Tag Archives: Peter Hitchens

Boris Johnson, Conservative Friends of Israel, daily blog, diary blog, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Party Politics, Reminiscences and Musings, society, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 11-12 May 2020

21 Comments

Boris-idiot and the Chinese virus

Well, Boris Johnson’s shambolic amateur-night Churchill impression of yesterday has not exactly gone down a storm. I think that the infamous casting director who first rejected Richard Whiteley’s application had the right injunction: “Himoff!”

Even that peculiar little “Misbegot”, Philip Schofield, is doing a Peter Finch “Network” reprise!

Yes?

In fact, the usually supine msm talking heads such as Schofield seem to be getting back a heady whiff of journalistic (or whatever) independence. Look at Piers Morgan, here tearing a strip off one of the barrow-boy “Conservative” MPs, former market gardener Andrew Bridgen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Bridgen#Early_life_and_career]:

Reading some of the readers’ comments in, eg the Daily Mail, the public mood is now becoming unforgiving toward Boris-idiot and his Cabinet of fools. And that is before the furlough money tap is shut off…

Even the msm journalists are scathing toward “Boris” now. The only one I saw who is not critical was the ancient reactionary joke scribbler, Janet Daley, in the Telegraph.

I forecast after the 2019 election that, with Labour an irrelevance, any opposition to the “Boris” government of fools would come from within the Conservative Party itself. So it is proving to be.

The public too are now, too late, awakening to the horror of the full uselessness of “Boris” Johnson. Yet he can only be (lawfully) removed by his own MPs, and they are very unlikely to do that at this stage.

Tweets seen, etc

In one part of his mind, “Boris”-idiot knows that the Underground is the best incubator that the Chinese virus could ever find. Another part of “Boris”, however, imagines that all those workers that have to resume (or continue to) work in London can just hail a taxi! Or perhaps bicycle, or stroll, to their work, as do Oxford students en route to lectures and tutorials.

“Boris” should be told that London workers of all kinds do not all live in the purlieus of the Palace of Westminster, or bicycle from Mayfair or Belgravia. Some come in from as far away as Didcot, Diss, Margate and the Isle of Wight! Not to mention North Finchley, Epping, Morden and Ealing

The tweet below caught my attention mainly because it is typical of the times: semi-literate, yet the tweeter is apparently a writer who has written or broadcast for BBC, Sky News, Guardian, New York Times etc…

As I have blogged before, forcing the public to wear absurd facemasks or scarves round the mouth or face will not only not do much (if anything) to stop the Chinese virus, but will be the biggest boon the shoplifters and other criminals have had for years. Eyewitness and cctv evidence will become almost useless, and people will look rather alike in many cases, so facilitating petty (and perhaps also serious) crime.

Evening foray

So to Waitrose. The police, even in this quiet corner (with apologies to Gogol’s Dead Souls) seem to have become much more active. A police jeep saw me and, though ahead of me just before I turned from one road to another, circled around by another route so that the police were behind me after a minute or two. Being rather intuitive, I had guessed from the start that that is what he or they would do, but (having a clear licence and the car insured and MOT-compliant), I could not be bothered to outwit them. In the end, the police followed me all the way to Waitrose in the nearby town, but did not bother to stop me after I turned into the store car park. Still, a sign of the times…

As to Waitrose itself, no obvious shortage of anything and, as on my previous visit, few shoppers, though this time none wearing those pathetic masks or wound-round scarves.

Recent tweets seen

Interesting tweet below, too!

and this (below):

I noticed that in someone, in either January or February (I forget which) for several days, and I believe that I myself may have caught this virus in early February but shown no symptoms at the time (despite being 63). I suppose that I shall never know.

“Furlough” scheme

The furlough payments scheme “should be extended”, it is said:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/may/12/extend-furlough-scheme-or-face-spiralling-job-losses-rishi-sunak-told

Why? It is not necessary once the absurd “lockdown” is lifted. The scheme costs £8 billion per month, almost as much as the entire NHS with its 2 million employees, which costs £11 billion a month.

It is suggested that the scheme might continue until September instead of end of June. Another £24 billion, almost as much as the wrongheaded HS2 project (in its entirety)! In fact, I would support the furlough extension if that meant that HS2 would be scrapped, but I doubt that ministers will do that. It would be too elegantly simple.

As for the idea floated around Westminster that employees might return part-time, and that the furlough payments be reduced accordingly, that idea would seem to have no logic at all behind it.

Kay Burley

I rarely bother with TV news these days. A kind of Soviet-style government mouthpiece, whatever the channel designation. However, I did see a few minutes of Sky News this [Tuesday] morning. Kay Burley interviewing Angela Rayner.

I do not have much time for Angela Rayner, but Kay Burley’s behaviour was extraordinary to those of us brought up to think that news presenters should be or at least seem “impartial”. To my mind, Kay Burley showed herself completely pro-Conservative Party, pro-Government. I am not talking about giving Angela Rayner a hard time as interviewee but Kay Burley simply shouting out her own opinions and refusing to leave open the possibility that the Government might have acted incompetently. In other words, she did not so much ask questions as demand that her view be accepted.

I have often seen Kay Burley cross the line into partisan territory. She was very hostile to Corbyn from 2015 to 2019, and totally in the pocket of the Jewish lobby; at least that was my strong impression. However, I always discounted the claims of Corbyn supporters that Kay Burley was biased in favour of the Conservative Party as such. No longer a question. She is.

Angela Rayner did try to remonstrate, mildly, with Kay Burley, about the latter’s behaviour in the interview, but to little effect. Indeed, Kay Burley hit back! This is what happens when fairly mediocre, not highly educated people, get jobs as news anchors, get paid a million a year or whatever, and then forget that they are only reporters or news facilitators, not active players. John Humphrys was another example.

Sanity breaks out here and there…

“Coronavirus is not at epidemic levels in Britain, experts at Oxford University have said, with new figures showing that only a tiny proportion of the population is currently infected.

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests that just 0.24 per cent of adults – approximately 136,000 people – have the virus. Separate surveillance by the Royal College of GPs indicates it may be even less. 

Figures released last week showed just 0.037 per cent of people have the virus…” [Daily Telegraph]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/11/coronavirus-no-longer-epidemic-uk-oxford-study-finds-cases-falling/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

Edwina Currie

Ghastly old Jewess Edwina Currie has apparently been on daytime TV, supporting the Government’s “policy” on “lockdown” etc. Poor Government!

https://twitter.com/lozhockers/status/1260106322701410304?s=20

https://twitter.com/BizPaul/status/1260106981609820161?s=20

Edwina Currie, like many Jews, especially women, “smiles”, or goes through the motions of what human beings do when they smile, when there is no actual reason to smile. I have never discovered why “they” do that. Like a nervous tic rather than any expression of humour or warmth.

As to Edwina Currie specifically, I remember well her overnight destruction of the UK egg market in 1988. My memory is not at all taxed. I remember that incident because I heard about it in specific circumstances that make it easy to recall. It was late at night and in December 1988, and I was at the Hotel Grand (now the Mercure Grand Warszawa) in Warsaw.

Ilustracja

I had just that evening arrived by train from Bielsko-Biala in the south of Poland. Outside, the snow lay heavy on the ground.

I turned on my radio and found the BBC World Service (which at the time was still worth listening to). The news from the UK had two main items: there had been a terrible train crash at Clapham, South London, with much loss of life; also, Edwina Currie, the government junior minister responsible for, inter alia, the egg industry, had said (wrongly) that most eggs in the UK were contaminated by salmonella. As a direct result of Edwina Currie’s mistake, 4 million hens were slaughtered.

Tweets seen

“Ain’t that the truth?!” [above]. Now, every Tom, Dick and Sharon has a “degree” from some place or other, quite many have a “Master’s”, involving a 1-year course, which no-one ever fails; in fact at Oxford and Cambridge you get a “Master’s” degree merely on payment of a small sum, with no course requirement, work, or dissertation required!

I am not making that up. In fact, I recall that my then girlfriend, in the 1980s, was sent a letter from Cambridge University warning her that if she wanted to be able to put “M.A.” after her name, she would have to pay (I think) £35, because the time limit was approaching (as I seem to recall). She had graduated around 1971. The limit must have been 10 or 15 years, if there was a limit. Maybe the University just wanted the money.

https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/your-course/graduation-and-what-next/cambridge-ma

What a farce…

As for “academics”, “academia” in the wider sense is now full of fakes and simplistic ideologues such as the woman lecturer (I think from Southampton University), whose tweets I saw on Twitter recently, to the effect that books written by “Nazis” should be burned. These are among the gravediggers of European civilization. They must be stopped.

There are numerous “doctors” of this or that (esp. on Twitter) who actually use the title, despite not being medical doctors, academics in any formerly-accepted sense, or persons in either holy orders or scientific institutes. Infra dig, but that is what Britain today is like: just a bad joke.

Despite official figures (quite possibly inflated) showing that 30,000 or so people have died “of” (with) Coronavirus, i.e. about one person out of every 2,000 in the UK, and that only about 4 people (if that) out of every 10,000 are presently infected, the public panic has scarcely abated. Fear has been spread (by the Government, the Opposition, the NHS lobby, the msm etc), and it is now proving hard to rein back on that.

The “Great Replacement” continues…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8309529/Joy-52-migrants-saved-languishing-Greek-camps-flown-UK-start-afresh.html

More Hitchens tweets

This is key, but it is actually alarming that so many people, including those with “degrees” and recognized professional qualifications cannot see it. I had smoked salmon for breakfast this morning, and the weather became less cloudy. I do not imagine that the weather became less cloudy because I had smoked salmon for breakfast. It would have happened whether I had smoked salmon, devilled kidneys or raspberry pop-up tarts. cf. “lockdown” and Coronavirus.

Rishi Sunak and furlough

Sunak has extended the “furlough” scheme until October. A remarkable decision, and I think the wrong one. The right decision would have been to open up the economy completely or almost completely from this week or certainly by the end of the month.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52634759

What has now been done is to say to at least 7 million employees and self-employeds, “stay on holiday until the Autumn” on what amounts —for many of them— on full pay, once the costs of simply being employed are taken away (eg transport to and from work).

Yes, others are “working from home”, either actually or notionally, while yet others are, whether as “key workers” or not, still working normally. However, a quarter of the total workforce are now as good as economically inactive until October or even November. The economic fallout will be massive, as will be the upfront costs of “furloughing” all those people: £8 BN x 7 months = £56 billion.

As Lord King, the former Governor of the Bank of England said today, the economy will not be damaged as much by the furlough programme costs (if only because the cost of State borrowings is very low at present and can be spread over long future periods) as it will be by the fact that a quarter of the workforce is not doing anything productive, and because companies on the edge before the “virus” struck are now insolvent but kept in suspended animation by “furlough” monies to employees, loans to companies from the State, and rent holidays (and/or suspension of rent default proceedings in the courts).

The furlough payments will keep up demand to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent, in that payments are capped at £2,500 per month.

The effect on the currency is as yet unknown. Other European (and yet other) countries have similar schemes, so there may well be relativity, but eventually the pound sterling must fall vis a vis most other currencies, thus fuelling inflation in the UK.

I have seen inflation of that type. It has political effects. I am not talking about the utterly mad hyperinflation of Germany in 1923 but a lesser, yet still fast, inflation. When I first went to Poland in 1988, the taxi drivers had a little sticker by the meter. You paid a multiple of what the meter said. When I was there in Summer 1988 (for a couple of months), the stickers read “x2” and then “x4”. When I returned, a few months later, the stickers read “x8”, then “x12”. The following year, the year when the whole Soviet and Eastern European socialist system started to collapse visibly, the stickers read “x40” and then, I think, “x200″…

For a foreigner (what some Germans of the post-WW2 occupation of Berlin called, in a mix of English and Russian, a “valuta vulture” , “valuta” being the Russian for “foreign currency”), the collapse of the Polish zloty in the late 1980s had selfish positive effects: I for example could take a taxi to whatever passed for a good hotel (when I was first in Poland, I was not staying in hotels), have a breakfast, get a taxi onward, and pay (including tips) about £1 or £2 for breakfast and taxis combined. That was not much even in 1988.

Anything produced in Poland could be bought for pennies in English or American currency. For example, I bought a few Polish vinyl records of symphonic music for about 10p or 20p each.

The drawback was that very little was for sale anyway. The usual local shops were not well-stocked. Anything imported had to be bought at hard-currency-only “PEWEX” (pron. “Pevex”) shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pewex

Where did people get their dollars to spend at PEWEX? Mostly from the Polish diaspora, particularly the long-established Polish communities in the USA. Remittances to famly members.

One of Lenin’s probably apocryphal statements was “to destroy a country, first destroy its currency“. The fact is true, even if the attribution is not. Currency is a major factor of any state. States that do not have their own currency are joke states (eg Zimbabwe 2009-2019). States where the currency is very weak tend to be weak states (Weimar Germany in the early 1920s, Poland in the 1980s).

In Poland, the collapse of the zloty was not the cause of the collapse of the socialist system, but accompanied it, as did other trends, and the currency collapse was at least one cause of the collapse of “Polish” socialism.

The pound in 2020 or 2022 may not quite go the whole way of the Polish zloty of the 1980s, but “never say never”…

Image

What the government of fools has done, in effect, is declare a national holiday on full pay for millions of people. For a further 4 months. At the same time, the most egregious restrictions of the “lockdown” nonsense are to be relaxed (before the mob ignore them anyway…), so allowing all those people “furloughed” some freedom to enjoy their unexpected weeks and months of leisure.

 

Boris Johnson, daily blog, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 10 May 2020

35 Comments

Yesterday evening, went out to Waitrose. First outing for 4 days. Roads fairly quiet but not empty. It was after 1900 hrs, though.

At Waitrose, the car park almost empty, though a source told me that a Tesco supermarket, in another and more populated area 21 miles away, had been packed earlier in the day. Different factors though: that other area is quite suburbanized, is on a major “A” road, the time of day was earlier, and of course Tesco is more popular than Waitrose anyway, being slightly cheaper.

At Waitrose, the Handmaid’s Tale militia (Waitrose “marshals”) were few, in fact I saw only three loitering outside or cleaning shopping trolleys. There have been as many as half a dozen in recent weeks. There was no line to get into the store; in fact there were almost no customers at all.

Inside, disappointed to see no last-minute offers at 10% or 5% of the usual price (I can be rather a scavenger), but for once no shortages. All the usual suspects were available: bread, dry pasta, rice, pasta sauce, even bleach. I think that the shopping public has decided that the “panic buy” emergency is at an end and so there is no need to join the throng. In any case, in my area, many people must be sitting on mountains of loo paper, kitchen roll, pasta and rice.

Still, there is still a background panicked atmosphere around. I saw one silly woman wearing a thick scarf very loosely wound round her mouth and neck. Very unlikely to make any difference whatsoever to getting or not getting the Chinese virus. Even more ludicrously, I saw another and even more silly woman driving out of the car park, alone in her car and wearing a face mask! So…she is afraid that she might transmit “the virus” to…herself? Or is she afraid that, somehow, the air that comes into the car might harbour “the virus”? Which is impossible.

Tweets seen

Some recent tweets by Peter Hitchens, who is worth reading because he is one of the few who has stood up against the Government-sponsored “virus” panic (etc) which has recently swept “the nation” (which latter does not exist any more, but let’s leave that aside).

“The virus that turned up late”

“Covid-19 is no more than a nasty, but basically normal, viral respiratory infection, though you’ll be regarded rather as a mullah regards a blasphemer if you say so. Why is this?

After all: it is precisely because its symptoms seemed so similar to viral pneumonia that the initial outbreak in Wuhan was missed until the numbers built, and it is now clear that we have been missing Covid-19 cases diagnosed as pneumonia in Europe at least as far back as December, probably earlier. In the vernacular: it looks as though it was bubbling away for ages before we noticed.”

and

“There are really only two particularly unusual things about the Covid-19 epidemic: the timing of its arrival and the lockdown some countries declared. And if we ask “Covid, where is thy sting?”, it is lockdown that will sting: in the UK, the death-toll of people not turning up to hospital with cardiac issues (admissions are down 50% across the country) is now unmissable in the weekly non-Covid excess death figures published by the ONS, now running over 3,000 per week just for England and Wales. The downstream toll from missed cancer diagnoses (referrals are down 67%, as stressed by Professor Sikora) is heartbreak yet to come.

This is to say nothing of the toll on education, liberty and the economy. We’ve given up everything we should hold dear for a virus that just turned up three months later than similar viruses normally do.”

https://hectordrummond.com/2020/05/09/alistair-haimes-the-virus-that-turned-up-late/

Some of the comments appended to that blog post are also of interest:

“It’s also a consequence of the media being increasingly dominated by young people, who thus have no sense of historical perspective. We see it in the climate change debate – weather events that are bog standard in any sort of medium to long term time span are immediately termed ‘unprecedented!’ by the media, whose attention span (and personal experience) hardly goes back more than a decade or so. Thus the idea that something that happened in the 1990s could be relevant to what is happening today would be laughed at.” [from above blog post comments section]

“Life today driven by demands of the minority of vocal pathetic snowflakes’ demands for “no-risk”. Just look at the headline today about the Unions not wanting to go back to work until they ‘feel safe’. This is the language of infants.” [from above blog post comments section]

“Three points. Lockdown started AFTER peak infection and peak hospital admissions. Continuing infections/deaths occuring despite weeks of lockdown because hot spots of infection unaffected by general population, they are in hospitals and care homes. Sweden, Japan, S Korea, Taiwan had no lockdown, considerably less deaths than UK.
Lockdown has had minimal effect on the normal bell curve of infection/deaths.” [[from above blog post comments section]

A “free country”?

Meanwhile, away from the toytown police state imposed on the British people, and in the real world:

“Five boats carrying 82 migrants were intercepted in the English Channel on Saturday as people smuggling gangs stepped up their operations during the good weather conditions.”

“It means a total of 227 people have been brought from Calais to the south coast of England in 13 small boats within just two days.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/09/record-numbers-migrants-intercepted-cross-english-channel/

[Daily Telegraph]

My view about “lockdown”

It is clear that some countries which have had little or no “lockdown” have done much better than the UK in dealing with the Chinese virus, and have at least tried to save their economies from ruination; others, on far more strict “lockdown”, such as Italy and Spain, have done worse than the UK (per capita) and now face economic meltdown.

I blogged from the start that (as the UK Government said before crazed advisers caused it to go mad) the only known way to safeguard yourself from getting this virus is to keep thoroughly washing hands with soap and water (or gel, if in transit). The other “measures taken” have been driven by public relations rather than any scientific facts. I mean the “2-metre social distancing”, the facemasks, the “stay home” mantra. As to those three aspects, it may be that a tiny number of people have been protected by such measures, but at what cost?!

Meanwhile, the London Underground has stayed open, though (you couldn’t make it up!) with reduced numbers of carriages, thus making the conditions even more friendly to “the virus” (and other viruses and bacteria). And let’s not forget the influxes into the UK: air passengers allowed in freely, and migrant-invaders “caught” in the Channel or on beaches, then directed to free shelter, food and cash, and allowed to mingle freely with the unwilling host population.

As for “Protect the NHS”, well the sacred cow has been protected, but at the cost of thousands of lives: those often elderly people bundled up and shunted off back home (to often-inadequate home care), sent back to residential care homes where they and other residents have been dying in droves, while the “clap for NHS” rabbits have been virtue-signalling on cue every week (though not as many ever did it as the propaganda would suggest, and the display has almost died out now; where I live, it was always only a tiny minority doing it).

Then there are the uncounted thousands who have died and will die because “lockdown” has delayed or cancelled consultations, treatment, surgical operations etc.

One may laugh at Boris-idiot and his “government of fools”, but these opportunists are killing people, by their half-measures but also by their over-reaction and by their sheer ineptitude and negligence.

I do not think that “lockdown” is very useful, and in any case I think that the Chinese virus is far more widespread than at first thought. It probably started to infect people in the UK in January or even last December. Neither do I think that the “social distancing” measures are hugely useful. What I do think useful are closures of crowded nightclubs, pubs, busy cafes, sports venues, pop concerts and (which was never done) closure of public transport in crowded cities like London. Places where people are jammed together and may breathe over each other.

My bottom line? Whatever the truth of any of the above, either way, the fact is that “lockdown” (especially) has huge economic effects, despite and even to some extent because of the ameliorating measures put in place by Rishi Sunak.

The Government has scared people silly, unnecessarily. Now, the public is only gradually getting used to the idea of not being under a kind of house arrest, only gradually getting used to the idea of going back to their —in many cases, boring— jobs. The 80%-of-pay furlough payments (capped at £2,500 per month) add up to 100% of pay for those making under £36,000 a year and who pay for transport to and from their usual work.

Apart from the niggling restrictions, the civil rights aspects and the sheer boredom, the “lockdown” has, thanks to furlough payments, not been too bad for many. However, the Government simply cannot indefinitely bribe much of the public not to work, not at that level.

For me, that is the bottom line, beyond all of the medical, scientific and other arguments around “lockdown”: it simply cannot be maintained endlessly, because it cannot be paid for.

Many have accepted “lockdown”, as a temporary measure, because they are not suffering financially. Indeed, that is what the furlough payments (etc) were designed to do. Furlough alone is costing £8 billion per month. By way of comparison, the NHS, with 2 million employees, costs £11 billion per month to run.

I doubt that the Government will authorize furlough payments after the end of June. Maybe until the end of July. Not later. Then those furloughed will either return to work or, in many cases, go onto the”Universal Credit” dole.

We do not know yet the full economic cost of the Government’s imposition of a toytown police state. Everything has been frozen: redundancies, sackings, domestic property evictions, commercial property legal actions for recovery of rent; and so on. We do know that the “ruthless entrepreneurs” and “hardnosed private enterprise” chancers, like Branson, have all been demanding, or begging for, money from Government. Many will beg without satisfaction.

Airlines (and so airports) may be uneconomic for months, for years. Ground support companies as well. Retailers may soon be failing by the hundred, by the thousand, not only from “lockdown” itself but because people will have less money to spend and may prefer to spend what they do have safely, via the Internet. Fancy a holiday in Spain or Italy? I doubt it. Not for a year or so, anyway. Ferry companies will also struggle. The list continues.

Quelle surprise…

“Nine in 10 people do not want the lockdown to ease immediately – with 50 per cent happy to stay off work if they are getting paid or receiving government subsidies.

As Boris Johnson prepares to unveil his ‘exit strategy’, a poll found just 4 per cent believe the draconian restrictions should start to be lifted now, and another 7 per cent were not sure.” [Daily Mail]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8304983/Nine-10-Britons-NOT-want-lockdown-end-immediately.html

So half the workforce are “happy” to stay off work so long as they are still getting paid? Well, there’s a shock (not).

The Daily Mail graphic is interesting, if accurate:

A poll found just 4 per cent believe the draconian restrictions should start to be lifted now, and another 7 per cent were not sure

So hardly any of the public (4%) want an end to the “lockdown” nonsense immediately (well, it’s not the first time I have stood as part of a small but worthy minority), more than a quarter think that the end of this month would be best, but a fifth think that the end of June would be best (!), while nearly a quarter prefer the end of July or even later!

I doubt whether many presently content to sit at home indefinitely, or at least for another month, so long as they still get paid, are aware of the probably lasting damage that this is doing to the UK economically. They will only notice it when it hits home in terms of no job, no home, no future for their children etc. By then, the virus may be in the past, but the negative effects of “lockdown” will be very much around.

Boris-idiot’s speech

Sitting in my car earlier, I heard a Radio 4 broadcast of a 10-minute speech by the person currently posing as Prime Minister. I should say that it was somewhere between mediocre and poor. A half-hearted attempt to reprise Churchill in 1940 fell very flat. Johnson called Coronavirus “the most vicious threat to the UK I have seen in my lifetime”. So it seems that the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and the Cold War passed “Boris” by?

Johnson seemed overwhelmed. This was not the easy prime minister stuff he wanted to do. He gave the impression of being not quite big enough for the role. His speech was pedestrian, forced, unconvincing. An overgrown schoolboy pretending and posing and whistling into a cold wind.

As for Johnson’s movement on “lockdown”, too little by far. He also went through a list of matters which only served to underline his incompetence and that of his Cabinet.

What Johnson does not seem to understand is that people are not waiting for his permission to do things such as drive places, walk through parks or national parks, or on beaches. Or maybe he does understand that he, the Government and the toytown police are losing control. His remedy? To make “lockdown” easier before people just ignore it.

Oh well, at least that stupid “Stay at home; Protect the NHS; Save lives” slogan is now dumped. Dump the weekly “clapathon” too!

Van der Valk

Another episode of the new Van der Valk. Slick compared to the mid-1970s original, a more developed storyline (in 2 hours compared to the original one hour), but somehow slightly missing the heavy Dutch atmosphere of the original 1970s stories.

In fact, I have just read on Wikipedia that the 1970s original was revived in 1991-92: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_der_Valk

I did not know that the series continued after the 1970s. As to that Dutch atmosphere, both productions were/are British, though filmed on location. I myself was first in Amsterdam in 1975, and made subsequent visits in the 1980s.

One aspect that seemed to be unnecessary in the new production was the introduction of a young black detective in a semi-comic role. Out of place.

Overall, I should award the new production 4 out of 5 stars. It is well done for the most part, though it suffers from the same problem as the first Van der Valk, namely the characterization of the title character. Somehow insubstantial or vacant. What makes him tick? Compare Van der Valk to Inspector Morse, Lewis, Endeavour, Wallander etc. Point made, I think.

Tweets seen

Seems that I am not the only one appalled by how out of his depth Boris Johnson seemed today:

https://twitter.com/alan0161/status/1259549326671597569?s=20

https://twitter.com/SkyeCity_/status/1259549345755652098?s=20

https://twitter.com/cononeilluk/status/1259548231635255296?s=20

and to date there are 117,000 more tweets in the same vein.

basic income, daily blog, diary blog, elections, free speech, historical, immigration, Jewish lobby in UK, Labour Friends of Israel, Party Politics, society, The Great Replacement, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 7 April 2020

21 Comments

Image

It will be seen from the above chart that the UK is in 4th place for death from Coronavirus, expressed in proportion to population. Belgium, Spain and Italy, all of which had strict “lockdown” regimes, have fared worse than has the UK. Some countries which have implemented only light regulation, such as Sweden, have fared better than the UK.

There are many variables, based on lifestyles, the way deaths are counted, when the virus really emerged in a particular country etc, so people can argue endlessly over which country has the worst or best record and why. However, it seems clear that whether a country has strict “lockdown”, less strict, or none at all, is almost irrelevant to the spread and effect of the Coronavirus, taken over a couple of months.

It will be seen, also, that Coronavirus has killed (taking the statistics as provided) about 500 people for every million in the UK. One out of every 2,000. That is unfortunate, but is hardly the Black Death (which is said to have killed about 1 out of 3 people across Europe, in other words about 700x the rate of Coronavirus in the UK (so far).

I notice that the political Twitterati have not disappointed me. They always get it wrong. They are on the wrong side of pretty much any argument. They predict every election or referendum inaccurately. In this case, they (most of them) want an extension of the UK “lockdown” nonsense; many want it even more strictly enforced, and with even fewer services and facilities open for business.

You cannot really talk or debate (not that I wish to) with that unthinking and self-righteous Twitter mob. They are the bookburners, the proponents of heresy laws etc.

As things stand, people in the UK are under loose house arrest, en bloc. It seems that some restrictions are going to be eased next week. All the same, and more importantly, the British people cannot do all manner of normal things at present, some of which are very necessary. Examples include accessing dental services, getting hair cut, sending their children to school.

This farce has to end. The cost is enormous. Vast numbers of people (at last count, over —uh-oh, that number again!— six million) were “furloughed” on 80% pay (capped at £2,500 per month). I have to admit that a wry smile may have been seen on my face at the sight of those who, many of them, cheered on Dunce Duncan Smith and others from both main System parties as they marginalized and demonized the poor and especially the not-employed poor, now themselves staring down the barrel of destitution.

Apart from that, the fact is that the “lockdown” is killing people every day in various ways: deferred consultations, cancelled operations etc.

At some point soon, all the “emergency” measures will have to end. Many prefer to stay away from boring jobs for a while, given that they are “furloughed” on 80% of their pay (and when you take off costs such as transport, it might even add up to 100% of net pay in reality). However, this will not be sustainable for much longer.

Having scared the people out of their skins, the government of fools is now preparing to crack the whip to get those same people out of their houses, by reducing the furlough cap to (probably) £2,000 from £2,500, by reducing the amount anyone can get to 60% of pay rather than 80%.

I wonder what the unemployment figure will be by Christmas. 3 million? 5 million?

Latest news (only 1 hour old at time of writing):

Those calling for “lockdown” to continue almost indefinitely, and certainly for months more, have no interest in or understanding of the effects on the UK economy. They seem to think that people can be subsidized indefinitely to stay in their homes while commerce and industry die on the vine.

As usual, the Twitter mob, all but irrelevant to the real course of events, rant at those (in this case) calling for an end to the “lockdown” nonsense, calling them “stupid” etc. Those Twitter drones have evidently not thought through all the implications of a continuing “lockdown”. Apart from which, it occurs to me that the present times are characterized, at least in part, by unthinking selfishness disguised as concern for society.

I favour Basic Income, but that can only work where society (and the economy) is open for business. If not, then the monies expended are merely dead outflows, fuelling inflation eventually.

Notting Hill Carnival

The Notting Hill Carnival has been cancelled, a rare bonus from the Coronavirus situation. The blacks may or may not riot as a consequence in August, when the heat builds and the tom-toms drum incessantly in the darkening (urban) jungle. For the local population, this will come as a blessed relief.

Notting Hill was already being gentrified when the Carnival (the white would-be ethnics drop the “the”) started to become a really major event in the 1970s, having started in 1966. In the 1960s and 1950s, Notting Hill had been known as an “edgy” neighbourhood wedged among other, more expensive, areas (Kensington, Holland Park etc).

I myself was familiar with Notting Hill in the 1980s. I would fairly often visit the wonderful art-nouveau Electric Cinema in Portobello Road, which sometimes showed Soviet films such as Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears; I was trying to improve my Russian at the time.

The Soviet diplomatic presence was not far away, near Notting Hill Gate (Consulate) and Kensington Palace Gardens (Embassy). The Czech Consulate was also at Notting Hill Gate.

Some of the films were very odd at first sight:

Other films (especially the ones from the Caucasus) seemed almost impenetrable. I remember this one, which I think was shown with Russian subtitles:

I visited the actual Portobello Road Market, specifically, a few times in the 1980s and early 1990s. It sold everything from apples to antiques and expensive fur coats (some valued at thousands of pounds, with provenance doubtful).

As for the Carnival, I did go once, out of curiosity. That would have been mid-1980s. Ghastly. Non-stop drumming “music”, dubious palm wine bought from an African in the street, fried plantains (not unpleasant but very over-priced) and, everywhere, huge numbers of people (by no means all non-whites, though blacks were by far the majority, as I suppose they soon will be in all of London, if they are not already). A hot day, too. I stayed for an hour or so. To return to real London was not easy. All Underground stations in the vicinity were closed because of the crush. I ended up walking all the way home, in the hot sun, to Little Venice, which was blessedly quiet and leafy by comparison with the streets of “Carnival”.

The present-day residents of Notting Hill (where houses now sell for millions) mostly barricade themselves in for a few days, or lock their houses up as securely as they can, and then go away for a few days. I imagine that they must be (secretly?) celebrating the cancellation this year.

Tweets seen

I start with one, the poster of which evidently imagines itself very clever:

Or…just maybe…because Iceland, unlike the UK, is not a multikulti, globalized, overcrowded dustbin of peoples…

Something better:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6197097/PETER-HITCHENS-reveals-REAL-truth-Communist-infiltration-Britain.html

Hitchens of course glosses over the fact that most important Communists in the UK, from the 1920s up to the effective end of the socialist/Communist movement in 1989, were Jews.

satan-maskt

In fact, Hitchens’ own Daily Mail article (an inset of) refers to Karl Marx simply as “German“, and not the more correct “Jew“, presumably because Marx was born in Germany and spoke German as well as other languages. If I had been born in China, would I be Chinese? Of course not (though some of the madder Twitterati would probably and defiantly answer in the affirmative!).

I cannot recall when I last heard a cuckoo. Perhaps in a deeply-wooded part of Surrey, c.1985, aged about 28, when I would go trekking every week for several hours with a well-organized group of elderly persons (all 70+), some of whom, like my parents’ then neighbour, Edward, had been officers of Special Operations Executive (SOE) and/or other organizations during the Second World War.

They would trek on a pre-planned route along rural footpaths (very rural— we never met another soul), wooded, with ferns pressing in at time, and always ending up at the country pub where we had started (and where a ploughman’s lunch and a pint of beer would await). Those old people were resilient! I myself, 50 years their junior (and at the time a student of Taekwando, who also could swim 2 miles or more) always fell asleep on the way home in Edward’s car! That was a tough generation.

More tweets:

I am rather surprised that Hitchens even bothers with Twitter, let alone little twerps such as his “interlocutor” there, “@taggio72″. I myself am banned from Twitter anyway, because a group of Jews organized a campaign of complaints against me in 2018. I do not know whether my 3,000 followers miss my tweets. I followed only about 50 accounts, I believe, and most of those were organizations.

Twitter is basically a waste of time. I do read tweets from a few people (Hitchens being one), but Twitter is basically an echo-chamber and outrage-chamber where the agenda changes almost daily. When you add to that the fact that the more interesting tweeters (like me) have been systematically removed over the last few years, the net result is that Twitter is almost useless, though it is a way of identifying some “enemies of the people”. The bias in Twitter is such that it is almost useless as a way of gauging public opinion. Maybe if you see the Twitter mood, the best idea is to then take the reverse view as being the view of most people.

More tweets

Hitchens is against Powell on various bases, including Powell’s alliance with what is now called “racism” (before about 1989, most people would have used the word “racialist”, though that was not so often heard. The politically-correct mob had not yet quite stormed the citadel (under their paramount chief, Blair).

My own view about Powell is that he was a Conservative, so I am not on the same page as him. When he made his famous or “infamous” speech, I was only 11 and living in Australia.

The ITV News piece below is of course multikulti-biased; still…

The fact is that, overall, Enoch Powell was right. Is the Tiber “foaming with much blood”? Not in the cartoon sense, but look at the violent crime in the large cities, the knife crime, the gangs etc. Look at the direction of travel. It is getting worse.

As to Powell himself, one of the true stars of postwar British politics. He was a Conservative, which I am not. He hunted the fox, which I deplore. Still, a real mind amid, even then, the mediocrity. Look at that clip again. Both of the other MPs featured are very slight as compared to Powell.

The first, Paul Uppal, a Sikh, was Conservative Party MP for Powell’s old seat, though only from 2010-2015. Prior to that, supposedly “ran his own business”, the nature of which was not disclosed even on his own website, except that it apparently had no employees other than himself… (#bullshitklaxon…)

As for Ian Austin, MP for Dudley North 2005-2019, he was a press officer in the Labour Party prior to becoming an MP. A total mediocrity, as well as being one of the worst expenses cheats in the Commons and a doormat for the Jewish lobby and Israel.

Austin was finally removed from Parliament in 2019, having stepped down to avoid losing his seat. He was not popular, and caused scandal by apparently wanting the law against pornography featuring bestiality to be repealed. He too has now been given a government sinecure. He is unmarried (I do not know whether he has a pet or companion animal; I hope not!).

Powell, a former Professor of Ancient Greek (Sydney University), who had been born into very modest circumstances in the UK, was multilingual, an academic star student who, after leaving his Sydney academic post, joined the British Army as a private soldier in 1939. He ended the war in 1945 as a brigadier.

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

I imagine that Powell would have been appalled at the MPs now sitting in the Westminster monkeyhouse. As for Twitter, I cannot see him having an account or bothering with the tidal wave of ignorance, though the brevity taught by his mastery of Greek epigrams and proverbs might have assisted him, if he were to have a Twitter account.

I oppose Powell in that he was very pro war with Germany, even before Hitler took power! Also, he did not say much about black and brown immigration into the UK until the late 1960s. To that extent, Hitchens is right. Powell did try to, as people now say, “weaponize” the race issue for his own political benefit. However, that resonated with millions of British people who even then suspected that the System was betraying them.

Why did Powell never really get anywhere politically after 1968? My view is that, as someone who was basically a Conservative and reactionary, he could not see himself as “national revolutionary”, leading a social-national party.

“A February 1969 Gallup poll showed Powell the “most admired person” in British public opinion.” [Wikipedia]

Had Powell started his own party, even if Conservative-nationalist, he probably would have won several seats and perhaps attracted a few Conservative Party MPs too. It has to be borne in mind that, in the 1970 General Election, over 97% of the votes went to LibLabCon, just under 90% to Labour and Conservative. Powell probably simply thought that new parties fail…

So it was that, in 1974, Powell abandoned the Conservative Party and joined the Ulster Unionists. Why? Again, my own view is that Powell had in mind the bloc of Irish MPs (I think about 90) that Parnell had once led, in the 19thC, though Powell was not the leader of the UUP (which was also few in number at Westminster, I think about 11 MPs).

It may be that, in the end, Powell over-valued Parliament, Parliamentary procedures etc. It was alien to him to start a new party, despite his surely knowing that he had all the talents necessary to lead one: public profile, public support (up to a point), a fine mind, public speaking skills of a high order, administrative skills etc.

Imagine if Powell had had the initiative to start a new party immediately after the “Rivers of Blood” speech. He could have recruited thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. He might have been able to get a bloc of MPs and, from there, who knows?

As for Hitchens, where I part company with him is that he is a kind of “small-c” conservative or quasi-conservative. The race question is as nothing to him, the Jewish Question is as nothing to him. As a result, he inevitably gets things wrong at times even when, often, he is on the right track.

My blog post about Hitchens, written a year ago:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/peter-hitchens-and-his-views/

Back to 2020 Britain

https://twitter.com/BaronStrucker/status/1257334245682528256?s=20

Why are they not dealing with that gorilla, even if it requires a taser (or a Glock)? I have no idea what the situation was, though. The black may simply have been sunbathing. God knows.

A tweet about the pathetic Question Time rubbish now fronted, poorly, by ludicrously-overpaid BBC face Fiona Bruce:

https://twitter.com/SocialM85897394/status/1258525416907665408?s=20

People who are “conservative” nationialists can never see that the UK is not being flooded by non-whites by some kind of accident! Question Time, The Pledge etc are not full of ignorant blacks such as Afua Hirsch or “Femi” by “accident“! Au contraire. This is part of the Great Replacement. It is not a “conspiracy theory”. It is real and it is all around you. Just open your eyes.

https://www.westernspring.co.uk/the-coudenhove-kalergi-plan-the-genocide-of-the-peoples-of-europe/

Well, that’s enough for today. I may not like the Chinese attitude to animals, but they can put on a parade!

End of the day…

Afterthought: the officially-mandated “clap” nonsense, which has been conspicuous by near-absence around where I live, was briefly in evidence this evening, at 2000 hrs. Some fireworks went off in the distance, then I heard one person loudly clapping, unseen but not far away. Maybe a drunk.

daily blog, David Irving, diary blog, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Jewish lobby in UK, MPs, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 4 April 2020

4 Comments

A very brief daily blog post today, mainly because I wrote an article about doomed Labour:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/05/04/labour-is-the-party-of-the-labour-is-the-party-for/

I was also interested to see that the Twitterati went mad today because a photograph of Michael Gove‘s bookshelves (rather less impressive than was my one-time library of 2,000+ books…) showed that he had a volume by that excellent and now-pilloried historian, David Irving, sitting there.

Well, regular readers will know what I think of Gove, that expenses cheat, fraud, drunk, cocaine abuser and (worst of all) doormat for Israel, but it makes me laugh to see him attacked by the pseudo-socialist “antifa” idiots (“useful idiots” for the Jew-Zionist lobby)!

Some of those idiots really are (far more than the Germans of the 1930s ever were) the bookburners of our times. What is shocking, though, is that some are well-known journalists, other scribblers, established academics etc. All commending censorship…

I shall probably blog about all that (and witchfinder-general Owen Jones, the fake “revolutionary” and “System-licensed Bolshevik”) another time; maybe soon, but not today. In any case, I have previously blogged about Owen Jones: https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/a-brief-word-about-owen-jones/

Coronavirus

268 deaths in the UK “from” or “with” Coronavirus today, a huge fall. The government of fools has made a huge mistake in putting the population under house arrest.

What almost interests me more is how very supine and compliant most of “my fellow citizens” (I prefer to think of them as obedient rabbits) have been and continue to be. They might, the more disorderly of them, have a drunken fight or catfight (in “normal” times) on a Friday night, but when push comes to crunch there they are, the rabbits, all lining up 6 feet apart to buy bread and milk, and only going out at all when the toytown police give them the nod. Pathetic.

In related news, the London “Nightingale” instant hospital has been “stood down”, having only received a few dozen patients out of the 4,000 expected. The other similar hospitals across the country have also been closed or are being closed; some never opened at all!

The Boris-idiot government is now going to pretend to be still somehow in control, which it very obviously is not. Before long, there will be an effective lifting of the “lockdown”, but disguised by pointless “testing”, by fake “trial runs” in places that don’t matter very much, like the Isle of Wight, etc.

Meanwhile, the UK economy is spinning into a terminal decline. Worse, the plebs (including affluent suburbanites and “country”-dwellers, by the way) have been scared out of their skins, and actually are now afraid to leave their houses! Except to clap on command (“for the NHS” which, for whatever reason, is now very far from offering the best medical service in Europe).

Jesus Christ! These are the descendants, 80% of them anyway, of the contemporaries of Nelson, Wellington, Drake, Hood…

******* sad.

Stray thought

The more I see of those who rule, or pretend to rule, the UK, as well as those who pretend to comment intelligently on various current affairs, the more I realize that I, and people who agree with me, should be seated at the head of those affairs.

Tweets seen on other topics

I agree with both tweets above.

https://twitter.com/MrBruccio/status/1257370996065153030?s=20

Re. the above tweet, exactly what I was blogging, nearly 2 months ago. I may not be an “expert” (virologist, epidemiologist etc…and btw any doctor or nurse who is neither of those really knows little if anything more about Coronavirus than me…), but looks like I was right and the “experts”, Downing Street loony “advisers”, MPs, Cabinet ministers and msm scribblers were, almost without exception, wrong.

Looks like [see below] Rishi Sunak’s honeymoon as “future Prime Minister” is over! Ha ha!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8286317/Forgotten-victims-corona-pandemic-whove-NHS-treatment-hold.html

postscript

Links to the works of David Irving. Well worth reading.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/

http://irvingbooks.com/xcart/home.php?cat=3

Boris Johnson, daily blog, David Icke, Deadhead MPs, diary blog, free speech, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 1 May 2020

10 Comments

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

“Denmark and the Czech Republic have said partially easing their lockdowns has not led to a surge in new coronavirus infections” [Guardian]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/30/danes-and-czechs-say-easing-lockdowns-has-produced-no-covid-19-surge

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.“

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8273135/Over-50s-kept-coronavirus-lockdown-longer.html

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.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8272681/Police-close-family-string-quartet-playing-classical-music-neighbours.html

Reality

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

https://twitter.com/BangoBilly/status/1256126668298747904?s=20

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:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/peter-hitchens-and-his-views/

More tweets

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.

biggesttradingpartners

[above: biggest trading partners in geographical Europe. See how many have Germany as their biggest partner; over 20 countries]

More tweets

Facemasks

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:

Still clapping for NHS?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8274403/Whistleblower-claims-elderly-Covid-19-patients-sent-die-care-homes.html

End the “lockdown” now!

https://twitter.com/simondolan/status/1256268332732428291?s=20

Tweets seen

This amused me. It’s so true…

BE89A6DB-91D7-4055-B7C1-3924193D86ED

This (below) is also very true, but is far less amusing…

A few late tweets by Hitchens with which I agree

Alt-Right, Boris Johnson, daily blog, diary blog, free speech, Jewish lobby in UK, Party Politics, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 29-30 April 2020

18 Comments

The outlines become clearer…

“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]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/29/no-case-child-passing-coronavirus-adult-exists-evidence-review/

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):

The UK economy may be collapsing, subsiding quietly into a (terminal?) decline…

“Affect”, not “effect”. Otherwise, yes.

For a less-intelligent response…

https://twitter.com/matthaig1/status/1255439495966740482?s=20

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…

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

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.

Another tweet from “Matt Haig”:

https://twitter.com/matthaig1/status/1255817875190886400?s=20

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.

  • Local authorities are becoming insolvent: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8269187/Windsor-Maidenhead-council-country-file-bankruptcy.html
  • 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)

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.

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/the-gathering-cloak-of-censorship/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/katie-hopkins-and-questions-arising/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/the-knives-are-out-for-freedom-of-expression-and-more/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/02/26/tommy-robinson-banned-on-facebook-the-repression-of-free-speech-online/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/07/28/the-latest-turn-of-the-screw/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/the-war-on-freedom-of-expression-in-the-uk-usa-and-eu-states/

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…

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scan25

The excuses for such “control” of “free speech” are various, put out to fool the public at large

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Useful idiots are often found to lay the groundwork for repression:

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Back to the crash of the UK economy

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!

Musical interlude

Shopping foray

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

shishkin3-gatheringstorm

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 USA, unemployment has surged to something like 30 million in little more than a month, while the true updated figure may be much higher: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/another-3-8-million-in-u-s-filed-for-jobless-benefits-last-week

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)…

Alison Chabloz, Alt-Right, Boris Johnson, Carl Benjamin, Count Dankula, daily blog, David Icke, Deadhead MPs, diary blog, free speech, historical, historical revisionism, Ian Millard, Jewish lobby in UK, Jez Turner, Katie Hopkins, Mark Meechan, Nick Griffin, Party Politics, Paul Watson, Prison Planet, Sargon of Akkad, society, Tommy Robinson, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 27-28 April 2020

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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.

Police speak to sunbathers as they patrol Greenwich Park.

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

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

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

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

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

Nightingale hospitals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do we know about protection from Coronavirus?

Speaking in practical terms, that

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

Peter Hitchens

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are there any good aspects to the situation?

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

Can’t think of anything else…

The clueless Government (and Opposition)

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

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

Britain 2020

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

London 2020

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

Free speech in the UK

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

Back, inevitably, to the Coronavirus…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tweets

Stasi Britain, 2020…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Luftwaffe officer speaks with a British policeman in St Helier ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweets seen

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

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

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

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

Contrast

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

Image

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

The madness which infests our society

Take a look at the tweet below:

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

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

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

Interesting video

daily blog, diary blog, free speech, Reminiscences and Musings, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 25 April 2020

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Coronavirus

It now seems to be accepted that, as I myself suspected some time ago, Coronavirus may have swept through the UK and particularly the London area as long ago as January:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8250371/How-people-REALLY-caught-coronavirus.html

There is now a plausible argument that as many as 5 million people in the London area are, or have been, infected. So far, about 5,000 have died of or with the virus. 1 in every 1,000 of the infected population.

The above facts make a nonsense of “lockdown”, as suspected. The entire economy and society has been closed down because of a likely one in a thousand chance of being killed (which probably would happen anyway, “lockdown” or no “lockdown”).

That is a thousand times greater than the chance of being struck by lightning, and is quite a high probability for mathematicians, but for those of us in the real world is a rather small chance, though admittedly far from de minimis.

No-one seriously suggests that Coronavirus is not a serious public health emergency, but it has been hugely overblown, and regarded like the Black Death or something similar.

http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/14/mortality-statistics-causes-death-england-wales-2009

The Government and its staff insist that it is only because of the “lockdown” that Britain has “wrestled the infection figures down” to the point where the reproduction number (RO) is below one, meaning that the virus will now decline inexorably to near zero. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8255677/Chris-Whitty-reveals-UKs-reproduction-number-dropped-1.html

Nonsense. “Lockdown” is all but irrelevant. A leading expert, an Israeli, has just recently said that any measures taken in various countries are close to irrelevant to the ultimate outcome. That seems to accord with what has happened in countries around the world.

The latest “plan” from little Matt Hancock is for people to be “allowed” to meet up to 10 specified others outside their own households! Only a cretin of the Hancock sort could come up with a “plan” so impossible to make work! Who will enforce this “plan”? The whole thing is ridiculous.

Someone like G.K. Chesterton would have fun with this “plan”, and probably write an amusing short story about it.

Meanwhile, in the real world, people are (judging by what I saw on my local roads yesterday) all but ignoring the “lockdown”. Plenty of traffic compared to a couple of weeks ago.

I hope that this episode has taught the increasingly arrogant Common Purpose-infected police a lesson, to wit that they police by consent in this country. People (misinformed, brainwashed, so be it) consented at first to the “lockdown”, but more and more are waking up to the fact that Coronavirus is almost yesterday’s news.

Most people now understand that, especially if they are under 70, they are not going to get Coronavirus or die from it, and that, if they are under 40, there is every chance that, even if they are infected, they will be totally unaware of the fact.

Those at high(er) risk are known: non-Europeans; inhabitants of “hotspots” such as London, West Midlands etc; older persons (esp. over 70); persons with other serious health problems.

The chance of getting it and being hospitalized and then dying is probably not even one in a thousand overall. For white people under 40 it is close to zero.

Tweets

(because Douglas Murray has not worked out, or been told, what the Jewish/NWO lobby wants him to say…)

Below, a Peter Hitchens tweet which echoes some of what I have been saying about Boris-idiot for years:

Alarming, that “Shannon” cannot see that this absurd and petty-tyrannical “lockdown” breaches “our rights“! A non-European, it seems; with where is she comparing the UK in human rights terms? Some place in Asia? North Korea? Also, “aspiring journalist”. Well, looking at the standards of journalism now, plummeting even in the national msm, I am hardly shocked. Looking at her other tweets, she seems well-meaning but, frankly put, not the brightest. Talks about “uni” and her “dissertation” (leading to a “doctorate”, presumably) yet mixes up “their” and “there” in some tweets. A couple of yet other tweets from this person, below:

https://twitter.com/shannonbammj/status/1242235128249794562?s=20

In other words, unless a political chancer like Boris-idiot gives you permission to leave your houses, stay effectively under house arrest, because “you are probably supposed to stay inside.” She obviously has no real idea what longstanding British civil rights are…and there are millions like her in the UK now, millions…

A sign of the times…

More tweets

Speaking personally, I keep to the “Government lockdown advice” not because it has any legitimacy (or legality, arguably), nor because I am afraid of being fined (the police would never be able to catch me for anything anyway), but simply because the libraries, bookshops, charity shops, cafes etc are all shut. Even the barber. In short, apart from the nearest supermarket (about a mile away), the nearest M&S (ditto) and the nearest village shop (a mile or so in the other direction), I have nowhere to go unless you count a monthly visit to a Boots and a weekly call-in to get a few gallons of fuel.

As for exercise, I have not done any serious exercise for nearly 20 years, and it is even longer since I swam 90 lengths (nearly 2 miles) without a pause, or trekked up the mountains of the Tien Shan in summer heat and winter snow. So I do not go out to exercise.

I am, in a word, the perfect “lockdown” citizen, without even wishing so to be!

More evidence that the “lockdown” in the UK is a pointless exercise that is trashing the economy (without which there will be no NHS, by the way). Still, “keep clapping” (nein danke!). As a matter of fact, it seems to me that this whole “clapathon” nonsense is basically the public services applauding themselves, and in some cases unmeritoriously.

https://twitter.com/hale_kari/status/1253998909921394688?s=20

https://twitter.com/hector_drummond/status/1253818097976389637?s=20

https://twitter.com/CherylBoruszko/status/1253965489467949057?s=20

Linguistic “hate”

I wish that people brainwashed by American msm culture would at least stick to tried and true English English. In particular, I see many tweets today on the subject of pasta, talking about people “hating on penne”. THERE IS NO “on“! “Hating penne”— good. “Not hating penne”— also good, BUT NO “on“, either way!

What makes it worse is that I would be prepared to bet that 90% of these miscreants have never visited, let alone lived in, the USA. They have no excuse! If I, once married to an American, once nearly married to another, who lived on and off in New Jersey for 3+ years, who repeatedly visited and/or worked in Florida and South Carolina, and who is still nominally a member of the New York Bar, do not say “hating on…“, then someone who has never left Essex, Brighton, or London (mostly London, judging from Twitter) has no excuse!

While I am on the same (perhaps minor) sort of subject, those places where you can embark on a train are railway or at least rail stations, not “train stations”! I first heard “train station” in London in or about 1990, from a West Indian woman. Since then, it has invaded and conquered the BBC, Sky, the print msm…Even persons pretending to education use it, sometimes. No…

“Hating railway stations” = OK (though puzzling), “hating on train stations“= not OK.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles – Transporting the Führer | Mark Felton

Back to the present “lockdown” nonsense

That, Mr. Hitchens, does not wash. It is for those who laid down the “rules” and the stupid Coronavirus Act 2020 to prove, via successful prosecutions, that one or both are lawful. The 17thC-19thC freedoms which Hitchens supports would never have emerged had the people of those times always waited for the State to be challenged in the courts.

I have not read all of the law recently passed, but I doubt that “incitement” to break it is itself an offence anyway.

The real reason not to “incite” breaking the new petty tyranny law is, simply, that few would attend a demonstration. Demonstrations and marches are almost always a waste of time and effort. “What would happen if you held a demo, and no-one came?” There is your problem, the spinelessness of the present UK population.

Oh dear (see below): I disagree with Hitchens again. “House prices are the true measure of inflation“? That’s nonsense.

From 1983 until 2000, people buying houses on mortgages got a completely unjustified tax break: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_interest_relief_at_source

That was a government giveaway; the same has been true of other more recent incentives to buy houses, eg relief for buy-to-let parasites. The result? Absurd house price inflation. If I lived in a house in London valued in 1980 at £100,000, which is now (or was in 2019) valued at £4 million, that is not a genuine measure of inflation but an artificially-fanned conflagration of inflation. House price increase— 40x in 40 years, in a society where pay has, on average, increased by, at most, 10x, and for most people maybe 5x.

The price of, say, retailed food, has also increased by maybe 5x in the same period. Wine that was £2 a bottle in 1980 is about £8 or £10 now.

Hitchens is very up the creek here, I fear.

After agreeing with many of Hitchens’ recent tweets, I am now in disagreement over some things…

“Rich” is indefinite, of course, but I do not think that anyone who has an overinflated house “worth” a couple of million can be described as anything but at least somewhat rich…(a thought dictated by my seeing on Rightmove a house for sale in the little crescent off Reigate Hill, Surrey, where my parents lived in the early 1980s. £1.25M! Ridiculous).

Yes, if the owner sells his one million pound house, he needs to buy another. Or does he? Someone with a million pounds has options, such as buying a house in a cheaper part of the UK (a million-pound house in Surrey or London can be replaced for as little as £300,000 in many quite decent parts of England or Wales. Or the possessor of a million pounds can buy a luxury yacht for, say, £250,000, live aboard and still have £750,000 to fund the fun in the Med, Caribbean etc.

Again, see below, it seems to me that Hitchens is, to some extent, up the creek here:

Most people with money (beyond some low level) in the UK inherited their money, they did not, primarily, earn it. Much of that is real property, or proceeds of sale thereof, that gets passed down. There are exceptions, and from 1945-1989 (to pick an end-date) quite a few, but these days, few really make much money actually working, even if that work is (or so the public think) lucrative, say at the Bar. Hitchens, as often noted, is here in his beloved 1950s rather than in the Britain of 2020.

I do, however, agree with Hitchens here (below):

More tweets

Here, below, the authentic voice of the inner London (Islington) “radical”, begging for “authority” to “step in” etc, while thinking herself almost revolutionary…

https://twitter.com/agirlcalledlina/status/1254004649109176320?s=20

Note the language: Allison Pearson, the columnist, as “a danger”. A “danger” to what? A constipated and completely pseudo-socialist view of society?

“Lina” is right about another of her targets, Priti Patel, though. What a thick plank she is! Home Secretary, no less, in the Government of Fools.

Here’s another “socialist” poseur, who thinks that he is terribly clever (it seems), one John Crace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crace_(writer)

Time was when the Guardian would have had something to say about the complete trashing of the rights of the British public, about their having been corralled at home because the advisers of a government of total incompetents thought that the Black Death was about to arrive. But no; these days, the Guardian’s unimpressive scribblers prefer to tweet that people who have woken up to the absurdity of State-imposed “lockdown” have “a single brain cell” for not complying (any longer) with the continuation of the patently ridiculous mass house arrest imposed. Time was…

Thus we see, in part, why “Guardian” views are just ignored these days, and we also see why, in part, the Labour Party is all but finished.

One of the few pleasant aspects of the manufactured “crisis” is that little Greta Nut is no more to be seen in the newspapers. She or those behind her made a brave attempt to piggyback on the virus news agenda, by claiming that Greta “showed symptoms” of Coronavirus. Sure she did…A Scandinavian, aged 17. What were the symptoms? A-tishoo? Twice?

Actually, I have to amend the above paragraph, because I saw this in the Guardian as I wrote: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/22/earth-day-greta-thunberg-calls-for-new-path-after-pandemic

“If one single virus can destroy economies in a couple of weeks, it shows we are not thinking long-term and taking risks into account.” [Greta Thunberg, or her “advisers”]. Has she never heard of the Black Death, the Plague etc?

I think that her 15 mins of fame must be nearly at an end.

Here is another brave attempt to retain relevance:

Claire Fox, one time Revolutionary Communist, now turned “libertarian”, briefly Brexit Party MEP (April 2019-January 2020). An odd woman from an odd (and rather suspicious) political or ideological background.

Boris Johnson, daily blog, diary blog, free speech, historical revisionism, Jewish lobby in UK, Party Politics, Russia and Russian relations, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 24 April 2020

7 Comments

Coronavirus, the scare of the century?

“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]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8249241/Nearly-40-000-hospital-beds-lie-operations-treatments-cancelled.html

“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]NHS staff at the Tavistock Day Case Theatre in West Devon were forced to apologise after they filmed themselves performing a traditional Maori chant

[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.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8248719/Swedens-coronavirus-cases-grow-slowly-Britains-despite-lack-lockdown.html

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.

Interesting news…

Is Coronavirus sparing white Northern Europeans?

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

Street impressions

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

https://twitter.com/Chris78Williams/status/1251013285282869251?s=20

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]

https://twitter.com/jasonedgington4/status/1253748838923481088?s=20

“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

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”.

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”.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus_Seven_Trial

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].

My articles about, inter alia, Dominic Cummings:

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/01/03/dominic-cummings-a-government-of-dystopia-and-lunacy-posing-as-genius/

https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/08/10/les-eminences-grises-of-dystopia/

Meanwhile, in other news…

daily blog, Deadhead MPs, diary blog, free speech, historical, society, Uncategorized

Diary Blog, 23 April 2020

17 Comments

Well, here we are on the evening of St. George’s Day, scarcely an auspicious day this year, with the compliant rabbit-pleb population begging to be kept in “lockdown” for “as long as it takes”, meaning until Coronavirus is no more. They can then (in a year or so) emerge from their dwellings to contemplate the complete destruction of the UK’s economy and society.

Actually, the above is somewhat hyperbolic. For one thing, at least as far as where I am situated is concerned, there was no visible or audible State-mandated clapathon this evening. Yay! Not a single “locked-down” serf-citizen (in my area) appeared to clap, bang, set off fireworks or virtue-signal. So that’s one dead propaganda campaign (I hope)…

Secondly, people are starting to revolt, gradually, against the wrongheaded and tyrannical “lockdown” nonsense.

It’s a very British revolt. For one thing, very slow! All the same, in a typically Brit “yes, repeat no” way, people are starting to ignore the “lockdown”. There would be a great deal more of this quiet revolt were shops open.  As it is, there is nowhere much to go anyway. However, there are still parks, beaches, national parks, lakes (those not yet poisoned by Derbyshire police woodentops) etc.

The msm continues to parrot System propaganda, though. Look, below, at the Daily Mail today, calling people “covidiots” simply because they decided to walk in a park, sunbathe alone in a park or on a beach, drive around for a change of view and air, all activities which do not spread the Chinese virus; neither do any of these people have any chance of getting the virus from their walking, sunbathing or driving.

Not that that stops Twitter’s “me-too” online mob of serfs and virtue-signallers from attacking these innocent people and their harmless behaviours. As for the toytown police that now infest the country, they love lecturing decent citizens doing completely harmless activities.

“Despite government pleas and warnings of strong fines from police for breaching lockdown rules, beaches were packed up and down the country, with covidiots sunbathing and enjoying the high temperatures.” [Daily Mail]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8248607/Hottest-day-year-coronavirus-lockdown.html

Police move two members of the public off a bench in Edinburgh today, after they appeared to decide to enjoy some tea in the sun, despite the coronavirus lockdown

[above: police idiots “move on” a harmless elderly/middleaged couple sitting having a drink from a Thermos flask. Why? Why?]

“In Edinburgh, a couple were moved on by police after they were spotted enjoying some tea on a park bench.” [Daily Mail]. Again, why? It is senseless, quite senseless.

Sunbathing is banned by the government under the guidelines, but that didn't seem to stop some covidiots all over the country, including this woman at Highgate park in north London

[above: it pleases Daily Mail scribblers Danny Hussain and Jordan King to call this harmless young woman, sunbathing in her sky-blue bikini at Highgate, a “covidiot”… Why? She is not spreading the bloody virus; she is not in danger of infection, and even if she did get it, she is young enough to have, probably, few if any symptoms. Oh, and the Daily Mail “newspaper” scribblers might care to note that sunbathing is not unlawful anyway, whatever little Matt Hancock might like to pretend]

Members of the public ignore the Coronavirus lockdown on the hottest day of the year on Primrose Hill, north London, including this woman who seemed to be enjoying the sun

[above: another young woman, alone in the sun on Primrose Hill. Harmless. Why call people like her “covidiots”? So that the Twitterati and other online mobs, ignorant and brainwashed, can chuck virtual rotten tomato at her?]

A driver stopped by police in Cornwall told officers he went on a 70-mile tour of the county because he was bored of lockdown

[above: further misuse of police resources and unnecessary intrusion into the lives of citizens: the motorist was bored and decided to drive around Cornwall. So? Mind your own business, Plod!].

“Devon and Cornwall Police said today they have carried out over 200 stops in the Penzance area alone in the past week. A driver pulled over for going on a 70-mile tour of Cornwall’s roads said ‘No reason for doing it really – I was just bored.’ It is the latest sign of the country getting back to normal life – despite ongoing lockdown rules.” [Daily Mail]

Huge queues built up outside the Five Guys burger restaurant in Edinburgh last night as people collect takeaway orders

[above: customers crowding together at a large takeaway food outlet in Edinburgh. This is within the “rules” as laid down! It’s all a nonsense!]

Crowds of commuters board a Jubilee line train at Canning Town station on the London Underground this morning

[above: the Central Line in East London. All within the “rules”, yet a wonderful incubator for bacteria and also viruses]…

According to the Daily Mail, people can now be fined if “caught” sunbathing in public, but not if exercizing in public, despite the fact that the latter is far more likely to lead to random infection! It’s all just nonsense! That’s assuming that the Daily Mail has the law right, which I doubt (I speak of the law, not whatever little Matt Hancock tries to pretend is the law).

Twitter full tonight of idiots engaged in the State Clapathon. Go away…thankfully, few if any around here. Once again, one sees that Twitter is the home of the natural serfs and virtue-signallers. Most unable to think for themselves.

Not that I do not appreciate the doctors, nurses and other staff in the NHS. Most are great. However, State-encouraged mass signalling is not to be pandered to. It also tends to kill thought (and dissent) about this whole Coronavirus thing and the government policy of putting the population under pointless house arrest.

Also, the NHS is badly-administered, to an almost absurd extent, and that is apart from any funding questions. “Clapping for NHS” tends to says “there are no serious problems in the NHS”. Again, this clapping coercion tends to kill thought and dissent.

An exception, as previously noted, has been Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah on Twitter):

https://davidallengreen.com/2020/04/the-significant-extension-of-the-coronavirus-restriction-on-movement-and-why-it-is-concerning/

End the “lockdown” nonsense now!

Crises such as the present one are for political leaders or at least pretend leaders to run with, not advisers, however supposedly eminent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Whitty

Advisers such as this Whitty character need to be put back in their box. It is always dangerous to, in effect, give power to such people.

I like this (from @TonyGreyMan)…

More tweets:

Not that most Twitter virtue-signallers care much (yet) about the economy collapsing. Most of that section of the Twitterati are public service people (NHS, police, fire brigade, local council staff, other public sector staff) who assume (wrongly) that their pay, conditions and employment are outside the wider “marketplace”, or they are people not working anyway (either retired or otherwise “economically inactive”). Then there are the BBC and other msm drones, entertainers etc, as well as the online soi-disant “film critics”, “writers” (who have written one or two sunk-without-trace books in the past 5+ years), “journalists” etc (untrained and on tiny online “newspapers”; see also “Mike Stuchbery”), people who talk on BBC local radio once or twice a month etc etc and put themselves forward as “academics”, “historians” etc, on the strength of a pathetic doctorate from some multikulti degree mill.

Music…