that scores of people use this newly granted luxurious freedom to wind these pricks up and do what they’re legally entitled to do – be free. There is no law, no edict, no directive, that stops people using a park or public space, for whatever purpose they see fit, that doesn’t break social distances rules. If I wish to travel from Lands End to Whitley Bay, just to stretch my legs, I’m going to do it.
Even if there were a law banning free association anyone who believes in freedom has a duty to defy it
Apologies if this has already been posted, but Episode 7 of Perspectives on the Pandemic appeared last night. I haven’t watched it yet, but here’s a note at the start to say that the series has been targeted for censorship, and thus that viewers should download and share as widely as they can.
Below is a list of the previous episodes, from which it appears that Episode 2 – the first interview with Knut Wittkowski – is no longer available on You Tube (it is now on Facebook, with transcripts available online).
I watched that episode a couple of times, and it seems to me to have just being a scientist with 35 years’ experience in the subject giving his legitimate view, which didn’t tie in with that of the mainstream. I say legitimate, I think much of what he said has turned out to be correct.
This is sinister.
It is hugely concerning, and reinforces the need to support alternatives to the big platforms, that support old fashioned commitments to actual free speech rather than the new “free speech except for that bad stuff that I don’t like” that is becoming the norm nowadays, wherever they can be found.
But it’s also encouraging. The Washington Post has put out a video supposedly ‘debunking’ the Bakersfield doctors which has got 4.3k dislikes from looking just now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59JwT08mhFI
They’ve tried to censor these guys but they keep on getting posted. After years and years of me being concerned that people are being hoodwinked by, amongst others, MSM and Big Pharma, I see that people are waking up. Episode Two may be missing but the others are there and sometimes the algorithms are just cocked up. I constantly see on forums like this that people such as the Bakersfield Docs have been censored and they haven’t. Not completely. And if we keep on crying that they have when they haven’t people will call us unfounded ‘conspiracy theorists’. It is sinister (as post above says) which means we have to be all the more careful not to post false accusations which undermine the credibility of those of us who see a not so hidden agenda.
Ha, good one on the Washington Post.
But I doubt the censorship on Perspectives is merely a mistake – I’ve been wondering when it might come, and it does claim this on the latest episode. It would be consistent with what we are hearing from elsewhere.
And certainly the concept of free speech hasn’t exactly emerged unscathed so far from all this.
There’s one thing I don’t understand. Youtube is just a video hosting platform, but it censors what gets shown. Bitchute is a video hosting platform but doesn’t censor what gets shown (..?) so why do people even bother with Youtube? Let Youtube ban the video and when the blank screen comes up, just find it on Bitchute. It doesn’t mean that one day the ISPs themselves won’t start blocking access, but at the moment, Bitchute is surely just as good as Youtube..?
The issue is really about access to information and ability to spread information and opinions.
Those who seek to control information flows claim it’s not like government censorship, it’s just individual companies policing what is on their own “property”. Ad of course the old argument is that there is no point to free speech if nobody can hear you.
The pro-censorship attitude of companies like Youtube, Twitter etc is certainly only a problem because they are so successful. The best response is certainly to promote the use of alternatives that do not censor, but for such providers it’s always going to be difficult to get large when they are small, and the larger they get the more pressure the information controllers apply to force them to toe the line.
Everyone who supports concepts like “hate speech” and “no platforming” is part of the problem, – those are the basic mechanisms that are used to push censorship.
agree. vote with your feet
Bitchute ought to be as good as YouTube, but for your average Joe, it isn’t. Yet.
It doesn’t work seamlessly on a mobile or tablets like YT does. It doesn’t integrate well with other social media like YT does. As a platform it’s still very immature and has a long way to go before it can hope be in the same league as YT.
One day, though, hopefully. They’ll have to work out how to make it wash its face though: Either they yield to what big-spending advertisers want, or they charge us a monthly fee, or they set up an equivalent to superchats and take a cut. None of those is necessarily ideal and they all carry with them their own problems.
BTW I think ISPs in Australia and NZ already block Bitchute.
https://bitchute.info/censorship-of-the-internet-is-on-the-rise/
One of the things a lot of people out there are forgetting is the squabbling to come about who gets to pay for all the costs incurred.
People tend to dismiss it as a job for the government to help people out, which postpones most of the problem during the emergency itself (though the nature of government means the process will be incompetently managed, full of fraud, and lots of deserving cases will fall through the cracks). But in the end all this spending has to be paid for, unless you believe, contrary to all experience, that we live in a world where you can get something for nothing without taking it from someone else.
Ultimately that means taxation, spending cuts, or inflation. Policy choices determine which it is, which just determines who pays for it and how. Magic money tree believers say we can just “borrow” it by creating money, which is feasible for those with their own currency (EU members get to go cap in hand to Germany, which is another story), but ultimately there must be limits to borrowing in that way and it just moves the problems down the line.
The point is that we are facing paying huge amounts in an environment of economic difficulty. The scale of the problem is going to be being driven home just as the “postponed unemployment” currently hidden by the furlough scheme starts to be revealed and government revenues remain low long after the lockdown itself becomes no longer a factor. The political fights over who ends up paying are going to be vicious on a level we have not experienced since the 1970s, I suspect.
Buckle up, and remind people at every opportunity that these are costs of the panic response, not costs of the disease. Those responsible will be desperate to avoid that truth becoming widely recognised.
This isnt new but still relevant. I show this clip to everyone that thinks news and media is free, independent and unbiased. Eyeopener for some…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF0VGnmLExc&feature=emb_logo
Actually quite disturbing.
Government minister admits to being an irrational coward:
Grant Shapps says he would not get on crowded bus or tube
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/13/grant-shapps-would-not-get-on-crowed-bus-tube-coronavirus-lockdown-eased
We’ve been told that there is no epidemic at the moment, because the disease prevalence is below what is required to count as one. We know the deaths and illness caused by this disease are comparable to flu, and that it’s only remotely dangerous to a very small minority, who should by now be properly protected. The idea that this disease should materially affect ordinary day to day behaviour is flat out irrational.
Shapps has just demonstrated he is part of the problem.
Come back Selwyn Gummer!
Or, at least, his daughter!
Uma Gummer?
Anyway, of course he would not – what is his givenment (sic!) car and driver for if not to obey his Master’s travel whims?!
https://abc6onyourside.com/news/local/dr-amy-acton-onset-of-covid-19-in-ohio-dates-back-to-january
First several cases of Covid-19 7th January in Ohio
https://www.laprovence.com/article/sante/5984552/coronavirus-lexplosion-des-prescriptions-de-lhydroxychloroquine.html
As reported by La Provence on May 10, 2020, a study reviewed 466 million prescriptions written since the coronavirus pandemic began in France, show a huge spike in prescriptions written for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug. As an example, during late March 2020, over 10,000 people were prescribed hydroxychloroquine in Marseille, France alone.
The study also noted that most people who were granted access to hydroxychloroquine across France were from higher socio-economic groups and were women.
These are stunning figures probably following the advice of Prof Raoult,Marseille, early in the pandemic. This is the drug BBC don’t want us to talk about and costs 10 cents a day, not for Big Pharma. It is most likely massive prescribed in Russia,Middle East and India and Pakistan.Interesting to see their death rates.
However, if you have G6PD deficiency, ie lack a particular enzyme which is indeed lacking in about 20 per cent of sub-saharan populations, probably because it makes people less susceptible to malaria, then hydroxychloroquine can lead to haemolysis, ie dissolution of red blood cells, which makes you feel as though you are about to suffocate. This is in fact what happens in severe covid cases. See Dr Wodarg’s latest article in Off Guardian. Dr Raoult in Marseille seems to have treated numerous patients very successfully with HCQ; I wonder if they were all non G6PD deficient. Dr Wodarg worries that treatment with HCQ might have something to do with the large number of African Americans who are dying of covid, and worries that ongoing trials of HCQ do not take this enzyme deficiency into account.
Correct.But can explain the remarkable figures from Eastern Europe,Russia,Turkey,Mid East and India where this G6PD deficiency is a less problem.Also the doctor in Bronx treaating 1700 pateinets with chloroquine in the Jewisch community with no deaths and hardly any hospitalisation. Of course prescribed with caution but a dirt cheap drug 40 years old readily available at the beginning of the pandemic and with some evidence of effect why not use it? We all know a double blinded control study would be the final answer but such a study takes several months. Big Pharma did not want that so instructed MSM BBC to dismiss the drug.
Yes, that would explain the low death rate in Eastern Europe and Dr Zelenko’s too, if it was mainly Jewish people he was treating.
“But fresh guidelines issued by the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs’ Council urges officers to only enforce what is written in law and that “government guidance is not enforceable, for example two-metre distancing, avoiding public transport or the wearing of face coverings in enclosed spaces”.
The advice, set out in a document published on Wednesday after being sent out to forces on Tuesday night, follows updated coronavirus legislation coming into force.”
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/police-forces-told-no-powers-18243257
A not insignificant part of the problem of making stupid laws to govern what people can do and then adding to it by making confusing and misleading government statements that don’t make clear what is advice and what is law nobody has a clue what the f they actually are and aren’t allowed to do!
A very good point. Laws ,when they are mooted, must be debated and approved in the correct setting. Not arbitrarily made up by some unelected bureaucrat who has just watched a news item on the BBC which had been describing the dark days of ragnorok according to Neil Ferguson.
As Lord Sumption pointed out two days ago:
“the problem about using law as your instrument is that law requires definition, exact definition, and it works in categories. So, if you do this not voluntarily but compulsorily you are bound to have laws which make perfect sense in some contexts and uh not in others. The problem about law is that it excludes common sense. Now the Prime Minister has said in the House of Commons this afternoon, that he trusts the British to use their common sense, but you can’t say to a policeman: “you must arrest somebody or fine them if he is [not] using common sense and not otherwise”. This, the whole legal approach, invites a collection of completely arbitrary rules unrelated to the underlying purpose of the regulations and you couldn’t have a more perfect illustration of that than the incredibly complex, utterly arbitrary distinctions contained in the government’s document this afternoon distinguishing between meeting one person and meeting two people, between meeting one person in your back garden and meeting one person in the street outside your front garden, I mean, these are illustrations of the kind of ridiculous distinctions that you get when instead of resorting to common sense uh you resort to law.”
https://youtu.be/86P7EEJeNKM
Worth pointing out here that the exact same arguments apply to speed limits. Speed limits are inherently stupid considered in isolation, in the sense that they are not flexible in response to circumstances. What is a safe speed in one set of conditions is not a safe speed on the same road at another time of day or in different traffic, weather or lighting conditions, or for a different car or driver, or for a driver in a different personal condition, etc.
We make speed limits primarily to make life easier for the police. Instead of having to prove that someone was actually endangering other people, they can just punish people for going over an essentially arbitrary set speed.
And the motivation for this is fear. People fear that if we do not allow this structure of control, there will be mass slaughter.
Different people will respond to this in different ways – some (most) will agree that the danger of increased deaths and injury justifies it, others won’t. But the principles are the same.
What the government has been trying to do is devise a set of speed limits to govern all human interactions that could theoretically involve disease transmission.
I was just about to post this! Now even the police has given up, I really think it’s as clear a message as any that we really must use common sense now, and that the gov is relying on some people still being scared to go out/wanting to be morally superior so that everyone doesn’t go rushing outside at once. Also, the gov will be relying on the fact that Joe Public isn’t going to go on gov.uk and start looking at statutes. He will be listening mostly to government guidance which is disseminated through the media, not looking at black letter law. The former is where the 2m rule lies but it’s ultimately unenforceable and not even technically illegal.
The problem with this kind of confusion is that it is going to lead to an awful lot of very ugly confrontations, both with police and with covid derangement syndrome sufferers.
Laws should be clear and simple, and government shouldn’t allow advice to be confused with law.
The article concerning the mental health of the German population whilst under lockdown is relevent to all nations enforcing a lockdown . I’m approaching my 7th decade and I’ve experienced some real political crap in my life but this lockdown has to beat all to the bottom of the worlds public urinal .
Here in Australia I watched dumbfounded as our idiotic PM Morrison straight out told us that the nation was going to shut down,that Some people might lose their jobs and that we will have to learn to live within a “surveillance society’ .. We no longer have an industrial base as successive political leaders have taken the 30 pieces of Chinese silver and sold us out. This of course means that we will no longer be able to trade our way out of the financial hole that was just dug for us. and , because the Australian government is asking for an enquiry into the virus and it’s origins,China is openly threatening us.
Look, this wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t a consequence of “relying on inaccurate data” – that is totally reversing cause and effect. The data is cherry-picked, as much as that is possible given the woeful state of it, to support the policy which has already been formulated!. Data supporting said policy is faithfully reproduced at full volume by the watermelon media and data that does not support the policy goes down the memory hole.
This entire episode is a deliberate attack on the already compromised foundations of western civilisation, including the rule of law, the trammeling of central power, and the right of individuals to judge for themselves what risks they will and will not endure.
(for the comprehensionally challenged, that is not an argument for a grand conspiracy or a claim that corona viruses don’t exist, so please sex and travel)
See also the war on Iraq for the same pattern of imperial over-reach supported by mass media malfeasance whereby all contrary intelligence is excluded by definition.
Arthur Silber also described it very well here: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2019/05/how-many-damn-fucking-times-do-i-have.html and here: http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/08/you-too-can-and-should-be-intelligence.html
Never attribute to bad intelligence what is a demonstrably decades-long policy.
Having recently watched ‘Shock and Awe’- clunky but interesting, despite Woody Harrelson’s heavy handed performance, I was struck, once again, by how the cherry picking of intelligence sources before the invasion of Iraq resonates with today’s suspension of normal life based on equally questionable grounds.
However, in 2003, public opposition to the disastrous invasion was widespread, vociferous and crossed all political and social boundaries, whereas now the public is overwhelmingly compliant , unquestioning and keen to signal its virtuous obedience by mindless clapping and fearful irrational behaviour.
How we’ve changed, in 17 years.
The difference being of course that people are now afraid for their own necks rather than those of soldiers and foreigners.
What does everyone think the plan is with the devolved administrations, what I mean is why has the PM let them go their own way after we went into lockdown together, surely this will give them a stronger call for independence, no ?
https://omni.se/undersokning-visar-cirka-92-000-var-smittade-i-april/a/MRePgm
Between 21st-24th April 2700 persons were randomly tested with PCR test self administered at home
Representative of the whole of Sweden and taken from healthy people at home invited to the study. 0,9 % of the population nationally and 2,3% in Stockholm were PCR pos. That is active infection and almost all asymptomatic. Translated to the population would be 90000 cases of infection in that time interval. The official confirmed pandemic Covid-19 cases in Sweden has been 27000 for the WHOLE pandemic. During 3 days it was estimated 3 times more infections than for all officially detected cases in the country.
How can anyone doubt that we have an enormous asymptomatic spread of infection which should have serious consequences for our response to this mostly hidden pandemic. This is unstoppable.
Is it just me who is a bit concerned/irritated that the emergent movement to push back against all this nonsense is being spearheaded by the AntiVax/5G bampots? I’d very much like to get involved in the pushback (beyond my donation to Mr Dolan’s action) but I don’t want to get into bed with the tinfoil hat and broken keyboard fraternity.
*sigh*
I guess you just need to get involved to dilute the bampots then
Not sure how accurate your impression is but the “enemy” will of course be trying to promote that characterization.
Well someone has to do it.
Though what does it tell us that “your kind” have utterly failed to put up any effective resistance to this nonsense, despite being in the vast, vast majority?
Spot on Mark.
Practically no-one has put up any effective resistance yet. My view is that effective resistance does not start from a place where a big part of your platform is easily discredited and discounted by the MSM where we’d need cut-through to gain a critical mass of public support.
I was there for the battles over GSM phone masts 20 years ago, and I’ve been there for umpteen battles around privacy and liberty. Experience shows the public are turned off from your campaign by the slightest whiff of weirdo, and I’m afraid for the purposes of the MSM narrative, the numpties setting fire to 5G masts count as weirdos, as do the anti-vaxxers who still cleave to the widely derided Andrew Wakefield and – God help us – anti-semite David Icke.
We can and should get involved and exercise our rights, and make our voices heard, I’m just concerned that ‘we’ should not let ourselves get lumped in with the ones at whom the media will immediately point and laugh.
This is not a campaign, and resistance to the lockdown has not yet reached the level of popular awareness where you can afford to be so picky about your company, I think. Though it is a good sign that people like you are starting to show up to call for silencing the taboo voices – means its achieved a degree of significance. Here and now, though, the main priority is still for people just to understand that they are not alone, and to have a place to exchange information widely suppressed or unnoticed elsewhere.
And indeed your whole approach is rendered questionable by its history. We have censorship in news media and in social media predicated on structures and attitudes designed to exclude exactly the kinds of people you sneer at, and now surprise surprise they are being used to suppress dissent from WHO guidelines etc etc. Turns out those hippies who said that if you let some people be censored sooner or later you will be censored yourself actually had a point.
Yours is a tired old song, and it’s the one that has excluded many of those few willing to stand up to this coronapanic from mainstream outlets. But you’re singing it here a bit early, I think. Though obviously it’s up to Toby whether or not he listens to your siren song.
You make some good points Mark – particularly that this thing has to get off the ground first.
I don’t think ‘my entire approach’ can be validated or otherwise, since the counterfactual doesn’t exist. We have no way of knowing how much more privacy we’d have lost and liberty we’d have lost without those people who have fought for it over the last 20 years. No-one can say.
What I can say is that the MSM narrative went away from us as soon as fringe elements started to dominate the message, and here we have that right out of the gate.
It’s possible that this won’t get off the ground at all if fringe voices dominate, brandishing junk science and burning down phone masts. That’s what concerns me and if it doesn’t concern you, I’d ask you just to give it a bit of thought, because I reckon it should.
You are correct on the counterfactual point, of course.
My observation is that the long battle against mass immigration was lost because people were allowed to create a new taboo (“racism”) and then exclude from the discourse people who believed in anything that could be portrayed as connected to that taboo, or anyone who could be smeared as associated with it in any way.
And there have been many other similar examples of positions lost through the creation of taboos followed by smearing moderates by association with them. And now we have the example of those attitudes used to justify and to enable censorship of dissent from coronapanic. My point is that the whole idea of taboo subjects and people is the problem. Now you might well say that the taboos already exist, and that’s true. I just kick back against the attempt to exclude people and to apply smears by association. It’s one of the main mechanisms that enforces conformism in modern society.
But obviously it’s not me you have to persuade, it’s Toby.
Hmm… I see your point now. I’ll have a little think.
A broader point made above, which I agree with, is that we should be careful not to bring other issues into this. Climate change is the example given. It’s something many of us have strong opinions on, and parallels can certainly be drawn regarding cavalier use of data and models, and of authoritarianism dressed up as the common good, but it’s not germane and including it on a roster of grievances is a distraction and a recipe for disunity. For me the same goes for antivax and 5G.
As to convincing Toby, I’d be delighted if I were to do so, but it’s not my objective. I simply posed a rhetorical question to see what people are thinking.
It’s difficult associating with people whose views you find annoying or offensive, for sure. And it would be best to try to avoid going over these tiresome old disputes again here, agreed, from Brexit to climate change.
And admittedly, if mainstream credibility is a major concern then you face the choice of fighting the prevailing exclusionist cultural mores and probably losing a lot of that credibility, or going along with them.
Part of the problem is that there is a clear nexus between the issue that is probably of primary concern to you and to me here (resisting the coronapanic) and the concerns of people worried about big pharma, vaccines (a clear agenda issue here), etc.
If the movement against the coronapanic is to have any impact, then mainstream credibility has to be a major concern, doesn’t it?
I’m not sure there’s a clear nexus between these issues.. there are dozens of other issues concerning freedom and the economy, many of which I would advocate for, but they’re not relevant here. They’re a distraction.
Either way, I’m going to London for beer in the park at the weekend. I just hope I have 5G service
By a nexus I mean that if, for instance, you are concerned about vaccination then you are clearly going to be drawn to resist this coronapanic, given that vaccination is one of the main promised/threatened “solutions” we are constantly presented with..
Err, no. The MSM has shown it’s colours, and will never give credibility to people opposing the worldwide panic agenda. Until/unless it suits them.
Once again, there are other issues; they are a distraction; and you introduced them.
You’re more brainwashed by the MSM than you think. Have you ever read the vast numbers of doctors and scientists who oppose vaccination ? Even if you disagree, repeating MSM labels rather than agreeing to disagree says a lot.
Are you in favour of rolling out 5G without any safety studies ?
(You’re the one who brought other issues into this.).
No dissenting voices at all (bar Hitchens) were permitted on the the MSM for 6 weeks. Maybe that was the fault of the ‘tin foil hat brigade’ ? Yeah, right.
The degree of control the MSM holds over the majority of people is one of the biggest, if not the biggest thing, that needs to change. All you seem to want to do is increase division. Though possibly you are a paid disinformant – rolling out Wakefield (vindicated by the CDC whistleblower Thompson) and Icke (anti-semite ? fuck off.) is a frequent characteristic.
“I was there for the battles over GSM phone masts 20 years ago, and I’ve been there for umpteen battles around privacy and liberty.”.
Get you. I was doing CND stuff 50-60 years ago, and don’t usually feel the need to drag it up on public forums.
“We can and should get involved and exercise our rights, and make our voices heard,”
This sentiment is correct. Your mission now is to effect this, without pissing like-minded people off, or worrying about what the totally bought-and-paid-for MSM say.
Sod off with the ‘bampots’, Aidan. Whatever the fuck they are.
Maybe baRmpots
Never read any Scottish literature, John?
Nutters, loonies, headbangers… take your pick.
The fact is the 5G and anti-vax* arguments are easily discounted and discredited in the mainstream narrative. It would distract and detract from the core message about liberty and the economy, and effectively neuter our message of resistance.
* I have no opinion on the efficacy of vaccines, but would be vehemently against any kind of mandatory vaccination.
Was unaware there is any Scottish literature …
The Broons maybe.
Even your insulting technique seems to need improvement. I could call you a twat in Ukrainian, Welsh, or Latin, but wouldn’t as the purpose of message would be lost.
Some things are just right.
If you’re not willing to not stand up for what’s right out of fear of being associated with ‘the undesirables’ you might wanna take a look at yourself, not them.
I never said I’m unwilling to do what’s right. If that was true, I wouldn’t even have bothered to posit the question – in fact I wouldn’t be here at all and I wouldn’t have chucked cash into Simon Dolan’s bucket.
But just like you can be against uncontrolled immigration but not want to join the BNP or For Britain or whatever, I’m not sure the movement that’s putting together these public gatherings is the right tool for the job.
If you want to go anyway, then all power to you, but don’t be surprised when you’re associated with this ‘lunatic fringe’ by the MSM that 80% of people still rely on for their information, and don’t be surprised if that ends up in being counterproductive when it comes to building a critical mass of public support.
Opposition to what one thinks is a bad idea is not counterproductive however much public support (or not) it garners, Even if a ‘lunatic fringe’ (your words) is associated with it.
Is my chain of logic faulty, Nigel?
Freedom movement is linked with irrelevant ideas that the media are able to easily smear, based on rudimentary and widely accepted science -> general public shy away from supporting the movement -> movement falls into obscurity and irrelevance.
If you’re already afraid of how the media will try to destroy your reputation and disqualify you from the debate by association then they’ve already won.
Dear me… who said anything about being afraid? I’m saying it would be better if this whole thing wasn’t made to be about fringe theories that detract from what this is actually all about i.e. freedom, the economy, our jobs and business.
” … and I wouldn’t have chucked cash into Simon Dolan’s bucket.”.
Twice you’ve mentioned that. Not sure I wish to be associated with someone whose communicating/campaigning style is so vulgar.
Just sayin’.
(The MSM will call you an ‘anti-vaxxer’ merely for opposing mandatory vaccines. Be prepared.).
Some relief if you enjoy water sports. In guidance issued this morning (13 May 2020), Government have confirmed that:
“All forms of water sports practised on open waterways, including sailing, windsurfing, canoeing, rowing, kayaking, surfing, paddle-boarding and the use of privately-owned motorised craft (in line with the guidance issued by the relevant navigation authority) are allowed.”
Ts & Cs apply.
It is very unwise to celebrate this.
They are no longer your right, now they are “allowed”.
No longer must our governments demonstrate clear and present danger but we must demonstrate “safety”, a fantasy of an infantile mind and in practice and impossible standard. A thousand years of progress is flipped on its head overnight.
To accept this historic reversal is foolhardy – the celebrate it is suicidal.
Has Goldfinger – Get Up been suggested as a theme song?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/separated-couples-can-meet-today-does-absence-make-heart-grow/
For those who haven’t got access due to the paywall, an article about adapting relationships now that couples can meet but must keep a 2m distance.
Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that this is a) completely ridiculous, b) totally defeats the object of being a couple, c) no one in their right might will keep 2m distance from a partner after months apart.
It sends a shiver down my spine. We’re being stopped from acting like humans.
It’s basically psychological abuse. Intimacy, physical touch and being close to your partner are fundamental human rights. The government has taken this to a ridiculous level of imbecilic proportions. They are so drunk on power and control, they have lost all sense of rationality and proportion.
My advice? Break the law. F**k it. Just don’t tell anyone and try not to get caught. There are still a lot of informants about, eager to call the police and report on the rule breakers. Don’t let them win.
Break the law? There is no law prohibiting you from touching another human being. This is nonsense.
Indeed, but as I said below the gov are relying on the fact that people will not formally distinguish between the law and mere guidance.
Stay sane. Ignore the guidance. Shake hands.
I do feel sorry for the Scots today. With England’s PERi-ometer index moving to “Medium”, they are still stuck at “Hot”, thanks to wee Krankie.
Yes – although I can report that today the traffic on the A96 and Inverness is noticeablty much busier, suggesting many businesses have taken the English cue to get going again today.
That’s not to say that the Scots have been any less witless, petrified and indolent than England over this fiasco, but it does suggest Sturgeon’s latest power-play telling Scots to still ‘Stay At Home’ has probably only resonated with The Party faithful.
She Who Must Be Obeyed is facing a gradual outbreak of disobedience by us heretics who don’t toe the SNP line
Regarding common sense. At my age I cannot now recall who said it but when I studied politics at university the observation was made that our freedom largely exists only in those areas where our rulers admit to their incompetence. This is a vital principle that people who would be free must bear in the forefront of our thinking about the powers that we permit our governments to exercise.
When our rulers consider that they are more competent than we to make significant life decision then instantaneously arises the hue and cry from the progressive elements that they now have a *moral obligation* to make these decisions for (all of) us. It is no coincidence that “think of the children!” is the catch-cry of these well-meaning busybodies for this is how they see the entire populace, as ignorant uneducated ill-disciplined emotionally volatile children. Our good and wise government, by great contrast, knows more than we do, knows better than we do, has battalions of scientific advisers, deputy assistant undersecretaries of how to sort your household garbage correctly, and of course they are just following the science. No decisions or trade-offs are ever necessary if one merely follows the science. One cannot be held morally or legally responsible for the destruction of lives, economies, and civilizations, if one merely follows the science. One cannot be incompetent, one cannot make a bad trade-off choice, if one merely follows the science.
One wonders, parenthetically, why we need governments at all, when each and every one of them, at each and every level of jurisdiction, merely follows the science? Perhaps this mystery too will one day be solved by science.
Returning to the point – it is utterly natural and proper for us to follow the guidance of those who really do know better, know more, and are wiser than we.
The central question then becomes, is it true in any particular case that our great and good governments do indeed know more about the risks to our lives than we know? Is it true in any particular case that our great and good governments do indeed know better than we? Is it true in any particular case that our great and good governments are wiser than we?
In this particular case, the case of the global corona virus pandemic, is it true?
I put it to you that in any court of law operated by these same governments, this contention could not be proved even on the loosest of “preponderance of evidence” standards, and is utterly impossible on the basis of the “beyond reasonable doubt” standard, but I leave that judgement to each reader to make for themselves.
I merely pose the question: is it true?
And if our great and good governments are not competent – what then?
I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’ve just had about as clear a demonstration as you could possibly wish for that governments absolutely do not know better.
In fact we are living through a global demonstration of the validity of the old refutation of paternalism – it only makes sense until you understand that the people running things are themselves only human, and far from being the best of us, what’s more.
Agreed in general, BUT I put it to you that any court of law operated by THESE SAME GOVERNMENTS will give the answer required by these same governments (at least as long as these governments are not sane and Conservative – i.e. any time since Maggie was ousted).
“One wonders, parenthetically, why we need governments at all, when each and every one of them, at each and every level of jurisdiction, merely follows the science?”.
Got to have someone to determine the science needed, commission it, and ensure it gets well publicised.
Oh, and in the States, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” is one of the most worrying/frightening things one can hear. Allegedly.
“Bill Gates has gone on record saying life will not go back to normal until we have the ability to vaccinate the entire global population against COVID-19. To that end, he is pushing for disease surveillance and a vaccine tracking system that might involve embedding vaccination records on our bodies.
According to Gates, societal and financial normalcy may never return to those who refuse vaccination, as the digital vaccination certificate Gates is pushing for might ultimately be required to go about your day-to-day life.”
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/05/13/digital-vaccination-certificate.aspx?
One of the comments to this article: “How sad that such great minds have gone over to the dark side when they could have done so much good.”
Where did he go on record as saying these things?
I was slightly concerned that Mrs Gates, being interviewed on CNBC last night, seemed to be pushing the ‘online teaching for ever’ narrative. Nothing to do with Microsoft Teams, of course! I do wish these philanthropists would just hand over the cheque book and leave the good causes to someone else.
Gates already signed a deal with New York City.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-york-teams-up-with-bill-melinda-gates-to-reimagine-education-2020-05-05
Obviously they will be pushing their choise to every city in the US and why not worldwide too.
And then we start burning shit.
OPEN the SCHOOLS so that people can return to work.
It’s simple to defeat the Telegraph paywall if you want to look at one of their articles. Copy the URL of the blocked article, open outline.com and paste the URL into the displayed box. This will bring up the article. Doesn’t work for Times or FT though.
Shhhh, someone at the DT might be here!
Some papers made coronavirus coverage free for all considering it a public service. Shame that the telegraph didn’t follow the same path.
Ironic, considering that scaremongering media coverage panicking people was one of most damaging things around in the past few months….
Though of course a cynic might suggest that there’s a direct connection there – why charge people for propaganda that you want them to see in order to affect their behaviour.
Interesting. Works for the Spectator too (just tried it on the link wendy gave above).
Only out of curiosity mind. I have to say I disapprove on principle. Let paywallers paywall, and hopefully ultimately open sources will win out in sheer traffic terms.
Perhaps it works because with both the Spectator and the Telegraph, you can register with them (without subscribing) and then see a certain number of articles per month for free.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-the-nhs-learn-anything-from-japan-s-health-care-system-
Very interesting
I used to live in Japan and I try to keep up with what NHK is saying. Though the Japanese aren’t actually locked down, the people are encouraged to practise “voluntary restraint.” Which means you are made to feel guilty if you go out. This is having all sorts of social and psychological effects as you can imagine. The thing is, the Japanese have been muttering about covid since January. Chinese and Japanese travel to each other’s countries. It is impossible that the virus wasn’t circulating in Japan already. Yet to date, despite not exercising “voluntary restraint” till very recently, they have had 633 covid deaths, a rate of five per million. While they still hoped the Olympics could go ahead they went about their business. Somebody said (not on NHK) that once the Olympics were definitely cancelled the Japanese would be under pressure to do what other countries had done and that is what has happened.
The only way to save the NHS is to follow the Japanese (also Swiss) example: “Everyone resident of Japan is required to have health insurance. The government’s scheme is funded by a tax based on income, topped up with fees for services paid at the hospital (generally 30 per cent of the cost of treatment, with a lower rate for seniors, and nothing for people on very low incomes). Coverage is wide (including mental illness and most dental care) and there is a ceiling to what you can pay, so no one should ever be ruined as a consequence of falling ill.” Copied from above link
This morning the little market at the foot of the hill was open for the first time in two months, France having come out of lockdown on Monday. While I was buying some cheese, I was aware of a man standing well back behind me, obviously keeping his distance. I turned to him and said he didn’t have anything to worry about; I had had the virus at the beginning of March. He could hardly believe it. Here I was still alive. How long was I in hospital? I didn’t go to hospital, just stayed at home and took vitamin D and vitamin C. He didn’t think it had reached our department. I said it had been circulating long before lockdown and there had only been 38 deaths. Did he know that 40,000 people die each year from respiratory illness in France? I really think I did manage to get my point across, that this virus is not the black death. As I was leaving I suggested we shake hands. At that he looked nervous. “It’s forbidden” says he. He didn’t dare. What sort of government dictates to its citizens whether or not they can shake hands? Yet he didn’t seem to find this strange. A bit depressing, but I still feel I might have made a little wave.
Gosh, one of the characterising things of the French is their handshaking as they greet one another. When I lived there I thought it was great as you actually engage with people. For it to come to that is very sad.
YES. This is my preferred approach. Get out there and shock people with normality!
Like I was saying before: Handshakes Save Lives is an apt motto, not just for the normal transfer of germs to keep us all healthy
Speaking today Mr Sunak said: “It is now very likely that the UK economy will face a significant recession this year, and we’re already in the middle of that as we speak.” You don’t say?! Thanks for catching up head of government finance! ‘Oh, and by the way I’m just gonna exacerbate the financial ruin by giving out the money I found at the end of the rainbow, oh, wait, I found it in your pockets, oh no, you don’t have a job, oh, where will it come from, perhaps the other end of the rainbow!’ What planet are these guys on? They caused the recession! Oh man, the mind boggles, how is it that intelligent people can be so stupid?!
how is it that intelligent people can be so stupid?!
We should have a requirement for all elected representatives and officials to repeat the litany against fear from Frank Herbert’s Dune, ten times out loud, in public, every morning.
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
So should we rely on the Magic Money Tree or the Magic Roundabout?
No.
Yesterday a video interview with Prof Cahill circled where she strongly advertised for Hydroxychloroquin as THE end all and be all cure for Covid-19.
Today Off-Guardian publishes this article by Prof Wodarg that HCL is indeed toxic mal medication for people from countries where malaria is endemic due to enzyme deficiency.
https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/covid-19-medical-detectives
I wonder why Prof Dolores Cahill didn’t elaborate on that? Or did I miss it in her interview? She kept banging on about Vit C, Zinc and Vit D as preventative measures as well as using HCL – which according to this article could be rather deadly for people. Is she not aware of this enzyme deficiency, is this oversight on her part?
Can anyone shed light on this?
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/13/covid19-a-case-for-medical-detectives/
This is the correct link for English version. Apologies.
That worried me too. You didn’t miss anything; she didn’t mention it.
HCQ not HCl.
HcQ has been used for decades to treat malaria across the globe, not just CV19 for a few months. If it really was toxic to BAME it would surely have come to light by now as it’s used right across Africa, and wherever malaria is endemic. One continent where there haven’t been so many cases of CV19 has been Africa, possibly because hydroxychloroquine is used there.
What was interesting was this paragraph:
“THE SARS-COV-2 PCR TEST: NON-SPECIFIC, MEDICALLY USELESS, BUT ANXIETY-PRODUCING
Because of the great importance for the Covid-19 occurrence, special attention must be paid to the SARS-CoV-2 PCR test – the only instrument available to measure the virus and to be able to talk about a new spread at all.
My assessment on this has not changed since the end of February: Without the PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 viruses designed by German scientists, we would not have noticed a corona “epidemic” or even a “pandemic”.”
Never trust the NHS with your data. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-covid-19-app-health-status-future
“After we alerted the Department of Health and Social Care and the NHS to the documents being exposed they were set to private and no longer available for anyone to view.”
Why did you do that, Wired?
Over my dead body, basically. I’ve already started leaving my phone at home every time I go out.
I believe the tracing app in S.Korea only had a 15% take up.
I’ve been leaving my phone at home since this started
This may upset a few people here but i am going to say it anyway – I am a little dissappointed at the lack of direct action that we seem to be taking.
I’ve said before that we need an organised campaign but i still don’t see one.
So far i have written to my MP. He followed it up by telephoning me personally to discuss my concerns. I have also submitted 2 petitions to the parliaments petition site. I notice someone is planning a tweetbomb but i dont seee much other direct action (unless i’ve missed it).
My idea to create a KEEP CALM…. t-shirt doesn’t seem to be getting much traction – see my earlier comment explaining that one.
Its great to re-inforce each others views here, but we are going to have to do a lot more than that to defeat the nonsense all around us.
I’ve sent several letters to my MP, sent over 20 to other conservative MP’s who are considered most prominent, bombarded Hancock, Raab, Schapps, Johnson with twitter messages but to be honest I see little point. My local MP is good and has the decency to reply and has agreed on many points that all of this lockdown is total shit and is a disaster. The other 20 have not replied at all and considering the abuse I sent Hancock, Raab, Schapps and Johnson on Twitter the only response I expect is from the police.
In my opinion, the convincing that needs to be done is of the general public. There are some main stream media outlets that are now seeing the disaster that were nurturing but it really needs corporations like them to get out the wider message. If a few like minded lockdown sceptics got together and demonstrated in some way I don’t think would get any coverage.
There needs to be a national exposure of the insanity of the lockdown, but that has to help by prominent scientists or people currently in the cabinet having the balls to stand up and be counted.
I hope, although its probably a false hope, that the fact the government seems to not give a shit who now goes where and what for that something, somewhere is beginning to give and they are realising the gargantuan nature of their folly.
I’ve thought the same thing, but I think it would need to be a serious lobby group rather than a street protest. There are enough sceptics amongst scientists and others to make a loud enough objection. It needs more than just websites like this one, good though it is for connecting sceptics online.
However, when you consider the number the anti-Brexit establishment did on the people of the UK, just to get their own way, if the government isn’t on side, and there really is another agenda at play, I’m not sure how successful it would be. It would depend on how receptive Boris is.
At least you got a reply. I’m still waiting after writing 2 weeks ago!
I think I might have found our two lobbyist front men (actually, one man, one woman): Piers Corbyn (does the science bit) and Kirsty Allsopp (well-known public figure, good with tv):
https://mobile.twitter.com/Piers_Corbyn?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Piers Corbyn
@Piers_Corbyn
·
It’s not a #pandemic, #Lockdown unecessary ADMITS UK GOV. Yet BBC spout #FearVirus 24/7
#BreakTheLockdown
REJECT #Globalist #NewNormal
#StandUp for OUR NewNormal:
*Accountability +END conflicts of interest in all decisions.
Sat 16May 12noon SpeakersCorner
Kirstie Allsopp
@KirstieMAllsopp
·
The Covid mortality rate for children is 0.01% roughly the same as seasonal flu and if you don’t believe me ask
@BBCNewsnight
. Those spreading fear and misinformation to parents, and children, are doing real, lasting damage to an entire generation.
Kirsty is credible, cuddly and well liked. I think the name Corbyn is a non starter. They can’t have an axe to grind, they’ve got to be seen to be agnostic on the whole polarising politics that’s going on. A sort of ‘common sense’ figure, with massive trust ratings.
Has anyone got any idea how we might get Lord Sumption on Newsnight and Question Time? Don’t laugh, he used to be a regular on Newsnight back in the days of Brexit legal challenges.
They wouldn’t dare.
He was on Radio 4 very recently, with Evan Davis, who did not so much interview him as lecture him.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=86P7EEJeNKM
Seen a few suggest Boris and Cummings have some sort of master plan. Well I can say is they best hurry up and pull it from their Rs
If so, it is bound to smell like bulls hit!
I noted that Tucker Carlson was focussing on Dr.Fauci in last night’s show, under the banner “Has America put too much faith in one man?”bearing in mind that it was he and Dr.Birx who used Neil Ferguson’s dodgy predictions to push for the shutdown of America. Plus his advice to the public has been about as consistent as that from the WHO.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1LcodR3OjhM
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/health-coronavirus-britain-elderly/
The press are beginning go catch on. But only in certain, acceptable, ‘government challenging’ ways.
At least the challenging is now about something substantial though rather than nit-picking over ventilators or test numbers.
What we’ve done to the old is what tipped me into full blown opposition to all this, it’s shameful. I’m so sad about it, I hope if there’s one thing we can salvage from the ashes of all this, it’s proper respect for our elders.
I keep getting a hint of deja vu about all this. It’s reminding me of Brexit, where a proportion of the country went into a kind of self-destructive frenzy for a couple of years (Gina Miller, supreme court, belligerent man in EU hat on parliament green and so on). This resulted in parliament doing very little for that time, the UK looking idiotic to outsiders, and the country at large getting a hint of the helplessness we’re feeling now. It also hurt the economy by causing uncertainty for business and generally dragging Britain’s reputation down.
And when the general election finally came, and Boris was elected as PM, it was all for nothing and could be seen as being for nothing. But the people who had put us through this didn’t apologise, or admit that perhaps their time could have been spent more constructively. It was as if they had gone onto automatic pilot, opposing the government, opposing the uneducated plebs even though they knew, ultimately that what they were doing was illegitimate, anti-democratic and self-destructive.
This feels the same. Similar people have gone into a self-destructive frenzy motivated by, I am guessing, some sense of a community of ‘nice people’ standing together in the face of some nasty threat. Instead of EU badges and posters in their windows, they have masks and rainbows. Just like Brexit, they want to believe the worst. And when it is all over, they won’t feel the slightest embarrassment or shame about it. Yes, the country will be on its knees, but they will have done what they simply had to do – it is as if they had no choice in the matter.
*round of applause*
It’s super gonorrhea all over again.
Remainer here, although not that anything I said, did anything to scupper parliament, although did quite passionately not want to leave. The thing is, it’s your frame of reference, I think that’s partly what drove the Brexit nightmare (regardless of what side you were on). From the remainer camp, Brexit itself WAS a self destructive frenzy, and everything you say about remain, remain felt about brexit. All the hoo ha about how crap the EU was, was ‘project fear’. Remainers didn’t feel it was democratic (closing down parliament, advisory ref, lies, we can be like Switzerland/Canada to suddenly no deal etc). So horses for courses depending on which side you are or were on. We could argue about it endlessly now and still not agree.
Lockdown strikes me more like the war on terror and weapons of mass destruction, with a massive dollop of the culture wars thrown in. Anti lockdowners (as we’ve discussed endlessly here) are not split by remain leave, we’re more the rational vs emotional, the pragmatic vs the ideological?
I’d love to see the polling data by socioeconomic group.
Dear God please let us not rehash the arguments over B****t.
I agree with a big part of your analysis though.
Good grief not likely, no wish to go there again! I think it’s hard to analyse it when in the thick of it, it’s such a massive mess it’s hard to pin it down. I never read the Sun, but their editorial today is about the most sensible thing I’ve seen in the press for weeks and weeks, I’m taking a little glimmer of hope from that. I just want as many people as possible on our team, I think it’s important not to conflate it with other issues, as then we’ve got two arguments to win, not one. Regardless of Brexit, lockdown is reckless damaging lunacy, we all agree on this.
We agree on that, Bec.. although my concerns further down about the gatherings this weekend being associated by the media with anti-vaxxers and anti-5G people got a pretty unwelcome reception
I’ve been involved for about four years on a long running women’s issue pushing back on one of the more insane woke outcomes of the culture wars, I won’t derail by saying what. I’ve also worked professionally on big media, corporate, national press campaigns, and run a local campaign, with massive PR element, fighting back against a rural planning nightmare (renegade local authority) – TV, radio, social media channels, regional and local press. In all of it, credibility really matters. One whiff of nutters, and nobody takes you seriously, and the other side use it to discredit you. Lockdown opposition has a sensible, cogent, compassionate, logical basis, even if useful idiots can be quite useful, in that they push the debate back into the middle, where it needs to be, it’s important they are not ‘part’ of the actual campaign, campaign identity is pretty crucial (which is also why I’m wishing Simon Dolan would stop sharing Breitbart articles, he’s got the moral highground and is now chipping away at his own potential supporter base). Basically the rule of thumb is ‘would I buy a used car from this person?’. There are fringe loonies running amok at the moment, on both sides (see: Refuse to work, and false flag deep state, for starters), most Brits, when they are thinking straight, are small c conservative, sensible, and in the middle. E.g. planning nightmare, I could write chapter and verse, when we polled it, what people cared about was parking, bins (services), medical access, green spaces and community (ie massive influx of new residents would change the place too much, too quickly). We also had support from climate and environmental activist people, who were dying for direct action, but we pitched the tone of it as if talking to your average National Trust member, quite deliberately and did a lot of very polite ‘write to your county councillor’ campaigns (we won).
Is there any demographic data on who lockdown sceptics are? That’d really help us.
Praise be. I hereby nominate you as defacto leader, Bec.
I haven’t said whether I was a Brexiteer or a remainer. For me, the issue is the *pointlessness* of trying to overturn the result after it had happened. This lockdown is *pointless* and destructive and I suspect that many of the zealots know, deep down, that it is. I don’t wish to re-hash Brexit; it’s just that it feels to me like a prelude to Covid. As someone points out above, the arguments feel similar in tone. This wouldn’t have happened in the past, but society has become so brittle that the slightest crack ends up destroying everything.
Two days ago Toby reported on the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights’ report into the tracking App.
The membership of this committee includes such people as Joanna Cherry QC, who were probably not on your side in the Brexit debate. Cherry brought the case against the government in Scotland over the prorogation.
These are the same people who are now standing up to defend us from a surveillance app. They’re not self-destructive or anti-democratic. They’re principled.
I have also had to admit that rather a lot of the pro-Brexit MPs I disapproved of so much back then are actually on the right side of this debate and the best chance of any kind of parliamentary rebellion against Johnson.
So let’s put Brexit behind us, heal old wounds, reunite the country etc. in the face of this new disaster.
Very pissed off that Brexit has been able to go ahead at all, but we’ve bigegr threats to worry about now. Ending lockdowns and stopping mas surveillance apps must come before any issue so, in hindsight, stupidly partisan, as Brexit.
Exactly, I’ll take a grown up, any grown up on our team.
You also have the same kind of stigma attached to you now as with Brexit. I voted for Brexit, people didn’t agree, fair enough. However, the amount of friends and colleagues who thought just because I voted Brexit was skin to me being some kind of colonial Victorian soldier on a killing spree in the Sudan, or having drinks every night with Pik Botha and Eugene de Kock, was unreal. I genuinely felt threatened for having a pretty rational political opinion.
The same thing has happened with the lockdown – I think its a load of bollocks, but no matter what rational, scientifically sound argument I present, I’m labelled as a septuagenarian/octogenarian serial killing bastard. I’m also a threat to worldwide peace, health and safety – I’m a monster.
These people I know – I see them all the time – some are friends, I work with them and at the end of all this there will be no memory of it for them, no reflection as to what irrational twats they’ve been. Its the oddest behavioural trait I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness and its all happened in a small space of time.
And I’d agree with you there, fringe remainers were extremely offensive and that’s why I don’t really care about it now, we lost, job done. But I had the same issue with ardent leavers, spouting the latest nonsense over the Lisbon Treaty, and they were also pretty scary. I had a man point and shout at me in a pub when I just gently said ‘but that’s not true though’ , YOU LOOK LIKE A REMAINER. Really scared me. The whole thing was insane, bitter, divisive and not based on many facts, on either side, it’s pointless rehashing it. Many remainers had rational, logical arguments too, I was one of them. But it’s done. My main concern is we don’t scare people off supporting our pov on lockdown because they disagree on other issues. I think sticking to a single issue is a better strategy.
I also agree that how lockdown has polarised people is more about emotion than facts. If you’ve ever argued with an ardent gender identity supporter, it’s a lot like that too, ‘shut up you are literally killing people!’ followed by reams of hokey stats and ‘science’.
More broadly I think it’s the culture wars, here we go again, just lockdown this time.
Do NOT discount Brexit as a factor in the last 12 weeks of fear propaganda. Or at least the idea and ideology of Brexit.
I haven’t, and I voted to remain.
I don’t think it was any coincidence that one of the latter black death ebola updates had a question ‘from the public’ about Brexit – seemed infuriatingly pointless, but again I suspect a carefully planted message in amongst all of this. Otherwise, why do it when most rational people were despairing at the non stop negativity
I too am a leftie, (although I’ve recently had to distance myself from UK Labour for all their gender nonsense.) I don’t think skepticism is anything to do with the left-right political spectrum. It’s science.
https://policing-the-corona-state.blog/2020/05/13/11-12-may-update/
Spare a thought for the poor, put upon police, who’ve spent the past six weeks harassing you and now don’t know how they’re gonna continue doing their ‘public service’ under the new fuzzy-wuzzy guidance!
They won’t be able to, that’s the point. The fuzzy guidance as you accurately put it, was a subliminal message (the new propaganda), the old message was very direct propaganda.
I understood it straight away, as was never taken in by the severity of the virus from the start, nor the subsequent mass brainwashing that took place. In amongst it all, the govt was dropping in hint bombs about what was going on to those still ‘awake’ and not in the fear coma.
Basically it is for the people to choose isn’t it?. ‘What do you want?’.
Compare it with the rules and regulations on being able to outside from most of abroad there isn’t much you can’t do. The stupid ‘social distancing’ and no crowds remains but go and speak to as many other people as you like – says 1 person per day, but how on earth can that be policed?Answer = it can’t.
Easy thing to do is knock on your neighbours door and see how they are doing… this is what is being encouraged. If they come out with a dishcloth wrapped around their face then they are (almost) a lost cause, if they don’t then they are either like us or are a bit confused and need to be given a lesson in logic.
I concur with that, it cannot be policed is the key message.
I don’t think the police are allowed to call them fuzzy-wuzzy any more.
I just want to say thanks, Toby, for keeping us sane in a world that has lost its mind. Brave of you, because I know you admire Boris, but you, Lionel Shriver, Peter Hitchens, Simon Dolan, Dr John Lee and a few others will be seen as common sense heroes in years to come.
This vedeo cheered me up no end. Takes awhile to get going but worth it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msYSfjW4ik8