- “Australian medical regulator finally relaxes Covid gag order on doctors” – An Australian directive to health practitioners banning criticism of the Covid vaccines has finally been dropped, says Rebekah Barnett on Substack.
- “NY Times fact check fail on excess deaths” – On Substack, David Zweig continues to fact check the fact checkers, and things are even worse than they initially appeared.
- “The architecture of isolation: The French connection” – In their latest historical review of infectious disease management, Dr. Tom Jefferson and Prof. Carl Heneghan highlight the ‘Manual of Practical Hygiene’, underscoring the importance of hospital design in controlling infections.
- “Tory MPs terrified Farage could try to make a comeback in February by-election” – The Wellingborough by-election in February could provide an opportunity for Reform U.K. – and Nigel Farage – to make a political breakthrough, says the Express.
- “Keir Starmer found to have helped hate preacher Abu Qatada fight back against deportation” – Sir Kier Starmer has come under fire for representing a notorious hate preacher in court, according to GB News.
- “Scotland pioneers the 84.5% tax rate” – In the Spectator, Ross Clark draws parallels between Scotland’s new tax rates on high earners and the tax policies of Jim Callaghan’s Labour Government in the 1970s.
- “The SNP’s tax and spend delusion” – From next year, many teachers are to be classed as high earners, thanks to the Scottish Government’s latest stealth tax raid, says Iain Macwhirter in the Spectator.
- “Anti-snooping laws planned for Sunak’s Britcoin after major backlash” – Britons who use digital pounds issued by the Bank of England will have their privacy “guaranteed” under new laws designed to allay snooping fears, reports the Telegraph.
- “Britain’s declining birth rate is becoming a problem too big to ignore” – Worrying about Britain’s lower than replacement birth rate does not make you an ethnonationalist or a conspiracy theorist, argues Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
- “History weighs like a nightmare on the living if they are ignorant of basic facts” – Weaponising history has been made easier by the common ‘postmodern’ view that there are no objective historical truths only a cacophony of ‘narratives’, writes Robert Tombs in the Telegraph.
- “The boiler tax exposes the truth about heat pumps” – The U.K.’s boiler tax is a genuinely terrible idea – and MPs are quite right to revolt against it, says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
- “Why the green elites hate Christmas” – Nothing horrifies plummy greens more than the thought of millions of plebs buying gifts, getting sloshed and eating dead birds, writes Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
- “Why the law on assisted dying must change” – The law needs to change and acknowledge a person’s right to end their life, says Mary Dejevsky in the Spectator.
- “‘Assisted dying is a slippery slope – just look at the U.S., Canada and Holland’” – The Church of England has warned that in those countries where assisted dying is legal, such as Canada, stringent safeguards have been dropped over time, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘I was sacked as a teacher for standing up to gender ideology’” – In the Mail, Kevin Lister, who was sacked after 20 years as a teacher for standing up to gender ideology, gives his verdict on the Government’s new trans school guidance.
- “Why drag is not the same as pantomime” – The difference between drag and pantomime is that in pantomime people are pretending, says Charlie Bentley-Astor in the Critic.
- “French feminism is being corrupted” – American activism has seeped into French culture, laments Dora Mouton in UnHerd.
- “Australia’s eSafety Commissioner initiates civil penalty proceedings against X” – Just days after the EU initiated formal legal proceedings against social media company X, Australia has followed suit, writes Rebekah Barnett on Substack.
- “Harvard finds more instances of ‘duplicative language’ in president’s work” – Harvard University says it has found two additional instances of insufficient citation in the scholarly work of Claudine Gay, according to the New York Times.
- “It’s a Christmas nightmare for men who were friends with Jeffrey Epstein” – It’s a whole new kind of festive countdown as the world awaits the publication of a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s friends, says Helen Rumbelow in the Times.
- “Who lied about what? And why?” – On The Glenn Show, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter speak to the two people behind the new George Floyd documentary, The Fall of Minneapolis.
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Oh thank goodness for that! That will save us when they next change the law about what we’re allowed to do.
I haven’t read the article but would they really drop the caveat allowing police access to data when there is a suspicion of illegal activity?
Privacy isn’t guaranteed at the moment. Banks can block payments until they are told what it is for.
Email from our MP
Thank you for your email about the draft WHO Treaty. I made clear in my speech and interventions in the debate that the UK must not give any powers away to make our own health decisions. The Minister did confirm the government will not agree text which would allow the WHO to impose a state of pandemic emergency on us against our will, and implied he did not intend to give away the power to make decisions on how to respond to a pandemic. They need to stick with receiving WHO advice leaving us free whether to accept it or not.
Yours sincerely
The Rt Hon Sir John Redwood MP, D.Phil, FCSI
Member of Parliament for Wokingham
He was quite eloquent. Mr Bridgen pulled a blinder as well.
Chope in his bumbling way, and Danny Kruger. Thank God there are still some MPs of integrity
England’s Kubicki.
Still, encouraging if true.
A big IF though.
It was Conservative MPs and leaders who repeatedly told us there was no question of loss of sovereignty when joining the EEC. They told us the flowery language about ever closer union was just the way of those continentals and the clever chaps at the FCO would ensure it developed as we wanted.
Well that was either a total failure of policy or a lie.
What confidence can we have over the WHO treaty.
I see no reason at all for binding treaties on these or many other matters. Good faith cooperation might benefit from a non-expoansionist and non-politically motivated central registrar but nothing more.
We voted for freedom in 2016 but the Tories have failed to deliver.
I believe the devil’s in the detail…
Worded in such a manner that it’s meaningless.
“against our will“
Who’s will?
A department, a minister, the civil service, the will of a corrupt Parliament or the will of the people?
Ah, I see.
It’s whoever’s will is strongest. At the moment we’re mainly outsourcing that to the government and that’s part of the problem.
That’s exactly right. The Social Contract has been broken – we can no longer assume (if we ever could) that Government or Parliament or MPs are acting in good faith in order to improve our lives – which is their job. I am not sure when this happened, but it only really became clear to me over the last 3 years or so.
Well, quite. There’s also the all-important distinction between being forced to comply and feeling obliged to comply. “against our will” only covers complying because of a forced commitment. It’s deliberately ambiguous.
‘Biden Administration officials from the U.S. State Department (State), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) all agree that the World Health Organization is in urgent need of reform.
Dr. Atul Gawande, Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, recognized the failures of the WHO during the COVID-19 pandemic
Dr. Atul Gawande explained the importance of protecting American sovereignty when Member States meet to discuss WHO reforms:
“We want respect for our sovereignty, and so we also limit how much WHO can control or demand things of us. And that is one of the challenges here, that we are protective of our own sovereignty and therefore do not want to have those tools challenged or potentially challenge us or other Member States…’
14 Dec. 2023, U.S. Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing:
“Reforming the WHO: Ensuring Global Health Security and Accountability”
It would be great to hear something similarly clear from our own government.
“The boiler tax exposes the truth about heat pumps”
This article includes a comment to the effect that; few would disagree that we need to reduce carbon emissions. Is that statement correct? It seems to me that it is this sort of blind acceptance of the ‘stop carbon’ narrative that gives the green light for the immiseration of society in the name of net-zero.
This article seems to be on firmer ground when it observes that people will cling on to old boilers and old cars as long as possible, certainly long enough to cause problems for the economy and for the manufacturers of boilers and cars. Already the the car market in the USA seems to be in a right old pickle with dealers stacked out with EVs they cannot sell whilst people cling on to the old petrol/diesel vehicles. The new trendy car driver is in an old car, here is a video of Geoff Buys Cars in his ULEZ beating 1969 Renault 10;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTeTys4MwOg&t=442s
More CO2 for a greener world…
Exactly.
Of all the utter rubbish spouted about climate the suggestion that a trace gas, necessary for all life on earth, is killing the planet has to be the biggest con and joke ever pulled on humanity.
And it doesn’t take any degree of scientific knowledge to reach that conclusion.
0.04 %! Get a bloody grip.
While I agree with you that human-produced CO2 is not an issue for the climate, I am not sure I buy the line that “0.04% is a really small number, therefore…” – how much cyanide in a glass of beer would be enough to have an adverse effect on someone’s health?
Sorry but this line of reasoning is completely disingenuous, Michael, and is one that the climate alarmists fall back on when faced with such a miniscule figure. Cyanide is a lethal poison; CO2 is not. It’s an essential gas for life. There have been much higher concentrations of CO2 throughout history and yet life flourished.
Aethelred – you have missed my point. I agree that CO2 is an essential gas for life and that CO2 has been much higher in the past – these are persuasive arguments. But saying that a gas can have no impact on something purely because it is a very small proportion of something else (the atmosphere) is not in itself persuasive. I don’t hear William Happer or Richard Lindzen, for example, dismissing the greenhouse effect simply on the basis that CO2 is only a very small proportion of the atmosphere.
Point taken, Michael. However, HP didn’t exactly say what you inferred. He said ‘…the suggestion that a trace gas, necessary for all life on earth, is killing the planet has to be the biggest con and joke ever...’. Never did he say that it can’t have any impact because it is such a small amount. I also don’t dispute that it doesn’t have any impact but whatever impact that it is, in my view, virtually negligible at those concentrations.
Thanks Aethelred as you have saved me the trouble of providing such a response
The Scottish government consultation to replace boilers and a choice of heating with centralised pollution under the guise of “clean heating”. All-electric systems lend to centralised control also just like smart meters.
https://consult.gov.scot/energy-and-climate-change-directorate/proposals-for-a-heat-in-buildings-bill/
The Scottish government takes climate change through human activity as gospel, does not know what a woman is and thinks the cost of living crisis is due to the cost of fossil fuels (no mention of money printing). Worth providing feedback if only to highlight flaws in their thinking which questions their capacity to make such regulations.
…”polluting heating systems,” seems to be a very popular phrase in this “consultation” but we’ve already made our decision, document. Presumably that means gas boilers.
Gas, oil, biomass, anything where you could have a fuel reserve on-site. What they prefer are systems that just happen to offer the potential of real-time centralised control.
As part of this, they want to have a regulation that heat networks are used where available.
The heat, they suggest, could be from a data centre. A quick look seemed to show that some proposed data centre sites are those of former power stations. Demolish power station, build power hungry data centre.
Subsidised Wind Solar Wreak Economic Havoc – latest leaflet to print at home and deliver to neighbours or forward to politicians, media, friends online.
Go for it Mr Musk. Withdraw access to X for accounts registered in or accessed from Oz. Start with government accounts.
Unexpected bonus of this was the Stones fleeing to the South of France and in scenes of utter debauchery concocting one of the finest albums of rock ‘n roll of all time – Exile On Main Street.
Not to mention The Beatles “Taxman”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMdcE8jdz70
How fucking good was pop music back in the day?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/21/the-boiler-tax-exposes-the-truth-about-heat-pumps/
Here we go, an article about the absurdity of this campaign against boilers until we reach this:
“Few disagree that we need to reduce carbon emissions. Finding more environmentally friendly ways of heating our homes is crucial to achieving it, given that domestic boilers account for an estimated 13pc of the UK’s overall carbon footprint.”boilers account for an estimated 13pc of the UK’s overall carbon footprint.”
Bizarre.
Is Matthew Lynn incapable of doing some research?
“Reduce carbon emissions…boilers account for an estimated 13pc of the UK’s overall carbon footprint.”
So f#ckin what? Co2 has sod all to do with a natural and ever changing climate.
Garbage so-called journalism.