- “Boris Johnson steps in to save holidays on the Continent” – Reprieve for popular destinations as plans for controversial new ‘amber watchlist’ are shelved following backlash, reports the Telegraph.
- “Tourism bosses call on PM to scrap traffic light system to save summer” – In a letter to the Prime Minister, major airlines and tour operators said simplified rules would help the UK travel sector recover while protecting the country’s health needs, according to the Mail.
- “Amber list marks out border between Johnson and Sunak” – “Thank God for Rishi Sunak,” writes Stephen Glover in the Daily Mail. “I don’t know whether he will be, or should be, Prime Minister. I am just grateful that he displays a reassuringly analytical approach.”
- “Just how bad is the situation in Spain, Italy and Greece?” – Experts say is’s unlikely that the South African ‘Beta’ variant will be able to ‘outrun’ the more transmissible Indian ‘Delta’ strain which is dominant in Europe and the U.K., says MailOnline.
- “Obama’s birthday party sets a terrible example” – Piers Morgan lets fly against President Obama in the Daily Mail, who is planning to invite 500 people to his birthday bash.
- “One AstraZeneca dose gives 82% protection against beta variant hospitalisation or death” – New findings increase pressure on the Government to lift restrictions on people travelling to and from France, reports the Telegraph.
- “Could hidden viruses in your body be causing long Covid?” – A new picture is emerging that links the often debilitating illness to other post-viral syndromes, says the Telegraph.
- “What Were Lockdowners Thinking? A Review of Jeremy Farrar” – Jeffrey A. Tucker, writing for the Brownstone Institute, his new think tank, tries to understand the mind of Jeremy Farrar, who he says was an even more influential advocate for lockdown than Neil Ferguson.
- “Are booster shots necessary?” – Will Britain become the first country in the world to have a large section of its population immunised against COVID-19 three times over, asks Ross Clark in the Spectator. And will that be a worthwhile achievement?
- “Nothing unethical about covert psychological ‘nudges’, says the BPS” – After six months of evasion and obfuscation, the British Psychological Society (BPS) has made its position clear: it sees nothing ethically questionable about deploying covert psychological strategies (often referred to as ‘nudges’) on the British people as a means of increasing compliance with public health restrictions. Gary Sidley is suitably outraged on his blog.
- “As protests grow against health passes, are elites imposing the measures making the same disdainful mistakes Remain did in 2016?” – Right-wing parties have swung behind recent anti-vaxx demos sweeping Europe. It’s a high-risk strategy, but the establishment should not dismiss the protests out of hand, as it may come back to haunt them, as it did with Brexit, writes ex-UKIP leader Paul Nuttall.
- “Neil Oliver: For the sake of freedom – yours and mine – I will cheerfully risk catching COVID-19” – Neil Oliver on GB News says the vast majority of us have nothing to fear from the virus.
- “Twitter Suspends Science Writer After He Posts Results Of Pfizer Clinical Test” – Twitter has suspended ex-New York Times science reporter and anti-lockdown campaigner Alex Berenson.
- “The smear campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration” – Dominic Cummings, scientists and the media successfully demonised anyone who questioned the lockdown, write Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff in Spiked.
- “The rest of the world has shamed Britain’s blasé rejection of liberty” – Our national failure to confront the autocratic implications of Covid rules is a devastating failure, says Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
- “£100,000-a-year lawyer loses harassment case against boss” – A lawyer who filed 42 discrimination and harassment complaints to a Reading employment tribunal has lost her case, with the judge warning against “a culture of hyper-sensitivity”.
- “Over-75s have plenty of reasons to reject the BBC. Here are a few” – The Corporation faces a funding crisis, and pensioners won’t cough up – but are Britain’s poorest to blame, or the overpaid suits? Hard-hitting stuff from former BBC journalist Robin Aitken in the Telegraph.
- “People expect sensible debate about education – not inflammatory rows about ‘decolonising’ the curriculum” – We should perhaps avoid complaining that there are, for example, too many ‘dead white men’ in literature set-text lists – and instead focus on making the canon bigger and more inclusive, writes Ed Dorrell in the Independent.
- “Hungary, Poland and the EU’s ‘diversity’ problem” – For 20 years the EU’s slogan has been ‘Unity in diversity’. But can the bloc cope with Hungary and Poland becoming illiberal democracies, asks Katja Hoyer in the Spectator.
- “If all ‘problematic’ statues have to go, then that includes monuments to Gandhi, Marx, Engels and Che Guevara” – Now that both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been ignominiously defenestrated, it is clear that the iconoclasts really do mean business. But will left-wing icons be held to the same standards as everyone else, asks RT.
- “Destruction and Hope in Portland” – How calls for justice morphed into the violence that struck the city. A harrowing account by ex-Portland resident Nancy Rommelmann for Persuasian.
- “NHS lets trans sex offenders on female wards” – Sex offenders who were born male but identify as female can be placed on women-only NHS wards, according to guidance issued by hospital trusts. The Daily Mail isn’t impressed.
- “Olympic rules for allowing transgender women to compete to be changed” – The Intentional Olympic Committee (IOC) say it will set out a new policy for the participation of transgender women in Olympic sports, following an international outcry over a transwoman being allowed to compete against biological women in the women’s weightlifting at the Olympics.
- “Experts give their verdict on The Firm’s favoured alternative remedies” – Members of the Royal Family have reportedly used homeopathy for their ailments for years – but it’s not the only alternative remedy they’ve favoured. The Daily Mail has got some experts to sort the wheat from the chaff.
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“Calls to scrap traffic light system [ the new tiers of hell]”.
Why don’t they just scrap track and trace and all the other human rights abuses? What are they afraid of? Do they actually have a way out of this?
You know the answer: the human rights abuses and abolition are the whole point of the plandemic.
Looking that way. Still, they need to be asked this until they give a straight answer (or get locked up).
“NHS lets ‘trans’ [i.e. male]sex offenders on female wards”.
In the words of Sergeant Wilson, do you think that’s wise? Those George Cross awarded NHS heroes…
This happened in Broadmoor Hospital over 20 years ago, when there were still women’s wards. The transwoman was a convicted rapist. Every single woman on the ward had been sexually abused before being admitted, usually in childhood. The trans-person didn’t even make an attempt to look like a woman, except for having long hair. Looked a bit like a bloke out of one of the 70s rock bands.
Boris Johnson only “steps in” to save himself.
Peking Piffle?
The article on the BPS response to ‘nudging’ contains the following passage in their letter.
”With the transmissibility and seriousness of covid-19 ”
If these people believe covid ( the disease ) rather than SARS2 ( the virus) is transmissible , there is no hope for logic or sanity.
Can anyone post the Names, Addresses and Photos of the BPS who decided coercion for our own (as decided by bureaucrats convenience) good is OK as they don’t mind being nudged?
Steps in? It’s his illiberal policy to begin, the great fat communist fraud.
Personally I think the concern about the government’s psyops department is completely exaggerated.
If their psyops department is so fiendishly brilliant, how come they weren’t able to get the Brexit result they wanted?
There is really nothing sophisticated at all about what the government has pulled off in the last 18 months. It has used the oldest trick in the book, which dozens of thinkers and writers have warned is the tool by which tyrants will control people: fear.
“You’re going to kill granny” isn’t sophisticated. It’s shameless and brash.
I think we want to believe it’s all been sophisticated psyops because we struggle to believe that the British public would lay down so meekly at the feet of its rulers.
But it’s happened all over the world. The explanation isn’t in the UK government’s devious psyops department. It lies elsewhere.
It’s not sophisticated. It’s just basic PR and marketing, which is why it was set up by Cameron – the ultimate marketing shill.
And it only works on those who are easily hypnotisable. If adverts get you to buy shiny things, then you’re the target. If they don’t then you won’t be affected by them.
Unfortunately at least a third of the population are highly suggestible.
Cameron was simply ‘the heir to Blair’
‘A distinctive feature of the three Blair New Labour governments’ domestic policy was the effort to change citizens’ behaviour. Variously explained using such slogans as ‘something for something’, ‘responsibility’ and, in combating antisocial behaviour, ‘respect’, behaviour change was presented by the PM’s Strategy Unit as an overarching strategic framework for policy.’
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2009.00817.x?journalCode=psxa
And, of course, the Blair/Brown government got the idea from the U.S. who set up their own nudge unit in 2009.
“Cameron was simply ‘the heir to Blair’
As Blair was simply ‘the heir to Thatcher’
Someone opined that Blair was Thatcher in drag.
Someone (else?) opined that Cameron was Blair in drag.
Different personnel in charge and no opposition to it, at least no one in parliament.
I agree it’s very blunt but unfortunately that’s just proved to me that people are more dumb than I thought!
I will never stop being confused by this incentive approach to the “vaccines” whereby young people will now decide that it’s right for their health now that they’ve got a free burger and an Uber. I can’t imagine that simple psychology would’ve worked on me after around age 4-5 😂
If covert psychological strategies are good for the goose, then they are good for the gander.
Time to link people to Chinese Political Approach.
‘All problems in his view trace to not institutioning his personal version of the totalitarian state earlier than was politically feasible. If you read this book, just keep this in mind: we are talking about a mental framework that would in any context otherwise be considered psychopathic.’
https://brownstone.org/articles/what-were-lockdowners-thinking-a-review-of-jeremy-farrar/
‘Given the many valid dissenting scientific opinions that remain on these issues, we argue that recent attempts to force an apparent scientific consensus (including the IPCC reports) on these scientific debates are premature and ultimately unhelpful for scientific progress.’
‘Connolly et al. (2021), in a comprehensive and fascinating review of the temperature and solar-irradiance datasets, have concluded that the surface-temperature datasets continue to be contaminated by the urban heat-island effect.’
‘….by studying 16 solar irradiance datasets and identifying the best fits to northern-hemisphere temperature datasets, Connolly et al. conclude that between none (Svalgaard) and almost all (Hoyt & Schatten) of the global warming from 1850-2020 might have been caused by solar variability alone, depending on which irradiance dataset one uses:
“IPCC AR5 appears to have tried to overcome this problem by ignoring those datasets that give conflicting results…..’
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/02/the-new-pause-lengthens-again/
If you include climate change under the public health heading then that further clarifies the real struggle here: a concerted attempt by publicly funded, conceited, narrow minded, narrowly educated, arrogant and illiberal socialist theoriticians to impose a new world order based on flawed or subjectively selected models.
‘Every age has generated some fashionable and overriding reason why people cannot be free. Public health is the reason of the moment. In this author’s telling, everything we think we know about the social and political order must conform to his number one priority of pathogen avoidance and suppression, while every other concern (such as freedom itself) should take a back seat.’
(Brownstone above)
In my opinion, this is not a struggle we can win in Britain until the NHS is returned to the private (not for profit, as with BUPA) sector.
I have not and will not read ‘Spike’, but after having read Jonathan Sumption’s and Jeffrey Tucker’s take on it, it strongly reminds me of another book I have only read reviews of, and of its author and his mindset, various derangement syndroms and God complex: Mein Kampf.
I have to nitpick here. President Obama? What is he currently presiding over please, except a birthday party?
All previous US presidents are referred to as President X in informal settings. It’s a convention that has grown up in recent years – like calling any fool at a University “Professor”.
The Neil Oliver clip is a tonic and just the reminder I needed after last night attempting to persuade my teenage daughter not to go clubbing for the umpteenth time since they reopened. I don’t sleep that well when she’s out on the town. She told me that since she’s decided to not take the vaccine, she needs to make the absolute most of these precious few weeks. Having spent her 18th birthday with just the four of us and a few balloons, I get that. She ignored me and went anyway.
This morning, after watching Neil, I realised how I’d been just like the people I’ve been heavily criticising for the past year or so …. I wanted my peace of mind/desire for safety to trump her freedom. Thanks Neil for the reminder that freedom means freedom and that my anxieties about her safety are my own issue.
Anyway, I highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sjRxrH5QL0
A good talk, but the analogy doesn’t quite work. The government was never our parent and should never be considered to be. The Communist motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is literally the way a family is structured. It is not a suitable structure for free people.
“Nothing unethical about covert psychological ‘nudges’, says the BPS”
More substantiation of the ‘Floater Theory’ of social control – that one major problem is that an excess of windy turds have risen to the top of many organisations and are acting as agents of government.
“ Levels of fear within the general population were proportionate to the objective risk posed by the virus, rather than having been strategically inflated”
If you actually believe that, then your brain has gone walkies to meet the fairies at the bottom of the garden.
Excellent piece to camera from Neil Oliver, stating clearly the moral case against the tyranny.
“Twitter has suspended ex-New York Times science reporter and anti-lockdown campaigner Alex Berenson”
Do you remember all the bullshit about how (anti-)social media heralded a new age of information freedom?
Thing is – unless the power of corporate finance is bridled, nothing remains ‘free’ or democratic. Forget it.
Round Up is deteriorating from a useful summary of evidence about the corporate take-over to a 50% platform for irrelevant obsessions about the irritations of wokery.
Diversion from the sins of former mates?
Not surprising that political movements based on hatred, intolerance and lies – the anti-Trump and BLM movements – would end in violence.
Nor a surprise that kowtowing to them only encourages them to push further.