- “Churches should not be shutting their doors at Christmas time” – It is easy to be overtaken by the prevalent spirit of fear, but churches should balance risk with opportunity and duty, writes Michael Nazir Ali in the Telegraph.
- “Small companies fear more Covid restrictions” – “A majority of small and medium-sized businesses expect the Government to deal them ‘a body blow’ by putting further restrictions in place this month, according to a survey,” reports the Times.
- “We cannot let them lock us down again” – If we can’t live freely when the population is vaccinated and boostered, then when can we?, asks Fraser Myers in Spiked.
- “England hospital units may close as staff revolt over jab mandate, says NHS leader” – Vaccination rule comes into force in April but many staff are unwilling to participate, warns NHS Providers chief, reports the Guardian.
- “Boris Johnson will not impose more Covid restrictions before Christmas” – “Boris Johnson is unlikely to impose further Covid restrictions before Christmas after delaying a decision today,” reports the Times.
- “Cheese and wine-gate? The media have lost the plot” – The real scandal here is that having a few drinks in the sun was ever illegal in the first place, writes Tom Slater in Spiked.
- “Clun pub facing losses over Omicron cancellations” – The White Horse in Clun, Shropshire, will lose money for two months in a row, its landlord says, reports BBC News.
- “Covid has only exacerbated the crisis millions of children face” – More than a million vulnerable children in England now grow up with diminished life chances – we must do more to help them, writes Hilary Armstrong in the Telegraph.
- “Scientists call for urgent inquiry into care home residents who died of ‘broken hearts’” – A team of top scientists has called for an inquiry into tens of thousands of non-Covid deaths in care homes after finding evidence vulnerable residents died of thirst, starvation and ‘broken hearts’ in the pandemic, reports the Express.
- “There is risk in not spending Christmas with my elderly parents” – There comes a point when you have to decide – not whether you want to live or die, but whether you want to live at all, says Mark Piggot in the Telegraph.
- “European borders closed to Brits to slow the spread of Covid Omicron variant” – “The classification of Britain as a high-risk ‘virus variant area’ follows a French ban on travel and will be followed by other European bans over the coming days,” reports the Times.
- “Is our duty to avoid harm unlimited?” – “That this bizarre splinter society is also one that turns its back on our human rights is merely the confirmation of what many of us have long suspected: that the politicization of a nasty virus now threatens to unravel civil society in its entirety,” says Chris Bateman for the American Institute for Economic Research.
- “Queen’s University to return to remote learning in January” – The University said it was returning to online lectures and seminars after “having reviewed the developing public health situation”, reports BBC News.
- “The left would sacrifice the unvaccinated” – What happened to the principle that everyone deserves healthcare?, asks Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd.
- “Covid Omicron variant may damage lungs less than Delta” – “The Omicron variant may damage the lungs less than earlier strains of Covid, laboratory tests suggest,” reports the Times.
- “The erasure of liberty” – The Covid culture of fear is the greatest threat to freedom in the 21st century, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
- “U.K. high streets hit by dip in footfall over key Christmas weekend” – ‘Growing nervousness’ among shoppers because of Omicron variant, reports the Guardian.
- “Why Ash Barty won’t push unvaccinated teen to get jab” – “World number one Ash Barty has spoken with rising star Olivia Gadecki about her decision not to get vaccinated for the Australian Open but won’t try to change her mind,” reports PerthNow.
- “Military refuses to grant religious exemption to 12,000 troops” – “The Department of Defence has delayed granting exemptions to more than 12,000 American troops looking to avoid getting the Covid vaccine for religious reasons,” reports the Mail.
- “Do we need university HR departments?” – “Nowadays, these departments seem more focused on pursuing a ‘woke’ culture, dictating what staff can say or do or even think (or increasingly not), and introducing evidence-free, trendy but transient initiatives,” write David Thompson and Roger Watson in the European Conservative.
- “Woke demands similar to ‘religious fervour,’ University professor reportedly says” – “Academics hoping for promotion at University College London reportedly have to limit the number of ‘dead white men’ in their courses, under a scheme to ‘liberate’ the curriculum from its ‘Eurocentric, male-dominated’ focus,” reports RT.
- “Wokepedia’s greed makes a mockery of the season of giving” – The Wikipedia donation banner insists that ‘the price of a cup of coffee is all we need’ – but it doesn’t need it at all, writes Andrew Orlowski in the Telegraph.
- “Christmas time, cheese and wine, Downing Street’s having a whale of a time” – The agenda for the emergency Cabinet meeting has been leaked to the press, with those reportedly present at the meeting tasked with selecting three out of a possible five cheeses to bring to this week’s Downing Street Christmas party.
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Just a thought. If my calculations are correct, Jan 18th (or thereabouts) is day 666.
6 June 2022 (2+2+2).
I’m being tongue in cheek. Let the Thomists interpret the text.
“Churches should not be shutting their doors at Christmas”.
And the dean of Durham cathedral, and any other clerics who support “vaxports” and similar discrimination in their churches, should be sacked.
And defrocked.
God has sacked them, and the Devil has recruited them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-59732802
Bizzare to include this article! The BBC have managed to track down a solitary landlord in Clun (lovely place, by the way) who says that cancelled bookings cause losses. So ordering food and beer and hiring staff to work costs money then when the place is empty and guests aren’t spending money this causes a loss. Thanks BBC! Without your fearless quest for truth we would be wallowing in a pit of ignorance.
Next BBC article suggestions? How about “Loss of my small business I built up over 30 years has caused me to somewhat scale down my Christmas spending this year”?
“England hospital units may close over ‘vaccine’ mandate”.
Protecting the NHS are you, Peking Piffle?
Interesting article. The numbers are all over the place (it is The Guardian, after all) but 125,000 is almost 1 in 10 NHS staff. That would be catastrophic for patient outcomes – as outlined it is very difficult to replace highly specialised and experienced staff.
“Clun pub facing loss over o mi cron cancellations”
Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun soon will be the quietest places under the sun if the government continues its assault on business…
And Edward Thomas died to keep them free…
” Care home residents died of thirst, starvation and broken hearts during ‘pandemic’ “.
Granny killers!
Bring on those trials…
“Is our duty to avoid harm unlimited”.
Now about that computer modelling for the worst case scenario if this mass road crossing we see everywhere continues unabated…
US Republicans – a stark contrast to UK “Conservatives”:
“Biden’s entire pandemic response is a giant bureaucratic mess of incoherence and misinformation. Just this week he said this:
[Biden: “How about making sure that you’re vaccinated so that you do not spread the disease to anybody else? What about that?”]
“What about that” is that “that” is not true, you useless lying fool! Even your own CDC Director says it’s not true!
[CDC Director: “Vaccines are working exceptionally well. They continue to work well for Delta with regard to severe illness and death, they prevent it, but what they can’t do any more is prevent transmission”]
It’s nonstop lies and misinformation. Biden’s still running around – or I suppose we should say stumbling around – saying this:
[Biden: “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The unvaccinated, not the vaccinated. The unvaccinated. That’s the problem.”]
Oh, is it? Is it really? Do Biden’s nurses – sorry, “aides” – even tell him what’s in the news? Cornell University, they just reported nearly 900 new cases with 97% of the students vaccinated. Virtually every case of Omicron has been found in fully vaccinated students. Some have even had three shots, as instructed by Biden and Fauci. Worse still, the panicky idiots who run Cornell University have sent everyone home, even though the students are barely at risk. Because they’re still, like so many other idiots in our ruling elite, nearly two years into the pandemic, pushing the utterly failed and discredited Fauci dogma of trying to stop all infections, instead of protecting the most vulnerable.
It’s the biggest public policy failure in history, and instead of correcting it, they’re lying, to try and justify it. None of it works, none of it makes sense. Unbelievably, Fauci – and of course they all take their cue from him still – pushing mask wearing, even though it’s been totally debunked.
[Fauci: “in indoor settings where you do not know the vaccine status of people, then you should be wearing a mask”]
He knows masks don’t stop the virus! He’s the one who first said so, right back at the beginning. I don’t know what we can do about a ruling class that just lies like this, in order to boss us all around! The CDC’s own study, published in May last year shows there’s almost no evidence surgical masks and cloth masks work, and no that’s not “medical misinformation”, Youtube, it’s medical fact. It’s science.
And if you want to hear the absolute, definitive science-based case against forced mask-wearing, do not miss an extended conversation I had recently with Dr Scott Atlas on my California Rebel Base podcast.”
Biden is ‘obviously senile’: Steve Hilton
Ron DeSantis: Floridians know there will be no lockdowns
“A stark contrast”.
Yes – they’re not monarchist.
If we could borrow De Santis though…
“Yes – they’re not monarchist.”
Well, of you prefer to focus on a triviality, that’s your choice. I prefer to focus on their generally strong opposition to lockdowns and mandates, in contrast to our “Conservatives” who have enthusiastically embraced such inherently leftist (radical collectivist) totalitarianism.
Be interesting to know why they took a triviality for their party’s name.
Incidentally, one of the few republics that worked, although even that one is hideously divided.
Because when the party was founded, it was rather more relevant than now (or rather, it harked back to a time when it had been genuinely relevant and important).
But that was 150 years ago.
But what I am interested in is your personal choice of response. My impression of your positions generally is that you are profoundly hostile to the covid panic nonsense, but most especially the intrusive and authoritarian mandates – lockdowns, mask and “vaccine” coercion.
That’s fine, and I largely share your positions on that.
So why, when the main source of organised political resistance to precisely those policies in the “western” world was highlighted, was your choice of response an implicitly dismissive one? Do you have a personal or political dislike of the Republican Party that overrides the seemingly less important ones (apparently, for you) of lockdowns and mask and “vaccine” coercion? That’s your business, if so, but it tells me, and perhaps you, something about your actual priorities, imo.
Could be it was just a light hearted piece of sardonic humour on your part, of course,, in which case I’m reading too much into it. Hard to tell, in writing.
Nothing particularly against the Republican party, and to be fair, there are plenty of things I wouldn’t defend about the British regime of the 18th Century (and rather more about the French one post 1889).
I’m just not sure how far it’s going to get us though, to keep coming back to partisan political points in a disparate group of people united by an issue that to a considerable degree cuts across party politics (although the so-called United States’ Republican Party may be an exception). If I go to an anti-lockdown protest and see some Socialist Worker supporters there, discussing the pros and cons of socialism might not be my first priority – their opposition to lockdowns is rather more important in that context..
Also, it amuses me that campaigners for a Republican state are seen as right wing, but maybe that’s just me..
In general, I might be considerably closer to your views than, say, RickH, but I wonder if that might be a bit besides the point in the current situation – people of the left and the right are against these human rights abuses. Obviously, it is up to each individual if they want to discuss these political topics on here (same as the “first” post thing that people used to do), but for me it is not the most important thing.
Also, I’m not sure the native “Americans” have been treated entirely fairly over the years. I suspect that if a similar thing happened to my country, I might resent it somewhat, though this also cuts across politics, I suppose – the author of The Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum, was said to be a model liberal apart from his policy of genocide towards the native Americans. It seems it wasn’t just British Darwinian naturalists in Tasmania who were at it back then.
What we do have in this country now is an epidemic of testing.
More tests equals more cases, the vast majority of whom are suffering such flimsy symptoms they wouldn’t normally think anything of it at this time of year.
We already have a highly vaccinated population, and an unofficial lockdown by people who do not want to have their Christmas plans ruined, so aren’t going out.
Many ‘hospitalisations’ are people gong into hospital for something else, who happen to test positive, because everyone going into hospital will be tested at least weekly.
You just don’t hear this from the media, who want to turn everything into a catastrophe.
I’ve logged a test result today as I am going to a football match tomorrow and vaxpass or negative LFT is an entry requirement. There must be millions of tests each week just for entry to places requiring vaxpass or LFT -ve result.
Until businesses see drops in footfall for imposing such requirements, they will not resist them strongly enough to prevent the regime imposing them.
Just saying…
“Scientists call for urgent inquiry into care home residents who died of ‘broken hearts’”
And a strong cocktail of Midazolam and Morphine… but let’s not talk about that, eh?
Let’s not talk about cruelty.
Let’s not talk about hypocrisy.
Let’s not talk about violating every conceivable tenet of human decency.
Let’s not talk about killing granny.
Let’s not talk about state-sponsored murder.
Let’s not talk about being governed by fiends from Hell
4 Telegraph, 4 Times, 2 Grauniad, 2 BBC items.
A little heavy on the left propaganda units eh Toby?
I’m one of the privileged Eloi – I work above ground in an office, separated from other people and kept ‘clean’ by misguided ‘work from home’ directives. Like Whitty and Vallance, I spent most of 2020 at home in the glorious weather (although admittedly like many working 10-12 hours+ days), every now and then served by a Morlock, working in the underground of Amazon, or Ocado or Deliveroo, forced together with little consideration for whether they got ill or died from the virus (which incidentally led to an increase in death rate of under 0.1%, and about 0.03% if you were fortunate enough to be under 70).
Unlike Whitty and Vallance, and Boris and the supposedly socialist Keir Starmer, I am revolted by the horrific re-introduction of 1920’s style (or probably much worse) class distinctions, the destruction of the souls of the young, the loss of jobs, the ruin of the leisure and socialisation of just about everybody in society, and the thousands of unlucky people who will die of cancer and other causes because of the blindness and negligence of our government, its hopeless advisers and the so-called opposition.
Now they have a great opportunity, a new variant that is even less toxic than the original, that can infect many people but does relatively little harm – their own personal ‘get out of jail free’ card, and what are they going to do: damage society even more to ‘protect’ us from this new scourge. Aided and abetted every now and then by a noble and brave, but ultimately misguided, doctor too keen to come on television to tell of their latest horrors – which are truly horrific and frightening, but affect a small element of the population and are not worth turning the world off for.
Let us have the courage, alongside the 100 or so brave Tories and other MPs (including Corbyn – I suppose you must give credit where it’s due), to campaign against the latest iteration of this nonsense.
To a healthy and happy 2022 !!
To a healthy and happy 2022 !!
Not if Boris and the gang can help it.
Cheers.
And I’m sorry I used to think there was no good in Corbyn. I’ve even managed to scrape up some good thought about Diane Abbott.
This is an inherent problem with a culture that bases its morality on the liberal harm principle – it’s a great sounding idea, and it works fine for a while, but it struggles when attacked at its weak point – the definition of what constitutes harm and when it should be applied to justify regulatory intervention (it is clearly insufficient in itself).
JS Mill might argue that the “harm” caused by exposing people to a general risk of an endemic respiratory disease does not justify regulatory action, because people in general cannot reasonably expect not to be exposed to such risks in the course of ordinary living.
That indeed was, in practice, the position in our more morally and socially healthy culture in the past, before it was sabotaged by the manipulative introduction of fear-based notions of exaggerated precautions. It’s doubtful we can ever now return to that more rational and more sensible society. The power-seeking authoritarians, and the profit-seeking pharma corporations and health professionals have destroyed it, and as is often the case in cultural matters, it is far easier to destroy than to build.
Similar issues arise in relation to the ongoing destruction of our freedom of speech by introducing the idea that mere offence can be treated as harm – something Mill specifically warned against, but failed to address coherently.
These changes to our culture have been gross acts of vandalism that have cost us dear, and we are unlikely to recover from in less than generations, yet the perpetrators have gotten away with them largely without the harmfulness of their behaviour being recognised.
“Rights are promises made by our societies that we can choose to uphold or dismiss, and the matters they are concerned with are authentic questions of political freedom. ”
This is not the American view of what rights are and whence they derive:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Among the greatest words in the English language. I wonder how they got from there to segregation (and killing children)?
These people have always killed children, it delights them.
If a black wax coating makes a cheddar’s consistency “buttery and creamy”, what does a green wax coating make it, or a red and white stripy wax coating?
The rubbish one can read on the internet!
ITEM: “Why Ash Barty won’t push unvaccinated teen to get jab” – “World number one Ash Barty has spoken with rising star Olivia Gadecki about her decision not to get vaccinated for the Australian Open but won’t try to change her mind,” reports PerthNow.
The ‘teenage tennis sensation’ from Queensland (her big scalps include Australian Open winner and world no. 4, Sofia Kenin), has knocked back the vaxx proving she can use her brain just as well as her racquet. As a 19 year-old lass, she would also be mindful of the vaxx’s potential to wreak reproductive harm, and has decided to put her future health, that of her future children, and her future tennis career and livelihood ahead of the short term offer of a wildcard entry (and its attractive $90,000 just for showing up) to the Australian Open in Melbourne in January – but only (thanks to a Daniel Andrews vaxx mandate decree) if she is fully-jabbed.
Gadecki is a protégé of Ash Barty whose statement that she is ‘proud’ to support Gadecki’s choice is an implied dig by the double-jabbed Wimbledon champion and world No. 1 at every Covid totalitarian who is mandating the Covid vaxxes rather than leaving the decision re the vaxx as a personal choice free of coercion. Touch Australia’s sporting heroes at your own risk, you Covid freaks!
A recent poll found that 42% of Australians who have got the shot have felt pressured (by governments, employers, etc.) to get it. Olivia Gadecki, despite the personal cost, has found the courage to say no. She is a Hero of the Resistance!
I suppose that’s not a real place like Liberal?
‘Woke demands like religious fervour’.
Hmm. You do not really know what religion or fervour is, do you, professor?
“Queen’s University to return to remote learning in January” – “having reviewed the developing public health situation.”
It’s clear that to most public organisations, “reviewing the health situation” meansnothing more or less than “implementing the government’s guidelines.” Health and Safteyt officers across the country are not actually doing risk assessments at all, but interpretation of political insrructions to keep safe legally.
That would be OK if it wasn’t costing so much in lives and health.