- “Covid fear-mongering has consequences too” – The scaremongers have overplayed their hand, according to Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator.
- “This narrow obsession with Covid has starved our lives of meaning” – Douglas Murray in the Telegraph says Christmas is a chance to lift our sights beyond entertainment, sport, and – most of all – the pandemic.
- “Austrian doctors defy law that criminalises the non-vaccinated” – Austrian doctors are defying the law that criminalises the non-vaccinated, reports Kathy Gyngell in the Conservative Woman.
- “Sorry Santa, you’re too white, straight and male, poll finds” – Nearly two-thirds (60%) of 18-24 year-olds in the U.K. think it is ‘acceptable’ for Father Christmas to be gay, while half said they were happy for an ethnic minority Santa, YouGov has found.
- “The HART Christmas Quiz – HART” – Here we are at the end of another year… what have we learned?
- “The misery of Macron’s Covid clampdown” – Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator says that his daughter will be spending Christmas with him but not her French mother, thanks to the draconian restrictions imposed on travel between our two countries by President Macron.
- “Tougher Covid rules lasting until spring among several proposals drawn up by experts” – Restrictions starting as early as next Monday have been modelled by those always reasonable members of SAGE’s SPI-M group.
- “Fourth jabs possible as Covid booster immunity may fall for millions by new year” – Protection against getting sick with Omicron is as low as 35% 10 weeks after a booster, according to Government data. The solution? A fourth jab, reports the Telegraph.
- “Lockdown vested interests hate Omicron good news” – We won’t ever get back to normal until we face down the groups that never want the pandemic crisis to end says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
- “London’s daily Covid hospital admissions surge 92% to 386” – Further Covid restrictions could be imposed just in time for New Year’s Eve if daily Covid hospitalisations exceed 400, according to MailOnline. And the new restrictions could be in place until late March.
- “Doctor admits people testing positive after admission is major problem” – Dr Zudin Puthucheary, a member of the Intensive Care Society and doctor in London, tells MailOnline that the number of patients coming into hospital who ‘happen to be Covid positive’ is skewing hospitalisation statistics.
- “Christmas starts now” – Ricky Gervais knows how to celebrate Christmas morning.
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Hope all DS members have a lovely Christmas.
Thanks for your kindness, decency and intelligence, you guys have helped me through the madness.
Sincere best wishes to Toby and his fantastic team – God Bless. You will never know how much you have meant to so many of us.
Cheers.
You, too huxley!
Just to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! However you spend it, take time out, recharge, reflect, and be at peace with others and most of all with yourselves. We’re going to get through this together.
Thank you. I always appreciate your thoughtful responses. Funnily enough I always tend to agree with you.
Well, we’ve made it to Christmas again. Happy Christmas to the 99.97% of us under 70 and 99.9% of us in total (figs based on AAMR excess mortality, Institute of Actuaries) who have been lucky enough to survive another year without being killed by this indiscriminate killer virus !
The pleading of the politicians and government ‘scientists’ to stop the world and stop Christmas ring even hollower this year as the Omicron variant proves to be far less toxic than even the original virus.
They begin to sound ridiculous when they advise to test to see if we have a cold or a virus which in most cases is not much worse. The figures for hospitalisations are stubbornly refusing to move, the figures for deaths are going down.
Even someone as spineless as Boris can stand up to these pathetic pleas from the advisors and doctors and scientists.
Maybe we will have a truly happy New Year as people realise they’ve had their lives ruined for 2 years for very little reason.
What devotion to duty, Toby. Time for a break.
Merry Christmas, all.
Merry Christmas to DSers everywhere. Enjoy time with your awakened family and friends. With any luck the unwakened have already excluded themselves; if not, smile and nod. Or quietly interrupt their rants with ‘I’ve never heard such shit in all my life.’
A typical Perth scorcher today at 40 degrees. Relentless blue sky without a fragment of a cloud.Anyone outdoors for more than ten minutes will be reduced to a puddle of sludge. So I’ll be indoors, working up a couple of blog posts. There IS some good news out of Lockdownunder for Christmas.
Well. We’re two years into the 2020s (this rather awful decade of ours, so far), and with year-ends come reflections on times past.
Lately I’ve been reflecting on what defines the early 2020s. Not just the Covid-Mania but the whole package. These two headlines (about countries “criminalising” people who decline an unnecessary vaccine and about bashing “Santa” for being white-straight-male) remind me of an excellent recent political cartoon which depicts “America’s ruling class” — though it could apply nearly equally to any Western country, I think. It is just perfect:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/americas-ruling-class-early-2020s/
A similar cartoon made in the 1990s or 2000s would look very different. Even though some of the social forces were already on the loose, they were either not important/dominant enough yet, or were not recognized yet, to be identified in this way.
But the biggest new addition of the many groups personified in this “ruling-class hot-air balloon” would never have been mentioned at all even in Dec 2019: the character labeled “CDC”, a lab-coated man aggressively shoving needles at faceless people down below; he is meant to personify a Public Health bureaucracy.
There are a number of characters in the balloon. It would have been the reserve a small, isolated, tin-foil-hat fringe in 2019 to toss a public-health official in the balloon and show him raining down missile-like attacks of needles at people, to implicitly allege public-health authorities were nefarious political actors either drunk on power or intentionally desiring to oppress people…But here we are!
It seems at least one reply was lost in the down-time for this website, by Londo Mollari: