Coronavirus
It now seems to be accepted that, as I myself suspected some time ago, Coronavirus may have swept through the UK and particularly the London area as long ago as January:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8250371/How-people-REALLY-caught-coronavirus.html
There is now a plausible argument that as many as 5 million people in the London area are, or have been, infected. So far, about 5,000 have died of or with the virus. 1 in every 1,000 of the infected population.
The above facts make a nonsense of “lockdown”, as suspected. The entire economy and society has been closed down because of a likely one in a thousand chance of being killed (which probably would happen anyway, “lockdown” or no “lockdown”).
That is a thousand times greater than the chance of being struck by lightning, and is quite a high probability for mathematicians, but for those of us in the real world is a rather small chance, though admittedly far from de minimis.
No-one seriously suggests that Coronavirus is not a serious public health emergency, but it has been hugely overblown, and regarded like the Black Death or something similar.
http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html
The Government and its staff insist that it is only because of the “lockdown” that Britain has “wrestled the infection figures down” to the point where the reproduction number (RO) is below one, meaning that the virus will now decline inexorably to near zero. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8255677/Chris-Whitty-reveals-UKs-reproduction-number-dropped-1.html
Nonsense. “Lockdown” is all but irrelevant. A leading expert, an Israeli, has just recently said that any measures taken in various countries are close to irrelevant to the ultimate outcome. That seems to accord with what has happened in countries around the world.
The latest “plan” from little Matt Hancock is for people to be “allowed” to meet up to 10 specified others outside their own households! Only a cretin of the Hancock sort could come up with a “plan” so impossible to make work! Who will enforce this “plan”? The whole thing is ridiculous.
Someone like G.K. Chesterton would have fun with this “plan”, and probably write an amusing short story about it.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people are (judging by what I saw on my local roads yesterday) all but ignoring the “lockdown”. Plenty of traffic compared to a couple of weeks ago.
I hope that this episode has taught the increasingly arrogant Common Purpose-infected police a lesson, to wit that they police by consent in this country. People (misinformed, brainwashed, so be it) consented at first to the “lockdown”, but more and more are waking up to the fact that Coronavirus is almost yesterday’s news.
Most people now understand that, especially if they are under 70, they are not going to get Coronavirus or die from it, and that, if they are under 40, there is every chance that, even if they are infected, they will be totally unaware of the fact.
Those at high(er) risk are known: non-Europeans; inhabitants of “hotspots” such as London, West Midlands etc; older persons (esp. over 70); persons with other serious health problems.
The chance of getting it and being hospitalized and then dying is probably not even one in a thousand overall. For white people under 40 it is close to zero.
Tweets
(because Douglas Murray has not worked out, or been told, what the Jewish/NWO lobby wants him to say…)
Below, a Peter Hitchens tweet which echoes some of what I have been saying about Boris-idiot for years:
Alarming, that “Shannon” cannot see that this absurd and petty-tyrannical “lockdown” breaches “our rights“! A non-European, it seems; with where is she comparing the UK in human rights terms? Some place in Asia? North Korea? Also, “aspiring journalist”. Well, looking at the standards of journalism now, plummeting even in the national msm, I am hardly shocked. Looking at her other tweets, she seems well-meaning but, frankly put, not the brightest. Talks about “uni” and her “dissertation” (leading to a “doctorate”, presumably) yet mixes up “their” and “there” in some tweets. A couple of yet other tweets from this person, below:
In other words, unless a political chancer like Boris-idiot gives you permission to leave your houses, stay effectively under house arrest, because “you are probably supposed to stay inside.” She obviously has no real idea what longstanding British civil rights are…and there are millions like her in the UK now, millions…
A sign of the times…
More tweets
Speaking personally, I keep to the “Government lockdown advice” not because it has any legitimacy (or legality, arguably), nor because I am afraid of being fined (the police would never be able to catch me for anything anyway), but simply because the libraries, bookshops, charity shops, cafes etc are all shut. Even the barber. In short, apart from the nearest supermarket (about a mile away), the nearest M&S (ditto) and the nearest village shop (a mile or so in the other direction), I have nowhere to go unless you count a monthly visit to a Boots and a weekly call-in to get a few gallons of fuel.
As for exercise, I have not done any serious exercise for nearly 20 years, and it is even longer since I swam 90 lengths (nearly 2 miles) without a pause, or trekked up the mountains of the Tien Shan in summer heat and winter snow. So I do not go out to exercise.
I am, in a word, the perfect “lockdown” citizen, without even wishing so to be!
More evidence that the “lockdown” in the UK is a pointless exercise that is trashing the economy (without which there will be no NHS, by the way). Still, “keep clapping” (nein danke!). As a matter of fact, it seems to me that this whole “clapathon” nonsense is basically the public services applauding themselves, and in some cases unmeritoriously.
Linguistic “hate”
I wish that people brainwashed by American msm culture would at least stick to tried and true English English. In particular, I see many tweets today on the subject of pasta, talking about people “hating on penne”. THERE IS NO “on“! “Hating penne”— good. “Not hating penne”— also good, BUT NO “on“, either way!
What makes it worse is that I would be prepared to bet that 90% of these miscreants have never visited, let alone lived in, the USA. They have no excuse! If I, once married to an American, once nearly married to another, who lived on and off in New Jersey for 3+ years, who repeatedly visited and/or worked in Florida and South Carolina, and who is still nominally a member of the New York Bar, do not say “hating on…“, then someone who has never left Essex, Brighton, or London (mostly London, judging from Twitter) has no excuse!
While I am on the same (perhaps minor) sort of subject, those places where you can embark on a train are railway or at least rail stations, not “train stations”! I first heard “train station” in London in or about 1990, from a West Indian woman. Since then, it has invaded and conquered the BBC, Sky, the print msm…Even persons pretending to education use it, sometimes. No…
“Hating railway stations” = OK (though puzzling), “hating on train stations“= not OK.
Back to the present “lockdown” nonsense
That, Mr. Hitchens, does not wash. It is for those who laid down the “rules” and the stupid Coronavirus Act 2020 to prove, via successful prosecutions, that one or both are lawful. The 17thC-19thC freedoms which Hitchens supports would never have emerged had the people of those times always waited for the State to be challenged in the courts.
I have not read all of the law recently passed, but I doubt that “incitement” to break it is itself an offence anyway.
The real reason not to “incite” breaking the new petty tyranny law is, simply, that few would attend a demonstration. Demonstrations and marches are almost always a waste of time and effort. “What would happen if you held a demo, and no-one came?” There is your problem, the spinelessness of the present UK population.
Oh dear (see below): I disagree with Hitchens again. “House prices are the true measure of inflation“? That’s nonsense.
From 1983 until 2000, people buying houses on mortgages got a completely unjustified tax break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_source
That was a government giveaway; the same has been true of other more recent incentives to buy houses, eg relief for buy-to-let parasites. The result? Absurd house price inflation. If I lived in a house in London valued in 1980 at £100,000, which is now (or was in 2019) valued at £4 million, that is not a genuine measure of inflation but an artificially-fanned conflagration of inflation. House price increase— 40x in 40 years, in a society where pay has, on average, increased by, at most, 10x, and for most people maybe 5x.
The price of, say, retailed food, has also increased by maybe 5x in the same period. Wine that was £2 a bottle in 1980 is about £8 or £10 now.
Hitchens is very up the creek here, I fear.
After agreeing with many of Hitchens’ recent tweets, I am now in disagreement over some things…
“Rich” is indefinite, of course, but I do not think that anyone who has an overinflated house “worth” a couple of million can be described as anything but at least somewhat rich…(a thought dictated by my seeing on Rightmove a house for sale in the little crescent off Reigate Hill, Surrey, where my parents lived in the early 1980s. £1.25M! Ridiculous).
Yes, if the owner sells his one million pound house, he needs to buy another. Or does he? Someone with a million pounds has options, such as buying a house in a cheaper part of the UK (a million-pound house in Surrey or London can be replaced for as little as £300,000 in many quite decent parts of England or Wales. Or the possessor of a million pounds can buy a luxury yacht for, say, £250,000, live aboard and still have £750,000 to fund the fun in the Med, Caribbean etc.
Again, see below, it seems to me that Hitchens is, to some extent, up the creek here:
Most people with money (beyond some low level) in the UK inherited their money, they did not, primarily, earn it. Much of that is real property, or proceeds of sale thereof, that gets passed down. There are exceptions, and from 1945-1989 (to pick an end-date) quite a few, but these days, few really make much money actually working, even if that work is (or so the public think) lucrative, say at the Bar. Hitchens, as often noted, is here in his beloved 1950s rather than in the Britain of 2020.
I do, however, agree with Hitchens here (below):
More tweets
Here, below, the authentic voice of the inner London (Islington) “radical”, begging for “authority” to “step in” etc, while thinking herself almost revolutionary…
Note the language: Allison Pearson, the columnist, as “a danger”. A “danger” to what? A constipated and completely pseudo-socialist view of society?
“Lina” is right about another of her targets, Priti Patel, though. What a thick plank she is! Home Secretary, no less, in the Government of Fools.
Here’s another “socialist” poseur, who thinks that he is terribly clever (it seems), one John Crace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crace_(writer)
Time was when the Guardian would have had something to say about the complete trashing of the rights of the British public, about their having been corralled at home because the advisers of a government of total incompetents thought that the Black Death was about to arrive. But no; these days, the Guardian’s unimpressive scribblers prefer to tweet that people who have woken up to the absurdity of State-imposed “lockdown” have “a single brain cell” for not complying (any longer) with the continuation of the patently ridiculous mass house arrest imposed. Time was…
Thus we see, in part, why “Guardian” views are just ignored these days, and we also see why, in part, the Labour Party is all but finished.
One of the few pleasant aspects of the manufactured “crisis” is that little Greta Nut is no more to be seen in the newspapers. She or those behind her made a brave attempt to piggyback on the virus news agenda, by claiming that Greta “showed symptoms” of Coronavirus. Sure she did…A Scandinavian, aged 17. What were the symptoms? A-tishoo? Twice?
Actually, I have to amend the above paragraph, because I saw this in the Guardian as I wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/22/earth-day-greta-thunberg-calls-for-new-path-after-pandemic
“If one single virus can destroy economies in a couple of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long-term and taking risks into account.” [Greta Thunberg, or her “advisers”]. Has she never heard of the Black Death, the Plague etc?
I think that her 15 mins of fame must be nearly at an end.
Here is another brave attempt to retain relevance:
Claire Fox, one time Revolutionary Communist, now turned “libertarian”, briefly Brexit Party MEP (April 2019-January 2020). An odd woman from an odd (and rather suspicious) political or ideological background.
Ian Robert Millard 