Emperor Boris Spies Second Wave; Declares War on Neptune
Today we wake with the depressing news that the Government doesn’t appear to have learnt a thing from the past six months. Here’s the Mail.
Boris Johnson last night warned that Britain was “seeing a second wave coming in” as he contemplated six months of “on-off” restrictions to tackle the upsurge in coronavirus cases.
The Prime Minister, who fears the country is six weeks behind Spain and France, said it was “inevitable” that a second wave would reach the UK.
He is now looking at six months of “on-off” nationwide restrictions amid concerns in Downing Street that the public is ignoring rules on social gatherings.
The new approach to get the country through winter would see it alternate periods of stricter measures with intervals of relaxation.
Fortnight-long “circuit breakers” would see tough restrictions introduced temporarily across the whole country to suppress the virus, before they would be lifted for a time and then re-introduced if necessary.
Measures could include bans on social contact between households, shutting down hospitality and leisure venues such as bars and restaurants, or restricting their opening hours…
Mr Johnson said last night said he was considering whether the Government needed to “go further” than the current national restrictions.
He said: “We’re looking very carefully at the spread of the pandemic as it evolves over the last few days and there’s no question, as I’ve said for several weeks now, that we could expect [and] are now seeing a second wave coming in. We are seeing it in France, in Spain, across Europe – it has been absolutely, I’m afraid, inevitable we were going to see it in this country.” Spain recorded 239 deaths in a single day this week. [They did not occur on a single day though; the maximum so far reported occurring on a single day is 81.]
The Prime Minister insisted a second lockdown was the “last thing anybody wants” but said the current measures would need to be kept “under review”.
He added: “On Monday, we brought in the measures that we did, the ‘rule of six’, to really try and restrict what people are doing and to bring in a new buffer. But the crucial thing is at the same time to observe the basic rules on social distancing – hands, face, space – that is what everybody has got to do if we want to continue to beat this thing.
“But as we look at this particular curve and what is happening now, clearly we are going to keep everything under review. I don’t want to get into a second national lockdown at all – it is the last thing anybody wants…
Earlier in the day, Matt Hancock suggested measures would need to be in place into next year.
The Health Secretary said: “The strategy is to keep the virus down as much as is possible whilst protecting education and the economy. And doing everything we possibly can for the cavalry that’s on the horizon – the vaccine and mass testing, and the treatments that, frankly, this country has done more than any other around the world to develop.”
That’s the Covid cult: an endless cycle of restrictions followed by relaxations followed by restrictions as we wait for the vaccine Messiah who never quite comes. Fraser Nelson in the Spectator suggests Boris gets on the phone to Anders Tegnell and gets some proper advice on how to handle an epidemic from someone whose results speak for themselves. As Tegnell told Andrew Neil for the all-new Spectator TV:
We looked at the [Imperial] model and we could see that the variables put into the model were quite extreme… Why did they choose variables that gave extreme results? So we were always quite doubtful. We did some work on our own that pointed in quite a different direction. In the end, it proved that our prognosis was much closer to the real situation. Probably because we used data that was coming from the actual situation, and not from some kind of theoretical model.
We used data that was coming from the actual situation, and not from some kind of theoretical model.
Someone needs to put that on a coin with Tegnell’s head on it and give it to Boris. It sums up perfectly the difference between Sweden and most of the rest of the world.
Matt Hancock: Obstinate or Innumerate?
Lockdown Sceptics contributor Mike Yeadon, formerly head of R&D at Pfizer, told Julia Hartley-Brewer on Wednesday that she should ask Matt Hancock what the false positive rate is next time he’s on her show. Well, Hancock appeared on her show yesterday morning and she put the question to him. His answer was “less than one percent”.
As Julia pointed out on Twitter, that wasn’t as reassuring as he hoped.
Matt Hancock told me on @talkRADIO that the False Positive Rate of Covid tests in the community is “under 1%”. Sounds good, doesn’t it? WRONG!
An FPR of 0.8% when the virus prevalence is so low means that at least 91% of “Covid cases” are FALSE POSITIVES.
This FPR means that thousands of the people testing positive for coronavirus in the community are NOT in fact currently infected with Covid and they CANNOT infect others with the virus. That’s why the “rising Covid cases” is not translating into mass deaths.
Oxford Uni Prof @carlheneghan has already shown that, even an FPR as low as 0.1% in community testing returns over 55% false positives.
The Government is planning to lockdown our country again when there is no evidence of a second wave.
We cannot allow this to happen.
You can read Julia’s Twitter thread here.
One alarming thing about Matt’s reply to Julia’s question is that he appears to think the false positive rate, or FPR, is the percentage of people among those who’ve tested positive who are, in fact, negative. After telling Julia that the FPR was “less than one per cent”, he went on to say: “Under one percent means that for all the positive cases the likelihood of one being a false positive is very small.” No, Health Secretary. The FPR is the percentage of all the people you’ve tested who are found, falsely, to be positive. And when the prevalence of infection is low, that means that the likelihood of a positive test result being a false positive is very high.
To illustrate this, let’s suppose that 11 in 10,000 people in England have the virus, which is what the latest ONS Coronavirus Infection Survey estimates (week of Sept 4th to Sept 10th). So according to the Health Secretary’s understanding, if the PCR test has an FPR of 0.8% and you test 10,000 people and 91 test positive, that means that 0.8% x 91 are false positives, i.e. less than one person in the 10,000 is a false positive; one out of the 91 who tested positive. But in fact the numerator is all the people you’ve tested – that’s who the FPR applies to – not just those who’ve tested positive. So the number of false positives is 0.8% x 10,000, i.e. 80 people. To be clear, 80 of the 91, not one out of the 91, are recorded as positive WHEN THEY ARE NOT. Which leaves exactly 11 ‘true’ positives. Just one in 9 of those getting a positive result actually carry the virus! In other words, because the Health Secretary appears not to understand what an FPR is, he’s over-estimating the number of true positives by ~700%.
But the number of people who should self-isolate – and hand over the details of those they’ve been in contact with to NHS Test and Trace – is actually much lower than 11 in 10,000 because about half of those 11 will be ‘cold positives’, i.e. people who test positive because they have fragments of the virus still in their systems even though they’ve long since ceased to be infectious. And 40% of the remainder will be asymptomatic – and, as we know, cases of asymptomatic secondary transmission are extremely rare. That brings the total of people who should be self-isolating per 10,000 to about three. That’s a far cry from the 91/10,000 Hancock thinks should be self-isolating. Scaling that up by the population of England, that’s about 16,800 people, or 0.03%.
Some people reading this will think the Health Secretary knows exactly how many of the people testing positive each day are false or cold positives, but is keeping this knowledge from the public for nefarious reasons. After all, it’s easier to dismiss concerns about false positives if you pretend the numerator is just those people who’ve tested positive rather than everyone you’ve tested. But what would be his motive for dismissing those concerns if he knows they’re well-founded? Might it be because it would discredit his whole approach to managing the pandemic, which is test, test and test again, and make his landmark achievement of carrying out 100,000 tests in one day a few months ago – the achievement which saved him from Boris’s axe – seem less impressive? Because he doesn’t want to undermine public confidence in the Government? Because he’s hoping to get a job with AstraZeneca when he leaves office?
I suspect his answer to Julia Hartley-Brewer wasn’t deliberately misleading; rather, he has misled himself because actually getting to grips with the FPR and thinking through its implications is much more politically perilous that saying things like, “Under one percent means that for all the positive cases the likelihood of one being a false positive is very small.”
As I’ve said before on Lockdown Sceptics, the fact that senior politicians and public health panjandrums say things that we know not to be true doesn’t mean they’re lying to us. Rather, they’re lying to themselves because it’s in their interests to do so. And the root cause of this self-deception isn’t stupidity – or innumeracy, as in this case. On the contrary, the smarter a person is, the more effortlessly they are able to persuade themselves to believe whatever it is that’s in their best interests to believe. Hancock is one of Robert Musil’s “rightly blended personalities” as described in The Man Without Qualities:
And indeed the most coldly calculating people do not have half the success in life that comes to those rightly blended personalities who are capable of feeling a really deep attachment to such persons and conditions as will advance their own interests.
The tragedy of our age is that these “rightly blended personalities” are the ones that rise to the top in politics.
More University Diktats
A reader has flagged up a story in the Nottingham Post about a joint statement issued by the vice-chancellors of the universities of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent. I guess expecting a scientifically-informed, evidence-based response to the Government’s constantly changing coronavirus guidance is too much to expect from university vice-chancellors!
In a joint statement, the vice-chancellors from the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, Professors Shearer West and Edward Peck, said: “Both of Nottingham’s universities welcome students to our city and invite them to be an integral part of the communities in which they live.
“This year we recognise that the coronavirus presents exceptional and individual challenges to every Nottingham citizen and that any incident of antisocial behaviour, such as not respecting the latest Government guidance on social distancing measures, has the potential to put lives at risk.
“All of our students will be required to sign and adhere to updated Codes of Conduct which include these guidelines.
“In the most serious of cases, students can find themselves removed from their accommodation, suspended from their course, and/or with a criminal record.”
It could be worse, I suppose. At least they’re not threatening to expel any students who break the rules and keep their first-year tuition fees, as Northeastern University in the United States has done.
Stop Press: A reader has got in touch to tell us about the lockdown imposed yesterday evening at St Andrew’s University.
I have a relative at St. Andrews University and the rules and regulations there are, well, draconian at best and cruel at worst. The halls residents have to wear a mask in their hall even though it is effectively their home. All lectures are done in your room via Zoom even though open lectures were promised right up until the students took up residence in their rooms (funny that). There is not enough room in the various hall canteens due to social distancing so most eat in the bedrooms. They must not stop in any corridor and must not talk to each other on pain of warnings and eventually being sent down. They are allowed no visitors (boyfriends or girlfriends) in their rooms. But they can pop over to a cheap hotel if one visits! They have employed students to snitch on each other if any rules are broken. I would rather be in prison.
As of an hour ago, the University Principal informed all students that they were being asked to go into “voluntary lockdown” due to two or three cases (positive tests?) on campus.
The relative is considering leaving and giving up their massively hard worked for place. They are strong willed and mentally tough but I fear many young, less mentally tough students are going to be in serious trouble this winter if we are not careful. I know I would have been! I despair.
This is from the email the Principal sent to all students:
It is now very clear that rates of Covid infection are surging again in various parts of this country, and it is very likely that we are very close to a form of further national lockdown. The First Minister of Scotland has today spoken of the urgent need to interrupt the chain of transmission of the virus. In these circumstances, I am writing to all of our students to ask you to please observe a voluntary lockdown this weekend, effective from 7pm this evening. This means that I am asking you all to remain in your rooms as much as possible, not to party, not to go to bars or restaurants, and to avoid mixing with any groups outside your own households. Catering will continue as normal in halls of residence. I appreciate that this request may appear to some of you to be premature, but a hallmark of this pandemic has been that, as a society, we have acted too slowly in the past, and thousands of people have died unnecessarily as a result. Early action saves lives, and we have an opportunity as one community to take action to protect ourselves, and those with whom we share this town. We acted swiftly in March when the pandemic first hit Fife, and the situation we face now is just as serious… There is no evidence that the virus is surging in our community. Rather it is because as a country we are now in a very fast-moving phase where early intervention is key, and hours make a difference.
Hospitals: Not All Full of Mask Nazis
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A Lockdown Sceptics reader had an encouraging encounter with a sensible doctor at the hospital recently and wrote to tell us about it.
I have been visiting a London Bridge private hospital for a sports injury. My charming doctor revealed his true colours as he said that we’re stuck in the wrong narrative about mass deaths. This has lead to healthcare organisations minimising risk at the cost of patients. One example of which is the suspension of pain relieving injections. Those with chronic joint or muscle pain have had to forego cortisol injections until very recently when they’ve been reintroduced. The panic was that cortisol might lower one’s immune system and hence increase one’s chances of dying of COVID-19. I told my doctor I’d be more likely to die from being hit by a bus on the way to the injection appointment than die of the virus because of a weaker immune system. My doctor agreed.
I did ask him on my first visit if he would like to remove his mask as I had no issue with him being maskless but as it was our first meeting I understand he wished to follow protocol. But in the consultation room we couldn’t quite hear each other so we dropped the masks.
Interesting that a senior clinician was so pragmatic, sensible and challenged the public narrative whereas the receptionist reprimanded me for leaving my snout exposed which I did in order to save them the ordeal of shovelling out my asphyxiated corpse from their lobby. He followed up his initial polite request to amend my mask use with a sinister reference to his colleagues who check this throughout the hospital. Big brother is watching.
Another reader found his hospital surprisingly easy-going when it came to his exposed face.
I’ve not worn a face mask since the Covid farce began six months ago. Not once. Never. I see it as a sort of badge of honour in resisting Government lies and general nincompoopery.
Anyway, yesterday I had to go to the hospital to see a consultant. The appointment letter that came through the post said I should wear a mask and would be given one at the hospital if I didn’t have one. My wife said I should be respectful. Reluctantly, I decided I’d probably go with the mask flow if pushed or confronted, seeing as the NHS was helping me on the health front.
When I arrived – not face muzzled – the usually bustling hospital was deserted. A notice on the main entrance sliding doors said I should wear a mask before entering. The entrance hall shops and coffee bar were all shuttered. Two or three masked people were sitting in the big main empty waiting area.
The woman on the desk – like me, unmasked and not wearing rubber gloves – took my letter off me and told me where Urology was. She did not challenge me about not wearing a mask. She did not eye me disapprovingly.
All staff I passed were masked. Nobody gave me the evil eye. When I arrived in Urology, several guys were waiting to see consultants. All were masked. Staff members came and went. All were masked and sounded muffled when they spoke, like they were talking from under a duvet.
My consultant called me through on time. He was masked. He did not ask me why I was unmasked. He wasn’t in the remotest bit put out because my face wasn’t covered. He also examined me.
By this time, it seemed a bit odd, if only because I’d wondered if I might come up against bedwetters as James Delingpole would say. I might as well have been wearing one of those silly Groucho Marx masks with the specs and rubber nose, and folk pretend not to notice like they pretend not to notice nutters in bus stations.
Fifteen minutes later I left. I didn’t notice the one-way-system stickers on the floor and nearly collided with a masked hospital staff member. She did not freak out bumping into me unmasked.
Besides the woman on the main desk, the only other unmasked person I saw on site was a woman working at a computer as I passed and an open office. Not a single negative word or dodgy eye glance came my way throughout the time I was there.
Mask Mouth
Are masks bad for your teeth? A reader writes with a concerning observation:
My beautician is a dentist with a side hustle. Chatting yesterday, she said ‘meth mouth’ is notorious among dentists, the wreckage of meth addicts’ mouths. She said they are now seeing cases of ‘mask mouth’ – people overly mouth breathing, and rebreathing bacteria sodden air from cloth masks. As she’s NHS she’s only allowed to see one patient an hour (it’s usually eight) and she said she and her colleagues are predicting an A&E influx of dental emergencies any time soon.
Can any dentist readers confirm if they’ve clocked this as well?
Where Is The Opposition?
Lockdown Sceptics reader and Labour Party member Dave Ferguson has written to his party asking them where on earth they are on all this.
I wanted to make you aware how disappointed I am with the response of the Labour Party to the current Coronavirus crisis. It is now very apparent that COVID-19 is much less virulent and less deadly than was originally thought. The official stance of the Labour Party in relation to the Government seems to be to accept the goals as valid and to criticise them for their inefficiency. There is certainly inefficiency but some of the goals and approaches also need to be questioned. In the early days of lockdown when Keir Starmer was asking about exit strategy this made sense but that is now no longer the case. The so called rule of six is a ridiculous response to the current so-called spikes, where many of the so-called cases are asymptomatic or false positives, clearly an artefact of the testing. Last night on Question Time Jon Ashworth, who is Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and should be expected to have an understanding of these matters, was clearly out of his depth in talking to Sunetra Gupta and gave no response to the very sensible question of why this over the top response was appropriate to COVID-19 and not to flu. The best he could manage was to say there might be epidemiologists who disagreed with her, but why not look at the arguments she makes rather than rely on a narrow band of experts who have repeatedly misjudged matters.
The Party needs to be an alternative voice, and that means listening to the alternative voices among the experts, like Sunetra Gupta. Like Carl Heneghan from the Centre for Evidence-based medicine who has shown that much of the current so called spike is most likely caused by false positive responses to PCR tests. Like Michael Levitt who has shown that the virus does not propagate exponentially but follows a Gompertz curve. Like Karol Sikora whose concerns about other health issues have shown how inadequate a response it is to say in defence of draconian measures, as Jon did, I am just trying to save lives.
There is talk of some kind of anti-lockdown party standing at local elections and there is every chance they could take votes from major parties as UKIP once did. The Labour Party needs to carefully consider its current response to this crisis. I am an active member of the Labour Party, but at present feel we need some better and more joined up thinking.
The Democratic Case Against Lockdown
Lockdown Sceptics contributor David Seedhouse, Professor of Deliberative Practice at Aston University, has written a book making the democratic case against the lockdowns. It’s being published by Sage (no, not that one) on September 26th and you can order a copy here for £6.99. We asked David to write a blog post for us explaining what his book’s about.
This book, written between March and May, during ‘lockdown’ in the UK, is a spontaneous analysis of a disturbing global drama that continues to disrupt normal standards of science, public health, human rights and medical ethics in ways few people thought possible at the start of 2020.
Civil liberties have been cast aside by a handful of people obsessed with a single risk, unable to think beyond the narrowest conception of health. For weeks, in the initial stages of the pandemic, the only focus of most governments was to ‘defeat’ a virus. They took advice almost exclusively from like-minded epidemiologists and public health doctors, who claimed to be ‘guided by the science’ yet whose predictions turned out to be wildly wrong. This small collection of establishment people simply disregarded entirely predictable negative impacts on so many other aspects of social life, myopically sacrificing countless lives, livelihoods and national economies to ‘battle’ a virus no worse than seasonal ‘flu. There was no attempt at democratic consultation, and governments had few if any qualms about using propaganda to terrify people into compliance.
The assumption that we live in accountable democracies, with unalienable rights, was erased with Orwellian disdain. It quickly became clear that it is impossible for citizens to challenge governments, even in the face of unprecedented restrictions on personal freedoms: if the government says you cannot leave your house they can force you to stay in, as millions from Melbourne in Australia to Lima in Peru now know. The cherished notion of informed consent to health measures has been replaced by a slew of hastily drafted legislation which has made previously normal, innocent actions criminal offences.
The Case for Democracy includes many examples of the failure of decision-makers to understand the meaning of evidence, to balance risks of disease with multiple other risks, and to follow the advice of their own professional bodies about what to do if there is a pandemic: for example, using repressive measures without public involvement flatly contradicts advice from the Centers for Disease Control in the USA, which consistently points to the importance of balancing individual liberty with combating disease.
However, cataloguing unfounded decision-making is not the main purpose of the book. After all, any competent person with internet access and a little determination can discover the deluge of errors, unethical laws and false reasoning for him or herself. Rather the book tries first to understand how apparently sane people could possibly think it made sense to implement such massively damaging policies, and secondly asks how we, the public, might ensure that such a disastrous episode can never happen again.
The explanation is simple: the ‘experts’ are subject to biases and errors of thought well-known to every first-year psychology student, yet none of them seem to realise it. The text-book examples of mistaken thinking include: ‘social amplification’ where new risks are falsely perceived as worse than existing dangers; ‘attentional bias’ where only very specific things are noticed while other relevant matters are ignored; and ‘confirmation bias’ in which only information that strengthens one’s prior view is valued – making it extremely difficult to assess alternatives fairly, and even harder to admit when you are wrong.
‘Group think’ amongst politicians has been ubiquitous. Apart from Sweden and South Korea, politicians right, left and centre have rushed either to copy or outdo each other, without seeming to question the sense of this. The ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’, in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their competence while feeling superior to others has been equally widespread; as has the tendency to predict more extreme outcomes than actually happen, and the simple, atavistic enjoyment of power and control.
The notion of ‘rational field blindness’ illuminates these elementary mistakes. This lack of vision occurs when it’s assumed that the evidence speaks for itself (it never does) and that scientific analysis is value free (it never is). Rational fields do involve evidence, logic, and sometimes science, but these factors are always selected and interpreted according to values, human instincts, linguistic classifications, and the physical and social environment. When policymakers are blind to this, their reasoning, choices, and actions inevitably become dangerously skewed and short-sighted.
Because the backgrounds of their advisers are so limited, no-one seems to have explained these elementary psychological errors to the politicians, who believe they are making rational, objective decisions, when really their behaviours are classic case studies in delusion.
These factors underpin the book’s argument for inclusive, participatory democracy: if the chief problem has been an unduly limited number of options for action, an obvious alternative is to broaden decision-making processes to include diverse voices, knowledge, values, experiences and cultures – as a practical, effective way to arrive at well-informed consensus.
Since our values-blind leaders are unable to see beyond their biases, they need to be better educated. And the best way to do this is via properly organised and funded Citizens’ Assemblies, with decision-making powers, where policies like lockdown can be properly debated. Our current leaders would, of course, be invited to present their viewpoints, which would then be subject to scrutiny from Assembly members with wide and varied expertise, from many walks of life. In these Assemblies our leaders would have to defend and justify their points of view and would, in the process, learn about and be able to reflect on intelligent and compassionate alternatives.
The Case for Democracy not only explains why this is so desperately needed, but gives examples of many existing inclusive, democratic initiatives around the world; including an extensive exercise in the USA where citizens considered what to do in preparation for a ‘flu epidemic and came to the sensible conclusion that vulnerable people should be protected, though not at the expense of normal social functioning.
Wide-reaching participatory democracy is already happening. While it will be a challenge to extend these examples to involve many thousands of us, it is by no means impossible. It can and must be done.
I like David’s explanation for why governments and their advisors around the world have mishandled the response to the Covid crisis so badly. Not a conspiracy, but a cock up stemming from a cluster of cognitive biases.
Vaccine Consultation Now Closed. What Comes Next?
The UK Government’s consultation on the roll out of Covid vaccines closed at midnight last night. So what comes next? According to the i‘s Jane Merrick, it’s not good.
Ministers are planning to invoke emergency powers to vaccinate the public against COVID-19 even if it is unlicensed, i can reveal.
If a vaccine becomes available before the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31st and it has not been approved by the European medicines watchdog, the UK will use its own emergency regulations to sidestep EU law to allow the jab to be deployed due to the serious threat the virus poses to human life.
The Government admits it would be an “very unusual” step to use the extraordinary powers for an unlicensed medicine but that it would be necessary, in those circumstances, to save lives from coronavirus.
Worth reading in full (although so many ads pop up when you look at anything on the i or the Independent, their articles are virtually unreadable).
Speaker Gets No-Platformed; Free Speech Union Gets Her Re-Platformed
The FSU managed to get Caroline Farrow, a Catholic journalist who’d been no-platformed by the University of Exeter Debating Society, re-invited on Thursday evening. She was due to speak on Friday in a debate on whether prostitution should be legalised, but she was notified at 11am on Thursday that she’d been disinvited because of her religious beliefs on a range of LGBT issues. This was a clear case of no-platforming and a breach of the University of Exeter’s professed commitment to free speech.
I wrote to the newly-installed Vice-Chancellor, Professor Lisa Roberts, letting her know that if she didn’t intervene to make sure Caroline’s invitation was reinstated, the University would be in breach of its legal duty to protect free speech, as set out in the Education (Nº 2) Act 1986, which was passed, in part, to prevent the no-platforming of visiting speakers at British universities. In particular, it would be a breach of s.43(a) of the 1986 Act, which requires universities to “take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ensure freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and for visiting speakers”. This Act and these words are referred to in Exeter’s “Freedom of Speech” policy.
Thankfully, after receiving my letter, Professor Roberts did intervene. I received a response from the Vice-Chancellor’s Office at 9.22pm on Thursday night informing me that Caroline had now been re-invited and, when I checked with her, she had. The following day, there was another attempt to no-platform her that the Vice-Chancellor again resisted and when the censorious members of the Debating Society’s committee were repulsed they took to Facebook to express their displeasure, saying they’d only agreed to re-platform Caroline because of the University’s intervention.
You can read an account of the affair on the FSU’s website here, as well as a shorter version on Guido Fawkes here. The FSU interviewed Caroline about the episode for its YouTube channel and you can see that here.
Round-Up
- “Unlike these readers cowed by Covid, I’ll stand up to the Rule of Six bullies” – Bel Mooney writes in the Conservative Woman about how disappointed she was by the reaction to her recent advice column in the Mail in which she said she wouldn’t be cancelling Christmas
- “MPs threaten to block renewal of sweeping powers” – Good to hear about this, though much of the lockdown is done under existing laws rather than the Coronavirus Act which is up for renewal
- “False Positives” – Excellent blog post by Desmond Swayne, the most sceptical MP in the House of Commons
- “Last time we locked down to buy more time for the NHS – so what exactly is the reason now?” – An excellent question from Alexandra Phillips in the Telegraph
- “Almost half of firms set to swing jobs axe” – It’s going to get messy
- “Covid pushes New Zealand into worst recession in years” – Wrong headline on this BBC story. Should read: “Hysterical over-reaction to Covid pushes New Zealand into worst recession in years.”
- “South Dakota: America’s Sweden” – Interesting piece on the AIER site by Amelia Janaskie holding up South Dakota as a (relative) beacon of liberty
- “Almost one third of Covid deaths in July and August ‘primarily caused by other conditions’” – Report based on the latest article from Carl Heneghan’s CEBM highlighting further problems with COVID-19 definitions and diagnosis, which can be found (without paywall) here
- “Do many people have pre-existing immunity?“– Important article in the BMJ reviewing the mounting evidence for widespread immunity to SARS-CoV-2
- “Our testing regime is dangerously flawed – here’s how to fix it” – The latest from Dr Clare Craig in the Speccie
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Van Morrison has joined the swelling ranks of wrinkly rockers against lockdown, alongside Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown and the bloke from the Corrs. He announced yesterday three lockdown protest songs for release soon. The BBC has the story.
Sir Van Morrison has accused the Government of “taking our freedom” in three new songs that protest against the coronavirus lockdown. In the lyrics, he claims scientists are “making up crooked facts” to justify measures that “enslave” the population. “The new normal, is not normal,” he sings. “We were born to be free…
“No More Lockdown” is the most strident of the three tracks. “No more lockdown/No more government overreach,” the musician sings in the chorus. “No more fascist bullies/Disturbing our peace. No more taking of our freedom/And our God given rights/Pretending it’s for our safety/When it’s really to enslave.“
Another song references a widely-shared Facebook post, of a screenshot from a UK Government website saying, “COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.”
While it is true that COVID-19 does not meet the criteria for an HCID – which typically has a high fatality rate (as much as 50% in the case of Ebola) – the disease is still considered highly infectious, with no specific vaccines or treatment currently available.
Hang on a minute – no treatment currently available? If that’s supposed to be the BBC fact checking Van Morrison’s “dangerous misinformation” then I’m afraid it backfires badly. There are now a number of treatments for COVID-19 which studies and clinical practice have shown to have some effect in reducing mortality. Such as HCQ with zinc, reported by American doctors to give an 84% decrease in hospitalisation rates and a 50% decrease in mortality rates among already hospitalised patients.
Anyway, the songs. They are “Born To Be Free”, released September 25th, “As I Walked Out”, to be released on October 9th and “No More Lockdown”, released October 23rd. We’ll send out a reminder when they come out and we’ll see if Lockdown Sceptics readers can help boost them to number one on iTunes.
Sir Van Morrison says:
I’m not telling people what to do or think, the Government is doing a great job of that already. It’s about freedom of choice. I believe people should have the right to think for themselves.
Preach, brother.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We’ve also introduced a section where people can arrange to meet up for non-romantic purposes. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email the Lockdown Sceptics webmaster Ian Rons here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today it’s the turn of Columbia University Marching Band, which has decided its very existence is so repugnant it will “unanimously and enthusiastically” disband after 116 years. Here’s the letter they wrote announcing their self-annihilation, an epistle worthy of Titania McGrath.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a permanent slot down here for people who want to buy (or make) a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and it has the advantage of not explicitly claiming you have a disability. But if you have no qualms about that (or you are disabled), you can buy a lanyard from Amazon saying you do have a disability/medical exemption here (takes a while to arrive). The Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. You can get a “Hidden Disability” tag from ebay here and an “exempt” card with lanyard for just £1.99 from Etsy here. And, finally, if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
Don’t forget to sign the petition on the UK Government’s petitions website calling for an end to mandatory face nappies in shops here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption.
And here’s a round-up of the scientific evidence on the effectiveness of mask (threadbare at best).
Stop Press: An American man, Reed Bender, was physically removed by police from a school board meeting about masks in Mitchell, South Dakota, on Monday night because he refused to wear a mask. Here’s the story from the local press:
Bender resisted the cops as other people urged him to stop, video of the altercation showed. A cop pulled out his taser but was hesitant to use it. “You’re going to have to tase me in front of all these people,” Bender said. “I want these people to video it while their cops of minority descent have to do this to everybody,” he said. One woman off-screen said that Bender just “wants to have a say.” After more struggling, the cops removed Bender from the room.
Watch the incident unfold here.
The Care Home Scandal – A Call For Evidence
Lockdown Sceptics has asked an award-winning investigative journalist, David Rose, to investigate the high death toll in Britain’s care homes. Did 20,000+ elderly people really die of COVID-19 between March and July or were many of them just collateral lockdown damage? With lots of care homes short-staffed because employees were self-isolating at home, and with relatives and partners unable to visit to check up on their loved ones because of restrictions, how many elderly residents died of neglect, not Covid? How many succumbed to other conditions, untreated because they weren’t able to access hospitals or their local GP? After doctors were told by care home managers that the cause of death of a deceased resident was “novel coronavirus”, how many bothered to check before signing the death certificate? The risk of doctors misdiagnosing the cause of death is particularly high, given that various safeguards to minimise the risk of that happening were suspended in March.
David Rose would like Lockdown Sceptics readers to share any information they have that could help in this investigation. Here is his request:
We are receiving reports that some residents of care homes who died from causes other than Covid may have had their deaths ascribed to it – even though they never had the disease at all, and never tested positive. Readers will already be familiar with the pioneering work by Carl Henghan and his colleagues at the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, which forced the Government to change its death toll counting method. Previously, it will be recalled, people who died of, say, a road accident, were being counted as Covid deaths if they had tested positive at any time, perhaps months earlier. But here we are talking of something different – Covid “deaths” among people who never had the virus at all.
In one case, where a family is deciding whether to grant permission for Lockdown Sceptics to publicise it, an elderly lady in reasonable health was locked in her room for many hours each day in a care home on the south coast, refused all visitors, deprived of contact with other residents, and eventually went on hunger strike, refusing even to drink water. She died in the most wretched circumstances which were only indirectly a product of the virus – and yet, her death certificate reportedly claims she had Covid.
I’m looking for further examples of 1) elderly people who died as a result of the lockdown and associated measures, but whose deaths were wrongly attributed to “novel coronavirus”, and 2) those elderly people who clearly died from other causes but whose deaths were still formally ascribed to Covid because they once tested positive for it, even after the counting method change.
If you have relevant information, please email Lockdown Sceptics or David directly on david@davidroseuk.com.
Shameless Begging Bit
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And Finally…
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There definitely is a war on, and it is a ‘hot’ war against all the things that Mr Murray stands for.
‘Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation state, and attempts to “build” one naturally lead to Nazism……a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.’
Russian state owned RIA Novosti 04 April 2022
The Russian state, Putin, clearly equates Nazism with a European culture.
The invasion of Ukraine is quite obviously but the first step in Putin’s de-Europeanization project.
So obvious that he told us himself. This is not some construct of various nefarious agencies. The man spelled it out for us splashed across the pages of his own newspaper!
Funny that so many in the US sphere are in such deep denial of their rulers’ use of actual Nazis (“like actual neo-nazis, not like CBC’s neo-nazis where everybody who doesn’t agree with Justin Trudeau is a neo-nazi”) as a weapon in the Ukraine against Russia, as they used jihadis as a weapon against the Soviet union in Afghanistan. The consequences, win or lose, will be every bit as bad for us.
As Avi Yemini noted recently:
“Let me get this straight.
If a group gather on the streets of New York to rally for Trump, the mainstream media condemns them as “Nazis”.
But when thousands rally to celebrate ACTUAL NAZIS, the same media suddenly supports them.
Putin isn’t good.
But this shit is also bad.”
https://twitter.com/OzraeliAvi/status/1517991778666033152
A Ukrainian “not a Nazi at all, only 2% of the vote” surrendered Azov fighter probably rather regretting some of his tattooing choices:
ANOTHER AZOV CAPTIVE SHOWS THAT THERE IS NO NAZISM IN UKRAINE (VIDEO)
“Another Azov regiment militant captured shows tattoos on his body. Among other tattoos, he has an SS symbol on his chest and a swastika between his fingers on his right hand.
On the forearm of his right arm he had one former tattoo, which was later covered with a complete paint. This is the only tattoo on his body that he tried to remove
In the 40th second of the video he was asked what was on that tattoo. The captive answers that it was an image of the Virgin Mary…
Paganism and various Satanic cults are being actively promoted among Ukrainian Nazis. “
One or two pictures of soldiers with extremist tattoos demonstrates nothing other than the well known fact that all militaries across the world attract their fair share of Walter Mittys.
In point of fact, it is Putin and the European far right that have a history of good relations.
‘Here they are: international ‘observers’ at the illegal and illegitimate ‘referendum’ held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea occupied by the Russian ‘little green men’.
The overwhelming majority of the ‘observers’ are representatives of a broad spectrum of European extreme-right parties and organisations: Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ) and Bündnis Zukunft, Belgian Vlaams Belang and Parti Communautaire National-Européen, Bulgarian Ataka, French Front National, Hungarian Jobbik, Italian Lega Nord and Fiamma Tricolore, Polish Samoobrona, Serbian ‘Dveri’ movement, Spanish Plataforma per Catalunya.
They were invited to legitimise the ‘referendum’ by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE) a smart name for an ‘international NGO’ founded and headed by Belgian neo-Nazi Luc Michel, a loyal follower of Belgian convicted war-time collaborationist and neo-Nazi Jean-François Thiriart.
Presented by Michel as ‘a non-aligned NGO’, the EODE does not conceal its anti-Westernism and loyalty to Putin, and is always there to put a stamp of ‘legitimacy’ on all illegitimate political developments, whether in Crimea, Transnistria, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow’s money talks.’
Never forget that:
‘Notorious Norwegian mass murderer and terrorist Anders Breivik called Putin ‘a fair and resolute leader worthy of respect’
Open Democracy 28 April 2014
“One or two pictures of soldiers with extremist tattoos demonstrates nothing other than the well known fact that all militaries across the world attract their fair share of Walter Mittys.”
Indeed, but in most countries the nazis don’t have their own military units, don’t have people appointed to senior police positions by sympathetic interior ministry ministers, and they don’t get to defy the elected government over internal policy and force it to abandon it.
Russian government employed nazi units:
Wagner: ‘the Wagner Group got its name from the call-sign of its skin-headed commander, Colonel Sergei Utkin, who himself is tattoed with Nazi iconography.’
Rusich: ‘they became more tightly controlled by the state, albeit at arm’s length through Wagner’ ‘They seemed to revel in their impunity and their reputation for violence, mutilating and burning the bodies of the dead and even putting videos of their atrocities online.’
After all ‘The war at home has been symbolised with a lightning flash style ‘Z’, and the bitter Russian joke goes: where is the other half of the swastika? Oh, it’s been stolen. A mix of fascism and kleptocracy, after all, are becoming the last defining features of Putinism in its final, morbid stage.’
Spectator Australia
An MSM source.
Got it.
Brilliant. Let’s reduce our sources down to random blokes on the internet, and then see what bollocks we come up with.
Nazis are (or rather, were) members of the NSDAP and active supporters of its politics back in the day. All of this came to a forceful end about 77 years ago. Hence, whatever these people are, they’re certainly not Nazis. That’s just a ready-made term people throw liberally around whenever they really want to expres that they are the goodest of the goodiest and their opponents the worst of the baddiest. Which is something so-disposed people always want to express.
The word ‘nazi’ in Germany existed before the foundation of the NSDAP, it meant something like peasant.
And most countries don’t have to put up with the decendants of those who joyfully committed the Holodomor invading them, either. (5-7 Million dead in the 30s. How many this time?)
It’s a sad story, but most nations have sad stories.
The Ukrainians should have stood up for a government that would treat the Russian speakers with basic decency, or one that would stick to the reasonable peace deals they signed up to (Minsk), or one that would have had the sense to tell the US neocons to f off and done a deal with the Russians when it was clear they were over-matched.
Reality trumps fantasy..
Are these people paid not to question what’s going on with Ukraine?
Perhaps, but given we can never really know, I prefer to stick with the maxim: never attribute to evil that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Russia has not treated Ukrainian speakers well in the past, and many other language groups as well. That’s why we have a problem today.
Putin has already shut down all Ukrainian language media in the conquered territory.
Irrelevant to the hard reality.
Forty two million Russians died at the hand of Hitler.
Is there any reason why the Russians should trust a European Union dominated by Germany, now calling for an EU army and inviting an increased NATO presence?
Define “far right” please.
If Anders Breivik said that the world was round would you become a flat earther?
A reassuring indictment of his sanity.
Fortunately there are erstwhile residents of Russia now amongst us who can provide real perspective:
‘In Ukraine’s 2019 elections, the far-Right—a coalition of parties—mustered barely two percent of the vote. Hungary’s far-Right party, Jobbik, received 20 percent of the vote the year before, in a country with which Vladimir Putin is happy to do business.’
‘Interestingly, those who throw the word “Nazi” at the Ukrainian people rarely, if ever, define what a Nazi actually is.’
Quillette 16 Apr 22
Except of course for Putin who defines de-Nazification as de-Europeanisation.
‘…the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.’
Russian state owned RIA Novosti newspaper 04 April 22
No mention of the U.S. No mention of NATO. Only Europe.
This is nothing to do with ‘Nazism’ and everything to do with a totalitarian plutocracy threatened by the increasing prosperity of an adjacent capitalist democracy; a totalitarian plutocracy threatened by the ever increasing number of its citizens that have realised they are living on the wrong side of the border.
No wonder Sweden, Finland, are rethinking their longstanding neutrality.
‘Interestingly, those who throw the word “Nazi” at the Ukrainian people rarely, if ever, define what a Nazi actually is.’
I’d say the people wearing SS and swastika tattoos and shooting Russian prisoners of war in the legs and leaving them to die probably count, but you are clearly a much more broad-minded man than I am.
“totalitarian plutocracy threatened by the increasing prosperity of an adjacent capitalist democracy”
LOL! Still trying that one?
“Totalitarian plutocracy” seems to most aptly describe the US, where the wealthy elites openly used their wealth and control of the media and social media to manipulate the result of the latest presidential election, to put an obviously senile old man in office, in place of the more popular man who represented a threat to their interests, and where those who dissent from the prevailing ideological Official Truth face discrimination and even officially tolerated mob violence.
While describing the Ukraine – one of the most corrupt countries on the planet, where opposition is actively suppressed (Ukraine: Zelenskiy bans three opposition TV stations), as a “capitalist democracy” seems …. optimistic.
The length and intemperate nature of your responses speak volumes, as does the curious nature of your use of English. I prefer the more measured perspective of a resident of Russia who recently followed his conscience, resigned his job immediately after Putin invaded Ukraine and left the country. He was by no means alone:
‘….although commentators question how fascist the (Azov) regiment is now, it has undeniably extremist roots. Yet it has at most 2,500 members (a more realistic estimate is 900) and remains a fringe. Ukraine certainly has its share of extremists within its borders—which country does not?—but there is a lot more evidence against mainstream Nazism in Ukraine than there is for it. Though hardly a trailblazer for LGBT, press freedom or democracy, Ukraine scores significantly—and consistently—higher on all these global indexes than Russia.’
Quillette 16 April 22
The invasion is quite clearly an attack on Europe and the European response is starkly different differentiated by each country’s distance from the Russian border, with the notable exception of Britain which was fortunate to find itself with a competent Defence Minister from a military background….
Mark is one of the resident Putin fangirls on this site, Russian socialist dictators meet with his approval.
And you’re the resident simpleton who doesn’t understand categories and philosophical argumentation.
And you give no evidence why I’m wrong.
He’s a Putin fangirl and he calls Israel Nazis for their treatment of the Palestinians, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Palestinians fly swastikas at Israel and that Hitler is the favourite infidel of Islam.
Evidence? You actually need me to refute the ludicrous, childish assertion that he is a ‘Putin fangirl’? He, along with others, simply gives some much needed balance to the debate.
I have not seen him make such arguments, but assuming you’re correct then I would part company with him on this issue. However, this is not particularly relevant in the current context.
Not balance, pretentious gaslighting.
It’s not an assertion, it’s an observation of his fangirling, his pretentious denials that Putin censors, harasses, arrests, imprisons and assassinates his critics and opponents.
Typical meaningless and puerile slur against someone who is more interested in getting to the truth than taking sides like some “fangirl” football hooligan.
Putin at least has the courage not to allow his country to be infested by UN and WEF insurgents.
I assume you’re a “fangirl” of the UN and WEF.
You assume stupidly.
Putin has no courage whatsoever in this regard, Putin is a national socialist, the UN and WEF are international socialists.
BTW, Putin’s critics don’t censor themselves, arrest themselves, imprison themselves of assassinate themselves.
Putin is the world leader in cancel culture.
“The length and intemperate nature of your responses speak volumes, as does the curious nature of your use of English.”
Whereas your responses are all short… err, hang on a mo. And what do you mean by the “…curious nature of [his] use of English”? Are you suggesting Mark’s writing skills aren’t up to standard, or that you find it odd that he should write in English at all?
Your words
What about my words? You have an odd way of answering a simple question, Monro, it’s almost as if you’re trying to avoid answering at all.
The reverse is true – is spite of appearances and the endless hysterical propaganda to psyche up the ‘masses’ , the real CIA intention is to take down Russia – it is Russia they want to taken out to steal its resources and neutralise its nationhood and independence because it is outside their sphere of control – the stooges in Ukraine and Nato are just the means to this send – Johnson included.
The old Cold War Warriors in Washington and the CIA never went away – they are still in charge now.
Latest revelations: CIA sponsored bio-warfare labs on Russia’s borders in Georgia exposed by brave Georgian female reporter!
“The length and intemperate nature of your responses speak volumes, as does the curious nature of your use of English“
ROFL! You are genuinely funny in many of your responses, in a kind of “wtf!?” way.
If you have some kind of accusation to make, make it. Don’t be such a pussy.
“The invasion is quite clearly an attack on Europe“
Except it clearly isn’t, it’s an attack on the forces in the Ukraine that have been waging war on the Russian community in the Ukraine for 8 years for merely demanding what we give freely to the Scots and Welsh.
This issues are absolutely specific to the Ukraine, and have no possible relevance to the vast majority of the European countries who have been marching to the US sphere globalists’ orders and Washington’s propaganda beat, to their own disastrous cost.
Russia thinks it can still live as an independent nation without being incorporated into the woke globalist borg administered from Washington whose interests you are pushing (whether you understand that or not). Time will tell whether or not Russia is correct in that, but we can only wish them well, while recognising that their fight is not our fight, even if the enemies are the same. Our fight is against the globalists’ assault on our own nation and culture.
Enough said.
Scott Ritter in explaining how the US would have gone about the invasion makes it absolutely clear that they would have destroyed everything. Furthermore, if President Putin was waging war on Europe, Germany would by now be smouldering from the onslaught.
Totally agree with you Mark. I feel sorry for the ordinary Ukrainians, and Russians, but for all our sakes I hope President Putin gets the required result. The future of humanity may well depend on this.
I feel increasingly sorry for the Brainwashed British, who since the Covid Scam have lost all sense and reason and now seem incapable of independent research, investigation or objective thought and merely parrot BBC and MSM propaganda, while foaming at the mouth with manufactured indignation over a conflict that actually does not affect them.
(Or at least did not until Biden’s best friend, crazy man Johnson, told us all that we will have to pay for his adventures with food and fuel shortages and hyper-inflation.)
In 1984 (I know, I know, it’s that year again) Dr. Eileen Barker published ‘The Making of a Moonie’ in which she disputed the claim that the Unification Church ‘brainwashed’ its members. Having known a number of current and former Moonies, and having attended many of the ‘workshops’ and courses run by the UC, I had to agree with her (and I still do) to the extent that I didn’t believe that ‘brainwashing’ was even possible. The last two years have changed my mind – it is possible if you have enormous resources, the sort of resources only a State can allocate.
The primary requirement is the ability to induce fear coupled with an absolute control of information. The latter has yet to be achieved, but so long as you have a target population that will not go out of its way to question the narrative (which, disappointingly I have found to be the case in the UK) you’re almost there.
Quite so – it has worked beyond Michie’s wildest expectations.
She even pushed the Gates/ Fauci “wearing masks forever” line to the very end!
Indeed!
Just one?
OK, two.
And these global indexes are run by who? UN affiliated NGO’s by any chance?
Putin’s blasting Ukraine off the map, combined with starving Ukraine off the map, just like Stalin did, is socialist.
It is the West that seems to be determined to do the starving.Putin is not a socialist – haven’t you noticed?
However, the obvious fact that the US is now in the hands of the Deranged Wokist Zero Carbon Extreme Left, fronting the Neo -con Deep State, under a senile, moronic, fraudulently ‘elected’, totally incapable and allegedly corrupt , non- President ought perhaps to bother you and all of us, rather more than Putin!
Large majorities in Sweden and Finland, other Baltic states, not to mention Ukraine, Belarus, appear to disagree…….
No they don’t – they have not even been asked what they think the principal ‘approved narrative’ of which in any case is totally controlled by the biggest mass and social media censorship and orchestrated propaganda campaign in Western history.
Nope
‘The poll by Demoskop and commissioned by the Aftonbladet newspaper showed 57% of Swedes now favoured NATO membership, up from 51% in March. Those opposed to joining fell to 21% from 24%, while those who were undecided dipped to 22% from 25%.’
Reuters 20 Apr 22
‘The most recent poll, by private Finnish broadcaster MTV, showed 68% of Finns in favour and only 12% against NATO membership.’
Reuters 13 Apr 22
I live in Finland and no-one has asked me. MTV is/was (sold) just some private TV company (stands for Mainos Television – ‘mainos’ means advertising, because that’s how they get their revenue).
Quite honestly all they churn out is miscellaneous rubbish for morons, and I certainly wouldn’t believe any ‘survey results’ they come up with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV3
The Aftonbladet Swedish newspaper is a channel for Swedish state propaganda.
‘NATO’ membership sounds a bit like paying protection money to a mafia. Anyway, if Russia were to invade Finland or Sweden, does anyone really think ‘NATO’ would come and help?
Do you think Russia should give back the massive chunk of Finnish territory they took in the Winter War?
I think China should give back Tibet to the Tibetans first. As for the USA …
I think we can all surely agree now, after 400 years experience of the consequences, that the Pilgrim Fathers ought never have been allowed to leave the country.
Why would we have wanted those miserable bastards to have remained here?
Yes indeed- that was the principal reason for letting them go!
But “Pay back time” has cost us very dear!
I agree with Tibet and in the past I’ve helped with that campaign.
Is there anything comparable to the 2,000 years the Bantus have spent exterminating the pygmies and the San?
2,000 years? They’re obviously not very good at it…
Well, fortunately for the aforementioned targeted minorities, the Bantus didn’t have modern technology and organisation. Just sharpened sticks, for most of the period in question.
And they had to move on foot.
The pygmies had shorter legs so couldn’t run as fast.
Perhaps you should learn to mind your own business.
That was the Soviet Union. Try to learn the difference.
‘In an interview with Foreign Policy, Orpo said “it’s clear” that Finland’s parliament will decide to apply to join NATO in the next month, and Kristersson said that after a separate debate in Sweden, his country is likely to follow suit.’
Finland can put a million men in the field very quickly protected by NATO’s nuclear capability.
“Finland is a security provider, not a user. And if something bad will happen, we are not going to be the first ones here to knock on the door to ask for help,” Orpo said. “This is an important message to the United States and all the other NATO countries. Because together with Sweden, we can take our share. We can guarantee our border line.”
Foreign Policy 22 Apr 22
Bloody hell!
I never, never thought I’d see the day when you talked any sense, still less did I expect I would bother to respond and blimey, sinner that I am I even gave you an uptick.
Maybe there is hope.
Hear, hear. I gave the green chicken rustler an uptick too.
Sound comment!
Paying “protection money” puts you in the hands of your ‘protectors’ who are in this case more dangerous than those you have been encouraged to irrationally fear as Russia has no intention whatever in “invading” Finland or Sweden. Whatever for?
Ukraine has paid a high price for putting itself in the hands of the CIA, Nuland, the Clintons and the Bidens in 2014!
Is there any money left in the country now?
If Finns are conned into this nonsense they will regret it – there is a very good reason Finland has been neutral and prosperous since 1945 .
As for the Swedes – they appear to have lost their way in every direction. How are those riots and fires going started by their rampaging “Newcomers”?
Oh for the days of “free love”, ABBA and IKEA!
Maybe not IKEA.
On reflction perhaps not…. Gravlax then?
Everyone thinks so – or everyone who matters. Including Putin.
Reuters???
Good grief, get a grip for crying out loud.
Polls? Rigged every time in a world of total media control in the hands of the Globalist Elite and where Media organisations and even individual publications are funded by Gates .
I expect you still believe the BBC tells the objective truth as well ?
Even Walter Lipman ( famous author of ‘Public Opinion’) acknowledged that opinion polls are designed to shape public opinion, not reflect it
Mike Graham said that he quickly learned when he was the editor of the Scottish Daily Mirror that opinion polls are designed to give you the answer you want.
Reuters? Is that the same Reuters that is now in the business of “fact-checking” Facebook and Twitter posts mentioning SARS CoV 2 vaccines, despite having ties to Pfizer?
The same Reuters that is an integral partner in –
The Trusted News Initiative –
along with ooh, BBC, CNN etc
For crying out loud. Even the name ‘TNI’ gives the Orwellian organisation away. Hiding in plain sight – furkin’ hell!
I believe it is …..so many years of respected integrity…. ditched.
A bit like the BBC!
And you somehow don’t consider this as being orchestrated by the west’s fear narrative, which is desperate to have a greater NATO presence in these countries?
Large majorities in Sweden and Finland, other Baltic states, not to mention Ukraine, Belarus are being strongarmed to sign up with the EU and NATO. The financial attractions are only matched by the fear of not complying.
Hear, hear.
https://news.yahoo.com/putin-still-communist-party-card-likes-socialist-ideals-183734163.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAABT6-aZDFSWUjPizkM7slVqb1VXtNd2rIwFVeTQ2-Aio0LJqY4srKMF0qnTgraOH2JJzHCGSv0qVUYJLi8mlAGY5tVxoHWeMnL8VhWrWk1NUpN-Aq8rs8pLFIcR9VZNH_7DMkKU8g8bSpQ-wCmItp641Swgk3VcmgrPrPQDLxMZG
Putin not a socialist? GTF.
As noted previously, you come across like a student lefty accusing anyone who disagrees with xe of being “fascist”. You need to come up with a more relevant criticism than just smearing everyone as “socialist” if you want to contribute more than noise.
Indeed. Have you noticed that the vast majority of criticisms levelled at Putin and Russia are entirely anachronistic? These people are stuck in the 1980s. How progressive is that?
Cold War nostalgia, or fixation.
When the facts change, one should change one’s opinion appropriately, or be left vulnerable to the kind of delusional anachronisms that hobble so many on the establishment political right these days, as far as foreign policy is concerned in particular.
‘Ukraine, as history has shown, is impossible as a nation state, and attempts to “build” one naturally lead to Nazism……a disguise for the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.’
Russian state owned RIA Novosti 04 April 2022
The Russian state, Putin, clearly equates Nazism with a European culture.
The invasion of Ukraine is the first move in Putin’s de-Europeanization project.
This is not from a previous century. Putin splashed it across the pages of his own newspaper just the other day!
1. Please link to the source and the ‘wider context.’
2. The quote itself, on its own, doesn’t lead one to your extratextual conclusions at all. It suggests that, along with the ‘denazification’ of Ukraine necessarily follows its (Ukraine’s) ‘deeuropeanisation’.
This suggests it wants to ‘deeuropeanise’ Ukraine, not Europe as a whole. That’s what the text suggests. So, without a link to the source and any wider context, your comment is irrational, and not only fails to refute my point but reinforces my point about anachronism. You appear to be hysterical.
Your comment is hysterical, hysterically funny; indeed hilarious.
‘..the European project of Nazi Ukraine, therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.’
Plain as a pike staff, ‘de-Europeanisation’ is, quite clearly, a threat to the European culture, in so far as there is one, but that is for another time.
The double headed eagle of Russia favoured by Putin derives from the Byzantine Empire. Do you know how much of Europe was governed by that empire?
As for references, you can no doubt speak Russian; why not thumb through a few back copies of RIA Novosti. You’ll soon get the hang of the whole thing.
Enjoy!
What’s ‘hilarious’, though I find it more tragic than funny, is your inability to understand plain English. It is also ironic when we consider your earlier (and erroneous) complaint regarding Mark’s use of the language.
So what do I mean?
Yes, its inevitable ‘deeuropeanisation’. I find it utterly astonishing that someone could so easily lift a possessive determiner and apply it in an extracontextual fashion, but that’s what having a predetermined agenda can so easily do to people.
Read the context (with added bold):
The ‘denazification’ of Ukraine is also its inevitable ‘deeuropeanisation’.
The possessive ‘its’ can only refer to Ukraine. It is talking about the ‘deeuropeanisation’ of Ukraine. That is the context
Yes, it is utterly plain and unequivocal, only your predermined agenda has you butchering the language and context.
You should be embarrassed.
Non Sequitur. Are you this irrational in other areas?
That’s not how rational discourse works, chum. You quoted a text/source, therefore it is incumbent on you to link to that source. Next you’ll be telling me to ‘Google it’!
You stand refuted.
Lazy. I give the RIA Novosti reference above.
It goes on to say:
‘…not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but including, and above all, Western totalitarianism, the imposed programs of civilizational degradation and disintegration, the mechanisms of subjugation to the superpower of the West and the United States.’
A bit of a blank cheque then…….
‘Russian Deputy Commander of the Central Military District stated that Russian control of southern Ukraine provides Russia a future capability to conduct an offensive toward Transnistria, rather than announcing an imminent Russian offensive toward Moldova. Minnekaev said Russian control of southern Ukraine will provide “another way out to Transnistria,” the illegally Russian-occupied strip of territory in Moldova, where he falsely claimed ”there are also facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population.”
ISW 22 Apr 22
No, you offered a vague reference with a bizarre comment about ‘speak[ing] Russian’:
So, can you speak Russian? It appears you have taken second-hand information, which provided no link/reliable source (hence your unwillingness/inability to provide a link), and passed it off as gospel truth.
That is the epitome of laziness.
1. Again, where’s the link to an original source?
2. The text still does not corroborate your assertion that Putin wants to ‘deeuropeanise’ Europe as a whole.
Now you’re simply scratching around for anything you can find.
1. You’re such a bore. Either link to an original source or stop. It’s embarrassing.
2. Again, this still does not support your claim.
You really want this badly, don’t you?
I note you have dropped the previous erroneous claim which I refuted, tacitly conceding the point.
Since you clearly have no clue about how to find the reference (or about much else) I would have helped you (it couldn’t be simpler) but your lack of courtesy is against you……
You may not recognise Russian threats to the rest of Europe but those a bit closer to the action clearly do:
‘Moldova has summoned Moscow’s ambassador over the comments, which its foreign ministry described as “deeply concerning”.
BBC 23 Apr 22
You call MR lazy and complain about his lack of courtesy. Oh the irony.
The onus is not on me to chase up your quotes/claims. I’m not here to do your job for you. Stop blaming others for being a shirker.
Well, I’ve refuted you without trying, so what does that say about you?
You need to help yourself, Gumbo.
Then go back and properly reference every one of your quotes.
Says the shirker whose lack of courtesy and consideration for others has lead them to utterly ignore the common practice of providing proper links to the source of their claims. Outstanding.
Good grief. You really are quite dim, aren’t you? What ‘comments’ What’s the context? Were you born this dense or did it take hard graft?
Allow me to drag you back kicking and screaming. Prove the claim that Putin wants to ‘deeuropeanise’ Europe. I’ve already demonstrated how you butchered the language and context in a previous effort, and pointed out how subsequent efforts also fell short, so you’ll need some other (no doubt second-hand) information.
Put up or put a sock in it.
Intemperate language invariably indicates the wrong end of the argument.
Bon voyage!
Excuses. The last refuge of the refuted. You’ve been thoroughly refuted, you know it, and you’re too emotionally invested in your agenda to show humility. Now we have the absurd excuse that intemperate language ‘invariably’ indicates one is on the wrong end of an argument. Since I’m nothing if not thorough, let’s deal with the claim:
Prove the claim that intemperate language invariably indicates one is on the wrong end of an argument. Of course, this is rhetorical, because such a claim cannot possibly be demonstrated. It is absurd.
Moreover, you have hardly been restrained in your language, so you condemn yourself to the wrong end of the argument, leaving us both at the wrong end of the argument, which is incoherent since either Putin wants to ‘deeuropeanise’ Europe or he doesn’t. You thus refute yourself.
Once again you stand utterly refuted.
Try really hard not to distort, for your own argumentative purposes, what you quote Putin said:
“…..therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.” [my emphasis]
In other words, he intends to deal with Ukraine, not the rest of Europe.
You are clearly struggling here. Let me help you out:
‘‘…not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but including, and above all, Western totalitarianism……
Then:
‘Russian Deputy Commander of the Central Military District stated that Russian control of southern Ukraine provides Russia a future capability to conduct an offensive toward Transnistria, rather than announcing an imminent Russian offensive toward Moldova. Minnekaev said Russian control of southern Ukraine will provide “another way out to Transnistria,”
Now I’m a fair minded man and you are, of course, entitled to your opinion but when Finland and Sweden decide to join NATO, a defensive alliance, Finland stating that its membership is aimed at enhancing regional security, and then Moldova calls in its Russian Ambassador because of the Russian desire to establish ‘another way out to Transnistria’ I have to ask myself a question:
Who sounds more convincing: the governments of Sweden, Finland, Moldova, or you?
Hmmmm……tricky……or not really….
But Ukraine blasting the Donbass off the map and starving its people is virtuously right wing, is it?
Indeed – the simply truth is far too complicated for the irrational foaming ‘Russia Haters’ whipped into hysteria as usual by the blatant propaganda of the BBC and the national gutter press!
Can we ask for an estimate on how many opponents have been imprisoned or killed so far by the ‘democratic'(sic) Zelensky regime?
We know in a full account of a Russian supporting Mayor murdered by the Azov Brigade in Donbas – there are others.
Stories surfacing today of Ukrainian Army recruits being threatened and even shot if they retreat or attempt to surrender to the enemy.
Presumably the CIA have told Zelensky to fight to the last Ukrainian before getting on the last plane to Washington?
Come on! There has been no one sided monopoly of violence. Yes, Ukrainians will be prosecuted for war crimes, but those Russians who will be so prosecuted will be a great deal more numerous….and a great deal more senior…..
You do not appear to be at all well informed about what is really going on – sorry.
A most convincing response……or not really.
‘ZURICH, April 22 (Reuters) – The United Nations human rights office said on Friday there was growing evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, including signs of indiscriminate shelling and summary executions, while it said Ukraine also appeared to have used weapons with indiscriminate effects.
“Russian armed forces have indiscriminately shelled and bombed populated areas, killing civilians and wrecking hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure, actions that may amount to war crimes,” the office of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Michelle Bachelet said.
U.N. human rights monitors in Ukraine have also documented what appeared to be the use of weapons with indiscriminate effects, causing civilian casualties, by Ukrainian armed forces in the east of the country, OHCHR said in a statement.’
Who cares what you think?
There is no independent evidence that the Russians have committed any deliberate atrocities against the civilian population – none whatever – only the claims of the Ukrainian military.
We do know that the Ukrainian Extreme Right Militias hide themselves and their weapons among civilians and use them as Human Shields – we do know that they have imprisoned civilians in the basements of Mariupol as ‘hostages’, we also know that the Extremists have occupied the top floors of tower blocks of flats, with civilians in the lower floors, to fire on the Russians. All this can be gleaned from first hand, vox pop accounts from the civilians involved.
There is plenty of Nato propaganda pumped out which we are getting very used to and circumstantial evidence and eye witness accounts that civilians could have been killed by Ukrainian Militia extremists seeking to pin the blame on the Russians to create outrage and hype up the hysterical anti-Russian sentiment being pushed in the West to justify the draconian attempt to destroy Russia’s economy and isolate her from the “world”.
The West is blocking and censoring Russian news reports which provide an alternative narrative to the endless stream of blatant Western propaganda – why would we block Russian news outlet equivalents of the BBC – we have never done it before ?
What are they trying to conceal from our population? Why don’t they let people evaluate what they see and make up their own minds? Don’t they think people any longer have a ‘mind’ to make up?
Perhaps they are right.Spoon-feeding blatant propaganda is obviously the planned Schwabian ‘New Normal ‘ Orwellian future.
Ten minute “Russia Hate” session planned for every evining soon?
There is plenty of evidence but it will be up to the judicial authority to decide whether the material and testimonies gathered so far – which are being tested to a UK evidential standard – could be used to support a charge of genocide:
‘Scotland Yard announced last month that it was supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) probe into alleged war crimes, and appealed for anyone with direct evidence to come forward.
Detective Chief Superintendent Dominic Murphy, providing an update on the evidence gathering operation as CTC head of operations, said:
“What we’re seeing is incredibly harrowing, beyond comprehension’
“In not far off 17 years in counterterrorism, (it is) some of the worst possible footage you could imagine seeing.”
‘Mr Murphy said: “Does it provide evidence of a war crime? Quite possibly.
“Does it provide evidence of other international crimes? Quite possibly.
“And then it’s for those prosecuting agencies that we provide the information to to make those sorts of judgments and decisions.’
ITV 22 Apr 22
The war in Ukraine has got F A to do with Scotland Yard. Now we’ve got a British plod acting as judge and jury. Meanwhile, Dr Sam White’s mountain of evidence of crimes against humanity gets chucked out with a “nothing to see hear.”
Looks like the urine is being extracted big time.
Indeed it is – a constant stream in our direction!
Let’s try that again:
‘Scotland Yard announced last month that it was supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) probe into alleged war crimes
“Does it provide evidence of a war crime? Quite possibly.
“Does it provide evidence of other international crimes? Quite possibly.
“And then it’s for those prosecuting agencies that we provide the information to to make those sorts of judgments and decisions.’
Reference above
Scotland Yard has no jurisdiction whatsoever over international affairs.
The only thing they are doing is taking witness statements.
Unless they are concerning Covid Vax deaths and injuries in which case it is: “Move along, nothing to see here”.
Oh dear.
‘‘Scotland Yard announced last month that it was supporting the International Criminal Court (ICC) probe into alleged war crimes.
“And then it’s for those prosecuting agencies that we provide the information to to make those sorts of judgments and decisions.’
Reference above
Who watches Mainstream propaganda media these days? Not an objective bone in their body and Ofcom looking over their shoulder 24/71
Massively untrue. I’ve seen/heard/read large numbers of personal testimonies from victims and witnesses.
You will probably say they’re all fake – although without any evidence yourself.
Meanwhile you’ll say that the reports of various Russian-paid stooges are for real – again, without any evidence yourself.
Some of us have seen large numbers of personal testimonies from victims and witnesses to counter claims of Russian brutality of war crimes.
Touché
The concept of evidence is beyond your comprehension. It’s a complicated and difficult matter.
You have no evidence they are real – and you must have seen them via the West’s propaganda media where objectivity is now dead and buried and alternative opinion ‘cancelled’ and censored by Ofcom!
As for “paid stooges” we always have the BBC!
However, I don’t think the little girl, collecting and playing with shell fragments from shells fired at her damaged home in Donbas by Ukrainian Azov Nazis, was a “paid stooge”.
Even if you made the entirely wild and unjustified assumption that every single one of the Russian accusations against Zelensky are true, Putin still runs far ahead in the repression stakes.
Even that isn’t true.
In any case Zelensky is just a puppet managed by Nuland and the CIA, not the Ukrainian people .
Give us some facts, not assertions!
You don’t do facts. ( Well only BBC “facts”)
And you know this, how?
Criticising the invasion of Ukraine and atrocities by Russian troops is not the same as ‘Russia hating’, and neither is it hysterical.
It’s a fact they’ve invaded, it’s a fact they have committed at least some atrocities. What are we supposed to do? Not report it?
Not remotely as many as Putin’s.
There is no independently verified evidence whatever of atrocities committed by Russian troops or an explanation of what they might possibly gain from committing them when they were withdrawing.
There is however evidence of atrocities committed by Azov brigade Nazis on Russian prisoners because they have very conveniently filmed them for us to see and there are eye witnesses too!
Fake. There, it’s easy to get rid of evidence, isn’t it?
Large numbers of victims and witnesses have testified. Their statements have often been verified with satellite images etc. Examination of bodies also supports testimony.
But without any justification you’re going to dismiss all of that as fake.
Easy to get rid of evidence, isn’t it?
There is plenty of evidence. Of course the judicial authorities will decide whether the material and testimonies gathered so far could be used to support a charge of genocide:
‘They put us on our knees and began to “smoke”. I had money and a watch with me. They took everything away, like the rest, that is, they simply robbed it. They knew some of the people, checked the documents, and if a person participated in the ATO (as Ukraine calls the period of hostilities in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions from 2014 to 2018) or was registered in the defense, they were immediately shot. They also checked tattoos, they were looking for “Natsiks”. In fact, even those who had the official coat of arms of Ukraine were shot.’
‘They shot either in the back of the head or in the heart. Among them were Russians and, most likely, Buryats, I understood this by appearance.’
‘My friend named Sergey Semenov, he is about 40 years old, decided to go with a friend on foot through the glass factory to the city of Irpin. Their bodies were found a few days later. Sergei was shot in the back of the head, and the second was tortured – they cut out his cheek and shot him in the heart, we buried them right on the territory of the plant.
On March 2, during the fighting for the city, five civilians were killed: three men, a woman and a pensioner. Their bodies lay on the bus for several weeks and we were not allowed to take them out.’
BOTTAK TV 04 04 22
‘‘In Ukraine’s 2019 elections, the far-Right—a coalition of parties—mustered barely two percent of the vote..’
And what percentage of the vote in the last UK election did the Green Get, or the alphabet people of the Woke Party, Expert Party yet the UK is now ruled by a coalition of these with our thoughts and words policed?
No need to ask that question. You will have a more up to date answer in a few days.
Gosh. The Tory party are part of a woke coalition? That’s news to them.
“The Tory party are part of a woke coalition?”
Let’s see:
Commitment to suicidal climate alarmist dogmas: check
Promotion of identity lobby woke nonsense: check
Worship of lie-based BLM thuggery: check
Introduction of speech crime laws to criminalise dissent from leftist dogmas: check
Failure to recognise mass immigration as inherently profoundly harmful and act meaningfully against it: check.
Outright worship of state socialist, collectivist healthcare: check.
We’ve had “Conservative” governments in office for 7 years now, 12 if you count Cameron’s. Yet this is the state of the nationalised healthcare bureaucracy:
https://order-order.com/2022/03/11/nhs-hiring-even-more-60000-equality-and-inclusion-managers/
“NHS Hiring Even More £60,000 Equality and Inclusion Managers”
https://www.england.nhs.uk/author/dr-nick-watts/
Dr Nick Watts, the “Chief Sustainability Officer” of the NHS. Based in [high wage] London, he “leads the Greener NHS team across the country”.
Looks like the “moderate” wing of the Woke Party to me. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck,….
The ‘Tory Party’ is no longer a political party with policies – just a bunch of chancers on the make currently backing Woke Globalism Carbon and the Gates Global Vax Mania as the most lucrative new show in town.
Plenty of earning potential available!
They certainly are a bunch of chancers, but not specifically on wokist grounds.
“Chancer” means following any scam going – the PCR tests and the PPE equipment were “nice little earners” as for “Furlough”…Jackpot!!
It may be news to you, but the Tories legislated for same-sex marriage and are pushing the AGW nonsense for all its worth. I fail to see what isn’t ‘woke’ about the lack of conservatism in the Conservative Party.
What’s going on is a shift in the ‘Overton window’ – ie the centre of the national debate has shifted in the direction of what you would call wokist polices.
But the Tory would be full of MPs who are very far from woks in their personal ideology.
From the point of view of the non-woke majority, what’s the difference between a “woke” politician and a “non-woke” one who votes “woke”?
I can assure you that plenty of Tory MPs are as reactionary as you could possible wish for.
But politics is the art of compromise and it shifts in all kinds of directions.
Name 10.
“Tory MP’s” are members of the ‘Conservative’ party. In other words they are conservative in their outlook, not reactionary.
Whatever gave you that idea? If a politician isn’t fighting to win for his country he should be immediately sacked.
In order to “compromise” you have to have beliefs other than self-advancement . the Tory Party no longer has any.
Politics is the art of lying without a having sense of shame when caught out.
“Woks”? Chinese frying pans?
My keyboard censored me. Wokist.
They are being strongarmed into rethinking their longstanding neutrality. The financial attraction of working with the EU and NATO is only matched by the fear of not doing so.
It’s the way you tell ’em. Finland can put one million men in the field very quickly.
‘strongarmed’……bless…..I may have damaged my ribs…….
If you going to talk about neo nazis, then you must include Russia’s Wagner Group.
At first glance, neither the Wagner Group nor the Azov Battalion make much sense in the context of their respective governments (who are both anti Nazi in rhetoric). This is particularly bizarre in relation to Ukraine, which even has a Jewish president.
In both cases this is more about creating an image of fear and an intimidation, rather than actual Nazi ideology.
It’s a strategy that’s been especially useful for Putin. While the impact of the Azovs is entirely limited to the Donbass, the Wagner Group have been used around the world as a military unit that can operate without any accountability or moral restraint.
They operate at arms’ length from the state so they can do what they want, without even the limited checks on behaviour provided by Russian media and public opinion.
Bandera – the hero of the regime in Kiev- led the Nazis in Ukraine in 1942 – they had exactly the same agenda then.
So easy to look up and verify!
Wagner was based on the US Blackwater model, not the Azov model. It is not an ideologically motivated militia, but a mercenary outfit with deep state connections that can serve as an extension of the regime’s (US for Blackwater, Russian for Wagner) military, and also do things the regime prefers not to be directly responsible for.
The attempt to defuse the negative PR consequences of Ukrainian extreme nationalism by muddying the waters with Wagner is just more dishonesty.
You’re not trying very hard to be even handed.
‘Originally drawn largely from neo-Nazis out of the St Petersburg nationalist underground scene, in 2014 Rusich emerged as one of the ‘volunteer battalions’ in rebel-held parts of Ukraine’s Donbas region….’
‘…Rusich seems to have had no qualms in being incorporated as a deniable weapon of the Russian state. One of their commanders even boasted of cutting the ears off the dead.’
‘Rusich became the focus of a small, disturbed but genuinely fervent cult, presenting themselves as modern-day Vikings (part of the roots of the Rus’ state being, after all, from early medieval Nordic raiders and traders who chose to carve out principalities in the Slavic lands).’
Spectator Australia 09 Apr 22
The topic was Wagner, not fringe militias.
Nope. The topic was neo nazis.
Rusich was ‘originally drawn largely from neo-Nazis out of the St Petersburg nationalist underground scene.’
Nope, the topic of the post to which you were supposedly replying was Wagner, and Fingal’s repeated attempt to abuse it to try to muddy the waters over the negative PR consequences of rampant nazism for the Ukraine he wants to protect from criticism.
You’re free to try to swing the topic back to an earlier point in the thread, but equally I’m free to point out your attempt to do so and decline to be distracted by it.
Nope. I was replying to your reply on this topic:
‘If you going to talk about neo nazis, then you must include Russia’s Wagner Group.’
You must also include Rusich. Rusich was ‘originally drawn largely from neo-Nazis out of the St Petersburg nationalist underground scene.’
You could maintain that you weren’t originally talking about neo nazis but that would be just plain silly.
“Nope. I was replying to your reply on this topic:“
…by which you concede my point that the topic of the post to which you were ostensibly replying was not what you implied it was.
I think we’ve gone around in circles on that for long enough, now.
The final sentence of my previous remark refers.
But the Wagner Group does have explicit Nazi references, including its name and the ideology of its founder.
You can’t simply pretend this doesn’t exist, while constantly banging on about the Azov imagery. (At least the Azov name is just geography).
You have a one-way filter.
As I said, Wagner is a mercenary group like Blackwater, not a political militia like Azov etc. The two issues are not remotely in the same ballpark, and you are just trying desperately to muddy the water as much as possible, because you are having to face up to not being able to suppress the truth forever.
The Wagner Group is an agent of the Russian state. Just because there has been an attempt to keep its activities at arm’s length, that doesn’t mean you have to fall for it.
A private operator Blackwater model cannot exist in Russia.
Why not?
Oh! I forgot. You don’t understand the difference between the USSR and Russia.
Richard Wagner, though an Anti-Semite, died in 1883, long before the founding of National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
I know, but that’s not the point. Wagner’s work was taken up by the Nazis as a kind of ideological theme tune – it’s got nothing to do with him personally.
They called it the Wagner Group as an explicit Nazi reference.
Is this an explicit political definition? Can I look it up somewhere?
So why is it an issue?
FFS………….
You have a knack of providing empty posts.
Yawn. Wagner isn’t “an explicit Nazi reference” for the reasons I explained. A Palestinian terror gang naming itself “The Waters Group” would make more sense.
I guess it’s aways possible they just wanted to express their love of classical music
Putin’s National Socialism meets with your approval.
Soviet Socialism also meets with your approval too.
Putin doesn’t operate National Socialism.
But he does support the Nazi Wagner Group.
Putin equates “Nazism” with people who call themselves Nazis and wear Nazi insignia ( The “Wolfsengel” borrowed from SS 2nd Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’ of ‘Oradour sur Glane’ fame) and wave Swastika flags, vow to exterminate Russians and even Russian speakers and torture their Russian prisoners for the cameras .
You seem to have ‘overlooked’ these very blatant ‘facts’.
Putin doesn’t ‘equate’ Nazism, he actively promotes, finances, it. Has been doing so for years, as evidenced by the nonsense spouted in these comments.
‘EODE is only a drop in the ocean of extensive co-operation between the Kremlin and the European far right. Front National’s Marine Le Pen now visits Moscow on a seemingly regular basis: in August 2013 and April 2014 she had meetings with Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Speaker of the Russian parliament Sergey Naryshkin….’
Open Democracy 28 April 2014
Still, looking on the bright side, I will be very surprised if Le Pen’s connections to Putin have not torpedoed her chances….
42 million Russians died fighting Naziism. Some of those were quite likely Putin’s relatives.
Do you really imagine Russians have any sympathy with Naziism, other than by western propaganda?
They were sympathetic enough to fight on the Nazi side for the first year of the war.
According to that logic the Poles were on the same side as the “Nazis” because they also seized Czech territory.
Something wrong with your logic. The Poles acted independently, they never had an alliance with Hitler (although it was offered).
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was a non-aggression pact not an alliance.
For a guy who prides himself on seeing through propaganda, this is not so bright. Obviously that’s what they called it.
In fact, in the secret protocols they agreed a carve up of eastern Europe between them. It was an aggression pact against everyone else. They coordinated their military attacks in Poland. This was an alliance.
Excellent point – often overlooked!
No they did not – that is total nonsense and discredits everything you have posted so far !
The Russians occupied Eastern Poland in a partition agreed with Hitler , which gave them the Polish frontier agreed by Curzon in 1919.
The Russian Winter War with Finland was a side show unrelated to the conflict between Germany and the British and French
The area taken by Stalin including Vilnius ( Vilna) and Lvov (Lemberg) and had been seized by the Poles during the Russian revolutionary war – just a few ” facts” for you.
For information: , before the Ribbentrop – Molotov pact of August 1939 Stalin had sought negotiation with the West regarding an agreed common response to German expansionism and had beeb rebuffed.
Yes – they signed a mutual aggression pact, in which they agreed how to carve up eastern Europe (not just Poland).
Yes, but so what? Why should Putin claim historical rights to Ukraine, when he’s still sitting on one third of Finland?
The borders of all eastern european countries have changed many times. Stalin and Hitler, between them, wiped Poland off the map.
The SU had no border with Czechoslovakia and could not have actually helped, even if anyone had trusted them – which they did not. Stalin and Hitler were a much better fit, as they quickly realised.
Is Fingal ignorant when it comes to history or simply dishonest? Answers on a postcard.
Errrr…..yes…..Putin definitely does…..
Putin and the European far right that have a history of good relations.
‘Here they are: international ‘observers’ at the illegal and illegitimate ‘referendum’ held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea occupied by the Russian ‘little green men’.
The overwhelming majority of the ‘observers’ are representatives of a broad spectrum of European extreme-right parties and organisations: Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ) and Bündnis Zukunft, Belgian Vlaams Belang and Parti Communautaire National-Européen, Bulgarian Ataka, French Front National, Hungarian Jobbik, Italian Lega Nord and Fiamma Tricolore, Polish Samoobrona, Serbian ‘Dveri’ movement, Spanish Plataforma per Catalunya.
They were invited to legitimise the ‘referendum’ by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE) a smart name for an ‘international NGO’ founded and headed by Belgian neo-Nazi Luc Michel, a loyal follower of Belgian convicted war-time collaborationist and neo-Nazi Jean-François Thiriart.
Presented by Michel as ‘a non-aligned NGO’, the EODE does not conceal its anti-Westernism and loyalty to Putin, and is always there to put a stamp of ‘legitimacy’ on all illegitimate political developments, whether in Crimea, Transnistria, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow’s money talks.’
Open Democracy 28 April 2014
Which may very well explain why there is such a weird out on this thread.
National Socialism is anti-western German philosophy, just as Communism is
Try really hard not to distort, for your own argumentative purposes, what you quote Putin said:
“…..therefore the denazification of Ukraine is also its inevitable de-Europeanization.” [my emphasis]
In other words, he intends to deal with Ukraine, not the rest of Europe.
‘‘…not just the Bandera version of Nazi Ukraine will be eradicated, but including, and above all, Western totalitarianism……
Then:
‘Russian Deputy Commander of the Central Military District stated that Russian control of southern Ukraine provides Russia a future capability to conduct an offensive toward Transnistria, rather than announcing an imminent Russian offensive toward Moldova. Minnekaev said Russian control of southern Ukraine will provide “another way out to Transnistria,”
Then, Moldova summons its Russian ambassador for an explanation.
Meanwhile Finland, Sweden decide to put aside their longstanding neutrality of over 75 years.
So its little old you against the governments of Finland, Sweden, Moldova….
Good luck with that…..
There is indeed a war on, and it is between those who seek to break the rest of the world as we in “the west” were broken in the C20th, and build it back better, and those who still resist the globalist, universalist radicalisms that underpin the corrosive elite ideologies of the US sphere.
Murray is typical of the “too little, too late”, compromised modern conservatives who accept and embody the poisons incorporated in what used to be termed the west, but is now merely the US sphere, during the C20th, and try to fight particular aspects of modern wokeness, but nevertheless push to expand the power of US sphere globalism because they themselves incorporate its fundamental worldviews in many ways.
As such, many of his battles are in the right direction, but he has already lost the war, as we can see from how easily he was co-opted into the war on Russian resistance to the US borg.
A true patriot is not someone who is loyal to a theoretical construct such as “the west”, but someone who respects and loves his own nation above all others, while being honest about its flaws and without hating those others, just as a good parent loves his children above all others. The problems we should be concerned with are those that harm our own society, not those that are pro- or anti- that theoretical, anachronistic trans-national construct.
As I noted recently in response to a query about how to define “the west”:
For a thousand years it was Christendom.
Then for a few centuries it was modernity.
Then for a few decades it was freedom.
Now, it’s the Empire of Lies.
When the facts change, one should change one’s opinion.
Russian Army Ad Makes Woke US Army Ad Look Like a Joke for Kids
Murray, whether he understands it or not, is pushing to impose the latter on the remaining bits of the world that still resist it.
Couldn’t agree more. It starts with what Roger Scruton called national loyalty, which he contrasted with nationalism and it’s tendency to create a them and us narrative.
National loyalty brings in aspects of culture, population and our own roots. But it challenges much of the modern agenda with it’s desperate attempts to claim all are equal and the same. We are not allowed to challenge the wisdom of inviting millions of foreigners who do not share our history nor show any great love of it.
But I agree the concept of the west is not what we should fight for. We should fight for our own home and culture which some wish to erase.
Well we are seeing a good example in the Ukraine of how bad nationalism can get. The trick is to stand for patriotism – national loyalty, while not being drawn into the further extremes of nationalism.
Though you will inevitably be accused of the latter if you stand for the former.
But it’s extremely difficult, when so much harm has already been done.
I think that was the point Scruton tried to make. National loyalty means a specific territory and the culture that emerged from it. British in our case.
It is increasingly difficult to make a positive case for Britain as a small number with loud voices believe we should be judged exclusively through a lens of their choosing, slavery, imperialism etc.
But it is the only way. We defeat the destroyers by reminding everyone how great out culture is. How tolerant we are. The things we gave the world.
“I think that was the point Scruton tried to make. National loyalty means a specific territory and the culture that emerged from it. British in our case.”
Yes.
“But it is the only way. We defeat the destroyers by reminding everyone how great out culture is. How tolerant we are. The things we gave the world.”
If only it were as simple as that. Yes, we should argue against those who try to obsessively denigrate and delegitimise our past, but in doing so we risk empowering those like Murray who have internalised much of the radicalisms of the C20th (antiracism, pro-homosexuality, anti-family feminism, etc), and seek to draw us into their own crusades abroad in place like Syria and Ukraine.
Everyone should read “Culture Counts” as Scruton’s legacy.
Ukrainian Nationalism has been fired up and sponsored by the CIA since the early 1950s – the target has always been Russia!
I am an English man first and British second but my loyalties do not extend to supporting the treasonous people nominally acting in my / our names.
Loves his own nation, especially when that nation is a socialist dictatorship.
Can we get down to having a discussion about the WHO power-grab? This is navel-gazing.
It is part of the same trend. The WHO would be more effectively neutered by strong nation-states, the thing the woke brigade are doing their bit to erase and discredit.
So basically without media or parliamentary scrutiny Javid will go to Davos next month and negotiate away our bodily autonomy and national sovereignty and even the Daily Sceptic can’t be a_sed to mention it?
This is building into a political scandal while the Nation is looking the other way at Johnson’s dangerous meddling in Ukraine .
MPs are just ignoring the issues and not even answering questions about it.
Vax Tyranny by stealth? What are the latest ‘official’ stats of injuries and deaths from the Covid Potion? Going up all the time of course!
People do know that creepy Bill Gates “owns”: the WHO and wants to jab the whole world whenever he feels like it and declares a new ‘pandemic’ with minimum clinical trial evidence and safety data don’t they?
He says openly that jabs will help control world population – so what does he mean by that exactly?
Doesn’t he still have serious “issues” to address with the consequences of his “experimental” jabs in Africa and India?
Last thought: is this how Johnson will dodge responsibility for imposing “Vax Mandates” for NHS staff and anyone else he chooses?
Have we finished with Slavery already?
No-one seems interested even though when combined with Johnson messing with our “Human Rights’ I his new ‘Bill of Rights’ threatening “Bodily Autonomy” it could lead to forced vaccinations at the whim of Bill Gates with whatever snake-oil he decides!
Seems it ought to be a subject of moderate importance to sentient human beings…but maybe times have changed in the New Normal Zombie World Order?
I think many of my friends have given up. In that sense the left have won and the future will be bleak for our children. But how much of our lives can we give to such struggles; I spent 25 years campaigning for independance and democracy (aka Brexit) and my income and career prospects were badly dented.
I am now trying to make up my income and have to leave the struggle to others. The constant theme since I became aware of politics over 50 years ago has been the lack of interest in our furture shown by Parliament and Government and the active undermining of it by the MSM. Of course I am not surprised that socialists in their various brands and guises celebrate the destruction of language, morals and institutions but the complete lack of resistance from most in politics who clkaim not to be socialists is amazing.
The left cannot win in the sense they represent destruction not construction. They do a lot of damage of course.
But I understand your perspective. How much can you really give when you are met with indifference. Surely the covidmania taught us most do not yearn for freedom. Maybe that’s the real issue.
I don’t think it’s indifference, it’s just that people don’t know what they can reasonably do, and they’re so bogged down with the distractions put in their way they don’t have anything left in the tank to work it out. If the last two years have proven anything, it’s that if you scare the population with graphic descriptions of how bad their future will be and then give them a clear and simple instruction, they will do as they’re told.
The ‘crime’ is that the Western World is being dismantled, demolished and destroyed before our eyes by our own Woke Governments, totally corrupted international and national Institutions, power grabbing Corporates, lying Media, busted Banks, deranged Pseudo Greenies, with no real interest in and even less knowledge of ecology and the ‘planet’ plus violent, depraved Extreme Leftist agitators all around us!
We have been subjected to a programme of ongoing, mass psychosis now for two years nd those who seem to have embraced it all and already lost the plot, seem to be ‘at war’ with the population lost in their own psychotic ‘punishment park’ world and who have not even the moist basic idea or understanding of ‘morality’ ‘humanity’ or ‘truth’ of any kind.
The West will have been destroyed completely in five years at the rate they are going and as a result of their dark ‘create chaos to impose a New Order’ ‘project’ many of those alive today will not even be here to see it!
The conspiratorial Globalist psychopaths don’t just want to “Cancel Culture” they want to wipe it out and replace it with the dystopian nightmare.of Schwab’s deranged fantasy for the enslavement of what is to be left of brain dead, cloned trans-humanity.
The principal challenge to the achieving this and therefore the target is the ‘civilisation’ and philosophical, humanitarian and democratic traditions of the West preached by enlightened, humanist Chistianity ….us!
Terrific post.
It really is
Ironical that the Tate decides a painting depicting slavery is a no no, yet their whole existence is based on the wealth obtained from the Caribbean cane sugar industry.
Woke is an ouroboros.
The “Tate”…. as represented by a few priviliged class, Luvvy Wokists living in London.
So not the “Tate” at all – just a few of those who have hijacked its greatness for their own tawdry political ends.
‘Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.‘ – Thomas Sowell
‘… almost all of our cultural institutions are ashamed of our culture,” he says. “They’re intimidated because they sense we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution,…’
There’s a contradiction there. If the institutions are ashamed and by implication that means the people in them, then they are not being intimidated, they are the ones doing the intimidating.
How else to explain it? Why is it one or a handful or people can so intimidate them that they comply? It is either cowardice or they are from the same crowd of stupids and agree.
But where is the leadership from Government and politicians? Their role is to be filters & moderators so that fringe elements, extremists, stupid people do not become mainstream and in effect govern the Country.
The institution which need the reform is Government. And there is currently no democratic means to do that.
As I see it (to paraphrase a quote by Thomas Sowell) the problem with western world is that it has replaced what worked with what sounded good – if western civilisation is to survive then it must get back to what is real once again and that means what worked – bin this destructive fetish for self-censorship, virtue signalling and woke PC nonsense and you can solve most of the western worlds problems over night.
Of course there is a war, the real question is who is funding it and how to stop them.
In the meantime, the asset stripping continues….
He didn’t love the western world enough to speak up against lockdowns, censorship, coerced medication, and the destruction of civil liberties, did he? Where was he when others were speaking up? Bringing legal cases? Marching? Losing their jobs?
Seriously, this man’s so called principles were challenged, and what did he do? Nothing. Sod all. How can anyone possibly take him seriously now?
“He didn’t love the western world enough to speak up against lockdowns, censorship, coerced medication, and the destruction of civil liberties, did he? Where was he when others were speaking up? Bringing legal cases? Marching? Losing their jobs?“
Later he might have shifted, but at the crucial moment in March 2020 when our government was browbeaten out of following a traditional approach to this new cold/flu, he, like most of our elites, failed us utterly:
“We’re speaking pretty early still in this crisis, but at the time in which the seriousness of it has now become clear to I think everybody, or everybody but a very small number of people. The government in Britain and other countries has had to take extraordinary measures and we’ve seen announcements that I think most of us would not expected to have ever seen in our lives. The Prime Minister telling everybody over the age of [?] to lock themselves in their homes for the foreseeable future. Encouraging no more than two people to gather in any one place, encouraging us all to keep a distance from each other in our societies and much more, and these are things which very few people were thinking about until only a few weeks ago“
Direct | Douglas Murray | On Coronavirus Lockdown
26th March 2020
But that kind of instinctive alignment with technocrat authority is exactly what should be expected of a neoconservative like Murray, who also backed the war in Iraq as he backs the aggression against Russia today.
Neoconservatism: Why We Need It
I love what the West used to be but that was many years ago.
Biden Chooses To Crucify Armed Forces For Green Agenda
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/04/23/biden-chooses-to-crucify-armed-forces-for-green-agenda/
President Joe Biden has unveiled a plan to commit billions of dollars to make every US military vehicle “climate friendly”.
Paul Homewood
Stand for freedom with our Yellow Boards By The Road
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Latest piece from former US military man Jacob Dreizin, which covers some of the issues raised in this discussion:
Russia’s Plan A and Plan B, explained
“Not enough war crimes, so let’s make some up
This reminds me of the joke line, “America is so racist that Jussie Smollett had to fake an assault on himself.”
The below photo has been going around Ukrainian media (social but not only), the same Telegram channels and other outlets that hyped the “Ghost of Kiev”, which great minds such as Congressman Dan Crenshaw fell for.
In an alternate universe, this photo shows the corpse of a woman who was killed and thrown into a sewer by Russian soldiers in hard-hit Borodianka near Kiev.
Conveniently, this photo circulated on the same day that the Prime Ministers of Spain and Denmark visited Borodianka to witness all the horror for themselves.
In our universe, the photo shows a minor Russian actress named Svetlana Vasilieva, from the Russian TV series След (trail or trace), which is Russia’s answer to the epidemic of crime scene forensic dramas in the USA.
Svetlana was so upset about the whole thing, she put out a video message to condemn it. ”
….
“Nothing to see here
American news (to include alternative news) sources have placed all Ukrainian Nazis into the Azov regiment.
The reality is, the Nazis are all over the place.
In the below video, two men of the Solnyshko (“Little Sun”) volunteer militia unit—from western Ukraine—are sieg-heil’ing at the camera. This is not the Azov.
.
As for the Azov, as I’ve written before, it is only the most famous (or infamous) unit within the Ukraine Interior Ministry’s National Guard component.
The National Guard in its current iteration was formed as a politically-vetted backup army, after the regular army proved unreliable in the first weeks of the 2014 “Russian Spring” in the Donbass.
The National Guard recruited many thousands of “second chance”, “dead ender” losers and freaks like this guy, who was fortunate to be taken prisoner recently.
In addition to regular army garrisons, the Ukraine permanently stationed various National Guard units throughout the Donbass, to keep a boot on the place, as the army, despite its enormous improvement since 2014, was still seen as insufficiently political, and likewise insufficiently motivated to intimidate the local population (e.g., identifying and having pleasant chats with suspected Russian sympathizers.)
Yes, the National Guard is the Ukrainian SS.
The most “internationally” well-known National Guard unit is of course the Azov, with its major (but not exclusive) base in Mariupol, where it functioned as a sort of mafia empire.
But the fact is, the entire Donbass was peppered with this filth. ”
It’s important to understand that a significant part of the population of the territory allocated to the post-Soviet Ukrainian state see the extreme nationalist regime that took control after the 2014 coup, and especially the militia enforcers, as basically an occupying force, and the Russians as liberators.
Other parts see it as the opposite.
Our media focus solely on the latter group and simply dismiss the former.
Every major event now has a trail of fake stories, both for an against. I don’t know about Svetlana Vasilieva specifically.
However, any number of direct interviews have taken place with victims and witnesses with reporters on the ground.
Russia is supreme at disinformation campaigns – so much better than us, I’m embarrassed.
“Russia is supreme at disinformation campaigns – so much better than us, I’m embarrassed.”
It wasn’t the Russians who persuaded tens of millions of us to be jabbed several times with experimental gunk in response to a trivial disease.
Russia also used vaccines.
Re evidence of the Skripals poisoning:
‘…the UK’s case is built on three other interlocking pieces of evidence.
First is the use of a military-grade nerve agent, originally developed by Moscow. That, as the Porton Down chief emphasised, is “only within the capabilities of a state actor”.
Second, and beyond Porton Down’s remit is evidence based on secret intelligence that Russia has manufactured and stockpiled small quantities of Novichok within the past decade, and investigated its use for assassination.
Third is the assessment, also informed by intelligence, that Russia has an active program of state-backed assassinations, views defectors as legitimate targets, and has passed laws to enable such action.
All of this constitutes evidence, some of which can be confirmed by independent third parties, such as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), at the UK’s invitation.
Other elements, based on human sources or signals intelligence, cannot.
But the unprecedented international rejoinder to Russia – the largest collective expulsion of intelligence officers in history – demonstrates the strength of British claims.’
The Interpreter 05 April
“Russia is supreme at disinformation campaigns – so much better than us, I’m embarrassed.”
The very opposite of the truth, and so ironic coming from someone who has managed to convince himself that the Russian President thought it was a jolly good wheeze to send a couple of goons with a tub-full of one of the most deadly substances in existence to try to kill an old man in a foreign country.
After all, what could possibly go wrong? And it just wouldn’t be anywhere near as exciting and risky to just have him double tapped.
And despite the self-evident utter absurdity of the scenario, you and much of the US sphere mug population are thoroughly convinced of it, along with a bunch of other convenient and equally absurd horror stories that just happen to paint the enemies of the US/UK deep states as comedy bad guys.
The reality is that Britain and the US have always been the world experts at propaganda and disinformation, even back when we were using it for what most of us might agree were good causes. Hollywood was for most of a century – until its replacement by the US social media giants, the greatest propaganda machine in human history.
Salisbury, the home of Porton Down, where they develop new and interesting macrame patterns.
I’m just shocked people didn’t instinctively smell a rat.
As ever, your only argument is based on guesswork about motives, not the facts as agreed by both sides.
Most of the facts are irrelevant, circumstantial stuff, or “facts” based on trusting people or organisations that are patently not trustworthy on such an issue. I satisfied myself long ago that the case was full of holes, and as I have said previously I’m not going to dig back into all the details just to argue the toss with someone who believes in every fairy tale that suits his own agenda.
Basic common sense seems to refute it adequately.
How is that 2 Russian agents happened to be walking through an obscure suburb of Salisbury, at the exact time when the Skripals were poisoned?
At the supposed “exact” time when the Skripals were supposedly poisoned?
Who knows? You certainly don’t.
Well, yes I do, because it’s within the timespan necessary for the Skripals to be poisoned.
You have yet to explain what they were doing.
Nobody needs to prove what they were doing in order to refute the official narrative..
You need to prove they were ever in the Skripal’s street.
They were caught on cctv heading out of the station towards the Skripals (the opposite way from the cathedral) and again in Wilton Road.
So there’s zero evidence they were ever in the Skripal’s street.
This link has a map of the area:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/novichok-suspects-claimed-were-visiting-13238741
They are caught on video turning the wrong way out of the station, and again on Wilton Rd (half way to the Skripals). The cathedral is the other way. There are also eyewitness reports.
Needles to say, Christie Miller Rd is not on the tourist trail.
We know Mr Skripal hadn’t been contaminated when he shared bread with the boys before going to the pub and restaurant.
That was several hours after the 2 Russians weren’t near his street.
No we don’t, that’s an assertion.
But we do know that the Russians set off towards the Skripal home, at the time necessary to lay poison.
You haven’t explained why?
No: if he had had a really, really, really deadly nerve agent on his hands when he shared bread with the boys they would have been affected.
Nothing happened to them.
“But we do know that the Russians set off towards the Skripal home”
No, we don’t.The fact that they weren’t picked up by the second set of CCTVs they’d have had to pass if they went there is proof of that.
The concentration and delivery of novichok matters. It wasn’t enough to kill the Skripals, who got the first exposure.
But they were more severely affected than Nick Bailey, who got the second exposure.
Dawn Sturgess got the worst dose, because she got straight from the bottle.
If there was no novichok at the Skripal home, how and why was Bailey exposed? Why poison Dawn? Doesn’t make one bit of sense.
I asked you to give a link to this claim before and you didn’t. There were no other cameras on the way to the Skripals.
“There were no other cameras on the way to the Skripals.”
Rob Slane demonstrated years ago that there were. That’s what made him, a Salisbury resident, suspicious of the official narrative. I’ve never been there, but I don’t remember anybody proving him wrong at the time, which rather suggests his local knowledge was accurate.
But the boys didn’t become ill,did they?
I checked out Rob Slane and he was talking about CCTV in the centre of town, not the route to the Skripals. He’s arguing a different point. You have misread or misremembered.
No, he made it very clear that the CCTV in the centre of town that caught the 2 Russians was followed by another CCTV in the centre of town that they would also have passed if they bhad gone to the Skripal’s street.
I think you win …by a mile!
AFAIK there was no footage of the Russians in the centre of town at all.
But there is footage of them walking out of the station when they arrived and heading straight to the Skripals. The route does not lie through the centre of town.
Take another look at that map – I think you’re getting mixed up
Dreizin: “The National Guard in its current iteration was formed as a politically-vetted backup army, after the regular army proved unreliable in the first weeks of the 2014 “Russian Spring” in the Donbass.
The National Guard recruited many thousands of “second chance”, “dead ender” losers and freaks like this guy, who was fortunate to be taken prisoner recently.”
Pretty much what former Swiss intel man Jacques Baud (who was there at the time as part of the operation to try to find supposed Russian inteference, and as part of the NATO effort to rebuild the Ukrainian military) wrote recently:
“The Ukrainian army was then in a deplorable state. In October 2018, after four years of war, the chief Ukrainian military prosecutor, Anatoly Matios, stated that Ukraine had lost 2,700 men in the Donbass: 891 from illnesses, 318 from road accidents, 177 from other accidents, 175 from poisonings (alcohol, drugs), 172 from careless handling of weapons, 101 from breaches of security regulations, 228 from murders and 615 from suicides.
In fact, the army was undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoyed the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, in the March/April 2014 recall of reservists, 70 percent did not show up for the first session, 80 percent for the second, 90 percent for the third, and 95 percent for the fourth. In October/November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Fall 2017” recall campaign. This is not counting suicides and desertions (often over to the autonomists), which reached up to 30 percent of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refused to go and fight in the Donbass and preferred emigration, which also explains, at least partially, the demographic deficit of the country.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense then turned to NATO to help make its armed forces more “attractive.” Having already worked on similar projects within the framework of the United Nations, I was asked by NATO to participate in a program to restore the image of the Ukrainian armed forces. But this is a long-term process and the Ukrainians wanted to move quickly.
So, to compensate for the lack of soldiers, the Ukrainian government resorted to paramilitary militias. They are essentially composed of foreign mercenaries, often extreme right-wing militants. In 2020, they constituted about 40 percent of the Ukrainian forces and numbered about 102,000 men, according to Reuters. They were armed, financed and trained by the United States, Great Britain, Canada and France. There were more than 19 nationalities—including Swiss.
Western countries have thus clearly created and supported Ukrainian far-right militias. In October 2021, the Jerusalem Post sounded the alarm by denouncing the Centuria project. These militias had been operating in the Donbass since 2014, with Western support. Even if one can argue about the term “Nazi,” the fact remains that these militias are violent, convey a nauseating ideology and are virulently anti-Semitic. Their anti-Semitism is more cultural than political, which is why the term “Nazi” is not really appropriate. Their hatred of the Jew stems from the great famines of the 1920s and 1930s in the Ukraine, resulting from Stalin’s confiscation of crops to finance the modernization of the Red Army. This genocide—known in the Ukraine as the Holodomor—was perpetrated by the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), whose upper echelons of leadership were mainly composed of Jews. This is why, today, Ukrainian extremists are asking Israel to apologize for the crimes of communism, as the Jerusalem Post notes. This is a far cry from Vladimir Putin’s “rewriting of history.”
These militias, originating from the far-right groups that animated the Euromaidan revolution in 2014, are composed of fanatical and brutal individuals. The best known of these is the Azov Regiment, whose emblem is reminiscent of the 2nd SS Das Reich Panzer Division, which is revered in the Ukraine for liberating Kharkov from the Soviets in 1943, before carrying out the 1944 Oradour-sur-Glane massacre in France.”
The Military Situation In The Ukraine
Damn complicated business. But as with all things in the minds of simpleton’s, “Orange man bad”.
The problem with Putin is, of course, the same as with Trump. He’s a nationalist in a world of globalist’s.
On covid Murray has been very, very AWOL. Only when it was clear where the cookie had indeed crumbled did he slide ever so slightly off the fence.
I am sorry to have to agree – has he been told to ‘cool it’?
Sir Douglas Murray.
“Sir”? As in Sir Kneeler, Sir Whitty, Sir Gavin, Sir Sir Valance etc ?
Thanks, but I’d rather not have my “Western values” defended by someone who places so little value on telling truth to power.
Murray’s vitriolic media campaign against Julian Assange, during his tenure with the Anglo-American Henry Jackson Society, deserves to be neither forgotten nor forgiven.
And, as our Home Secretary ponders whether to throw the Wikileaks founder to the wolves, are we expected to totally ignore her former association with the HJS and its Assange-haters?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/30/conflicts-in-priti-patels-power-over-assange/
I’d like to read the article but I cancelled my subscription to The Times 5 years ago when it tacked left and became little better than The Guardian. I won’t be re-subscribing.
I see Douglas has been interviewed again on Triggernometry, so I’ll watch that instead.
It is a crime if he loves committing genocides for imperialistic hegemony.
‘The West’ is a suitably indescribable concept, isn’t it?
Does he love the slavery upon which the USA was founded and which many people fought and died to uphold?
Does he love everyone born in the UK to be ‘subjects’ rather than free citizens?
Does he love repulsive civil servants never fighting a day in real wars but ‘promoting foreign policy’ which invariably murders for commercial gain?
Does he love the way that the USA treated the indiginous Red Man since the day they started arriving?
Does he love the way that Australians have always treated the Aborigines?
Does he love the endemic hatred of those that actually make things whilst glorifying those that financialise everything?
The list of truly disgusting aspects of the West is very long. That doesn’t mean that the list of better things isn’t pretty long too.
But if he is prepared to stick his head in the sand over the never-ending murdering that the West has committed, then he is unfit to remain alive.
I have been surprised at how weird so many so sound on scepticism re lockdowns, masks etc have been regarding Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
But now I think I get it:
‘Here they are: international ‘observers’ at the illegal and illegitimate ‘referendum’ held in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea occupied by the Russian ‘little green men.”
The overwhelming majority of the ‘observers’ are representatives of a broad spectrum of European extreme-right parties and organisations: Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei (FPÖ) and Bündnis Zukunft, Belgian Vlaams Belang and Parti Communautaire National-Européen, Bulgarian Ataka, French Front National, Hungarian Jobbik, Italian Lega Nord and Fiamma Tricolore, Polish Samoobrona, Serbian ‘Dveri’ movement, Spanish Plataforma per Catalunya.
They were invited to legitimise the ‘referendum’ by the Eurasian Observatory for Democracy & Elections (EODE), a smart name for an ‘international NGO’ founded and headed by Belgian neo-Nazi Luc Michel, a loyal follower of Belgian convicted war-time collaborationist and neo-Nazi Jean-François Thiriart.
Presented by Michel as ‘a non-aligned NGO’, the EODE does not conceal its anti-Westernism and loyalty to Putin, and is always there to put a stamp of ‘legitimacy’ on all illegitimate political developments, whether in Crimea, Transnistria, South Ossetia or Abkhazia. Moscow’s money talks.
Yet the EODE is only a drop in the ocean of extensive co-operation between the Kremlin and the European far right. Front National’s Marine Le Pen now visits Moscow on a seemingly regular basis: in August 2013 and April 2014 she had meetings with Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and Speaker of the Russian parliament Sergey Naryshkin.’
Open Democracy 28 April 2014