- “Sunak must embrace traditional Conservative values to win election, poll suggests” – Eight in 10 former Tory voters think the party would have a better chance of winning the election with a leader who embraces “traditional Conservative values”, a poll circulating among MPs has found, the Telegraph reports.
- “Tories eye May election to ‘stop the bleeding’ and head off Sunak mutiny” – A senior Tory source tells the Mirror that a May election might be necessary, following polls suggesting the party will be “obliterated”, with an announcement potentially soon.
- “Tory chicken run: more than 100 MPs could resign before election” – Some predict the number of Tories abandoning ship will be as high as 150 if the polls continue to show Labour on course for a landslide, says Tim Shipman in the Times.
- “How did Navalny die? Russian spies ‘visited prison’ days earlier” – FSB agents are accused of disconnecting CCTV as the Putin critic’s mother demands his body back, according to the Times.
- “Israel claims dozens more UNRWA staff took part in October 7th attacks” – Israel has identified dozens more UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) workers who it claims took part in the October 7th Hamas attacks, the country’s Defence Minister has told the Telegraph.
- “Metropolitan Police arrest 12 people at pro-Palestine protest” – The arrests were for a string of alleged offences, including inciting racial hatred, suspicion of support for a proscribed organisation in relation to a placard and assaulting emergency workers, the Mail reports.
- “Michael Gove criticises housing association for suspending peer over Hamas ‘murderers’ comment” – Michael Gove has criticised a housing association for removing Lord Austin, a former Labour minister, as its Chairman after the peer tweeted derogatory remarks about Hamas, the Telegraph reports.
- “Britain has raised a generation of anti-Semites. It might be too late to fix” – The poisonous fruits of this educational and moral madness have become impossible to ignore – and Jews are paying the price, says the Telegraph‘s Zoe Strimpel.
- “Germany announces wide-ranging plans to restrict the speech, travel and economic activity of political dissidents, in order to better control the ‘thought and speech patterns’ of its own people” – While other countries have endured the rise of new parties and political structures with some measure of equanimity, politicians in Germany are terrified of losing power, and they will use all the tools at their disposal to keep hold of it – up to and including the suspension of democracy itself, says Eugyppius.
- “Joe Biden’s catastrophic Presidency represents the final surrender of the West” – While Russia has put its economy onto a full war footing, China continues to push its military exercises and Iranian proxies fire missiles across its region, the British and American armies have serious recruitment problems fuelled by DEI wokery, says Douglas Murray in the Telegraph.
- “A letter to the Cochrane Board” – Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan express their concern that for Cochrane, junk rapid reviews are taking the place of evidence reviews.
- “Clergy warn of ‘doom spiral’ as church attendance drops off at record rate” – Sunday services have dwindled in popularity by 20% since 2019, despite Church of England’s claims it has “bounced back” after the pandemic, the Telegraph reports.
- “The feuding tearing apart the Royal Society of Literature” – The Spectator‘s Sam Leith tries to get a handle on the blazing row engulfing the RSL.
- “Salman Rushdie, Bernardine Evaristo and the Royal Society of Literature at war” – Next week, when the council of the RSL holds its quarterly meeting, it will be responding to a barrage of angry criticism from figures such as Salman Rushdie, Philip Pullman and Hermione Lee, says Patrick Marnham in the Times.
- “SNP bans use of ‘remote’ to describe Highlands” – The SNP has banned use of the word ‘remote’ to describe the Scottish Highlands and Scottish islands over fears it is putting people off living there, according to the Telegraph. Which appears to misunderstand why people like living in remote areas…
- “In The Navy” – Dr. Roger Watson bemoans the state of the military in the New Conservative.
- “I’m done with mayor’s performative politics” – Sadiq Khan’s naming of London’s rail lines typifies a style that prefers virtue-signalling to tackling real problems, says Janice Turner in the Times.
- “Trans ideology has taken over Shakespeare’s Globe” – In Spiked, Zoe Cairns says her former employer dismissed her concerns about women’s spaces and child safeguarding.
- “Foreign dentists to be allowed to work in U.K. without qualification checks” – Foreign dentists are to be allowed to work in the U.K. without taking an exam to check their qualifications under Government plans to solve the dental crisis, reports the Telegraph. What could go wrong?
- “Six-car pile up on smart motorway while entire safety system shut down” – The smart motorways computer safety system shut down across the country, leading to a “terrifying” six-car pile up after a vehicle broke down in a live lane, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘Bankrupt’ council at centre of budget-cut protest holds ‘Queering Nutrition’ event” – Birmingham City Council, which has declared itself ‘bankrupt’ and been the subject of protests over proposed budget cuts, has held a ‘Queering Nutrition’ event, according to the Telegraph.
- “Riot erupts on streets of the Hague as ‘migrants’ attack cops” – Dozens of rioters were filmed surrounding the Opera conference hall along Fruitweg in the Netherlands, as multiple police vans drove to the scene this evening, reports the Mail.
- “Just Stop Oil’s secret plot to ‘occupy the homes of MPs’” – Just Stop Oil activists are plotting a nationwide blitz to ‘occupy’ MPs’ homes ahead of the General Election, a Mail on Sunday investigation has found.
- “‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals” – Companies knew for decades recycling was not viable but promoted it regardless, a Centre for Climate Integrity study finds, reported in the Guardian.
- “Sunak is ‘squandering Brexit freedoms’ by approving more EU rules” – Rishi Sunak has been accused of squandering Brexit freedoms after quietly introducing sweeping EU equality rules into British law that “gold-plate” judgments by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and amount to a significant expansion of the Equality Act, the Telegraph reports.
- “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies” – Citizen Free Press tweets the classic 90-second video showing the fast-declining claims made for the Covid vaccines.
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I think you have to weight the cost of a life in favour of the young. Any other approach seems unnatural.
Any analysis that doesn’t include a notional cost of lost liberty on the cost side is severely lacking. Governments pay people compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
LOCKDOWN DON’T Work – they kill old people they don’t save old people
Mask don’t work
Where Are the Scientific Studies for Universal Masking?
Why Masks Are a Charade Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/08/23/masks-are-charade.aspx?ui=1fb065e0c4152b58bd4ed94cf29c7cbfad40307fb723460ddabacd55f3c58b0c&sd=20210518&cid_source=dnl&cid_medium=email&cid_content=art1HL&cid=20210823&mid=DM965507&rid=1242686923
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell every Sunday from 10am meet fellow anti lockdown freedom lovers, keep yourself sane, make new friends and have a laugh.
(also Wednesdays from 2pm)
Join our Stand in the Park – Bracknell – Telegram Group
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Ouch! I’m hoping that the Daily Sceptic looks with disfavor at the citing of dens of kookery like mercola.com
Yes, there’s a reason they used to say women and children first. Of course that doesn’t mean the old don’t matter or that we should euthanise them. But any adult who puts their own life before children’s should be ashamed.
I’m 74. I have 5 granddaughters aged between 22 and 7. Let’s face it, their likely value to society far outweighs mine. They should have been the priority over the last 18 months. I have my degrees and professional qualifications, I have worked but have been retired for years, therefore I do not make an valuable contribution to the national economy. They have had their futures blighted by the over 50s politicians who have also had their chance to learn. I am a drain – they have a productive lfe ahead of them, in spite of the last 18 months. I don’t want to be got rid of, but I am clear headed enough to know that my value is far less than theirs.
Those preferred value numbers still seem ridiculously high – no doubt to try and get the correct answer.
Do they mention the value of someone who will die in the next month covid or no covid?
My guess is we’d soon come to the obvious conclusion without having to conduct a study.
Removed. Rephrased as a top-level comment,
This sort of analysis does very little to convince people one way or the other.
There are so many arbitrary assumptions like the value of each life or the number of people “saved” that if one disagrees with the conclusions one need only take a few shots at the assumptions and retreat back into the comfort of one’s firmly held belief.
What is the assumption about “lives saved” (by shielding measures)? How do these experts determine this estimate? Seems to me the only way you could calculate “lives saved” would be to compare two similar nations that used completely opposite mitigation strategies – One nation did essentially nothing and another did essentially everything. Then you compare the fatalities from COVID.
Unfortunately, we have only one nation – Sweden – in the “placebo” group to perform such “scientific” comparisons. Still, this one comparison does reveal that there is no statistically significant difference in deaths in Sweden to most of the other countries that did use all the lockdown measures, especially when you look at the age cohorts before retirement age.
In America, one could compare mortality data from Alabama – which had much more stringent mitigation mandates – than its neighboring state of Florida. Florida has better mortality statistics on a per capita basis than Alabama. And Florida has more elderly citizens than any state in the union except maybe California.
In other words, more lives were seemingly “saved” in Florida than in Alabama. But this comparison doesn’t fit the narrative, so we can’t use it, I guess.
https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/state-vs-state
Covid charts quiz. Spot the mask mandates and the lockdowns…
So even better still when you look at age groups
There is no benefit in lockdown because communism has no benefits, mediaeval superstition has no benefits.
Oh dear. Political illiteracy strikes again. What we’ve got ain’t ‘communism’ by any stretch of the imagination.
Lockdown is communist, it is a policy imported from a communist dictatorship that has concentration camps.
No, we don’t have communism.
Communist countries didn’t have communism either.
Some more equal, were they?
No, it’s fascism!
Reminds me of that sketch about comminazis.
The only similarity I see is that neither works.
Both communism and medieval superstition seem to lead away from Liberty and towards our current economic model namely Feudalism (although it’s more stealthily done, even though economic-rent is at at historical high).
There was a story a few years back about Europe’s last feudal society (Sark, I think) coming to an end. Didn’t stay away long, did it?
On the contrary, communism always works, it always succeeds in achieving its goal of destruction for the sake of destruction.
Were any lives ‘saved’. Most commentators, even ‘pro lockdown’ ones seem to say all that happens is the can is kicked further down the road. The impact on overall mortality is minimal at best.
Quite. Given the age and co-morbidity profiles of deaths of/with Covid, the likelihood is that a high proportion of these “saved” people would have died anyway soon, either due to Covid catching up with them or to their existing age/conditions.
We haven’t really saved any lives, which can be verified by looking at the all-cause mortality figures. There is no exceptional about last year in terms of deaths
In a rational world, the latest all cause mortality from Belarus would surely be seen as conclusive (I suppose the BBC didn’t cover it…).
No, of course not. The lives “saved” by lockdowns (which I don’t believe) are more than outweighed by the ones lost by all manner of other conditions, some of which have not yet been able to be calculated (how many suicides, deaths from mental illness, bankruptcy, consistent abuse etc). hese are long term figures, which will not become evident for years.
To the rational mind, it is clear that lockdowns ‘weren’t worth it’. There are simply no significant benefits that can be pinned down, whilst the horrendous costs are plain to see.
But … all these analyses depend on the ‘assumptions’ that are made, and then turned into further assumptions about very dodgy monetary equivalents.
The real problem is that governments in general have made no attempt to analyse the immense obvious penalties of lockdowns against the lack of any claimed and unobvious benefits.
Basically, the exercise is fundamentally flawed.
European COVID-19 Vaccine adverse reactions report.
How’s that line up (in terms of numbers jabbed in the EU vassal states) with the UK’s 1500+ jab victims?
It doesn’t.
I’m convinced our total deaths post-vaccination are too low. At a rough guess, at a minimum it should be at least double, and possibly much higher than that, if we assume only 10% of adverse reactions are recorded.
30 day FB ban for posting this!!!!
The real cost, the human cost, the psychological and spiritual cost, has been incalculable.
People are not numbers or economic units.
Seems to me, we need to make just two observations:
Therefore, the “life cost” of Covid19 is zero and the benefits of the Covid19 response is zero.
Disclaimer: Getting on a bit myself, so I’m heading into the higher-chance end.
I’m 74. My 5 granddaughters matter more in terms of the future than I do. I’ve had my working and academic life, my qualifications, my youth (long, long ago) and it they who should have been prioritised. Blow the emotive response of stupid, politicians and so called experts (who are nothing of the kind) that we mustn’t “kill Granny”. This grandma thinks the young should have been prioritised. I don’t want to die, but I am less valuable than they area and to say otherwise is irrational.
Re: The “lives saved” assumption all we can do is look at the ONE “placebo” nation that did not implement “shielding” measures to save lives or slow spread. This nation of course is Sweden.
In the entire nation of Sweden, fewer than 100 people under the age of 40 have died of COVID.
Sweden has more than 14,000 deaths but the average age of a COVID victim is 82.
Apparently, FEWER people under 70 died in Sweden than in nations that went all in on lockdowns. So one could validly argue that no lives were “saved” by the mitigation mandates.
Yes, the benefit side looks to be zero or negative. I’d say it’s very hard to prove to any reasonable degree there was any benefit, so the assumption is that it was zero. The cost side is easier in that whatever approach you take, it’s going to be massive. In truth, the calculation can be done on the back of a postage stamp.
The economic value of a life is assigned and adjusted according to age. Reid’s calculation considers deaths in terms of economic loss. But might not the creeps behind this scam, have looked at the vulnerable (very old, frail, obese) and seen a value to be gained from their deaths?
So even as a decaying old bat I am worth 1.5 million dollars?lHow much does thirty pieces of silver go into 1.5 million dollars?
In my opinion, doing a cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns is fundamentally misguided because it implicitly accepts the assumption the people are essentially the same as cattle, hence, manageing them in them same way is principally ok and the only question here is whether or nor a particular attempt at manageing peoplecattle was efficient.
I’m not a cow. I object to being treated as such. In particular,
I could continue this list, but these are the three most important points which came to my mind.
Meanwhile: in the Philippines, draconian lockdowns continue.
https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/goodbadnews?e=8e86beb5bb
“due to the so-called “delta” variant, citizens are expected to remain at home for two weeks (a tired trope by now) and may only exit their residences for essential items with a quarantine pass (one per household). Outdoor exercise was allowed until yesterday, but the authorities probably got spooked into banning it when they saw people still outside enjoying themselves (or trying to be healthy) and not cowering in fear at home.”
In New Zealand, lockdowns have been extended. Parliament suspended. Dissidents rounded up, or getting visits from the police for “re-education”, and Jacinda Ardern has sent $3million to the Taliban.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0uDUGU50Y
In Australia, there have been large public protests, and the police have used pepper spray and rubber bullets in response.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bD5-1Z1LXeU
Truckers in Australia are planning to bring Australia to a halt, telling people to stock up on food for at least two weeks.
Would anyone have believed this back in 2019??
Bears. Woods. Popes. Catholics. Fictional Detectives and Excrement. FIGHT. BACK. BETTER. Useful information, links and resources: https://www.LCAHub.org/
2 million lives saved by lockdowns? I don’t see how this can possibly be credible, looking at all cause mortality from Belarus. No lockdowns, no restrictions, no disaster.
Lockdowns were worth it. Not to me or society as a whole. The elite has achieved exactly what they wanted…fear and control. It was planned and they probably can’t believe how stupid and compliant society actually is…and how easy it was to achieve their aim.
In the UK government’s document “The tolerability of risk from nuclear power stations” first published by the HSE in 1988 (last revised 1992) there is a UK government department estimated value put on a human life:
“The Department of Transport’s consultation exercise secured widespread endorsement for its proposed value of life for application in road transport appraisal. This value now stands at £660 000 for a life.”
Adjusted for inflation 1992 to 2021 yields £1,320,000 ($1,810,000). This is less than one quarter the estimate of $7.8 million used in the study by L. Jan Reid.
Well, d’uh!