- “Anti-gay discrimination not qualification for asylum, says Suella Braverman” – The Home Secretary says that fearing discrimination for being gay or a woman should not be enough to qualify for international refugee protection, reports BBC News. Cue massive row.
- “Doctors to take legal action against GMC over ‘inaction’ on Covid vaccine misinformation” – A group of doctors has initiated legal proceedings against the General Medical Council, courtesy of the Good Law Project, for not doing more to censor Aseem Malhotra, according to Pulse Today.
- “What happened to London’s post Covid return to the office?” – Millions of train journeys that took commuters in and out of the capital during the week are no longer taking place, prompting fears that the drive to return workers to London is failing, says the Mail.
- “Why do public sector workers take more time off sick?” – The number of people taking time off work due to supposed illness is at a 15-year high and is up sharply from just before Covid, writes John O’Connell in the Mail.
- “England and Wales mortality bulletin” – On Substack, Joel Smalley outlines a method to calculate excess mortality, emphasising the need for precise data and careful analysis.
- “Five evidence-based early known Covid facts – ignored and censored” – Highly acclaimed experts presented evidence-based facts on COVID-19 at the beginning of the crisis in 2020, but were ignored and censored by the authorities, says Theo L. Glück on Substack.
- “Will the pandemic approach be more like Sweden’s next time?” – Can we trust Dame Jenny Harries, head of the U.K. Health Security Agency, given her history of flip-flopping, ask Prof. Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson on Substack.
- “‘Disease X’ is 20 times more fatal than COVID-19 – or so say the ‘experts’” – “Disease X’ is the newest diversion to create fear worldwide, says Dr. Robert W. Malone on Substack.
- “Why smart people seem to believe all manner of crazy things, and smarter people seem to believe them even harder” – A Swedish study found a link between higher intelligence and COVID-19 vaccine acceptance, which suggests it’s a mistake to assume that whatever smart people are doing is always a good idea, writes Eugyppius on Substack.
- “Nick Robinson blames ‘news avoiders’ for Today programme’s ratings slump” – Nick Robinson has blamed the Today programme’s falling ratings on “news avoiders”, reports the Telegraph.
- “Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins is sheer hell for Matt Hancock – and a balm for the nation” – The notoriously tough reality show, Celebrity SAS, does not pull its punches with the former Health Secretary, says Alex Diggins in the Telegraph.
- “Boss of South Cambridgeshire council edited ‘independent’ report to remove negative comments about trial of a four-day week” – A council boss intervened to remove negative comments from a Cambridge University report into a four-day week trial at her local authority, reveals the Mail.
- “Italian PM Meloni slams Germany for funding migrant rescue charities” – Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has said she was “astonished” to learn of a German Government initiative to finance migrant rescue charity groups operating in the Mediterranean, according to the Mail.
- “Why the West’s elites invented a ‘permacrisis’” – ‘Permacrisis’ neatly encapsulates the panic of Western elites: It is their global order, their dominant position in the global food chain, that is under threat, argues Thomas Fazi in UnHerd.
- “China prepares to crack down on ‘hurt feelings’” – Major Chinese media outlets have remained largely silent on Beijing’s recent proposal to ban merchandise and behaviours that hurt people’s feelings. But the Chinese people are outraged, writes Benjamin Qiu in the WSJ.
- “Fewer than half of drivers want to buy electric cars” – The number of people considering an EV has dwindled over the past two years because of the “perceived barriers” of cost and charging infrastructure, says the Times. Surely, those barriers are real?
- “Mark Drakeford’s miserable war on the car” – The new 20mph speed limit in Wales seems designed purely to make life difficult for motorists, writes Austin Williams in Spiked.
- “Greens, stop using kids to fight your battles” – The spectacle of school children suing national governments over climate change is absurd, says Joanna Williams in Spiked.
- “How war in Ukraine sank Europe’s Net Zero plans” – European politicians are reconsidering climate change action as they fear being punished by voters facing surging food and energy prices, according to the Telegraph.
- “World must invest more than entire German economy each year to hit Net Zero, says IEA” – According to the International Energy Agency, vast spending is needed on clean energy technologies to reach Net Zero by 2050, reports the Telegraph.
- “Is it foolish to think the world can achieve Net Zero by 2050?” – Rising global emissions are a reminder of just how difficult it is to decarbonise the global economy, writes Ross Clark in the Spectator.
- “The deep absurdity of HS2 diversity’s agenda” – Britain has created vast, crazy, self-enhancing and Kafka-esque bureaucracies dedicated to ensuring that absurd bureaucrats get paid long before anything gets built, says Sean Thomas in the Spectator.
- “Harry Potter panel axed from London Comic Con to keep transgender fans ‘safe’” – A Harry Potter panel has been axed from one of the country’s largest pop culture festivals to keep transgender fans “safe”, according to the Telegraph.
- “The young must learn to confront disagreeable ideas” – Words can cause pain and distress, but safe spaces and censorship will not build resilience, argues Joanna Williams in the Times.
- “Why is TED scared of colour blindness?” – In the Free Press, Coleman Hughes asks why TED is shadow-banning his talk extolling the virtues of colour blindness when it comes to race.
- “Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom to hold televised debate” – After taunting each other for months, the Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and California Governor Gavin Newsom have agreed to debate each other head-to-head, according to the Times.
- “Have you heard dis information?” – Elon Musk has shared an eye-opening video montage on X, featuring headlines making weaker and weaker claims about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines.
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Till the lunatic Starmer gets in….why were conservatives ever funding this bs.
Because they’re just politicians, like all the rest.
It was a very normie post, apologies.
“No current plans to do so”
I seem to remember:
”We have no plans to introduce a vaccine passport”
Is there a general election coming up?
No need to fund GDI any more – they did more than ‘uphold [the govt’s] values’, their control & censor ideology is now fully embedded.
They won’t notice. It’s already privately funded by busybody billionaires with highly questionable motives.
No government (ie our) money should be spent on this tripe.
What is disinformation? Who decides its definition? Why does the government think that countering ‘disinformation’ is its job? And more to the point, why is this unelected buttock faced multi-millionaire grifter in the cabinet?
They can counter “disinformation” if they like. They can do so by putting out what they think is the right information and then let each of us decide what we think about it all.
The best response to bad information is good information, not shutting people up.
But this assumes this is all actually in good faith and the government is actually worried about bad information. What they’re really worried about is perfectly good information that is a threat to established power. And of course, they can try to counter that with bad but more persuasive information, but that doesn’t really work. Censorship is the only real remedy to inconveniently true information.
Accusing others of lying to cover or promote their own lies is just yet another form of gaslighting of the population.
I do believe in the ‘Online Harms’ bill there is legislation that addresses censorship of true but problematic information.
“problematic” ——-Usually because it interferes with and has the potential to lower confidence in government policies on the 5 main agenda’s. —–Equality Diversity Race Gender and Climate
why is this unelected buttock faced multi-millionaire grifter in the cabinet?
Nobody in the cabinet is elected, they’re all appointed by the monarch on advice of the prime minister (which is itself principally appointed by the monarch as he sees fit although the convention is that it should be the leader of a party which commands a majority in the house of commons).
Yes but ideally in order for our dropped and run over pizza of a democracy to be taken seriously they have to be an elected MP surely? And Cameron is not.
I don’t think so. At least, that’s not mentioned in here:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9877
On a not unrelated note, UK Column delved into C40 cities and the big players & Foundations behind it….It seems Sadiq Kahn is just a small fish in this Globalist agenda.
“….It seems Sadiq Kahn is just a small fish in this Globalist agenda.”
Yes, but he’s ambitious Ron.
But why (if it still is) is the Conservative party funding Hope Not Hate HNH the far left pressure group that Reform didn’t have to spine to tell, go do one!
Correction: The taxpayers will no longer be funding the global disinformation index. Fear not, the government will have something else planned to fritter our taxes away.
That’s for sure. And they almost certainly have some other way of censoring and don’t need the GDI any more.
Penny Mordaunt has simply re-directed the funds as the article I have posted from Off-Guardian makes clear.
Oliver Cromwell’s speech shows politicians haven’t changed much …
“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money. Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not process? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?
Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lords temple into a den of thieves, by you’re immoral principles and wicked practices?
Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone! So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!”
Oliver Cromwell’s speech to Parliament on April 20, 1653.
A very nice Philippic.
A key requirement for countering disinformation is the ability to recognise it. I don’t think anyone in government or opposition has that skill. The skill they are required to have is the ability to present whatever the government line currently is in a convincing manner, or to put it another way, lying with a straight face.
Thus we have Zelensky a paragon of virtue, whose every word is the shining truth and Putin who is a slippery-tongued dissembler. There is Biden, the virtuous leader of the free world and Xi, a ruthless dictator.
Then back home we have Sunak and Starmer, but no-one can really tell the difference, they just have different flavours of the same “truth”.
As this article makes clear the UK government is still fighting the good fight on the “misinformation” garbage and so ‘Just Call me Dave’ is, no surprise, telling porkies. And look at who funded the guide:
https://off-guardian.org/2024/05/08/new-guide-teaches-uk-mps-to-spot-conspiracy-theories/
“The report was co-written by “experts” representing several non-governmental organisations, and fact-checkers including:
FullFact – funded by (among others) Google, Facebook and the Open Society Foundation.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue – funded by (among others)
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Facebook, over a dozen national governments and the UN.
Global Network on Extremism and Technology – The academic research arm of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a thinktank “designed to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms”…and which is funded by (among others) Facebook, Amazon, Youtube and Microsoft.
In short, it’s all a rather incestuous funding pool of the same handful of tech giants and billionaires paying “experts” to tell them what they want to hear.
But we probably shouldn’t judge until we’ve read the “guide” itself, which is tricky because it doesn’t seem to be publicly available (seriously I looked everywhere, if you’re aware of a copy online post it in the comments and we’ll add it the link here).
Fortunately, our old friends at the Guardian have given us a little taste, here’s three things they’re warning about.
The Great Reset, which the Graun describes as…
…a vague set of proposals from the World Economic Forum to encourage governments to move to adopt more equitable policies, the concept has been hijacked by conspiracy theorists claiming it is a bid by a small group to exert control.
…which is wonderful, because it’s essentially admitting it’s true and then pretending it’s not.
The Great Reset is, indeed, a WEF initiative. It was launched in June 2020 with the backing of world leaders and captains of industry, it aims to totally and completely rebuild the way our society works, including how we travel, what we eat and where we live.
You can read about it in Klaus Schwab’s own words here, or see their handy diagram:
How is that NOT “exerting control”? How does one go about transforming the farming, travel, taxation and employment policies of every nation on Earth without “exerting control”?
Eating Insects is another “conspiracy theory”, apparently. With the Guardian warning that:
[conspiracy theories] have included claims – fuelled by attempts to reduce meat consumption – that the WEF wants to make people eat insects.
The only problem being that the WEF really does want people to eat insects:
Like, a lot:
You know what? The Guardian wants people to eat insects too. So does the BBC. And Time. The list is endless.
This is – to use an overused word – gaslighting of the highest degree.
They are at once saying “hey, we all need to eat insects to save the world”, and then claiming anyone who repeats it back at them is a conspiracy theorist.
To encompass how mad this is you have to picture it being done on an interpersonal level.
Imagine a double-glazing salesman comes to your door, wearing a double-glazing company logo and holding a double-glazing sales catalogue and says “I think you should buy some double-glazing”.
To which you reply, “No thanks I don’t need any double glazing.”
At this point the man screams “Double glazing? Who said anything about double glazing!? You lunatic!” storms off down the path, gets in his double-glazing van and drives away.
It’s just that insane.
Climate Lockdowns are the third “conspiracy theory” the Guardian warns us about, claiming:
The ISD identified “climate lockdown” as the catchphrase for the conspiracy that the climate crisis will be used as a pretext for depriving citizens of liberty.
But climate lockdowns are not a conspiracy theory either, they were first posited in a report in October 2020 published by Project Syndicate and the World Council for Sustainable Development. The proposed lockdown included banning private vehicles, the consumption of red meat and “extreme energy-saving measures”.
Since then we have been inundated with peer-review studies, claiming lockdown is good for the environment.
The Guardian itself headlined, in March 2021:
Global lockdown every two years needed to meet Paris CO2 goals – study
It was such an unpopular story that they sneakily changed the headline.
It’s fairly clear that “climate lockdowns” are far from a conspiracy theory, that they were planned and then abandoned (or delayed) due to public anger at the first lockdown.
*
The report is on the ISD Global website:
https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Conspiracy-Theories-Guide.pdf
I’ve had a quick scan through. It appears to be the usual double-down, deny-everything propagandist guff, complete with picture of Trump under the QAnon heading (as if that applies to the UK). It also seems to claim that everything should be treated as potentially anti-semitic (‘Numerous conspiracy theories are rooted in anti-Jewish racism.‘) – the list of conspiracy theories on page 11 has anti-semitism linked to every single one. WTAF?
There is of course absolutely no mention of all the ‘conspiracy theories’ which have been proven to be factually correct.
They might take a leaf out of their own recommendations:
1. Check before sharing. It is vital to check that information has a solid factual basis.