Amid the Cummings Frenzy, UK media have only very slightly reported the important news from Japan. Despite very limited measures, Japan has emerged from the Virus Panic with very few deaths. https://t.co/UdOfXbNXvP
Yes, this is the next stage, the evidence-free pretence that weeks of house arrest, plus a self-inflicted economic disaster, stopped it from being worse. Accept this and you will be doomed to decades of facemasks, sanitiser and stupid rules. https://t.co/4gQlxHrFzz
To understand Peter Hitchens’ (@ClarkeMicah) disapproval of Dominic Cummings, you need to be acquainted with his criticism of Blair’s civil service reform which replaced traditional C.S. with B.S. advisors/ quangocrats like Cummings. Article from Jun 2019: https://t.co/X0Yxg1ZhqMpic.twitter.com/KzOhxxiK1k
In normal times this extraordinary story about our 'ally' Saudi Arabia (to which premiers and members of the Royal family hurry to pay obeisance and from which they receive honours), might have more prominence: https://t.co/k2w2cLm9eL
The West is weak, not only or even mostly in terms of military strength, but in terms of moral force, of authority, of integrity. It has been largely taken over by the Jew element but. alongside that, has rolled over for the wealthy Arab element.
Anyone who has lived in or near Central London will know to what extent there has been a huge Arab (and other Muslim) influx since the 1970s. The instability of the Middle East has sent a series of waves of migration to London: the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian Islamic revolution, the many subsequent events.
However, beyond that, there has been another Arab invasion since the 1970s, that of Arab wealth. As someone whose parents and brothers were all great racing fans, I heard the stories of how this or that sheikh or emir would glide through Ascot, giving doormen baksheesh of a £50 or £20 note merely for having opened a door or gate for the mogul. That was in the late 1970s and the 1980s, when £50 was really worth having.
That eagerness, to have a little of the new-ish Arab oil wealth rub off on English palms, was not confined to doormen and chauffeurs but spread to the City of London money-men, lawyers and others and, most tellingly, to the more corrupt of the political class at Westminster. One name: Jonathan Aitken.
Then there was the rumoured £30 million bung paid to Mark Thatcher (despite his being a political nullity and a general nobody), in order to sweeten Mrs. Thatcher, his mother and, of course, Prime Minister at the time. Britain for sale…
The Gulf Arabs (Saudis, Qataris, Kuwaitis etc) have only the most negligible culture and history to set alongside that of Europe, but Fate (they say the Will of Allah) has made them rich via oil found by Europeans (and by Europeans become Americans), exploited by Europeans/Americans, extracted by Europeans/Americans, shipped or pumped by Europeans/Americans, refined by Europeans/Americans, and finally bought and utilized mainly by Europeans/Americans.
The Gulf Arabs bring nothing to the table. They just sit there, arrogantly, unable to defend themselves without American, British and French help, unable even to make their societies function on a 20th/21st Century basis without expat Europeans/Americans etc to run everything (and Indians, Pakistanis, Filipinos etc to do much of the manual work, with refugee Palestinians often occupying the space in between).
In Qatar, for example, Qataris are only about 15% of the population, but they are the only ones with any real rights. I have been there twice, once in 2001 when it was a pleasant, sleepy place, then again in 2008, by which time it had become a horrible overdeveloped mess.
In fact, if the Qataris all just disappeared, Qatar would be a far better place (also applicable to the rest of the Middle East).
The invasion of Kuwait in 1990 showed up the Kuwaitis for the useless, venal, cowardly creatures they are, the “royal” family and others living in luxury hotels in Taif (Saudi Arabia) while the British, American and French Foreign Legion forces fought for and won back Kuwait for the Kuwaitis who did not deserve it.
Had it not been for the Second World War and then the Cold War and its superpower standoff, the Gulf would have become more or less another Western colony and would have been far far better for it. It is very regrettable that the Gulf Arabs were able to pose as powerful independent allies inter se and vis a vis “the West”, when they are just parasites.
They infest London and other cities, driving their million-pound sports cars around, enjoying themselves with local sluts and making a nuisance of themselves in areas such as Kensington, Knightsbridge etc.
I think that the West generally should impose a true suzerainty over the whole of the Middle East, and rule all the states there (including Israel) while allowing a degree of autonomy within state boundaries. It’s only right.
As for the “sheikhs”, “emirs”, “kings” and local dictators, just remove them. Permanently.
Oh, I forgot: Lawrence of Arabia (T.E. Lawrence) was an idiot, albeit an erudite and remarkable one!
Other tweets seen
German patriots demonstrate against lockdown. The absurd restrictions placed on protest, & detention of 'excess' demonstrators, highlights the totalitarian nature of the #Covid_1984 clampdown.
Major news from Japan, which has ended its very mild shutdown to rescue its economy . Not many interested, as Japan's facts don't fit the prejudices of the Covid Zealots. : https://t.co/A77JlsUs65
It seems that the popularity of Boris-idiot is plummeting. Not because he and his moronic crew have imposed a mass house arrest and destroyed both civil rights and the British economy, but because of his support for Dominic Cummings amid the recent trivial “scandal”.
Israel is a country with many interesting aspects in terms of water supply, agriculture and horticulture, urban planning, afforestation etc.
I should certainly find it interesting to visit Israel, because I find artificially-contrived societies interesting in general (Singapore and North Korea being two others which do not seem natural), but I doubt that it would be long before I became the victim of a traffic accident, a scuba accident, or whatever. You get the idea…
16 months later, I believe that the article is even more relevant, now that Coronavirus/Covid-19 has concentrated minds (and leaving aside the fact that the Chinese virus is overblown and also being used by the System to bluff people into becoming members of police states across Europe and beyond).
I was just reading again about “Doggerland”, which is not a gonzo-literature novel about some of the leisure activities of a sub-set of the English pleb-dom, but a large territory that once existed between the area now designated as “UK”, and those of present-day “Denmark”, “Germany”, “Netherlands” etc.
[By Francis Lima – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49850020] It can be seen that, at its greatest extent, what is now called “Doggerland” (a term invented only in the 1990s), together with similar areas in the Atlantic off (mainly) the present-day coasts of the UK and Ireland (the ancient land of Lyonesse, of Arthurian legend), was larger in extent than the present-day UK.
Consideration of these matters gives perspective.
Videos about the above matters:
and while looking at those Doggerland videos, I also saw this one (below)
Fascinating, though possibly not a good idea even if do-able.. How about starting with something smaller, such as the Irish Sea? (only, sort-of, joking…).
In fact, large-scale projects are not always a poor idea. One which has interested many is that of creating a canal from the Mediterranean to the Qattara Depression in the Western Desert of Egypt, then using gravity to move seawater the 40 miles to the Depression.
The Qattara Depression is on average 200 ft (60m) below sea level, though the lowest part is 440 ft (134m) below sea level. No-one lives there, though the very isolated oasis of Qara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qara_Oasis lies near the Western edge of the Depression, some 47 miles (75km) North-East of the nearest larger oasis, Siwa. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siwa_Oasis
I myself stayed in Siwa for a month, in early 1998, out of three months spent in Egypt (on that trip).
Siwa is 189 miles (305km) from the Mediterranean Sea coast. British or American people tend to think of an oasis as being a small lake with a fringe of palm trees, but Siwa is, at greatest extent, 50 miles long and 12 miles wide, and has a total population of some 30,000 (though when you are there —admittedly I was there over 20 years ago— the place does not seem in any way heavily populated, rather the reverse). It has about 350 freshwater springs (the water of which is exported to Alexandria and Cairo in plastic bottles), 300,000 date palms, 70,000 olive trees (and some fruit trees, too).
Reverting to Qattara, the Depression is 190 miles (300km) long by 84 miles (135km) wide. Area: 7,570 square miles, about the same as mainland Wales.
A project to flood the Depression would be hugely beneficial. Fish would flood in with the water, it would change the regional climate for the better, and it would enable hydropower as well.
It may be that, by using hydropower and solar power, new eco-cities or towns, even horticultural areas, could be created and maintained, supplied with fresh water via desalination.
In Iran, not long before the Islamic Revolution unseated the Shah , there was a government programme to replace sand dunes and semi-desert with forest. Of course, the backward mullahs did not continue with it. I read about the project in the National Geographic. Brilliant.
First, the sand dunes were coated with a very thin layer of crude oil, sprayed from tanked vehicles. Secondly, seeds of the tamarisk tree (salt-resistant and heat-resistant) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarix were spread over the oil layer.
The thin oil layer prevented the seeds from being blown away by wind, and anchored the tiny shoots when germinated. The climate had enough moisture for their survival. The tiny growing shoots and trees (within a few years about 4 feet high) were protected from goats and their owners, if any, by fences and a ranger force.
Once the trees were mature (some of the 60 types of tamarisk grow as high as 60ft/18m), the idea was that the climate and ecology would be markedly improved.
Under the Shah, there was to have been a roll-out across Iran. It never happened. Sad.
There have been and still are many large-scale projects of great value, both engineering projects and more obviously “environmental” ones. Most founder on the rocks of politics and/or finance.
I suppose that what passes for a strategy in Labour is to wait until Boris-idiot messes things up even more than he has already done, then hope that, in Britain’s absurd and unfair (and basically binary) First Past The Post political-electoral system, the voters will simply cool towards the Conservative Party and thus elect Labour by default. Not much of a strategy, really…
Tweets seen
Well, alas, Mr Madman, this is rather what the govt did with care homes, incompetently failing to protect the most vulnerable in the country, while pretending that everyone was in equal danger and engaging in a wild, flailing policy of house arrest and economic strangulation. https://t.co/LxeNbkqzut
I don't doubt that it *can* regulate everything @craigglasgow2. I have visited the PRC, the GDR and the DPRK and lived in the USSR . The question is whether it *should* do so. https://t.co/nY7E61PqQL
Not myself a ‘libertarian’ but I am aware of the great range of responses and can find no congruence between any policy and any outcome. The virus arrives, follows its bell-curve and tails off. Errors such as failure to isolate care homes are significant. But shutdowns etc? Nope https://t.co/utpSkX1q87
Little children forced to go without ANY human contact even if in distress. Is this callous idiocy: cruel incompetence, or deliberate psyops intended to make people surrender to ID vaccination & #Covid1984 tyranny? Either way these bastards should be ….https://t.co/8yyAO3wwJE
Guardian turns blind eye to inconvenient truth: 20% of hospital (and carehome) patients have Covid_19. Normal deaths 12,000/week = 1,700/day. 20% = 340 deaths/day WITH coronavirus = not one extra death = #COVID1984 power grab hoax.#lockdownrebellionhttps://t.co/oEoJhBQtJN
astonished that the PM said there would be no checks and now it’s clear there will be checks https://t.co/XYQqvNfKv4
— Friend of Deep State 🐋 (@PickardJE) May 13, 2020
Why would you be surprised that a psychopathic liar and part-Jew public entertainer (merely posing as “Prime Minister”) would…lie? It’s what he does.
Well, who would have thought it, #BorisJohnson has #Lied about something else. Now border checks on goods moving over the Irish sea. Add that to a long, long list……. probably longer that can be comfortably fitted on the side of a bus. OR…… What is Dom trying to deflect?
Customs in the Irish Sea will lead rapidly to a united Ireland. Which might well lead to Scotland separating from the UK. Johnston’s lies might have significant historic impact. https://t.co/jeMRMgeVNj
— David Miller T.O. (@iamdavidmiller) May 14, 2020
…particularly when, only yesterday, the UK Supreme Court quashed the convictions of Gerry Adams. Do we see where this is going? I think that we do.
Indeed, it now seems that Boris-idiot secretly agreed to the “border in the Irish Sea” as long ago as October 2019!
The “Communist” campaign of subversion that started as an adjunct to Soviet Intelligence and was noted by such as Golitsyn (albeit over-valued by him, and to some extent distorted), became so-called “Cultural Marxism”, infecting society from the 1960s. It was particularly powerful in infecting students across Europe, North America, Australasia (and, to a lesser extent, South Africa).
Those students became prime ministers, Cabinet ministers, judges, heads of TV stations, radio current affairs programmes, as well as journalists and talking heads etc. A few names from the UK? Tony Blair, Cherie Blair, Alistair Darling, Jack Dromey, Jack Straw, and many many others. Few if any were “Soviet agents” (as far as I know, not even ghastly Jack Dromey, later a Blairite “Labour” MP, who attended the 1970s mercenaries’ “trial” in Angola as a kind of “socialist” vulture, sub nom “observer”).
Few of those then-young people were even pro-Soviet, not least because “Cultural Marxism” broke free from its conspiratorial Soviet origins as the Soviet Union started to slowly decay and eventually collapse.
It could be said that what is called, inter alia, “Cultural Marxism”, is now just another NWO cultural current. It has little or nothing to do with any form of “socialism”, that’s for sure.
Where Golitsyn went wrong was in assuming that the “headwaters” of “Cultural Marxism” lay in Sovietism, when in fact they lay on higher ground, in the groups that developed (and named) the “New World Order” or NWO. Those same groups were those who fostered the Soviet Union under Lenin in the first place.
In other words, the former secret operatives who helped to collapse Soviet and Eastern European socialism (in the Soviet Union, Romania, Poland etc) were not communists disguising themselves as something else, but a metamorphosis of communists or socialists turning into something else, while still coming under the overall and yet covert control of the NWO powers on the grand scale.
Russia is not in control of the play as it is acted out; neither is the USA, as such. The NWO is pulling the strings, often through “Zionist Occupation Governments” [“ZOG”].
The aim is to form a one-world regime, composed mainly of raceless, cultureless serfs, ruled over by ZOG and, beyond ZOG, the NWO powers. Below the ruling levels, a mass of untermenschen is promoted by the “governments” and the contaminated msm, drowning out the true voices of Europe’s future.
Tweets seen
Seems that some Americans have never heard of “tax” and, in particular, “income tax”. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet is very dry in its humour…
If only there were some public fund billionaires could pay into along with everyone else that helps fund our infrastructure, hospitals, and public systems all at once.
It could even be a modest % of what they earn every year. We could have an agency collect it and everything https://t.co/g0vI45xnYG
Unfortunately, while in principle it is far more efficient for tax monies to go into one fund, or what in the UK are usually termed “central funds”, in practice this has flaws and drawbacks. It tends to mean that governments decide to use some of the tax monies gathered for all sorts of misconceived projects and grandiose ideas, while the foundations of society are ill-funded. It also means that those who pay tax (one way or another, and to some extent, everyone) lose any feeling of connection between what they pay in tax and what they see being funded and/or underfunded.
It might well be worth the loss of a certain amount of notional fiscal efficiency to both tie and be seen to tie tax monies raised to specific expenditures. For example, “Road Tax”, or “Vehicle Tax” is raised from motorists and others on the misleading basis (apart from it being compulsory) that the monies raised will pay for roads. Well, some may go to that, but probably less than is raised. The rest? To “central funds”.
“National Insurance” is another and similar example.
I am sure that people would more readily accept taxation if they knew that X% was going to go to the NHS directly, perhaps by taking X% off income tax and having a new “NHS Tax” at X% (or whatever).
The above proposal would also make more rational the election-time arguments about money, taxes, and services.
There is a limit to how far funding of NHS, roads etc can or should be localized, however. There is always the danger that poorer areas will be hugely impoverished if dependent only on a local tax base. However, a degree of localism is, in my view, good. It enables people to relate easier to what needs funding and to the sources of funding.
Why get rid of the one channel that’s dedicated to culture, art, history etc? Quality educational programming is so important and should be funded just as much (if not more) then entertainment. What a shame..
…and to “balance” all the sensible opinions (with which I agree), let’s have the obligatory dim SNP tweet of the day:
I don’t watch BBC, ITV, SKY……..all foreign media to us in Scotland!
— KizzieWiz@KizzieWiz..ALBA Party (@KizzieWiz) May 14, 2020
Ah, yes, UK/English TV is “foreign” to a dim SNP partisan. Funny how these Scottish “nationalists” have (certainly Sturgeon’s SNP leadership have) no objection to the Jewish/Zionist lobby, no objection to mass immigration of non-Europeans into the UK (or even Scotland itself), no objection to Scotland being ruled or partly-ruled by the EU, NATO, the USA/NWO, “international” banks and financial institutions etc…Fake “nationalism”.
Lord Reith laid down his famous dictum for the BBC: “Inform, educate, and entertain“, presumably in that order. That dictum has been watered down to the extent that the BBC usually now fails to inform, or deliberately misinforms; it scarcely “educates” at all, even on BBC2, though it does —to some extent— on apparently-doomed BBC Four. As for “entertain”, it still tries to do that, mostly unsuccessfully, as far as I am concerned. Lowest common denominator.
The fact that opinionated football idiot Gary Lineker is (as I read) paid nearly £2 million a year makes the BBC worse than a mere absurdity.
The BBC pays millions to unpleasant “comedians” who trash everything worthwhile: Jo Brand, Jimmy Carr, David Baddiel; and many others.
The BBC is a negative force in national life now, in every respect. This latest insult to those of its viewers (and “licence”-payers) who have a mentality above gutter-level proves that it should now be shut down. It is not true “public service broadcasting” now, is an expensive anachronism and also a nest of anti-British propaganda.
Tweets by Peter Hitchens re. “the current situation”
Am I, @mwqa_limited? Have to read the Coronavirus Act? Did you note that it was passed without a vote? Do you not see that opposition to the government has been marginalised? How do you think freedom dies in a formerly free country? https://t.co/HV8DBOvURx
Excellent from @Sherelle_E_J Sherelle Jacobs @Telegraph: https://t.co/tMXOC7WcfT 'BBC has …pumped out No10's basic pro-lockdown propaganda message without question,genuinely convinced that they're holding the Government to account by spinning news items about a "No10 shambles".
I also very much doubt it it sweetie. That’s why I use my freedom to mock the powerful while I still can. @mwqa_limited I sense free speech hasn’t long to go. https://t.co/7god0jUEXu
Seems very likely that Covid-19 was present in Western Europe at least as early as December 2019 (one such case has been identified with certainty in France) and has since been quietly following the normal bell curve of such things, regardless of state panics. https://t.co/6RTupUvoCi
“A team of international researchers say mouthwash could destroy the outermost layer or ‘envelope’ of the virus, preventing its replication in the mouth and throat.” [Daily Mail]
“Spending time in the fresh air and sunshine can reduce someone’s risk of catching the coronavirus, a scientific adviser to the Government has said…Professor Alan Penn, a member of SAGE, the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, reassured that those who flock to the parks that the risk of catching the virus outside is lower…He said: ‘The science suggests that being outside in sunlight, with good ventilation, are both highly protective against transmission of the virus.’ Other scientists say they ‘totally agree’ with Professor Penn and advocate spending more time outdoors, where the virus is less likely to survive.”
So much for the “Stay at home, Protect the NHS, Save lives” nonsense-propaganda that has been pumped out by idiots to idiots for months now…
I wonder how many virtue-signalling serfs will be out “clapping for the NHS” this evening? Where I live, not many; I have only ever seen one or two clapping. We now know that in fact NHS staff face little if any more risk from Coronavirus than do the general population. The risky jobs seem to be those done by care staff, taxi drivers and, oddest of all, security guards.
Evening foray
Needed a few things from Waitrose. Far more traffic on the roads than seen for maybe 6-8 weeks. In Waitrose itself, still the ludicrous “social distancing”, which seems to have been ingrained in many; a couple of people jumped clear as I, carrier of the Plague (as it might be) approached. One vacant-looking woman was wearing a —clearly home-made– facemask.
In fact, there were few shoppers and no obvious shortage of any goods. One “interesting” event occurred. I was there just before closing, and got stuck behind a woman buying a mountain of shopping while also having an extended conversation about trivia with the cashier. While standing waiting for my turn to be dealt with, an announcement over the PA system: “Waitrose closes at 8 pm, at which time all staff will stop what they are doing and clap for our carers”! In other words, what started as a genuine and spontaneous gesture in a few places has become a socially-mandated, Government-promoted and corporately-enforced and compelled act.
As a matter of fact, I left the Waitrose building a minute before 2000 hrs, and was still in the car park when the designated clap-time arrived. I noticed that only the black-clad Waitrose marshals, two of them (I call them Handmaid’s Tale militia) actually stood outside the main doors and clapped for 10 seconds or so. I also heard a police or ambulance siren, which was probably not co-incidental.
En route back to Schloss Millard a minute or two later, I saw one family of 5 standing outside a house, having presumably clapped. I later heard that some idiot let off some fireworks somewhere in the area.
Das ist’s. Time to dispense with the “clapathon”, I think.
Any fatality from cancer, coronavirus or any illness is tragic, but we've become so obsessed with the fight against Coronavirus we've neglected these other patients.
This simply has to change or it will cost countless more lives.
— Professor Karol Sikora (@ProfKarolSikora) May 14, 2020
Lionel Shriver excellent here. Yet the Spectator still teeters on the edge of full-scale resistance. Where are you @douglaskmurray? If this isn't the madness of crowds, what is? . https://t.co/5CW12fxPU3 via @spectator
Something else worth noting is that below, about “social distancing” being “here to stay” (or so says thick Ugandan Asian Priti Patel, the inept would-be spy for Israel who is now, laughably, a Cabinet minister for the second time)…
Entirely believable, alas @sallycopper. As I have said, unless the government can be made to admit its policy was wrong, we are stuck with this forever. https://t.co/VXEUAOT0aD
But our teenage government are qualified to act? If you dismiss my qualification to comment, why do you accept this talentless, scared Cabinet’s qualifications to ruin the country? They are expert in nothing. https://t.co/nG1FvU1Tyg
Again, this by Hitchens hits the nail on the head. Why oh why do people simply accept without question what deadheads like Boris-idiot and little Matt Hancock say? I put it down to centuries-ingrained English or British deference, a class-based behaviour, though in fact “Boris” is a part-Jew, part-Turk, of very peculiar origins, and basically acting a part, the “upper-class” “Englishman”, neither of which he is. The training in privilege received at Eton, then at Oxford, helped. As for the rest of the present Cabinet, they are mostly Jews or part-Jews, Indians etc, and the few English ones of a “beggar on horseback” type, such as Hancock.
Sadly, a certain confident manner and a Standard English accent (perceived as “posh” by the plebs) gets many mediocre types rather far, not least many MPs. People really should look at the real levels of intelligence, education and other qualities of “our” MPs. Very poor, for the most part.
I am not ‘obsessed’ with it, the people who want to impose these futile muzzles on others are the obsessives. I simply point out that there is no good evidence for their use outside a few very narrow circs, and that the muzzles are a further humiliation of a cowed population. https://t.co/XIVzy5SMpU
I have to say that, though I am far from agreeing on everything with Peter Hitchens, he must have the patience of a saint, the endurance of a Trojan, and the hide of a rhinoceros to put up with the Twitter mob as he does. I admit that I myself would simply not have the patience. I can only assume that Hitchens perceives what he does on Twitter as a duty of some kind laid upon him.
Summed up in 60 seconds. We will not escape from these Maoist panic rules until the government (and much of the media) admit that throttling the economy and mass house arrest were a wild, disproportionate error. https://t.co/dNzjtt9lkS
And these muzzles are also no use . The WHO itself says https://t.co/xC6QBEr5Cm 'If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with COVID-19.' https://t.co/B2eMJGi5ss
ONS figures, up to 1st May 2020 = 3911 deaths for people up to age 64. Approximately 57 deaths per million for working-age people. Are we really locking down a country with those statistics? The elderly and vulnerable can choose to isolate themselves. https://t.co/Ey6102epggpic.twitter.com/7uDnW6SPU8
One aspect that made me laugh from the start of the Coronavirus “pandemic” (which is now, in the UK, not even an epidemic) is that all or almost all the pseudo-socialist mob on Twitter have been in favour of ever-more restriction of liberty, ever-more rules and ever-stricter “lockdown”. It is one of their psychological flaws. The need or perceived need to be told what to do.
One saw it in the Brexit situation, that idea that the UK’s civil liberties etc (free speech being the greatest), fought and struggled for over hundreds of years by British people could now only be maintained by a pack of tired Eurotrash politicians and bureaucrats in places like Brussels and Berlin and Strasbourg. In fact, the wish not to be free was palpable in the Remain camp.
Indeed, would anyone think himself “free” in an EU where to question any of the often absurd details of the “holocaust” fable is actually a criminal offence?!
We have seen, all through this “crisis” or scare, that the Labour Party official Opposition has been pathetic, just supporting the Government! Really really pathetic. I think I understand why Keir Starmer is doing it. He really, at heart, would like to see Labour as part of a fake “National Government”, thus giving Labour some reflected credibility as part of that Government. “Boris”, though, thanks to his unmerited and unexpected 80-seat Commons majority, does not need Labour. The result is that Labour is a total irrelevance.
Likewise the TUC. I remember from my teenage years the TUC as a vast, monolithic, almost Soviet bloc of unions, powerful and of national importance whether one supported or opposed their actions. Today on, I think, Sky News, up pops Frances O’Grady, its General Secretary, and all she can do, really, is bleat a little. A waste of space. The TUC still has 5.6 million members (Wikipedia; another source says only 3.69M), but that is only about 1 in 5 employees; if you include the self-employed, probably 1 in 6. Like Labour, near-irrelevant.
The Jew Shapps
The “Cabinet minister”, Jew Grant Shapps, on TV news this morning, posing in front of a small bookcase prominently featuring two Union Jacks. Surely, in view of his Zionist ideology and one-time position as head of the youth wing of Bnai Brith UK, Israeli flags would have been more fitting?
BREAKING: UK’s highest court @UKSupremeCourt rules that Gerry Adams was imprisoned illegally by British government when was interned without trial in early 1970s. The Supreme Court has quashed his two convictions for trying to escape from the Maze Prison @rtenews @RTENewsNow
Already on its knees because of unreformed libel law & rapacious lawyers, the press will be terrified now to print the truth about Adams and many of his IRA chums. Yet Gerry Adams was among those directing an organisation dedicated to mass murder. https://t.co/P5RAN5Syg5
I should be used to it by now but it still astonishes me that Gerry Adams has the gall to complain about violations of due process, given the IRA's record of torture, murder and disappearance. What due process did Jean McConville get? Robert Nairac? Tim Parry? https://t.co/482TXgyZib
— Niall Gooch 👍🇻🇦🏴🚅🏏✒ (@niall_gooch) May 13, 2020
In 1984 I was present when Gerry Adams and two other senior members of The PIRA arrived from Belfast for an Army Council meeting in Monaghan Town…I was there…I seen and I listened…Why dont you get John the piss artist to issue legal proceedings over that…Comfort Letter! https://t.co/O3zASsIsYY
— The Irish Observer (@theirishobserve) May 13, 2020
We live in a society where the likes of Gerry Adams have their supposed “rights” fastidiously upheld by a “Supreme Court”, but also a society in which Jez Turner was convicted and actually sent to prison merely for saying that Jews should be deported from the UK (as has happened several times in history), and a society in which Alison Chabloz was prosecuted and sentenced merely for singing satirical songs about proven “holocaust” fakes!
[above: the satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, at the piano]
Corbyn
I’ve joined 145 UK MPs and peers in demanding action over the Israeli government’s illegal plan to annexe large areas of occupied Palestinian territory.
Annexation would be an act of aggression – and the UK government should make clear now that would lead to sanctions. https://t.co/A5I9mZ7wvk
Not that Corbyn is “wrong” in this, but he has just spent 5 years supporting the mainstay of the Israeli/Zionist state, i.e. the “holocaust” narrative! Also, decrying anything supposedly “anti-Semitic”. In other words, he is against Zionism in the Middle East, but —in effect— supportive of it in Europe, North America and Australasia!
Ah, well, Corbyn is back in his comfort zone, bleating about matters far away, which he has no power to influence or change…
For more than six weeks I have been abused and smeared as someone who cares more about money than life, because I have warned that the smashing of the economy by the government was a major threat to the NHS. Now the govt admits it. Apologies welcome: https://t.co/i0LZCAU5Qh
'We have both an eye-watering number of avoidable deaths and a staggering amount of avoidable economic damage. The purported trade-off between lives and jobs – always a false choice – has instead spared neither. It is the worst of both.'https://t.co/LGS6BRnqkx
Actually, the “facemask” nonsense is the ideal excuse for anyone asked in court, “and why were you walking around covering your face?” The criminal defence barrister has a new tool to put in his box, along with “it was someone who looked like the defendant”, “his fingerprints were there because he had been there previously, and legitimately…” and (after conviction) “the defendant has had an unhappy life to date…”
I acknowledge it. @vidur_kapur I am glad Prof Ferguson has defenders, but I am not one of them . My own opinion of Imperial was greatly influenced by the Foot and Mouth outbreak. I saw the results of their advice. Farmers weeping as their healthy beasts were killed and burned. https://t.co/KklzCg11e1
I am sure that laughter is the best weapon against this comic-opera despotism of Dear Leader Kim Jong Son and his dreaded Health Commissar Mat Hang Kok. https://t.co/WldDjseWlq
@l1ttkeherbert . I love your use of ‘virtually’ to mean ‘not’ . As in , not Japan, not Taiwan, not Sweden. So not all. There is *no* congruence between shutdowns and reduced deaths. Absorb this, and you can start thinking, which I recommend. https://t.co/ThkKVyB3y3
NZ did not ‘nail’ anything. It had very few cases because it is so remote. No connection has been shown between its shutdown and the continued low instance of Covid-19 there. Why are people so *gullible*? Taiwan and Japan have no shutdown and few deaths. https://t.co/7XTHSAWKWG
Neither I nor anyone else has presented me as an expert @bedlingtonjamie. I am a journalist, disseminating the work of actual experts, largely denied a platform by flaccid or one-sided media. Why do you never attack the lack of expertise in the * government*? https://t.co/B0sbRiZKnX
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!
Oh shit man, we're through the looking glass now. It's defcon one. Even Schofield's gone renegade. https://t.co/Wkj8l1jyUv
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]:
This is really powerful from Piers Morgan. A grasp of the facts, and the bravery to articulate them, that most political editors and politics correspondents wholly lack. pic.twitter.com/gqFJyJfSUG
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
10% safe capacity. How long do you think the queues will be? Has Johnson EVER seen Oxford Circus Tube at 5pm on a weekday? When operating at 100%?. When they have to close it for safety? https://t.co/hiIulSMu1D
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
And the commute from, Surrey, Kent, middlesex, Essex, Sussex, and beyond? That's a bloody long way to cycle or walk? Absolute dotards, the lot of them.
It seems as if the reputation of Imperial College (whose advice triggered the Kim Jong Son Panic Policy, is not rising among other epidemiologists. https://t.co/q9UEgw616I
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…
You can pay a nany to come to your house daily, but your sister can’t watch your kd while you’re at work.Really saying the quiet part loud in terms of class.
— The Poisonous Euros Atmosphere Fan (@DawnHFoster) May 11, 2020
For some reason, proponents of the Panic Policy *really* don't like this story (barely covered in the UK) which shows large numbers of people getting Covid-19 after obediently staying at home: https://t.co/lBf0wM3xLr
I suspect the pressure for obligatory futile muzzles in public places and on pubic transport will come from the unions. Once again, reason and fact will be bulldozed by emotion and panic. https://t.co/30gMtr5a7J
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.
Yes, it is interesting that the government has so far paid no attention to this crucial work by Prof Carl Heneghan and colleagues at Oxford, still preferring the work of Imperial College. https://t.co/2pM3dJiZwS
Poor you. I grew up in a country where Oppositions *opposed* – Gaitskell & Bevan at Suez, most notably. This isn't a war. There's no threat of invasion. It's a plain dereliction of duty for opposition to coalesce with the government. Such coalitions are coalitions against liberty https://t.co/OvTZRQzPaw
Good for you @jazznbits ( though the scientific justification for the seven foot rule in the open air is thin to say the least). But I frequently encounter people (often wearing futile cloth muzzles) who are unsmiling and plainly scared. https://t.co/JSLR86JfYm
You miss my point @oneukba. The BBC, in almost all its coverage, accepts that the policy of throttling the economy and mass house arrest is right and justified. Like the Labour (non) 'Opposition', It criticises the government only for its operation and delivery of this policy. https://t.co/J5rvQwFZZw
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
Why are otherwise sensible people in the chattering classes defending the absurd Dear Leader Kim Jon Song? I'm not 'pretending to be baffled'. I'm furious and contemptuous at this simultaneously pathetic and nasty announcement of the continuation of a failed, wrong policy. https://t.co/A2QnBXE94X
Lord Sumption excoriates Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's absurd continued assault on our liberty 'The worst interference in our personal liberty in our history' .From 38 minutes in this BBC Sounds recording of the PM programme 11/5/2020. https://t.co/lC6zoldCSW
"Attempts to prove correlation between lockdown and a reduction in deaths continue to be thwarted by data showing no such correlation." pic.twitter.com/0NgkPbPRYz
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.
No, I haven't heard, and it is a good point. Lord Sumption pointed out that police obeying instructions of Ministers, rather than enforcing law, was the essence of a police state. Whole use of Public Health Act 1984 is highly questionable anyway. https://t.co/yNYx4Z2kBK
Most striking bit of Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's document 'Our Plan to Rebuild the Country After We Completely Messed it Up' is (Section 7, Annex B): 'You are very unlikely to be infected if you walk past another person in the street.' Now they tell us. https://t.co/Pwtbfy6Ff2
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]
Ghastly old Jewess Edwina Currie has apparently been on daytime TV, supporting the Government’s “policy” on “lockdown” etc. Poor Government!
Dear English friends you have my deepest sympathy Edwina Currie on #GMB said to Piers you can have a member of your family from a different household in your house as long as they are cleaning. The weird and bizarre messages from the Tories is getting weirder by the day
— THE BLACK SALTIRE#FBSI (@80_mcswan) May 12, 2020
Did Edwina Currie honestly just tell @piersmorgan he can see his son if he hires him as a cleaner basically? This Government and their representatives are absolute jokes 😂😂🤦♀️
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.
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.
University expansion and general dilution of educational standards. ‘Academic’ ’ really doesn’t mean all that much by itself any more. Like ‘A-level’ and ‘degree’ and ‘Master’s’ . https://t.co/ik0aUOif48
“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.
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.
We could get our sense of proportion back @petergreig6, and stop scaring ourselves needlessly into poverty, serfdom and ill health. https://t.co/sQgeMZ9pUy
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.
Oh , it is *so* simple, isn’t it @mriggorz. But in NY survey, 66% of new Covid-19 hospital cases had *stayed at home* . And there is now evidence that virus was present in W.Europe in December 2019, so was already widespread long before shutdown. No evidence that shutdown works. https://t.co/eOkW1opziy
1/4 Lord Sumption: https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 'According to the Office of National Statistics 91% of the [Covid-19] deaths have been of people with serious underlying conditions. 88% have been of people over 65…'
2/4 Lord Sumption https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 '…The number of deaths of people under 50 is so tiny that the ONS isn't even able to show it on their colourful charts. It is people who are fit and under 65 who are being asked to sacrifice not just their liberty…
3/4 Lord Sumption https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 '…but their jobs, their businesses and all the ordinary collective activities that make life worth living for something that hardly affects them at all….Its obvious that the NHS capacity has caught up…
4/4 Lord Sumption : https://t.co/CfxRH6J706 'The threat was always grossly overstated …that's why we heard nothing last night from the PM about "saving the NHS" and the phrase has been dropped from their slogan'. 'The worst interference with personal liberty in our history'
For not above the 5 millionth time @avrammeitner, there is not a 🕷️speck🕷️ of evidence for the government's claim to have stopped the spread of the virus by throttling the economy and introducing mass house arrest. Why do you 💥presume💥 this propaganda is true? https://t.co/D8zESLw05P
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.
How would it affect it @scepticalape? The govt can act ( or can fail to act) to protect care homes, quite independently of ceasing to deprive people of the freedom to live and work normally. The Utopian gesture is the enemy of the practical and effective. https://t.co/EsqfpMwfwo
Tripe @asbrexit I have merely pointed out that the shutdown of the economy and the stifling of personal liberty are deeply damaging and absurdly disproportionate responses to an overstated danger, and that there is no evidence they have done any good. https://t.co/hMUlsc0Rlx
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.
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”…
1/2 'In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die." https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
2/3 Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four…. https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
3/3 'And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins, As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!' https://t.co/hfzHdSV958
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.
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 disturbing fact is that the police in many formerly free countries now actively side with a political viewpoint, and failure to hold that viewpoint can swiftly bring you into conflict with a body established to uphold *law* not the govt of the day. This is a huge loss., https://t.co/Mqgl3ouPOT
My view is that so-called 'lockdown' (in fact a US prison term which should not be applied to free countries) has so far had no discernible effect on the pattern of the disease, if you examine all the affected countries. https://t.co/4KqCKwunXN
The unmistakable sound of one mind shutting @hyperglobalist. What a dreary life you must lead cut off from the ideas you fear. Tombs is a good writer, though in my view his ‘That Sweet Enemy’ written with his French wife Isabelle, is better. https://t.co/wg63pXP2tj
On April 5 at govt briefing Dr Jenny Harries, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer, confirmed that many deaths with Covid are not necessarily from Covid. She said: ‘These are Covid-associated deaths, they are all sad events, they would not all be a death as a result of Covid.’ https://t.co/UAGhuyLWfk
I know the difference between hard science, objective testable, falsifiable, experimental and predictive, and pseudo-science, which is none of these things but pretends to have the same status. Which is why it describes its guesswork as 'stochastic'. Big words baffle. https://t.co/HqNFNleQil
Heresy! An affront to our Dear Leader Kim Jong Al our All-Wise Helmsman ! But this article: https://t.co/pyWshJGJuY is also a calm, well-reasoned and researched corrective to much that has bene said about the Covid outbreak. Please read, but only if you are intelligent.
“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.”
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”?
Just as plans harden for a court challenge to Kim Jong Al's shutdown (see https://t.co/OCFvptAai1 A former govt law adviser says Human Rights laws should be suspended to prevent such challenge: https://t.co/F0PFubdewR Free country or what?
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.”
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]
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:
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.
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:
So in a nutshell. Step one: Make the impression of easing lockdown Step two: Give impossibly vague guidance on who can go to work Step three: Increase fines Step four: Use the vague guidance loopholes to rake it in Step five: oh and yes, every death a tragedy etc #BorisHasFailed
and to date there are 117,000 more tweets in the same vein.
So what? Now include Belgium and Ireland, the Netherlands, and Japan and Taiwan. Any serious analysis does not focus narrowly on a few countries. And it finds there is *no* pattern which links the severity of the shutdown and the number of deaths. https://t.co/u1rxNGlDsE
Define 'hysteria' @jlflanner. I'm not ordering people to stay in their homes,like Wee Willie Winkie, or sending out the police to arrest sunbathers, or spending £2.4 billion a day I haven't got, paying people to do nothing,on the basis of guesswork. I'm the one saying it's silly. https://t.co/0JHeYyEphe
Let me say it one more time. Many countries which have not shut down have had low numbers of deaths. There is no pattern which suggests that oppressive measures save lives. https://t.co/YnVqDgQaVx
I think the Churchillian pretence has never looked so thin. The Kim Jong Son statement was simultaneously boring and outrageous, then made ridiculous by clunky Blue Peter graphics. Like watching John Major declare war on Monaco. https://t.co/44cMGgvAoF
1/2 Watching Dear Leader Kim Jong Son's address to the people of the Democratic People's Republic of England, I noted this was the first time any head of government in this country had ever concerned himself with when and how I go to work, how I travel, who I meet.
2/2 All this absurd Maoist interference with private and personal matters was founded on a claim, unsupported by evidence, that he was somehow able to protect me from a virus. This is a classic distillation of fear into power….
3/2 As I watched this Maoist performance, it was amusing to think that only a few weeks ago this man and his party machine (now also flooding the country with fairy gold) were trying to persuade me that Jeremy Corbyn was a Marxist threat to freedom and the economy. Well, I never
Oh dear @kundesteria, how determinedly you miss the point. You actually *want* to believe that Big Brother can protect you from a virus, don't you? What all the evidence shows is that He can't. At some point you have to grow up and be an adult in a world of risk. https://t.co/W3E25SGO8U
And you *believed* that @hollinssquare? You gave power and freedom to the state and expected to get it back? What *do* they teach them in these schools? https://t.co/wKcdf3YYAz
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):
Debenhams is to shut five stores after failing to reach agreement with its landlords over rent, resulting in 1,000 job losses https://t.co/414K3gDR57
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.
Errrrr…Vitamin D deficiency anyone? Not exactly cutting edge science, but surely worth a mention, BBC? Don’t worry, no-one sane will think you’re being anything-ist. https://t.co/DivDMA6Toh
I start with one, the poster of which evidently imagines itself very clever:
#Iceland are doing brilliantly vs #CoronaVirus, confirming no new #COVID19 cases. Currently, just 3 patients hospitalised. It's only suffered 10 fatalities
Or…just maybe…because Iceland, unlike the UK, is not a multikulti, globalized, overcrowded dustbin of peoples…
Something better:
I think the best way of describing Dear Leader Kim Jong Al's approach to the Covid-19 epidemic is that he is like a man who sets fire to his own pyjamas to cure himself of the hiccoughs. And then says it worked because, lo, the hiccoughs have gone.
Much worse than that @emilyjanecrews. Champagne Trotskyist. Almost nobody can cope with the undoubted facts in this article, so everyone ignores it: https://t.co/ZlYmwTZQeHhttps://t.co/7hxeC6qr2g
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.
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!).
Thank you @ben_crocket , l hope so. I think the shift is among people working for themselves who really cannot afford to stay at home any longer. https://t.co/ZLsCOh3AZs
I disagree @jayfab69. I think the dangers of Covid-19 to healthy people of any age are gravely exaggerated by a government which wishes to distil fear into power. https://t.co/RytrTjvWTo
I'm sorry @steventomboots. I don't regard testing as a practical or useful response to the prob. The only thing that really needs to be tested is the intelligence of the government, a test they'd fail if properly applied, so requiring them to hand over to somebody sensible. https://t.co/FjGkOQY9xN
Deaths peaked on 8th April. French scientists have found evidence that Covid-19 was in Europe in December. Imperial College's modelling, which caused this panic, is increasingly under question. Expect – and demand – a major rethink soon. https://t.co/XFymlyxqGN
2/2 @johnnyclithero As a result I think the level of fear spread by government propaganda is wholly disproportionate to the problem, as is the policy of throttling the economy and mass house arrest, which do not seem to me to be effective. Happy to discuss further, if you wish. https://t.co/dGUWhKLKyA
Heard one whilst out on my bike Tuesday; can't remember the last time I heard one before then.
— Lee E Collins | Could do better (@Lee_E_Collins) May 7, 2020
Quite, it has been ages, 30 years, I'd guess, since before I went to live in Moscow in 1990. I have put it down the chemical warfare known as modern farming which has led to many British birds moving to the suburbs to find food. https://t.co/KDYr9rijGo
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:
This,ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of thing complete strangers,such as @taggio72 here, feel entitled to say to me because I dissent from the official view(this tweet is part of a larger mob troll attack).I regard it with contempt, but others might be scared from speaking out. https://t.co/IVMNX09iHW
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
The government have done something that weak, incompetent and insecure rulers often do. They sought to distil power from fear. In this case the spirit is too strong. The fear is so great they are trapped by it. https://t.co/fgR0bw95HD
Failure to protect care homes, plus very loose definitions of who died from rather than of the virus, which have enlarged the figures. https://t.co/4RGDGcgN22
Nope @F59man Powell was a fastidious man of great intellect and education. He knew that terms such as 'grinning piccaninnies' and 'whip hand' were the weapons of the rabble rouser. yet he deliberately used them in a speech calculated to boost his political 'career'. No excuse. https://t.co/U0yOznlyV7
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I think 3 of my neighbours clapped for 30 seconds this week! 😂😂#NHSclap When it started almost the entire street was out. They have to stop this nonsense.
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.
That would work better @danieljhannan, if the govt hadn't made such a huge propaganda song and dance over those hospitals. A competent government in what was once our tradition would have made quiet, effective preparations. This lot sought the praise, must now take the criticism. https://t.co/qpXNKu6BAb
Everybody has always hoped that unshut Sweden would survive without too many Covid deaths, haven’t they? Well, Sweden tames its ‘R number’ without lockdown https://t.co/KVNqf0iAP3 via @spectator
Yes, and our political leaders are less well-educated, less experienced and face no serious opposition. Our media, once adversarial, are consensual and in many cases co-opted into a sort of semi-official Al Ahram role. 1968 wasn’t all bad @harrypaye. https://t.co/M3BavK3TdK
Well, I would disagree with Fraser when he says Sweden 'tamed' anything. There is no evidence that any action (except handwashing and general common sense) inhibits the spread of the virus, which appears largely to follow its own course. https://t.co/HJvuKqbsP7
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.
Even the wild gamblers at Rishi Sunak's Treasury now see that the cost of the Panic Policy is unsustainable (as I have pointed out for several wasted weeks). How are we protecting the NHS by emptying the national bank account? https://t.co/8gweMek8mL
Isn’t it remarkable how unimpressive Mr Johnson is once the funny jokes stop? I am increasingly persuaded that he really doesn’t know very much, or understand the world very well. https://t.co/FaU8IaP6kC
More from the minor academic enablers of the new UK toytown police state
“Keeping the over-50s in isolation longer and requiring people to prove their age when out and about is ‘the safest way out of lockdown’, researchers claim.
A Warwick University study found that a ‘rolling age-release strategy’ was the best option to end the lockdown introduced to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.
The strategy proposed by researchers is based on the fact that death rates from COVID-19 among 50-year-olds are 20 times higher than deaths among 20-year-olds.
Study authors wrote that that police officers would have to be given the power to fine those caught breaking the age rule to ensure it was followed.“
The sheer cheek of the bastards! Everyone over 50 to be placed under house arrest “for their own good”, supposedly! It’s about time for there to be a national revolution in this country, to recover proper civil rights for British people, not the fake version peddled for 30 years. First up against the wall to be fake “experts” and minor official bullies but, even before these, those who make careers and money out of pretending to have the right to rule.
If anything like the measures proposed in the Warwick University study were implemented, the present government of idiots would do what Lenin, Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher failed to do, i.e. rouse the British people from their torpor, get them up on their feet and away from their (increasingly-Soviet style) TV boredom, and onto the streets.
Oh, look! The toytown police are at it again!
“An impromptu classical orchestra was shut down after police feared it would cause quarantined neighbours to flout lockdown measures amid the coronavirus outbreak.”
The UK is about to hit an economic reef that will knock the stuffing out of the present system. Millions on the dole, millions in unsustainable mortgage debt and, very likely and before long, a house price crash and millions of mortgage-holders in negative equity.
I apprehend that, before very long, even the compliant serf-mob “clapping for the NHS” etc will be rooting out their pitchforks.
Tweets seen
Which, being translated means :'How dare you dissent from the official view? Shut up before we shut you up! ' Not surprising that the symbol of this era is the face mask, covering the mouth and turning the wearer into a dumb submissive serf. @samuraislack https://t.co/JmHSylntLr
Because properly-fitted high quality masks are useful in hospitals, a completely different question from whether cheap unfitted scraps of cloth are effective on a bus. https://t.co/8wIjfmEt96
Perhaps I should (not for the first time) explain why I have been republishing so many of the tweets of Peter Hitchens. I do not agree with everything that he tweets or writes, especially about society generally, but as far as the Coronavirus situation, “crisis” and panic is concerned, he has been and is overwhelmingly right, in my view. It is therefore easier to republish his tweets than to write effectively the same views anew.
If anyone wants to see my assessment of Hitchens generally, here is my blog post from a year ago:
Another chart. When observing that the US has gone from 7 million to 38 million unemployed in 7 weeks, it should be remembered that it was apparently done to stop a virus with a case fatality rate of max 0.5%, as the NYC Governor admitted:https://t.co/RhEOXhZ9mdpic.twitter.com/yG8FqaLrI0
38 MILLION unemployed in the USA! Already. Here in the UK, the policy is not identical. We have the “kick the can down the road” “furlough” policy. That ends in June. Will the government continue it? The costs are enormous. However, many of those furloughed will find, in all likelihood, that they have no jobs to which to return once the wrongheaded “lockdown” is lifted. The same will be true of the very small business operators.
Bloomberg and other organizations say that UK unemployment will exceed the 12% that the Thatcher government achieved or suffered in 1984. The money received by (and by any other word) dole claimants in 2020 is far less in real terms than it was in 1984, thanks to Iain Dunce Duncan Smith, the Jew “lord” Freud etc. One sees huge discontent ahead.
As I predicted about 2 months ago, the “recovery” will not be the “V” type predicted by the pathetic Office of Budget Responsibility but more like an “L”-shaped non-recovery. Britain’s biggest trading partner is Germany, followed by the USA, as far as I am aware. Both are being badly hit economically.
[above: biggest trading partners in geographical Europe. See how many have Germany as their biggest partner; over 20 countries]
More tweets
No doubt @haguepaddy. AS it happens, I know of no evidence of *any* consistent relationship between shutdowns(or the lack of them) and the numbers of deaths. This is actually my point. Then there's the problem of the reliability of the death stats themselves. https://t.co/dCjXzTqv98
But Sweden did *not* copy the UK by adopting home imprisonment or crashing its economy. Britain did so in the fear of suffering 250,000 deaths. Pro-rata to population that would presumably mean that by not following UK, Sweden risked just under 40,000 deaths. https://t.co/HWspMZ1Heu
All those people who bizarrely place faith in 'testing' as the solution to the Covid problem might like to read this (wonder how long it will be before Capita is involved too) : https://t.co/FGuk9wdLKw
I think all these people saying that "lockdown" works might have a point. I mean, just look at how Sweden tops this chart of 14 countries.
Oh whoops … no that's Belgium, which has been on strict "lockdown" since 18th March. Oh and Sweden seems to be doing better than the UK. pic.twitter.com/ZzjIy9Qnyb
Mr Hitchens to you. We don’t know that because for almost all healthy younger people, Covid ranges between no symptoms and very mild ones. So why are we acting as if it was a rerun of 1918? https://t.co/3B32dJqcgl
Wearing facemasks or scarves impacts little on the transmission of “the virus”, though it may protect the odd person from being sneezed on; that’s true. As against that, again we see huge disproportion (as with the “lockdown”): millions forced to do something with the supposed aim of protecting a few, despite little evidence that it works. Steamroller going over any reasonable idea of civil or individual rights, too.
As I blogged before, the criminals will love this! Perfect cover and disguise. Eyewitness evidence even less reliable than usual; cctv far less useful to police and prosecutors. Not only because the alleged perpetrators will have been wearing masks or scarves but because everyone else in the area will have been! Perfect conditions for “reasonable doubt” (assuming that the police can identify a plausible defendant in the first place).
David Icke
I have never met David Icke, though I heard him speak once (at Wigmore Hall, Marylebone, sometime in the early 1990s, I think). He used to follow my Twitter account, before the Jews had me expelled, and he follows very few people, so he cannot be bad! Anyway, (((they))) are trying to shut him up by taking away his online platforms. Facebook has now censored Icke permanently. See the tweet by Jewish Zionist Rachel Riley, below:
The hate preacher was banned from Australia. Big arenas have rejected him, yet social media orgs allow him a megaphone (& pocket the profits).
Facebook have finally deleted him today!!
He needs the same treatment as Alex (Sandyhook is a hoax) Jones – across the board rejection. pic.twitter.com/bCqgEeh2hQ
Much worse than that. They symbolise the gagging of dissent which has accompanied this frenzy of fear-mongering and state worship. https://t.co/slrRSOpkmX
WE don't know because Covid-19, in most cases, has few symptoms. Sometimes, in fact quite often, it has none at all. This @blakmark55, might give you a hint as to why this fuss is out of all proportion to the threat. https://t.co/1UiovDQaCn
This (below) is also very true, but is far less amusing…
A few late tweets by Hitchens with which I agree
No, since 1989 the Left has lost its nerve, and increasingly sides and identifies with the state. This is one of the reasons for the rapid decline of dissent .. https://t.co/IKwRRp3uaX
Where is the evidence that crashing the economy and stifling personal liberty has saved a single life? Covid deaths peaked in England on 8th April. Most unlikely this was brought about by the March 23 Johnson panic. https://t.co/mFfVNoUtt1
There is no war, @mikekingwriter. Just a disease. It’s not Hitler. Quarantining the healthy is unprecedented. House arrest likewise. The crashing of the economy crazy and counterproductive on its own terms. Seldom has freedom of speech been more badly needed, and less exercised https://t.co/o9r0gTmY1q
“No child has been found to have passed coronavirus to an adult, a review of evidence in partnership with the Royal College of Paediatricians has found. Major studies into the impact of Covid-19 on young children show it is likely that they “do not play a significant role” in spreading the virus and are significantly less likely to become infected than adults.” [Daily Telegraph]
It is clear to me, as to many, that the “lockdown” need not have happened at all, with exceptions: nightclubs, pubs, the Underground (which was not shut down, incredibly), hairdressing places, mass events where people are likely to be breathed or sneezed upon e.g. popular or other music concerts, racecourses etc (though it occurs to me that racecourses could have continued to hold meetings safely if they had been willing to close the cheaper enclosures (Silver Ring etc) and Tattersall’s, leaving only the Members’ enclosures open and perhaps restricted to annual members).
Schools in particular need not have shut; the same goes for universities.
Economic enterprises are now shut, to a large extent; to re-open the economy or get it moving may not be easy. Meanwhile, Downing Street has been trying to invent statistics to support its “lockdown” “strategy” (kneejerk reaction):
They rang and asked us to put in a statement from them saying approval of the govt was not falling and asking us to change the headline. Despite 18% drop innet approval of govt handling in a fortnight, and 10% drop in confidence. Is that enough information?
All those for whom the state sponsored panic shutdown has meant release from commuting on full pay, and long sunny evenings consuming misted glasses of Waitrose Chablis beneath the Wisteria, might take a look at this: https://t.co/rqNM27bLPm
Dismal news of planned mass sackings from British Airways once again underlines the profound, lasting damage done to the economy by the Johnson government's mistaken panic measures. The sunny dreamtime is over. Hard, chilly reality is here. An inquiry is needed.
I had to look up “Matt Haig” on Wikipedia. Apparently a “novelist and journalist”, despite not knowing the difference between “less” and “fewer”. Well, after all, this is the UK. In 2020…
I looked at some of his tweets. Castigates this idiotic government for not having a stricter “lockdown” (wrongheaded) and for all Boris-idiot’s other failings (right). Presumably that includes Raab, little Matt Hancock and the other stupid wannabees like Priti Patel. I cannot disagree with him on that score.
Monsieur Haig does not seem to realize that, while a vaccine or medicine may be developed within months, it may take years. It may even never be developed. That is possible. Does Mr. Haig want the UK to basically just shut down for not even months, but for a year, two, three, four years?! I do expect people who preach to the assembled masses at least to try to think logically or realistically.
As always, one realizes how absurd and irrelevant Twitter usually is. That person has over 400,000 Twitter followers!
The skies are starting to fall in— Boris-idiot is no Atlas
It is a unfortunate concatenation of circumstances that leaves Boris-idiot and his Cabinet of fools in charge at such a time, and with an official Opposition so weak that it might as easily simply not exist.
Large employers are becoming or are already insolvent: Debenhams, Oasis, Warehouse, Swissport, Virgin Atlantic etc;
Other large employers are laying off thousands of staff, or will do once the State stops subsidizing furloughed employees: British Airways alone is soon going to let go at least 12,000.
Huge numbers of businesses are perforce not paying rent, for now immune from legal action. Once the special measures are lifted, there will be a crushing tsunami of corporate insolvencies, lawsuits and personal bankruptcies.
In the parallel universe that is Twitter, most of the tweeters (sheep? rabbits? Why dump human inadequacies on the animal kingdom?) support “lockdown”, even longer and/or severe “lockdown”. A good rule of thumb is that any viewpoint trending on, or popular on, Twitter is probably wrongheaded and/or an irrelevance. Like most tweeters.
I saw a report on Sky News (I think) about the effects of the “lockdown” on the retail and service sector. Regent Street shown, empty as if after a sci-fi alien attack of some sort. It may be that the ultra-wealthy will be back, buying jewels and furs, before very long. As for less well-padded consumers, I doubt it.
Court backlogs
The Lord Chief Justice has expressed a fear that huge backlogs are building up, in particular in respect of criminal trials likely to take 3+ days. At present, such trials are all stayed (frozen) because of the Coronavirus situation.
I imagine that many trials scheduled, and many others which might have taken place, will now either not take place or will collapse at hearing because of the fact that witnesses will (for various reasons) not be available or will not come up to proof. In the old maxim, “justice delayed is justice denied.”
Private-public partnership (in tyranny)
The new liberalism takes up the censor's blue pencil: 'Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices…'https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Look at (UK) TV ads, mostly by private-enterprise organizations of all kinds, at present. All promoting an almost-identical racially-mixed multikulti society, many also pushing the present “all in it together” fake communitarianism and “Conservative” government propaganda.
I have also blogged, previously, about how non-State quasi-monopolies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon etc) are imposing a (largely Jewish-origined) censorship on the world public.
'Digital surveillance and speech control in the US already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.' https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Of course, one cannot, as “they” tend to say, “blame” all of this on the Jews, or even on the overtly Zionist Jews; but you do tend to find that, behind most attempts to repress, control and censor socio-political expression (commonly called simply “free speech”), there is a Jew, or Jews, or Jewish organizations. Not always, but usually, and at the higher levels (in politics, msm, legal “regulation” too, these days) even more often…
The excuses for such “control” of “free speech” are various, put out to fool the public at large
Useful idiots are often found to lay the groundwork for repression:
'The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.' https://t.co/erLoXzT8WR
Forget most of Twitter, the most energetic users of which are either unemployed, effectively unemployed or retired, or work in relatively secure public service occupations. They will not be hit so quickly or so hard as the rest.
The fact is that the UK now has a hapless, hopeless government of idiots, headed by the least useful idiot of all. Yet so panicked has been the British public, that they all applaud or at least accept Boris-idiot, while his Indian Chancellor, Rishi Sunak (an “Indian giver”?), has been acclaimed by many in the msm and on Twitter as almost a conquering hero, throwing gold sesterces to the plebs of Rome. To some, Sunak is thus “proven” to be a suitable later prime minister, while to others he mixes the erudition of J.K. Galbraith with the intellect of J.M. Keynes. Not to all, though!
And this government of half-educated inexperienced bobo teenagers *is* qualified to take these enormous decisions? What qualifications have they to take this dangerous action @andyrossecon? I am arguing for caution, and against rash action. https://t.co/tHgqfWJJXR
No @andyrossecon, I'm much more sure, with every day that passes, that the crashing of the economy and the accompanying assault on personal freedom were grave and disproportionate errors. https://t.co/0w3yjtLq6C
I am not a 'libertarian'. I have seen no evidence which shows that curtailing liberty and wrecking the economy saves lives. It is a presumption, which far too many people accept without thought or question. https://t.co/GJzvzNFBuV
Went to get a few things at Waitrose. The usual bare shelves in the dried pasta and home-baking areas. Everything else seemed to be in good supply. A few last-day things on sale for as little as 10p (smoked mackerel pate); brie, bread rolls etc.
The sky was thundercloud grey-purple, but the little sun in front of that made the scene look like one of the most famous paintings of Shishkin, Gathering Storm
Waiting in line to enter the store, I noticed the oddness of the situation: the line of “socially-distancing” people (mostly men, presumably sent out to get something), the black-garbed and scarved Handmaid’s Tale militia (Waitrose marshals), pleasant enough but controlling the line. There was something about it that made me wonder what really is at the back of all this?
Professional hypnotists usually condition suitable subjects before placing them under actual hypnosis. Is that what is happening, on a grand scale? Whole populations being conditioned to behave in certain fixed ways, like human marionettes: to dress in certain ways at certain times etc, to stand a certain (almost completely arbitrary) number of feet or metres apart, like soldiers on parade? To move forward only on command (however amiably voiced)? To become accustomed to being corralled by keepers or marshals? Is this in fact a preliminary experiment on the populations of the advanced countries, to be deepened and quickened at a later time?
What might be the socio-political consequences of the UK Coronavirus “crisis”?
We are being told, usually impliedly, that once Boris-idiot has gathered up his courage (if any), “lockdown” will end (“in stages”…why? There is no credible reason; the usual hospitals are almost empty, the new instant ones have no patients) and everything will return to normal, with the exception that we may all have to wear scarves or even masks when not at home. The criminals (acquisitive department) will love that! Joking aside, in reality the so-far-lulled public might find that a very different UK awaits them.
In the UK, analysts are already saying that UK unemployment figures could top the 1984 peak of 12%. In other words, millions on the dole.
Businesses are going to collapse, not by the hundreds, or even the thousands, but quite possibly (if very small businesses are included) by the hundreds of thousands.
This could be social-nationalism’s moment, if a movement exists to harness the power.
Afterthought
I just realized: the socially-mandated clapathon (“Clap for NHS” etc) was supposed to be this evening. Nothing. Not a sign, not a peep. Is it petering out? I hope so. I have nothing but praise for most NHS staff, but this is not toytown North Korea (yet)…
[By Francis Lima – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, 
By AlwaysUnite – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, 
[above: tamarisk tree in the Negev Desert, Israel. CC BY-SA 3.0, 
[above: the satirical singer-songwriter, Alison Chabloz, at the piano]
Ian Robert Millard 