- “UK Covid cases drop almost 10,000 in a week” – Although seven-day case rate continues to rise, numbers have been below 50,000 for several days.
- “Forcing children to self-isolate was ‘needless’” – Oxford study suggests Covid can be controlled better by tests than quarantine.
- “Sectors where double-jabbed key staff WON’T have to isolate if pinged” – Updated guidance issued across England said “a limited number of named workers may be able to leave self-isolation under specific controls for the purpose of undertaking critical work only”.
- “BBC pulls local morning TV bulletins as ‘pingdemic’ leads to staff shortages” – Breakfast programme’s regional coverage in England off air until September at least – with further regional programmes at risk.
- “Covid vaccine passports WILL be required to get into Tory conference” – EXCLUSIVE: Tory insiders told MailOnline that proof people are double-jabbed is set to be required at the gathering in Manchester in October. Several prominent MPs have already said they won’t be going as a result.
- “Lockdown Summit: ‘The Government has frightened us senseless’” – A write-up of last weekend’s Lockdown Summit by Sally Beck in the Conservative Woman.
- “The Bog Roll Bandits are back… don’t panic! ” – Supermarket shelves are being stripped bare again, because of a combination of supply shortages and the return of panic buying, writes Richard Littlejohn in his Daily Mail column.
- “Biden falsely claims you WON’T get COVID if you have the shot” – Joe Biden overinflated the efficiency of vaccines during his gaffe-filled town hall speech on Wednesday. “You’re OK,” he assured. “You’re not going to – you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”
- “Get a Covid test BEFORE heading to Cornwall, tourism bosses warn” – Visit Cornwall’s chief is asking visitors to see this holiday season as a “summer of understanding”, while the region’s council is asking visitors to “respect local communities in holiday hotspots”.
- “Almost 40% of cases are among holidaymakers from Spain and Portugal” – Infection rates among travellers returning to England from Portugal and Spain were twice as high as France’s, which is the only country under special ‘amber-plus’ restrictions.
- “Guitarist Eric Clapton says he’ll CANCEL shows at venues that ‘discriminate’ by requiring vaccination” – Reacting to the Government insisting on vaccine passports to access to live venues and nightclubs, musician Eric Clapton said he would cancel shows at places that discriminated against the unvaccinated.
- “Birmingham restaurant issues furious rant against customers” – Alex Claridge, chef-owner of The Wildnerness, a modern British fine dining restaurant in Birmingham, told the Daily Mail he was “flabbergasted” by customers who are cancelling reservations because he’s insisting that customers wear masks.
- “Here in Australia, this childish reliance on lockdowns will eventually end in tears” – The wheels on the bus go round and round for a zero-Covid strategy that has no exit.
- “Eating disorders: The terrible impact of the pandemic on the young” – Admissions soared during lockdown, and NHS bosses warn they are running out of beds.
- “Did scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?” – Jeremy Farrar’s account of his role in the suppression of the lab leak theory raises more questions than it answers, says Ian Birrell in UnHerd.
- “Do these vaccines even work?” – Professor Roger Watson has written a fairly measured piece about the fact that the Covid vaccines appear to be less effective than billed.
- “Suppression Plans Straight From CCP Play Book” – “Perhaps we have advanced as a society since those pandemic plans of 2019?” writes Adam Creighton for AIER. “If so, it’s towards a more authoritarian, controlling future. As part of its 100th anniversary celebrations this year, the Chinese Communist Party might count the successful export of disease management.”
- “As Covid cases rise across Australia, the Government’s never-ending war on Covid intensifies” – Australia’s leaders make Boris Johnson look like the freedom-touting Churchillian he pretends to be, writes Thomas McKenna in Bournbrook Magazine.
- “Jeff Bezos vows to fight climate change, but space tourism could do more harm, critics say” – Mr. Bezos says space tourism is a first step toward moving people (and heavy industry) into space to avert an energy crisis on Earth. But couldn’t he have made the point without burning up millions of tons of fossil fuel?
- “A war on woke? I wish” – It’s a myth that Boris Johnson’s government is fighting a culture war, writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
- “Schools minister Nick Gibb: Teach ‘dead white men’ with pride” – Black children should study the works of “dead white men” as decolonising the curriculum will not create a more equal society, the schools minister Nick Gibb says.
- “In defence of footballers taking the knee” – In his latest Spectator column, Toby says he now accepts that footballers taking the knee are not rabid neo-Marxists, but calls for the same understanding to be extended to the fans who are bound to boo the gesture when the football season resumes next month.
- “Wokeness as a bootlegger-baptist coalition” – Lockdown Sceptics contributor Noah Carl compares the unholy alliance between the self-righteous and the self-interested in support of woke nonsense to the coalition between bootleggers and baptists during Prohibition.
- “‘We’re not woke’, says Unilever boss” – Unilever CEO Alan Jope seeks to distance the consumer goods giant from Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling ice cream in “occupied Palestinian territories”.
- “CDC makes another adjustment to the number of Covid vaccine death reports, this time reducing it by more than 6,000” – Alex Berenson has tweeted an update to his news yesterday that the CDC more than doubled the number of Covid vaccine death reports.
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Retarded restaurant owner asks, “How can some cotton over your gob offend you so much?”
It offends me to be told by some germaphobic corona cultist that I must inhale much of my own exhaled air (such that CO2 is ~1% and O2 is ~17%), raising my heart rate and blood pressure, along with bacteria and fungi from a filthy ‘Petri dish’, increase the problem of single-use plastic (polypropylene) waste in the oceans, and participate in a bizarre, humiliating ritual pretending to imagine that the equivalent of a mosquito is likely to be stopped by a pair of ‘goal posts’, simply because the cultist has been brainwashed from watching too much TV.
“how can people cancelling their bookings because of your silky mask rule offend you so much?”
Shows you don’t need a brain to ru(i)n a restaurant.
ask him if he’s been to Africa and slept in a chainlink fence to prevent mosquito bites.
The question should be, why is he so offended by the sight of his customers faces?
Maybe we should all make bookings – ideally on the same night – then just cancel or not turn up? I mean it’s childish but I’m past the point of playing clean with these sorts of privilege-blinded idiots.
No, don’t do that, that’s fraud.
Let him go out of business under his own steam, as it were.
A better approach is just to say, why do I need a mask if yours works? Why not just get a better mask, then you don’t need to worry what I do? FFP3 filter inwards and actually work.
They don’t believe your stuff, but they do believe the mask has magical warding properties. Call that into question and you will persuade.
When you trigger the Cognitive Dissonance this way you get some great responses. I’ve had one say “well some people might not wear their mask correctly”. And they said that with a straight face.
Do they wear their snake oil correctly?
I live in the JQ and was fairly tempted to spend a few quid at his (expensive) restaurant. Certainly not now. Get woke go broke Alex. It baffles me how hospitality venues have been moaning for the past 18 months about how restrictions are killing their trade and now they have every right to remove them they are insisting on keeping them! In this guy’s case literally insulting his customers! When I see next see him out and about I may not be able to resist the urge to remind him what a collosal bell end he his.
Let’s hope this fucktard is bust by the end of the month.
Apparently we’re “f**kin nuts” if we don’t want to wear one! Er, we’re not the brainwashed ones here, mate!
hopefully he wil go bust
Get this from the Grauniad, and be flabbergasted:
.
“In recent weeks a number of consumer surveys have painted a mixed picture of the public’s relationship with news media organisations.
A recent YouGov poll of 1,652 people for Sky News found that two-thirds of the public don’t trust TV journalists, and almost three-quarters don’t trust newspaper journalists. This has been attributed by some Conservative MPs and commentators to the mainstream media’s sometimes aggressive questioning of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, arguing it is out of step with the mood of a panicked public seeking national unity during the crisis.”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/07/public-trust-in-uk-journalism-eroding-amid-coronavirus-polls-suggest
My italics.
Hilarious
… if you’ve got any sense of humour left.
But, actually, the interesting thing is this as another example of total disconnect in the public brain.
They will respond in the same way when asked about ‘politicians.
Yet we now live in a fantasy world determined by blind obedience to the diktats of these ‘untrusted’ groups.
Did they copy and paste from the Babylon Bee?!
There I was thinking it’s cos all they do is trumpet a narative and for the most part lie and obfuscate. Silly me.
Yeah. Same spin in Germany recently. Freedom of press under attack- by opponents of the Covid restrictions being nasty to mainstream journalists.
Orwell nailed it.
Errr, are those conservative MPs viewing the same media outlets as me? I have seen next to zero questioning of any of the government’s crackpot policies over the last 15 months.
If you find yourself envying vaxtards as they prepare for their happy holidays, read this (no paywall):
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/comment/pre-holiday-diary/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
Reading the DT comments, I can’t see anyone asking why the double vaxxed travellers have to be tested – and if they do, then that demonstrates that the vaccines aren’t fit for purpose! It would also indicate that the unvaxxed should be able to travel subject to the same tests (as useless as they are!).
Edit – Posted the message below before reading the third item ATL
*
So the Pingdemic is a deliberate concoction being used as another vehicle for vaccine coercion.
This may have been highlighted already, I have been busy doing some old normal activities, so have not been fully in touch.
Any news headline that I have seen over the last few days has been about the havoc caused by the Pingdemic and the government refusal to budge on Track and Trace
Today the news is all about how to keep supply chains open by giving exemptions in key areas, but only to people who have been double vaxxed.
So, no genuine meaningful dissent – just another part of the evil cunning plan after all.
Stalinist Labour gives the Tory Fascists some advice about their conference:
“a senior Labour source said ministers should require a negative test instead – as even the fully-vaccinated can spread coronavirus.
‘For nightclubs, sporting events or whatever it may be, a negative test is worth more than being double-jabbed,’ the source said.”
So even professional political semi-morons know that the snake oil is useless, yeah.
Anyway, the conference win’t have run for five minutes before somebody gets pinged and they all have to go home.
The best test is just if you feel ill stay home, and perhaps a thermometer check, only problem with the checks is they check for a something with the same CFR as flu and we don’t shut down because of flu.
Amen. And predictably, this is just what people don’t do.
We’ll all be locked down by october anyway – apart from the resistance
Bravo Mr Clapton.
Too bloody right
So now we have exemptions for something that is advisory? Seriously is there a single fucking brain cell anywhere in government right now?
Sadly plenty of brain cells that are working reasonably well at reading and manipulating the public mood and judging how to write the next act of the play.
Measures only need to be plausible to the layman who doesn’t think too hard about them, and is already frightened or resentful about the unvaxxed, and need to be plausible enough to the obedient media that they are not embarrassed into questioning them.
That’s what we are up against.
Yes. Have no illusions that we are seeing the exploitation of exactly the same mass psychology as used the Jews as an ‘virus’ in society during the 1930s.
… and that went well, didn’t it?
Well it depends on wat side you were on
Just on a side note, did you know that MPs will be exempt from showing vax passports when in the House? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bB09P8cgkPA
Yep. Which I dont disagree with, because no one should be showing them anywhere
Exactly! But it’s the “rules for thee but not for me” that is so incendiary.
I don’t think anyone ever thought the footballers taking the knee were Marxists – any more than those raising their arms in Munich 80 years ago were Nazis. They were just both naive.
The knee gesture – whatever their intentions – is inextricably linked with BLM, which let’s not forget is a movement whose supporters have straight up murdered people. Most of those they killed being black.
Taking the knee is a bit like those genuinely dopey hippies who use the swastika because it’s “really” a Sanskrit symbol for peace. Well yes it is, but no really it’s lost that meaning now.
The irony of course is that the first person to really bring the knee into public consciousness was an incredibly brave athlete who lost his career fighting to raise the issue of discrimination. Those doing it now aren’t brave at all – they are doing the popular thing at no cost to themselves. Luxury virtue as the phrase goes.
The brave ones are the likes of John Barnes – another man who spoke out against racism before it was easy – who are calling out taking the knee for what it is.
No one ever booed any other anti-racist gesture made at football. No one would boo if the footballers came up with their own symbol of support for anti-racism. That’s because no one is booing anti-racism they are booing the murderous, sinister and racist ideology of an American race-supremacist cult. – that seems like a good thing to boo to me.
Modest-proposal: there needs to be positive-discrimination for White and especially Asian people in football, Black football players are far too abundant for their demographics.
The “brave athlete,” rather, launched his career (in advertising). People boo mainly because they resent being reminded of politics, and lectured to, when they’ve come to enjoy the sport. They see through these cynical gestures.
It’s not adherence to BLM doctrine that resulted in West Midlands Police thinking they’d done a brave and noble thing by taking a 12 year old into custody for insulting a multi-millionaire.
That was the poisonous fanaticism of antiracism.
But that’s the thing – anti racism isn’t fanaticism, it’s just fairness. It’s BLM and their like’s version of anti-racism that is fanaticism. And super racist.
And of course it’s the only ideology outside of anti-semitism that decides an entire race should be tainted by the “sins” – imagined or otherwise- of their ancestors.
Leaving aside the question of whether antiracism and fairness are easily equated, would you characterise the taking into custody of someone for posting insults on social media to be “fair” or an appropriate use of the state’s power?
And if so, what other kinds of online speech do you think should merit the same treatment, and why, and who should be in charge of deciding, and what is an appropriate punishment?
You are confusing anti racism (being against treating people differently simply because of their pigmentation) with BLM/woke doctrine which is precisely treating people differently because of their pigmentation.
I am anti racist, which is why I hate BLM and Critical Race Theory, both of which are super, super KKK-level racist.
I don’t see how what I posted confuses those things.
Anyway, you didn’t answer my questions, which I thought relevant to the specific news item being debated.
I wouldn’t be on this site if I thought suppressing free speech of any kind was a good thing.
Fair enough.
The problem with the fetishisation of a particular issue such as “racism” is that it lends itself to exploitation by fanatics and by interest groups.
“Treating people differently simply because of their pigmentation” can be a significant issue, or it might not, depending upon context. In a medical context it can be the right thing to do, as where some racial groups have increased susceptibility to particular medical problems. In many situations it’s just another minor social issue. In some it can be very harmful.
The question is whether you think that the practical applications of antiracist dogma are constructive or destructive in the context of our society.
We will never control the problems of the excessive influence of the likes of BLM, critical race theory, anti-white discrimination, etc until we end the obsessive fetishisation of “racism” that underlies them all.
Your distinction is essential.
“BLM and their like’s version of anti-racism that is fanaticism.”
It’s more than that – it’s cynical exploitation of what are positive instincts.
People think that partaking in this gesturism is actually about countering racism in reality. It isn’t. Gesturism actually diverts energy away from positive substantive change – as we also see in the BBC’s trumpeting of distorted ‘feminism’.
The role of the establishment’s supposed adoption of principle is to divert attention whilst essential power structures remain unchanged, recruiting oppressors from groups that genuinely have a beef.
It’s a clever double-bluff, in a way parallel to the use of a genuine illness to cover the embedding of power. The shit-show has, at bottom, been about the exploitation and perversion of genuine social instincts into sociopathy.
Fairness is what it claims to be based on (much as communism claims to be based on fairness, and nazism to be based on patriotism (among other things)).
One must judge political ideologies by their practical effects, not by their claimed ideals.
No – they are not interested in fairness, they want equality.
You can either try to have a fair society or an equal society, you can’t have both. That is their biggest ideological failing.
“No – they are not interested in fairness, they want equality.“
Not sure why you think this is a significant point. My point was that ideologies always claim to be based on noble ideals (and they often are in fact based originally on pushing those ideals). But when they become dominating dogmas, they become poisonous nonetheless.
By “they” I presume you mean BLM and their ilk. I presume you just want fairness. Fair enough, but should “fairness” in people’s speech be regulated by law?
No, Colin Kaepernick is a supporter of communism, he wasn’t getting a game for his team and has, in essence, gained hugely from his absurd actions, being paid loads of money for nothing.
Well put. I defended CK back then against being cancelled by the now oh so woke corporations and teams.
And where were Lewis Hamilton&co back then?
Nowhere to be seen or heard against his cancellation, let alone joining him in taking the knee.
So spare me their moralising. They are just the biggest hypocrites on Earth right now.
As soon as it’s no longer fashionable or won’t pay anymore, they’ll run away from that gesture.
I see Toby’s limited point, but he should have read Brendan O’Neill’s piece first. He nails what this is really about.
If you want to go even further, read one of Paul Craig Roberts latest at Lew Rockwell.
He basically thinks, and courageously states in it, that we are now just obsessed with and falling for defending perversions, as is typical for all late stage civilizations.
Not sure why we have to know Toby has softened his position on BLM and the kneeling. That’s hardly sceptic news is it?
Why not? It seems obviously so for me (though very bad news). A defeat for scepticism in general, because it’s an acceptance by a former dissenter of (yet more) institutionalised political indoctrination of the masses with elite dogma.
It’s not lockdown scepticism, but this is the Daily Sceptic, not Lockdown Sceptics.
It will be back to lockdown sceptics soon enough
Let’s face it, noone ever thought the football kneelers were neo-Marxists; we just realised that they were being used to further Neo-marxism without understanding that that was the case. Furthermore, we DID realise that these massively over-paid ‘stars’ were simply being woke hypocrites!
Strawman argument, Toby.
“they were being used to further Neo-marxism”
The ‘Marxism’/’neo-Marxism’/’communism’ arguments are a diversion.
See my previous posting. It’s about Power using such movements as tools as a means of consolidating its interests.
Everything woke, climate, Covid etc. related is hijacked and connected in that regard.
And this was always the problem with the “safe” way of opposing this politicisation of sport.
BLM is certainly a noxious organisation whose campaigning is based upon a vicious blood libel against US police, and a lie about US sphere societies in general, with dark paymasters and leaders, but most of those kowtowing to it have no idea about the latter and no intention of supporting it.
What they support is the ideology of antiracism, and the failure to understand that antiracism is a pernicious ideology rather than some kind of naive inherently good principle, is at the root of the issue here. Sport is politicised by antiracism without people understanding explicitly that it is being politicised. But nevertheless that is what it is.
And thus by opposing this institutionalisation of a political gesture on the wrong basis, Toby and others who are either too indoctrinated themselves to understand the issue or fear to confront it openly, set themselves up to fail, without even having made any useful point. In fact, they’ve allowed the harmful indoctrination to seem moderate and harmless, by setting up a false harder line to ultimately “compromise” with.
This is a very familiar process for conservatives.
O’Neill is right on point in this piece.
It’s a little ironic, because O’Neill and his group were in the past big supporters of the fetishisation and demonisation of “racism” that underlies modern woke-ism in that area. Though his opinions in this area seem to be based upon Marxist thinking (that’s not an empty smear – he admits that as his political foundation explicitly) and hark back to the conflicts of the 1970s, which was the last time when “racism” was a genuine political issue in this country. Racism as an organised poliical force and as a relevant ideology was defeated and essentially eliminated in this country in the 1970s and 1980s, but many of those who fought that battle, or see themselves as formed and inspired by it, have been unable to let go of their obsession with racism (Peter Hitchens is another such, with a similar admitted Marxist background, but having moved on from it).
And what’s interesting about the combination of O’Neill’s piece and Toby’s Spectator piece is how they reveal just how integrated Toby still is with the “Conservative” Party.
Is it a coincidence that Toby has announced his submission to antiracism just as the likes of Baker and Finkelstein are advocating surrender to the same dogma? Perhaps. At the least these people have reached the same conclusion at the same time, about the likelihood of losing on this issue and the supposed advantages of conceding before being defeated – the modus of the “Conservative” Party for a generation or more.
The truth:
Racist insults are bad because they are insults, not because they are racist.
Current elite US sphere dogma:
Insults are ok, as long as they are not racist. The former are tolerated with no more than mild disapproval. The latter are greeted with outrage and actually criminalised.
In a nutshell, there’s the problem with the position in our culture of the ideology of antiracism. And that’s why our opinion leaders think that the outrageous thing about our police tracking down and arresting a 12 year old for offending a multi-millionaire professional sportsman, while simultaneously complaining of a lack or resources for addressing real crime, is the insults throw by the 12 year old.
“Just a few weeks more”.
Apply to June 21st, then 19th July and now August 16th.
ON AND ON AND ON AND ON!!!!!!!!!
What’s happening on August 16th?
NOTHING, JUST A FEW WEEKS MORE.
Ah. I thought maybe there had been some announcement I had missed.
Apparently the track and trace self isolation rules are supposed to be relaxed/reduced on the 16th.
Carl’s piece is very good and contains some very important points.
It does, however, lack a bit of historical perspective. Painting “wokeness” as something new arising in 2010 rather misses the point that it is just the continuation and rising to cultural domination of the “political correctness” ideologies of the late C20th, in the later internet age. In the 1990s those of us resisting the rise of what is now termed “woke” (spoiler: we failed) referred to it as “political correctness”. Here (amusingly) is Wikipedia’s description:
“1980s and 1990s
Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind[21] heralded a debate about “political correctness” in American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s.[7][22][34] Professor of English literary and cultural studies at CMU Jeffrey J. Williams wrote that the “assault on … political correctness that simmered through the Reagan years, gained bestsellerdom with Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.”[35] According to Z.F. Gamson, Bloom’s book “attacked the faculty for ‘political correctness'”.[36] Prof. of Social Work at CSU Tony Platt says the “campaign against ‘political correctness'” was launched by Bloom’s book in 1987.[37]
An October 1990 New York Times article by Richard Bernstein is credited with popularizing the term.[17][19][20][38][39] At this time, the term was mainly being used within academia: “Across the country the term p.c., as it is commonly abbreviated, is being heard more and more in debates over what should be taught at the universities”.[15] Nexis citations in “arcnews/curnews” reveal only seventy total citations in articles to “political correctness” for 1990; but one year later, Nexis records 1,532 citations, with a steady increase to more than 7,000 citations by 1994.[38][40] In May 1991, The New York Times had a follow-up article, according to which the term was increasingly being used in a wider public arena:
What has come to be called “political correctness,” a term that began to gain currency at the start of the academic year last fall, has spread in recent months and has become the focus of an angry national debate, mainly on campuses, but also in the larger arenas of American life.
— Robert D. McFadden, “Political Correctness: New Bias Test?”, 1991.[16]
The previously obscure far-left term became common currency in the lexicon of the conservative social and political challenges against progressive teaching methods and curriculum changes in the secondary schools and universities of the U.S.[8][41][42][43][44][45] Policies, behavior, and speech codes that the speaker or the writer regarded as being the imposition of a liberal orthodoxy, were described and criticized as “politically correct”.[23] In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”[46]
After 1991, its use as a pejorative phrase became widespread amongst conservatives in the US.[8] It became a key term encapsulating conservative concerns about the left in cultural and political debates extending beyond academia. ”
Sound familiar?
Sounds very familiar. Funnily enough I was explaining this exact timeline to my teenage son the other day. But without the references to the literature!
I think Noah is just too young to remember this context.
Not sure what Toby’s excuse is….
The restaurant owner is going out of business unless he changes his Branch Covidian rules.
What is the best way to campaign against vaccine ID (‘vaccine passports’)? There are various references to campaign against supported by some MPs but I can’t find any actual campaign site other than Big Brother Watch, which contains information from the position in February. Is there any link to a campaign?
VAERS data is being (lazily) manipulated to obscure elderly death numbers, the victim’s ages are being excluded from the search criteria (tagged as ‘unknown’) but the ages are clearly visible in the event description. They are being falsely grouped as foreign deaths.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/3y3ULLQRMlgv/
Great business model. Rant at your customers.
Works for elite sport.
Less than 1% of all deaths in June from Covid. Blimey.
Oh no, the conspiracy did not work out, let’s invent another conspiracy.