This week the Church of England unveiled proposals for a shake-up of its national governance structure in what critics have called “a coup by Archbishops to take control of everything”.
I won’t bore you with the details (you can read the full report here, headed-up by the anti-Brexit Bishop Nick Baines) but what stood out to me was the barely concealed aim of replacing the organic accountability of democracy with a sterile rule by a woke technocracy. One purpose of this is, inevitably, to increase ‘diversity’, but it’s not hard to see that the real agenda is to impose a woke uniformity of political ideology on a church already infamous for being led by a clerisy out of touch with ordinary churchgoers and the country as a whole.
At the heart of the takeover is the all-powerful Nominations Committee, which is tasked with establishing “a community of diverse, appropriately skilled and appropriately knowledgeable people from which panels would be convened to oversee appointments and ensure eligibility for election”. Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer puts his finger on the problem here.
Note “appropriately skilled”, “relevant knowledge”, “suitable to stand”, “talent pipeline”, and “appropriate.. behaviours”. It will fall to the Nominations Committee to ‘sift’ all applicants to all Church of England boards, committees and governing bodies. It will be for them to discern and define what is ‘appropriate’ and ‘relevant’, who is ‘suitable’ and has ‘talent’, and whether or not they manifest appropriate ‘behaviours’.
Has it not occurred to the Review Group that this Nominations Committee will have the power to create a church in its own image, and that the Chair of the Nominations Committee will have more executive power than the Archbishop of Canterbury? Or perhaps that’s the idea. It isn’t clear, however, which committee will ‘sift’ nominations to the Nominations Committee, but you can be sure that the process will be the antithesis of transparency and accountability.
He sees parallels with the notorious Cameroonian ‘A-list’ for Tory candidates:
Clause 200 is designed to be the safety valve, the check or balance on the abuse of power, but it is a bit of verbal chicanery. In what sense is pre-election ‘rigorous sifting’ not a negation of of [sic] democracy? If candidates may not emerge organically and appeal to their electorates directly, but instead may be weeded out by the Anglican Conclave compliance committee to ensure theological conformity and gender/ethnicity diversity, then democracy is indeed removed. The proposal apes the process adopted by the Conservative Party under David Cameron and his ‘A-list‘ for candidates, which caused such outrage among Party members with its social engineering of removal of democracy that it was eventually abolished – but not really: it is still very much in place to ensure the ‘right’ candidates are nominated to the ‘right’ seats, and are seen to be. But the Conservative Party’s Candidates Committee doesn’t operate with transparency and accountability. If it did, it would be subject to democracy, and that would hinder the political objective.
The Church of England’s ‘sifting’ people for the ‘talent pipeline’ is also a mechanism for seeming: to ensure the ‘right’ women and ethnic minorities are appointed to the ‘right’ boards, committees and governing bodies of the Church of England, in order that they might in turn select the ‘right’ candidates from the list ‘sifted’ by the Nominations Committee, who, you can be sure, will sift some more than others.
The report is clear that it regards democracy as an inadequate mechanism for ensuring sufficiently diverse governance.
In the Church of England, a significant number of appointments to governance bodies are made through the electoral process. In our view, this does not deliver what the Church needs from its governing bodies. …
The Church bodies which either elect or nominate people onto the Church of England’s governance bodies are themselves not very diverse bodies, meaning that the people they elect or nominate onto governance bodies tend not to supply the diversity which is one of the requirements of the Charity Commission’s Seven Principles of Governance.
Ah, so it’s all about complying with the requirements of the Charity Commission’s Seven Principles of Governance? What exactly do these require of the Church of England?
Well, nothing at all as it happens, as the code does not ‘require’ anything but commends certain principles and practices. It also leaves entirely to the discretion of the charity itself how it defines and achieves ‘diversity‘:
The board assesses its own understanding of equality, diversity and inclusion. It considers how this happens in the charity and identifies any gaps in understanding which could be filled by discussion, learning, research or information.
The report’s implication that the elected General Synod is deficient in respect of the Charity Commission’s ‘requirements’ for diversity and therefore needs to be made less democratic, the better to comply, is thus a wholly misleading insinuation intended, we must suppose, to convince readers that they have no choice but to accept this reform.
Likewise, there is an appeal to the U.K. Corporate Governance Code, which the report quotes to show how the elected Synod is deficient in this regard:
Appointments to the board should be subject to a formal, rigorous and transparent procedure, and an effective succession plan should be maintained for board and senior management.
The Corporate Governance Code is published by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and applies only to companies “with a Premium Listing of equity shares in the UK”. The Church of England is not a publicly listed company and does not have shareholders and thus the code does not apply to it. In addition, the code is not obligatory and makes clear that deviations, clearly explained to shareholders, aren’t necessarily indicative of poor governance: “There may be many good reasons why a company may choose not to comply and an explanation does not imply poor governance.” This too is therefore a misleading effort on the part of the report authors to make it appear that the proposed reform is a statutory requirement when it is no such thing.
Hopefully the General Synod will reject this report and its attempt to replace lively church democracy with a dull woke conformity. If it does not and instead gives it the green light, it’s hard to see how the Church of England will avoid accelerating faster down the right-on rabbit hole it has lately made its home – Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby rarely misses an opportunity to accuse his church of being “deeply institutionally racist” – which so jars with many of the people who would be its natural supporters. Wokery hasn’t revived the fortunes of any church to date and it seems unlikely to start with the C of E.
These problems of woke takeovers aren’t limited to the C of E of course. The church’s appeal to the FRC Code is telling, as this appears to be the font of much corporate wokery in the U.K. The code has been evolving quickly in recent years, with contentious ‘social justice’ elements being hardened even between the 2016 and 2018 editions.
The 2016 version, for instance, still made an effort to couch diversity in terms of improving the quality of deliberation: “One of the ways in which constructive debate can be encouraged is through having sufficient diversity on the board.”
Diversity here was just a ‘supporting principle’, and companies were only asked to have ‘due regard’ to its benefits: “The search for board candidates should be conducted, and appointments made, on merit, against objective criteria and with due regard for the benefits of diversity on the board, including gender.”
Come 2018, and it is now a central principle that diversity “should” be actively promoted in appointments: “Both appointments and succession plans should be based on merit and objective criteria and, within this context, should promote diversity of gender, social and ethnic backgrounds, cognitive and personal strengths.”
The annual report “should” also “describe the work of the nomination committee” (is this where the C of E got the idea from?) in “developing a diverse pipeline” and in its “progress on achieving the objectives” of its diversity and inclusion policy.
What’s more, it seems this is still not woke enough for the apparatchiks at the FRC. In July 2021 the FRC published research claiming to show that “diverse boards lead to better corporate culture and performance” and arguing that companies need to go even further in promoting ‘diversity’:
• Regulators and companies must focus on collecting more data on the types of diversity, board dynamics and social inclusion
• The Nomination Committee itself should be diverse and have a clear mandate to work with search firms that access talent from wide and diverse pools.
• The greater representation of women in the boardroom is reshaping culture and dynamics and benefiting businesses from a social justice as well as a performance perspective
The idea that ‘diversity’ improves performance and profit has been taken apart by Alex Edmans in the Telegraph, who argues that although he is himself ethnic minority and a supporter of diversity, the fact is the business case for diversity is wholly lacking in good quality evidence.
A much heralded McKinsey report, entitled Diversity Wins, argued that “the business case for gender and ethnic diversity in top teams is stronger than ever”.
Last month, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) released a study, which concluded that “gender-diverse boards are more effective than those without women”. The evidence is supposedly so compelling that one chairman claimed in the study that “there have been enough reports … statistics and … evidence-based research to stop talking about it and get on with it”.
Another declared that “I don’t want to see any men. I don’t care if they’re Jesus Christ. I don’t want to see them.” …
But the business case for diversity is far weaker than commonly claimed. The McKinsey study has been shown to be irreplicable even with their chosen performance measure (EBIT) and preferred methodology. Moreover, there is no link between diversity and other performance measures – gross margin, return on assets, return on equity, sales growth, or total shareholder return – or when using more established methodologies.
The study commissioned by the FRC runs 90 regressions investigating the link between diversity and profitability. Eighty-eight find no relationship, and two find a weak relationship that fails the standard threshold for statistical significance. Yet many articles have been written based on the study’s headline claim, without looking at its actual results.
Corporate wokery, spearheaded by the patronising, divisive and discriminatory drive for ill-defined ‘diversity’ is increasingly out of control, whether in the corporate world or the wannabe corporate world of the C of E. If we had elected a Labour government for the past decade that might be understandable. That this is happening on the Conservatives’ watch raises important questions about who governs Britain and how seriously the Conservative party takes its commitment to conservative values.
The FRC is slated to be replaced, when the Government gets round to it. This is a prime opportunity to steer corporate governance away from divisive woke ideology and towards something more sensible and benign.
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Isn’t it more a case of: money can flow to our relative and cronies, therefore money must flow to our relatives and cronies?
(Literally) unaccountable (literally) hundreds of billions of swill has flowed into the trough, and even the runtiest of the swine have got their snouts in it.
Recall that Parliamentary scrutiny of the £37bn (with a b) Snitch-n-Spy system’s main demand wasn’t that those who ordered it and profited from it be hung up in gibbets. No, it’s that “for the £billions spent we need to see a top class legacy system”.
Sure, it didn’t work, but we need to ensure that it keeps not working.
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/150988/unimaginable-cost-of-test-trace-failed-to-deliver-central-promise-of-averting-another-lockdown/
Don’t believe anything these politicians say
Vaccine rebellion rising as Biden wages biological warfare on the American people
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-09-12-top-interviews-with-zach-vorhies-dr-christiane-northrup-mark-grenon-brad-harris.html
Upcoming events anti lockdown roadside events with the Big Boards
Monday 13th September 5pm
BIG BOARD NIGHT – anti lockdown roadside event
High St, ASCOT SL5 7HP
just before A330 Winkfield Road/A329 London Road
Wednesday 15th September 5.30pm Rebels on Roundabouts
Downshire Way, Bracknell RG12 7AA
near Premier Inn/Bracknell Fire Station
Saturday 2nd October 2pm GRAND STAND IN THE PARK BERKSHIRE
– with a couple of guest speakers.
Reading River Promenade
Reading RG4 8BX
Stand in the Park Reading River Promenade Reading
Sundays from 10am
Telegram https://t.me/standindparkreading
Stand in South Hill Park Bracknell –
Sundays from 10am
Wednesdays from 2pm
Make friends – keep sane
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
COVID Data, Facts Not Fear
We know that much of the raw data underlying the CDC statistics are inflated by the way the data is collected and manipulated by the hospitals and healthcare system. However, that said, if we just accept the raw CDC data and evaluate what they are collecting as a way to estimate the risks….here’s the outcome.
♦ Facts as of 9/4/21:
♦ DEATHS BY AGE:
♦ TOTAL DEATHS account for 1.6% of total cases.
Why is COVID-19 being disproportionately hyped as such a dangerous threat, when the reality of the statistical danger is much less than the intense level of hype?
These FOI (freedom of information) figures for Scotland, courtesy of a hardworking investigator, reinforce your findings.
https://mobile.twitter.com/TheRustler83/status/1436583453315813379?s=20
Sweden.
Partly I see what they did as defensive. Defending themselves from the huge push of the fanatical zero covid and we need to be more like Jacinda Arden mad folk who would readily liked to have brought the government down. Then they had Dominic Cummings on the inside forcing lockdowns and European leaders all doing it. It would have taken a special kind of leader to stand up to all that.
“a special kind of leader”
Well, if by special you mean a leader that displayed leadership qualities, respected the rule of law, respected freedom of speech, tried to honour their election pledges, was able to look at varying expert advice critically, followed established protocols for dealing with “emergencies”, then I suppose so, yes. Isn’t that what a leader is, in a liberal democracy? if you don’t do those things, you’re not a leader.
Yes, and we didn’t have that person
I guess the point I am making is that I don’t regard those qualities as “special” (though they do seem rare). They are the minimum requirement for leadership positions.
The PM sought power and took an oath to defend our country against our enemies. Instead, he has given them aid, and waged war on his own people using our money to do it.
Were the people in Sweden who stuck to the plan “special” or were they just doing the job expected of them?
Yep. And being numerate and scientifically literate would help filter out the bullshitters, the last prime minister to have such skills was probably Thatcher.
I’m not sure that simple numeracy and scientific literacy are the criterion that has primacy, even though it’s important. A lot of the allegedly scientifically literate are part of the problem. Look at SAGE.
I think honesty is more of an issue, and the lack of checks on the exercise of power. I strongly doubt the PM is less numerate and scientifically literate than I am.
I think one of the problems is the ‘floater’ syndrome, where we are in a situation where there are a large number of windy turds coming to the top.
Some might say ”twas always thus’ – but I genuinely think that the quality of leadership has suffered a general decline as a social phenomenon.
Quite possibly. I think the other thing that happened was covid presented a unique combination of circumstances, at a point in time, which enabled people to get away with stuff they probably would not have before. A perfect storm.
Yes. It is a bit of a ‘cart and horse’ problem. What I’m pointing up is that the ‘floater’ problem was growing before this all happened, creating a key condition.
And one who didn’t let his health secretary discharge untested ill old people back into care homes and then spay midaxolam around like it was smarties [allegedly]
Every country in the world, with a few notable exceptions, scrapped its pandemic preparedness plans and adopted Draco’s. Lockdown was orchestrated and coordinated, with sinister intent. I don’t buy that politicians were afraid. Except for Trump. He wasn’t in on the psy-ops. Falling for it was his fatal mistake.
Are we really this naïve? Still? After 18 months of this pythonic squeeze, relax, squeeze harder?
Mandatory imposition of vaxports has been temporarily paused, and nothing more.
The system remains in place, and will remain in place. They are already required as a contractual condition of entry into some venues. The correct sort of chaps with the correct sort of common purpose will be called up and asked if they wouldn’t mind awfully imposing vaxports across their retail and office empires.
Meanwhile, Queen Nicola, whose cabal is limited to public sector parasites, has had to charge ahead openly with the New Normal, and iron out (or stamp on) the hitches and the opposition.
Come Autumn/Winter coughs-and-sneezes season the terror will be ramped up again, muzzles will be back South of the border, and “With great reluctance, now is the time for Vaxports”.
In the meantime, I have no doubt that they’ll come up with a Vaxport Sniffer app so that our outsourced hi-vis Stasi can probe us efficiently and remotely, with our without our consent.
Please, please stop falling for politicians’ words. Look only at their actions and reality. A temporary reprieve in more despotism is not the same as increased freedoms, it is merely a brief relaxation in the slithery coils that are breaking our spirit to resist.
Please, please stop falling for politicians’ words.
We don’t fall for politicians words. We comply to stop the politicians hired thugs beating ups up, fining and imprisoning us…
Perhaps it is a good time to remind ourselves that the precautionary principle – often espoused by the ‘decision makers’ throughout 2020 – is essentially a presumption against action. Its use to justify action always seemed very dubious to me.
The precautionary principle is a process for allowing environmentalists to do what they want and suppressing disagreement…
Does anyone have a link or links where i can fund vaccine rollout rates by country (eg., for country XXX n% vax’d in jan21, m% vaxed in feb21, etc)? European countries in particular, for the US by state?
I’m looking for data to research the hypothesis that vaccines have no significant effect on long term overall mortality rates.
Thanks in advance.
The Our World in Data website should do that for you.
This link should give you a lot of what you want.
Reply to all who gave me info, thanks
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
Sweden
You were TOLD that you CAN’T observe it! This was not a comment, it was an order…
With apologies to Isaac Asimov,
The three laws of government :
1) A government through action or inaction must not harm or allow harm to the general public.
2) A government must obey the general public except if in doing so it breaks the First law
3) A government must protect itself except if in doing so it breaks the First or Second law.
But the usual problem arises – “harm” needs to be carefully and tightly defined, otherwise principles using it in the way you do here can easily become tools for justifying illiberal oppression. See the woke speechcrime laws that have applied in this country now for decades, and form part of the European superstate’s quasi-constitution, or the medico-fascism imposed in pursuit of a supposed duty on the state to protect the health of the population..
Even Asimov noted that ‘harm’ could be widely interpreted, and had a story where some robots had the ‘prevent harm’ instruction suppressed to allow them to work with humans in dangerous conditions where a man might suffer moderate amounts of harm – low-level radiation, for instance.
Of course, those robots got loose…
Indeed. Iirc most of Asimov’s robot stories involved clever ways of interpreting and finding loopholes in his Laws.
Clever and entertaining stuff, but the use of principles based on interpretations of harm has a long history in our culture, pervading utilitarianism and a lot of liberal thinking.
Politician’s logic applies to a wider class of people than just politicians. When the medical advisers were asked what to do – and there was inadequate data to base a decision on – that didn’t stop them recommending courses of action…
For what it’s worth. my view of the episode is:
1 – New disease starts spreading from China. Unknown lethality – could be very bad.
2 – Government starts activating pandemic plan. (This is sensible – even though it calls for the elderly to be kicked out of hospital and die in care homes.). At that stage data suggested that we needed to prepare for a bad disease.
3 – Now the Medical Establishment start to be in charge. They start to order PPE in. Suddenly, a lot of money is made available. This corrupts the process.
4 – The Pharmaceutical Companies see their chance to monetarise the 20 years worth of work they have been doing on experimental respiratory disease vaccines to fight flu. They tell the Medical Establishment that they can save the world. The Medical Establishment eagerly support them and brief politicians accordingly.
5 – The Pharma companies need TIME to develop, manufacture and distribute their vaccine. The don’t want the lucrative patient base:
a) to die before getting jabbed
b) to catch it and gain immunity
c) to find a useful pre-existing treatment
So, they stop the Pandemic Plan, call for lockdown and masks, and suppress research into alternative treatments
6 – This whole process requires vast sums of money. Every fraudster jumps in. The Establishment loses control as every bureaucrat becomes a little oppressor. The police go into full oppression mode
7 – By now, effective control has been lost to single-interest groups competing in a purity spiral. Teachers refuse to work, the NHS shuts up shop, large businesses close down offices, Airlines and small businesses lose out and start to go bust….
There was a pre existing very long term plan by Fauci, Gates, Wellcome and their lieutenants who had. worked with WHO and been funded by them, to weaponise the first signs of any possible pandemic disease to bring in rna “vaccines” and universal medical ID.
They’d rehearsed it with swine flu, failed, and planned and bribed via research grants ever since to do it successfully next time.
Add that to the top of your list and that’s pretty much it.
Lockdowns were a brilliant addition to forcing us into vaccines, adopted by the Fauci gang on the hoof because China did it.
Leaders across the world gave in to the idea in the panic because they thought the “experts” knew best and they were being terrified by predictions of numbers dead.
Add in China immediately exploiting the situation every which way to weaken the West.
Noah, Freddie, Toby etc are blinded mainly by their terror of seeming stupid conspiracists, and their disbelief that people like them could do such a thing.
Correct about long term plan. Dr David Martin has documented this – and since explained further aspects on various blogs – in the The Fauci/COVID-19 Dossierhttps://f.hubspotusercontent10.net › hubfs › The Fau…
It has been attacked by “fact checkers” so form your own opinion; his dogged recording of the Patents relating to SARS/Coronaviruses etc etc cannot be denied as they are all public records in the US…and his recent dive into the Pfizer/Cominarty scam is revealing too..Del B at the Highwire has interviewed him as have others.
The fact that aspects of the “vaccines” were patented before SARS COV2 was unleashed should be cause for thought – at the very least.
“At that stage data suggested that we needed to prepare for a bad disease.”
Is that an established fact? I am not so sure. Data from the Diamond Princess suggested is wasn’t, I thought. Anyway, why would we have believed Chinese data?
My pet theory is that they got wind of the possibility of a lab leak and it frightened them into the action we saw.
my memory suggests that the data that came back from Italy in early March 2020 showed it was only old people dying but that a years’ worth of old people dying may be compressed into a month and overwhelm the NHS. This is the sort of stuff Spiegelhalter was saying. The 3 week lockdown was to prevent that but then it dragged on for months (I don’t know why). The winter lockdown was done because they got away with it before and everyone else was doing it.
We stopped following the science the moment we threw out the pandemic response plan and politicians took over (egged on by the media and bedwetting scientists)
…but then it dragged on for months (I don’t know why).
I explained that. It dragged on because by then the Pharma Companies had sold the Medical Establishment on a vaccine cure for the pandemic. But they needed time. So a lockdown was extended to ‘keep people safe until the vaccine was ready’.
Of course, the lockdown did not stop the virus. But by then the entire bureaucratic establishment of the country was sold on lockdown, and it could not be stopped…
I thought Imperial based their doom predictions on Chinese data as well as Italian, but I could be wrong.
It is the job of politicians to lead the response. That in itself is not the problem (Whitty is no solution!). The problem is the motivations and the resulting nature of the response.
Is that an established fact? I am not so sure. Data from the Diamond Princess suggested is wasn’t, I thought. …
Data from the Princess was interesting, but hadn’t been peer reviewed, examined for confounders, etc. It might have been an outlier for all sorts of reasons which we couldn’t appreciate AT THE TIME.
I would not like to, and I’m sure that the Chief Medical Officer would not like to, advise that a whole country need not prepare for a pandemic based on the raw data from one ship.
Of course, LATER, it turned out that the Diamond Princess was a pretty accurate predictor. But we could not have been sure at the time….
why would we have believed Chinese data?
The data that started the panic was Italian…
my money is on Neil Ferguson’s phrase – I’m paraphrasing here – we saw lockdowns in China and didn’t think we could do it here but when we saw they were doing it in Italy “we knew we could get away with it” (his actual words).
I think you are right.
Seems pretty accurate to me.
the key words there are “purity spiral” !!!
“the successes of the command-and-control governments of Asia”
What successes would these be, and who is to say that they occurred because of a command-and-control government, rather than in spite of it?
I expect he is referring to the economic growth of some Asian countries. Well, liberal democracies have done that too, before the Asians. We’ve also done improved public health, low crime, long periods of peace, not being conquered, general happiness, cultural growth, world domination. I’m not saying we don’t have flaws, just can’t see what success we should be envious of, in particular.
Anyway, why assume that our politicians are interested in success, in the sense the writer means it. The evidence is that they are interested in the success of the CCP in staying in power for more than 70 years, largely unchallenged.
Problem is, you are referring to a reaction to a situation and whether that reaction was right or not. But the evidence points to the Govt having created the situation. In which case the scrutiny must be of earlier events than reaction. The evidence is, that the PCR test is inappropriate in this context and was used inappropriately. This would lead to excess positive results, which appears to be what was required. Deaths within 28 days (originally 60) is almost designed to exaggerate. And it is entirely coincidental that the virus chosen to receive these reactions, was a mild one, no worse than flu? How can we extend the ‘pandemic’? Lockdowns. How do we get the public to go along with it? Relentless fear-mongering. And apart from the massive wealth transferred to vaccine companies, I cannot see what the point was? The useless NHS, offering a massively reduced service, demands huge increases in funding, to go back to what they did before. The easily led imbecile Johnson, goes on to apply the logic of a five year old to non-existent Climate Change.
While I would normally agree with your essay during “normal “ times, in the present “new normal” being forced across all nations with rare exceptions, I can’t find the satisfaction that this thesis; politicians just doing something, has much explanatory power.
Rather this is just the normalising excuse used to maintain that this is just a cock-up theory much loved by TY and those attached to the old normal.
It is trully difficult for normies, and now I must include those who still cling to old perspectives like TY and you, the author, to see that this is far more diabolical than you are capable of imagining.
All the leaders of the G7 are fully on board and coordinating this controlled demolition of the old order, synchronised to diminish the individual spectacle and to spread the notion that this reaction was the only possible reaction to an incredibly minor viral pandemic.
After all the cooperation of media outlets, social media giants with singular owners that frequently meet with these same leaders, along with the wealthiest financiers on the planet, all with megalomaniacal beliefs in their role of controlling the planet, knowing full well the financial system will collapse imminently, have planned these recent events and have been freewheeling the general responses across the globe.
I think it’s sweet that you still think the world works like the times of Yes Prime minister. But it’s a nonsense.
This ^^^^
Yes, this. Normies gonna normie. They spent a lifetime thinking within the box and there’s literally no way out for these people. That’s why I find London Calling simultaneously fascinating and frustrating at the same time. It’s good to see James hacking into Toby, but Toby’s defences and smug turnarounds are cringe. Because he’s a normie, and that’s all he has to work with. The worst normie’s are the educated ones, and especially the journalists, because they equate their experience with How the World Works. I was near the front lines of power for two decades says Toby. No, he went to a couple of flatulent London dinner parties. Not the same thing. So yes, Yes Minister represents the peak of ironic wit and wisdom to the normie intelligentsia. This is because in normie world there is no active principle of evil, just too much paperwork sometimes. Even this website is really a great snapshot of normie teetering on the brink of the abyss. Lockdowns bad, masks bad, vaccines maybe they’re ok? See what happened there? Most recent Catherine Austin Fitts interview on Delingpod pretty much nails it exactly in my book. 10,000 year secret government rules earth. If you’re snorting as you read that, you’re a normie.
“ 10,000 year secret government rules earth. If you’re snorting as you read that, you’re a normie.”
Well I guess I’m a normie then. Isn’t there a middle ground where you recognise politicians can be/are often badly intentioned/evil if the circumstances allow them to get away with it, but you don’t think there’s a 10,000 year secret government ruling earth?
Neither you nor I have the slightest idea of whether or not there really is a 10,000 year secret government. The difference between us is you are convinced there is not and are sure you are right. That is EXACTLY how I defined normie above: you equate your experience with how the world works. You never got to meet the 10,000 year old government, nor read about it in your crappy degree, but you’re worldview is tiptop shiny and in no need to review: you are sure that any talk of a 10,000 year old government is completely batshit crazy. You didn’t stop, doubt yourself for a moment, go and listen to Catherine Austin Fitts, and then realise, hey, maybe there is more to it than my tiny mind and experience is aware of. Nope you just hit reply. Yep, you are a normie. Textbook.
I don’t have a degree.
I don’t think I ever said I know for sure there is not a secret 10,000 year government ruling earth, just seems unlikely based on what I know, which is very little, but not sure how much more you would know.
One has limited energy, so one tends not to spend too much time on things that are possible but unlikely, unless they hit you in the face e.g. the covid madness.
You said you don’t think there’s a 10,000 year secret government. On what basis? They didn’t send you an invitation? You didn’t read it about it at your favourite website? You have not the feintest clue whether it is true or not, and no way of knowing. But you’ve made up your mind, because you think you know the limits of reality. My point is you don’t know the limits of reality. You, me, anyone. But as soon as you think you do, as you are doing, you are just making stuff up. Catherine Austin Fitts is not just making stuff up like you. So quit arguing with me, and listen to the podcast, or not, I don’t care. But if you don’t listen, and you still think you know who runs the planet, you’re a normie.
I am afraid I don’t have time to listen to every possibly interesting podcast people link to.
I don’t think there is a 10,000 year old secret government because there doesn’t seem to be much evidence for it. Of course there might be, but I don’t think it’s an important avenue for anyone to pursue, at least not for me anyway.
I’m fully aware there is a lot of evil in the world and that people do things that are bad and attempt to hide them. But most of the time opportunism seems a more likely explanation than a long-running or elaborate conspiracy.
This is nothing but an appeal to ignorance. Logically invalid reasoning since the times of Aristotle and an all-time favorite of all kinds of snake-oil salesmen (such as the Corona practioners). Nothing follows from the fact that something is unknown.
Don’t forget about the lizards
Precisely this. It really is like walking through the looking glass vs peering at the surface and seeing flickering images of the wonderland. Once you step through however, you aren’t going back and that world is absurd and littered throughout with evil actors, practically demonic, but it is the real behind the superficial drama. That’s not to say there aren’t legions of useful idiots vacuously carrying out the plans of the megalomaniacs.
This is not a pleasant place, so you absolutely need to keep hold of the natural and eternal joys that living still offers even as the despicable entities lie, cheat, steal and attempt to enslave.
Excellent summation.
Does anyone have any details around the much censored “self-exemption” rights?
“ “I think I’m on the side that healthcare workers, perhaps social care staff, given that they’re interacting with highly vulnerable people, who are most at risk of Covid, there’s a justification there for requiring vaccination.”
Prof Ferguson quoted above on BBC. Why does it take so long to sink in that it doesn’t stop transmission? Are they lying on purpose?
I’m sure it has sunk in. They don’t care. They are desperate to push vaccines at all costs. As to why, take your pick.
lot of money and job security for a lot of people, pushing vaccines…
The lessons of Yes, Minister? How about Hippocrates?
An Open Lettercc: Mr. Nigel Farage, Mr. Laurence Fox, Mr. William Clouston and Mr. Richard Tice
Britain – whether we wish to admit it or not – is dying
.
This letter is a plea, to all of you, to help resuscitate it… together.
https://thecommoner.substack.com/p/an-open-letter
Politicians follow “politician’s logic” because a vocal, strident sector of the population instigated by the media demand action, any action.
Sayers hits the nail on the head of what has changed, though. China is the hot success story that too many people around the world admire and think we must replicate, in order to “not fall behind”.
Unfortunately, China’s success is grossly misunderstood. Copying anything from the “Chinese Model” will only make us poorer in every sense.
What success is this, exactly?
The demand for action was as much manufactured by government-funded fear porn, injudicious words designed to increase rather than reduce panic, and by a very selective use of data.
Exactly. If this had been treated as most ‘flu seasons are, no exceptionality or ‘crisis’ would have emerged – just levels of illness and mortality quite usual in a moderate infection season.
This isn’t really true: A demand for action manifested itself while the government still claimed to stick to the existing plan because of Italy! and also, because of Fergusons number games.
Government-funded fear porn was part of the action which was ultimatively taken.
I would love to have the time to cross-check the various government press conferences with the publication of the Imperial papers and the news from Italy. Someone who is working on this full time, like one of the DS journalists, ought to do that while the information is still available online.
Belgium was a well run country in the extended period it did not suffer from an operating government. Most of the time governments interfere, they don’t add constructively. but their very existence becomes a growing obstacle for societal development.
this is true. politicians don’t run countries – countries run themselves. politicians are supposed to use the law to change the framework within which countries run themselves. but they can’t help fiddling. what we need is a limit to when government’s sit or when they can change law. MPs should spend far more time helping their constituents with specific issues.
So you’re saying that bureaucrats (who presumably were the guys running Belgium when they didn’t have a functioning government) are better than politicians then?
No. Bureaucrats are a mixed bunch, some bad, some good, most neither. Someone has to keep processes working that a modern society needs. But poiticians generally have insufficient knowledge of detail to constructively help ‘manage’. When they do interfere its often to no good effect.
One of the major problems is that there are far too many overpaid politicians who end up trying to micro-manage because only a few have the wisdom to create policy. Its like all organisations, about 5% are indispensable and carry most of the 95%.
most people I speak to are expecting a winter lockdown. our company is preparing for it
it doesn’t really matter what Boris says about not wanting one. if cases go up (or if flu surges) he will u-turn again.
If politicians say they don’t want to do something, or that they don’t currently believe it to be necessary or proportionate, they’re almost certainly already making plans to do it. I wrote to my MSP about the vaccine passport vote, and the copy and paste response I received included this:
So they’re definitely planning to extend it to all but the most essential services before the end of the year.
“public transport, education and access to medical services or shops.”
But my taxes pay for those so I am paying for those services. Am I to pay for services that I am to be excluded from???
I have yet to see any journo or politician or commentator address that issue.
Locked up prisoners would still get access to education food and medical services. Why should someone who has NOT committed a criminal offence of such severity to be removed from society be put in a position where they are DENIED access to the services a prisoner is still given access to AND is expected to continue to pay to support the provision of those services to others including prisoners?
if you were following ‘the science’ you would not demand care home workers or NHS staff get vaccinated. you would ask for proof of previous natural infection.
if you are under 60 you might even consider getting it on purpose. natural infection is going to leave you done and dusted for the next 50 years.
I didn’t get it on purpose but I was happy to have it, after going to a big festival and getting drunk for a long weekend. quite mild (I’m in my early 50s) but now I am safe to visit my elderly parents.
I travelled all around Europe on the train, visited crowded bars, restaurants and concerts and I still couldn’t catch it. However, I did get a pretty unusual cough from Portugal in January 2020, so I’ve probably got multi-decade immunity already.
At the very start of this I would have gladly gone to a Covid-party to do my bit to protect the vulnerable. Unfortunately, no one seemed to actually have it apart from anyone who stepped foot inside a hospital, and besides I didn’t appreciate that it was so mild that I probably already had it before the PCR-demic got into full swing.
Incidentally, is anyone else seeing that before the mass vaccination we personally knew of literally no one who was ill with Covid, but now we hear of plenty of doubl-vaxxed, some of whom are actually very ill (and far too young to be that ill from the ‘rona). ADE seems to be in plain-sight.
last spring I knew of a handful of people who had it (all mild)
this summer and autumn its about half the people I know – all double jabbed
but nobody is dying with/of it and in a normal world we’d just think a mild summer cold is going round
“a pretty unusual cough from Portugal”
The fiction and confusion has so overlain the actuality that it is hard to tease out that actuality.
It wasn’t from Portugal, but I recall a particular lousy infection in 2019 that had the feature of a totally unusual long-lasting cough.
Nothing COVID-specific about that: As far as I know, this happens because viruses have started to replicate in the lung in numbers. I had this as part of some flu years ago (and didn’t get during the 2019 flu from hell or since, except for half a day in 2020, before COVID became a household monster).
Me too, autumn 2019 and several others I know.
A family I know reckoned their son brought it back from a skiing holiday in France. Lots of other people, self imcluded, had a strange long lasting cough around the end of 2019. No-one died but then we didn’t know we were meant to.
Yes we all got it this July. I’m 50. We had stocked up a long time ago on Ivermectin, HCQ and some other things. It was like flu for 2 or 3 days. Usual anosmia which went quickly. Then we got antibody tests showing high levels. As far as I’m concerned, I’m done. If I needed to I’d show that to people who are still cowering in fear. Unfortunately I have found most of the cowering classes still don’t think that’s enough and tsk tsk me for not getting jabbed and stand well back and masked nevertheless.
*sigh*
I’m in same boat except without antibody test – but if I had one I don’t see why I would need to produce it to anyone not medically qualified. Would imagine if my neighbours knew I wasn’t double jabbed I’d be getting the cold shoulder
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
I disagree – Sweden is that counterfactual. They didn’t lock down but they are now refusing entry to citizens of Israel, one of the most locked down and jabbed countries on the planet due to the risk of Covid infection that they carry.
Pretty conclusive evidence that lockdowns and jabs are not as effective as some would have us believe if you ask me.
AFAIK Sweden isn’t discriminating against Israel in particular: they just have a blanket ban on non-essential visits by anyone not from an EU or EFTA country.
Let’s get a couple of Noah Naivety tropes out of the way as minor irritations :
Well – absent any convincing evidence that they do, and considering that any such marginality is without doubt balanced against massive and disproportionate penalites, then any claim to utility is supreme bollocks.
This was a ‘pandemic’ only by virtue of the WHO re-writing the dictionary. There was never a health emergency in terms of excessive mortality, which was a previous condition of the definition. It is hard to conceive how a virus which, at its worst, never reached the level defined as ‘epidemic’ in the UK could be defined as a ‘pandemic’. So it’s a case of ‘when the next new infection arrives’ – pandemic or not.
That said – the knee-jerk motivation described is certainly in the mix, even given a lot of other motives. It wasn’t just Yes Minister that lampooned it – it was also brilliantly done in The Thick of It, with a minister and advisors frantically searching for anything thart could be called an ‘initiative’ – the result of which would always be a major cock-up.
A pandemic is not a pandemic.
A case is not a case.
A vaccine is not a vaccine.
However, a lie remains what it always was: a lie.
Well said!
“After all, we can’t observe the counterfactual of what would have happened in the absence of lockdown.”
But we can. Not all countries locked down, and in the USA we have the example of adjacent states following very different rules. The statistics indicate clearly that lockdowns were very effective at causing economic damage but no use at all in containing the virus.
… and we can note the lack of any inflections related to lockdowns in any curves mapping mortality.
Lockdowns were never really going to work for US states because US states are constitutionally forbidden from closing their borders.
Well, maybe, but didn’t a lot of states have “stay at home” orders applying to residents of that state, that were presumably supposed to have at least some impact to the spread, locally? I doubt whether thousands flocked to say, California, while it was “locked down” as many of their own states were probably also locked down and why go to California to look at closed shops and restaurants?
Many states did everything they could to close borders including fining people if they didn’t quarantine or take covid tests when crossing the state border. It was mostly just signaling, but it did depress mobility.
Work depends on what you want to achieve. If your goal is to have unprecedented and complete control of all aspects of life, lockdowns work.
King Log vs King Stork. You’d think these people would have read a little Aesop.
Doing more things faster is no substitute for doing the right things.
Covey.
But we can test the “counterfactual” of what would have been the results if no lockdowns had been implemented. There actually IS one “placebo” nation – Sweden. The nation of Sweden should actually be viewed as a major epjdemologic study that included 10.17 millions participants in a study that has lasted at least 18 months.
With schools, the “study” involved at least 2 million students, none of who missed a day of class (at least up to age 16), no mask requirements and no social distancing requirements. In the school term of 2020, zero school-age children died of COVID, only 15 had to be admitted to ICU and the mortality rates for teachers and school employees were the same as every other profession in Sweden.
If the UK had done exactly like Sweden did, the death figures from COVID would be identical as they are today. So all the lockdowns didn’t save one life. But they definitely caused deaths that would not have happened absent the lockdowns.
Not to mention endless individual misery, plus economic ruin, plus social disintegration, plus the collapse of ‘liberal democracy’, plus the destruction of education, plus…
Politicians are simply the useful idiots. There is no logic. Information, resources and useful links: https://www.LCAHub.org/
We ‘can observe the counterfactual’ by looking at Sweden, South Dakota, Florida etc.
No offense to Freddy Sayers, whom I admire a great deal, but rhe assymetric risk profile for politicians’ careers between excessive action and less authoritarian options has been put much better by Professor Philipp Bagus in his recent Mises article “Vaccine Mandates and the Great Reset” and even more so in his February 2021 eye opening academic paper “Covid-19 and the Political Economy of Mass Hysteria” in International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.