- “We’re in the Age of the Curfew – and there’s no escape” – “I can’t say when we will be confined to our homes again and prevented from working. But after last week’s parliamentary report on the Covid panic, you may be sure it will happen. Next time it may well not be Covid. But that does not matter,” writes Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday.
- “The truth is still in lockdown” – The first cross-party report says we didn’t lock down early enough. The truth is, lockdowns don’t work, writes Laura Dodsworth in her latest Substack update.
- “Anti-vaxxers march through London demanding ‘don’t jab our kids’” – Hundreds of demonstrators were seen marching by Hyde Park Corner on Saturday as they protested against mandatory vaccination passports and the vaccination of children, reports MailOnline.
- “The Little Dark Age – The Week in Review” – S.D. Wickett and Luke Perry discuss the murder of Sir David Amess and the political monoculture on university campuses in the latest Bournbrook Magazine podcast.
- “Safetyism” – “Over the last 18 months, the barrage of public health messaging about the perils of Covid coursed down the same deep riverbed carved by the doomsday rhetoric we’ve been hearing for years: warnings about climate apocalypse, rampant racism, and other social evils,” writes R.R. Reno in First Things.
- “Pandexit, please: The need for a Covid end date” – “The rolling Covid mandates and restrictions sidestep the most important question: what is the end-game,” writes award winning medical journalist Gabrielle Bauer in Bournbrook Magazine.
- “Proof that the CDC is lying to the world about Covid vaccine safety” – “Nobody wants to face the fact that they were wrong,” writes Steve Kirsch in TrialSite.
- “Zero-Covid has transformed Melbourne into a RoboCop-style dystopia” – The true cost of our lockdown policy is yet to be fully understood. While deaths have remained low, other metrics paint a disastrous picture, writes Megan Goldin in the Telegraph.
- “German state allows all businesses to ban unvaxxed customers, even for groceries and other essentials” – The German state of Hesse has become the first to allow businesses to deny the unvaccinated access even to basic necessities, setting a troubling precedent as its neighbours wrestle with protests against vaccination mandates, reports RT.
- “Despite the tough rhetoric, ministers are handing Britain’s electric car production to China” – Kwasi Kwarteng’s Business Department seems extraordinarily reluctant to properly scrutinise the sales of strategic assets, writes Juliet Samuel in the Telegraph.
- “Tory donor whose dad lends PM his helicopter nabs millions in eco-deals” – Jo Bamford, the heir to the JCB empire, has set himself up in the hydrogen fuel industry – set to be big business at next month’s COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow, reports the Mirror.
- “The climate change cult now owes more to religion than rationality” – A fundamental failure to understand the real nature and purpose of science risks dire consequences, writes Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
- “Failed Serial Doomcasters” – “According to the UN’s MyWorld poll of seven million people in 194 countries, out of the 16 possibilities climate action came out… wait for it… dead last.” Willis Eschenbach writes in Watts Up With That.
- “Do we really need to panic about flooding in Britain?” – “It is quite right that the Environment Agency prepares for worst-case climate change scenarios. But it would do us all a favour if its leader didn’t feel compelled to draw attention to their work through hysterical statements which are serving merely to feed anxiety in impressionable people,” writes Ross Clark in the Spectator.
- “The Big Tech barons must be stopped” – The social-media giants have an unprecedented amount of control over public debate, writes Norman Lewis in Spiked.
- “We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage” – “Liberty. Equality. Freedom. Dignity. These are ideas worth fighting for,” writes Bari Weiss in Commentary.
- “The misogyny of trans activists” – At a conference in Portsmouth, they behaved like they wanted a war, not dialogue, writes Julie Bindel in UnHerd.
- “Sweden is down to 52nd in the ranking of total Covid deaths per capita since the pandemic began” – James Melville writes: “Almost every other country ranked above Sweden had lockdowns, mask mandates and restrictions. Sweden largely kept its society open, freedoms intact and with no vaccine passports.”
Sweden
— James Melvilleis down to 52nd in the ranking of total Covid deaths per capita since the pandemic began. Almost every other country ranked above Sweden had lockdowns, mask mandates and restrictions. Sweden largely kept its society open, freedoms intact and with no vaccine passports. pic.twitter.com/urGBgFPFOt
(@JamesMelville) October 16, 2021
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For the record, I have no interest in what the Lesser Hitchens has to say, after he admitted to taking Matt Hancock’s toxic little prick inside him, twice, in order to get his freedoms back.
How’s that working out, chap?
The Lesser Hitchens is the most tarnished and tawdry of tin gods.
I intend to avoid the Mail on Sunday after they printed that disgraceful piece by stick-at-nought Hancock. And it is disappointing that Hitchens has given in on this. However, I think he has been good on some issues.
He has yet to point out that quacksine macht nicht frei.
Yes – a definite curate’s egg!
Wokingham Stand in the Park
Howard Palmer Gardens RG40 2HD
Make friends – talk freedom – have a laugh
Sundays 10am
behind the Cockpit Path car park in the centre of the town
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
I don’t agree with the dismissal of those who resist the lockdowns but take the “vaccine”. It’s the direct equivalent of the antilockdowners who dismiss “vaccine” resisters as “antivaxxers” and “conspiracy theorists”, and it introduces unnecessary division, making the best the enemy of the good.
As far as resistance to the covid disaster is concerned, imo the line should be drawn at one’s attitude to mass and coerced “vaccination”. I do think it is morally wrong to take the “vaccine”, primarily because it weakens solidarity with those resisting its coercive imposition, but the freedom to choose must go both ways.
As for Hitchens, casting him into the outer darkness rather churlishly forgets his crucial and lonely early resistance to lockdowns, and disregards his hugely positive contributions to the continuing resistance to the coronapanic, as evidenced again today:
PETER HITCHENS: We’re in the Age of the Curfew – and there’s no escape
By PETER HITCHENS FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:08, 16 October 2021 | UPDATED: 22:09, 16 October 2021
Prepare to be confined to your home again. Prepare to be prevented from working and put on a state dole. Prepare to have your education trashed.
Prepare to be banned from travelling and required to show wads of paper or permit intrusive apps to be installed on your phone.
I can’t say when this will be. But after last week’s parliamentary report on the Covid panic, you may be sure it will happen. Next time it may well not be Covid. But that does not matter.
A terrifying principle has been established, that shutting down society is a wise and proportionate response to disease.
If you want to know how bad this can get in a supposedly free country, look at what has being going on, over and over again, in the Australian state of Victoria and especially the once-delightful city of Melbourne.
A bullying and overbearing police force has allowed itself to be used to enforce the orders of a not very intelligent head of government. Life has been miserable, confined and under surveillance.
And nobody knows when this will stop or whether it will start again.
I mention this because I am pretty sure that the next time our country goes for a national shutdown, it will be much better prepared and have many fewer loopholes than it had last time.
Those who like this sort of thing will have been watching carefully and they will have noticed how some people managed to stretch the rules a bit to make life more bearable. There will be none of that. Show your papers, get scanned, or else.
And all on the basis of what? Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee and the Health and Social Care Committee simply assume that shutdowns work.
This belief is now the conventional wisdom, the groupthink which these MPs weirdly claim that others suffer from.
Evidence from around the world does not support this at all. From Japan to Sweden, nations which instead used light-touch restrictions did not do significantly worse than those which put their people under rigid house arrest.
And the hardliners did not do particularly well. Take the Czech Republic, to begin with much praised by shutdown enthusiasts.
It ‘locked down’ on March 16, 2020, slammed tight controls on its frontiers and issued Europe’s first mask decree. Yet that autumn the disease returned in force, leading it to shut down again – and the process was repeated in December.
It currently has the sixth-highest number of deaths per million, 2,860, compared with relaxed Sweden’s 1,451. And that is despite the fact that Sweden, like us, badly mishandled its care homes.
Studies from around the world show there is no obvious link between shutdowns and the containment of the disease. What’s more, this is the first time in human history in which the healthy, rather than the sick, have been quarantined.
What we need is better MPs and a more vigilant media. But without them, we’ll be back before long to the days of the Sunbathing Squad, the Picnic Squad, the Front Garden Squad, and drones flying over remote moorlands, tracking hikers trying to get away from it all.
This is the Age of the Curfew. I wonder which other bit of the Middle Ages they will reintroduce next?
I disagree with Hitchens on some issues, agree with him on many. He’s not a saint, just a flawed human being like the rest of us. But he’s an unusually experienced and quite a wise one, and imo his response to the covid panic has highlighted that he is just the kind of person we ought to have in our House of Lords (and, of course, just the kind of person who is highly unlikely to be appointed to that position, sadly).
LOL! I’d forgotten that Hitchens piece was already listed in the atl RoundUp. Sorry for the duplication. Well worth a read, anyway.
But is behind a paywall. Thanks for posting so that it could be freely read.
Don’t think it is (unless I’ve bought a subscription to the MoS without realising…).
Tbh one of the reasons I mainly use the DM to follow the msm fairy stories is that it’s free access, and I assumed the MoS is the same.
If you go to his blog (which also avoids all the tedious Mail addenda) there is no paywall : https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
Hitchens gave his piece a rather defeatist title. Is the message give up?
Tiresome to read the Middle Ages being disparaged once again.
In many ways, I’d rather live then than now, that’s for sure. Give it another few years and the middle ages may seem like a wondrous time of freedom in comparison. Probably already do in some parts of Australia.
‘ imo the line should be drawn at one’s attitude to mass and coerced “vaccination” ‘
Absolutely this. “Vaccine” coercion has been perhaps the most oisonous aspect of this whole shambles. It is pretty much equivalent to rape.
‘For the record, I have no interest in what the Lesser Hitchens has to say, after he admitted to taking Matt Hancock’s toxic little prick inside him, twice, in order to get his freedoms back.’
That’s rather silly. While I certainly lost some respect for Peter Hitchens after he admitted he caved to the blackmail, it would be irrational to dismiss all he has to say.
‘The Lesser Hitchens is the most tarnished and tawdry of tin gods.’
This is ironic considering you sound like one of those Christopher Hitchens ‘fanboys’. This ‘Lesser Hitchens’ trope is hackneyed and passé. It is embarrassing, and it reveals a certain level of cultishness. Do you also refer to Christopher as ‘Hitch’ or ‘The Hitch’, as if you knew him? Do you reverently refer to the (apparently famous in unthinking circles) ‘Hitch slap’?
Both Christopher and Peter (were and are) towering intellects, extremely well read and well travelled, and both deserve respect regardless of one’s political leanings.
Unfortunately for Christopher and his adoring fans, he had a severe blind spot when it came to world view and philosophical argumentation. While he was extremely clever and witty, he was utterly inept philosophically. His arguments for atheism never got beyond the emotional, and were consistently question-begging.
“Pandexit please”.
(Or shamdexit). It’s about time we had a proper exit strategy. And about time the muppets working for papers like the Times started pushing back against what is looking increasingly like permanent restrictions.
The govt changed ofcom rules in May 2020 to instruct MSM not to contradict the govt line on pretty much anything. The MSM in its current format cannot push back.
It’s true that there are rules in place, but if that were really the only reason they don’t speak truth to power there would be lots of high profile resignations, cases of publications making a big noise about defying the rules, etc. Clearly the owners, managers, editors and “journalists”, as a class, are mostly behind the panic (or at the least, not strongly opposed to it).
We could do with a lot more of this kind of thing:
I cannot do it anymore
In an open letter, an employee of German public broadcaster ARD is critical of one and a half years of Corona coverage: Ole Skambraks has worked as an editorial assistant and editor at the public broadcaster for 12 years.
OLE SKAMBRAKS, 14. Oktober 2021, 0 Kommentare, PDF
That article was featured in yesterday’s Roundup.
It shows how closely the German State mirrors that of the UK in the conduct of Lockdown. They using ‘shock tactics’ to induce ‘a climate of fear’ as in the UK.
Did they actually have to do follow this, and if so, what about LS and papers like The Light, or are they exempt?
Remember the tsunamis of covid/lockdown propaganda posing as advertising. The MSM will not bite the hand that feeds them.
The article makes the crucial point that the covvibollox will stop when people stop obeying it, i.e. when they are no longer lobotomised by terror porn.
I’m not even sure if the average sheep is actually terrified anymore. The line I often hear touted is “covid hasn’t gone away”. Therefore they have to carry on with the masks and gel and tests etc or it will be tantamount to admitting that there was no point in the first place. However, when faced with an opportunity to experience some old normal they lap it up.
“Proof that the CDC is lying”.
The CDC that is in bed with big pharma – which has lied repeatedly, over many years up to the present time. Now why don’t you report that, you Times muppets?
(Actually, I can guess – because they are probably in bed with them too, effectively).
And why wasn’t this the DS headline, not stories about incompetent politicians and their tarts?
The culture war meets the coronapanic.
In many ways this is a very telling exchange, not for its informational content but rather in the attitudes and behaviours exhibited.
Feminist Lawyer Calls Dave Sexist as Vaccine Mandate Debate Gets Heated | POLITICS | Rubin Report
The self-confessed and self-described leftist (“progressive”) panicker attacks Rubin for “sexism” for describing progressives like her as being “hysterical authoritarians”, literally seconds after she had accused him of being “irresponsible” for choosing not to be vaccinated.
Leftist panicker: “if you exercise your choice not to get a vaccine, you get to do that, but you also have to pay the consequences of that, and the consequences of that may be that you’re not going to be able to have a job any more.”
Let’s just think how that might have been phrased just a few decades ago (except leftists hysterically opposed and overturned it):
“if you exercise your choice to be a communist, you get to do that, but you also have to pay the consequences of that, and the consequences of that may be that you’re not going to be able to have a job any more.”
This is, in a nutshell, the leftist bullshit argument that “there is no such thing as cancel culture, it’s just conservatives facing consequences for their speech”.
Shameless, totalitarian leftist hypocrisy, as clear as day and as culturally poisonous as you can get. These are the attitudes that dominate in the cultures of the US sphere elites today.
But sure, if you feel more comfortable insisting that “no true lefty would say these things” or “there’s no such thing as left/right any more” or “it’s not what’s important”, feel free to live in your fantasy world instead of reality.
The sharper former lefties, like Peter Hitchens or indeed Dave Rubin, jumped ship long ago when they saw the way things were going.
Or as practiced in the USSR ‘if you choose not to be a communist . . . you’re not going to be able to have a job/education/life anymore’ .
Much the same with the nazis.
And the corona totalitarians complete the hellish trinity.
The entertaining CNN v Joe Rogan saga continues. Now Gupta has put out a desperate damage limitation piece making excuses for his weak, guilty performance and dissing Rogan.
CNN Doctor Gupta Claims He Was TERRIFIED Joe Rogan Would Physically Attack Him During Their Talk
In reality, the reason Gupta was guilty looking, nervous and ineffective in addressing Rogan’s direct and honest questioning was that Gupta knew that he was there to defend a line which his employers had indeed lied about.
Further, he knew that his social and potentially his employment status depended on not under any circumstances admitting the truth, that the reasons why the US msm lied about Rogan’s use of ivermectin were precisely because they cannot afford to have the idea get around that covid could be treatable with safe and cheap off-patent drugs, which would undermine the entire covid panic and coercive “vaccination” policies.
I’ve seen a suggestion that if IVM is effective in treating covvie then it could also be effective in treating flu and colds. Imagine that becoming public knowledge.
I daresay someone will get around to testing it on them as well (perhaps they already have), but colds and flus aren’t The Worst Pandemic In Human History TM.
“In general, the only people who thought it was important were the perpetually offended white wokerati with pronouns …”
Climate alarmists are the global equivalent of the Insulate Britain zealots, but with a firmer grip on the media and on political elites.
What a wonderful, spitty little piece by the Daily Mail. Using all the “conspiracy theorist” word salads they could muster up, accusing the “anti-vaxxwrs” of “spreading disinformation” and throwing out all sorts of disingenuous lies, which, ironically, is exactly what the the mainstream media and their controllers are guilty of! And yet at the same time providing a huge piece of publicity about the march! As they say, no publicity is bad publicity.
The Daily will be acting under the same censorship restraints as the rest of the MSM.
They will know perfectly well the opinion of those many readers who comment and vote on other comments, always overwhelmingly sceptical.
These articles provide a vehicle for that scepticism. To expand on a thought yesterday, perhaps some of the most absurd pro lockdown pro vax comments (often with give away ridiculous names) are inserted by Daily Mail staffers to give their readers even more to rage against.
Local Live (mirror group news) main article this Sunday morning.
“Schools lead rise in County cases”.
No surprise there; this succinct headline is followed by an unbelievably long and tedious breakdown of local circumstances that could easily have been illustrated as a simple chart.
It is accompanied by a short video presentation of the national picture which I imagine appears in a Covid related article every day. The graphic remains the same but with various statistics overlaid.
Can anybody out there spot the Cartography Calamity ?
Is it floating about loose in the Irish Sea?
That’s it Norman, bonus for spotting that although the statistics are broken down by England, Wales, Scotland and N.I., Cardiff has disappeared.
ITEM: “Zero-Covid has transformed Melbourne into a RoboCop-style dystopia” – The true cost of our lockdown policy is yet to be fully understood. While deaths have remained low, other metrics paint a disastrous picture, writes Megan Goldin in the Telegraph.
Symbolic of the Covid insanity/tyranny in Melbourne is the latest cry-laugh video of police checking an unmasked man’s coffee cup to see if there was really coffee in it and it was not in fact empty and just an excuse to not wear a mask.
As hundreds of Melbourne’s finest were mobilised in a ‘ring of steel’ to thwart would-be protesters from entering the city as part of the nationwide protest rallies held yesterday, protesters got creative with the absurd lockdown rules by taking a picnic to a park, then going to a cafe to order a coffee, drink the coffee and then carry it around all afternoon as they do a brisk walk. Dan Andrews, Lockdown Emperor Supreme, has allowed masks to be removed when drinking beverages whilst outside for (time-limited) exercise, picnics allowed (within your permitted 5k radius). Don’t dare shout out ‘No More lockdowns’, however, with other picnic rebels because that will draw the ire of the police and a trip to Dan’s dungeons.
No wonder that one of the most popular chants at the protest rallies elsewhere in Australia’s capital cities was ‘Free Victoria’. In total, around a hundred thousand Australians (Far-Right Conspiracy Theorists and Anti-Vaxxers, natch) hit the streets to say they are fed up – with their Covid control-freak state premiers, their ‘public health’ Svengalis and with Australia’s Prime Minister who is doing his level best impression of Where’s Wally.
Phil
Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist and unvaxxed vermin, heigh-ho!
Adelaide
Thanks for that Phil; do you think Dan Andrews will find away around the coffee exemption, ban coffee takeaways or simply remove the exemption?
You can buy a coffee, but you can’t remove your facepants in order to drink it.
Could be any of the above but the question may be moot since Victoria has today just hit the magic 80% double-jabbed mark (80.2% of the 16+population – isn’t it amazing what the world’s longest lockdown and ‘No Jab No Job’ policy can achieve – terror works!) which Andrews says means the end of lockdown from next week. Liberation Day, at last! But only for the double-jabbed, of course.
Out of interest, have any of these psychopathic thugs dressed as police, who’ve gone viral for brutalizing members of the public, had legal action taken against them by their victims? Because when it’s caught on film that’s all the evidence you need for a conviction right there. If not, where the feck have all the lawyers gone??
There are lawyers who are keeping their powder dry and collecting video material for a reckoning on behalf of the worst-affected victims of police violence, whilst Vic Police have suspended one officer for overstepping the mark (which must have been really bad considering the stuff that his peer have routinely gotten up to when dealing with rebellious citizens).
Most lawyers worth their salt have been fighting losing battles against Public Health Orders and vaxx passports in various courts in the land (where’s Horace Rumpole when you need him – he wasn’t afraid to defend the rights of criminal ‘scum’).
I’m with you – bring on the legal suits against Dan’s Robocops. Even the Covid-compliant judiciary wouldn’t be able to dismiss video evidence of wrongdoing.
“Even the Covid-compliant judiciary wouldn’t be able to dismiss video evidence of wrongdoing“
Idk. Remember that legal systems in the grip of these kinds of moral panics that conveniently dovetail with elite authoritarianism are capable of some pretty remarkable feats of judicial gymnastics.
Not so long ago the UK police openly executed an innocent Brazilian in public, and nobody was individually convicted (as opposed to institutional wrist-slapping) of anything, as far as I recall.
But it’s absolutely right to make the effort. Optimism of the will. pessimism of the intellect.
Vic Police have suspended one officer for overstepping the mark
Presumably that was the cop who ran in from nowhere and slammed a citizen to the floor. The cop who knocked an elderly woman to the ground comes a close second.
If there’s been worse than either of these thug moments… hell, I shudder to think.
From the Roundup ‘Pandexit please, we need an endgame’. Bournbrook magazine.
Misses the point, TPTB don’t want an endgame, they are enjoying the power too much and fear that were the game to end they might have to face the consequences of abusing that power.
From the Roundup ‘Climate change cult now owes more to religion than rationality’ Janet Daley, Telegraph.
“Dutifully following . . . The Science turned out not such a good idea after all . . .”
Thanks Janet, been saying that for years, same goes for covid/lockdown/vaccines these past 12-18 months.
Hitchen’s is a busted flush. He no longer has any credibility after selling out for holiday.
Some old normal.
I’ve had a tough week this week so I wanted to let you all know about how I spent last weekend and how wonderful it was. I won’t give too many specific details but it was a weekend long amateur sporting competition.
Approx 480 competitors, prob 1000 spectators if we assume each person brought one coach/supporter on average. Prob around 80-100 volunteers on top of the organisers, many vendors inc. caterers. All indoors and impeccably organised.
Not one single mention of the existence of respiratory viruses was made. No announcements, no masks, no sanitiser, no distancing, no one way systems, no freezing draughts, certainly no requirements for tests or compulsory jabbyjabs. Plenty of hugging, high fives and fist bumps. Much shouting and cheering. Even some daytime dancing to the v loud music. The only bodily fluids being wiped up were blood and sweat.
It was wonderful.
Congratulations to you and all the others having such a great time while the freedom hesitant cower in their sanitised homes watching propaganda.
I mentioned last week about taking a lunchtime trip to our riverside leisure and tourism hub. The outside seating areas were all busy with entirely mask free youngish people enjoying the late sunshine.
When I came out of a bar with my drink and gestured for ‘permission’ to share a table/bench with the three young men already using it we all knew it was about ‘invading their space’ in the old normal way, sod all to do with Covid.
Sverige – elefanten in rummet.
While I live far from the madness of Danfukditstan, we’re not exactly free in the west either.
Bearded gent by the name of Matt Dillion provides a fair and accurate update here.
Dozens of Scientists, Others Could Be Fired After Judge Won’t Halt COVID Vaccine Mandate
ROFL!
Those damned science deniers!
https://live.childrenshealthdefense.org/shows/the-peoples-testaments?utm_source=salsa&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=chd_tv&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=08be546f-5bae-454a-a479-511a5f05893a
Brave young schoolboy refuses to be masked in school. Interview.