Day: 11 September 2020

by James Delingpole The point of face masks is not to protect humans, but to diminish humanity – to rob people of their ego, their identity, and their autonomy. Masks are worn by disposable horror movie villains and ignorable background dancers; they make people less-than-human. If you haven't read it already, I commend to you an excellent piece in The Critic by Patrick Fagan, from which the above quotation is taken. It's titled "Face masks make you stupid". This of course is true and is one of the many reasons why I consider it my duty both as a free spirit and a responsible human being to avoid wearing a face muzzle wherever reasonably possible. On the rare occasions I do wear one, I feel like one of the conquered, enslaved victims when Conan the Barbarian is asked what is best in life. He replies: "To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." Now imagine that grinning tosser Matt Hancock in the Conan role – or worse, re-enacting the sex dungeon scene in Pulp Fiction – and you'll better understand just how viscerally I loathe putting on one of those slave gags. Sometimes, though, you have no choice. For example, I have just come back from a holiday in Greece (Gialova ...

Operation Moonshine We've been hearing for some time that the Government hopes to return to "normal" through mass testing of the population with enforced quarantine for those who fail the test. Boris Johnson has now dubbed this "Operation Moonshot" and to say it has not gone down well with experts would be an understatement. Sky has more. The mass testing programme would cost £100bn – almost as much as the government spends on the NHS each year (£130bn) – according to a briefing memo seen by medical journal the BMJ. A separate document revealed there were plans to grow the UK's testing capacity from the current 350,000 a day to up to 10 million a day by early 2021...Anthony Costello, a former World Health Organisation director and UCL professor, wrote on Twitter: "The PM's Moonshot nonsense (no science, feasibility, evidence) has been earmarked for £100bn, almost the entire NHS budget, w contracts for Astra, Serco and G4S. This is waste/corruption on a cosmic scale." ...Dr David Strain, Clinical Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter and chairman of the BMA's medical academic staff committee, said the mass testing strategy is "fundamentally flawed"."The Prime Minister's suggestion that this will be as simple as 'getting a pregnancy test' that will give results within 15 minutes is unlikely, if not impossible, in the ...