Don’t You Dare Enjoy the Sunshine
Yesterday, the R Rate was as low as it has ever been; infections, hospitalisations and deaths were continuing to drop; and Brits were told not to relax. MailOnline has the details.
Jonathan Van-Tam tonight urged Britons not to “relax” as the UK heads into a glorious weekend with the first warm weather for months, warning that “this is not a battle that we have won yet”.
The Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England brought stern warnings to tonight’s Downing Street press conference when he told the public: “Do not wreck this now.”
Coronavirus cases are rising in dozens of parts of England, around one in five and mainly in the Midlands and the North, Professor Van-Tam said, and people must continue to follow lockdown rules for as long as they are in place.
He called for the UK to “hold our nerve” and added: “I do worry that people think it’s all over. The more they think that when it’s not, the greater the headwind they’re going to give to the vaccine programme and the more at risk will become the milestones set on the road map.”
His “sobering” warnings came as data show that Britain’s Covid outbreak is still firmly in retreat, with a catalogue of official figures today piling even more pressure on Boris Johnson to relax lockdown sooner.
Department of Health bosses recorded another 8,523 coronavirus infections and 345 deaths – with both measures down by roughly a third week-on-week. More than 520,000 vaccines were also dished out, with nearly 19.2 million Britons now vaccinated.
No 10’s top scientific advisory panel SAGE estimated the R rate – the average number of people each Covid patient infects – is still at the lowest level since records began in June, staying between 0.6 and 0.9.
Separate statistics from one of the country’s most respected surveillance studies showed England’s outbreak has nearly halved in size over the last fortnight. Office for National Statistics experts estimated 373,700 people would test positive for the virus on any given day in the week ending February 19th, or one in 145 residents. In comparison, the figure was almost 700,000 two weeks ago.
But a weekly report from a symptom-tracking app today warned daily cases had risen 3% in a week, to 9,545 in the seven-day spell ending February 21st. SAGE also estimated the R rate has crept up slightly in the South East, North West and the Midlands but insisted the figure is still below the crucial level of one.
Despite the troubling trend, one leading scientist today urged Britons “not to panic” because hospitalisations and Covid deaths were still falling – and said Number 10 was still on track to lift restrictions “sooner rather than later” because the UK is in a similar position to last May.
Professor Tim Spector, the King’s College London epidemiologist who is behind the app, added: “The difference this time is, while the variants may be more infectious, we have a vaccine that works and the older age groups are largely protected.”
Worth reading in full.
Over in the Spectator, Ross Clark comments on the deceleration in the decline of infections reported at the press conference.
But why should the decline in new infections be slowing down? There are several possible explanations. It is likely that people are beginning to tire of lockdown and are beginning to circulate, even to break the rules, a little more than they were in January. Then there is the weather: the week before last was especially cold; it may be that the virus was better able to spread in those conditions.
Today’s instalment of the Office of National Statistics’ infection survey seems to confirm that the prevalence of Covid infection has fallen in recent weeks. However, it only goes up to February 19th. Over the seven days to that date, it estimates that 373,000 people in England were infected with Covid – equating to 0.69% of the population. In the previous week, it estimated that 0.88% were infected. During the worst week – January 3rd to 9th– it was 2.08%.
Overall, the decline in deaths and hospitalisations seems to be much faster during the second wave than it was during the first wave. As far as infections are concerned, it is much harder to tell, because there was a huge ramp-up in the number of tests being performed last April. There is nothing in the figures so far to suggest that the Government’s plans for lifting lockdown and reopening society should be at risk.
Could it be that people are beginning to break the rules a little more? The Telegraph reports new ONS data on compliance with Social Distancing rules.
People are less likely to adhere to social distancing measures as increasing numbers are vaccinated, Government figures suggest.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) data analysing the social impact of Covid during the period from February 17th to 21st found compliance with most measures to stop the spread remained high, with the proportions reporting always or often washing their hands after returning home (89%) and using a face covering (96%) unchanged from the previous week.
However, researchers found that 86% of adults reported always or often maintaining social distance when meeting people outside their support bubble – lower than last week, when it stood at 91%.
The lower compliance comes as personal happiness levels have begun to increase and a growing number of people receive Covid jabs amid a decline in vaccine scepticism.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Tim Spector makes a good point about the slowing decline in cases.
What is the Truth About Covid Deaths?
The Daily Mail has splashed on mounting concerns about doctors wrongly putting “novel coronavirus” as the cause of death on death certificates when it’s blindingly obvious to the relatives of those who’ve died that their death had nothing to do with Covid.
Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as COVID-19.
Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were “certain” that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus.
One funeral director said it was “a national scandal”. The claims are part of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the spiralling death toll.
More than 100 readers wrote heartbreaking letters following a moving article by Bel Mooney last Saturday. She revealed the death of her 99-year-old father, who suffered from dementia and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, was recorded as coronavirus.
Dozens expressed similar frustrations that the causes of death of elderly and already-unwell relatives had been wrongly attributed. Eight of the families who wrote to the Daily Mail have successfully urged doctors to change causes of death previously recorded as COVID-19.
Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus, said: “The Government should call a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic immediately with an interim investigation into all Covid deaths that should report as soon as possible.”
Tory MP Paul Bristow, a member of the Commons health committee, said: “It’s almost certain that a number of deaths have been wrongly attributed to COVID-19.
“Not only has this skewed figures when data has been so important in deciding how we respond to the pandemic, it has caused distress and anxiety for relatives.
“Whether we have received the most appropriate figures should definitely be considered in any future inquiry.”
A funeral director in the North West told the Mail: “The way Covid has been recorded and reported is a national scandal and a thorough enquiry should be opened immediately.”
Medical experts have cited pressure on doctors to include COVID-19 as a cause of death because it was last year ruled a ‘notifiable disease’, meaning any case needs to be reported officially.
Professor Clare Gerada, former chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said: “When this all comes out in the wash, we will find out we have over-recorded COVID-19 as a cause of death.”
Richard Vautrey, who chairs the British Medical Association’s GP committee, said the toll may have been overstated at the beginning of the pandemic when testing was not widely available and “cause of death would have been based on best judgement of clinical symptoms”.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are confident the death statistics are robust and provide an accurate picture of those who have sadly died from the virus. The guidance to doctors completing a medical certificate of cause of death explains they are expected to state cause of death to the best of their medical knowledge and belief.”
Worth reading in full.
It’s great to see a national newspaper finally digging into this story.
Why Has Boris Thrown the Hospitality Sector to the Wolves?
As with the lockdown, so with the Roadmap: few industries can have suffered more than hospitality from the Government’s cack-handed attempts to minimise the COVID-19 death toll. Pubs will not be allowed to open until April 12th, and even then only to offer an outdoor service. Johnnie Arkwright, who runs a visitor attraction called Hatton Country World in Warwick – as well as a local pub – feels that the sector has been thrown to the wolves. This is his statement to the local media,
Not being allowed to open the ‘Outside’ areas of rural attractions and pubs at the end of March in time for Easter is a major financial blow for many desperately stretched small hospitality businesses; and it’s down to serious anomalies in the PM’s Roadmap to Lift Lockdown.
It must be a nonsense to let playgrounds in public parks stay open throughout Lockdown, after-school activities to proceed from March 8th, amateur contact sports like football with 22 players to start on March 29th and then to continue to ban family groups from the ‘Outside’ areas of rural attractions and pubs until the middle of April.
Under the proposals, the Great Outdoors, with all its fresh air and space to socially distance, can only open at the same time as higher risk ‘Enclosed Areas’ like non-essential shops and gyms in the middle of April.
Even drive-in Cinemas are banned till then, despite the fact that families never even get out of their cars – surely, no reason for them not to be open now!
And, actually, why on Earth keep shops closed for another seven weeks when Garden Centres have remained open throughout the current lockdown?
None of us want another false dawn again, but when we at Hatton Country World were allowed to open last summer, we entertained well over a thousand people a day without a single COVID-19 case by taking sensible precautions – pre-booking so we could Track and Trace, restricting numbers, maximum family groups of six, not opening enclosed areas, taking temperatures, installing social distance markers, hand sanitiser points, and so on .
That, of course, was before the more vulnerable elements of our society were all vaccinated in the brilliant initiative that has put the UK at the forefront of the Western world.
Frankly, the chances of small family groups catching COVID-19 in an outdoor environment is minimal anyway.
As for pubs and restaurants – we all understand why packed boozers and boogying nightclubs need to wait. But keeping the inside of food-led pubs and restaurants with table service closed for another three months – really?
The hospitality sector has been closed for eight of the last 12 months – we’re all right on the edge. The detail of this blanket plan has not been properly thought through, and more businesses will close completely unnecessarily unless changes to the plan are made.
With closures come, of course, job losses – mostly the under-25s and school leavers who staff the hospitality sector, the same young people who have already been hit so hard by the pandemic for which they will also be paying most of their lives.
Let’s pray that Parliament makes the Government see sense.
The More Stringent the Lockdown, the Higher the Covid Death Toll
Last week brought the news that Britain’s Covid response was ranked among the toughest in the world by researchers at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Only two countries ranked higher on the school’s stringency index – Lebanon and Venezuela. What does that tell us about the effectiveness of our national response? One Lockdown Sceptics reader with a head for numbers has analysed this data against their reported cases and deaths and made a striking observation:
Anecdote is not data, so the recent revelation that the UK has among the harshest anti-Covid policies but also among the highest Covid case and death rates does not prove that lockdowns (and the other fun response measures) are useless. It’s more meaningful actually to look at the whole of the data on national policy responses and COVID incidence/harm.
The Oxford University Blavatnik School’s index of COVID-19 policy ‘stringency’ (comprising 18 policy indicators) covers over 180 countries, ranking stringency on a scale 0 to 100. The UK was 81 on February 23rd. At worldometers there are data on Covid cases, deaths and tests for 220 countries or so.
By aligning these two data bases together – mainly leaving out countries where the Blavatnik School doesn’t have policy data – the correlation between policy rigour and Covid cases/deaths can be calculated. Now, we all know “correlation isn’t causation”. Indeed, the British Journal of Medicine only goes so far as saying correlation “is used in everyday life to denote some form of association”. And the ‘correlation coefficient’ measures the strength of this association, on a scale from -1 (perfect negative; one variable moves opposite the other perfectly) to +1 (perfect positive; one variable moves in tandem with the other perfectly).
The correlation coefficients I calculated are also ‘good’ for only one point in time – I’m simply looking at the association of the latest known data we have on Covid harm and anti-Covid policy. This could be improved by looking at average values since Covid began, but it’s a good enough place to start.
Now you’d expect, if you’d been listening to ‘the science’ for a whole year, that the association between Covid harm and policy response would be negative, wouldn’t you, i.e., the more draconian the policy, the better the Covid outcome. You’d be wrong.
The correlation coefficients with policy stringency are: +0.35 with COVID cases and +0.38 with COVID deaths! On the face of it – data remember, not anecdote – the harsher the anti-Covid regime the worse the Covid harm.
Is this significant? Well, in a purely statistical sense, yes. There are tables to check, and on the basis of a sample size of 170 countries used here, correlations of 0.35 and 0.38 are indeed ‘significant’ (handsomely so).
A couple of pictures might save a thousand or two words. Quite clearly ‘the experts’ have deployed a scatter gun to fight Covid. Policy stringency varies from Somalia at 2.8 (413 cases per million, 14 deaths per million according to Worldometers) to Lebanon at 93 (54,324 cases per million and 677 deaths)
But through this scatter, the ‘association’ between policy and COVID harm is not ‘linear’. Above stringency of around 60, increases in policy bloody-mindedness are associated with faster rises in Covid cases and deaths.
The takeaway, as it were, is demand ‘cold turkey’; let’s do a Somalia and watch Covid cases and deaths go zero-wards.
A Response to Ian Dunt’s Anti-Sceptic Screed by a Law Professor
Yesterday’s round-up linked to a piece by Ian Dunt, arguing, that lockdown scepticism is “an ethical abyss”. There follows a response by Dr David McGrogan, Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School
Ian Dunt describes lockdown scepticism as “an ethical abyss” in a recent article – “a testament,” he puts it, “to how certain commentators and politicians will allow their need for attention to overrule even the most rudimentary of moral standards.”
This is, of course, kneejerk mainstream opinion: lockdown sceptics are immoral because they don’t care about grannies dying. It is also complete nonsense on its face, as we all know: one could just as readily respond that lockdown zealots are immoral because they don’t care about children’s futures or about cancer patients or about the death of liberal democracy. That doesn’t ultimately get us very far. It has been my argument since March 2020 that the main argument against lockdowns is that they actually make ethical conduct impossible. Indeed, they deprive human beings of that most fundamental characteristic of humanity: the ability to make ethical choices of one’s own. In that sense, they represent the complete absence or negation of ‘ethics’ properly understood. So the phrase “ethical abyss” is absolutely on the money – the perfect descriptor of the lockdown movement.
Michel Foucault once said that “freedom is the ontological condition of ethics”. That is a fancy French post-structuralist’s way of saying that ethics cannot exist without freedom. What does this mean? Very simply, if you are being forced to ‘do the right thing’, or you just do so to comply with the law or social expectation, then you can hardly be said to be acting ethically. You are just doing what you’re told, or what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, and that isn’t the exercise of any genuine sort of ethics. The only time you can properly be described as acting ethically is when you have a choice to do two or more things, and you make that choice in reference to ethical standards of your own. To simplify things rather, Adam and Eve were not acting ethically in the garden of Eden – until they had the choice to eat the forbidden fruit or not.
Foucault did not dismiss the difficulty of all of this. How does one generate one’s own ethical standards, and exercise choice on that basis? How does one cultivate in oneself the propensity to act ethically? These are not easy questions to answer, but they are not impossible ones, and indeed Foucault was attempting to chart a path to genuine self-actualising ethics before his untimely death. What he was clear about was that the whole enterprise was contingent on acting freely. “Freedom is a practice,” he once said in an interview. You have to do it. In doing it, in acting freely, and in reflecting on what it is doing, one can develop within oneself the propensity to act in light of ethical standards of one’s own. The two things go hand in hand: ethics do not exist without freedom; freedom is ethics’ ontological condition.
The lockdown movement is responsible for many great crimes but the greatest might be depriving people of their moral agency – depriving them of the capacity to make ethical choices. Our ethics have been determined for us. In taking our freedom away from us, the Government has taken away our capacity to develop ethically, indeed to act ethically at all. We do not exercise our own judgment about risk and the harms we might do to others – choosing to stay at home, choosing to limit social interactions, choosing to wear a mask if we think it important. We act mostly only in reference to ‘the rules’.
Lockdown zealots like Ian Dunt will say that this is all to the good, because people can’t possibly be trusted to behave ethically (or at least with the ‘right’ ethics) if left to their own devices. They will have parties, they will hug their grannies, they will watch football matches, and they will kill people as a result. Maybe, maybe not, but what we can really be sure of is that their capacity to exercise genuine ethical conduct, on Foucault’s terms, will wither and die on the vine the longer lockdownism prevails. They will become ever more dependent on predetermined ethical standards, selected for them, and ever less able to develop that most essential of human capacities, the ability to determine one’s own moral fate. How, when this lockdown is over, will people ever revert to the position of acting, not in reference to what the government says is permissible, but in reference to their own ethical standards? How will children grow into fully formed adults if they can’t exercise ethical choices of their own? How will our society recover when the State has imposed its own ethics in between every single one of us in such an intrusive way, and for so long?
This is the real enormity of what lockdowns are doing. This is the real ethical abyss.
The Ne Plus Ultra of Zero-Zealotry
In an article for the New Statesman, Professor Gabriel Scally argues that it is not too late to pursue a Zero Covid strategy. Guy de la Bédoyère, historian and Lockdown Sceptics regular, felt that this prime example of Zero Covid absurdity required a response on these pages, and so here it is.
Those of us contribute to and read Lockdown Sceptics have had the opportunity to consider a wide range of views. There’s been a healthy debate. I’ve tried to steer something of a middle course in an effort to find common ground that might help us get out of this mess.
I’ll lay my cards on the table. I am going to be vaccinated as soon as I can. That is my choice, and I am glad that it is my choice.
I accept for example that in order to protect other people I needed to learn to drive and to have a driving licence to prove it. Similarly, I accept the normal passport as a means of proving who I am and protecting me and everyone else from maniacs and others not entitled to come to this country. I also accept that there are consequences of making choices. If I choose not to have a driving licence, then I would have to accept I cannot drive on a public road. And I doubt if anyone would want me to. If I chose freely not to have a passport then I would not be allowed to travel. So, I have no problem with the notion of vaccine choice as another facet of choice with consequences. I grew up at a time when large numbers of children had polio, a disease that gradually dwindled away as a result of the vaccine program.
That is all about freedom of choice. However, occasionally something pops up that is so horrifying it sends a chill down my spine, and freedom of choice is at the heart of it.
I have just opened the latest edition of New Statesman and found myself reading an article by Professor Gabriel Scally, President of the Epidemiology and Public Health section of the Royal Society of Medicine. The article, which extols the virtues of Zero Covid, is a portal into the level of insanity evolving behind closed doors among some of the scientific community.
In this extraordinary piece of zero-zealotry Scally is pleased to point out that many of the countries which have dealt with the pandemic ‘effectively’ are islands. Oblivious to the vastly differing population sizes and profiles, and geographical locations, he lumps them together with the success achieved by one-party states in other geographical settings like Thailand and Vietnam (where the median age is lower, and the incidence of obesity is also lower). One has an instant sense of where this is going.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: It was reported yesterday that the UK’s Coronavirus ‘alert’ level has been lowered from level five to four, as the risk in all four nations that the NHS could be overwhelmed has receded. One reader posed an interesting question: Given that Zero Covid is apparently not the policy of the British Government, one must assume that it is accepted that there will continue to be some transmission. Does that mean that the alert level can never sink below ‘two’ and that there will therefore forever be some level of minimal social distancing and enhanced tracing?
An Incredible Berk of Staggering Ignorance
Today we’re publish a new essay by Dr Sinéad Murphy, a Research Associate in Philosophy at Newcastle University and regular contributor to Lockdown Sceptics. Here she responds to a recent video by Owen Jones, whose title “The Deniers” tells you everything you need to know about its contents. Dr Murphy sees in Jones’s supreme confidence and unmannerliness, an illustration of the ‘Covid Differend’, a concept devised by Michel Foucault to describe an impasse between two sides in a dispute that is irresolvable.
Over a week ago, the journalist Owen Jones posted a video on his YouTube channel. Its title: “The Deniers.”
I have not been a reader of Jones’s writings nor a viewer of his videos, but I have been aware of his relatively high profile as an opinion columnist and an interviewer. Nothing could have prepared me for his performance in “The Deniers”.
Jones’s demeanour in this video is that of a bad-tempered child who, from the safety of his mother’s skirts, entertains himself by taunting his chosen targets – he pulls faces, he calls names, and he mocks the objects of his petulance with hand gestures and sarcasm of the most puerile variety.
Jones’s victims are professional people – just like him. Among them: Professor Karol Sikora, former Chief of the Cancer Programme of the World Health Organisation; Professor Sunetra Gupta, Chair of Theoretical Epidemiology at University of Oxford; Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal’s Evidence-Based Medicine provision; and Dr Michael Yeadon, former Head of Allergy and Respiratory Research at Pfizer Global.
These are the people – the ‘Deniers’ – at whom Jones makes his faces and levels his taunts. More than once, he uses his hands to place notional quotation marks around Karol Sikora’s academic title. What is this to suggest? That Karol Sikora is not a professor, or not a real one, or not a good one? Jones all but spits the word “oncologist” in his description of Sikora’s area of scientific practice, with the caveat that there’s “nothing wrong with that” and that “we all have our opinions”. Nothing wrong with world-renowned expertise in the treatment of cancer? The medical opinions of a leading cancer specialist, neither better nor worse than those of anyone else?
The ignorance of Jones’s opinionating, let alone its unmannerliness, is staggering. That any one of his targets would address him in this way is inconceivable – every convention of professional conduct is against it.
So as to rise to something better than mere scorn at this degrading display, I began to consider the question: What is it that has given Owen Jones such assuredness, such an implicit sense of immunity from censure, that he puts himself abroad in this way – so full of his own opinions, so lacking in respect, so unmoderated, so misjudged? If it is the style of a mean-spirited child sticking out his tongue from behind his mother’s skirts, then from what does Jones’s extraordinary sense of security stem? Whence his heady experience of standing on ground that is so protected from counter-argument or criticism that he can throw aside established forms of reasonable and respectful exchange of ideas and indulge himself in childish antics?
Worth reading in full.
COVID-1984
We are continuing to get some great slogans for COVID-1984. Here are a few of the best.
ISOLATION IS COMMUNITY
LOVE IS FEAR
SILENCE IS ELOQUENCE
DISTANCE IS CLOSENESS
BREATHING IS SELFISHNESS
SANITY IS ACCEPTING ABSURDITY
TO LEAD IS TO FOLLOW
TO HUG IS TO HATE
MASKS ARE FREEDOM
VACCINATION IS LIBERATION
And one reader thought Shakespeare said it all
FAIR IS FOUL AND FOUL IS FAIR
Round-up
- “Workers will be flocking back to their offices in a few short months” – Boris does not think we will be working from home forever, according to the Daily Mail
- “Single Pfizer vaccine dose could be enough for people who have had Covid, studies show” – The Telegraph reports on new research which suggests that one jab may be enough
- “Medical reversals – when doctors hurt patients” – In his latest blog, Sebastian Rushworth takes a look at medical history and and the damage done by doctors over the centuries
- “TD wrote letter for Dublin couple’s home extension works during Level 5 lockdown” – According to the Irish Independent, a Dublin couple gained the support of a Fianna Fáil TD to build a home extension during a level 5 lockdown but the work had to stop when a neighbour called the Gardaí
- “Coronavirus Fact-Check #10: Why ‘new cases’ are plummeting” – OffGuardian wonders if the credit should go to the World Health Organisation’s new PCR test guidelines
- “Angela Merkel faces lockdown rebellion as German regions loosen Covid restrictions” – The Chancellor is losing control as regional Governments move to ease restrictions, reports the Telegraph
- “And you thought Johnson’s roadmap was slow . . .” – Just take a look at Scotland’s says Gary Oliver in the Conservative Woman
- “Dear Head Teacher – why my child will not be wearing a mask” – Writing in the Conservative Woman, Sonia Elijah makes things clear for the staff at her child’s school
- “How to beat the permanent Covidocracy” – Michael Fumento writes for AIER about trying to reason with people besieged by Covid horror stories so that Covidocracy does not become permanent
- “Why does the pandemic seem to be hitting some countries harder than others?” – Writing for the New Yorker, Siddhartha Mukherjee investigates the difference in death rates between rich nations and poor nations and asks what it can tell us about global health
- “The Wolfson Prize 2021” – This year the Wolfson prize is looking for ideas to help create hospitals that work better for patients. Got an idea? Why not enter? First price is worth £250,000
- “I can’t teach children if they have to wear masks” – Watch David Perks, the first headmaster to defy guidance on face masks in the classroom, speak to Martin Daubney on Unlocked TV
Theme Tunes Suggested by Readers
Eleven today: “Minority” by Subhumans, “If The Kids Are United” by Sham 69, “Questions” by Manfred Mann, “Same Old Blues” by Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, “Shadow of a Doubt” by Sonic Youth, “On My Radio” by Selecter, “Everything’s Ruined” by Faith No More, “Down Down” by Status Quo, “Hey Hey Bad News” by Bad News, “Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai and “Help!” by the Beatles.
Love in the Time of Covid
We have created some Lockdown Sceptics Forums, including a dating forum called “Love in a Covid Climate” that has attracted a bit of attention. We have a team of moderators in place to remove spam and deal with the trolls, but sometimes it takes a little while so please bear with us. You have to register to use the Forums as well as post comments below the line, but that should just be a one-time thing. Any problems, email Lockdown Sceptics here.
Sharing Stories
Some of you have asked how to link to particular stories on Lockdown Sceptics so you can share it. To do that, click on the headline of a particular story and a link symbol will appear on the right-hand side of the headline. Click on the link and the URL of your page will switch to the URL of that particular story. You can then copy that URL and either email it to your friends or post it on social media. Please do share the stories.
Social Media Accounts
You can follow Lockdown Sceptics on our social media accounts which are updated throughout the day. To follow us on Facebook, click here; to follow us on Twitter, click here; to follow us on Instagram, click here; to follow us on Parler, click here; and to follow us on MeWe, click here.
Woke Gobbledegook
We’ve decided to create a permanent slot down here for woke gobbledegook. Today, we bring you la langue française, which, if some of the woker voices in France have their way, will become even harder for us rosbifs to get our tongues around. Happily this looks unlikely. Anthony Peregrine has the details for the Telegraph.
In some dim and distant future, leisure travel to France might once again become possible. Those wishing to take advantage in order, among other things, to brush up their French should be holding their breaths right now. They should be hoping that France’s simmering campaign to promote “inclusive writing” falls flat, and falls flat fast. Irregular French verbs are, they will know, enough of a challenge already, without the added headache of tangling with a woke revision of the language.
Granted, the signs are promising. More than 60 French MPs have this week tabled a proposition to stop France’s vast, heaving public administration from using “gender inclusive” words. Former PM Edouard Philippe had already ordered something along these lines, but it seems the message needs ramming home more firmly. The MPs, drawn both from Emmanuel Macron’s party and the conservative Republicans, are to have the draft law debated in the French parliament in coming weeks…
Standard French – you know, a world language for a couple of millennia and still spoken by more than 300 million people in France and beyond – holds that a group of neighbours be termed by the masculine “voisins”. That is the case even if the vast majority are women, even if they are all women except for one man. The feminine version of the word, “voisines”, is only used if there’s no male among the group. L’écriture inclusive would correct this gender “imbalance” with things apparently called middots. The word would thus be rendered “voisin.e.s”, thus covering masculine and feminine. Yes. Really. Everyone would be happy. Or, to put it another way, half a dozen zealots would be very happy indeed.
Apart from being visibly bonkers, and unpronounceable, the change would mangle the language into incomprehensibility. Among very many objections, one concerns adjectives. In France, as you know, these agree with the gender of the noun they describe. Thus we wouldn’t be stopping at vandalising the word “voisins”. We’d have to corrupt any accompanying adjective, too. So “kind neighbours” – presently “voisins gentils” – would become “voisin.e.s gentil.le.s”. Good luck with getting your tonsils round that. And you can imagine how great it’s going to look on the pages of a novel. It will improve Flaubert no end.
A further complication is that France has no neutral “they”. The third person plural pronoun is gender sensitive. If you want to say “they”, you have to specify whether the people or things indicated are masculine or feminine: in other words, “ils” or “elles”. Take the neighbours. Having established they’re kind, we now learn they are organising a street party. How do we tackle that? “I.elle.s organisent une fête de rue”? Is that even sayable ?
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: Douglas Murray takes a look at the ‘cancellation’ of Professor Gregory Clark in UnHerd, who was unable to give a lecture at Glasgow University’s Adam Smith Business School because of its title: “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes.” What is the woke mob so scared of, asks Murray?
Stop Press 2: “Putin has weaponised western wokery – and Amnesty has been fooled,” says John Lloyd in CapX, referring to the case of Alexei Navalny, and the way attention was drawn to his Nationalist views.
“Mask Exempt” Lanyards
We’ve created a one-stop shop down here for people who want to obtain a “Mask Exempt” lanyard/card – because wearing a mask causes them “severe distress”, for instance. You can print out and laminate a fairly standard one for free here and the Government has instructions on how to download an official “Mask Exempt” notice to put on your phone here. And if you feel obliged to wear a mask but want to signal your disapproval of having to do so, you can get a “sexy world” mask with the Swedish flag on it here.
A reader has started a website that contains some useful guidance about how you can claim legal exemption. Another reader has created an Android app which displays “I am exempt from wearing a face mask” on your phone. Only 99p.
If you’re a shop owner and you want to let your customers know you will not be insisting on face masks or asking them what their reasons for exemption are, you can download a friendly sign to stick in your window here.
And here’s an excellent piece about the ineffectiveness of masks by a Roger W. Koops, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry. See also the Swiss Doctor’s thorough review of the scientific evidence here and Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson’s Spectator article about the Danish mask study here.
Stop Press: At the press conference yesterday, Dr Susan Hopkins, the Chief Medical Advisor to Public Health England, warned against forcing primary school children to wear masks, the Daily Mail reports.
A top Public Health England adviser said experts were “very strongly” against advising coverings for primary-age youngsters.
Dr Susan Hopkins told last night’s Downing Street press conference: “This is for two reasons.
“One is that they can have difficulties wearing them and keeping them on all day.
“The second part is that it is really important that they can see facial expressions in order to develop their communication and language skills.”
Dr Hopkins added that other risk-reducing measures were in place instead, as well as plans to test the families of primary school pupils when they return to class.
Stop Press 2: At the CPAC conference in Florida, hosts were booed for asking guests to wear masks.
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration, a petition started by Professor Martin Kulldorff, Professor Sunetra Gupta and Professor Jay Bhattacharya calling for a strategy of “Focused Protection” (protect the elderly and the vulnerable and let everyone else get on with life), was launched in October and the lockdown zealots have been doing their best to discredit it ever since. If you googled it a week after launch, the top hits were three smear pieces from the Guardian, including: “Herd immunity letter signed by fake experts including ‘Dr Johnny Bananas’.” (Freddie Sayers at UnHerd warned us about this the day before it appeared.) On the bright side, Google UK has stopped shadow banning it, so the actual Declaration now tops the search results – and Toby’s Spectator piece about the attempt to suppress it is among the top hits – although discussion of it has been censored by Reddit. In February, Facebook deleted the GBD’s page because it “goes against our community standards”. The reason the zealots hate it, of course, is that it gives the lie to their claim that “the science” only supports their strategy. These three scientists are every bit as eminent – more eminent – than the pro-lockdown fanatics so expect no let up in the attacks. (Wikipedia has also done a smear job.)
You can find it here. Please sign it. Now over three quarters of a million signatures.
Update: The authors of the GBD have expanded the FAQs to deal with some of the arguments and smears that have been made against their proposal. Worth reading in full.
Update 2: Many of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration are involved with new UK anti-lockdown campaign Recovery. Find out more and join here.
Update 3: You can watch Sunetra Gupta set out the case for “Focused Protection” here and Jay Bhattacharya make it here.
Update 4: The three GBD authors plus Prof Carl Heneghan of CEBM have launched a new website collateralglobal.org, “a global repository for research into the collateral effects of the COVID-19 lockdown measures”. Follow Collateral Global on Twitter here. Sign up to the newsletter here.
Judicial Reviews Against the Government
There are now so many legal cases being brought against the Government and its ministers we thought we’d include them all in one place down here.
The Simon Dolan case has now reached the end of the road. The current lead case is the Robin Tilbrook case which challenges whether the Lockdown Regulations are constitutional, although that case, too, has been refused permission to proceed. There’s still one more thing that can be tried. You can read about that and contribute here.
The GoodLawProject and three MPs – Debbie Abrahams, Caroline Lucas and Layla Moran – brought a Judicial Review against Matt Hancock for failing to publish details of lucrative contracts awarded by his department and it was upheld. The Court ruled Hancock had acted unlawfully.
Then there’s John’s Campaign which is focused specifically on care homes. Find out more about that here.
There’s the GoodLawProject and Runnymede Trust’s Judicial Review of the Government’s award of lucrative PPE contracts to various private companies. You can find out more about that here and contribute to the crowdfunder here.
Scottish Church leaders from a range of Christian denominations have launched legal action, supported by the Christian Legal Centre against the Scottish Government’s attempt to close churches in Scotland for the first time since the the Stuart kings in the 17th century. The church leaders emphasised it is a disproportionate step, and one which has serious implications for freedom of religion.” Further information available here.
There’s the class action lawsuit being brought by Dr Reiner Fuellmich and his team in various countries against “the manufacturers and sellers of the defective product, PCR tests”. Dr Fuellmich explains the lawsuit in this video. Dr Fuellmich has also served cease and desist papers on Professor Christian Drosten, co-author of the Corman-Drosten paper which was the first and WHO-recommended PCR protocol for detection of SARS-CoV-2. That paper, which was pivotal to the roll out of mass PCR testing, was submitted to the journal Eurosurveillance on January 21st and accepted following peer review on January 22nd. The paper has been critically reviewed here by Pieter Borger and colleagues, who also submitted a retraction request, which was rejected in February.
And last but not least there was the Free Speech Union‘s challenge to Ofcom over its ‘coronavirus guidance’. A High Court judge refused permission for the FSU’s judicial review on December 9th and the FSU has decided not to appeal the decision because Ofcom has conceded most of the points it was making. Check here for details.
Samaritans
If you are struggling to cope, please call Samaritans for free on 116 123 (UK and ROI), email [email protected] or visit the Samaritans website to find details of your nearest branch. Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone struggling to cope, whoever they are, however they feel, whatever life has done to them.
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the past 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. Doing these daily updates is hard work (although we have help from lots of people, mainly in the form of readers sending us stories and links). If you feel like donating, please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links we should include in future updates, email us here. (Don’t assume we’ll pick them up in the comments.)
And Finally…
The World Economic Forum has released a video celebrating the impact of the lockdowns on cities. No, you didn’t read that wrong. The WEF likes the fact that there are fewer cars driving round, fewer planes in the sky and fewer people on the street. Oh, and less “ambient noise”.
They really are psychopaths, aren’t they?
Discussion
Comments
This week across the site:
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No one reads the comments this late so I like to wander a little off-topic SUNY Suspends Education Student For Posting Views On Biological Gender My view is gender is an academic construct society was hoodwinked into adopting. There are just 2 sexes! & genetic mutations.
I’m in this part of the US.
Geneseo is a super woke school in a rural farming area.
The on campus ratio is something like 70% female/30% male.
First Amendment? Does that still exist?
Not in reality. The Supreme Court has declared it has no interest in the Constitution.
No!
Next question.
Here’s a song My Choice – Van valentine I’m confident LS & TY WON’T be linking ATL.
Nice one.
Farce mask: it’s safe for only 20 minutes The Sydney Morning Herald, First published 17 years ago
Good find.
You’ll like this CANADIAN MAN GOES BEAST MODE in airport
Dunno if this has been posted before The Day Masks Died (Trader Joe’s Santa Cruz)
You’re right. Bar getting vaxxed, that guy and I have a lot in common.
Saw that on Dollar Vigilante….well done to the lad!
I knew a family named Wildgoose, Buxton, Derbyshire, England 1960s.
My family name is very English, but it is not my screen name.
My screen name was inspired by the film with Burton, Harris, and Moore.
Your screen name is terrific, always makes me chuckle!
I remember that film in relation to it being the first time I saw a “blooper” on TV. Harris brought one along to the Parkinson show.
Back in the day when IRC was the only social media on the interweb. One evening after watching Sink the Bismarck! (1960) I went on IRC (AUS network) deciding to call myself The Hood (after the battleship) I got instantly banned from every channel I tried to join.
Life imitating art!
Ole
, OleOle`Am I alone in finding today’s GDB contribution a bit lurching and full of disjointed thinking? I usually enjoy his stuff, but he’s gone off form for me.
I know he wrote the polio vaccine book back in the day, etc, etc, but surely that hasn’t clouded his judgement to such an extent that’s seriously thinks there’s a parallel between Polio and SARS-Cov-2? And if there is, surely it’s that vaccination seems to be stimulating a rebound in infection a la Polio, although the mechanism are possibly different as the Polio drops contained live virus.
Surely as an historian, he’s been looking at his sources and examining the chances of the main players being (a.) honest, (b.) altruistic, and (c.) safe and concluded that this is the time to wait, not rush into a vaccine simply because he’s old enough to remember Polio as a “thing” in the Western World, (whereas now it’s just a vaccine-derived illness in Africa, circulated thanks to the Sterling with of the WHO and “My darling cousin, Bill” (as I like to think of him now – RIP John Le Carre)).
Perhaps he’s not as acquainted with the mechanism by which those… Read more »
Did he think that if he just threw himself on the pyre along with the rest of his generation that the gate would spring open? Did he read the reports on the vaccine or look at what defined success. Was lockdown scepticism the limit of this purview?
To be clear, efficacity in this vaccine is measured by its effect on reducing severity of symptoms. It was not measured for its capacity to reduce development of illness. In fact it is pretty much now understood and multiply documented that the vaccine does nothing more than suppress symptoms. Hence the slavish masks and hand washing. It was not measured for its ability to reduce onward transmission. Only it’s ability to stop the old dears fetching up in hospital, gumming up the works and shining a unwelcome light on the dark work of QALYS. In this it has been of limited use. It has merely been a distraction from the epic levels of data harvesting and AI analytics on how to manipulate people globally, for future weaponisation as a tool of warfare.
The only way in which to wage war any longer is not even biologically, it’s to get people to… Read more »
In my opinion, this year is going to be lonely and cut off, with a brief respite over Summer, which will come at the price of the future health and fertility of a currently unquantifiable number of vaccinees. (Hopefully the end of phase 3 human trial, mass vaccination will yield those results).
And if pre-travel testing continues, many numpties who book a holiday following their vaccine, waving their vaccine passport will discover that they are testing positive just before they travel. They will then be unable to leave. If they make it out, they will contract an asymptomatic infection from one of the many circulating “mutations” abroad which will colonise their upper respiratory tracts and keep them quarantined until they test negative, in their host country, at considerable, (uninsurable), cost, no doubt.
So how about a spot of ye olde source question work.. Using historical evidence and perspective to assess the reliability of the current evidence?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/02/vaccine-derived-polio-spreads-in-africa-after-defeat-of-wild-virus
https://www.who.int/csr/don/01-september-2020-polio-sudan/en/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793754/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/
(The gist of this one is that you’ll have a good level of antibody protection, but if you come into contact with a similar wild-type virus, you could end up with something akin to a cytokine storm.… Read more »
In my opinion, this year is going to be lonely and cut off, with a brief respite over Summer, which will come at the price of the future health and fertility of a currently unquantifiable number of vaccinees. (Hopefully the end of phase 3 human trial, mass vaccination will yield those results).
And if pre-travel testing continues, many numpties who book a holiday following their vaccine, waving their vaccine passport will discover that they are testing positive just before they travel. They will then be unable to leave. If they make it out, they will contract an asymptomatic infection from one of the many circulating “mutations” abroad which will colonise their upper respiratory tracts and keep them quarantined until they test negative, in their host country, at considerable, (uninsurable), cost, no doubt.
So how about a spot of ye olde source question work.. Using historical evidence and perspective to assess the reliability of the current evidence?
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/02/vaccine-derived-polio-spreads-in-africa-after-defeat-of-wild-virus
https://www.who.int/csr/don/01-september-2020-polio-sudan/en/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30793754/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/
(The gist of the above is that you’ll have a good level of antibody protection, but if you come into contact with a similar wild-type virus, you could end up with something akin to a cytokine storm. This one would have killed its animal recipients if they hadn’t already have been sacrificed, but humans are more complex and less fragile than lab animals, so it’s possibly the vaccinated who will be at more risk from travel).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7142689/#!po=79.1667
If you read nothing else, read this.
And consider what an act of bravery and probity it must take to stand out. Not to swim through the middle calling for moderation on both sides, but to say, “let’s be cautious”.
IF freedom of Movement is permitted, but with tests and a passport, you’ll know quite the extent to which this is a bid to trade your inalienable human rights for your data and compliance. If it is, but tests severely choke off travel, or it just isn’t, you’ll know quite the extent to which the gross ineptitude and greed of this government has now crashed us and many others into a wall. We will be the pariahs of the Western… Read more »
Very much my thoughts. Polio vaccination has nothing in common with Covid vaccination. Nothing at all. With Covid vaccination we are talking about vaccinating healthy people at no threat from the disease.
The polio vaccine is the poster child for the whole vaccination movement. You can understand why. In the mid 20th century the disease rose up and crippled millions of children and teenagers across the world in the cruellest of ways. On balance, the polio vaccine is probably a positive contribution to public and personal health.
It’s interesting to note – as a reminder yet again of how little we understand viruses – that no one knows why polio, a relatively harmless virus prior to the 20th century suddenly became so lethal and damaging. Some theorised it was to do with the popularity of public bathing, though that seems not to correlate accurately. Syphilis is another pathogen that changed over time. It was a tropical disease that was again relatively harmless, passing easily between largely unclothed individual native communities. But the introduction of clothing changed its nature, it is thought. In order survive, it became more virulent and deadly.
Great post.
In my own poor way I have been trying to point out there are different types of vax.
I am all for effective, thoroughly tested vaxes that are safe for nearly everyone, administered on a voluntary basis.
The WuFlu vax is none of these things.
And as I keep trying to get across…there is a specific problem with respiratory virus vaccines. Respiratory viruses are particularly deadly to people at or near the end of life. This is because said people’s lungs are diseased and/or their immune systems are crumbling.
A successful vaccine doesn’t give old people new lungs or restore their immune systems to youthful vigour. It means there are millions of environmental niches available to other pathogens, perhaps novel and highly dangerous pathogens which will take up the niches previously occupied by Covid and flu.
So even if the Covid vaccine were effective and protected individuals there are much bigger ethical issues at play.
I keep trying to get across the majority dying with Covid-19 are dying of old age, their bodies are worn out, immune system shot, sadly, but bluntly they are walking dead just waiting for an infection to finish them.
Those few younger victims of “Covid-19” are simply genetically unlucky, genetic freaks who didn’t have what was required to fight infection, quite likely they also probably would have been taken by another infection before old age.
It has a name ‘NATURE’! It’s no consolation to family members, but that’s the reality of life.
I also keep saying you can’t vaccinate against old age, only way to mitigate this, is a healthy lifestyle, personally i’m willing to trade 10yrs of indulgence living than live to 90 having someone else wipe my bum & dribble from my mouth, worst still spend the end of life in a no one cares, not my home.
The other argument against polio vaccines was improvement too sanitation. Polio can be nasty, my brothers mother-in-law had polio & was crippled for life. I think anyone might be inclined to consider a polio vaccine if they ever met her & saw how polio can affect you.
Indeed – a relative of mine was badly affected by it. As I understand it the polio vaccine is highly protective. Side effects are probably as minimal as you are going to get with a vaccine. And the disease can affect very healthy people. So putting it all together, I think having the vaccine is, or was, a logical choice.
Good points OKUK but (remaining aware of the effects of polio), the incidence was dropping markedly before the vaccine as a result of public health changes and more knowledge of the virus. The vaccine undoubtedly had an effect but not as marked as the PH changes. Also, I was surprised to learn how low the death rate from polio was (I can dig the figures out if anyone’s interested).
As ever, the whole story is not so simple.
DavidC
Indeed, improved sewage disposal and treatment undoubtedly helped reduce polio infections, but it is still a fact polio was not the serious threat it became in the 20th century during the 19th century when sanitation was even worse. So there was something else going on.
population.
DDT usage seems to have begun in the 1940s. Polio had been devastating communities long before that. FDR was a victim from the earlier part of the century. Polio emerged around the turn of the century as a very destructive disease.
Wasn’t there a theory relating polio to massive DDT use? lt was covered in Suzanne Humphries’ excellent book “Dissolving Illusions”.
Yes, there is an argument to be made that polio was really DDT poisoning and that it was the banning of DDT that led to the reduction in polio rather than the vaccine. I believe they also changed the definition of polio shortly after banning DDT, which contributed to its “eradication.” In countries that still used DDT, polio was not eradicated, and today the only polio we see is vaccine induced in countries that administer the oral polio vaccine.
DDT usage began in the 1940s while polio had been causing major illness for decades before that.
Wasn’t there a theory relating the growth in polio to massive DDT use? lt was covered in Suzanne Humphries’ excellent book “Dissolving Illusions”.
Sorry, who is GDB?
Thank you I was just about to ask that!
DavidC
It stands for Guy de la Bédoyère, a so-called lockdown sceptic who wrote the horrid piece ATL about taking the “vaccine” and likening vaccine passports to regular passports. I read it very late last night my time and I wasn’t sure if I was reading it correctly. His pieces have been excellent, but this one had me stymied. It’s very disheartening to see people like GDB and Peter Hitchens caving in to the “vaccine” tyranny so early in the game.
Thank you!
Re Hitchens, vaccine passports and so on…
The globalists are deliberately encouraging bogus Venn diagram overlapping in our minds. We are familiar with the word “passport”, as a requirement for international travel, and we are familiar with the idea that some countries insist on proof of vaccination for various diseases before you will be allowed in.
But we are not really talking about “passports” in the future. We are talking about Social Control Permits. You won’t be permitted to engage in a wide range of social activities or access necessary services e.g. education for children unless you can demonstrate you have a Social Control Permit and vaccination, in the first instance, will be the means by which you obtain a permit. However, the qualifications for Social Control Permits can easily be extended e.g. criminal records, health status, banning from Facebook or other Big Tech sites, might determine what you can do. Social Control Permits might be required to get access to the Internet. Logically participation in elections might be a next step: only those with unblemished Social Control Permits might be allowed to participate. You might have to have attended unconscious bias training or watched certain videos online before… Read more »
I share your fears. But I note even amongst my own ‘believers’ the health/vaccine passport premise is not acceptable. With any luck the sheep will see us out of this too. (PH = total sellout. He must know that the concept of vaccine passports for the common cold is immoral….oh Peter….no words….you will be banished)
The best thing is that ethnic minorities – particularly those in a religious community which is the subject of much PC genuflection – have been noticeably reluctant to vaccinate. This may be the best defence, as the PC crowd will face huge protests if they say prevent people going on piligrimage to some key places or say you can’t stay in x hotel or attend Glastonbury.
If I had to lay money on it I would say they won’t be able to enforce Social Control Permits this time round. Of course this isn’t the end of the story.
I never thought of that.No more hajj to Mecca or trips to the sub continent to see relatives.Although they may just turn a blind eye as they normally do when dealing with certain diverse communities.
The Chinese social credit score is the aim.
Yes, something like that.
UK Column had a great breakdown on a policy wonk the WEF pays six figures a year to write policy papers stating, “LOL the West should be just like China.”
I am sure that particular individual is one of many.
There is only one agenda CONTROL. The other day I linked to a Blair article claiming vaccine passports are about making people feel safe. The irony that ever since Tony Blair became PM we’ve been terrorized by our own government to keep us SAFE! & so they can implement Draconian legislation to control us, the worst thing about this is how many people literally beg for more.
Fear, gives control to an abuser or bully.
I heard someone say the other day say “I just want a government that doesn’t keep threatening me” (think it was Laura Perrin’s).
It was in her latest chat with Delingpole.Im beginning to really like him.He is one of the last thinking investigative journalists left in this country.
James and Laura are excellent……especially James 🥰 his views are 100% us (well me anyway 😀).
Sorry to say this on LS, but I’m on Team James vs. Team Toby. I went down the rabbit hole before James, but he’s a welcome voice and I look forward to James and Laura — it would be like me and my OH if he was willing to talk about it with me. He’s a total sceptic but doesn’t relish complaining and being indignant about it all like I do. I don’t really have anyone I can commiserate with, so I live vicariously through James and Laura.
Yes I totally get that. OH wants quiet life and definitely would vote to end this shit but no interest whatsoever in discussing the issue, which for me is all there is to do until we ‘win’. It’s the core of what needs to be explored so it never happens again. Isn’t it strange what makes you understand yourself better and question everything/one you thought you understood.
Excellent point.
DavidC
WEF piggies shredded on social media:
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/propaganda-crash-world-economic-forum-tweets-lockdowns-improving-cities-then-deletes
Some excellent responses on there
Australia’s, David Icke They Can Only Push You As Far As You Let Them Max Igan – The Crowhouse, but don’t be to put off, he does sometimes provide good references to data.
After the Queen made her pronouncement the other night, I predicted: https://dailysceptic.org/2021/02/25/latest-news-296/#comment-435115
And tonight on the Beeb: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56224314
I win the Internet! 😉
And next? Live tonight, George gets the vax?
Probably; unless that shy couple from LA get their kid done first. I can imagine them selling the poor little sod’s arm to whover bids the highest.
I can’t wait for this stupid phase to be over, and for meatier headlines such as this:
“Government announces completion of national network of quarantine facilities for unvaccinated: Army units to begin round ups within days.“
What will you do, Richard, if they come knocking at your door?
Take as many of them with me as I can.
Good man. As will I.
Same here.
I almost can’t wait, and I think it will be something of a relief, if and when that time comes. I’m like a caged animal, just waiting to get my claws into them.
In the absence of a suitable weapon to hand, I’m reliably informed that a can of hairspray works equally as well as mace.
Add a lighter you’ve got a flame thrower. Be warned though it can be just as dangerous as a flame thrower to the person standing behind it . 😉
I’ll stick with my Uzi then 🙂
Inside 7 yards/21 feet a blade beats a firearm every time.
I’ll bear that in mind too when I’m compiling my arsenal of weapons 🙂
One of many vids proving a blade is better than a gun under 21 feet:
https://youtu.be/js0haocH4-o
thanks for the tip.
I’m just waiting for Jim Jones to encourage people.It feels like the Jonestown massacre on a global scale.
I thought Hitchens was more a pint of beer but it seems he loves the Kool Aid.
I’ve had the exact same thought.
Planet Jonestown.
Yep, Hitchens fell into line pronto once Liz spoke on the subject…no pun intended.
Here’s the thing, the truth doesn’t change whoever chooses to front the lie. You can’t tell me the long term (5-10 years) out-look of a treatment that’s currently only 10 months into trial. All the patronising and ignorant pronouncements of arrogant, thick ‘influencers’ won’t change that.
I see BBC is running a kind of propaganda snapshot that has multiple images shown very briefly – almost subliminal. There’s a voiceover by someone who may be the American drag artist, Ru Paul…not an expert in that field, I’m happy to say – but it is a succession of statements similar to greeting card moralising and the stuff you get in self improvement books. The overall message is that individuals who are being oppressed can triumph. Professional liar Greta Thunberg features. There may be a bit of BLM protest. There’s certainly Mao – yes, Mao the mass murderer and keen Stalinist. It’s kind of like a WEF film sped up.
I have been watching too closely – it was mass murderer Mao who caught my eye.
Anyone else seen it?
Mao Zedong –
Of course.
Mao is their greatest hero!
James and Laura’s Chinwag #14 Two of the best anti-covid sceptics.
Just read about a pensioner who received the vaccine 2 days after he apparently recovered from acute covid. The GP said it was ok. The family should report him to the GMC. The guidelines clearly state NOT to vaccinate within 3 months of a c illness. Unbelievable!
People have given this zero thought. It’s pure politics
Peter Hitchens admits to having the ‘vaccine’ in his column.He does it grudgingly because he feels he won’t be allowed to travel abroad to see family without it.
To see so many people willingly accept this is very disheartening.
Disappointing. He will soon find out that he has been conned. The era of civilian international travel is over, but the era of multiple mandatory vaccinations every year is just beginning, in part thanks to his acquiescence.
It seems his MSM media career is more important than the freedom he so eloquently writes about.
yes, Hitchens has fallen.
His surrender to the gene therapy make his last 12 months of resistance a pathetic waste of time as it was always about the experimental vaxseen.
Agreed, it’s an epic fail on his part. His position is now terminally compromised because as you say the reason for all the restrictions was to create the conditions for a mass vaccination rollout.
Once again, we are on our own here folks. No one in the public arena can be trusted.
Yes we are definitely on our own . I have felt that public consciousness has been shifting towards us but apart from this forum I feel surrounded by brainwashed and/or braindead morons.
I have never felt at any stage that the public consciousness was anything other than hurtling into the abyss of a global technocratic slave state from which there will be no escape, and I have seen nothing since March 2020 to dissuade me from this position.
There is no doubt that WEF are promoting a new serfdom. We’ve all seen the video. We (emphasis on we – doesn’t include Gates or Zuckerberg or Schwab for that matter) won’t own anything. That is serfdom.
We are surrounded by them, Merlin. I’m starting to fear for my own sanity.
We don’t really have a single leader in the public sphere who is a strong voice against lockdowns, mandatory masking, intrusive testing and vaccine dogma.
Well I can’t think of one.
This is precisely the point. I find it astonishing that someone as intelligent as Hitchens (and others such as Fox) cannot see all of the above are inextricably linked. It looks to me like they have succumbed to the fanatical Vaccine Macht Frei propaganda, which renders all of their previous work null and void.
Yep, even Tobes which is rather ironic given all the abuse he gets from the holier than thou PC crowd.
There was a reason why Piers Corbyn was arrested for distributing that leaflet.
It was too truthful.
The vaccine is not the key to freedom it is the gateway drug to totalitarianism.
Actually I don’t think James Delingpole hasn’t caved on anything…yet – but he’s not really leader material.
I agree. Where are his family? Can’t he pay for them to come see him?
That’s disappointing
I would be ok with that if he was doing it for some kind of risk reason. Even then I’d have words. But for travel? That doesn’t make sense. Will he still be against mandated vaccine passports then? Confusing. I mean he could have waited. Looks like these passports are going to happen within weeks.
He has surrendered.He has claimed throughout that this is all done to incompetence when it has always been about the vaccine passport.The first step in the coming totalitarian state.Tied to digital currency it is the end of freedom.
This is a betrayal.
Now he’s justifying his U-turn using some weird YouGov stats https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1365817458800607232?s=20
He’s about as useless as the “useless Tories” he’s always complaining about.
I remember very clearly,him saying many times opinion polls are a means of influencing public opinion,not measuring it.
Good to see him getting a battering on Twitter from people who would normally support him.
His rationale is terrible.Basicslly I’ve tried,I’ve failed so I’m going to submit now rather than later.
He’s like a teenager being sent to his room kicking the door as he sulks away.Biggest disappointment so far for me.
I think this covid passprt think is a sage psych ops ploy, can’t see how they will get this in, just about breaks every law going.
After the last year where we have been governed by decree,how can you still believe in the rule of law.
This is not a psy op this is something that has been planned for years.
laws are made by people, they can be changed by people. they’re only as good as the commitment of the people behind them to the values they express
I’ve said it before, but those us who are under no pressure to comply with the “vaccine” should hold out in order to make it easier for others to say no and to make it increasingly difficult for the government to treat us as second-class citizens. There is power in numbers. It is very disheartening that Peter Hitchens, who should know better, capitulated so quickly. And for what? The false promise of travel? This exemplifies the schism between lockdown sceptics who believe this is all due to incompetence and those of us who have always known there is an agenda. The former believe the magical “vaccine” is our ticket to normalcy while the latter know it’s the road to medical fascism.
This is where Peter departs from principle and integrity. Vac pass for travel is immoral. He of all people should, would and do know that. His capitulation does indeed not reflect well on him but still does not diminish the principle and truth that we stand by. Lockdowns are immoral, untested gene therapy coerced on the general public are immoral and health/vaccine passports are immoral. They are immutable truths. Our position is unchanged.
His reason given is very strange.Vaccine passports are not a reality yet.If travelling abroad is such a big thing then he could easily had a jab when he had no choice,but to do this and then to write a column about it.Defeatism and he is forever compromised now.
Totally agree.
It seems that when it came to the offer, for him to say no to the vaccine would lay it all on the line. He would have his weekly Talk Radio slot under pressure to be cancelled. He couldn’t write an article defending the decision.
He wasn’t mentally prepared for it. I hope he still ha s the strength to oppose mandates and passports, but I can’t respect his decision right now. I do understand it probably wasn’t a very easy one
All he had to say is ‘it’s a private matter and should remain a private matter, thus excluding any form of health/vaccine passport/certificate’.
Choosing not to take that line he knows what he’s done thus joining Littlejohn in the ‘Bargain Basement Complete Sellout’ section.
It’s disheartening. Too many seem to be losing their bollocks and surrendering now.
Little John was on another level.Actively calling for vaccine passports to visit the pub.I posted a comment under that article about littlejohn finally loving big brother and that was censored.
Traitor.
Many have commented before that Hitchens is controlled opposition , after this news I think that is now pretty obvious he is very much part of the establishment he supposedly rails against . Also remember his late brother , went from full on Trotskyite socialist to Neo Con shill demanding the US bomb impoverished brown people in the middle east .
I do know that the BBC are quite keen on Hitchens because he exudes a kind of fusty fifties CS Lewis gaberdine mac and Common Prayer Book aura about him that the BBC think, probably rightly, will turn off young people. They have never allowed any of the combative younger conservative commentators such as Paul Jospeh Watson from the internet any extended air time (even though Far Leftist internet dwellers have been given loads of access). So in that sense I would agree Hitchens is “controlled opposition”.
He says it himself , that the BBC only have him on question time so woke twats like like Owen Jones ( Also very much part of the establishment ) can howl derision at him over gay marriage for example thus making anyone of conservative values look old and very much out of touch . As you say they would never dare have anyone from the new younger right wing commentators as they possibly shake things up a bit and maybe stir things in the minds of younger people who are fed up seeing the land of their ancestors turn to shit . Hitchens never has an solutions , it’s just doom laden black pills . Deliberately demoralising .
I had a couple of comments censored on his blog.One because I said he should call this for what it is,a coup and the other when I accused him of being a gatekeeper.
A gate keeper of some sort for sure , and I say this as someone who was once quite fond of him . All that write to your MP crap when he must be privy to all sorts of info in knowing just how corrupt the system really is and who really calls the shots . He’s now there to steer his readers into the desired outcome of vax compliance .
And ‘they’ win. 🙁
Hitchens claims to have “tried to fight against it, but lost”. Didn’t try hard enough, did you Peter?
He’s denying it but I reckon he’s been nudged by the Mail. Timing fits with Madge and the Listen to your Nan shit.
Very likely
Hancock seems to be avoiding the limelight at the moment. Is it because he thinks we’ll forget his megalomania and corruption if we don’t see him on the telly? Not a fucking chance pal!
The power of propaganda is all over the DM, the in fighting about who should get the vaccine, what age group and when, people have lost their minds.
Frankly I don’t give a toss who gets the vaccine or when. Let them fight out amongst themselves. I will just sit back and watch the fun.
Yep, sums it up for me.
It’s like “Who shot JR?” in Dallas or goings-on in East Enders – lots of people getting excited about something which is of little interest to me.
We should set up a sceptic’s vaccine charity donating our doses to good causes, Chairwomxn Nic Sturg-Un deserves mine.
So many to choose from. I think Wancock for mine….straight into his eyes.
Give him 666 doses
Stop feeding my fantasies!
Loss of reason is a known symptom of severe vaccinitus.
Article at Church Militant suggests the Pope’s new personal physician does not go along with the “official” Covid narrative, stating that “Wuhan virus–related deaths are “almost always” among the elderly suffering from at least three pre-existing conditions” and being “against the policy of locking down the elderly, insisting that “staying at home is harmful, as is the virus.””
https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/popes-new-doctor-debunks-covid-alarmism
The Pope meanwhile seems to think lockdowns a good idea…
Wow. The things you learn on this site.
The bishop of Rome says God wants everybody muzzled.
The bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.
The bishop of Rome can try to muzzle God if he likes, but it won’t work.
The bishop of Rome can eff off.
The anti-pope is a full up Bolshevik.
A lot of people have commented on the full moon – which was actually first thing this morning (27th)
Here’s a lot of info about it. It’s a very special time!
The light and dark aspects of both Aquarius and Satabhishk and the relationship to the full Moon are in evidence as both the Sun and Venus are in Aquarius ruled by Saturn and Rahu and Satabhishak is ruled by Rahu and Purva Phalghuni by Venus so there is an exchange of energies between them which gives a potency to all that is playing out. This is also a reminder to see that when major challenges like health issues are transcended then true realisation comes. So in truth there is no light or dark or right and wrong, simply opportunities from which to evolve and grow and find new ways of being. It is to be hoped that this may be realised more in the world at this time, as Aquarius is the sign that represents global change.
https://oraclelife.co.uk/2021/02/26/the-full-moon-today/?utm_source=mailpoet&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=new-blog-post
I’m sorry, I’m not attacking the messenger, but the article is drivel & best ignored 😉
we’re all one with the cosmos man
As a contrarian, I’m actively opposed to solidarity.
Science https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/uk/glasgow dude!
Full Moon:27 Feb 2021, 08:17
https://www.timeanddate.com/moon/phases/uk/london
Spectator article The way ‘covid deaths’ are being reported is a national scandal, narrated by triggernometry
It has been a scandal since the beginning. We are running out of time to turn this around, and outlets like Triggernometry need to realise just how late in the game we are.
It’s impossible to prove, most “covid victims” are worm food or ashes, it’s just another beautiful aspect of the fraud.
I recall early on reading a Dr claiming the only real conclusive way to diagnose covid was a lung xray.
I’ve been trying to find this very powerful piece for ages. Note that the author highlighted the disturbing changes in death certification procedures and called for urgent autopsies on all those with Covid given as the reason for death. Glad that this YouTube channel is dredging it back up out of the memory hole.
They nailed it.
Anyone having discussions with family and friends about whether to participate in the gene therapy trial, here is where you can find the lastest reports on the adverse reactions..
Up to the 14th Feb, 180,000 reports and 400 deaths reported.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting#annex-1-vaccine-analysis-print
Thanks for that collation.
Intrigued by this Pfizer vaccine injury:-
Chest crushing 1 0
WTF? Did a couple of obese vaccine hesitancy nurses sit on the victim when they looked a bit twitchy?
Don’t forget to compare and contrast with flu vaccine which has 215 deaths recorded against it since 1963.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/607122/response/1452561/attach/8/Inactivated%20Influenza%20DAP.pdf?cookie_passthrough=1
Pfizer up 24 deaths from last report date: 7/2/2021 – 173 > 14/2/2021 – Current total: 197
AZ up 55 deaths from last report date: 7/2/2021 – 150 > 14/2/2021 – Current total: 205
Those of you who have been following Vanessa Beeley’s reports about Syria might want to take action as requested below.
Those who don’t know about her might like to stand up to the BBC below an find out more about Vanessa’s work on UK Column.
ACTION REQUIRED
BBC Puts Vanessa Beeley’s Life At Risk As many of you know, Vanessa Beeley lives and reports from Damascus in Syria. She has been a tireless thorn in the side of the UK government, the BBC and Channel 4 News in particular, as she has challenged their narratives on Syria in particular, and the Middle East in general.
The recent BBC hit piece on Radio 4, called Mayday, was a tissue of lies based on “evidence” provided by a “researcher” who has worked with the specific individuals who beheaded the twelve-year-old Mohammad Issa in 2012. We will have more to say on this on Monday’s UK Column News.
Today, the BBC crossed the line on journalistic ethics, in a follow up article to that Radio 4 hit-piece. Not only did they make a further personal attack on Vanessa, but they decided to publish a photograph of her car, with the number plate clearly… Read more »
Great to be out in the sun in a mates garden having a few beers this afternoon… although can’t get my head around why they all then felt it necessary to leave and watch the rugby in our own homes over zoom?
Properly daft.
But at the least, it shows that even the dopey sheeple are going to ignore the police state’s edicts as soon as it’s a bit warmer
London Protest
https://www.facebook.com/footsoldiers4freedom/posts/219168239951422?notif_id=1614459091916623¬if_t=page_followed_contents_awareness&ref=notif
Bloody disgraceful.
Evening moon gazers! 😜
Preferably dead!
In other words, the perfect “leader” for the transformation of the UK into a police state.
I thought it had some Turkish in him.
Glad to hear it, kh.
Maybe, just maybe, the bullies and thugs are beginning to hear the first faint chimes at midnight?
I understand now why those chaps beat that Owen Jones up.
I can see it: “Stop hitting me in order that I can stun you intellectually with my rational arguments!”
The words Owen Jones & rational arguments! Don’t belong in the same narrative. The other day I saw a headline, “conservatives are cancelling the left” by Owen Jones!
I know that, you know that, but Little Owen…
Meanwhile… “It’s the bloody Tories”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G98MYKd6sUc
What to do when your parents in their early 70s and fit and healthy are too terrified to allow your 10 year old daughter (who they adore) in the house and will only countenance seeing her once a week in a park?
When that normally happy and contented daughter cries at bedtime and asks why they have rejected her?
Do I tell them and add to their guilt and agony?
Do I continue to watch my daughter suffer?
Please forgive the personal nature of this message, but she’s finally gone to bed and I am hitting the wine tonight, feeling totally trapped in a corner.
Tell them. They are old enough to cope with any feelings of guilt but your daughter is too young to understand their reasons for rejecting her. Tell them. Sooner rather than later.
They are simply not themselves at the moment. They have been inflicted with a phobia by their own Government. Telling them might help them start to come out of it by giving them a reason to fight back against their irrational fears.
Yes, tell them. for exactly the reasons Steve gives above. Brilliantly put, Steve.
Tell them. The time for niceities when dealing with the other side are over.
The time for niceties passed in March 2020.
Your parents ought to know better. However they are probably of the generation who firmly believe what comes out of that box in the corner of their sitting room. The MSM have an enormous amount of responsibility for this fear led narrative. It is their irresponsible reporting, complete lack of research and more importantly their inability to ask the really tough questions.
Not sure how old your daughter is but you could try to explain to her that her grandparents are probably very scared.
I would however talk to your parents and explain to them the effect this is having on you but more importantly on your daughter. They are adults and have been for some time and as you say are fit and healthy, so they need to know how this is translating into emotional turmoil for your daughter and put it right.
I have a similar problem with my outlaws, but it is nothing to do with the current situation, and has been ongoing for years. I have explained to my son in detail why the situation arose and he now fully understands and is very accepting and understanding.
Hope this helps.
Bob. Enough said.
Sincerely thanks to all of you for the help. I am still torn however and ultimately they do not for one second want to act this way.
Should they act differently? Of course.
But it is what it is and they are as much victims as my daughter, as living like this is eating them up.
My worry is that I say something and force a change, whilst knowing that I am effectively guilt tripping my own parents.
As I say though, I really do appreciate the help guys.
They have one another. So their victimhood isn’t a lonely place. I hope when your daughter is old enough to understand, they will explain to her why they hurt her like this.
LS reprinted that without the words recently to justify a vaccination will set you free storyline.
I’ve just had my wife tell me that her parents won’t see me if I’ve not had the jab (I’m keen to wait at least until the trials finish in 2023). Although they will be perfectly happy to see the kids as soon as the state decrees it’s allowed…
Can’t understand the level of stupidity that is out there.
I know what you mean. The fact that people who’ve so willingly ‘had it’ and yet are still afraid of others makes a mockery of it all.
Do you want to see your wife’s stupid relations?
It’s not about him, it’s the children that count.
I had the same from my inlaws.My wife told me this morning. My response was of course sensitive to the situation so I told her to quote me:Please,please fuck off and never talk to me again. My wife and my daughter can see them anytime they want ,but they are now dead to me.
Gawdelpus – this will be the next epidemic, a bit like Brexit all over again, with families split.
I’m so sorry
Well I’m not a parent so I can’t pretend to say that I know how you feel.. only that must be heartbreaking to witness. Totally agree with the other comments – tell your parents, as soon as reasonably possible. Personally, though I haven’t known anybody in either family or friends’ circles, who has had covid-19; I have seen people’s lives change forever, either financially destroyed, or struggling with serious life-changing illness that could potentially have been so different. because for many people, regular checks, treatments, simply were not there even very early in 2020.
So to be a tiny bit blunt, frankly, who knows how much time they have left? who knows how much time anybody has left? is that what they want, to stand 6′ away in a park? Tell them.
They are obviously able enough to do their own research. If I am afraid of something I try to slay my dragons by trying to understand what it is I am afraid of. They should be self aware enough to do that. If they are suffering ”guilt and agony” then it is self-inflicted. There is enough information out there to slay their own dragons for the sake of their grandchild.
If they can’t understand what they are inflicting upon their grandchild by their own timidity …. well, I don’t know what you could say to them in a way they’d understand. It’s hard to think they could be so unimaginative when there are many ways out of the prison of their own making.
Yes tell them they are out of order and show them the evidence that the pandemic finished last May.
If your relationship with your parents is otherwise good, I would definitely tell them how your daughter is feeling.
They will have had their first jabs by now – hasn’t that changed their view of the risk your daughter poses to them? They must surely understand that they pose no risk to her.
I would also ask them to fast forward a bit
When will they feel comfortable having her in the house? Are they happy that something like this is decided by the government? Assuming this virus becomes ‘something we have to live with’ like other viruses – are they really prepared to cut themselves off from her permanently? If they say ‘when the government tells us it’s safe’ remind them of ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ and all the other broken promises over the past 12 months.
I would also explain to your daughter – she’s fairly wordly-wise at 10 – just why her grandparents feel scared, why she should feel sympathy for them and most importantly why it’s not her fault. This stigmatising of chidren as potential lethal weapons is one of the most terrifying aspects of this past year.
I fear what’s really driving your… Read more »
I think you are right – my parents are in mid 70s had argument with them over not seeing their grand daughter over half term. They have been terrified by the bbc and MSM, won’t engage with any content I send them. But their big thing is all our friends are sticking by the “rules” so we think we should too. They live in bourgeois suburbs – I honestly could tell them to fuck off completely – it’s getting very close depending on what happens in the Easter holidays…they have had their jabs – don’t really have the heart to explain essentially they have shortened their remaking time in all probability so caring about what neighbours think is really irrelevant at this point. It’s brutal and horrible for all of us going through it.
Thank you. Great to get the opinion of somebody their age.
No apology necessary, this is personal to each and every one of us. I have no words viz your situation as I have experienced the same situation from one side and complete opposite (my mum 82) from the other side who believes in the love of family above all else. Best advice is that you find any and every way to compensate the gap until ‘the change’ when your parents feel safe to see you and your daughter again. (Having just typed those word I wouldn’t blame you if you told them to f*ck off forever’)
We have to live with these people (mums, dads, in-laws, friends) but it’s really difficult to forgive that they value their fear of a common cold above basic family and human love and physical contact. Unforgivable really but knowing how reasonable and forgiving our community is I have no doubt we’ll forgive them.
My ten year-old granddaughter would be able to understand why they are so scared if it were explained. Your daughter needs to understand who is to blame here.
The film Monsters Inc is a good expose of brainwashing.
I’d say your parents ought to know the hurt they are causing too – and that deliberate government policy, not a flu bug, is to blame.
Thing is, I have dug a hole since day one raising her to believe this is all bullshit, which I will never apologise for.
The problem of course however is that whilst she will readily agree that the masked idiot in Tesco is a lunatic, I don’t ever want the same for the people she loves. Neither do I want to knock them off the pedestal by telling her they are scared.
I think what I resent the most is having these dilemmas at all, forced on us by lockdown. It has invaded our lives and the innocent bubbles of our kids so profoundly, and all we can do is watch.
Then perhaps THEY should tell her themselves.
Sometimes I think we do a disservice to our children by thinking that they are incapable of rational thought. Yes sometimes they say and do daft things but weren’t we all children once.
You don’t have to knock her grandparents off their pedestal, but she may just respond well to a relatively grown up conversation. We can all get scared at any time of our lives. Generally all it takes is for the adults to behave like adults.
If my son ever has children I would not dream of inflicting my probably irrational fears on them. These are exceptional times which will live long in the memory, so as adults we must do everything we can to ensure we give our children the tools to ensure this never happens again. Especially the totally irrational and hideous mental torture we have placed on our trainee adults.
Look,its very easy.Your daughter is a child in the prime of her life and deserves to be loved and cherished. If they are unable to do that ,they are not worthy to even see her in the park.No ifs,no buts,no excuses. Don’t care ,they should know better and if they don’t,their loss.You either tell you daughter her grandparents are scared shirtless and are behaving accordingly or just tell her that they see her as a germ filled bag and traumatise her for life.Choice is clear here.
Tell your parents to act like fucking humans
Tell the poor girl the truth. Explain that we are living under an evil regime that has poisoned her grandparents’ minds. Underneath, they still love her, and when the evil regime is removed, there will be no more brain poison and her grandparents will come round, in both senses of that phrase.
Tell your parents they will never ever see your daughter again, unless they see her in the house.
yeh, I wouldn’t pussyfoot around with stupid visits to the park either. let them make their mind up where they stand. anything else is not fair to the child.
Just popped up onto the moor for a stroll under the full moon. The orb itself was pin sharp, like the stars to the south and west, in that atmospheric clarity reserved for winter nights. Walking alone by moonlight, in the absence of any artificial light, is a great way of clearing one’s thoughts.
As I set out I thought I’d be musing on retribution, of metaphorical heads on spikes.
Instead I found myself thinking how it might be possible to prevent so many people being so dumb-foundingly stupid. I don’t know any answers.
It’s quite the conundrum ain’t it? The Jab of Joy seems to have tipped even the slightly more sensible into lemming-like lunacy.
It’s good out there tonight, TJN. I’m on the Cumbrian fells and the moon is full and bright. There are about half a dozen tawny owls making a racket in the trees around here but no other sound from anywhere, not even a breath of wind, and no light but that which falls from the heavens. It makes all this madness seem somehow insignificant but we are mortal and this life is all we’ve got so it is quite possible to feel awestruck by the ancient beauty above and around us and yet still muse “on retribution and metaphorical heads on spikes.” Physical heads on spikes would be even better.
Curious lack of tawny owls here (SW Dartmoor) at the moment.
I have a theory: no one who’s used to walking alone at night under the stars would be fooled by the covid garbage.
And so to bed. To muse on retribution.
I’m on the banks of the River Severn, facing west. I watched a glorious sunset tonight, and then the moon rose behind me. I’ll go outside again now and look at the stars. It’s a wonderful place to be, and does the soul good, and puts all this coercid tripe into perspective.
There are so many who are incarcerated and can’t enjoy these things. As you say, sometimes one can’t help but muse on retribution, even if it is unchristian.
”Thought followed thought, star followed star,
Through boundless regions….”
And still no answer. It’s too big, isn’t it?
Indeed. I also like being on the moor at night in a storm.
High waving heather ‘neath stormy blasts bending/midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars …
‘Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.’
Didn’t know that one! It sounded like Lear, but I didn’t recognise it. Schiller must have read Lear.
https://twitter.com/alkcheet/status/1365770518717161482
Anything in this?
You mean like finding sars-cov-2 in sewage in Barcelona in March 2019.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1.full.pdf
Not sure why somebidy has thumb you down.
Ivor Cummins mentioned in a video a couple of weeks back, that 14% of Italian blood samples from September 2019 showed signs – antibodies – that those from whom they had been taken had been exposed to Sars Cov2
If this is true, and I have no reason to doubt it isn’t right now, then it really had been over since May and it ain’t never coming back. What we have now is of our own making.
Lots of tut tutting and murmurings from my Mother’s neighbours this afternoon when, during the little chat we had, they discovered that: The friend I going to visit later was not in my ‘bubble’; I did not clap for the NHS; I don’t wear a muzzle, and neither will I be taking a jab; I hate the police now. The neighbour is an ex copper, and Freemason too, don’t ya know. How I smirked.
Good for you.
You ol’ Granny Killer, you. 😉
Guilty as charged, Ceriain 🙂
why have you got bubbles