Isn’t it remarkable how unimpressive Mr Johnson is once the funny jokes stop? I am increasingly persuaded that he really doesn’t know very much, or understand the world very well. https://t.co/FaU8IaP6kC
More from the minor academic enablers of the new UK toytown police state
“Keeping the over-50s in isolation longer and requiring people to prove their age when out and about is ‘the safest way out of lockdown’, researchers claim.
A Warwick University study found that a ‘rolling age-release strategy’ was the best option to end the lockdown introduced to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The strategy proposed by researchers is based on the fact that death rates from COVID-19 among 50-year-olds are 20 times higher than deaths among 20-year-olds.
Study authors wrote that that police officers would have to be given the power to fine those caught breaking the age rule to ensure it was followed.“
The sheer cheek of the bastards! Everyone over 50 to be placed under house arrest “for their own good”, supposedly! It’s about time for there to be a national revolution in this country, to recover proper civil rights for British people, not the fake version peddled for 30 years. First up against the wall to be fake “experts” and minor official bullies but, even before these, those who make careers and money out of pretending to have the right to rule.
If anything like the measures proposed in the Warwick University study were implemented, the present government of idiots would do what Lenin, Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher failed to do, i.e. rouse the British people from their torpor, get them up on their feet and away from their (increasingly-Soviet style) TV boredom, and onto the streets.
Oh, look! The toytown police are at it again!
“An impromptu classical orchestra was shut down after police feared it would cause quarantined neighbours to flout lockdown measures amid the coronavirus outbreak.”
The UK is about to hit an economic reef that will knock the stuffing out of the present system. Millions on the dole, millions in unsustainable mortgage debt and, very likely and before long, a house price crash and millions of mortgage-holders in negative equity.
I apprehend that, before very long, even the compliant serf-mob “clapping for the NHS” etc will be rooting out their pitchforks.
Tweets seen
Which, being translated means :'How dare you dissent from the official view? Shut up before we shut you up! ' Not surprising that the symbol of this era is the face mask, covering the mouth and turning the wearer into a dumb submissive serf. @samuraislack https://t.co/JmHSylntLr
Because properly-fitted high quality masks are useful in hospitals, a completely different question from whether cheap unfitted scraps of cloth are effective on a bus. https://t.co/8wIjfmEt96
Perhaps I should (not for the first time) explain why I have been republishing so many of the tweets of Peter Hitchens. I do not agree with everything that he tweets or writes, especially about society generally, but as far as the Coronavirus situation, “crisis” and panic is concerned, he has been and is overwhelmingly right, in my view. It is therefore easier to republish his tweets than to write effectively the same views anew.
If anyone wants to see my assessment of Hitchens generally, here is my blog post from a year ago:
Another chart. When observing that the US has gone from 7 million to 38 million unemployed in 7 weeks, it should be remembered that it was apparently done to stop a virus with a case fatality rate of max 0.5%, as the NYC Governor admitted:https://t.co/RhEOXhZ9mdpic.twitter.com/yG8FqaLrI0
38 MILLION unemployed in the USA! Already. Here in the UK, the policy is not identical. We have the “kick the can down the road” “furlough” policy. That ends in June. Will the government continue it? The costs are enormous. However, many of those furloughed will find, in all likelihood, that they have no jobs to which to return once the wrongheaded “lockdown” is lifted. The same will be true of the very small business operators.
Bloomberg and other organizations say that UK unemployment will exceed the 12% that the Thatcher government achieved or suffered in 1984. The money received by (and by any other word) dole claimants in 2020 is far less in real terms than it was in 1984, thanks to Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, the Jew “lord” Freud etc. One sees huge discontent ahead.
As I predicted about 2 months ago, the “recovery” will not be the “V” type predicted by the pathetic Office of Budget Responsibility but more like an “L”-shaped non-recovery. Britain’s biggest trading partner is Germany, followed by the USA, as far as I am aware. Both are being badly hit economically.
[above: biggest trading partners in geographical Europe. See how many have Germany as their biggest partner; over 20 countries]
More tweets
No doubt @haguepaddy. AS it happens, I know of no evidence of *any* consistent relationship between shutdowns(or the lack of them) and the numbers of deaths. This is actually my point. Then there's the problem of the reliability of the death stats themselves. https://t.co/dCjXzTqv98
But Sweden did *not* copy the UK by adopting home imprisonment or crashing its economy. Britain did so in the fear of suffering 250,000 deaths. Pro-rata to population that would presumably mean that by not following UK, Sweden risked just under 40,000 deaths. https://t.co/HWspMZ1Heu
All those people who bizarrely place faith in 'testing' as the solution to the Covid problem might like to read this (wonder how long it will be before Capita is involved too) : https://t.co/FGuk9wdLKw
I think all these people saying that "lockdown" works might have a point. I mean, just look at how Sweden tops this chart of 14 countries.
Oh whoops … no that's Belgium, which has been on strict "lockdown" since 18th March. Oh and Sweden seems to be doing better than the UK. pic.twitter.com/ZzjIy9Qnyb
Mr Hitchens to you. We don’t know that because for almost all healthy younger people, Covid ranges between no symptoms and very mild ones. So why are we acting as if it was a rerun of 1918? https://t.co/3B32dJqcgl
Wearing facemasks or scarves impacts little on the transmission of “the virus”, though it may protect the odd person from being sneezed on; that’s true. As against that, again we see huge disproportion (as with the “lockdown”): millions forced to do something with the supposed aim of protecting a few, despite little evidence that it works. Steamroller going over any reasonable idea of civil or individual rights, too.
As I blogged before, the criminals will love this! Perfect cover and disguise. Eyewitness evidence even less reliable than usual; cctv far less useful to police and prosecutors. Not only because the alleged perpetrators will have been wearing masks or scarves but because everyone else in the area will have been! Perfect conditions for “reasonable doubt” (assuming that the police can identify a plausible defendant in the first place).
David Icke
I have never met David Icke, though I heard him speak once (at Wigmore Hall, Marylebone, sometime in the early 1990s, I think). He used to follow my Twitter account, before the Jews had me expelled, and he follows very few people, so he cannot be bad! Anyway, (((they))) are trying to shut him up by taking away his online platforms. Facebook has now censored Icke permanently. See the tweet by Jewish Zionist Rachel Riley, below:
The hate preacher was banned from Australia. Big arenas have rejected him, yet social media orgs allow him a megaphone (& pocket the profits).
Facebook have finally deleted him today!!
He needs the same treatment as Alex (Sandyhook is a hoax) Jones – across the board rejection. pic.twitter.com/bCqgEeh2hQ
Much worse than that. They symbolise the gagging of dissent which has accompanied this frenzy of fear-mongering and state worship. https://t.co/slrRSOpkmX
WE don't know because Covid-19, in most cases, has few symptoms. Sometimes, in fact quite often, it has none at all. This @blakmark55, might give you a hint as to why this fuss is out of all proportion to the threat. https://t.co/1UiovDQaCn
This (below) is also very true, but is far less amusing…
A few late tweets by Hitchens with which I agree
No, since 1989 the Left has lost its nerve, and increasingly sides and identifies with the state. This is one of the reasons for the rapid decline of dissent .. https://t.co/IKwRRp3uaX
Where is the evidence that crashing the economy and stifling personal liberty has saved a single life? Covid deaths peaked in England on 8th April. Most unlikely this was brought about by the March 23 Johnson panic. https://t.co/mFfVNoUtt1
There is no war, @mikekingwriter. Just a disease. It’s not Hitler. Quarantining the healthy is unprecedented. House arrest likewise. The crashing of the economy crazy and counterproductive on its own terms. Seldom has freedom of speech been more badly needed, and less exercised https://t.co/o9r0gTmY1q
“No child has been found to have passed coronavirus to an adult, a review of evidence in partnership with the Royal College of Paediatricians has found. Major studies into the impact of Covid-19 on young children show it is likely that they “do not play a significant role” in spreading the virus and are significantly less likely to become infected than adults.” [Daily Telegraph]
It is clear to me, as to many, that the “lockdown” need not have happened at all, with exceptions: nightclubs, pubs, the Underground (which was not shut down, incredibly), hairdressing places, mass events where people are likely to be breathed or sneezed upon e.g. popular or other music concerts, racecourses etc (though it occurs to me that racecourses could have continued to hold meetings safely if they had been willing to close the cheaper enclosures (Silver Ring etc) and Tattersall’s, leaving only the Members’ enclosures open and perhaps restricted to annual members).
Schools in particular need not have shut; the same goes for universities.
Economic enterprises are now shut, to a large extent; to re-open the economy or get it moving may not be easy. Meanwhile, Downing Street has been trying to invent statistics to support its “lockdown” “strategy” (kneejerk reaction):
They rang and asked us to put in a statement from them saying approval of the govt was not falling and asking us to change the headline. Despite 18% drop innet approval of govt handling in a fortnight, and 10% drop in confidence. Is that enough information?
All those for whom the state sponsored panic shutdown has meant release from commuting on full pay, and long sunny evenings consuming misted glasses of Waitrose Chablis beneath the Wisteria, might take a look at this: https://t.co/rqNM27bLPm
Dismal news of planned mass sackings from British Airways once again underlines the profound, lasting damage done to the economy by the Johnson government's mistaken panic measures. The sunny dreamtime is over. Hard, chilly reality is here. An inquiry is needed.
I had to look up “Matt Haig” on Wikipedia. Apparently a “novelist and journalist”, despite not knowing the difference between “less” and “fewer”. Well, after all, this is the UK. In 2020…
I looked at some of his tweets. Castigates this idiotic government for not having a stricter “lockdown” (wrongheaded) and for all Boris-idiot’s other failings (right). Presumably that includes Raab, little Matt Hancock and the other stupid wannabees like Priti Patel. I cannot disagree with him on that score.
Monsieur Haig does not seem to realize that, while a vaccine or medicine may be developed within months, it may take years. It may even never be developed. That is possible. Does Mr. Haig want the UK to basically just shut down for not even months, but for a year, two, three, four years?! I do expect people who preach to the assembled masses at least to try to think logically or realistically.
As always, one realizes how absurd and irrelevant Twitter usually is. That person has over 400,000 Twitter followers!
The skies are starting to fall in— Boris-idiot is no Atlas
It is a unfortunate concatenation of circumstances that leaves Boris-idiot and his Cabinet of fools in charge at such a time, and with an official Opposition so weak that it might as easily simply not exist.
Large employers are becoming or are already insolvent: Debenhams, Oasis, Warehouse, Swissport, Virgin Atlantic etc;
Other large employers are laying off thousands of staff, or will do once the State stops subsidizing furloughed employees: British Airways alone is soon going to let go at least 12,000.
Huge numbers of businesses are perforce not paying rent, for now immune from legal action. Once the special measures are lifted, there will be a crushing tsunami of corporate insolvencies, lawsuits and personal bankruptcies.
In the parallel universe that is Twitter, most of the tweeters (sheep? rabbits? Why dump human inadequacies on the animal kingdom?) support “lockdown”, even longer and/or severe “lockdown”. A good rule of thumb is that any viewpoint trending on, or popular on, Twitter is probably wrongheaded and/or an irrelevance. Like most tweeters.
I saw a report on Sky News (I think) about the effects of the “lockdown” on the retail and service sector. Regent Street shown, empty as if after a sci-fi alien attack of some sort. It may be that the ultra-wealthy will be back, buying jewels and furs, before very long. As for less well-padded consumers, I doubt it.
Court backlogs
The Lord Chief Justice has expressed a fear that huge backlogs are building up, in particular in respect of criminal trials likely to take 3+ days. At present, such trials are all stayed (frozen) because of the Coronavirus situation.
I imagine that many trials scheduled, and many others which might have taken place, will now either not take place or will collapse at hearing because of the fact that witnesses will (for various reasons) not be available or will not come up to proof. In the old maxim, “justice delayed is justice denied.”
Private-public partnership (in tyranny)
The new liberalism takes up the censor's blue pencil: 'Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices…'https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Look at (UK) TV ads, mostly by private-enterprise organizations of all kinds, at present. All promoting an almost-identical racially-mixed multikulti society, many also pushing the present “all in it together” fake communitarianism and “Conservative” government propaganda.
I have also blogged, previously, about how non-State quasi-monopolies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc) are imposing a (largely Jewish-origined) censorship on the world public.
'Digital surveillance and speech control in the US already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.' https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Of course, one cannot, as “they” tend to say, “blame” all of this on the Jews, or even on the overtly Zionist Jews; but you do tend to find that, behind most attempts to repress, control and censor socio-political expression (commonly called simply “free speech”), there is a Jew, or Jews, or Jewish organizations. Not always, but usually, and at the higher levels (in politics, msm, legal “regulation” too, these days) even more often…
The excuses for such “control” of “free speech” are various, put out to fool the public at large
Useful idiots are often found to lay the groundwork for repression:
'The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.' https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Forget most of Twitter, the most energetic users of which are either unemployed, effectively unemployed or retired, or work in relatively secure public service occupations. They will not be hit so quickly or so hard as the rest.
The fact is that the UK now has a hapless, hopeless government of idiots, headed by the least useful idiot of all. Yet so panicked has been the British public, that they all applaud or at least accept Boris-idiot, while his Indian Chancellor, Rishi Sunak (an “Indian giver”?), has been acclaimed by many in the msm and on Twitter as almost a conquering hero, throwing gold sesterces to the plebs of Rome. To some, Sunak is thus “proven” to be a suitable later prime minister, while to others he mixes the erudition of J.K. Galbraith with the intellect of J.M. Keynes. Not to all, though!
And this government of half-educated inexperienced bobo teenagers *is* qualified to take these enormous decisions? What qualifications have they to take this dangerous action @andyrossecon? I am arguing for caution, and against rash action. https://t.co/tHgqfWJJXR
No @andyrossecon, I'm much more sure, with every day that passes, that the crashing of the economy and the accompanying assault on personal freedom were grave and disproportionate errors. https://t.co/0w3yjtLq6C
I am not a 'libertarian'. I have seen no evidence which shows that curtailing liberty and wrecking the economy saves lives. It is a presumption, which far too many people accept without thought or question. https://t.co/GJzvzNFBuV
Went to get a few things at Waitrose. The usual bare shelves in the dried pasta and home-baking areas. Everything else seemed to be in good supply. A few last-day things on sale for as little as 10p (smoked mackerel pate); brie, bread rolls etc.
The sky was thundercloud grey-purple, but the little sun in front of that made the scene look like one of the most famous paintings of Shishkin, Gathering Storm
Waiting in line to enter the store, I noticed the oddness of the situation: the line of “socially-distancing” people (mostly men, presumably sent out to get something), the black-garbed and scarved Handmaid’s Tale militia (Waitrose marshals), pleasant enough but controlling the line. There was something about it that made me wonder what really is at the back of all this?
Professional hypnotists usually condition suitable subjects before placing them under actual hypnosis. Is that what is happening, on a grand scale? Whole populations being conditioned to behave in certain fixed ways, like human marionettes: to dress in certain ways at certain times etc, to stand a certain (almost completely arbitrary) number of feet or metres apart, like soldiers on parade? To move forward only on command (however amiably voiced)? To become accustomed to being corralled by keepers or marshals? Is this in fact a preliminary experiment on the populations of the advanced countries, to be deepened and quickened at a later time?
What might be the socio-political consequences of the UK Coronavirus “crisis”?
We are being told, usually impliedly, that once Boris-idiot has gathered up his courage (if any), “lockdown” will end (“in stages”…why? There is no credible reason; the usual hospitals are almost empty, the new instant ones have no patients) and everything will return to normal, with the exception that we may all have to wear scarves or even masks when not at home. The criminals (acquisitive department) will love that! Joking aside, in reality the so-far-lulled public might find that a very different UK awaits them.
In the UK, analysts are already saying that UK unemployment figures could top the 1984 peak of 12%. In other words, millions on the dole.
Businesses are going to collapse, not by the hundreds, or even the thousands, but quite possibly (if very small businesses are included) by the hundreds of thousands.
This could be social-nationalism’s moment, if a movement exists to harness the power.
Afterthought
I just realized: the socially-mandated clapathon (“Clap for NHS” etc) was supposed to be this evening. Nothing. Not a sign, not a peep. Is it petering out? I hope so. I have nothing but praise for most NHS staff, but this is not toytown North Korea (yet)…
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]
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.
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.”
This chart is devastating for shutdown advocates. If it is correct, and deaths peaked on April 8, then the shutdown cannot be the cause of the decline in deaths. It came far too late to influence them. Please listen to 1st item https://t.co/Mp7a5BDgPbhttps://t.co/DbySlKztnD
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.
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…
It is true that poor Belgium's plight, which just does not fit the 'shutdown will save us' dogma, gets little attention. https://t.co/E1OVz7PzEF
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…).
2/2 @spq400 It is my supposed great age and resulting vulnerability to *you* , not *my* limited power to infect you with a disease which in most cases has no symptoms, which is the supposed cause for this. You should read the thread before barging in, in my view. https://t.co/mkqzNL0iCK
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.
For persons who prefer reason and proportion to panic and exit-free policy bungles, this website offers key comparisons which enable you to make sense of the figures much bandied about by panic-mongers: https://t.co/fdusp3eULW
And even if you cannot demonstrate it @brexitguard? And there is no evidence for it? I've tried you late and I've tried you early, old chap, but there is nothing in you. I'm afraid you have to go now. The door is over there. https://t.co/zlUSZKSJP4
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”…
Thank you @TandT_SEO. I think this spiteful 'Toe the line or be deprived of a medical service you've paid for all your life for the benefit of others' line is actually disgusting. If I were left-wing, I'd call it 'fascist' As I'm not, I'll stick to 'disgusting'. @miket_pops. https://t.co/ptCZpbwXzl
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
There is incompetence, @RobotLong. But the policy is also mistaken. Duff predictions, disproportionate, ill-timed, despotic, economically disastrous, ineffectual, founded on fear which was then uncontrollable, and then ….no exit. https://t.co/CwORkDmt5H
1/2 Al Johnson's wholly unrepentant statement https://t.co/XqWfj4oJkj shows why it is so important to argue and establish that the Govt's policy has been wrong from the start. Or it will drag on for a dismal year of ruin and confinement.
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]
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).
“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.”
"Usually there are around 700,000 planned and elective operations per month. So over three months, that is a total of 2.1 million operations that will not take place,”
Yes! I dread the thought of the deaths and economic destruction lying in wait if we are locked down any longer. And the restrictions on our liberty which will probably never be lifted, also the new distaste for the police in the law-abiding middle classes.
— Julia Stephenson🇬🇧SaveOurTreesAndHedges🌲 (@Vernia) April 28, 2020
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…
“Private hospitals are empty and up to 40,000 NHS beds lie unused amid mounting fury over the handling of non coronavirus treatment as thousands of operations are cancelled and cancers go undetected.
Figures suggest that up to four times the number of beds are free than normal for this time of year after a huge slowdown in non Covid-19 admissions as health bosses aim their focus at the pandemic response.
Hospitals have cancelled ‘thousands’ of their non-urgent surgeries – like hip and knee operations and IVF treatment – to free up space for infected patients, and operating theatres, equipped with oxygen supplies, have been turned into coronavirus wards.
Nightingale hospitals, built for the expected surge in coronavirus victims, are also largely empty, and private hospitals taken over by the NHS at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds are also barely being used.” [Daily Mail]
“Medics say up to 2,700 cancers are being missed every week as the numbers being referred by doctors for urgent hospital appointments or checks had dropped by 75 per cent. Professor Karol Sikora, a cancer specialist, has warned that the impact of the coronavirus outbreak could result in 50,000 cancer deaths.
Meanwhile NHS staff have been accused of making a ‘mockery’ of the health service as they faced a barrage of criticism for posting ‘tone deaf’ and ‘disrespectful’ videos of dance routines on coronavirus wards while seriously ill patients have their medical treatment delayed.” [Daily Mail]
[above: “NHS staff at the Tavistock Day Case Theatre in West Devon were forced to apologise after they filmed themselves performing a traditional Maori chant“—Daily Mail]
“Clap for the NHS”? Nein danke. The NHS is a very good thing, in principle, but the fact is that maladministration is a major problem, as well as underfunding. I have no time for virtue-signalling, nor for de facto enforced “community-ism”.
“NIGHTINGALES COULD BE RE-PURPOSED
It emerged today that NHS Nightingale hospitals could be ‘re-purposed’ to treat non-coronavirus patients to clear a mounting backlog of cancelled operations and other treatments.
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace yesterday said empty beds at the seven Nightingales around the country may be used for cases including cancer sufferers or ‘stepdown’ patients on the road to recovery.
It came as the Nightingales remain largely empty despite having the capacity for up to 11,000 patients.
The first of the seven major sites in England to open at the ExCel Centre in East London has so far treated just 41 patients despite already having a capacity of 500.
And the transfer of more than 30 patients to the hospital which opened on April 3 was allegedly ‘cancelled due to staffing shortages’, according to NHS documents.
Of the 41 patients treated in London, four have died, seven have been discharged to a less critical level of care and the other 30 are still having treatment there.
There have since been three more Nightingales open – in Birmingham on April 16, in Manchester the following day and in Harrogate in North Yorkshire on Tuesday.
The NHS has not yet provided data on how many people have been treated by any of these three, although the figure is believed to be dozens at best. This means the total number of patients treated at the four sites could be under 100.” [Daily Mail]
So, after all the hullabaloo around the huge instant “Nightingale” hospitals, at least one (on Tyneside) never opened for patients at all, and the others outside London have had few if any patients. The London one, capacity 500, which was supposed to be treating “thousands” of critically-ill patients has in fact received only 41!
Of those 41, 7 have been discharged, 30 are still there, and 4 have died. So, with known infection rates in London falling quite fast now, it looks as though the London Nightingale will soon be redundant unless repurposed, but it is a “hospital” good for only one thing— keeping patients alive who need ventilation or oxygen. It has no operating theatres or other usual hospital facilities, so it looks as if Ben Wallace is talking out of his ****.
Sweden, Britain, washing hands and other questions
It has been obvious to the non-brainwashed since the beginning of the Coronavirus situation that the only known way to stop its spread is widespread washing of hands, thoroughly, with soap and water. As I blogged almost two months ago, the survey of 2015, showing the levels of personal hygiene across Europe, exposed the fact that Italy, Spain and France were the least hygienic, the very countries where the pro rata infection rates have been highest.
Likewise, the only other really useful measures to help stop the infection on a mass basis are closure of or avoidance of crowded, hot, places where many excited people gather: popular concerts and dances, nightclubs, underground and other trains. Preventing people from walking, sunbathing, sitting on beaches or park benches are useless wastes of time.
Coverage of Sweden's rational approach to Covid-19 is perhaps becoming less hostile as the weeks go by https://t.co/BCQ6CG2sKI
Countries that avoided hard shutdowns have had fewer deaths per million – Japan (1.2 coronavirus deaths per million), South Korea (4.3), Singapore (1.8) and Taiwan (0.3) – than those that imposed most severe rules – Spain (397.6), Italy (358.2), France (256.3) and the UK (193.5). https://t.co/nxdci442Y2
A recent Cambridge graduate, who is accused of writing online that extermination was the "best option" for Jewish people, has appeared at the Old Bailey charged with a terrorism offence
It seems a strange idea at first blush. After all, we are brought up to believe that diseases generally attack people on an equal-opportunity basis. Whites, blacks, whatever. However, that is, like much of what people are told to believe, not actually true.
It is well known that some diseases attack, or conditions affect, only blacks: sickle-cell anaemia is one (showing that blacks do not belong in Northern climes). Likewise, though NHS and other propaganda concealed it or tried to conceal it, HIV/AIDS was much more easily contracted by blacks, half-caste blacks etc than by Europeans, especially those from North-West Europe or with family origins there.
Now we see Coronavirus affecting, in the UK for example, people of all racial origins, yes, but so called BAME people (including Jews) far worse than those of what might be called “Aryan” or more accurately “post-Aryan” origins.
Age is obviously the most important demographic factor in Coronavirus infection, symptomatics and mortality, but after that the racial aspect is obviously significant, though the importance is blurred by social factors such as modes of life, ways of life and living, housing etc.
I was struck by the Boris Johnson case. Here you have someone aged 55, of not only European but also Turkish and Jewish origins. He gets the virus and, it seems, was lucky not to die from it. His fiancee, Carrie Symonds, apparently European, and only 32 years old, showed symptoms and tested positive but suffered no more than slight discomfort before swiftly recovering. Makes you think…
Recent tweets
1/2 Government ought to be alarmed by Daily Mail editorial today :'This national paralysis must end soon. The Government simply must not, whatever its top scientist blithely warns, let the shutdown drag on for a year…
2/2 '…The cataclysmic harm inflicted upon the economy, society and the nation's well-being would be irreparable….Ministers must begin an adult conversation about their plan for ending this torment'.
I had to go out in late afternoon (Friday afternoon) on an errand even the new UK bully police would certify as “essential”, so was able to observe how many people were out and about in my corner of Southern England. In fact, quite a few.
I remember when the “lockdown” nonsense started, a few weeks ago (though it seems far longer). The roads were empty. Now, today, I should say that, though the traffic has not built up to the Friday or any weekday norm, there was rather a lot of traffic around. Private cars as well as delivery vehicles. Quite a few people on bicycles, too.
A police car saw me as I passed in the opposite direction. The police car had cars ahead of and behind it. It slowed. I wondered whether the driver wanted to check me out, but was unable to do so because of the road situation. In fact, he would have been wasting his time. My car has valid MOT, is properly registered, as well as fully insured and so on; my UK licence is up to date and without “points”. In short, and in those senses only, I am “kosher”!
As I blogged yesterday, there is a “yes, repeat no” thing going on. No-one in the UK is rioting about this nonsense of the whole population being placed under conditional house arrest; no-one is even protesting loudly in the streets. Yet, with the weather warm, people are just taking their chances of being hassled by the toytown police, in the knowledge that the relatively few police around cannot, despite being more in evidence than pre-Coronavirus, arrest, ticket, or even talk to every motorist, every walking couple, every sunbathing young lady…
It reminds me of what happened in 1989. In 1988, I crossed the “East German” (DDR) border by car from Poland, then the next day into the then West Germany (Bundesrepublik). The border was rather fearsome in a quiet way, despite the fact that I crossed at a little-used and rural crossing-point in the south of the DDR.
Yet, only a year later, triggered by an announcement from a government minister (seemingly unintended), thousands of DDR citizens built up at the Berlin Wall and just started to cross. The Grenzpolizei (border police, aka Grepos) did not know what to do…so did nothing. One illegal crosser— shoot him; a thousand? Ten thousand. Impossible.
That, in minor key, is the situation the UK police are in now. They can throw their weight around when only a small number of (harmless, law-abiding English) people are involved, but when a thousand or a million people decide that they have had enough of the misconceived (and in any case pointless) “lockdown” petty tyranny, the police are powerless to stop those people from doing things such as driving around, visiting beaches, walking in parks or even —what wickedness!— sunbathing…
Musical interlude
A few tweets
Covid-19 related hospital fatalities in England by date of death:
Many people evidently have taken the “lockdown” at face value. This was an attempt by the global self-styled “elite” power club to see how far they can go in turning notionally “free” people into obedient, compliant, and above all unaware and bamboozled, serfs, clapping their own house arrest, in effect. Look at Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner and Common Purpose “alumna”, right there in the forefront. I was thinking that this was the result of stupidity [cf. the view of @ClarkeMicah/Peter Hitchens] but I veer now to conspiracy.
The plebs are easily manipulated…
“A woman says she was “named and shamed” by neighbours after she fell asleep and missed the weekly clap for carers tribute to NHS staff and key workers.
The mother said had been tired after “a rough night” with her son, and inadvertently failed to take part in the event despite having done so in previous weeks.” [Sky News]
If people actively wish to applaud the NHS, then that is their business and good for them. But any sort of compulsion or shaming directed against anyone who does not join in is totalitarian in nature. Applause that is not voluntary and spontaneous is worthless. https://t.co/qm8ChHxwXN
“The woman went on to write: “I just feel like I’m a total outcast on my previously friendly street now even though only one person posted it and only two others agreed
“It’s really disturbing how quickly people are ready to turn on each other and ‘report’ each other.”” [Sky News]
What many of the unthinking plebs would love would be a kind of “Nuremberg Trial” or kangaroo court every month (or week), with dissidents suitably “named and shamed” and then put in virtual or actual stocks so that the mob can throw things at anyone not going along with the official line.
Some “dissident” tweets
Sweden is taking the rational, considered approach any grown-up government would take. You need to ask, why is the UK government acting like a collection of hysterical prep-school boys? https://t.co/A0Z15KMTT1
This is just the abuse of power by petty authority for its own sake. There is no reason to it. Exercise will *protect* people, especially older people, from illness and so reduce the general pressure on the NHS. People exercising have no major risk of breaking distancing rules. https://t.co/bgvKRUlbTv
Again, as Hitchens says, or implies, the little penpushers, the toytown police and poundland KGB are finding new ways to fill their time, new “rules” to “enforce”.
Yes @Barristerblog, but with much reluctance, and not because there's anything wrong with juries as such. It's egalitarian, PC societies that can't sustain them. https://t.co/b7wvZBL41e
Like most barristers (in my case, “ex”, since late 2016) who have done criminal trials, I am thoroughly in favour of juries, not because they are educated, intelligent, logical, or have any knowledge of the law beyond what the judge chooses to share with them (direct them as to), for mostly those qualities do not apply. No, the value of the jury is in the “sense of justice” within that small conclave. That may go against “the law” as written, against the evidence in some cases. It is a mystery, a mystery which worries the neat and little minds of some.
I can think of a few cases from my pupillage and later my own Bar experience (though I stopped doing most criminal work after a year or two, around 1995); other cases I have in mind were far more serious trials where the State was obviously thought, by the jury, to have gone “too far”.
The problem that we now have is that juries are so brainwashed by State and/or politically-correct propaganda that the accused might often actually be better off being tried by a “Diplock Court” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court].
Care homes are a separate issue @dermotmcgrath. The government, especially after observing Italy, should have quarantined them. But it preferred to pretend (I think it still does) that Covid-19 was equally dangerous to everybody, and to make grandiose gestures. https://t.co/lKwT60MjEe
not sure why people are questioning the independence of SAGE when its lead by the eminent Professor of eugenics and population cull Dr Dominic Cummings pic.twitter.com/Y9nAARmbKY
Remarkable story from The Guardian. Cummings' place on SAGE must considerably lessen the authority of Downing St "guided by the science" line, given we now know, that to some extent at least, that scientific advice has been influenced by well, Downing St. https://t.co/XgwJQpyWCv
Have just spoken to Sir Bob Kerslake, former Head of the Civil Service. He told me that if Cummings is a full member of SAGE: “it’s both surprising and concerning. The risk is the government is leading the science when it’s supposed to be the other way round.”
Absolutely fantastic to see a double page spread in the Mail on Sunday on how garden centres/nurseries CAN safely reopen. Alan Titchmarsh once more showing great leadership in speaking up for our industry, along with Boyd Douglas Davies of the HTA, @choyp16#saveournurseriespic.twitter.com/IXdPtAHR9n
— 🇺🇦 Constance CraigSmith 🇮🇱 (@Concraigsmith) April 19, 2020
This is a fascinating interview with an epidemiologist defending the Swedish policy, and doing so quite persuasively. Only time will tell if he's right or wrong. https://t.co/9hvK1xdlMe
Troopers of the Royal Scots Greys (2nd Dragoons) regiment with swords drawn mount a charge during a training exercise over Long Valley #Aldershot as the last horse mounted cavalry regiment in the British Army on 18 October 1937 pic.twitter.com/B4keKpDtmT
— Aldershot Military History (@Aldershot_Past) April 18, 2020
1937, and the British Army thinks that it is 1837…
Fraser Nelson on the crisis: 'Of the 91,000 available beds in the NHS, 37,000 lay empty as of last weekend' . This is four times more empty beds than is normal for this time of year.https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
That is my feeling. The toytown police state brought into being by the Coronavirus Act can be continued, extended, or resurrected almost at will, either by extending the “sunset” of the Act itself, or by passing a new Mickey Mouse “virus” Act…
A good point, that last. Personally, I believe that Boris-idiot is hiding out until the air has cleared and the virus wave effectively over, so that he can emerge as “wounded-in-action and conquering hero (clown) returns”. As I predicted long ago, Boris-idiot is useless in a crisis. As for the headless chicken now posing as a government, its “Cabinet ministers” are a mediocre stupid lot, unwilling to take responsibility or the obvious necessary step of ending the “lockdown” now.
WE all know that it is vital, if felled by a stroke or heart attack, to get help and act as quickly as possible. This shutdown is like a heart attack and a stroke combined, for the economy and our society. We cannot waste another second, if we want to avoid permanent deep damage.
I have been told that, eg “hairdressers and butchers are suffering”.
I’m sure, but people offering personal services in perpetual demand, such as barbers, will be the first to recover. People need their services, such businesses do not require much capital to restock with anything, and they get paid in cash or via immediate card payment.
Small shops such as butchers or whatever may be in deeper trouble, because they need to buy stock and (like most hairdressers etc) are still, during the “lockdown”, paying at least rent, if not also business rates, in most cases.
The obvious result of the present nonsense is that many closed-down shops will not reopen, or be open for long,while new entrants to the “High Street” retail landscape will be few. This really could spell the end of the High Street, or something very close to it.
I have seen tweets saying that some publicans are still paying rent of as much as £2,000 a week to landlords (usually breweries), despite being closed and thus having no or almost no income (a few are delivering food and drink to clients, in small quantities).
Fortunately, the inn where I often based myself when in the UK from France, the Royal Oak at Dunsford, near Dartmoor, is owned by its proprietors. I urge people to go there when this nonsense is over. It’s a great place, deserves support, and the village of Dunsford itself is (as I used to think of it when I was there) “a blessed plot”.
Returning to the less-happy facts of the overall UK economic situation, many people have been either made redundant, or “furloughed”. Even those on furlough may not be getting their full pay, nor even the 80% of it guaranteed by the Government. It is capped at £2,500 per month. Cold comfort for those (formerly) making more than average pay.
After furlough? How many will even have jobs to which they can return?
I imagine that, once we are into the Summer and Autumn, there will be a personal/family crisis for many. Rents, mortgages etc may become unsustainable. The buy to let parasite market may well crash. Not that I care about the landlords, but those who cannot pay rent will mostly be ejected and become homeless. Will those houses become empty indictments of our whole system?
The idea being put forward by the present government, as well as by the “experts” who have been so wrong so many times before, i.e. that the economy will “bounce back” in a “V”-shaped recovery, sounds to me like pie in the sky.
People in the UK will, many of them, have no money, be maxed-out on credit cards, have had to remortgage houses (when or if they can). Demand in the economy will be low, not only in the UK, but Europe-wide and, to a lesser extent, worldwide. From where will that “bounce-back” come?
I see today that the price of oil is so low that it is only just worth producing. Bad for oil-producing states, including Russia. I have not looked at gas, but I presume that the same is true. At least it should mean the end of the fracking nonsense in England. An end to part-Jew Osborne’s con-trick propaganda.
More tweets
The government cannot continue to drift, offering no hope of release from house arrest and economic disaster. Inaction is not a solution. If the country drifts, it drifts towards the rocks. Politicians and media who have so far been complacent have a civic *duty* to dissent.
Oh, I agree @mrupertdermody. The steady accustoming of a once-free society to humiliating servility, where they live by permission of the police, is terrifying and miserable to watch. But many don't miss liberty they seldom exercised. They'll miss their former standard of living. https://t.co/OhB6bOPyjn
How right you are, @PeterMcC66. In our newly subjugated society thinking is not encouraged, and may actually come to hurt those who try it. As so often, Huxley's Brave New World , drugged society, entertained to death with trivial distraction, takes shape in our midst https://t.co/oWAkNTJlth
I do not much like Ms Symond’s choice of life-partner (and I rather disparage behind-the-scenes “kitchen Cabinets” and the like), but if she can use her influence to help the animals or the environment, then good:
The bastards will even eat koalas. They sold live koalas in the Wuhan market, for locals to buy, kill, cook and eat. Koalas! What kind of untermenschen could do that?…
[above: Australian cyclists help a koala in a drought zone by giving water]
The “British” Press
I read that the newspapers, at least as print entities, face closure or at least significant cutbacks. Specialized or niche newspapers, such as the Jewish Chronicle, have already folded, though still publishing at time of writing. The larger or national newspapers are making huge losses. Am I worried on their behalf? No. In fact, I am laughing.
The “free press” of the UK, infested by Jewish-Zionist influence, has rarely been a positive influence in British life, even before WW2. In fact, with a few exceptions, as when the Daily Telegraph broke open the MPs’ expenses scandal, and thus exposed many MPs as a pack of squalid, thieving, cheating, freeloading, embezzling evildoers, I can think of few really good things that the “free Press” has done.
Come to that, while the Telegraph did break the expenses scandal in the latter part of the 2005-2009 Parliament, many of the worst expenses cheats and freeloaders are still MPs! One or two have even been promoted to the Cabinet! A few names? Yvette Cooper, Nadine Dorries, Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, Michael Gove. There are many more. All or almost all are members of Labour or Conservative Friends of Israel.
No, I shall not be crying when the “national Press” (Lugenpresse, Judenpresse) goes down. I shall welcome the downfall, especially if the scribblers and others face well-merited ruin.
[caption: “get down there, you unclean spirit, where you wanted to send me!“]
End “lockdown” now!
End “lockdown” NOW!!
At last! . I think Lord Sumption may share some of your position. Will you or others now challenge this imposition in the courts? https://t.co/m4kKQU1RzE
No, only caused the destruction of our economy and our way of life. When people wake up from their netflix induced slumbers they will see the devastating effects this has had, and the lives and livelihoods that have been destroyed will outweigh those saved by these house arrests
Majorities are so often wrong it's hardly worth stating @johnward_runner (The vast majority once thought A.Blair was a great leader, for instance). They also change. When the cost of this becomes clear, I think it may be others who are found to have believed the earth was flat. https://t.co/JzffzvNaV0
The “lockdown” is destroying everything: economy, society, confidence in the police, belief that this is a “democracy”, any belief left in the government, any belief in the future. Was that the hidden agenda?
When I lived in Little Venice, on and off until 24 years ago, there was a large houseboat, where Branson was said to have lived once. Beyond Blomfield Road.
[above: Branson’s former boat at Little Venice, or one very similar; I think the same]
I was told that that he owned a house right by where that houseboat was berthed.
[above: the Regent’s Canal at Little Venice, not far from where I once lived; also not very far from where the previous photo was taken]
Virgin Australia, and other Branson-founded businesses, are also said to be teetering on the edge of insolvency.
I have no particular animus against Branson. He certainly seems no worse than other big businessmen, and in some ways seems better than others in the public eye. His courage cannot be questioned, after his ballooning exploits, and he is certainly willing to try new things in business. I do not particularly like some of his socio-political attitudes, and he is obviously mainly interested in making as much money as possible; that is, however, scarcely unusual in the business world.
At one time, 1989-1993, I was a fairly regular flyer on Virgin Atlantic, flying from the UK to Newark Airport in New Jersey. Not bad (for an Economy ticket), and more convenient for me than Kennedy Airport (which I also used, when other airlines had cheap tickets), because I then lived in Middlesex County, New Jersey, about half an hour by car from Newark Airport. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlesex_County,_New_Jersey
I was rather surprised to see that Branson’s enterprises employ as many as 70,000 people all over the world. I do not know how many of those are in the UK.
I do not see why the UK Government should give his airline £500M, even as a loan. Airlines are going to be a drug on the market (almost worthless) for some time into the future. Any loan to Virgin Atlantic would probably be money thrown away. Admittedly, that is true of most of the money now being pumped out by the present government of fools, but why add more? Also, it seems that Branson himself has not paid tax in the UK for 14 years. Not exactly an incentive for a government looking at public reaction.
Coronavirus: an interesting view from Israel
“A similar pattern – rapid increase in infections to a peak in the sixth week, and decline from the eighth week – is common everywhere, regardless of response policies“
That would be more or less forever. I don't think people will put up with that. The government needs to understand that there is a limit on how long it can impose severe restrictions on personal freedom and normal economic activity. https://t.co/bJjRreGiyP
I understand the government cannot admit its mistake or immediately end the throttling of the economy and the stifling of personal liberty. But nor can it drift vaguely onwards, offering no hope of an end. There is a limit to how long people will put up with such things.
Hitchens has come to the same or a similar view to my own: this government of incompetents, advised by complete idiots, is starting to understand what it has done, i.e. pretty much killed, already, the UK’s economy (not to mention civil rights and the proper rule of law) but cannot, politically, simply whine that it got it wrong.
So comes the idea that there has to be an “exit strategy“, rather than the UK just resuming what is left of normal life overnight (by far the best idea). The Government (from its own standpoint) needs to pretend to be authoritative, in charge (and not, well, a bunch of idiotic mediocrities advised by similar ones).
Maybe so. I don't in any way suggest Sweden is a perfect nation. There is no such place. But I think its Covid-19 policy is better suited to a mature, free, law-governed nation than the schemes adopted here by Al Johnson and his committee of mediocrities. https://t.co/dQSNuuCOhy
I can think of several sane reasons for not doing such a thing, one of them being that it will soon be forced on us by the same people who accidentally wrecked the economy and left civil liberty lying unconscious on the ground. https://t.co/11DqwcMenq
I can think of one reason why a citizen (though perhaps not a very good citizen) might wear a surgical mask if required by the cretinous “authorities” of this poor country: it would be an excellent way in which those who commit crimes could stay undetected. I do not say that criminals, from shoplifters to bank robbers, will not still be detected and arrested (though, I hazard, in fewer numbers), but it will be harder for the prosecutors to get convictions in situations where not only have the accused allegedly been wearing masks but also where all other people at the alleged locus or loci were wearing similar masks! Eyewitness and cctv evidence will be almost worthless.
Below, Peter Hitchens teaches a little logic and commonsense to a lady evidently devoid of both:
Where did you read that and on what research was it based and how much protection did it say it gives? Locking yourself in the bathroom for the rest of your life would also stop you spreading the virus, but one must ask what the proportionality of such an action would be. https://t.co/VOZiybfYKu
I can't quite work this into a coherent thought, but Richard Branson pleading for state subsidies, the same Richard Branson who sued the NHS in 2016, right now, as people are being encouraged to donate to the NHS as if it were a charity and not a state health service, is… wild.
Not sure that I agree entirely with the last tweet, above. If Branson were to be allowed financial assistance for his companies in return for stumping up some sum in lieu of taxes previously avoided, it would be analogous to an individual not paying, say, car insurance and then, after an accident, being allowed to pay some money and then be treated as if he had paid previously.
Branson is a union buster. He’s paid no personal income tax to exchequer since moving to the Virgin Islands 14yrs ago. He sued the NHS. Virgin Healthcare paid 0 corporation tax while being handed £2bn worth of NHS & local authority deals. He deserves 0 sympathy. He’s a parasite. https://t.co/zPOY6t9cEs
Very interesting analysis of virus panic by Australian TV commentator Andrew Bolt. Brief, carefully-argued, powerful (and as far as I know, no equivalent in the UK) https://t.co/MjTSoMak3p
Why can't the government admit its mistake and immediately end the throttling of the economy and the stifling of personal liberty? Pride? Stupidity? Please enlighten us @ClarkeMicah
My latest conversation with Mike Graham of TalkRadio on the Covid-19 crisis : the damage to the police from this episode is irrevocable. https://t.co/R1emla9AAr
Yes, if the speaker or interviewee is a dissident (I mean a real dissident, not a faux-“revolutionary” joke like Owen Jones or Ash Sarkar), a radio or TV station faces “sanctions” (i.e. punishment for not self-censoring), or may even be shut down.
Did you really believe that we live in a (mythical) “free country”?
More Coronavirus nonsense exploded…
“The UK has today announced 449 more coronavirus deaths – the fewest for a fortnight – taking Britain’s total death toll to 16,509.
England declared 429 deaths and a further 20 were confirmed across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. And 4,676 more people have tested positive for the virus, taking the total number of patients to 124,743.
The day’s death toll is a fall on the 596 fatalities announced yesterday, Sunday, and half as many as the day before that (888). It is the lowest number for a fortnight, since April 6 when 439 victims were confirmed.
Although the statistics are known to drop after a weekend, the sharp fall adds to evidence that the peak of the UK’s epidemic has blown over.” [Daily Mail]
“It comes as a leading expert at the University of Oxford has argued the peak was actually about a month ago, a week before lockdown started on March 23, and that the draconian measures people are now living with were unnecessary.
Professor Carl Heneghan claims data shows infection rates halved after the Government launched a public information campaign on March 16 urging people to wash their hands and keep two metres (6’6″) away from others.” [Daily Mail]
Looks like I was right…all the way along, in fact…
The government of fools
As I blogged before, it is clear the pack of mediocrities and idiots now in government are afraid to take the decision to end the toytown police state called UK “lockdown”. They are avoiding having to take responsibility. The same is true of Boris-idiot, who (surely obviously now?) is hiding out at Chequers until the “crisis” he himself has partly manufactured is over or seen to be almost over. He can then reappear as clown “conquering hero”…
Unexpected? Maybe not
Britain was [X] to vote to leave the European Union:
Looks as if people are now unsure (at least more of them than previously) as to whether the EU was a “good thing” for the UK. Hard to say. Presumably, 13% are “Don’t Knows” or similar. On the other hand, in the actual EU Referendum of 2016, while there was just the binary choice to Leave or Remain, 27.8% failed to vote. Were they “Don’t Knows”?
Is anyone listening out there?
UK announces 449 more coronavirus deaths – the fewest for a fortnight as leading expert argues Britain's crisis peaked BEFORE lockdown and claims fatality rate could be as low as 0.1% You don't say https://t.co/w0oMiJmvKD
https://t.co/812hTfz5SX Carl Heneghan at Oxford has called for liberation of the people asap
— Alexei Romanov #NotABot – In a Castle on a Cloud (@AlexeiRomanov13) April 20, 2020
The question as always is whether the result is proportionate to the action. If you wore a goldfish bowl over your head at all times @_rp_77 , I am sure a lot of people would benefit. But is that a good enough reason for you to be made to do so? I think not. https://t.co/GkjaFiSRDp
@notacunnigplan, I’m not a Tory or a contrarian. I disagree with innocent people being treated like convicted prisoners because I was brought up in a free country,not out of ideology or a futile desire to make mischief. I disagree with needless economic ruin because it is stupid. https://t.co/VeZThbbMyX
Urgent question now is not rows over who messed up over the virus in the past. It is that people can't be expected to put up with this level of restriction & this amount of economic damage, indefinitely & without hope of an end. There's a limit. Drift will bring us to that limit.
Very interesting analysis of virus panic by Australian TV commentator Andrew Bolt. Brief, carefully-argued, powerful (and as far as I know, no equivalent in the UK) https://t.co/MjTSoMak3p
People may ask of me, “if you think that the government-mandated lockdown is a poorly-conceived and petty-tyrannical measure, and likely to half-wipe out the UK economy as well, why do you yourself obey it?”
My reply? “I am broadly going along with the lockdown nonsense because:
I find talking with (let alone being lectured by) the police (most of whom are poorly educated and as thick as two short planks) a bore, so I want to minimize the chance of being stopped on the local roads (mainly semi-rural or rural) around here, or on visits to the nearby small local town;
Almost nothing is open anyway, and I am not a partygoer, public (or private) sunbather, team sports enthusiast or general rambler on foot (these days).
On that basis, I may as well only make occasional shopping forays.”
What the government needs to do is to end the “lockdown”, right now, but also to keep advising people strongly, via the msm, re. washing hands (the only really effective way to prevent getting the virus) and reasonable social distancing (i.e. in particular avoiding crowded places and/or places where there are hot and excited people).
Michael Gove
Michael Gove, the pro-Israel, pro-Jewish lobby careerist MP and now Cabinet minister, is in the news again. It will be recalled that he was an expenses cheat in the 2005-2010 Parliament, to the extent that he was lucky not to be prosecuted for fraud. He is also a (supposedly former) cocaine abuser and drunk, who was also filmed in 2019, in the Chambers of the House of Commons, either dead drunk or drugged.
Gove has a Jewish wife, Sarah Vine, who is a Daily Mail scribbler:
“She is thought to come from a wealthy background and, although it is difficult to find out what her parents did, at the time of her marriage to Gove in 2001, they were resident in Monte Carlo. The wedding was at the beautiful village of Vence in the south of France and the reception was held at a local chateau.” [The Guardian]
Michael Gove is a repulsive, sinister, rancid, rotten, vile, creepy, disloyal individual, this snake like creature slithers onto our screens to reassure us, no integrity, dishonest, if you believe this spiv, go have a chat with yourself, Murdoch taught him well #Ridge#Marr
Is our lazy alcoholic clown PM really about to get his P45? And which of the parade of ghouls might replace him? Gove positively makes my flesh creep so it'll probably be him 😨
It was a tweet about Gove which was one of five tweets (yes, that’s right, only 5 out of 150,000+) that got me disbarred in 2016, at the instigation of a pack of Jews: see https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/ , or google “Ian Millard barrister” for a one-sided msm view. Now, my tweet about Gove can be seen to have been obviously true (as were the other 4). At that time, Gove had not yet been exposed as a “cokehead”, just as a fraudster, embezzler, doormat for Jews and Israel, and a backstairs manipulator.
The emerging British toytown police state
Something to look forward to: Bullying police officers stopping people for not wearing facemasks and forcing non-wearers to don them in the street. Shops refusing to admit non-wearers. Non-wearers denied access to pubic transport. For months and months and months.
1/2 We agreed to all these new arrangements by our national passivity when our new status was imposed on us. Neither our institutions, nor most of us, uttered a whisper of opposition. We took the yoke, and have entered a new servile relationship with the state. https://t.co/Elpg3F1iyk
2/2 I think that when we are all *compelled* to don facemasks – in most cases useless against infection, but very useful in dehumanising and humiliating their wearers and imposing an obedient prison-style uniformity – some of us may grasp that we've actually embraced servitude. https://t.co/Elpg3F1iyk
It strikes me that, in most revolutions (in their uncontrolled “street” phase), it is not the intellectuals, not the ideologues, not the “responsible” trade unionists or the faux-revolutionary newspaper scribblers and TV talking heads who are the first to take to the barricades, but the delinquent youths and the —to use the contemporary colloquialism— the “totally pissed-off— who do so. They are the ones who assault the police, hang the HVO secret police (Hungary 1956) , burn down the headquarters of the local Stasi and destroy its files (East Germany/DDR 1989) and who create the conditions for an actual revolution going beyond mere temporary upheaval.
Who are those who are “ignoring the rules” of toytown dystopian Britain in 2020? Not the bloggers, not the journalists (not even the dissident ones), not the pesudo-religious priests, priestesses and other frauds. No, we see that it is the youth, or part of it, plus a hard core of people willing to think for themselves and show themselves unafraid of the state, as well as (whisper it) the blacks and other non-Europeans in the UK (who have no thought for the principles of liberty, but who just want the practical or actual freedom to go to parks, play football on Brighton beach etc).
There is no revolution happening in Britain. Not yet, anyway. However, I notice that the young are the ones mostly ignoring the new repressive law and the police-invented “rules” taken from Government ministers’ mere wishes.
My local online newspaper reports that the police have, inter alia, tried to apprehend 7 youths fishing. My God, fishing! What devilment is this?! In fact, “when the officers arrived, the youths ran off“. Meanwhile, in other evil, police were called to a beach where youths had been reported to be using a jetski. My God, don’t they understand that they could be “spreading Coronavirus“, “literally killing people“, and “destroying the NHS“?
Well, no, actually. Because they are not. This pathetic poundland police state-ism is driving even me up the wall. Fishing in small groups (people who already know each other anyway), or using a jetski on the sea (much as I dislike jetskis) are not behaviours with the slightest chance of spreading this bloody Chinese virus.
In fact, the police were out of luck with the jetski “criminals” too, because it appears that, “by the time officers arrived, the youths and the jetski had gone, but officers found the remains of a barbecue on the beach.” A barbecue? The bastards!
Joking aside, what does it take for “Middle England” (let alone the brainwashed plebs) to defend what little is left of their liberties and civil rights?
Actually, my impression is that the vast bulk of the British people have sold their soul not for fame, money (in any large quantity), or other of the usual inducements. No. Just chuck them a family-pack of loo paper, some dried pasta, and a bottle of booze. That’s them sorted…and goodbye all the fine words about “democracy”, “a society under law” (nb. “law“, not laws“), “freedom”, “civil rights”, “human rights” etc.
I don’t want to hear any more about the (large fake anyway) “wartime spirit”, “Dunkirk spirit”, “Blitz spirit” etc, and how “we” fought “tyranny” (as propaganda had it in WW2 and, germinally, for several years beforehand, as well as since).
We see the 100-y-o ex-officer raising £20M or more for the NHS, and he is quite rightly being honoured. Having said that, why does a National Health Service need to have monies raised for it by ad hoc crowdfunding? The fact is that the NHS has been both underfunded and, at least equally important, maladministered for years, even decades. In the past decade, vast sums have been shaven off NHS budgets and, since 2017, nurses have had their pay frozen.
Will the £20M-£30M raised be properly deployed or applied? Come to that, I wonder whether that 100-year-old ex-officer himself voted Conservative in 2010, 2015, 2017 or 2019??
It's been clear to me since at least September 11 2001 that a lot of people in the modern world do not especially wish to be free. The ready acceptance of the presumption of guilt and the convict-like treatment of air-travellers at first amazed me. Then I realised. They liked it. https://t.co/lnqVZS1CGp
“Yes, the virus has killed a significant number of people, but the expected mass onslaught of deaths has not arrived. The NHS has a huge number of empty beds for the time of year. The mortality figures show a confused picture, not least because it is not clear how the authorities decide who is and who is not recorded as a Covid-19 death.” [Peter Hitchens, in the Daily Mail]
Lol, it's funny though that all the things that conspiracy theorists have been warning about for the last 20 years seems to be coming true, implantable ID chips, cashless society, never ending wars against imagined enemies, constant surveillance, the rise of technochracy etc
1/2 Governments which are good at sweeping, grandiose gestures (such as quarantining millions of healthy people in their homes and shutting down an entire economy) are unsurprisingly bad at the hard detail, such as protecting the old and equipping doctors. https://t.co/WxSAWpGB8X
So far, only a minority of clear-thinking people and sceptics has stood up to the brainwashing around the present attempt to place a significant amount of the world population (focussing here on the UK) under a form of house arrest. Here below are a few tweets from leading dissident, Peter Hitchens:
How to think of the furious, raging attackers on Twitter, unresponsive and intolerant, who try to scare dissenters into conformity: 'People sitting in basements quietly converting fizzy drinks into human lard'. https://t.co/ZqdLKJAQPW
I have been pointing out for ages ( and so has Dr John Lee) that the figures are remarkably vague and do not distinguish between deaths from and deaths with. https://t.co/QJYoo4aVYY
Thanks @grumpyoxford. I've been promoting his work for a month now, and you are right. He devastates the ridiculously high mortality figures on which so much of the panicdemnic was based. https://t.co/s6PNhJZrRb
Most BBC journalists these days are not intellectually equipped to question government with any rigour. They can question failings in delivery (the Soviet media used to do with under Communism) but they cannot question actual policy. It does not occur to them. @mark85767033 https://t.co/XqHKvi5Zw3
In relation to that last of Hitchens’ tweets, how true that is! The BBC is now purely a System/Government/Common Purpose mouthpiece, as demonstrated by some pathetic nonsense on BBC News this morning. A virtual concert in “celebration” of the (not-very-effective) public services, I believe. Some bearded fellow selling rainbow T-shirts (apparently for the NHS) too.
A tweet, and answering tweet, below, too, which both reference Joan Bakewell:
It was dispiriting to see someone who ( as a sixties survivor) I remember as a sharp, irreverent mind becoming a conformist burbler of the official line. I suspect the 1960s cultural revolutionaries now believe they have got what they wanted, and have become the establishment. https://t.co/KNwvZIDOCk
Well, I am only 5 years younger than Peter Hitchens, so I also remember Joan Bakewell, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Bakewell , though from the 1970s, not 1960s. As I saw her, a pursed-lipped busybody type, the sort of woman back then who did well at a State grammar school, attended university (in her case, Cambridge), then joined some “Establishment” body such as MI5 or (in her case) the BBC.
Others who did the same (see above) included Jilly Cooper, Diana Rigg, Petula Clark, the theatre director Peter Hall, Kingsley Amis, and even that excellent adventure writer, Hammond Innes (now rather forgotten, but one of the few non-classic fiction writers that I like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammond_Innes), as well as the once-famous but now equally-forgotten early “celebrity chef”, Robert Carrier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carrier_(chef). Others too. Sadly, I have been unable to locate Joan Bakewell’s equivalent magazine ad. Or that of Hammond Innes, though I did find this, one of his best books, in my opinion:
Also found a few minutes of silent film showing the writer at his East Anglian home:
A satirist in the early 1970s suggested that Sanderson might try out a Russian literary giant of the time: “Very Solzhenitsyn, very Sanderson” (unsurprisingly, that never happened). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
I have to say that Joan Bakewell is so typical of many of the people I have fought all my life, the bien-pensant Hampstead-dwellers (I believe that Joan Bakewell herself lives in nearby Primrose Hill, though I may be mistaken) who think, for example, that the multicultural society is wonderful (because they themselves live in a bubble cossetted by wealth and general privilege), and so on. Plenty like that at the Bar, too.
“I don’t really care about mass immigration, neither do I care about Coronavirus lockdown, because I and all my friends live in big houses with nice gardens in Hampstead and Highgate and Primrose Hill and Blackheath.” Bluntly put, but in essence that is more or less the attitude.
This [below] is what we are not hearing from the hysterical msm, let alone the Government of Fools:
But several countries have not had what you call 'lockdown'. What did the famous 'curve' do there? . https://t.co/nGRfzDFtCl
The “flattening of the curve” of the “pandemic” has occurred in both countries with “lockdown” and those without…
Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
1/2 Dr John Lee 'The real point is that there isn’t any direct evidence that what we are doing is actually affecting the peak. It is possible to make arguments that sound reasonable that a lockdown should affect the peak…. https://t.co/GWWJPs8ifv
2/2 Dr John Lee 'And yet other places which are doing different things seem to have similarly shaped graphs. It is only an assumption that the lockdown is having a big effect on the virus spread, but this is not a known scientific fact.'https://t.co/GWWJPspT73
In fact, in terms of propaganda method, the UK state has managed to manage the public easily, in a judo-like way, not using blunt force as the primary way of manipulating behaviour, but combining that with the channelling of the fear of the public (fear of the virus) and the inherent British social conformity.
Where the Government itself has fallen down is in the fact that it has painted itself into a corner, and now cannot back down and then re-open or free the economy and society.
There is this idea abroad that there has to be an “exit strategy”. Why not just say “everything will be open as of X-day, the last day of X-month”?
Meanwhile, the economic tidal wave is approaching. Debenhams (23,000 jobs) has gone (officially only 7 stores and 400 jobs so far, but I doubt that the rest will last long) and I see that the ground force for aviation, comprising several large enterprises such as Swissport, are saying that they will lay off their thousands of employees this weekend unless government guarantees are given.
It is clear that once the furlough monies made available by the Government end (now extended until end of June), there will be a crashing wave of redundancies. More than that, there will, even as things stand, be millions of people on State benefits, maybe for the first time unable to pay their rents, mortgage payments, and general living expenses.
So far the population has been supine, scarcely willing to think for itself, let alone protest as its most basic everyday civil rights have been taken away. That may change when people start to suffer directly. We shall see.
Actually, the very lack of protest or individual (or group) rebellion is not just stunning in itself. It shows how it is that British people have been almost quiescent as their country has been swamped by migration-invasion for decades.
This is a British people that gets more excited or angry about the result of a TV talent show, or the plot of a “soap”, or about who screws whom in some “Year of the Sex Olympics” TV “reality” show, than when their own rights, jobs, and future are trashed.
Twitter, thank God, is not the whole society, but look at Twitter and you see the willing slaves begging to be enslaved more; none more so than the “liberal” or “socialist” tweeters, the sort of people who, in the 1960s, 1970s, even 1980s, would have been debating, protesting, rebelling against the infringement of rights, liberties and life-chances. Now? Begging for longer and harsher “lockdown”, demanding more active policing, eager to clap en masse and on command, eager to “celebrate” state services which in fact are only just, or not, functioning.
I notice that a few of the more notorious “usual suspects”, such as Jew-Zionist minor academic Ben Gidley (under one of his surviving aliases, “@BobFromBrockley”) have started to call any people who do not accept the official line(s) put out by the System re. Coronavirus, “denialists”. cf. “holocaust” “denial” (meaning historical revision of WW2 narratives; and the view that all aspects of history can be examined and commented upon freely), climate change “denial” etc.
David Icke tweets
David Icke used to follow my Twitter account before I was expelled from Twitter via Jewish lobby machinations. He only follows a couple of hundred people, so he must have found my tweets interesting. Perhaps he reads my blog.Here are a few of his recent tweets:
[Update, 14 December 2020: David Icke has now been expelled from Twitter —in the Twitter weasel word, “suspended”— as I was (over two years ago)]
Boris-idiot
Many tweets seen asking “where is Boris?” and many answering their own question by saying that he is in hiding until the death-toll reduces. Quite likely, but what did the voters expect when “they voted for” a part-Jew public entertainer as “their” Prime Minister? (I do not forget, though, that only about 4 out of 10 voters did vote for Conservative Party candidates in 2019).
Evening foray
Went out to Waitrose. The usual black-garbed Handmaid’s Tale marshals there, shuffling around outside. No other shoppers waiting, so no need to join a line. I was graciously waved through. Before that, while parked, I saw the local police drive round the car park once. Why? God knows. In case some people were actually talking to each other and needed to be shouted at? Whatever. The police just drove round and out again.
It strikes me that the police have an easy job right now, certainly in rural and quiet coastal areas. Crime down by a third, officially (I suspect far more, half or three-quarters, if we are talking about real crime, not people saying too many truths on the Internet). Many police seem to spend their time at present driving around, checking out (snooping) as to why someone is out of their house arrest etc; or parked, observing.
In the supermarket, bought a scratchcard. A winner again (though only £10). Few shoppers. Bought a few necessary items (kefir, bread, butter, milk, water, cat food), and a load of unnecessary ones (ice-creams on sticks, raw prawns at one-third of usual price, curry paste, lime pickle, poppadoms etc). Did not notice what items were unobtainable (except bleach, again all gone). Plenty of bread, eggs, milk etc including those panic-buy staples of loo paper and kitchen roll (I myself had no need of any); lemons, limes, grapes and other fruit all available in quantity. Reasonably good selection of tomato. Looks as if this area, at least, has shopped itself to a standstill except for the apparently insatiable demand for pasta, rice and bleach.
Turned on the TV, to see that The World at War is again being shown. Interesting to the extent that many people who were in quite high positions in WW2 were still alive and able to be interviewed in 1973 when the series started. Not the top leaders, of course, but (mainly on the British and German sides) the secondary or lower commanders and other personalities: Speer, General Warlimont, Stalin’s interpreter etc.
As before, I was struck by how close the Wehrmacht came to capturing Moscow. As I have blogged before, in 1993 my driver made it from the Khimki memorial (the point of furthest advance in 1941) to close to the Kremlin in 15-20 minutes!
A 1941 German tank would take longer, but even so… (yes, since both 1941 and my first visit in 1993, an IKEA store has appeared there!).
Annoying that, in World at War, Laurence Olivier, doing the voiceover, attempts a kind of faux-Russian pronunciation which is in fact wrong in both Russian and Western usage, eg “Shtalin” for “Stalin”.
Ash Sarkar
Ash Sarkar, who taught briefly at a new university (and now at some institute in the Netherlands, founded by a Dutch Jew), is now seen quite often on TV in the UK as a kind of “licensed Bolshevik”, following her rather silly “I’m literally a communist” outburst on a daytime TV show a couple of years ago. She is 28 today. That fact is “trending” on Twitter.
Ash Sarkar is part of the Novara Media set-up, along with Aaron Bastani.
Here is not the time or place convenient to examine the inanity of being both “communist” and “libertarian” (which is what both of the above claim to be; they also both claim to be “feminist”). To go into the full depths of their political childishness would take too long today. I have blogged about them, en passant, in relation to wider issues:
Neither is here and now the time and place to examine how it is that Anglia Ruskin University had someone whose degree and MA were both in English Literature teaching “Global Politics” for a year. We are talking about someone who defined Communism as “the desire to see the coercive structures of state dismantled, while also having fun“… I wonder what Marx (let alone Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky) would have thought of that!
As said, Ash Sarkar has taken over from Owen Jones the mantle of the “licensed Bolshevik” or “System-approved faux-revolutionary” on the msm in the UK. She appears, despite her “I’m a communist” outburst, on BBC, Sky etc. I wonder whether the System msm would have been so accommodating had someone said “I’m literally a National Socialist”? Or even “social-nationalist”? Of course not. Blackballed at once. So Ash Sarkar fulfils the role of pseudo-revolutionary or radical. The BBC or Sky can then say “look, we’re an open and free mass media outlet. We even have revolutionaries on our shows.” Yes, of course…
The Ash Sarkar trend on Twitter provides yet more evidence of how little Twitter reflects the real political world. I read that Novara Media has grown from having only a few thousand readers in 2015 to hundreds of thousands, on occasion 1 million or more, now.
However, there are 70 million inhabitants of the UK. If you looked only at Twitter, you might imagine that most support a “Novara Media” political position, when in fact Labour as a whole (and there is little organized “socialism” outside Labour) only has the support at present of about 25% of the population, and an Ash Sarkar position some very small proportion of that.
Twitter has expelled most truly dissident personalities (including me, in 2018), mostly at the behest of the organized Jewish lobby. Increasingly, one can almost judge the public mood by seeing what is favoured on Twitter, then reversing it.
Westminster Bridge clapathon for idiots
I blogged about this yesterday. I have to agree with this fellow:
This country is the world leader at empty gestures. Give the key workers proper protection and increase their pay! Nobody cares about the feds doing nee naw nee naw on Westminster Bridge. https://t.co/6zdGASnvxw
(though I wish that some people would stop referring to the British police as “the feds”! Did that come from American TV via the blacks in the UK, somehow? How silly it is…)
The UK as North Korea-lite, complete with emotional blackmail (if you don’t clap, and more importantly if you don’t support “lockdown”, or if you doubt the official narrative, you must be a bad person, almost a murderer…)
The Government of fools
It seems that little Matt Hancock and his fellow-clowns may “instruct” anyone over 70 and also anyone under 70 with health problems as common as high blood pressure to stay “indefinitely” in “lockdown”, i.e. under house arrest! For years, or for the rest of their lives!
I suggest that little Matt Hancock and this government shut up before they really do cause a (typically British, quiet?) revolution in this compliant nation of serfs.
The only reason that I am not going out wherever I please on a daily basis at present is because I have nowhere much to go anyway! If the proposed restrictions (beyond May) are mandated, however, I may have to go out with the specific intention of “flouting” the UK’s toytown police state “laws”.
Meanwhile…
Around 15,000 people a day are still flying into the UK. Their medical condition is not checked on arrival. That's the equivalent of 105,000 passengers a week, including those with serious Covid-19 outbreaks, like the US, China, Spain and Italy.
Below, UK North Korea-lite riot squad goons (“Territorial Support Group” in the Metropolitan Police) getting very agitato at a (Jew) journalist who tried to film an arrest (probably a pointless one):
This is always the problem, in any country, when you give the police too much power. They tend to abuse it and/or treat government preferences as “law”. What the government wants is not law. Look at the sergeant in charge there, in the clip. Shouts out that the journalist “is killing people” by standing outside a park, filming. How bloody stupid can you get?! When will the sergeant call in an air strike?…
This, below, is how the UK Government of Fools runs its toytown “war effort”:
The gov't said it's delivery of free food to vulnerable would be the 'biggest effort to deliver supplies to those in need since World War Two'. They gave the 6,500 people in Wirral just 11 cans of beans, a handful of Kit Kats and a few other items https://t.co/1GSqKKHz1G
I don't think so @dproffitt. Media are already becoming far more critical, over govt incompetence, and over economic damage. And public beginning to realise that the economic damage is real and reaching into their own lives. But it takes time. https://t.co/L07K6u0zZ3
I hadn't observed any polls about the Tory Party. I think a lot of people have forgotten that this *is* a Tory government, judging by the widespread leftist support for its actions. I hope that one day we will grow out of imagining that it is always 1940. It is not. It is 2020. https://t.co/eeSv3uxLTG
Hubris is A Bad Thing, so I shall not claim that Peter Hitchens is [see below] copying my blog remark of yesterday, which compared the government of fools’ “lockdown” with the actions of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. After all, the parallel is rather obvious.
The government, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, has called into being forces it can no longer control. It persuaded public opinion to back a shutdown. It still does.But many ministers fear that with every day of stoppage they are destroying the economy for the foreseeable future.
Fraser Nelson notes: 'What can never be repaired is the long-term damage to children's education, or the lives of those whose cancers might lie undetected in this interregnum.' https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
Fraser Nelson in Telegraph: 'One fairly obvious alternative to a mandatory lockdown is moving to a Swedish-style system of consent: asking people to be careful, rather than sending the police after them'. https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
'Fraser Nelson on the fix the government are in : 'Their mission was to prepare for a Wuhan-style Covid onslaught. The onslaught has simply not arrived in the form that was feared' https://t.co/TEgS2NsthM
A few years ago, a pack of Jews, including some public entertainers, got together and, via the Jew-Zionist fake “charity”, the “Campaign Against Antisemitism”, had the satirical singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz barred from the Edinburgh Fringe, part of the Edinburgh Festival. How they laughed! Well, guess what? Most of those singers, monologuers, comedians etc were hoping to appear and make money, or advance their careers, at the Fringe this year. Oh, no, wait. Coronavirus…
Festival cancelled. Fringe cancelled. As Windsor Davies used to say, “oh dear, what a pity, never mind”.
L’homme qui rire…
The same is true of all those barristers who either applauded my getting disbarred (via an allied pack of Jews) in 2016, or who failed to defend me publicly (not one did defend me, in fact). Coronavirus has now shut all of the courts, or almost all (I believe that some magistrates’ courts are still ploughing their way through their pathetic daily lists of minor crimes). Much of the Bar (despite “virtual hearings” here and there) has had its court work frozen. Not all have paperwork to do.
I sincerely hope that those who attacked me or failed to speak up, not so much for me personally, but for freedom of socio-political expression, suffer stinging blows; and well-deserved.
Unfortunately, many barristers have plenty of capital on which to draw, but many do not. I hope that those who opposed me and especially those who tried to kick me when I was down (via Twitter etc) will take a hit. They will anyway, eventually, one way or another, but now (in the pocket) would be a good start.
A tiny glimmer of commonsense (but not much)
“Driving to the countryside and walking – where more time is spent doing the latter than the former – is among a list of reasonable excuses for Britons leaving their home during the coronavirus lockdown, according to advice issued to police.” [The Guardian]
…yet still no sign that the “authorities” or the police or public understand that, in terms of commonsense, there is nothing wrong in driving around just to get some change of air (with window down, for example). It neither exposes anyone to the virus, nor spreads it (because the virus is only able to move in air, briefly, in droplets of water, as when someone sneezes).
Prison Island UK
So the Government of this country, unlike all others in Europe, at least so far, is suggesting that 10% or 20% of the population is going to have to remain under house arrest for months, maybe years, until a vaccine is found or…when? Until the next Chinese virus is upon us? First thought: tell the Chinese to stop eating bats, rats, pangolins, birds’ nests and all the other disgraceful stuff they eat.
It is not acceptable for a British government to place a substantial minority or indeed majority of the population under house arrest. The only reason that the UK is in a bad position vis a vis this virus is because the Conservative Party governments have been for years cutting to the bone the NHS, care homes, social care in the community, and other relevant areas.
Do we see in Germany, France, Scandinavia etc this panic about shortages of equipment, of staff, of beds, of hospitals? No. Do we see in those other countries officially-approved “clapothons” to “celebrate” the health service? No. Do we see individuals having to (or deciding to) collect funds for the health service via crowdfunding, because that service is underfunded? No.
Well, I drove out on a couple of connected errands, both (I regret) within the new toytown police-state “rules”; two errands, one drive, as the Chinese might put it. My first afternoon drive for weeks.
My impressions: more cars than when the “lockdown” was first imposed, though fewer than when the UK lived what was then called “normal” life. No obvious police presence, though I hear through local sources that the police have been quite active in the wider local area in the (presumably) late evenings, i.e. after the supermarkets and convenience stores shut (mostly 2000 hrs). They have apparently been stopping cars, checking people out etc.
The little village shop a couple of miles away is now operating a “1 out 1 in” system, with only 2-3 people in toto allowed in at any time. I was able to buy some artisan trout pate and trout pate with horseradish, and a couple of bunches of local asparagus, as well as a few Lotto tickets.
It strikes me that “social distancing” is having a quite powerful psychological effect on people, a mental or emotional distancing too. Fewer smiles, a feeling around of wariness. What is really behind all this? As with the mass sacrifice of cattle during the Foot and Mouth emergency, there seems to be at least one hidden agenda.
China
I am coming to the provisonal view that the world as a whole is going to have to treat China as a deadly enemy. I am not happy about that tentative judgment, but I cannot see an alternative, the way things are. We must see things as they are, not as they might be in a more perfect world…
BBC Radio 4 Today Programme drone pushing the “lockdown saves lives” rubbish, when in fact, taken overall, far more will die because of “lockdown”. They will die of everything except Coronavirus.
Looks as if the UK government (ZOG regime) is intent on keeping the “Coronavirus crisis” going as long as possible. In fact, the regime may well be quite content that, in care homes and private homes, the very elderly and unwell are dying “quietly”, out of the public eye. It solves for the regime the care crisis that it itself has created via spending cuts since 2010.
Conspiracy theory? I think not (ask Dominic Cummings and his “weirdos and misfits”).
#r4today Tory Cabinet Minister Therese Coffey coming up. She has the welfare brief! No seriously – she’s in charge of our welfare! pic.twitter.com/X1seg7yF8h
Therese Coffey is parroting lines not answering the questions & not showing any empathy for residents or workers. This is simply not good enough. #CareHomeCrisis#COVID2019https://t.co/bNPoyNpnHv
— Simon Gosden. Esq. #fbpe 3.5% 🇪🇺🐟🇬🇧🏴☠️🦠💙 (@g_gosden) April 14, 2020
Therese Coffey “entirely happy” with the Govt’s response to the c19 crisis. #BBCBreakfast UK deaths now 167 per million of population (excluding those who have died outside hospital) Germany deaths now 38 per million.
But the Tories are happy with that. 🤬
— NE man lost at sea 🇪🇺🇬🇧🏴 (@nemanlostatsea) April 14, 2020
This government of fools (illegitimate ZOG regime) is lost without its part-Jew public entertainer, Boris-idiot (who apparently has now been tested for Coronavirus and shows no sign of it, oddly, despite his supposedly having been almost dying from it for two weeks; surely he would show “antibodies”? Perhaps either I, or the commentator, more likely, need to understand better the situation, the virus, the testing procedure or the language used.
Looks like I was right to blog about Therese Coffey as a “deadhead MP”!
— Mirror Breaking News (@MirrorBreaking_) April 14, 2020
Either Sky News or the useless “Office of Budget Responsibility” is looking for pie in the sky (Sky?). The near-collapse of the UK economy is already happening in reality, and the Government is now unlikely to finish this nonsense of “lockdown” any time soon, mainly because the Cabinet is now, in the absence of the part-Jew public entertainer Boris-idiot, posing as Prime Minister, akin to a headless chicken.
As for a swift “bouncing back”, where does that idea originate? In the Conservative Party propaganda department? Half of the world is still not functioning economically. By Autumn, the Coronavirus crisis/scare/whatever will be over, presumably, but in Europe (still our main trading area, despite Brexit) demand will be at rock-bottom. The same will be true of the USA/North America, our second most important area.
Domestic demand will be very weak too, in a situation where millions will be unemployed and where the “self-employed” (5 million people) will often be making little money. Pay generally is likely to be low. So from where does the “bounce-back” come?
Perhaps what is meant is that there will be a huge fall in activity, but then followed by an increase on that low figure.
NEW OBR will publish noon today illustrative scenarios on pandemic hit to UK GDP/deficit… we reported last week internally Gov looking at bigger end of Q2 hit ranging from independent forecasts of -7.5% to -24% GDP -average -14% -no precedent since 1921 https://t.co/ClDw86Z444
Lack of PPE is a symptom of general permanent failings in an NHS which (whisper it ) is often well short of perfect. Testing is a diversion. https://t.co/YG2qrUOEPT
Causation is easily demonstrated with seat-belts. Also, you cannot, if you examine all countries' experience of covid-19 outbreaks, identify any consistent correlation between *any* state action and the level of deaths, let alone causation. @veritasherehttps://t.co/k6jNo2m9qr
How have I moved them? Why should I do so? My argument has remained the same from the start. The government's actions are damaging, threaten lives, freedom and prosperity and are not proportionate to the problem.This is still the case. @raulmurryhttps://t.co/q8FxoMgFWd
People want to believe what they're told @jwdlewis. Fear's a great unifier, and tends to make those who are afraid more trusting towards, and reliant upon, power. Govt and much of the media released this force and now, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, they can't control it. https://t.co/mdMRAOlwLc
A kind word about me on Twitter. Rare, now that Twitter has been ethnically and politically “cleansed” by the Jew-Zionist element and its malicious and concerted campaign of “complaints” and “reports”…
(the tweeters below are discussing the self-publicizing solicitor, now an Israeli citizen, and who calls himself “Mark Lewis Lawyer”)
Oh yes, especially after the disciplinary action against him, well detailed in Ian Millard's blog. I am probably not of the correct ethnic category to expect his help.
Incidentally, I still see people tweeting the 2016 report about me in the Independent. The report was one-sided but at least partly-accurate. I disliked as much, or more, the accompanying headless photograph, presented as if me, but which was of some other barrister.
I do not smoke, have never been a cigarette smoker, and had far better shoes than the barrister in that Independent photo! The Independent also seemed ignorant of the fact that “to practise law” is written thus, and not “to practice law”, which is only the correct usage in the USA. A small but telling point, symptomatic of the crashing standards in the terminally-sick UK Press (Lugenpresse; Judenpresse…).
My blog
I had a pleasing spike in blog hits yesterday: 435 views from 286 individual visitors. Far above the usual range.
The madness gets madder (something I keep thinking impossible, and then am proven wrong…)
I do not blame “Bootstrap Cook”, aka Jack Monroe, for using the unpleasant “Mark Lewis Lawyer” in her libel case against the commentator, Katie Hopkins, and it worked out for the Bootstrap Cook, though as a one-time practising barrister I can say with absolute certainty that a precocious child could have won that case against Katie Hopkins, who was evidently either badly-advised or not advised (I do not know whether she was “her own lawyer”, which is usually a mistake).
I have to say that, of the few of her recipes seen by me via her Twitter profile, I have not been enthusiastic about many, but I admit that I have never actually made (or tasted) any of them (they may well be pleasant in actuality). However, I think that this person is performing a public service.
We see in Britain how many people are living on peanuts (sometimes literally), the result of Britain’s economic and social decline combined with —mostly— Conservative Party government policies which have made tough times worse for so many, while the wealthy and very wealthy have thrived in the past 10-20 years especially. Anything that helps people both to survive, and survive without unnecessary pain, must be good.
Many people in the UK cook little, and eat far too many takeways etc, which may be not only unhealthy if taken in excess, but relatively expensive if indulged in frequently. That becomes even more true for those on very low incomes. Often one sees TV reports about people living on pennies getting Chinese takeaways, Indian curry, or fish and chips, and spending their little money on that. Fish and chips ?£5-£10 per head, an Indian or Chinese even more; the Indian place, in a nearby town, and that I use occasionally for takeaway (it’s also a restaurant), is very good but works out at about £15 a head.
I do not forget that sometimes people living in a poor way need something that just briefly seems to make life worth living, even if it is not the most healthy option. George Orwell wrote about that in one of his essays.
I am not merely opining de haut en bas here. I have been down there a few times… especially in — and for several months— 1998, when I had to learn to live in London on plain rice, one piece of fruit per day, bits and pieces (I even ate fruit abandoned by traders at street markets and left in empty boxes by the stalls!).
I had to be “creative” with the Underground (I expect that their technology would defeat me these days) and otherwise had to walk everywhere, trudging morosely past places formerly frequented as a customer, such as Julie’s restaurant in Holland Park, Raoul’s cafe in Little Venice (where I had formerly breakfasted daily in the early/mid 1990s) and other places barred to me by lack of cash such as the once-lovely River Room at the Savoy Hotel (I believe much changed since those days), where I always ate and drank the same thing: “Atlantic Platter” of fish and shellfish, washed down by pretty much the best Chablis I ever had.
[above: The River Room at the Savoy. Actually not looking completely different to how it was c.1994, if memory serves, but the tables are ugly square things now; they used to have beautiful big round tables, even for two people; also, there is a less opulent look somehow, the tables now without full heavy white tablecloths]
Silver lining: I lost rather a lot of weight on my enforced diet with enforced exercise; in fact everyone told me how well I was looking!
“Shocking footage shows a man brandishing a stick after being confronted by a furious local after he ignored the coronavirus lockdown to go camping in Wales. The video was posted on social media after the camper was confronted by a group of locals who asked him to leave the site at Llyn Cowlyd near Trefriw on Saturday.”
“The daughter of the 60-year-old in the footage told North Wales Live : “My dad was with the owner of the land and all they did was ask them to leave and said that the police were on their way.”
“Then the man threatened to hit my dad in the head with the stick. She added: “When the police arrived, the campers said they were from Hull. The officers were mortified.”
“”They were fined and they traced the number plate to make sure they returned home.”
Her dad added: “It was unbelievable that they travelled all the way from Hull to the top of a mountain to camp when the whole country is on lockdown and the government clearly has instructed everyone to stay home unless necessary.” [Daily Mirror]
Well, for me the lunacy is on the part of those locals. What possible harm in terms of spreading the virus can two people do, camping on a remote mountain? It seems that they left a mess. Well, fine them for that.
It just shows how quickly the masses have internalized the “we are slaves of the State and will do what the government says (even if very silly)” propaganda, given strength by the virus-“fear” aspect…Actually, what is borderline frightening is how easily supposedly rational individuals (as a mass) can be manipulated and controlled.
As for the locals, the story put me in mind, perhaps unfairly, of this:
The shutdown of the economy
Was just looking at the latest companies to actually go into administration. They are unlikely ever to return to active trading. Oasis, Warehouse and Debenhams. About 25,000 employees, currently on furlough, have nowhere to go when the stupid “lockdown” finishes. Their furlough money ends in June.
More tweets recently seen
Struck by change of tone on major TV news bulletins this evening. ITV leading on unemployment threat, BBC lead critical on care homes (as was C4, and second lead the huge problems facing economy.
My feelings about China are torn: I hate the way the Chinese as a group abuse the natural world and especially the animals. In some ways they are very backward as a people. Also, the sheer numbers are an existential danger not only to Europe but to the whole planet. On the other hand, who could fail to be impressed by a display such as this?
Ian Robert Millard 