- “Allow visitors for an hour a day under ‘living with Covid’ plan, hospitals told” – New NHS England guidance says it is “important to recognise the contribution that visiting makes to the well-being of patients”, the Telegraph reports.
- “Thousands of pupils left school during lockdowns and never came back” – Local authorities “do not have an accurate figure” of how many children are absent from education, warns the Children’s Commissioner, according to the Telegraph.
- “Risk of another pandemic is high, Chris Whitty warns” – Speaking at a summit in London, Professor Sir Chris Whitty said there had been many “near misses” in the past decade, pointing to Ebola and Zika outbreaks, reports the Mail. Oh dear – is he missing the spotlight and power already?
- “Austria suspends law forcing all adults to have Covid jabs” – The Alpine nation of nine million people was one of the few countries in the world to make jabs against the coronavirus compulsory for all adults, though may not be following through with it, reports the Mail.
- “Germany Set to Pass More Coronavirus Rules as Europe Moves On” – While Europe may be moving on from lockdown rules, Germany is instead looking to pass more legislation in the name of the disease, reports Breitbart News.
- “Who Changed the Scientific Conclusions of a Paper that Could Have Saved Millions? At Last, We May Have a Name.” – The FLCCC says the changing of the conclusion of Dr. Andrew Hill’s ivermectin paper is a “scandal of immense proportions that warrants an immediate investigation”.
- “Deadly mutant Omicron smashes Hong Kong – should Australia be worried?” – Hong Kong has been ravaged by the virus since mid-February when deaths soared from just 224 in total to 2,287 within weeks, and hundreds are now dying daily. Now a new mutant strain has been detected, reports the Mail.
- “Kiwis turn on New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern” – Frustrated Kiwis have hit out at Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as she continues to reject claims New Zealand is in crisis despite the cost of living rising by 5.2%, reports the Mail.
- “Finding the true origin of SARS-CoV-2 is of paramount importance” – Why do we not care more about this potential explanation for the origin of the virus, and that it may well have been covered up, asks Jamie Walden in Bournbrook.
- “Mark Steyn: Wednesday March 9th” – Watch the Daily Sceptic‘s Dr. Noah Carl appear on GB News on Wednesday night to discuss his latest article.
- “Ex-minister slams Treasury over ‘Dad’s Army’ Covid anti-fraud efforts” – Lord Agnew, who quit in protest from his role as anti-fraud minister in January, told MPs that Treasury attempts to stop fraud on Covid business loans was a “Dad’s Army operation”, according to the Mail.
- “At 78 and unvaxxed, I’ve come through Covid unscathed – and I curse the fearmongers” – Neville Hodgkinson in TCW Defending Freedom on his recent brush with the virus – which sounds not so dissimilar to my own.
- “American Lockdowns Began Two Years Ago Today” – Certain dates should live in infamy. One is March 7th, 2020. That is the date that the American lockdowns began in Austin, Texas, recalls Jeffrey A. Tucker at the Brownstone Institute.
- “Why carmakers fear shift to electric could stall” – Higher costs for vital materials threaten to make cars even more expensive, reports the Telegraph.
- “Nicola Sturgeon is now the West’s woke weak link” – What sane country would view the current crisis and reject the obvious solution of turning to our own domestic resources, asks Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
- “Why would the Saudis bail out Biden?” – Mohammed bin Salman has the West where he wants it, says Angus Colwell in the Spectator.
- “Oil and gas sanctions hurt the West more than Russia” – While many of the sanctions seem to hurt Russia in the short-term but weaken us in the long-term, the recently announced oil and gas embargoes strengthen the Russian economy and weaken our own in both the short-term and the long-term, says Philip Pilkington in UnHerd.
- “Is the Government in denial about the looming economic crisis?” – It’s not clear that the Government has quite yet grasped the scale of the economic challenge that is upon it, says Robert Peston in the Spectator.
- “Boris Johnson urged to seek more oil from Saudi Arabia as energy crisis deepens” – The Prime Minister is said to have a warm relationship with the kingdom’s Crown Prince, who has refused a call from U.S. President Biden, according to the Telegraph. Pick the current least bad dictator…
- “Robert Jenrick warns the U.K. to brace for ‘difficult economic year’” – Robert Jenrick has warned that the U.K. could face “the most difficult economic year that we’ve seen in our lifetime” amid the heavy sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine, reports the Mail.
- “Fracking could be revived despite ministers warning over ‘earthquakes’” – Brexit Opportunities Minister Jacob Rees-Mogg became the latest and most senior minister to come out in support of the technology, according to the Mail.
- “£450m heat pump subsidy scheme could end up funding those who would have bought them anyway” – Benefits of scheme, in which homeowners will get grants of up to £5,000 to ditch their gas boilers, are unclear, a parliamentary committee warns, the Telegraph reports.
- “Japan Sees No Winter Warming in Decades…Tokyo Winters Haven’t Warmed Since 1984!” – So are winters getting colder, or are they getting milder like the media like to have everyone believe, asks Kirye on Watts Up With That?
- “Infrared Forcing by Greenhouse Gases” – Read the freshly revised article from physicists William A. van Wijngaarden and Will Happer arguing that the warming effect of carbon dioxide is “suppressed by four orders of magnitude… because of saturation of the strong absorption bands and interference from other greenhouse gases” and that as a result doubling carbon dioxide concentration “only increases the forcings by a few per cent”.
- “The Essay That Prompted an Editorial Revolt” – Kathleen Stock’s essay in the latest issue of Law and Contemporary Problems was controversial before she even wrote it, writes Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
- “Teach your child censorship!” – As any critically thinking parent knows, schools are a hotbed of state propaganda, from subversive gender ideology to prophecies of doom on climate change. But this has worsened significantly in the past two years, says Niall McCrae in Unity News Network.
- “How anti-racism can make you rich” – Diversity has become a business tactic, rather than a moral imperative, writes Sam Leith in UnHerd.
- “Pressure on British Museum as Smithsonian gives back entire Benin Bronze collection to Nigeria” – Return of looted artefacts to Africa “could be a turning point”, as attention now focuses on 700-strong collection held in London, the Telegraph reports.
- “Children are self-censoring because teachers have chastised them if they challenge this cult” – Watch Toby on talkRADIO with Mike Graham responding to the news that a well-known London private school has been downgraded by Ofsted due to excessive time teaching social justice.
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Good morning to the tenth.
The vile persecution of Canada’s Christians by Trudeau’s regime
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-vile-persecution-of-canadas-christians-by-trudeaus-regime/
Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack
Next events – come and join us
Thursday 10th March 5pm to 6pm
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A329 London Rd,
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Bracknell RG12 2UJ
Stand in the Park Sundays from 10am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
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Gee, ya think?
Cost to the UK Economy of the [reaction to the] Russian Invasion of Ukraine – a scenario analysis
Centre for Economics and Business Research Ltd
“This is not meant to be even a worst case set of assumptions. At time of writing most spot commodity markets are actually above the prices assumed and the threat of an oil embargo by Russia, with the potential to raise the price of oil possibly to $300, is not addressed in this report.
…
Based on our scenario analysis which assumes a high transmission of sanctions to global commodity prices and UK inflation, we estimate that GDP growth this year will be halved – down from a previously forecast 4.2% in 2022 to 1.9%. And growth in 2023 is reduced from 2.0% to 0.0%. The reduction in real GDP in 2022 is £51.4 billion; that in 2023 is £42.5 billion. Cumulatively this is a reduction in GDP of more than £90 billion.
The main channels for these impacts are the rising cost of living, a reduction in consumption and reduced exports because of sanctions on Russia.
The effect of higher commodity prices reduces the level of disposable income by 1.9% in 2022 and by 2.1% in 2023. As a result we estimate that disposable incomes will fall in 2022 by 4.8% with a further fall of 1.4% in 2023. The fall in 2022 is the largest since records started in 19551 . The forecast fall in living standards this year is an estimated £71 billion – which amounts to £2,553 per household. The part of it due to invasion of Ukraine is about half – £35 billion (£1,259 per household) – but there is a further reduction from this source in 2023 of £29 billion (£1,043 per household). The combined effects of sanctions and slower world trade growth reduce export growth in 2022 by 2.1% and by 0.5% in 2023. Export growth was previously predicted to be 3.0% this year and 0.4% next so these combined impacts more or less wipe out the predicted export growth. Inflation by Q4 2022 is likely to be 4.1 percentage points higher than we previously forecast.”
[Emphasis added]
Brits again to suffer the consequences of allowing their leaders to do and to support stupid and evil things in their names for decades, and for electing scumbags into office.
I think the crisis is a little more fundamental than even your analysis suggests. Global fertiliser and fuel supplies put under severe pressure by the Western reaction.
Why do people think famine is something that only strikes the Third World?
I suspect you are probably correct in that. What I posted is merely what is admitted to by “respectable” sources. So far.
Because of many decades of over-production and over-consumption of food perhaps?
Fertiliser depends on natural gas. So let’s not fall in the trap that everything is caused by the Ukraine crisis, therefore evil Putin, it is caused by our own evil slimeballs in charge.
Just as CoVid hasn’t caused our economic woes, the Government did.
As Peston discovers journalism, it can only be with regret that he has spent so much time wasting his position of ‘public paid for’ privilege on stupid lines of questioning of our politicians.
Not sure he has discovered journalism, just that he’s quite happy to attack the government when it suits him. Support from the MSM for the government is not unconditional, and they went along with covid bollocks because it suited their agenda.
And anyone who thinks that inflation is running at a mere 4.9% is wilfully not looking at the prices of food, fuel, transport or housing, i.e. the things we actually need.
The cost of living is rising far, far higher than that.
Yes.
Our entire financial system is fraudulent. Or to put it another way intervened by central planners.
It’s not just the inflation rate. It’s interest rates and the supply of money which underpin everything.
The most important market of all, the money market, is as far removed from a free market as you can get. And central planners systematically get things wrong because it’s literally impossible for them to get it right. The system is too complicated, the variables are for all practical purposes infinite.
And that is the reason why our entire financial system is on the brink of collapse. You just can’t keep printing money without any economic activity to back it and pretend it’s not going to destroy the system. Any more than you can repeatedly inject adrenaline into someone without killing them.
I keep trying to make the case for free markets and against central planning, not because free markets are perfect, but because central planning is a disaster.
This ^^^^^^^^^^^
We all see the “after” picture given in our media of Ukraine, 24/7. How about the “before” picture? Here it is, courtesy of mark tilley @hitman29563:
Quite a remake!
https://twitter.com/hitman29563/status/1501610634802339848
And did you know about the MH17 false-flag and cover up, which was designed to justify increased sanctions against Russia and a full on attack on the Donbass and Crimea back in 2014?
A plane load of people killed and Russia blamed for what was almost certainly a deliberate Ukrainian missile attack, almost certainly approved by Obama et al.
I’ve only just heard about this. But it’s yet more evidence of the role that Ukraine has been and is playing in US-NATO plans/manoeuvres against Russia.
A slightly rambling but generally decent account here, with a very good 11 minute video about the lead-up/background linked a little way in:
https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/shocking-update-on-the-mh17-cover-up/
Excellent report on the event and cover up by John Helmer here:
http://johnhelmer.net/mh-17-evidence-tampering-revealed-by-malaysia-fbi-attempt-to-seize-black-boxes-dutch-cover-up-of-forged-telephone-tapes-ukrainian-air-force-hid-radar-records-crash-site-witness-testimon/print/
I watched the coverage of the MH17 event as it happened, and participated in extensive discussion of it afterwards. My assumption at the time was that it was most likely a simple mistake. but partisans of both sides inevitably produced arguments for darker interpretations. In the end, I think it goes into one of those “we’ll never really know for certain” categories, and nobody will ever convince the partisans of the other side of their own preferred interpretation..Which, since our elites and mainstream media are firmly partisan on the issue, means “the science is settled” as far as it is concerned,
Here’s one reason for such an impressive national makeover for Ukraine.
Peter Van Buren on the War in Ukraine and the Origins of Russiagate
Scott Horton: “…. I interviewed the great Ben Freeman, real nuts and bolts and bean counting expert on foreign lobbies and their influence in Washington DC, and of course that means he specialises first and foremost in the Israel Lobby and the Saudi Lobby, but he did this huge study about the Ukraine Lobby and said they put more money in by far than anyone has ever seen. They put the Israel Lobby and the Saudi Lobby to shame. Now as he said, they’re [Israelis and Saudis] way ahead in the race anyway, they’ve got very deep grooves already in DC, the Ukraine Lobby is new at this. But they’re just dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in…to propagandise, to focus directly on the most important Senators and Congressmen and their staff, the thinktanks, and the media. And it’s just – they got K Street, they got professional lobbyists, you mentioned the babies in incubators – that was the Hill and Knowlton public relations firm on Madison Avenue in New York City that came up with that. But who the hell are we to compete with that? We’re nobody, we’re just the American people. Foreign lobbies have far more influence than we have over our government and their foreign policies, by a million miles at this point
Peter van Buren: “I just want to reiterate though what’s new this time around, and that is the amazing ability to reach directly into our homes, and the willingness of our own media to just act as a free flow pipeline. I think one of the things missing was that during the 2003 runup, most of the propaganda had to still work its way through, if you imagine water dripping through a filter. It still had to get to us all, and we were not in a position to contribute to it, but now it’s almost as if the propaganda has been crowd-sourced … whoever the Ukrainians have hired puts up something, true or false, about “the Russians are raping babies”, they put it out in any form of media. It doesn’t even have to hit the mainstream media, it just has to show up anywhere online, including social media, and then Americans, many of them well-meaning people who listen to NPR on the way to work, will then amplify that, free of charge, through their own personal networks, and this direct lobbying, if you will, is far more insidious, because that way the Congresspeople are getting it from top and bottom. They’re being directly lobbied by the K Street firms who are taking them out for dinners and things like that, and then they come back to the office and there’s 20,000 constituent emails demanding war with Russia. And that’s on us. We’re not just passive any more, we ourselves are participants in our own propaganda.”
An interesting podcast chat between two old US anti-war hands – Scott Horton of Antiwar.com, and Peter van Buren, State Dept veteran and now contributing editor at The American Conservative.
[Re the atrocity, the BBC are already running with a children’s hospital, but for the big one my money’s on a “chemical weapons” attack, since we’ve seen such fake allegations used against Russia before, so the US sphere public are primed for it, and the tactic of fabricating such attacks was used quite effectively by the US/UK liars in Syria.
In that regard, this kind of priming is concerning:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60657155
“A maternity ward and a children’s ward have been destroyed in a Russian air strike on a hospital in the southern city of Mariupol, officials there say
….
White House: Russia could use chemical weapons in Ukraine“
Here’s another price we pay for allowing our elites to whip up frenzies of hysterical emotion over issues that should be addressed calmly and rationally (such as covid, BLM, and the war in the Ukraine).
“MailOnline has tracked seven ships carrying Russian oil, gas and diesel all turned away from the UK in the past week including several trying to use a loophole meaning they weren’t technically covered by sanctions.
Dockers at the Isle of Grain in Kent, Milford Haven in Wales, Ellesmere Port on Merseyside and on the Isle of Orkney all refused to unload the fuel being sold by Putin’s Russia to help pay for his invasion.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10589803/Seven-Russian-tankers-head-home-British-dock-workers-REFUSED-unload-them.html
Our elites have intentionally whipped up hysteria for two main reasons. First, some of them desire confrontation of Russia and see that as a way of both getting more of their policies enacted and locking the country in to that confrontation, and of making it politically impossible to make rational arguments against it. Others simply see that pandering to the infantile, emotive nonsense is a way of making themselves look good – virtue signalling, pure and simple.
But an added cost of the process is that self-harming policies adopted to pander to the hysteria – such as sanctions – are carried even further than necessarily intended, voluntarily, in the wave of whipped up emotion. In this case, dockers turning away cargoes to which the stupid sanctions might not have applied, and which would have gone some way towards ameliorating the problems ordinary people will face in this country. The same thing was commonplace in the covid panic, with people and organisations routinely going way beyond the actual rules, and even the “advice”.
And here’s an example of how this kind of emotive power is whipped up (and the Ukrainian regime get some value for its lobbying millions) – allowing an actor like Zelensky to posture in front of our institutions of power, giving his words undue force and making the gullible get even more worked up and partisan, and driving the discourse still further from reality:
“Julia Hartley-Brewer
@JuliaHB1
President Zellensky’s address to Parliament. Bloody hell.
Is there a greater statesman on the planet right now?
5:11 PM · Mar 8, 2022·Twitter for iPhone”
https://twitter.com/JuliaHB1/status/1501244350642204675
You can ignore reality for as long as you want, but you won’t be able to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality for long.
I wonder how long it will take them to realise that refusing to take oil and wheat from Russia doesn’t reduce the capacity of Russia to do anything by one single rouble, because Putin controls the rouble, and thereby the entire productive capacity of Russia.
All it means is the UK has less stuff to go around and prices go up.
Paradoxically to deprive Russia of the capacity to wage war we should be taking all their oil and wheat so they have less themselves, giving them promises in return (which is what money is) and then reneging on those promises (which is what freezing foreign reserves is).
And we should keep doing that until Russia works out what we’re doing. In the meantime we’d have a massive stockpile of oil and wheat.
There comes a point when our population will have to stop acting emotionally to everything and learn that you do have to steer into a skid and no amount of wishing really hard and doing what feels right will change that fact.
Taking Russian exports for nothing material in return is how you reduce their capacity to wage war. It ties up workers in Russia filling ships with stuff.
Good point … but I believe that certain interests actively want to deprive people in Europe and the US and its allies of fuel and food and put vast numbers in debt ( trying to pay for the increasingly high priced short supplies ) so that they’ll all be more than happy to accept an ID-linked digital currency that wipes out that debt.
If COVID is anything to go by, it looks as if people can put up with about 12-24 months of senseless pain and hardship before they start to complain.
Bubble-luvvies will always fall for sufficient adept theatrics eventually.
“But I feel this truth deeply in my true feelings”, is essentially what Julia is saying there.
Yes. We used to have some cultural protection against it, back when unseemly displays of emotion were frowned upon.
That’s war. Ordinary people suffer and pay the price required for those who govern them to pursue their goals.
The west is trying to instigate regime change in Russia, to turn it into a client state and control its vast resources.
It requires pain and suffering from the people to achieve the objective, like with any war.
The propaganda is to make the pain more tolerable and purposeful.
If we aren’t juiced up with rage against Russia we’ll question the sense of the economic pain and turn against our own leaders.
The Russians no doubt are doing the same from their side. But really, it’s a defensive war for them. Even though they try to convince us that Putin wants to conquer the whole of Eastern Europe, or whatever it is, he’s primarily trying to keep control of his country and its resources.
He’s an aggressor only in the way that someone who has just been punched in the face punches back.
And some followup on the video letter from Dr Tess Lawrie to Dr Andrew HIll asking why he changed his study on Ivermectin. Pretty sure it was posted here atl, but I certainly posted it btl.
A Letter to Andrew Hill
Here’s a claim to have discovered a potential culprit for hanging the results:
Who Changed the Scientific Conclusions of a Paper that Could Have Saved Millions? At Last, We May Have a Name.This is a scandal of immense proportions that warrants an immediate investigation.
Its pretty clear from the names at the centre of the covid/vaccine scam that the UK was very over represented. This includes the psyop.
Roundup 1.
The NHS acknowledges the value to patient recovery of having visitors. It’s something to do with that mental health thingy. FFS.
Roundup 2.
Thousands of pupils left school and now the authorities don’t know where to find them. I can’t blame the pupils given the rubbish being taught. I suppose lost school children are a bit like illegal immigrants – to the authorities
Roundup 3.
The risk of another “pandemic” is highly likely warns Chris Whitty, whoops I mean Billy Gates. Why would that be Chris? Is this the pre-announcement?
Roundup 4.
Austria suspends forced injections. Is that because they will be EU law by 1st July?
Great Reset. Build Back Better. All coming along nicely.
A good piece on LeftLockdownSceptics from Aussie trad leftie (I say that without intending offence – I much prefer trad lefties to Blairite lefties) Phil Shannon, who posts here regularly:
Phil Shannon asks how the left can avoid spiralling into Covid-induced irrelevance…
Plenty I disagree with him about, obviously, but also plenty we can agree on, and I enjoyed his flaying of many of the most covid-noxious of the mainstream left.
Cheers Mark!
The Left’s lunacy on the Covid baloney is indeed a target-rich political environment – and I only picked the low-hanging fruit (my first draft had much more before I calmed down for the sake of brevity and readability and edited the hell out of it).
As an old-fashioned, vintage lefty, I have watched on in stunned amazement, incredulity and disbelief as almost the entirety of the modern left went all Fear and Panic over the virus and trashed ever principle and value they claimed to hold. Brexit, Trump and the Woke nonsense had also sent the Left into a tailspin prior to this but The Virus really sealed the Left’s decline for me.
And I have discovered that people from the political Right do not have two horns and tail, at least on Covid. Discovering Toby, TCW, James Delingpole, Roger Kimball, Jeffrey Tucker and the other folks at Brownstone, etc. etc. has been rewarding – it was they who spoke sense on Covid.
See you in the Comments!
Phil
“And I have discovered that people from the political Right do not have two horns and tail, at least on Covid.”
A good education for all of us concerned the “other side”, I suppose.
Though obviously not where Blairites are concerned – they actually do have horns and tails, I’m pretty certain.
Here’s something I’m curious about atm. As I noted here the other day, I’m going with Tucker Carlson’s interpretation that we are, in the war hysteria over Ukraine, experiencing the third of three great civilisation-wide waves of moral panic in just two years – covid, BLM, Ukraine.
The first two clearly came very much from the left, more or less, and as you pointed out most left institutions ran with them hard. This latest one is much less clear-cut, and my impression is it’s much more even as far as the commitment to it from right/left is concerned. Perhaps even leaning to the right, though it’s hard to tell – certainly there’s bipartisan political war fever in the US and UK. War and confrontation always has an appeal, sadly, to the patriotic and militarist tendencies on the right.
I’m interested to see how this perceived contrast between moral panic III versus I and II develops.
It looks like the Speccie (and not just James Forsyth, who was always squishy on Covid) are full-on Forces of Goodness vs wicked Kremlin Man. American Thinker, which was v. good on Covid and TDS) also seem to have gone deep shades of Cold War on Putin. Their coverage has been ahistorical and decontextualised, thoroughly headline-simple. TCW is holding the line, however. So, yes, a mixed bag on the Right re Russia/Ukraine.
Now I’m wondering if the broken link to Noah Carl’s intervew (linked above the line here) about Ukraine with Mark Steyn on GB New means it has been removed because the editors/managers/owners there didn’t like some of what was said because it went against the hysteria push. Or potentially that they’ve had a lot of angry responses from their viewers about having to hear things they don’t like being said.
Indiscriminate support for wars our leaders choose to engage in seems to be a big weakness of a lot of people who would consider themselves “right wing”.
Sadly so. As I’ve noted here before, back when I went on my only ever pre-covid demo in 2003, against the Iraq atrocity, I felt like a leftie antilockdown campaigner in early 2020, as far as the political company I was keeping was concerned. The Conservatives, then still in transition to their modern Blairite form, were completely useless.
This latest one is much less clear-cut, and my impression is it’s much more even as far as the commitment to it from right/left is concerned.
Some of the lefties I know, who were absolutely insensitive to the authoritarian nature of the COVID responses, are immensely indignant about Putin’s authoritarianism and annoyed if I mention certain problems re Nazism in the Ukraine. Go figure.
The “woke” nonsense seems to have put a lot of lefties to sleep; or exposed them as people who were merely virtue signallers all along.
I suspect the Ukraine hysteria is at least partly dependent upon the COVID hysteria. All sorts of people have been whipped into saviour or denouncer mode. There aren’t many cool heads around.
Absolutely, the absence of cool heads seems to be the prevailing feature of our modern society.
Thanks for a superb article.
I know a few stand-out lefties, but they’re vastly outnumbered. They now read DS, TCW , Brownstone et al with some vestigial sense of guilt – frowning every time “the Left” is attacked and ignoring the opening para on TCW’s website.
The conversation BTL here is exactly the kind of conversation the Left stopped having some time ago, when its leaders and wannabes decided that workers were an embarrassment in need of a firm hand – because they kept making mistakes (Brexit, Trump) and really didn’t understand what dreadful things they were saying.
I’m quite sure trad lefties (I like the term) much prefer you to “Blairite lefties”. A goodly number, back in the day, referred to the latter as “right-wing traitors” – a pretty heavy insult then.
Well, as groups we do agree on a fair bit, and we share an enemy in the globalist borg (hopefully Roger of that ilk isn’t around to catch me at it again).
And we’re both almost completely excluded from respectable political influence.
And guess who’s popped up on an old video warning of the dangers of provoking Russia with NATO expansion. And that was talking about the previous round of expansion, into the Baltic States, not the last and most provocative of all into Ukraine and Georgia.
It’s from 1997 – so long ago that he wasn’t senile, and perhaps even wasn’t as corrupt as he is now:
Video of Joe Biden Warning of Russian Hostility if NATO Expands Resurfaces
Is there a policy of Biden today that isn’t a total backflip on Biden in the past?
Seems unlikely, and I’m pretty sure Biden himself has no idea….
Aviation adverse reactions. Politicians projecting.
Never a dull moment!
Excuse me, pilot, are you vaccinated?
This is a good, ranging discussion of the fundamental culture war issues surrounding the descent of US sphere societies into woke ideological decadence, from a Canadian legal point of view.
There’s quite a bit of stuff that’s specific to the Canadian legal and constitutional situation, but the underlying issues are common to all of us, certainly in the Anglosphere, to do with the meaning of terms like equal, racism, freedom etc, the fundamentally different views of the place of individuals in society, of speech, and other key issues, on the part of true believers in the new woke faith versus sensible folk.
Democracy Doesn’t Work Unless Citizens Think for Themselves
| Julie Ponesse & Bruce Pardy
“NHS says it’s important to recognize the contribution visiting makes to patient well-being.”
Observed forever. Which is precisely why they prevented it for the last two years.
Visiting is important now more than ever. Someone needs to smuggle in the ivermectin, object to the vent and insist no remdesivir.
Who dares compare the Benin Bronzes to the Elgin Marbles?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10590465/Risk-pandemic-HIGH-Chris-Whitty-warns.html
Dead-eyed Witless ingratiating himself with his big pharma buddies again, revving up scaremongering about future pandemics and the need for an easily adaptable, quick fix, universal panacea to save mankind from all manner of plagues. Sigh.
They are not giving up on the mRNA shite, are they?
“The new funding will see CEPI invest up to around £32million to support the development of a broadly protective vaccine using mRNA technology already adopted for the Moderna and Pfizer jabs.”
I recall Johnson boasting in 2020 about building a world beating, super duper vaccine lab in the U.K.to enable ready supplies of vaccines to combat whatever viruses were prevalent in the future.
I’m sure I read recently the multi million pound lab had been sold for a song to Pfizer who were going to strip it out and re-equip it.
More tax payers money wasted.
You can always send Chris an e-mail if you’d like to congratulate him on the way he’s handled the pandemic.
c.whitty@nhs.net.
“How much is the UK Chief Medical Officer paid?
The typical Department of Health UK Chief Medical Officer salary is £273,963 per year.”
What pandemic?
He deserves no commendation whatsoever for his role in The Great Lie – definitely not from the public whose best interests he has continuously thwarted.
His handlers may have a different viewpoint, however.
Good grief! We could get four Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Advisors for that price, or one and a half full Diversity and Inclusion teams!
The public sector’s top five woke non-jobs
To be honest I’m not too bothered about our museum giving back African artefacts – they have little cultural or artistic value and are the things 99% of visitors half-heartedly glance at on their way out to the tea shop after seeing the real history.
I’m looking forward to the wokists tying themselves in knots trying to work out who we culturally appropriated whilst digging up sauropods from the Cretaceous and displaying them in “imperialistic” musea.
They can have them back if they return sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health.
So the US has been funding numerous research bio labs in Ukraine. Which are working with some of the worlds most deadly pathogens. More gain of function experiments which are prohibited in the US?
Tucker Carlson: Why are we funding this?
https://youtu.be/AugzqXPYaOc
Tulsi Gabbard: Labs need to be ‘shut down immediately’
https://youtu.be/0IZQJyk3L58
I’ll read up on this story today.
Are there any written texts you’d recommend?
I posted some on yesterday’s News roundup last night.
Thanks.
OK. I’ve now read the pieces that you linked to. It’s interesting that China too has mentioned the US labs – around the world and including in the Ukraine. I hope this gets taken to the UN Security Council and fast.
Greenwald writes quite well: “[US Under-Sec of State Victoria Nuland’s] answer visibly stunned [Marco] Rubio, who — as soon as he realized the damage she was doing to the U.S. messaging campaign by telling the truth — interrupted her and demanded that she instead affirm that if a biological attack were to occur, everyone should be ‘100% sure’ that it was Russia who did it. Grateful for the life raft, Nuland told Rubio he was right.”
That seems like preparation for an event.
The number 30 for “research laboratories” seems unlikely. If the number of locations is that large, they sound as though they are mostly storage or launch facilities. It would be interesting to see a map. Even the talk of the order going out to destroy all the pathogens (regardless of whether there has actually been such an order) suggests that the facilities contain some pretty damned unpleasant stuff.
Russian defence minister Igor Konashenko has made more detailed allegations. He has cited US work on the transfer of pathogens by birds migrating in Ukraine, Russia, and neighbouring countries, and he has also mentioned US work with birds, bats and reptiles in Ukraine in 2022, and the possible propagation of the African swine fever virus and anthrax.
There are a couple of maps here, in this now hilarious “fact check” of the “Russian propaganda” claim about foreign biolabs in Ukraine:
Ukraine, US Biolabs, and an Ongoing Russian Disinformation Campaign
“Before we get into the factual details that disprove this theory (such as the fact that the U.S. did not install and does not operate biolabs in Ukraine, completely nullifying the second half of this comparison), let’s note a few quick observations about these two maps.”
Snopes 24th Feb – that aged well!
Someone techie should produce a meme interspersing these kinds of “fact-checker” opinion policing comments with Nuland’s confession.
I’m pretty sure I saw a more recent map from the Russians, though. If I recall where it was I’ll link.
Oh yes:
A briefing on the medico-biological US activity in Ukraine (MUST SEE!)
These US facilities in Ukraine are receiving wider coverage than I thought. Not just anthrax but also plague – presumably meaning Yersinia pestis – also gets a look-in.[*] That sounds about right from a depopulationist-technofascist point of view:
A guess would be that this time the laboratory-enhanced plague bacterium will cause more pneumonic and septicaemic problems rather than that traditional “bubonic” armpit stuff.
Those who allowed themselves to be spiked “against SARSCoV2” could be absolutely f***ed.
Note
*) I am sceptical of the theory that the Black Death of the 14th century was caused by Yersinia pestis spread by rat fleas. The rat flea theory dates back to the 1890s if I recall correctly. That may have been the cause, but the pathogen may been something else, perhaps anthrax.
is anyone not a bit sceptical about the US choosing to house sensitive material close to the border with Russia in a country which might have quite easily chosen to go back under Russian influence rather in lots of other more suitable places. Americans do think about this. A friend of mine whose father ended up working in the Pentagon had to go by boat from Italy to Greece in case a plane she was on had to come down in Russia, even though Tito was not fully aligned with Russia.
sorry should have typed had to come down in Yugoslavia
The US, privately, seemed to have no problem with the idea of funding gain of function research in China, of all places. My impression is that short term imperatives tend to dominate with these dubious military deep state adventures.
The “conspiracy theory” explanation for doing it in the Ukraine is that these were intended for a covert action against Russia and Russians. The more prosaic one is that Ukraine allowed for a sufficiently morally, legally and politically flexible environment for them to get up to all kinds of off-book and covert projects that they couldn’t get away with elsewhere.
“A friend of mine whose father ended up working in the Pentagon had to go by boat from Italy to Greece in case a plane she was on had to come down in Russia, even though Tito was not fully aligned with Russia.”
Write out 1000 times on the blackboard:
“Russia is not the Soviet Union.”
Did anybody notice something odd about the British government’s suddenly adopted position that it’s bad for British soldiers to go AWOL to fight against the Russian army in the Ukraine?
Here it is: soldiers aren’t allowed to go AWOL at any time. It doesn’t matter whether they do it to fight against the Russian army, to go and see their girlfriends, or to have a relaxing week tending the garden. Soldiers mustn’t go AWOL. That’s part of being a soldier. It applies in every army.
This story is a case of what is called “deniability”.
It suggests that Britain may have covertly sent some of its soldiers to fight against Russian forces, and that Russia may have captured some of those soldiers.
If Russia produces them, Britain will say “Oh yes, those are the dirty devils who went AWOL. We didn’t send them. Can you hand them over to us so we can court-martial them. Thanks.”
Of course at a press conference in say Donetsk the soldiers may give a very different account of how come they left their British bases.
Classic deniability. So uk ‘special ops’ have been deployed.
They can point at the Foreign Secretary explicitly inciting them to commit this double crime[*]
For the record: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0015034/sunday-morning-27022022
42:30 onwards.
Question: “President Zelenskyy has asked for people from abroad to join an international force. Do you support that?”
Answer: “I do. I do support that, and that is something that people can make their own decisions about.”
Question: “So you support people from Britain going over to Ukraine to help in the fight.”
Answer: “Absolutely, if that’s what they want to do.”
[*] 1) Desertion
2) The moment they pick up a Ukrainian issued weapon or follow any order, Section 4 of the Foreign Enlistment Act since Russia is a “friendly nation” until and unless we declare WAAAAGH, which we won’t.
I don’t recall any formal announcements, but I’ve seen several dark references by informal Russian military sources to the war conventions not applying to foreign adventurers in the Ukraine, and such men can expect harsh treatment.
Though I suspect British or US military men will get some protection from the fact of being valuable propaganda items, at least from being shot out of hand.
This article in the spectator gives a vivid description of what happened in the Balkan’s.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/british-fighters-in-ukraine-are-brave-but-misguided
In other news, I’m waiting for the announcement that Ukraine and the USSR have joined forces against Sean Penn.
Can I sign up to this new club?
Genuine question: Are you allowed to visit patients in hospitals in the UK now?
Believe it depends on the hospital. The brother of a work colleague has not been able to see his wife in Walsall Manor. She’s been in there for five weeks now. Don’t forget to clap for ‘our wonderful NHS’ !
Why was the only photo of hospital abomination in MSM papers today of clean women and clean soldiers carrying her on a stretcher in front of a building with no windows? Where was the fire, smoke, and dust from the explosion? Where were the people milling around stunned, in shock, and covered in dust, dirt, and blood? Where were the ambulances?
I don’t want to see it, but normally those type of photos and coverage is rammed in our faces.
Exactly the same scenes that were played out for the cameras in Syria. Bring on the White Helmets.
They’re only missing Damian Day, and his poignant reminder of the human cost of this tragedy, a child’s teddy bear.
Gives:
Video unavailable
This video is private
for me.
Did Noah say something the GB News owners and editors didn’t like hearing? Or is it just a moved link?
It worked for earlier today but is unavailable now. Could have been Kathy Gyngell mentioning the “I” word when talking about covid treatments
President Zelenskiy is calling the Russian aerial bombing of a building in Mariupol that he says was a functioning maternity hospital “genocide”. This comedian ought to watch his mouth. The Russian government claims that the Ukrainian military had taken over the building and there were no patients there.
What is a fact is that Zelenskiy stood in the way of the opening up of a number of humanitarian corridors because they led to Russia and Belarus. Never mind that more than 100000 refugees from this war are already being looked after in Russia and as far as I am aware there are no reports of their being mistreated. Preventing the evacuation of civilians from a warzone is certainly a war crime. In fact it is similar to holding civilians “hostage”, which is exactly what Zelenskiy is accusing the Russian side of doing when he says that 400000 people are being held “hostage” in Mariupol, meaning the entire population of that city.
What will Zelenskiy do next – call President Putin a television comedian paid for by an oligarch who carries at least three passports?
The Mark Steyn YouTube link does not work.
Reminder to journalists.