- “A fifth of Brits have still never had Covid, officials estimate” – Nearly a fifth of people in England have still never caught Covid, ONS officials say, meaning around 10.3 million have dodged the virus since the pandemic began three years ago, the Mail reports.
- “European Parliament chiefs block public scrutiny of von der Leyen over Pfizer contract” – Transparency concerns over the Commission President’s role in negotiations will be handled behind closed doors, Politico reports.
- “Are there places you should still mask in, forever? Three experts weigh in” – NPR asked “COVID-19 experts” how we should keep weighing risk as we enter the fourth year of the pandemic. Inevitably, they say we should wear them forever…
- “Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo sends scathing letter to FDA and CDC” – Only one Surgeon General in the entire U.S. sees clearly what is going on, says Steve Kirsch.
- “Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff” – A tribute to the Great Barrington trio from Gabrielle Bauer for the Brownstone Institute.
- “One in 45,000” – That was the Covid death risk for people under 50, including people with severe comorbidities, according to new research from Denmark as reported by Alex Berenson.
- “Kwasi Kwarteng: Net Zero is ‘absolutely the right agenda’” – The former Chancellor defends green targets amid the cost of living crisis, according to the Telegraph.
- “Ukraine warned against attempting to retake Crimea from Putin” – The U.S. Secretary of State fears efforts to reclaim the annexed peninsula would be a red line for the Russian President, the Telegraph reports. Or is it because their arms supplies are running low?
- “OSINT picks holes in Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream claims” – Rob Lownie in UnHerd with a handy overview of the latest points in the Nord Stream whodunnit.
- “Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?” – Douglas Murray in the Spectator lambasts Prevent for going “so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem”.
- “Cancel the Vikings” – Rod Liddle in the Spectator wonders what took them so long to realise the “Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling”.
- “Sex is real. Erasing it from science is ridiculous” – Getting rid of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ undermines the clear and accurate language essential to science, argues Oxford evolutionary biology PhD student Ellen Pasternack in the Telegraph.
- “How to solve the campus free speech crisis” – There is a gathering crisis with academic freedom in British universities, at the core of which lies “an unholy alliance between the ‘cancel culture’ illiberal far Left and cowardly university management”, says Steven Greer in the Times.
- “How the New York Times was engulfed by a trans culture war” – The Grey Lady is caught between activist young staff and an old guard who value objectivity, reports the Telegraph.
- “NYT publishes op-ed defending Rowling trans views despite staff revolt” – Mail report that the New York Times published an op-ed in support of J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender issues a day after two open letters signed by its own staff and celebrities accused the paper of anti-trans ‘bias’.
- “When people are asked to point to something transphobic J.K. Rowling has said, they can’t find anything” – Watch Toby tell GB News‘s Dan Wootton that people are trying to “shut down debate” by dubbing J.K. Rowling a transphobe.
‘When people are asked to point to something transphobic JK Rowling has said, they can’t find anything.’
— GB News (@GBNEWS) February 16, 2023
Toby Young says people are trying to ‘shut down debate’ by dubbing JK Rowling a transphobe.Freeview 236, Sky 512, Virgin 604
GB News YouTube: https://t.co/Wa58gYGZwF pic.twitter.com/icMsYOVUzn
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This is good news. The vast majority of the population are utterly sick and fed up with the alphabet menacers so this announcement should lose votes for the Liebour party.
Trebles all round.
I think they’ll still win, sadly.
Quite so. The reason being that most people are bored by politics in the first place; they draw conclusions from headlines and the headlines are written by the left. The comforting illusion that Labour’s extremism will prevent it from gaining power, therefore, is to be avoided.
It is little use, I know, advocating a Tory vote on the pragmatic grounds that wind is preferable to dysentery, but those grounds – notwithstanding all the objections which might plausibly be mustered – remain the only hope of mitigating disaster. Note that I say “mitigating” – I offer no pretence that the current Tory party offers anything more than a stay of execution. But that is all we can hope for; and what is the proposed alternative?
Wherever I find people advocating abstention or “Reform” or even direct vengeance upon the Tory party by means of a Labour vote, I discern two illusions.
First, that with massive Labour incompetence will come sufficient unrest to usher in a truly right of centre party in five years’ time. This is to underestimate the control of society which Labour plans to take; to underestimate the demographic transformation to which we are already being subjected and the sheer age of the right wing population. Let Labour in now and it’s curtains. Sternly confronted with this argument, the purists and the vengeance takers often reveal their despair, by confessing that they no longer care, they just want to kick something.
The second illusion of the purists is that even supposing a properly right wing government is ever elected again, it will have to spend years and years undoing – to the extent that it can – the damage inflicted by an all powerful left. And this is to say nothing of the conclusions which many will draw from a Labour victory, which – of course – will be that the public actually wants, desires and wishes for hard left policy.
Yes, there is a lack of hope in this message but it differs from vengeful despair. Because by holding off the very worst of disaster, it will remain possible to gather an anti-left coalition within and outside the Tory party which might then produce a sustainable form of resistance. That, I respectfully suggest, is the way – the only way which remains to us – to avert a final slide towards the total eclipse of freedom. Now, to all those who oppose this message, rather than simply downvoting it, or offering abuse, or lazily pouring scorn on our easily condemned Tory party, why not confront the argumentative heart of this case? I would be genuinely interested to read a reasoned objection.
“wind is preferable to dysentery”
God made it more sociable.
In a crowded lift even the deaf can enloy it.
So at the next election, vote wind.
In order to begin any recovery of power from the elites and accountability by them, in order to get a proper conservative, patriotic party, we first need to break the Conservative Party. If they were to regain power they would deliver five more years of the same: poor economic management, unaffordable vanity infrastructure, high taxes and decline.
If Labour rule with LibDem support it will be even more left wing and woke than on iots own.
There is no choice – we are going to have to suffer and it is all the Tories fault.
“There is no choice – we are going to have to suffer and it is all the Tories fault.”.
Yes – absolutely agree. The Conservative Party has shafted all of us since Mrs Thatcher was pushed out of the party. Unfortunately, I’ve no confidence that current Tories will offer a light touch, low tax alternative to the uniparty shit show we have now.
We can swap the cover on the phone all we want, it will offer the same functionality until it breaks.
Identify as whatever you like. Just don’t expect me to accept as true your belief that a peach is actually a cucumber, or vice versa.
And certainly don’t expect me to design my life (or that of my children, for that matter) around your crackpot beliefs.
Can’t help but think of the short, but oft screened interplay on GB News between Lee Anderson and Michelle Dewberry. She’d joked about self identifying as a cat, so playing along, Anderson tried feeding her from an unmarked tin with a spoon. Dewb’s response was “I’m not eating that, it’s bloody cat-food. Have you gone mental?”
Will labour also criminalise maths teachers who teach their pupils that 2 + 2 is 4?
Misinformation must be criminalised.
My kids in a progressive school were taught how to choose an accountant.
“Now children, when you are starting up your net-zero carbon and gender neutral green LGBTQI+++ not-for profit enterprise you will need an accountant.
To decide who to appoint, make a shortlist and ask this question ‘what is two plus two?’
Then choose the one who says ‘what figure have you got in mind?’“
To my mind, this is the ultimate demonstration of what it is to be on the Left (with some honourable exceptions): Anneliese Dodds believes that it’s her role to interfere in the most harmful way imaginable in the lives of private individuals. And not just any old individuals: she means to criminalise people who are concerned that children should be allowed to grow up before being influenced, in the most intimate and private area of their lives, by political ideologues. Anneliese Dodds and the army of meddlesome, nannying, intrusive, delusional authoritarians she represents, are the quintessence of Woke. I believe they are the greatest evil faced by mankind. An adult man feels better wearing women’s clothes? Fine by me. And adult woman wants to wear men’s clothes? Fine by me. A confused pre-pubescent child should be encouraged to undergo grotesque chemical and surgical interventions? This is not fine by me.
Blimey – deja vu
“If only we had a democracy here too and had some say.
We give all the power to a handful of political activists – Con or Lab – who have never done anything useful but jabber about ideology to get elected and get power.
The worst possible outcome of our next big election is a landslide for any party.”
This “rising tide of hate” I keep hearing about, other than people getting pissed off that trans women keep winning sporting events, is there actually any evidence for this? Do people really think it’s worse to be gay or trans in 2023 than it was, say, 50 years ago??
They just redefine hate until they get what they want.
Fascinating, and illuminating, stat turned up during the recent coverage of the autistic girl arrested for saying the short haired female police office looked like her lesbian nana.
Turns out that nearly 50% of reported ‘hate incidents’ are being reported by police officers regards comments made to them.
My word … how pathetic they are … and it reminds us to keep in mind lies, damned lies and statistics etc.
I heard Analise Dodds on the radio the other day – I was just embarrassed at her use of English. Everything was about “solidarity”. If I hear that word again from a politician (or journalist) I swear, I will burst a blood vessel.