Well, the Coronavirus continues to decline (in reality), but the “this is a war, Boris-idiot is our great leader and we are all in it together to defeat the virus” nonsense is, if anything, being promoted even harder, though there is an obviously-growing dissent as well.

[above: police nuisance harasses and lectures a young couple minding their own business in Greenwich Park][Daily Telegraph]

Boris-idiot himself is back posing as Prime Minister and, predictably, has taken the easy road of continuing to impose the “lockdown”. No matter the economic damage. No matter the social damage both to individuals and to institutions. No matter the evidence against it.

The police are still enforcing ridiculous so-called “rules” that make no sense:

“Ken Marsh, chair of the Met Police Federation, said the force need clearer guidance over what is and isn’t allowed during the lockdown. He told The Sun : “Why is it OK to queue with hundreds outside a B&Q but not to sit on a blanket in a park well away from other people?” [Daily Mirror]

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-lockdown-rules-make-no-21932799

Nightingale hospitals

The decision to open the temporary “Nightingale” hospitals was probably the right one, and the results in terms of construction and fitting-out were impressive for such a brief time, meaning the short time between the decision having been made and the places being ready. However, they now stand as proof that the Coronavirus situation has peaked in the UK.

The London Nightingale, with capacity for 4,000 patients at once, has only admitted about 40 patients altogether, over 3 weeks, and is said to have only about 20 left now, most having recovered and been discharged.

The latest figures say that 51 patients were treated in its first 3 weeks: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52448982

Several other Nightingales have either not been opened officially because of lack of demand, or have closed after having opened with much fanfare.

The death rate in the UK from the virus (supposedly) has fallen sharply, as it has across Europe. The deaths being seen now are probably mostly of people infected as long ago as February.

Boris Johnson: “the nation is starting to “wrestle” the “invisible mugger” that is Covid-19 “to the floor” – adding: “We are beginning to turn the tide“. [Mirror]

Boris-idiot is clueless. An Israeli expert who seems to know a great deal more than those advising the hopeless UK government has said that measures taken in various countries have varied, but that the virus travels through a cycle or wave lasting about 70 days, whatever measures are taken.

The UK government has half-trashed the economy already, and for what?

• Schools are shut despite the fact that hardly any children under 10 get infected or at least show any symptoms; children and young people are generally little affected;
• Very few people under 40 are affected badly enough to need medical help (example: Carrie Symonds, Boris Johnson’s fiancee);
• “Professor Keith Neal, an expert in Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Nottingham, explains coronavirus doesn’t appear to affect children under 10 – so they might be first to return. He also explains evidence has not actually revealed kids pose a spreading risk.” [Daily Mirror] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/what-new-normal-could-look-21935648
• “Lockdown” has had, in reality, little effect: “So it looks like the virus had a fairly wide spread in Great Britain very, very early in this epidemic.“

• The 2 metre/6ft “social distancing” mandated is a purely arbitrary distance decided upon by civil servants.

What do we know about protection from Coronavirus?

Speaking in practical terms, that

• Frequent washing of hands and lower forearms with soap and water (or gel, if in transit) gives quite good protection, and anyway the best protection available;
• Avoid hot crowded places where people breathe or sneeze etc over each other;
• Avoid incubator-places such as London Underground trains and stations; nightclubs and pubs too (now closed anyway);
• “Social distancing” is pointless beyond a few feet distance; 3 feet is OK in most instances;
• Face masks are only useful for doctors, nurses, dentists, barbers etc;
• Preventing people from sunbathing, walking, driving around in cars etc is just silly and has no effect on Coronavirus.

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens’ blog republishes his recent Mail on Sunday column. I think that it is worth copying some of it to this page:

“I have come to hate this beautiful weather, the loveliest spring for 50 years. I long to wake up to a filthy morning of dirty grey skies and miserable rain, like the one Tennyson described when he wrote ‘ghastly, thro’ the drizzling rain, on the bald street, breaks the blank day’. This is because I think the British people are lost in an unreal, sunshiny dreamtime of delusion, seeing the current crisis as a sort of holiday after which they can all amble off back to the world. 

They once knew a world that died forever some time ago. I am reminded of John Wyndham’s terrifying science fiction novel The Day Of The Triffids, in which everyone is captivated by an amazing, spectacular meteor shower – and all those who watch it late into the night, oohing and aahing with delight, wake up the next morning permanently blind. 

Except, in this case, we will all be permanently less free and permanently poorer. And that will, of course, include the sacred NHS, which the nation love-bombs every Thursday night but which is already so threadbare that it cannot properly equip its doctors and nurses. Just wait and see how much worse this gets in the coming era of post-shutdown austerity.

Not to mention all the various zealots and fanatics who already see this new world as an opportunity to impose their various dogmas and fads on us. I won’t dwell yet again on the damage the Government has already done, and which deepens every day. I only say that without serious and angry opposition, this will only get worse. This clueless Cabinet is motivated only by fear. 

People who strove all their lives for office now have no idea what to do with the powers they thought they wanted, and are terrified of the responsibilities that came with them. They do not understand what they are doing and are not in charge of their own destiny.

And until they are afraid of the wrath of the voters, or perhaps of the courts, they will continue to hide in their bunker, biting their nails and wondering how to get out of the mess they panicked themselves into a month ago. They cannot admit they gravely overestimated the danger of the virus, and gravely underestimated the damage they would do to the economy.”

Are there any good aspects to the situation?

• Animals and birds are being helped by the fall-off in human activities;
• Seas are being polluted less, for the moment;
• Little Greta Nut has been pushed into irrelevance and off the front pages, in fact out of the news altogether.

Can’t think of anything else…

The clueless Government (and Opposition)

The Government should have kept most shops, businesses, schools and recycling centres open. It should not have prevented people doing things that certainly have no effect on transmission: walking in parks, on beaches etc; driving or riding around.

The results of the extreme “lockdown” will not become fully apparent until later in the year. Huge dole queues, businesses going bust all over the place, an even greater rollout of the poverty caused by “Conservative” governments (mainly) over the past decade or so. Also, the increase in deaths from other serious conditions.

Britain 2020

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/heartbreaking-reality-poverty-stricken-children-21656083

London 2020

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/27/london-coronavirus-sacked-hospitality-workers-sleeping-rough

Free speech in the UK

I have blogged before about those “alt-Right” wastes of space: “Prison Planet” Watson, “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin; Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson too. Pro-Israel, pro-Jew lobby etc. Just completely pointless politically and ideologically.

Back, inevitably, to the Coronavirus…

The tweet by “Sharon”, below, is of interest, mainly because it typifies the unthinking Twitterati, the “people should drive at 10 mph; it’s worth it, if it saves even one life” bleat. The bleat can be made more emoting (not emotional…emoting) yet by saying “child’s life” or “mother and child” (fill in other possibilities and tick box…).

In fact, it is instructive to read some of the tweets by the extreme pro-“lockdown” Twitterati. Apart from calling those with dissident views “morons”, “c*nts” etc, these types have obviously not really thought it through: they accept the official narrative, including the “lockdown saves lives” nonsense. They no doubt all “clap for the NHS” without really thinking why that is necessary or even desirable, and they imagine that the UK can simply shut down and live more or less normally “off its hump” for months or even years.

Twitter is, of course, now the home of the terminally out-of-touch. Twitter thought that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump, and that the Remain side would win the 2016 EU Referendum (easily), to name just two prediction errors. Now, Twitter thinks that Coronavirus affects everyone equally (patently not the case), that “lockdown” is essential, as is “clapping for the NHS” (which must be worshipped, whether in success or failure) and not leaving your home until Boris-idiot says so.

Actually, one of the most amazing aspects to all this is to see how compliant are the pseudo-socialists on Twitter. They are willing to say that the Government should have spent more on the NHS since 2010 (despite the fact that funding is by no means the only problem in the NHS), but are unwilling to say that the present Government has made an egregious and massive over-reactive error in dealing with this virus.

Another aspect is that the extreme Twitterati say that anyone who has seen through the “lockdown” scam is so evil that they, if suffering from Coronavirus (or anything else?) should not be afforded medical help. The same sort of thinking that leads some (even some doctors in the NHS!) to say that smokers and drinkers or the very fat should not be helped by the NHS, because their sufferings might have been “self-inflicted”. Strange, they never say that about, say, HIV/AIDS “volunteers”, blacks and browns carrying more traditional sexual diseases, or even drug abusers seeking “rehab”…

In fact, those Twitterati who want people to obey every word of Boris-idiot, Raab or little Matt Hancock are by and large the same sort that voted Remain in 2016 because Big Parent EU can look after (they foolishly imagine) their civil rights, workplace rights etc. It is a kind of socio-political infantilism.

Talking about little Matt Hancock, he was totally thrown by the not-difficult questions from the public at the news conference on Tuesday. Like a rabbit in the headlights. He just gabbled nonsense and fell back on the pathetic slogan of these times, “Stay at home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives”. Wrongheaded nonsense.

More tweets

Stasi Britain, 2020…

https://twitter.com/WatersideCops/status/1254080422469828610?s=20

One of the most striking aspects of the “lockdown” nonsense has been to notice how very enthusiastically many members of the public have “collaborated” with the police by fingering their neighbours and others.

We were told for years about how,”had Germany invaded”, the British would have not only “fought on the beaches” but later engaged in a sabotage and terror/guerrilla war spearheaded by a stay-behind secret army and supported by the whole nation. Complete and utter fantasy.

I have no idea whether the fantasy of a WW2 Britain fighting secretly after German invasion sprang from the febrile mind of Churchill alone, or whether lower-ranking figures had the idea. People such as Ian Fleming, who was appointed as male PA to the Director of Naval Intelligence, and then “commissioned” as a naval officer (before long, Lt. Commander) without ever having had any naval training. Neither had Fleming any experience or knowledge of intelligence work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Fleming#Education_and_early_life

George Orwell noted that the British might have collaborated obediently under German rule, and that was certainly the case, overall, in the occupied Channel Islands during 1940-45, as was also the case in France (despite the ahistorical propaganda now put out about the “Resistance”).

[above: Parisian gendarme salutes German officer by the Arc de Triomphe, 1941]

[above: a Parisienne talks to a German soldier during the Occupation]

[above: German Luftwaffe officer talks to local policeman, St. Helier, Jersey, Sept. 1940]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3291671/Pictures-Jersey-1943-Britain-looked-like-Nazis.html

In fact, in Germany itself, the Gestapo, which was in fact rather a small organization, contrary to the popular view, had only a few staff in most cities and towns. Records often did not survive the war, but those that did indicate a small staff, reliant on a fairly small paid-informer contingent, and secret or not-secret denunciation by members of the public. e.g. the Lower Rhine area, with 4 million inhabitants, had 281 staff in all. Quite large cities such as Frankfurt had only 20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo#Population_ratios,_methods_and_effectiveness

The Gestapo was often overwhelmed by the amount of unsolicited denunciation it received. I was interested to read recently that several UK police forces during the Coronavirus situation have had the same problem: hundreds or thousands of denunciations, as in “my neighbours go sunbathing locally”…

Incidentally, the amateur secret army Churchill set up in 1940 would have lasted, probably, about a year before its active members were all shot or deported East.

Final thought: the whole discussion about whether or not there would ever have been a “British Resistance” (I doubt it) and as to how long it might survive if it ever had existed (a year, at maximum, is my guess), is anyway a pointless one. There never was a serious plan to invade mainland Britain. “Operation Sealion” (Unternehmen Seelöwe) was a typically detailed OKW (German Army High Command) contingency plan which was never going to happen, if only because the Germans lacked serious carrying capacity (barges, landing craft, ships).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion#Background

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion#Chances_of_success

“British secret army”: “Service in the Auxiliary Units was expected to be highly dangerous, with a projected life expectancy of just twelve days for its members.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_Units

Tweets seen

https://twitter.com/InProportion2/status/1254901600881201154?s=20

https://twitter.com/NeuroNerd78/status/1254890858157129729?s=20

https://twitter.com/InProportion2/status/1254904363660828672?s=20

https://twitter.com/InProportion2/status/1254544775820296192?s=20

Contrast

I might not agree with every aspect of the American cartoon below, but it is certainly on the right track:

[above: “Russia has no borders; it is wherever there are Russians“. Geographical borders mean nothing; only the race and culture matters]

The madness which infests our society

Take a look at the tweet below:

https://twitter.com/WatersideCops/status/1255199543215427584?s=20

Incredibly, the above plainly deluded tweet came from an official police Twitter account! “Diversity” at the centre of “an ever improving society”! Absolutely off the wall! Simply mad.

Who writes this stuff? Some civilian employed by the police? A student working part-time? I hope not an actual police officer…

Interesting video