- “The most shocking thing about Dominic Cummings’ testimony? It exposed Ofcom’s Orwellian muzzling of our media” – Toby makes a valiant effort to resurrect his case against Ofcom for censoring the broadcast media during the pandemic
- “New Thai Covid variant found in UK – Public Health England investigating” – To date, there are 109 U.K. cases of variant C.36.3 which was first detected in Thailand, according to the Express
- “UK travellers may not need PCR test on return from green list countries” – Grant Shapps is in favour of a “vaccination dividend” for jabbed travellers, the Telegraph says, but he is awaiting results of tests at Porton Down before making a decision
- “Michael Gove hints Covid certificate plans might be dropped saying the benefits are ‘finely balanced’ against the hassle” – Michael Gove has said there are “benefits” in Covid status certification but that there is also a lot of “hassle” and “friction”, and pointed out that Israel has suspended its Green Pass scheme, MailOnline reports. Fingers crossed!
- “After NHS app data controversy, plans to share patient records with third-parties revealed” – The NHS is facing a backlash over plans to create a database of up to 55 million patient records which will reportedly be made available to third parties for purposes such as research and planning, the Express reports
- “The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible” – “In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense,” says Matt Ridley in the Spectator. But today “the mood has changed”. Matt Ridley also discusses the lab leak theory on this week’s SpectatorTV
- “BBC Radio Newcastle presenter Lisa Shaw died aged 44 after suffering blood clots following Covid AstraZeneca jab, her family reveal” – Lisa Shaw developed a severe headache a week after having the AstraZeneca jab and died in intensive care from blood clots and bleeding, according to MailOnline
- “Mother, 25, is put into intensive care coma after ‘very rare’ reaction to second Covid Pfizer jab caused terrifying anaphylactic shocks” – Kirsty Hext suffered 14 anaphylactic shocks and a seizure following her jab and was placed in an induced coma, MailOnline reports. She has nonetheless spoken out to encourage others to get vaccinated
- “Henry Slade exclusive: I am not going to have a Covid vaccine – I don’t agree with it all” – In an interview with the Telegraph, Rugby star Henry Slade has become the first high-profile sports personality to publicly reject the vaccine
- “The crucial facts Cummings left out tell a very different story of lockdown” – There is another side to the story Cummings told, argues Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph. “It shows decisions being made not in a chaotic way – but following the best advice. And a prime minister always nervous about the absence of a good case presented for lockdown”
- “The lives lost by lockdown that Dominic Cummings did not compute” – Had he had his way, Cummings said, he would have have appointed a “dictator” with “kingly authority’ to do whatever they thought necessary to tackle COVID-19. He behaves, says Ross Clark in the Daily Mail, as “if nothing else mattered at all”
- “Ignore Cummings: Boris’s open border approach was right all along” – “It’s time the Prime Minister’s libertarian spirit is allowed to rule again,” says the Telegraph‘s Annabel Fenwick Elliott
- “Death in Isolation” – Rosemary tells John’s Campaign about her friend, an 83 year-old, who went dramatically downhill after she was put into isolation in a care home
- “Your brilliant response to our vaccine rebuttal competition” – Kathy Gyngell was greatly cheered, she says, by readers’ responses to the vaccine rebuttal competition being run at the Conservative Woman and looks forward to sharing them over the next few days
- “Music to these locked-down ears” – Nicholas Orlando writes in the Conservative Woman of how much he enjoyed the novelty of attending a live concert in person at the Barbican last week
- “The Gloves Are Off” – Dr Ros Jones joins Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan on this week’s Planet Normal to discuss vaccinating children
- “Travel industry experts on the post-COVID travel trends emerging from bookings” – Holiday makers are craving “one-off, ferocious travel experiences”, according to Euronews, and there will also be less travelling by plane and more by train, car and bike
- “Keep BioNTech COVID jab for school children, German health minister says” – Deutsche Welle reports that German Health Minister Jens Spahn thinks the Pfizer jabs should be reserved for children so that they can return to school after the summer holidays
- “The Backward-Looking Storyteller” – “Looking back at the pandemic,” writes Joakim Book at AIER, “it’s fairly easy to say what and how we should have prepared.” But there is a problem: “This information is not available in real time, and fighting the last war is a sure-fire way of losing the next one”
- “Dismisinfoganda” – “Many Americans once believed government officials unless and until they had good reason to doubt them,” says Robert E. Wright at AIER. “But increasingly they disbelieve officials unless and until they have reason to believe them”
- “Lockdowns Turned Many Blue-State Democrats Into Red-State Republicans” – The media slammed Florida’s response to the coronavirus, Governor Ron DeSantis says, but now residents of blue states are flocking to the sunshine state
- “The Drug that Cracked Covid” – Michael Capuzzo tells the story of five doctors who discovered the benefit of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 in Mountain Home Magazine
- “Chinese researchers created new corona viruses under unsafe conditions” – A PhD dissertation by a researcher connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology has just been published online, Minervanett reports, and it suggests that experiments were carried out on live viruses at safety standards that were far from ideal
- “The many failures of China’s vaccine programme” – China’s vaccination rollout is moving slowly, Ross Clark reports in the Spectator, and the Sinovac jabs are not very effective
- “Taiwan accuses China of interfering with Covid vaccine deals” – Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, has accused Beijing of interfering with its acquisition of Pfizer jabs, the Guardian reports
- “Victoria wakes to first morning of new lockdown” – 9 News provides details of the seven-day circuit breaker lockdown which has just begun in Victoria
- “Mark Dolan says lockdown has become a religious cult” – Lockdowns have “become almost an ideology now,” says Dominque Samuels in agreement. “It’s about dogma”
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And right there is why we shouldn’t encourage in-breeding…
ITS WHAT YOU GET FROM A LIMITED GENE POOL
I was thinking that her name would be a good one for a product of eugenics (Eugene for a male).
If such a thing were to happen of course.
You saved me typing the same thing!!
So now we have sub, sub branches of Windsor Inc believing they have the right to lecture us.
She doesn’t like flying – great. Don’t friggin fly as you lot keep hectoring the rest of us.
She doesn’t have plastic in the house. Really? How did she feed her august newborn then? She used terry nappies? Well obviously not her but…
Eugenie just STFU because your bloody tribe have caused enough trouble on this planet already!
I’m sure she insists that the nanny/nannies only use reusable nappies
We should be informed about the rest of her lifestyle. Will she retro-fitting lead pipes to get water into the house ?!
Or have the house re-wired so none of the cables are sheathed in plastic.
I assume she doesn’t use a mobile phone, and wears only natural fibres.
The monarchy is grasping to have some sort of relevance, some sort of purpose.
At this point, I think they should just go quietly.
I’m ready for constitutional reform. A Republic with a short and clear constitution enshrining our inalienable rights as free people and a limited government.
I’m sure the Saudis will take the Windsors in, let them live the rest of their days out in luxury with all the other disgraced ex-leaders they have there.
Well, I would be delighted with some of that, but would suggest rather than a republic we have a new settlement with the monarchy whereby anyone on the payroll is expressly prohibited from getting involved in politics or campaigning of any kind. I’m with Hitchens regarding the potential horrors of trying to find a President you want to represent you.
The problem with the Windsors is that they (by-and-large) serve absolutely no purpose: They’re going to lead secure, luxurious lives at the taxpayer’s expense and are free to do whatever pleases them provided they don’t directly interfere with the running of the country.
Well, countries generally have a head of state to represent the country, which in parliamentary democracies is usually either a monarch or an appointed president with very limited powers. Assuming the UK continues as a parliamentary democracy, we’d probably need to find a way to appoint a president – a process that seems awkward to say the least. I don’t know how it’s done in Germany but in Italy it’s usually some ex-politician that proves just about acceptable to most of the legislature – doesn’t seem very appealing. Alternatively I suppose the PM could represent the UK as head of state, but that’s not really been done before that I am aware of. I guess we could try it. The current and future crop of Windsors I would happily ditch tomorrow if we had any kind of workable alternative, though as stated above whoever you get should have limited powers and not be allowed to shoot their mouth off about stuff.
I’m trying to be a bit more precise (it’s unclear how good this will work out): They (the Windsor-clan) are basically royalty big brother. They exist to be gawped at and to go through the motions of their ceremonial duties but they have no real power to do anything and hence, they can do whatever they want ever bearing responsibility for the outcome (with certain limits). They’re really just members of the class of the global super-rich without closer ties to any particular country. That’s nicely exemplified by this vulnerable people who are vulnerable to volunerable climate-statement.
There are people in the UK who can’t afford heating their dwellings in winter or people in the UK who die because they couldn’t afford paying their electricity bills. Their lots will get a lot worse due to Nut Zero. But that’s of no concern to Princes Eugenie because it’s of no concern to the members of her peer group and it’s unclear even if she even knows that such people exist. It’s also a safe bet that Charles III feels closer to his plants and to environmental worries than to his supposed subjects.
Indeed it is ceremonial mainly. Just would rather they didn’t push pet causes that harm their citizens while taking our tax money.
If you want these people to act responsibly, they need responsibilities. For as long as they’re basically doing jobs a robot could do while getting princely (literally) paid for this, they’ll act irresponsibly wrt what they’re suppsed to care about and will tend to flock towards situations where they’re more than the guy from the palace on whose head the very much honourable, traditional hat for this occasion is to be placed.
The Gormenghast-monarchy is an Unding (German, literally Not-thing, something which may seem conceivable but cannot ever really exist).
Maybe we should employ actors to do it, and sack them if they get out of line.
Well, you are employing actors, except that you pay them regardless of performance and can’t sack them. That’s not a particularly sensible arrangement, at least not in my opinion. Historically, parliament was a counter-weight to the crown and vice versa. The present system lacks on of the counter-weights.
“That’s not a particularly sensible arrangement”
Yup, hopefully a lot of people are now realising this
Except they are not free to walk into a shop and buy a Mars Bar. So they are not really FREE at all are they? They are prisoners.
Whenever they appear in public, they have to play their designed roles. That’s part of the deal. For the larger part of each day, I’m also not free to walk into a shop and buy a Mars bar because I get paid to do something else.
I think that’s a very generous offer Stewart. Too generous for me but if it got rid of them that’s fine.
The grasping for relevance seems to have overtaken all the elite and the super rich. I suppose if you have $100bn in the bank then nothing you can buy has meaning. Bugatti’s, personal jumbo jets, huge private houses. There can’t be any satisfaction to it. Its like the ordinary fellow spending a fiver. Everything is so easy to them, I can understand why they might crave complex challenges. What could be more complex and important than to solve a problem like ‘Saving the World’, made even more intractable by its stubborn non-existence. Now there’s a challenge worth applying yourself to.
Well maybe we should look really closely at how the monarchy is financed then?
Anything that is currently the property of “the crown” would be transferred to the public ownership and any member of the royal family who wants to perform royal duties should be paid at the same rate as an MP, with the leader (king) getting the same as the PM.
Considering that pretty much all of this crap comes from the USA, imitating the USA even harder doesn’t seem much like a solution.
What would you propose?
As I sometimes spend time thinking on this, I like to sketch a counterproposal:
The monarch should be the actual head of the government, not just its figurehead. He is to appoint a prime minister for running the day-to-day tasks he’s free to change for a different one at any time.
Then, there should be a chamber of elected representatives of the various regions of the country whose actual purpose would need to be defined. It could be anything between the law and budget making parliaments we’re familar with and a purely advisory organ which has the right to give advice on any matter it deems sufficiently important and whose advice must be seriously considered (ie, the government must publish a statement which parts of it it’s going to follow or not follow for which reasons).
In order to assure that these representatives actually represent their constituents, region-spanning political parties are to be outlawed.
An absolute monarchy. Gutsy.
An absolute monarchy is one where the monarch is not bound by law, only informally by customs and traditions. In principle, that’s not a bad form of government (or no worse than any other) but the problem is you might always end up with someone like Friedrich Wilhelm III, ie, an incompetent monarch who can’t really be arsed to care about anything except is private pleasures. Putting this into technical terms, the monarch of an absolute monarchy is a single point of failure. Single points of failure ought to be avoided by suitable system design.
I believe the last time we had an absolute monarchy we went to war and chopped his head off!
How about employing a Chinese style digitalised social credit system out on the Royals? Every time they start engaging in politics their credit score goes down and the Sovereign grant along with their Coutts ctredit cards are frozen?
Do you know what I used to be a Royalist not a real deep believer but enough to go along with it. But now over the last two years I’m beginning to think perhaps it’s time for a change. Trouble is do we really want corrupt arseholes like Biden ,Clinton, Bush or Obama in charge?
Clearly not one of the world’s great thinkers.
Now the Queen is gone, the Royal Family has predictably gone down the plughole. Its sad in a way, because Charles III has done some good things: the Prince’s Trust and Poundbury are two things of which I approve, but nailing your loyalties to a fascist organisation like the WEF is akin to Edward VIII shaking hands with Hitler.
Roger Scruton was dead on when he wrote England: An Elegy quarter of a century ago. Blair finished off the mortally-wounded England (and the rest of UK) and what we live in now is a bloated corpse writhing with maggots. I’m a monarchist, but I’m not a fan of the Royal Family.
I used to be a monarchist too because the empirical evidence seemed to suggest it worked. There seemed to be a correlation between a high standard of development and freedom and monarchy – with some very notable exceptions.
However, the last 3 years have demonstrated there is no causality and monarchy does nothing for personal freedom or rights.
Our supposedly advanced, free system is entirely reliant on the self restraint of those in power and sadly in what seemed like the once free west, the self restraint is gone. There are some customs and institutions and laws that have acted as safeguards, but they’re busy dismantling those, aren’t they?
And the monarchy isn’t just not doing anything to stop it, not even just standing by watching doing nothing, they’re leading the bloody charge. So they are of less than no use to me. They are a menace to my freedom.
Off to Saudi Arabia they go.
Poundbury is a horrid carbunkel on the lovely town of Dorchester.
Child abuse – call child protection.
Another deranged inadequately-educated royal telling us things that we know are not true.
Stick with whatever the day job is please.
The kid’s doing well. At just two years old he’s already got the confused vacant eyes and all the knowledge he’ll ever need to become a climate activist.
we know that when the climate is vulnerable, the most vulnerable people are affected by it. And we’re going to see that more and more, you know, each time there’s a crisis happening, that people are going to be vulnerable
Getting rid of this bunch of overrated simpletons-with-sex-lives for any kind of public function would really make sense.
Eugenie:
“Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos”
In exactly what capacity has this handout merchant been speaking at the eugenecist fest?
Who paid for her to attend? Us or Charlie boy?
“Plastic causes climate change which causes slavery”. OMG, Too much inbreeding
So she wants the kid to be a climate activist. Go and glue him to the M25 then
Class.


So it’s the plastic wot dun it ! & There’s me thinking it was the WEF Globalist tinkerers !! Thank God the Royal Family are not part of it – oh hang on……
It’s not that such cultish attitudes and behaviour haven’t been analysed yet. https://off-guardian.org/2023/01/16/science-blessed-be-thy-name/
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/wissenschaft_religion_groessenwahn
Shocking.
The 97% consensus fraud exposed. https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/97-consensus-what-consensus
There is such a thing as too much Battenberg (far too rich)
Perhaps one should look modern slavery in relation to rare mineral extraction.
I’ve noticed all the inbred remarks have been removed! Will this mention of a mention be removed?
I was prepared to give the monarchy a chance after QE2 passed but am now beginning to think the Windsors should quit while they’re still ahead.
Or marry into another royal family so we can exchange them for a spare son on the other side.
The Windsor’s all seem to be suffering from the same conditions: a severe lack of functioning brain-cells and a belief that they have the right to lecture the rest of us about their climate delusion.
She forgot the bit about the end of the Monarchy
“The Environment” or “Social Justice” are the default activities for those Royals, Pop Stars, Actors and other assorted self styled do gooders who mostly would not be able to explain the alleged global warming to a bunch of 3-year-olds. ———— “Saving the Planet” is now the must have fashionable accessory. They speak of their “children and grandchildren’s future”, but ofcourse none of their children will struggle to heat their house because cheap abundant energy has been removed, and replaced with expensive unreliable energy. ——–To all the Eugenie’s of this world I say—-“There are one billion people in this world with no electricity and people like you are helping to maintain that miserable state of affairs with your pathetic eco posturing”.
The sad thing is that constitutional monarchy has worked very well for us. A slimmed down non political Royal Family is essential if it is to survive.
If it’s all about our children and grandchildren then a better grand standing viewpoint for her would be to call
for a stop to the self inflicted injuries that are net zero. As it is the daft brat is calling for her kids to not only have no access to reliable power, but to protest for and demand it. Just another ignorant bandwagon jumper.
No plastic in the home – so we can assume that she has safely disposed of phones, TV and all electronic equipment and the cars must have gone as well.
Moronarchy.
Word of the year/years to come.
Saddling the poor kid with a stupid name won’t help.