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News Round-Up

by Will Jones
23 February 2023 12:04 AM

  • “The Mask Mandates Did Nothing. Will Any Lessons Be Learned?” – “Do something” is not science, and it shouldn’t have been public policy, writes Bret Stephens in, er, the New York Times.
  • “New York Times readers confront the manifest failure of masks to do anything, cope and seethe” – Eugyppius entertains himself and us by reviewing the most popular comments on Bret Stephens’ NYT mask article.
  • “The four-day week experiment’s killer finding is borderline embarrassing” – At this rate, people will soon be objecting to the very concept of work itself, suggests Ben Marlow in the Telegraph.
  • “Britain is barely working. Now it wants to work less” – The results from a four-day week trial should be taken with a fistful of salt, says Ross Clark in the Telegraph.
  • “The Pfizer Clinical Trial in Argentina Was a Military Operation” – And Augusto Roux has the contracts to prove it, says Dr. Josh Guetzkow.
  • “Will Tony Blair ever give up on ID cards?” – Is Blair ever going to give up hope of foisting ID cards on us, after being defeated over the issue as Prime Minister, asks Ross Clark in the Spectator.
  • “What really caused the surge in Covid deaths in early 2020?” – Professor Norman Fenton defends one version of the iatrogenesis hypothesis – though I’m not convinced it’s the same as the extreme ‘ABC’ version that I was criticising, where excess deaths are attributed to Anything But Covid.
  • “Perspectives on the pandemic from a children’s dance teacher” – “Many new starters struggled to fit in and focus, and would appear much younger in their development,” writes an anonymous children’s dance teacher for UsForThem.
  • “Pfizer Knowingly Allowed Dangerous Components in its Vaccines” – The Epoch Times covers the contamination and cover-up story known on social media as ‘blotgate’.
  • “Cambridge University students vote for completely vegan menus” – The union will hold talks with catering services about removing all animal products from cafes and canteens, reports the Guardian.
  • “Nobody is buying heat pumps because they’re an awful product” – Is anyone surprised that the heat pump rollout is failing when they cost a ton and aren’t particularly efficient, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
  • “Roald Dahl publisher says it has ‘significant responsibility’ to protect young readers” – Defiant Puffin defends its extensive story changes as “minimal” after the rewrite row, adding it is “not unusual for publishers to review and update language”, reports the Telegraph.
  • “Meet the Woke Activists behind the Roald Dahl Book Purge” – The U.K.-based consultancy Inclusive Minds contracts with dozens of ‘inclusion ambassadors’ to shape the next generation of children’s books, reports National Review.
  • “George Orwell’s chilling prediction has come true – it’s time to make a stand” – The censorship of books, statues and history is an attempt to eradicate the past and enforce a single point of view, says Simon Heffer in the Telegraph.
  • “Being ‘Offensive’ is Irrelevant” – English teacher Paul Sutton says that “very few English teachers (especially the younger ones) have any interest in literature, other than as a grim but necessary dietary supplement needed to rid the world of ‘Tories’, ‘Climate change deniers’, ‘Racists’ and ‘Transphobes’”.
  • “Fiddling while Ohio burns” – The Democratic elites aren’t even pretending to care about the East Palestine disaster, says Jenny Holland in Spiked.
  • “The EU Files: What Elon Musk Is Not Telling You About Twitter Censorship” – Robert Kogon in Brownstone says the untold story of Twitter censorship is not what is happening in the U.S. but in the EU, where there is no First Amendment.
  • “Lady Susan Hussey back performing duties on behalf of Princess Anne” – One senior member of the Royal Family has made a very public display of support for Lady Susan, the Daily Mail discloses.
  • “Fury over new plans to fast-track 12,000 immigration applications” – Rishi Sunak faces renewed pressure on immigration after a new fast-track scheme for 12,000 asylum seekers – including Channel migrants – was dubbed an “amnesty in all but name”, the Mail reports.
  • “The doctors failed me: Detransitioned woman – who had her breasts and uterus removed when she thought she was a man during mental health crisis – sues eight health care workers who helped her change” – Michelle Zacchinga was bullied at school and says she put her anxiety and depression down to being trans after reading about gender online, but now she will sue the doctors who helped her transition, reports the Mail.
  • “The SNP leadership race has turned into the mother of all culture wars” – The race so far has been dominated by Twitter, which is why it appears to be solely about gender and same-sex marriage, says Iain Macwhirter in the Spectator.
  • “The real reason to be scared of Kate Forbes” – Scotland has gone, in the space of just over 40 years, from a country where male homosexual acts were illegal to one where failure to believe personally in same-sex marriage (even as you support its legality) is a disqualifier for high public office, writes Stephen Daisley in the Spectator.
  • “It’s okay for somebody who’s a Marxist to bring what they’ve learned from Das Kapital into the room, but not to take what you believe from the Bible. That’s nonsense, isn’t it?” – Tim Farron tells TimesRadio that being religious can be a bar to serving in high public office.

“It's okay for somebody who's a Marxist to bring what they've learned from Das Kapital into the room, but not to take what you believe from the Bible. That's nonsense, isn't it?”@TimFarron tells #TimesRadio that being religious can be a bar to serving in high public office. pic.twitter.com/fPQXCaxQt7

— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) February 21, 2023

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50 Comments
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Jabby Mcstiff
Jabby Mcstiff
1 year ago

Well you know when people don’t have war or famine to concentrate on then they tend to get wound up in their own arse. It might well be interesting in a university seminar but the situation in the workplace isn’t going to improve ostensibly anytime soon. I will say though, working for the government, that there is a strong movement within to defy these rules and conventions because when something doesn’t accord with reality its time is limited.

41
0
RW
RW
1 year ago

How to square this circle is, it is increasingly apparent, one of the most serious challenges of our time and it is not readily apparent how […] we can rise to it.

This brings a famous quote of Billy the Gates to mind, namely (paraphrased from memory)

The obvious technical progress here would be to find a fast way to factor large prime numbers.

a completely clueless comment of His Billness (by then still at Microsoft) about the RSA public-key crypto algorithm which is based on the so-called factoring problem, ie, that it’s computionally infeasible to factor the product of two large prime numbers. Factoring the primes themselves is – of course – trivial as all prime numbers are only evenly divisble by 1 and themselves.

In the light of this: Squaring the circle is a famous geometrical problem dating back to mathematicians of classic Greece and it’s known that squaring a circle, ie, find a square whose area is the same as that of a given circle, is impossible. Hence, nobdoy can ever rise to it.

Last edited 1 year ago by RW
10
-1
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

I would prefer the 20 pence version of this article. —–It is way too long winded. Sorry.

25
-6
wryobserver
wryobserver
1 year ago

The scenario described raises the question of whether the complainant, having found alternative employment, deliberately found some minor reasons to extract compensation by being confrontational. In any case of yes he did, no I didn’t, the only way to prove the point is to have a live recording of the conversation or independent witnesses. The recent TV series Forensic CSI offers an exposition of this, with the analysis of CCTV and of phone records. I was involved with a damages claim made by a patient on behalf of whom I appeared in court, to find that what she had told me in clinic, and subsequently told her lawyer, about the disability caused by her RTA was a pack of lies. The defence had employed a private detective to follow and film her.

But if every workplace has to have CCTV and audio recording everywhere (presumably including the toilets) we are certainly in a dark place.

19
0
CircusSpot
CircusSpot
1 year ago

You cannot sort this out without stopping legal aid, wall to wall benefits and an unchecked and unregulated legal profession.
The real sufferers are the public who pay for this lunacy and still end up with the same poor services.

22
0
marebobowl
marebobowl
1 year ago

Wow, don’t most people wish the UK would put this much thought into running the country smartly rather than trying to create new ways to waste EVERYONE’S time and money? A big thank you to the legal profession who appear to be slim on the ground in representing the thousands injured and killed by the government issued covid vaxxes? Crickets on this, why?

21
0
JDee
JDee
1 year ago

Hi David. I think you have the answer, it is the lack of clear rules on what factors lead to a breakdown in ‘mutual trust and confidence ‘. Part of this is caused by the protected characteristic trump cards of the equality act, making things harder or unequal for everyone else. Instead reciprocity and the golden rule over ‘common basic rights ‘ should be applied, along with the private rights of association of the employer.

The other side of your consideration is that for many professionals it’s just not worth going to tribunal or law over this kind of thing. Things get out and within the connected world in which people work, you will never get another job again. The prospective tribunal awards never stack up to much unless you are on a trump card. Employment disputes are also littered with gagging orders and the Liberal application of the data protection act. The information about the employers poor behaviour to you, because it is also always about work in some sense, is private. You are not allowed to know and spread these bad things about us!

What is needed are clear rules which cover basic rights of everyone, not giving a trump card to protected characteristics a trump cards and a free court to enforce them. The fact that we are talking basic common rights including those of the employer would stop mission creep, and the fact that its a free court would stop employers taking the piss. Of course at the moment we have the complete opposite, mission creep and trump cards, and not a free court further enhancing trump card cases as the only ones worth winning.

Finally I would say that there is a legitimate cross over between private law and public law here. Private law should never overule basic common rights, its just that using protected characteristics and no clear definition of the basic rights implicit within continued ‘mutual trust and confidence ‘ will inevitably cause the current mess.

4
-1

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