- “Chris Whitty warns U.K. could be plunged back into restrictions in just five weeks” – The Chief Medical Officer has sounded the alarm over a “scary growth” in hospitalisations that could leave the NHS in “trouble again, surprisingly fast”, the Mirror says
- “Lancet Freedom Day letter included people with no scientific clout” – The letter in the Lancet accusing the Government of conducting a “dangerous and unethical experiment” (‘Freedom Day’) accepted signatures from just about anyone, according to MailOnline
- “Exclusive: Neighbours ‘pinged’ through walls by NHS Covid app” – The NHS Test and Trace app has been pinging people through walls, the Telegraph reports
- “Chaos of the pingdemic: bin collections halted, ferries cancelled and guests clean own hotel rooms” – Huge numbers of workers have been sent into isolation by the NHS COVID-19 app, the Telegraph says, including employees of the car manufacturer Rolls Royce who are now on the “edge of a critical situation”
- “Rising Covid cases delay plans to ease contact-tracing app ‘pingdemic’” – Plans to make the NHS contact-tracing app in England less sensitive have been shelved according to the Times, amid concerns about rising cases
- “All official and unofficial Covid symptoms across world – from fever to rashes” – The Mirror provides readers with a round-up of all the symptoms, from a new “continuous cough” to “tiredness” and a “runny nose” that are taken by various authorities around the world as signs that someone may have COVID-19
- “PM’s plans for Covid passports in chaos as eight in 10 nightclubs say they won’t use them” – A survey of 250 nightclubs and event organisers conducted by the Night Time Industries Association finds that just 17% of venues plan to ask customers to show a Covid pass, LBC reports
- “Covid passport backlash as pubs and restaurants say they can’t check QR codes” – Pubs and Restaurant owners have labelled the plans for vaccine passports “completely unworkable”, the Telegraph reports
- “Alcoholic liver deaths increased by 21% during year of the pandemic” – Increased alcohol consumption during the pandemic is likely driving “an unprecedented acceleration in alcoholic liver disease deaths”, says this press release from Public Health England, commenting on its new analysis of alcohol consumption trends
- “France could be put on travel red list as beta variant fears grow” – The Telegraph has learnt that Ministers are considering adding France to the “red list”
- “Mass testing for flu can help NHS beat winter triple whammy” – A new report from the Academy of Medical Sciences recommends that people be tested for flu in the same way as they are for COVID-19 according to the Times. It warns that influenza and RSV hospital admissions and deaths could be twice what is seen in a normal year
- “Nanny Boris: the PM’s alarming flight from liberalism” – “In a rather Orwellian turn, ‘Freedom Day’ means freedom for some, but not for others,” writes Fraser Nelson in the Spectator
- “Unvaccinated as ‘variant factories’?” – Writing for the HART group, Dr Gerry Quinn takes aim at the allegation, made in several media outlets, that unvaccinated people will become potential factories of coronavirus variants. Part of HART’s latest newsletter
- “The beautiful game” – “The latest big debate in Covid biosecurity (Covid BS) is whether we should continue to wear face masks when the mandate is lifted,” says Andy Lambeth on Lockdown Satire. He covers everything you need to know
- “Covid – Start at the beginning and question everything” – In the Conservative Woman, Abir Ballan heralds the Question Everything: Lockdowns Summit taking place in London on Saturday. Both Toby and Will Jones are speaking
- “Our slide into spiritual bankruptcy” – Rebecca D’Amato provides the Conservative Woman with an account of our “apparent, collective slide away from humanity, humility and stoicism towards an emotional immaturity, division and spiritual bankruptcy
- “The Approaching Storm” – “I don’t have a crystal ball or anything, but I’m expecting things to get rather ugly this Autumn, and probably even uglier in the foreseeable future,” says C.J. Hopkins in Off-Guardian
- “Dublin Ireland Protest Against two tier society and Passport Discrimination” – Hugo Talks reports on the protests in Dublin against vaccine passports
- “How strict are France’s Covid border checks? Readers share experiences” – Readers of the Connexion share their generally smooth experiences of travelling to France under the current restrictions
- “Protests in France over health passport – but three million vaccine appointments booked since Macron’s announcement” – The Local reports that French Presidents drastic measure to encourage people to accept vaccination has proven to be effective
- “France is sliding into medical authoritarianism” – “The French president is stamping his will on a vaccine-sceptical country,” says Josie Appleton in Spiked. “Rather than convince or persuade, he has effectively said that if you want to be a citizen, you must be vaccinated”
- “Vaccine failure? Not really” – The Swiss Doctor takes a look at data from European countries which had vaccinated their senior citizens by the time the British variant hit them in spring to conclude that the vaccines were effective in preventing hospitalisation and death
- “Tourism not contributing to surge of COVID-19 infections in Greece” – The Greek Tourism Minister says tourism is not to blame for a surge of COVID-19 infections in Greece, Reuters reports, pointing to the testing data from the country’s entry points
- “Natural infection vs vaccination: Which gives more protection?” – New numbers presented by the Israeli Health Ministry suggests that nearly 40% of Covid cases in the current wave were in people who had received the vaccination whereas just 1% of them had the infection previously, the Arutz Sheva 7 reports
- “Will Israel have a COVID-19 lockdown on Rosh Hashanah?” – Writing for the Jerusalem Post, Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman scrutinises the suggestion of an official that there could be a new lockdown by the Jewish New Year
- “‘A split society’: Doug Ford rejects vaccine passports for Ontario” – Ontario Premier Doug Ford opposes vaccine passports, the Post Millennial reports
- “Kitchener-area waitress short-changed by customer on tip because she was not vaccinated” – A customer at a restaurant in Drayton Ontario, told waitress Brooke Rew that he would add $20 to the tip once she was vaccinated, according to the Post Millennial
- “Biden Keeps Travel Ban on Europeans Despite Pleas to Ease It” – The Biden Administration is not saying when it might lift the travel ban for EU citizens, Bloomberg reports
- “Did Jen Psaki just claim that vaccines ‘can still kill you’?” – Townhall spotlights an apparent slip of the tongue on the part of the White House Press Secretary
- “Covid dashes career hopes for young graduates” – Graduates in India are struggling to make their way in a tightened jobs market, Deutsche Welle reports
- “Unless Sydney lifts its game lockdown could drag on forever” – The Sydney Morning Herald urges the people and Government of New South Wales to lockdown even harder
- “Millions in Victoria wake up to their fifth lockdown” – Melbourne has gone into another lockdown, the Daily Mail reports, after an outbreak of cases connected to a football stadium. There are growing fears that it may last longer than the planned five days
- “Four in five New Zealanders plan to get vaccinated, but many people want more information about vaccine safety” – New research suggest that the proportion of New Zealanders intending to take the vaccine has increased to 80%, but, says Jagadish Thakur in the Conversation, it is not enough to protect the population from the Delta strain
- “The World’s Financial Centres Struggle Back to the Office” – Google mobility data indicates that world’s key financial centres, including London, New York, Singapore and Hong Kong, are struggling to persuade their employees to come back into the office, Bloomberg reports
- “A Conversation On Fear, Altruism, and Freedom” – The latest edition of the AIER’s Author’s Corner sees Ethan Yang sits down with Lou Eastman to discuss Lou’s article exploring the psychological forces that drove the curtailment of liberty in response to COVID-19
- “The War of the Noses’” – In this week’s episode of the Telegraph‘s Planet Normal podcast Professor Paul Dolan tells Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan why the Government must restore freedom in a post-vaccine world
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) July 15, 2021
On this week's #PlanetNormal podcast @AllisonPearson and @LiamHalligan speak to LSE behavioural scientist Professor Paul Dolan.
Paul tells listeners why the government must honour its social contract of freedom in a post-vaccine world
Listen herehttps://t.co/EBw3EnT09x pic.twitter.com/iQgaQBxFSL
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It really is as if paedophilia has become decriminalized. This here, this tip of the iceberg collection, demonstrates that. Also, I remember reading a Twitter thread somebody had very cleverly worked on. They’d researched the judges who were putting away protestors and people who’d written anti-establishment posts online, and these same judges were letting sick paedos walk free. And it apparently doesn’t matter that some of these men are dads. No threat to kids, really?? Just a harmless pastime?
So anti-narrative words are officially deemed worse than viewing child rape images by the Clown World justice system. Reassuring isn’t it?
”SOUTH SHIELDS: Paedophile dad, Matthew Robinson, 37, guilty of possessing and distributing sexual abuse images of children between 4-10 being raped – & likened distribution of the images to “trading football cards” – has walked free from court
Defence said he ‘is a family man”’
https://x.com/Wommando/status/1834527319626490024
https://x.com/Wommando/status/1835713437202092100
It is true that drug dealers, prostitutes and paedophiles routinely use their children as human shields, presenting themselves as “devoted mothers”, or “caring babysitters”, or “family men”, and the children co-operate with this because they’ve been groomed from infancy, helping the criminals to maintain a facade of respectability in the town, and prolonging the child’s suffering.
Judge orders Rotherham rape gang survivor to REMOVE demand for deportations in court statement (gbnews.com)
If he’d have gotten anywhere near my children, I wouldn’t have needed a judge to advise me of the required action!
Don’t Self Censor Speak The Truth – latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, your new MP, your local vicar, online media and friends online. Start a local campaign.
We have over 200 leaflet ideas on the link on the leaflet.
I’d be very interested to hear the thoughtful opinions of anyone here about this story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13857487/Shakespeare-play-axed-director-refused-remove-pro-transgender-pro-Palestine-references-new-Midsummer-Nights-Dream.html
“Shakespeare play is axed after director ‘refused’ to remove ‘pro-transgender’ and ‘pro-Palestine’ references in new take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream
A five-week run of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at a major Manchester theatre was cancelled after the director bitterly feuded with theatre bosses over references to Palestine and trans rights.
…Theatre bosses cancelled the first few performances, which were due to start on September 6, citing a cast injury and a ‘technical issue.
But the real reason for the cancellation was that theatre bosses objected to a song in the production which referred to trans rights and the phrase ‘Free Palestine’, Manchester Evening News revealed.
…On Wednesday the cast were called in for a meeting at 11am to resolve it, they couldn’t’, they said.
‘At the weekend they couldn’t agree, the director had walked, so they cancelled it.’”
You may abhor the idea of inserting pro-trans and pro-Palestine propaganda into a Shakespeare play, but do you support the cancellation of the play or do you think the director and cast should have been allowed the freedom to perform the play in the way they wanted, against the wishes of the ‘theatre bosses’?
They were absolutely right. Trying to force current political messaging into established pieces is an abomination. What next Harry Potter and the Working Time Directive..?
If you’re asking what I would have done in their shoes, I like to think I would have let the thing go ahead, unless I thought it was going to lose me money. If you’re in the theatre business you surely accept that there will be stuff you don’t like, for various reasons. But until you are faced with that choice, it’s just speculation. But unless this theatre is taking public money, it’s up to the people who own and manage the theatre.
I understand your position tof but at some point lines of decency are crossed and this is one of them.
As long as no-one expects me to pay for it, I’m happy for them to do what they like – this is between the owners, the writers and the audience – all are free to walk away from something they don’t like. Andrew Lawrence was cancelled by theatre owners – maybe some of them thought he had crossed lines of decency.
The production sounds awful – much like most of what I catch fragments of on TV and in film trailers.
The production itself is what happens when people walk around the enchanted wood of left-liberalism wearing the ass’s head of decolonialism. Ill-met by moonlight.
Well, that’s me out.
A few years back I saw and enjoyed a production of ‘Macbeth’ at ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’. In the Porter’s scene the actor departed a little from the script of the play and listed a few modern day ‘demons’ as well as, or instead of, the conventional script (including a reference to Trump). I understand it’s a fairly common thing for production companies to do with this scene. It didn’t spoil the scene and raised a bit of a laugh.
I don’t have a problem with different ‘takes’ on Shakespeare’s plays – but I mostly prefer them played ‘straight’.
An [musical] adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a drum’n’bass soundtrack? Let me check my diary… Ah. what a shame, I’ll be chewing my own leg off instead.
Why do theatre directors believe they have a right to infuse modern day thinking in to writings that are rooted in the past? The fact that the British people own Shakespeare’s plays as part of our heritage does not provide luvvy wokerati with a licence to defile them as they see fit. These precious and rightly treasured gifts are deserving of their own protections. What next, The Merchant of Venice reinterpreted by Hamas?
They have a right to do what they want creatively with Shakespeare and you have a right not to like it and not to pay money to see it.
Do I have to pay money for them to put the show on? Government (local or central) grants and whatnot? It’s fine if they can put it on and attract a paying audience – well done them – but if it’s my money then I don’t want it spent on something that can’t even attract a decent audience.
I don’t think very much of your money goes towards a grant for one production of a play in a Manchester Theatre, if they even got a grant. A tiny fraction of a penny at the most.
That’s waaay too much.
If they didn’t have a grant then it’s just a commercial decision. I’d be fine with that no matter which way it had gone or how much alphabet soup was involved.
If they were supporting a terrorist organisation then I’d want them to be closed down.
The trouble with government funding to the ‘arts’ is often not the amount given to the individual productions but the cost of the bureaucracy to administer it.
“Second-hand electric car prices falling at faster and faster rate”
This article reports on the inability of the lease industry to sell it’s end of lease electric cars (EVs) to private buyers. This sort of sentiment fails to recognise that what they are trying to do is to move from a situation where the lease company carries the risks and liabilities of owning an EV to the situation where a private individual carries the risks and liabilities of an EV, risks and liabilities, which for a secondhand EV are considerable.
A leased EV in the corporate world will be serviced and maintained by a main agent, the driver will probably have a gilt edged corporate charging/payment card. All of that goes when the EV moves to private ownership. Many private motorists rely on local garages and repair shops to keep their petrol/diesel (ICE) car on the road, few of these ICE repair people will ever be in a position to handle EVs and if we go 100% EV many of these local car repairers will be closed down. If I had an EV how would I get it repaired? And also, how would I get it charged? I do not have a Smart-Phone and only have a barely creditable credit card, I would not dare to go anywhere for fear of getting stuck at a charging point that told me I had no credit left.
A certain well known motoring pundit has reportedly said that EVs are essentially white goods like kettles, toasters or washing machines. When your kettle burns out you bin it and buy a new one, EVs are fast being seen as being in that category. Except that whereas junk kettles are a big enough waste problem, junk EVs are going to be a colossal problem and as junked EVs stack up faster than we can re-cycle them this will put a distinct limit on how many EVs the country can handle.
It seems to me that all these issues with EVs means that for a country like the UK there is a finite limit as to how many EVs we can operate. My estimate is that the maximum number of EVs the UK can handle is between 3 to 5 million. If I am correct then EVs equal a move to a two tier standard of transport; the elite corporate funded EV drivers and the rest of us on a bike or a bus or simply going nowhere. As with so many issues in modern life, for many of us EVs are just more smoke and mirrors, pipe-dream nonsense.
A sane private buyer might get a good deal if they are prepared to take a financial risk. However, if they actually end up being scrap quite early it undermines the claim that they are good for the environment.
Ben Wallace calls out ‘two-tier policing’ for trail hunts
‘Blair’s Britain’
Blair got away with forcing the hunting act through parliament by improper use of the parliament act.
The hunting act had zero scientific evidence to support it.
So much that has followed since, abuses of parliamentary procedure, a lack of evidential base for far reaching and illiberal measures, proceeds from the arrogance of this self serving and partial political class.
No wonder they are held in contempt across the country, this government supported by a scant 12% of the population.
What a bunch of venal, mendacious, bigoted and ignorant socialist fascist apparatchiks!
Banning fox hunting was all about demonstrating who rules England. It wasn’t the red-coated country toffs. It was nothing to do with cruelty to animals.
Quite so and frankly admitted by the one or two Labour MPs with some honesty (and, no doubt, several pints) in them.
Scientific and peer reviewed research since has shown the illiberal and barbaric hunting act to have significant adverse animal welfare effects, thousands of shot and wounded foxes left to die an unspeakable death underground unrecovered as a direct consequence of the hunting acts two dog limit, admitted even by the league against cruel sports to be useless in thick cover.
Albania is a substitute for the English Channel.
Sir K will stop the boats. The ‘asylum seekers’ (itself a grossly deceptive term) will be given papers rubber-stamped in the former realm of King Zog. Italy may have reduced the numbers coming across the Mediterranean in boats, but the number of ‘asylum seekers’ has risen by a third.
It’s time for him to have a look at a map, a cynic might observe.
“Why does the National Trust poo-poo its past?”
This is a ludicrous, shameful corruption of the English language by the Telegraph’s Charles Moore. He talks about preserving our heritage, but what about preserving our language?
The correct English word is “POOH-POOH”:
“”to dismiss lightly and contemptuously,” literally “to turn aside with an exclamation of ‘pooh,'” 1827, a slang reduplication of dismissive expression pooh. Among the many 19th century theories of the origin of language was the Pooh-pooh theory (1860), which held that language grew from natural expressions of surprise, joy, pain, or grief.”
“Devon & Cornwall Police tried to section a disabled 64 year-old man for being Right-wing”– Turning Point U.K.
Thanks to Turning Point U.K. and the Daily Sceptic for drawing attention to this case, and featuring the excellent interview with the British Patriot Mr. Dunn.
“Net Zero ‘monstrosities’ threaten to scar Loch Ness ‘until the next ice age”
Brilliant! pumping water uphill just to let it run down again! Our energy security is solved!
“Legal right to work from home will boost productivity, says Labour”
So if my toilet gets backed up with sh!t, it’s no good calling a plumber because he’s working from home?
More two tier. Try teaching chemistry from home. Or doing an operation, only people who spend time looking at screens can do this. And some of them are totally unproductive.