The Observer drops the second shoe in the Cummings scandal on its front page – the news that he visited his parents in Durham again in the middle of April after staying with them at the end of March. How do they know this? Thanks to an eagle-eyed member of the public:
Robin Lees, 70, a retired chemistry teacher from [Barnard Castle], says he saw Cummings and his family walking by the Tees before getting into a car around lunchtime on 12 April.
Lees said: “I was a bit gobsmacked to see him, because I know what he looks like. And the rest of the family seemed to match – a wife and child. I was pretty convinced it was him and it didn’t seem right because I assumed he would be in London.”
He added: “I went home and told my wife, we thought he must be in London. I searched up the number plate later that day and my computer search history shows that.”
I find it incredible that this man is so unashamed about being a tell-tale he actually flaunts the fact that he plugged Cummings’s number plate into Google on his computer. If Mr Lees had been born in East Germany rather than England, I have little doubt about which state agency he would have worked for.
Keir Starmer has now stuck the boot in, but I don’t think Boris will budge on this one.
Stay Alert, Stay Safe
Great spot by Andrew Mahon, the brilliant journalist who came up with the Crimson Tide metaphor about our handling of the crisis. (He thinks governments around the world behaved like the panicky nuclear submarine commander played by Gene Hackman in the 25 year-old Cold War thriller, rather than his level-headed second-in-command played by Denzil Washington.) A campaign aimed at children in Canada dating back to the early 90s with the slogan “Stay Alert/Stay Safe.”
Andrew has another great piece in Hector Drummond Magazine, this one about “our” NHS.
You Can Register a Death, But Not a Birth
Got an interesting email from a reader:
Our daughter was born at St Thomas’s hospital in London on February 18th and we cannot get a birth certificate for her as councils have stopped all registrations other than deaths.
I understand we have bigger issues with what is going on but my husband and I are feeling increasingly stressed and irritated by this. Without a birth certificate we cannot get our daughter a passport. It does leave us feeling quite trapped! We have plans to attend a wedding in Chicago in August – which is of course unlikely to happen – however if flights do go ahead and we are left unable to go due to a lack of passport for one of our children we are likely to incur the cost of the trip. However, the money isn’t the main issue but the continued lack of freedom that has become our way of life. It feels extremely claustrophobic to think we couldn’t travel once restrictions are lifted – potentially for many months whilst waiting for the certificate.
Has anyone else has raised this with you? Surely thousands of babies will have been born in lockdown and others must be impacted by this. Lambeth council have told me they are unlikely to start to register births until September – that is over seven months of babies with no birth certificates – followed by what I expect to be a long wait with the passport office. I understand the same is true of weddings – however as individuals they could still travel with ease and flexibility.
I wonder if Boris and Carrie are also waiting for a birth certificate for Wilfred? Or is it one rule for them and… etc., etc.
Facebook Censors Sci-Fi Drawing
Last week, I posted a picture a reader had sent me of a drawing that had appeared in an Italian magazine in 1962 depicting life in 2022 because it seemed eerily prescient. The reader had discovered it in a Facebook group dedicated to sci-fi memorabilia, but don’t try and repost it on Facebook because the moderators won’t let you. A reader in Germany tells me he got the above message when he tried to do that, informing him it was “Partially wrong information. Tested by independent fact checker.” It included a link to an article on a Turkish website by Ali Osman Arabaci, presumably the “independent fact checker” being referred to. Arabaci writes:
It is not possible to say that the image depicts the quarantine in 2022. The visuals are made with city traffic and ideas to reduce it… In the box titled, it is stated that the traffic problem can be solved with vehicles similar to small transportation vehicles that are considered as scooters today…
In other words, it is also possible to qualify the claim as a disconnection from the wrong types of information.
Not sure Google Translate has got that last bit quite right, but you get the general idea. That’s something the artist failed to anticipate – in the future people won’t be allowed to see his depictions of the future because it might lead to wrongthink.
Lockdown Land
Guy de la Bédoyère has written another superb essay for this site about the psychological state the lockdown has left people in. It’s called “Lockdown Land” and I urge you to read it. Here are the concluding two sentences:
Not long before the virus crisis took hold my three-year-old granddaughter was supposed to be going out for a walk. “I’m not ready,” she said. It soon transpired that this was not a statement about not having her coat or shoes on but a more metaphysical observation of her state of mind. “I’m not ready” meant she was not disposed to going out at all. Ever. She would therefore never be ready.
I am reminded by that every time I hear someone saying “I’m not going back to work until I feel safe”, or “I’m not sending my child back to school until it is safe to do so”. Such sentiments are conveniently couched in rational terms but in reality cloak an emotional reluctance ever to return. Right now they represent this country’s biggest obstacle to recovery. The world has changed and we can never go back to where we were, but whatever we do we have to face up to the realities Lockdown Land has closed so many people’s eyes to and not hide beneath the bedclothes where we might suffocate instead.
Another Hatchet Job
Philip Ball, a science journalist, has written a piece in Prospect attacking lockdown sceptics that, even by his standards, is quite breathtakingly pompous. He has form here – he wrote a piece in the New Statesman a couple of years ago that got a bunch of stuff about me wrong (although he also got some things right, to be fair). Prior to this, he got some things about Dominic Cummings wrong, too, and Dom responded in his usual bracing style. I wrote about both those incidents, and corrected Ball’s errors, in a blog post for the Spectator.
In this piece, Ball argues that sceptics like me – and Hitchens and Delingpole – are part of an “infodemic”. That word was coined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) back in February to describe the spread of fake news about SARS-CoV-2 on social media. Indeed, the WHO urged the tech giants to remove any suspect content about Covid and, as we know, both Facebook and YouTube have done precisely that (see above). Ball is wholly supportive of this censorship
Andrew Pattison, the WHO’s Digital Business Solutions Manager, met with representatives from Google, Apple, Airbnb, Lyft, Uber and Salesforce, among others, at Facebook’s headquarters in Silicon Valley and urged them to remove any “misinformation”, by which he meant any content the WHO disapproves of. And he expressed the hope that all material that isn’t “responsible”, not just content about Covid, would be removed from social media in future. “I think what would be very exciting is to see this emergency changed into a long-term sustainable model, where we can have responsible content on these platforms,” he said.
You would think that as a journalist Ball would disapprove of rich and powerful men deciding what the public can and can’t read, but no. He thoroughly approves of the WHO’s “responsible” approach, overlooking the fact that the WHO itself has disseminated more “fake news” and “misinformation” about the virus than David Icke. Remember that famous tweet saying there was “no human to human transmission”? That’s the tip of the iceberg.
Ball thinks anyone who dissents from official Covid orthodoxy – or, rather, whatever the WHO decides is the “responsible” thing to say, even though it changes its mind about that from one day to the next – is guilty of trafficking in “fake news” that will undermine public confidence in science and medicine, such as the hypothesis that “the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory”. He neglects to mention that that particular “conspiracy theory” – he calls it that – is believed by Dr Luc Montagnier, joint winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and is currently under investigation by multiple intelligence agencies. Ball says such “falsehoods” can be “literally lethal” – that is, people reading an article on Lockdown Sceptics raising doubts about the scientific basis of the two-metre rule might end up neglecting social distancing rules, catch Covid and die. I suppose that’s possible – although, as John Ioannidis pointed out, if you’re under-65 you’re more likely to die in a road traffic accident than from COVID-19 and, as I pointed out yesterday, if you’re under-15 you’re more likely to be struck by lightning – four times more likely, in fact.
But the real problem with this argument isn’t that it exaggerates the risk of dying from Covid, but that it underplays the risks of following the advice pumped out by public health authorities and other organs of the state. For instance, the “Guidance for social or community care and residential settings” published by Public Health England on February 25th that assured people it was “very unlikely that anyone receiving care in a care home or the community will become infected”. As we now know, about a third of all deaths from COVID-19 have occurred in care homes. Indeed, if I had to sum up the Government’s approach to managing this pandemic in a one-sentence slogan, I’d say: “Protecting the healthy, endangering the vulnerable.” If more people had been sceptical about this and other official advice – if journalists hadn’t felt inhibited by finger-wagging colleagues like Philip Ball – there’d be fewer Covid deaths, not more.
As the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandies put it: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
Ball’s article is called ‘The Epidemiology of Misinformation’. If only Facebook would ban the use of laboured coronavirus metaphors, that might actually be a useful service.
New Poster From NHS Puts People in Wrong Place
Shouldn’t those people be under the bed?
Theme Tune Suggestions
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest, “I fought the law” by the Clash, “Caught by the Fuzz‘ by Supergrass, “Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy and “Gallows Pole” by Led Zeppelin
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
Last week, 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 help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have opened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
Shameless Begging Bit
Apologies that Lockdown Sceptics is a bit shorter than usual today. Drank a little too much wine last night and am now going to try to walk off my hangover. Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. It still takes me about nine hours a day, what with doing these updates, moderating your comments and commissioning original material. If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here.
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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I thought Hitchens was spot on today.
Interesting how these weekly discussions have become less adversarial as the evidence comes in.
https://youtu.be/Rq05MKdJHzE
Yes, excellent, as he has been n this throughout. I agree with everything he says here, except that I think he’s tactically wrong (not wrong on the general issues around it) on the Cummings issue.
I will say that that series of weekly Talkradio chats between Mike Graham and Peter Hitchens have been great entertainment. I obviously agree with Hitchens and disagree with Graham on the basic issue, but they have managed to discuss the issues constructively and make good points on both sides. I think Graham has moved quite a lot in response to the arguments and the information coming to light, which is to his credit.
There has also been a great personal interaction, two forceful talkers who are good at taking over the conversation if allowed to do so, and while early on I think Graham was a little too interruptive, he responded well to criticism on that score and if anything it became Hitchens who was a little more pushy in getting his point across. But it works well, overall, so credit to them both.
Certainly the latter point is my worry. The covid policy disaster has already gone to nuclear war level of destruction.
Oliver Cromwell?
This is great. Former BBC journalist interviews an ‘ordinary’ bloke about his feelings towards the media hysteria. He says he started off terrified but has completely flipped on doing his own research. He seems to be pretty representative of what is actually happening around the country, oh so gradually. May it continue!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0jabKnOsq4
Very good.
“You comforted yourself with statistics…with research and statistics, and I have seen that so many people contacted me doing the same thing as you. They’re almost becoming data journalists….I did this myself. I went to the Office of National Statistics. I was looking at the death rates amongst those under 16 and they’re very, very low and they haven’t changed..”
Imagine if we had a national broadcaster and news service that could perform that service for us – to find out genuine information and pass it on to us, without pre-digesting it to try to manipulate us into behaving in particular ways or to have particular attitudes.
Such a broadcaster might even justify taxpayer funding, unlike what we have now, where we basically are required to pay to be browbeaten into obedience and conformity.
I note, however, that it was a ‘former’ BBC journalist (in so far as that is not an oxymoron). Wouldn’t have seen the light of day if the journo still worked at the BBC.
This is True. Pretty sure she left because she didn’t want to work for The Man any more.
Clearly Boris has to go. The answer is that we need to find a replacement who is sound on Brexit. And not Gove, who is first one of the lockdown coronapanic prime movers and must go as well, and second certifiably insane on foreign policy.
Fortunately the Commons is not as dramatically biased in favour of remain (compared with the populace) as it was before the last election, and there are more “Conservative” MPs who are reasonably sound on Brexit than there were. We absolutely cannot afford to reopen that can of worms.
David Davis. GET DAVID DAVIS IN THERE.
(I’m sorry I really love him and still don’t really know why)
Not going to argue with that one.
Iirc, he was very good on ID cards.
He’d be about 75 at the next election, so might not fancy it, but he’d make a great caretaker to get Brexit done and look after things for a couple of years before getting a new leader in a year or so before the next election.
We are desperately lacking in grey hairs at the moment (as opposed to blond tresses).
I’d go for Owen Patterson, except that he has been frozen out for so long.
Whoo hoo ! Snappy new website upgrade. Now I can bold italic underline
strikethroughbullet blockquote link etc. !Damn! Right after I spent 10 minutes writing out an HTML primer for the ‘Dawg earlier today….
(Nice work from the admin though)
(I saved that primer, Mark.). 🙂
I was just thinking that! But thank you Mark and Farinances, I appreciate it!
With any luck a snappy new website upgrade is premature. As goes Lockdown goes LS. (I’ve enjoyed the forum, I’d just rather not have lockdown.) On second thoughts perhaps I’m the one being optimistically premature. Well done to to IT crew here though.
I hope Toby can find a way to carry this thing forward, obviously on a less intensive level, as a campaigning blog. If he can focus on a few key issues that this whole experience has raised, there would be room for that. I’d suggest for a start:
The legal and moral issues around lockdown and making sure it can’t be repeated
The issue of information control and the role of the BBC, the mainstream media in general and of government propaganda and “nudging”
The cultural problems at the root of the collapse of our society into authority-worship – sentimentality and risk-aversion
And if he can associate it with some sort of “Dangerous Party” to give politically homeless Lockdown Sceptics somewhere to threaten to put their votes if the main parties don’t listen, so much the better.
I could favour that so long as we don’t slide into partisanship. As a self-imposed exile from the left (principally because of their authoritarian tendencies) I’m looking for political integrity..
He just said he argued for it.
In fairness, has Cummings ever told the public to abide by the guidelines? Maybe he thinks like many that they’re a load of b@!!o(£s too. I just hope he doesn’t do the usual grovelling apology that such ‘gotcha’ revelations usually demand. If he thinks it’s only the plebs that should comply ( and not important Gov people like him) then that’s not on, but if hes doing what he’d have done anyway ie just as a skeptical member of public then good on him for taking a stand.
He argued for the lockdown
Case closed. Take him down, officer.
An interesting point that I had not heard before was that he went back to No 10 AFTER checking up on his wife at their London residence. That, at least, was very clearly in opposition to the guidelines.
Has anyone else mentioned – as posted here a couple of days ago – that this jail break coincided with his wife’s birthday. Or was that a faux pas?
Dominic Spaffings is so entitled he thinks he can keep the country tuned in and waiting…. for 20 minutes and counting..
Half an hour and counting…..
Without casting any nasturtiums, who the fuck sits and waits to listen to him ?
He was 42 minutes late. And no I didn’t wait, or watch.
I did check the summary though: “I don’t regret what I did and as I said, I think reasonable people may well disagree about how I thought about what to do in those circumstances but I think what I did was actually reasonable.””
Does this mean that whenever another member of staff makes a booboo they get a podium too?
A small miracle today.
New washing machine delivered to one of our neighbours. Delivered by two men with no gloves and no face masks,
It is possible to act normally.
Make sure you speak to anyone still working who arrives to your house. I have found them to be mostly one of the normals. But one of them was expressing some ‘concern’ about a USA trip he had planned because of trump’s attitude to the virus…. I laughed and told him that the old orange man was probably the sanest person in government over there!
The ones working and delivering day to day are definitely more normal, but some are clearly not as clued up as we are
Judging by the photos in the Daily Mail of English beaches today the lockdown is well and truly over. Now get the pubs open and get the slackers back to work.
And dentists and airlines and hotels and schools and …….
Yeah, yeah, all the trivial things can follow. After the pubs. 🙂
(Be interesting to have a poll on the sequence in which people would like things ‘re-opened’ ?).
‘Pubs open now! Pubs open now!’ is the refrain from my little area of East Sussex.
Wierd stuff going down in Spain. Let’s rewind to the 8th of March and a massive demonstration in Madrid to celebrate International Women’s Day. The Department of Health allowed it to go ahead despite fears of such large gatherings due to Coronavirus. The permission was given despite the fact that 3 days before a congress of evangelical christians were advised to cancel by the same government oficial, Fernando Simon. I posted here a few days ago that Simon is being sued by the family of a Covid victim. 6 days after the Madrid demo the government closed down the whole country. The head of the Guardia Civil pólice force, who was investigating the 8th of March demo has been removed from his post by the Ministry of the Interior. So far, so murky, but a judge has also today, requested that the government produce reports relating to the 8th of March demo. The deputy PM, Pablo Iglesias has also been in the news owing to a strange case of a mobile phone stolen from an advisor to his far left Unidas Podemos party. He portrayed this as a Deep state plot against him and his merry band of crusty SJWs.… Read more »
Got my wires crossed about bereavement leave in my previous post. Justice dept can’t balance the figures of covid deaths with the number of deaths registered. Data they requested a month and a half ago has still not been supplied. As I was writing this, the government have reduced the number of deaths they announced yesterday by 2,000. A total coincidence I’m sure.
Lots of countries have start quietly revising their covid death figures down. It’s gonna be happening constantly, a trickle here and a trickle there, over the next year imo. Wonder if our government will ever concede similar?
how do they do this – on what basis?
Because they can now they are being questioned.
Someone has been fiddling the figures -is that what you are saying?
I’m shocked at such a suggestion!
Well, the morning papers report that the Justice Department are querying the government’s figures. Later in the day, they knock 2,000 of the death toll. Looks like a cover up of some very dodgy behaviour to me.
The “lockdown” measures introduced to deal with the alleged risk posed by the coronavirus have violated rights on an unprecedented scale. The measures have resulted in:
the suspension of juries,
the cancellation of elections,
the suppression of the right to freedom of expression,
the denial of the right to assembly,
the suspension of the right to protest,
the limitation of the right to engage in legitimate economic transactions,
the removal of the right to receive or refuse medical attention,
the limitation of the right to freedom of movement within the country,
the limitation of the right to practise religion,
the suspension of the right to an education,
the violation of the right to family life,
the denial of the right to a livelihood,
the institution of a police state by giving the police and others the right to detain indefinitely on mere suspicion,
the removal of the right to privacy,
the undermining of the rule of law;
and, if all that were not enough, the Coronavirus Act 2020 Part 2 Section 90 gives a minister of the Crown the power to extend these powers indefinitely and to change any power by mere fiat.
None of this was subjected… Read more »
The government and indeed all the opposition parties seem to be enjoying it too – no reluctance that I can see. The opposition are trying to outdo the government in terms of the extent of the expansion of state power over the individual. I think the ultimate objective of those who value freedom has to be the abolition of the Coronavirus Act, and beyond that a recognition that the state exceeded its proper function, by some margin, initially out of cowardice and incompetence but latterly to cover their arses.
We really don’t want this to drag on into next year with unworkable rules about distancing hobbling public and private organisations and cementing a revolting new normal.
The opposition, from all sides, has largely been sent home and paid handsomely to stay there.
Oh dear.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/24/lockdown-restrictions-eased-allowing-social-contact-shops-reopen/
Encouraging article from the Telegraph for all those who are missing proper social contact. Apparently we will be allowed to meet in houses in ‘social bubbles’.
Obviously the bubble idea is total rubbish in practice and unenforceable (and relies on the scared mugs to strictly comply with it) but who cares? This is basically carte blanche for all those who are still sane to begin interacting as normal again. Things are looking up.
It sounds as if ‘bubbles’ are only allowed outdoors though.
Just a reminder that the only people who are safe are in the cemetery.
All of the rest of us cannot avoid some degree of risk, and the most dangerously stupid and evil aspect of all the dangerously stupid and evil aspects of this lockdown over-reach is that it has removed from all of us the legal right to choose those risks for ourselves and our families.
So CEPI, for example, the partly Gates Foundation funded Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, uses this slogan:
“New Vaccines for a Safer World”
(see http://www.cepi.net)
Notice that “safer” is relative whereas “safe” is absolute. So while these kinds of organisations have been instrumental in spreading this idiotic “Stay Safe” message, they publicly acknowledge, in their own publications, that making us “safe” is not their objective nor do they claim it can be or has been done.
They rightly make a far more modest claim, that the fruits of their work could possibly make us safer.
It’s long past time we remind them, and our political class, of this distinction.
Even to them, ‘Fora safe world’ must surely sound ridiculous.
Well this is heartwarming, let’s replace humans with robot baristas in the name of social distancing. The new normal.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southkorea-robots/south-korean-cafe-hires-robot-barista-to-help-with-social-distancing-idUSKBN2310T9?il=0
You just gotta laugh.
When you order, do you do it online and tick the little box that says ‘I’m not a robot’?
This is the technological angle of this virus… That’s the endgame here. As well as greener sources of power.
It’s so obvious. Virus is a smokescreen.
Wait to see more tech being announced bon a regular basis.
To be honest, am not scared of that at all. Am no luddite, tech advances are quite exciting
What does scare me is what impact that has on society, democracy, freedom of speech and expression. We are seeing all that shit right now
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1264841432973672448/photo/1
This show excess deaths in France
The biggest excess deaths by far heath wave 2003.
Look at Covid-19 versus Hong Kong 1968 ? Difference? No, except that one had lockdown the other not.
It would be interesting to have death numbers per age group for both pandemics.
France has a peculiar geographic location for Covid-19 in Iles de France with about 20% of France population with suspicion of clusters and super spreaders.
Two wonderful utterances from our Dear Leader, Ms Sturgeon:
“We will have access to 2000 contact tracers by the end of the month but we do not think we will need all of them by then given the current low level of virus,” says the first minister in response to a question from STV News.
In the same questioning session she also said:
“We have made real progress here but we are not out of the woods yet.”
Which is it:
The thing about this virus is that it’s so infectious you can catch it from anyone who has been within 2m of you in the last 72h but in spite of that hardly anyone has had it (or ten times as many people would have died obviously). The only explanation is that it is extremely cunning and vindictive and is just waiting for the likes of Sturgeon to let their guard down. Maybe it’s hiding at the bottom of the sea like the missing global warming, just biding its time.
Yeah. I was on the ‘everyone has had it’ train. Now I’m on the ‘everyone has been exposed to it but not necessarily had it’ train. To actually get it your immune system needs to be crap, basically, and/or you need to have prolonged, contact exposure.
Probably not unusual behaviour for this kind of thing it’s just nobody has really bothered investigating it much before. I’ve often had colds that have sort of started and then immediately gone away again, whether that’s cross immunity, innate immune response, or what I don’t know.
Exactly. There’s definitely a huge element of trying to quantify things we’ve never tried to quantify before in all this. It’s plainly obvious now that had we never known about this ‘Novel’ new threat, it would have passed us by relatively unnoticed and not occured to anyone as being anything particularly novel at all.
I think, with the possible exception of Michael Levitt, we were all in pretty much the same boat – trying to find reasons why the disease was acting so differently from what we were being told it should, because we were constantly being fed misinformation. It was like trying to see through a constantly shifting smoke screen, and things never quite seemed to add up.
Agreed!
Just seen some minor American celebrity on Instagram, smugly sat in her garden with a face mask on. Lots of clapping emojis and a comment that reads ‘my dad just died from covid, thank you for protecting your neighbours 🙏🙏🙏🙏’
Why is it that this smug, simplified, gratitude-hungry angle is so prevalent instead of anything that is thought through on more than surface level? I’m now imagining people telling their old relatives to mask up in their own garden… so they sit their breathing in their own breath in the heat instead of fresh air.
The average person has an IQ of 100. Have you ever met someone with an IQ of 100?
Half the population are stupider than that. Statistical fact.
The only people in support of lockdown:
– Lower IQ than 100
– Momentum “woke” activists
– Virtue signallers
– Those being furloughed
– Public sector workers
With Venn Diagram doubtless showing enormous overlap.
If only it were so. I think you need to add in people who can work from home, who have well paid jobs that they don’t think are threatened by an impending economic depression, who are only virtue signallers in the very broadest definition. Most of us like to think we’re nice people, and a lot of otherwise intelligent people are not actually very curious about what is going on in the world. If you combine those two things you get people who are just sleepwalking along with this, because they were told that lots of people would die and that seems like a horrid thing that we ought to try and prevent. I like to think they will crack soon, leaving only the diehards.
And Cummings apparently. IQ 160 and still a blithering idiot
It has to be said I’ve met some MENSAs in my time and many of them have been dumb as two rocks when it comes to woods and trees. I know a girl who can learn any language to fluency by herself in under six months with minimal immersion. She’s a literal genius. And yet she needed to be told how to unfold a flat pack tent.
Yes agreed with that which explains many so called intelligent people being in favour. I would say the biggest group of that lot by far are the virtue signallers. Take a sample of those odious narcissists and I bet you will get the highest percentage of lockdownistas
You could even say that all virtue signallers are lockdown zealots. I don’t think you could say that for the other groups on your list, if I am being fair
Don’t forget those who are well off and have no problems with rent or mortgage or job
And most MPs seem to be in that category.
Just watch past episodes of Family Fortunes to get an idea of the average person.
Jesus wept!!!!
The comments are INSANE . One woman wrote ‘I wear my ask at home. You never know if someone will sneeze through an open window 😷🤧’.
Just. Fuck. Off.
And since masks only protect others (marginally at that) from the mask-wearer’s sneezes/coughs, all she needs to do, if she has to sneeze, is sneeze in the opposite direction of her window. Dumb and Dumber too!
But then the sneeze would bounce off the wall and infect her.
The magic sneeze bullet theory!! 🤣
That’s a big ask!
“I wear my mask when I eat
I wear my mask when I sleep
I wear my mask I can’t breathe”
The longer this goes on, I’m in danger of killing someone……. 🙁
Don’t worry the masketeers will kill themselves off soon enough, slow and suffocating
Out and about today and went shopping in Tesco. Almost no masks nor social distancing going on which was encouraging.
Towards the end of my shop a smarmy management type who had just spent the last 20 minutes in a huddle in the centre of the store with 2 others of the same type and all of them within arms length of each other told me and the wife off for not observing the one way system.
Asked her why I had to observe it an she said “it’s the rules”. I asked if it was law, voluntary or had the store been given a formal restricted operations notice by the proper person of the local authority as per section 45 of the relevant legislation? She said it was voluntary. I asked if it is voluntary why do I have to abide by it and she said “it’s the rules because of the pandemic”.
I asked what pandemic? She said it’s to protect the vulnerable. I asked if they are that vulnerable then they should be at home where it is “safe”.
I asked her if it was such a dangerous pandemic could she please tell me how many… Read more »
This pandemic has anointed a priestly class of Karens.
The police weren’t there for you. Keep plugging away.
Keeps me amused between bouts of cooking, chilli paneer tonight with lots of poppadums.
Depending on what crap is on TV or how many beers I have during cooking I may send the letter to Tesco and possibly ones to the 3 local council environmental health departments about them acting outwith their remit and misleading business as to their powers in forcing restrictive practices onto businesses plus one to the federation of small businesses.
I’ve already sent one to the Beer and Pub trade body plus as the high-end food destination pub company the son works for are getting ready to re-open soon I’ve offered to give them info to stir the pot.
Wife claims I write better between 3 and 4 beers as the vitriol and creative juices flow. less than that I can’t be bothered and more than that I forget what I want to say.
Keep having fun and don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Awkward Git, I’d love to go shopping with you and hear you taking on the managers 😀
Just been to homebase. Going through the tills was like passing airport security. Without the indignity of having to remove belt and shoes
Good question to ask is at the checkouts and ask the poor sod behind the screen how the management think that a flimsy piece of plastic with holes in it an only just about covering them will stop a virus that is microscopic and wafts around in air currents.
Today the screen was that long the poor checkout operator couldn’t put my shopping to the end of the collection tray thing and I had to keep going behind it and grabbing it out of her hands.
She looked very sheepish when I said how does this social distancing thing work then? Don’t blame the poor sods at the bottom on minimum wage trying to get by and I try and help them as much as I can, it’s management knob heads and dipshits that get my goat and they deserve all the bile I can give all they way to the top.
The bigger the boss the more I’ll give them grief, once made the boss of one of the world’s biggest commodity traders based in London and their high price lawyers look like compete idiots and incompetence, won the for them though against their actions and… Read more »
In our town all the shops except Morrisons and B& M bargains have gone fully over the top with the one way systems,staff with masks etc,no couples allowed etc,etc,I have argued that if it was a legal requirement then how come the the two mentioned shops don’t do it and manage to treat their paying customers normally and friendly ?,as you have mentioned all I get is ‘it’s the rules’,some of the staff in these shops are enjoying their newly found purpose in life a bit too much.
Local farmers’ markets and farm shops to the extent you can get stuff there are the answer. Yes some stuff is hideously expensive but if you shop around a bit you can get away even on a smaller budget. Look for ones that don’t have the miserable “certified by” certificates but have farms that have been owned by the same families for donkeys years and work with common sense and few pesticides, if any. Kent is a whopper in that regard. Doesn’t work of course if you are an Instatastic, Hackney based, virtue-signaling hipster. Support local British produce directly where you can… our local farmers’ market stayed open all way through “pandemic”, stalls spread out wider, markings on the ground, but all suppliers and customers have been steadfast.
An excellent graphical representation of daily deaths by cause: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-many-people-die-each-day/
Hello all,
feeling a lot more positive that things are picking up – even the SUN has an editorial pointing out that we need to get back to work….
Also – may have been posted before, but here is a treatment of the Death numbers for UK, Sweden and the Netherlands, which, to me , indicate that lockdowns have zero or almost zero effect on the rates….
https://twitter.com/boriquagato/status/1264596818429505537
Worth looking at .
Cheers
BillH, see also
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264838174553112577?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264839394751586305?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264840081094979588?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264840680662355977?s=21
A different comparison of England and Sweden and showing near identical behaviour of the virus.
Thanks, very similar analysis, same conclusion.
Severity of lockdown has no effect on deaths.
Particularly shocking as the data were already showing this over 4 weeks ago.
Massive economic damage since then – and continuing now.
Yes, the data were clear a long time ago. There was enough to test the effect of lockdown and establish the validity of the models. I’ve not seen a single plot like mine for the UK which actually fits a Gompertz function and determines the parameters of the dynamics. SAGE could have done this. It took me about 30 minutes!
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-disappearing-so-fast-oxford-vaccine-has-only-50-chance-of-working-11993739
If it’s disappearing so fast, why are we still in lockdown? Can’t believe these people actually want the virus to stay just so they can prove the supposed effectiveness of their vaccine!
Indeed they can. AstraZeneca have said the same thing.
Like firemen pouring petrol on a blaze so they can play with their new hoses.
Oh dear… Cummings’ parents have dug him into what I might call a big effing hole.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/05/25/dominic-cummings-parents-leap-defence-saying-public-arent-aware/
The revelation that his trip to Durham coincided with the death of his uncle does not look good.
The public square is awash with stories of relatives who died alone because no-one could see them due to covid…. people saying their last goodbyes on Skype etc… not being able to hold funerals.
These stories are heartbreaking, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone – including Cummings and his family. But he has indeed visited such torment on thousands of UK families, so the idea that Cummings and his family consider themselves above such privations speaks volumes.
He’s definitely done for now.
Good. One down, if so. A start.
Coronavirus: Dominic Cummings to make statement on lockdown allegations
Think he’s going to make a late play for the fake apology gambit?
He’s going to try some kind of mental double backflip with twist and pike in the hope of bamboozling us. And for 24-48 hours he’ll think he got away with it.
I have money on him going by the end of May.
I think that would be a first for him! More likely will be a Non-je-ne-regrette-rien.
Interesting development either way!
You could well be right, Ian, and that would align with his image as a sperg. There must be someone in No 10 (Gove and Johnson both being former journos) who will tell him that brass neck is not the way to get through this, given the public mood.
But he’ll probably do it anyway.
We can’t have unelected advisors behaving like this
It should be left to those elected.
I’ve only read the summary but there doesn’t seem to have been much apology in his statement.
We can make a direct comparison between NHS England data and Sweden – see series of tweets below. The data are very well fit by a Gompertz distribution across 80 days.
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264838174553112577?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264839394751586305?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264840081094979588?s=21
https://twitter.com/pfdgeologist/status/1264840680662355977?s=21
Data are based on actual date of death and not the reporting date. The epidemic never was exponential. The dynamics in Sweden are virtually the same as in England. I conclude that the lockdown in England had no impact on the trajectory or dynamics of the infection.
It will be interesting to do the same analysis for the other countries in Simon Anthony’s discussion if the raw data is available.
When I refer to Simon Anthony, I’m referring to todays post at the Hector Drummond website.
https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/25/simon-anthony-do-lockdowns-work/#comment-21788
Yes – the only thing exponential is the increasing damage due to Lockdown as the days tick by!
I’ve read a lot of stuff on Dominic Cummings over the last 2 days and although he’s obviously a twat and winds people up with his superiority complex, I’m leaning towards hoping he doesn’t get sacked. You can see the lockdown fanatics rabidly screaming for his head and all that will achieve is reinforcement of lockdown, or resetting of it so everyone obeys. I’m not bothered if he’s an architect of lockdown – I don’t think he is the head gimp, SAGE are the real problem. What he can help achieve though, as long as they don’t sack him, is its acceleration to disintegration. We need to take advantage of his so called rule breaking and do the same at every opportunity. If he goes, I think any hint of this kind of behaviour will be stamped on by the whining bastards in the press and the lockdown loving political opponents. If the government cave in, things will get a whole lot worse, in my opinion.
Agree. The baying media will go away after a while when some actual news emerges.
Reluctantly I have to agree.
You want him there pushing more policies like the quarantine idea, and right where he’s in position to cover up all kinds of inconvenient facts about the way the lockdown was brought in and by whom and on what advice?
I understand that having him there is another little boost to arguing that the government is hypocritical, but is that really added to much by him still being there? They’ve already done the damage on that score by trying to defend him.
I want him out of there, yesterday. He’s done almost all the damage he’s likely to do to the lockdown, which is on its way out now, anyway. He can still do an awful lot more damage to the country though, while ever he’s in government.
I definitely see your concern and things might get worse on the screaming lockdownista echo chamber that is social media, but I think the damage has been done now so it doesn’t matter whether he stays or goes because he behaved the way he did and nothing can change that. The silent majority and anyone with half a brain can see that the virus is petering out around the world now, other countries are opening up, and the MSM are running out of fear mongering stories now. There are only so many lies they can keep telling to sustain this prison sentence.
Well apparently there’s been a spike in Somerset and a hospital is overwhelmed with covid cases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/25/somerset-hospital-weston-general-hospital-closed-new-patients-halt-spread-coronavirus
Is this not a bit like ‘we know B is a rapist, but while we do not condone that, we have to look at the bigger picture and ensure that T is not re-elected’ as said by a not insignificant number of liberal left, high profile Me-Too activists in the US?
SAGE were always there as cover in my opinion (as always, advisers deliver what they are expected to deliver). Quite how central Cummings was to the Lockdown is hard to say, but he usually seems to go with what he thinks will be popular and, with Boris around, Cummings is usually at the centre of things, regardless of whether it is, as they keep insisting, the ‘right thing’ to do.
I do see your point, but I still think he has to go, and he will go. He’s the story now, and that can only end one way.
I’m all for upending the table and letting the chips fall where they may, just now.
Well it seems to have got Boris out of hiding. He actually turned up to do the briefing today!
Hello from London. Lockdown is over here, doesn’t matter what the government says.
Looks like even the BBC are back tracking on the ‘we’ll all die’ scenario.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52758024
The graph & data is particularly interesting considering what gas been previously mentioned by them
BBC only about 1 month behind LD Sceptics!
Now manipulating the sheep out of their coma… Slowly.
BBC has been pathetic, worst of the lot as still seen by a lot of people as respectable, impartial… Even the sheep know what they are getting with the papers and sky news etc.
They abused that position. Any lingering respect had gone out the window for good.
Apparently we all have to look at a company called Idox and one of its directors who may be a relative of someone in the news.
The story is that Idox has some sort of dealings with the NHS, and a possible new contract that may be Covid related.
I don’t know what it all means, but maybe some other people round here are better detectives than I am.
Oh, and GlaxoSmithKline has a big factory at Barnard Castle..?
I’m just reporting what has apparently been said in a trending tweet…
See this: https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/business/18400944.glaxosmithkline-barnard-castle-enter-vaccine-collaboration-fight-covid-19/
According to its website ‘Our solutions track more than 11.5 million Active Patient Records in NHS Trusts across the UK’ – is it the sister?
That’s what the tweet suggests, but I also saw a tweet that said this was fake news and just someone who happens to share the name…
That I don’t know. She may not be his sister, wonder how we can find out?
On my digging, unless he has 2 sisters, or a brother who is married, the lady at IDOX is not his sister (he has one called Sarah, I think)
But he’s too bright to be that obvious so perhaps it is a coincidence
Possible. On further digging, suggest she is too old to be his sister unless his father was a ‘child bride’! From what I can see from Companies House filings, his dad was born in 1946, and this lady was born in 1963.
True Story About Registering My First Daughter’s Birth:
Some time in the (southern hemisphere) Autumn of 1996 my wife and I approach the counter at the local office of the Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages. We present the completed form to the nice woman behind the counter. She peruses the mandatory sections for a moment before realising that the Date of Birth is in October 1994. At this point our daughter is about 18 months old.
“Is this right?”
“Yes, that’s right, the xx of October, 1994.”
“But you’re supposed to register the birth within 60 days.”
“Yes, we know.”
“But you have to – it’s the law!”
“Yes, we know.”
“But … but you have to!”
“Yes, we know.”
“You know you can be prosecuted for this!”
(it had the form of a question but it was spoken as more of a statement.)
“Yes, we know.”
[Grumbles, stamps the form, files it.]
“Have a nice day!”
[Scowls.]
Exeunt.
My daughter broke her arm when she was six years old. I brought her to the emergency room and was greeted with the following conversation at intake:
“Has she ever been to this hospital before?”
“She was born here on May 3, 2001.”
“[looking at computer screen]…. Was she really born in June?”
“No, May 3.”
“It says you had a boy in June.”
“No, she’s a girl, and she was born May 3.”
“Did you have twins?”
By this point, my mother-in-law had abandoned this discussion and taken the child off to the nurses. And I was left wondering, shoot, did I maybe have two children six years earlier and just forget to bring the boy home? Also, who are these people they hire to work at hospitals?
Which then reminded me of the day my daughter was born. I presented myself at labor and delivery, obviously in labor, and was asked “Did they tell you why they sent you up here?”