Tag Archives: University of Bath

Diary Blog, 9 April 2020

“Clap for the NHS”?

Hospitals may have broken the law by sending patients with Covid-19 back to care homes without telling their managers they had the virus. 

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has been told that several hospitals returned people despite suspecting – or even knowing – they were infected.” [Daily Mail]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8302039/Hospitals-probed-sending-elderly-care-homes-despite-KNOWING-coronavirus.html

Perhaps “imagine one hand clapping”…[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dan#The_sound_of_one_hand]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/reader-comments/p/comment/link/544411967

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/reader-comments/p/comment/link/544399709

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/reader-comments/p/comment/link/544385407

Roy Horn

Sad to hear that Roy Horn, of the stage act Siegfried and Roy, died. I recall seeing Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on TV feature them, when I lived in the USA about 30 years ago. They had a fabulous villa in the desert near Las Vegas and lived there with their huge and beautiful white tigers. In general, I don’t like stage acts involving animals, but Siegfried and Roy really loved their big cats (white tigers, lions, leopards). Pity that the full episode featuring them at home is not up on YouTube at present.

Britain 2020, where free speech is being killed

This ghastly little bastard, Evan Smith [see below] has written a book attempting to weasel about preventing people from giving lectures or speeches thought unsuitable by the “anti-fascist” thug element. What this is, is an attempt to intellectually legitimize censorship and socio-political repression.

https://twitter.com/evanishistory/status/1258920762343211010?s=20

It will be noted that one Aurelien Mondon of the University of Bath, and one Gavan Titley of Maynooth University (the place in Ireland from where most of their censorious Roman Catholic priests used to be churned out), have both endorsed this new book, for what such endorsement is worth.

My view has always been that there should be absolute freedom of speech on socio-political, historical and religious topics. If others want to restrict such freedom, and make it all about who has the biggest club or the most weapons, then that is their decision, their choice and their self-judgment.

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You get the idea…

Tweets seen

Labour continues to bump along the bottom vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”. Keir Starmer, dull as ditchwater, and Lisa Nandy, humourless and not particularly intelligent political-correctness banner-carrier. No chance. I suppose that both they and the Labour rank and file think that, in the UK’s unfair binary system of ping-pong politics, if people tire of Boris-idiot and his entourage, the electorate will have nowhere to go but Labour. Don’t be so sure. Look at what happened in and after 2015 in Scotland.

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

While Labour has rarely had so many committed members and supporters, they number only about 600,000. That may seem many, and actually does make Labour the largest political party in Europe, but is still only about 1%-2% of the electorate.

2019votermigration

George Orwell tried to imagine how a less free UK might be taken over. What he did not quite foretell was that old-established liberties and norms (eg the right to leave your house, to walk in the park with a friend, to stroll on a beach with the same, the right for shopkeepers to open shops, or the right to drive in the country for a change of scenery) might be extinguished, not by Stalinist despots and grim-faced soldiers, but by incompetent Old Etonians and Oxford graduates, by a part-Jew public entertainer posing as Prime Minister, and by a kind of toytown police patrolling roads to see whether someone is “allowed” to drive to the country, or the same uniformed clowns patrolling city parks and popular beaches to lecture old couples and solitary sunbathers.

It’s that that is so bizarre: the mixture of the repressive and the clownish; the mixture of emergent police state rigour, the remnants of “policing by consent”. Those elements and, of course, the utter illogic of it all, “sanctified” by the ludicrous and pathetic officially-mandated and promoted weekly community clapping sessions…

Police state Britain, 2020

I am the last person likely to be accused of being “pro-black” and/or “socially-liberal”, but this clip, below, showing a black man shot (with a taser) by Manchester Police, is truly shocking:

https://twitter.com/essmurph/status/1258537649368739840?s=20

What disturbs me more than anything is that the black was shot in front of his small child. Something like that could have lifelong negative psychological effects, with bad results for society too.

I do not have the facts behind what is shown, so do not want to be too swift to judge, but surely there must be an inquiry into this.

I have just now seen this, which seems to relate to the filmed incident:

“The times they are a’changing…”

Me like…

The combination of social disruption and economic disruption, combined with floundering by the System parties, provides the best chance for social nationalism since the 1930s, but that opportunity can only be grounded if there exists a social-national party or movement to act as lightning rod and vanguard.