The name of this website is about to change from Lockdown Sceptics to the Daily Sceptic. I intended this change to coincide with the bonfire of the coronavirus restrictions – the long-awaited terminus – but ‘Freedom Day’ has turned out to be a damp squib. Not only have many of the restrictions remained in place, but it’s been made clear by Chris Whitty and others that any freedoms we’ve been granted today will be snatched away as soon as the NHS comes under pressure again.
I always imagined I’d retire Lockdown Sceptics one day – turn it into an archive that would serve as a record of a dark period in our history – but after almost 16 months of continuous activity, it has developed in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t just mean it averages 1.5 million page views a month and has almost 15,000 email subscribers, as well as a staff of seven. It has also attracted a community of regular contributors and commentators, either above the line, below the line, or in the forums, as well as a team of tireless moderators. Together, we’ve created a kind of intellectual home for tens of thousands of people, and I get regular emails from people all over the world telling me that if it wasn’t for Lockdown Sceptics they would have gone mad.
So instead of shutting down the site, I’ve decided to turn it into the Daily Sceptic. All of the original content we published will still be there, organised under the headings you can see on the right-hand vertical, and the focus will be on the lockdowns and associated restrictions for the time being. But the subject matter will be a bit broader. I wanted to create something more permanent, something that wasn’t contingent on lockdowns continuing forever, but which was imbued with the same irreverent, antic spirit as the original site, and the same rigorous, analytical approach.
So the Daily Sceptic will include sceptical articles by disaffected journalists and academics – including citizen journalists and independent scholars – about a range of public policies that are supposedly based on science or data or evidence, where ‘the Science’ is being invoked as a source of unassailable authority, but which often appear to be rooted in a covert political agenda. The idea is to challenge the new powerful class of government scientists and public health officials – as well as their colleagues in universities, grant-giving trusts, large international charities, Silicon Valley and the pharmaceutical industry – that have emerged as a kind of secular priesthood during the pandemic. And to challenge them on their own terms, much like the group of citizen journalists who successfully rehabilitated the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis after it had been designated a ‘conspiracy theory’ in the pages of the Lancet. (Scientific and medical journals will also be in our sights.)
The temptation when debunking ‘the Science’ behind these policies is to see sinister cabals at work, bent on some secret plot to subvert democratic institutions and usher in a New World Order in which they control every aspect of our lives. But as someone who’s earned his living as a journalist for over 35 years, occasionally with a front row seat on the inner workings of government, I’m a subscriber to the cock-up theory of history. I see a great deal of vanity and hubris in the state’s mismanagement of this crisis, but not much planning or conspiring. I don’t doubt that plenty of clever, successful people in the Government’s orbit have seized upon opportunities during the past 16 months, enriching themselves or consolidating their power and status in some other way, and a fair few are now doing what they can to keep the gravy train on the road. But that’s a far cry from the ‘Plandemic’. History can in rare circumstances be bent to the will of an extraordinary individual, but it is never planned. Societies ‘reset’ themselves all the time, but not in a way that’s ‘great’ if by that is meant ‘permanent’, and I doubt even Klaus Schwab really believes that. He’s just a carnival barker standing outside a tent called ‘Davos’ and we shouldn’t take his flimflam too seriously.
I know some readers will disagree and I look forward to seeing that debate play out in the pages of the Daily Sceptic, much like it did in Lockdown Sceptics. I’m a free speech zealot. In February 2020, a couple of months before I created Lockdown Sceptics, I helped set up the Free Speech Union, a non-partisan, mass membership public interest body that stands up for the speech rights of its members and campaigns for free speech more widely. The timing was perfect since one of the hallmarks of the coronavirus crisis has been the suppression of dissenting voices within the scientific and public health communities – the creep of cancel culture into the hard sciences. That process was already underway, as any doctor who dissents from trans orthodoxy can tell you, but the pandemic acted like an accelerant. The Daily Sceptic, like Lockdown Sceptics, will campaign against this new climate of Maoist intolerance that is sweeping through our most important institutions and companies – and that includes taking the Mickey out of woke gobbledegook. Scientific censorship is a deadly serious business, but the way to take down the would-be Torquemadas is often to aim at the funny bone.
I hope you enjoy the new site. Do keep the contributions coming, both above and below the line. (Our email address remains the same.) And if you appreciate what we do, please help us keep the wolf from the door by making a donation. The Daily Sceptic, like Lockdown Sceptics, will be a labour of love, and the staff of seven is now a staff of five: me, Ian Rons, Will Jones, Noah Carl and Michael Curzon. But we also have wives and girlfriends and mortgages and families, and every little helps.
If you’re a subscriber to the daily email newsletter, you’ll still receive it but we are going to start sending it out from a new domain – DailySceptic.org – from tomorrow. So if you suddenly stop getting it, check your spam folder and if it’s in there move it to your inbox. After that, it should go straight to your inbox.
If you’re a below-the-line contributor, or someone who participates in the Forums, you’ll still be able to do that, but the site change means you’ll be logged out and you’ll need your username or password to log back in again. If you can’t remember them, just use the reset facility, although you’ll need to know one of them to reset the other. If you can’t remember either, email Ian Rons on lockdownsceptics@castironsolutions.co.uk.
The data we use to send out the daily email newsletter is owned by Lockdown Sceptics and we are transferring it to Skeptics Ltd, a company we’ve set up to publish the Daily Sceptic. We won’t be passing on this data to anyone else, but if you object to this transfer then please contact Ian Rons, our Data Protection Officer, at lockdownsceptics@castironsolutions.co.uk, within the next seven days and we’ll delete your data from our database.
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EU Pushes Its Orwellian Digital Euro
latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Yet more grand plans which won’t work.
They won’t work, not (in this case) because people oppose/frustrate them, but because the people who dream up these crazy ideas have never been troubled by actually having to realise anything.
They can’t even perform basic electrical energy calculations, for gawd’s sake. I doubt they could even chop a log.
So, they surround themselves with people they believe are up to the job, i.e. people who are the best at convincing them they are the best – the subsidy truffle hounds, grifters and pretengineers (e.g. Elon Musk). The end result is nothing that is fit for their stupid/naive/diabolical purposes, and a lot of taxpayers’ money in the hands of conmen.
Plus ça change…
I see that the campaign to pin all the responsibility for the Horizon horror on politicians and thereby deflect responsibility away from bureaucrats continues.
No doubt it’s orchestrated by bureaucrats who are actually the ones who control and decide everything.
It is quite clear to me who is responsible for the Horizon crisis, and that is the senior management of the Post Office. I will outline the reasons, which are simple and easily understood:
I assume that the Enquiry will also come to these conclusions. Every one of the management responsible should be prosecuted for at least malfeasance in public office, and any that lied anywhere for fraud and perverting the course of justice.
Wholly agree. Great post.
If that had been aircraft software, and people died as a result, the subsequent investigation would have resulted in court appearances for the culpable. Oh wait, people did die, of stress and suicide, and the innocent did jail time.
So will it all be shrugged off, see also the probable outcome of the covid inquiry….
A lot of them responsible for it’s development were probably ignorant of the risks. If it is supposedly developed within the IEC 61508 protocol (e.g. https://www.perforce.com/blog/qac/what-iec-61508-safety-integrity-levels-sils), it could be no better than SIL1 – maybe even zero, if it contains faults that are hazardous, as seems to be the case.
I have been involved as a user in IT systems development and I concur with all that is written in the above. As a Chartered Accountant from business I would also draw attention to other defects in the PO case.
1 There has never been any evidence of any actual shortfall of assets. Reliance was put on a balance report from a system which was an admiunistration syatem and not an accounting system with double entry balances as accountants would recognise.
One would have expected the PO financial statements to report the monetary amount of any real losses. If, as we all suspect, the Horizon system was plain defective, where were the surpluses and what happened to them? PO management even at this late date should be required to identify where the actual financial deficit existed in their books of account and which the money they took from sub-postmasters was said to be directed.
2 No audit trail was ever produced and from what a number of sub-postmasters have said (as laymen) there wasn’t one or they had no access to it.
One would have expected the PO to produce in any prosecution some credible information of branch financial throughput. My observation from the excellent book on the subject and the drama documentary and the documentary itself was that some of these post office branches were tiny. The total takings and dispersals in the period when very large deficits were claimed could not have arisen.
One further thought, HMG should ensure that no PO records nor any information held by Fujitsu or current and former employees of the PO is disposed of. Ditto records in the civil service. If data is not protected someone might take the way out a BP contractor did after the Gulf of Mexico spillage and just shred the papers on the basis the standard court penalty for destruction of records was bound to be less than the cost of compensation.
Thank you gentlemen (it may be ladies if so sorry) your comments are very useful to anyone trying to understand what is happening.
EB, I agree with your comment on double entry book keeping but relational database systems can always be made to produce this if necessary, although data is generally not stored quite like that. The fact that a SPM could not print this out is a major systems design failure, because it is a sure way to find errors anywhere. I will try to explain how a RDB should carry out a transaction, say buying a stamp. The PO clerk will press a button to say a stamp sale, a value of the stamp, and the number purchased. The software will then carry out 3 operations:
At the end of the day the SPM will enter the number of each stamp value to the stock check table, which should agree withe stored number.
I see that he actually keeps tally of every value of coin, so again the numbers of each in the till should agree with the cash table numbers for each value.
Assuming no errors in either of the above (there will be a lot to enter) he will see a value for the days takings, and add these to the PO branch money sent to the PO accounts (cash) dept., keeping some amount for a float. these numbers are then used to start the next days transactions. At that point he will know that all is in order, and there is the stock check record to see that all was well (after any errors are corrected).
There will be many accounts for receipts but the process above will be the same in principle, but the point here is that he will know exactly which stock does not match the cash taken, himself. This is interesting because Horizon doesn’t tell him anything about balances, it just reports a deficit. This make tracing an error very difficult, whether he counts the coins or stamps incorrectly he is just told there is a deficit indicated! This is the second serious system design error, it is inherently not possible for the SPM to trace otherwise trivial errors. He will have no access to the stored data tables.
Thank you HP, I am simply trying to make it clear as far as possible why the problems are within ther PO management. The fact that they accepted a system with so many holes has to be due to incompetence or lazyness, did one of their senior accountants not actually try to do the SPM job at acceptance? Obviously not!
“The delusion of the Houthi pacifists”
‘Yemen’s Houthi’s are a bunch of reckless, illiberal, Jew-hating pirates. Why is anyone in Britain and the West speaking up for them.’
The Socialist Workers party and the Transform party (merger of Left Unity, Breakthrough party, peoples alliance of the left, Liverpool community independents) support the Houthis in order to ‘stand up once again for those being bombarded in Gaza—and also those now under the imperialist cosh in Yemen.’
‘….the airstrikes have nothing to do with international law. They are to show the world that the West remains in charge of the Middle East, and that it will punish any country that steps out of line.’
‘The move can only heighten the anger at imperialism that has spread across the region.’
Socialist (Fascist) Worker
The founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity campaign was unable to attend, having been arrested for having ‘thanked Hamas for ‘breaking out of the Gaza concentration camp.’
Let us not forget that Corbyn received 30% of the national vote in 2017.
Left unity (now part of transform) is a bunch of luvvies set up by Ken Loach.
As a great man once said: ‘We’re f*cked’
‘From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea;’
Protection money has its limits which seem to have been reached again. That $6Bn to Iran wasn’t a good plan Joe!
Many other historic examples, just business as usual (on both sides).
They say there’s a troopship just leaving Bombay, bound for old Blighty shore
Heavily laden with time expired men, bound for the land they adore
There’s many an airman just finishing his time, there’s many a twerp signing on
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up my lads
Bless ’em all, bless ’em all, the long and the short and the tall
Bless all the sergeants and W. O. ones
Bless all the corporals and their blinking sons
‘Cause we’re saying goodbye to them all, as back to their billets they crawl
You’ll get no promotion this side of the ocean, so cheer up my lads, bless ’em all…….
(Replace bless with f*ck to get the correct lyrics)
Ireland does it again with another mad-cap hair branded ‘recycling’ scheme to save the world one plastic bottle at a time!
Ireland already recycles but apparently not enough to make any money out of it, so as from 1st Feb we’ll now be charged extra for every bottle and can! Put them back in a machine, undamaged, at a supermarket and get your 15c /25c deposit back, all so they can be sent to Indonesia and dumped in a land fill, or the sea!
https://re-turn.ie/
Same here in the NL, Dinger. The most recent garbage introduced is if you get a takeaway, even a takeaway coffee when you’re out and about, you get charged for every single container. I know you get reusable coffee cups but who’s going to go to the restaurant in advance with a collection of multi-sized tupperware so the chefs can put your family Indian meal in a variety of containers, all so that you can say you’ve done your bit to save the planet? No sane person does this. They’ll just pay the extra but order less takeaways.
Wow, the total scum that the UK lets in….He gets to say this but go wave a Union Jack flag at your peril! Somebody should’ve just burned a Koran in front of him. ‘Free speech’ should work both ways, after all. ”Normalize massacres”, just so long as it’s of the Jews or the ‘infidels’, right? I don’t think his hate speech could get any more hateful… ( mini clip )
”Absolutely shocking video from yesterday’s Palestinian march. This is Mohammed el-Kurd.
“We must normalise massacres as the statues quo.”
He is a Palestinian writer and poet from Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem.”
https://twitter.com/DaveAtherton20/status/1746454992460955955
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/13/blair-warned-scrapping-horizon-scheme-damage-japan-ties/
Well fancy that. Yet another outrageous F. Up engineered by the one man who has done more damage to this country than anything or anybody currently on this planet – T. firkin Bliar.
Surprised this hasn’t been picked up by the DS, given the obvious bias in this direction: Germany ‘to intervene’ on behalf of Israel at ICJ:
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/erklaerung-der-bundesregierung-zur-verhandlung-am-internationalen-gerichtshof-2252842
(Machine translation):
On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists brutally ambushed, tortured, killed and kidnapped innocent people in Israel. Hamas’ goal is to wipe out Israel. Since then, Israel has been defending itself against Hamas’ inhumane attack.
In view of Germany’s history and the crime against humanity of the Shoah, the Federal Government sees itself as particularly committed to the Convention against Genocide. This convention is a central instrument of international law to implement the “never again”. We resolutely oppose political instrumentalization.
We know that different countries assess Israel’s operation in the Gaza Strip differently. However, the German government firmly and explicitly rejects the accusation of genocide that has now been brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice. This accusation is completely unfounded.
The German Government supports the International Court of Justice in its work, as it has done for many decades. The Federal Government intends to intervene as a third party in the main hearing.
Namibia however, disagrees:
https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956
Namibian Presidency
@NamPresidency
Namibia rejects Germany’s Support of the Genocidal Intent of the Racist Israeli State against Innocent Civilians in Gaza
On Namibian soil, #Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904-1908, in which tens of thousands of innocent Namibians died in the most inhumane and brutal conditions. The German Government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil. Therefore, in light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President @hagegeingob
expresses deep concern with the shocking decision communicated by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany yesterday, 12 January 2024, in which it rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa before the #InternationalCourtofJustice that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in #Gaza.
Worryingly, ignoring the violent deaths of over 23 000 Palestinians in Gaza and various United Nations reports disturbingly highlighting the internal displacement of 85% of civilians in Gaza amid acute shortages of food and essential services, the German Government has chosen to defend in the International Court of Justice the genocidal and gruesome acts of the Israeli Government against innocent civilians in Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza. Various international organizations, such as Human Rights Watch have chillingly concluded that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza.
President Geingob reiterates his call made on 31 December 2023, “No peace-loving human being can ignore the carnage waged against Palestinians in Gaza”. In that vein, President Geingob appeals to the German Government to reconsider its untimely decision to intervene as a third-party in defence and support of the genocidal acts of Israel before the International Court of Justice.
Germany ‘to intervene’ on behalf of Israel at the ICJ hearing:
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/erklaerung-der-bundesregierung-zur-verhandlung-am-internationalen-gerichtshof-2252842
(Hit the English tab at the top for translation)
Namibia’s response to Germany’s intervention on behalf of Israel:
https://twitter.com/NamPresidency/status/1746259880871149956
“Nothing awards me for growing food” – says Harry on “Harry’s Farm” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEudP3Sa3uk&list=WL&index=8 towards the end, as he describes the Defra paperwork.
“1,700 police officers from the Met and other U.K. forces have been mobilised”
I guess it will need a lot of them to deliver blankets and coffee in cold weather.
“Civil servants have been told to “think” of transgender colleagues as women in woke new staff guidance”
Seems the Tory Government is continuing the tend set by Cameron-Clegg in 2010
“Seems the Tory Government is continuing the trend set by Cameron-Clegg in 2010″
By that I assume you are referring to the destruction of the country.