Lies, lies, lies
By John Ellwood | TCW Defending Freedom | July 10, 2022
WHILE the public has been distracted by beer, cake and sleaze, our politicians have been consistently lying about their ruinous policies.
Here are the first 20 lies (there are many more):
They lied about Covid
They lied about the ‘vaccine’
They lied about the side effects
They lied about Covid passes
They lied about lockdowns
They lied about the pandemic
They lied about the consequences
They lied about their contracts with Big Pharma
They lied about Russia
They lied about Ukraine
They lied about carbon dioxide
They lied about the ‘climate emergency’
They lied about ‘green’ energy
They lied about heat pumps
They lied about electric vehicles
They lied about Brexit
They lied about immigration
They lied about taxation
They lied about their attack on agriculture
They lied about the influence of the WEF/Gates/all the rest
When the contenders for Downing Street open their mouths, remember the quote ‘Why is this lying b*stard lying to me?’
Sacrificing Children’s Needs for Those of Adults was Devastating and Must Never Happen Again
BY MOLLY KINGSLEY AND LIZ COLE | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JULY 6, 2022
A photo circulating on social media in summer 2021 shows a scene which would have been unimaginable in 2019. In it, a row of small children – aged four or five perhaps – line up holding hands. They are all masked. Behind them stands a row of adults, one of whom is the Governor of New York. None of the adults are masked, and their smiles beam out at the camera. It is an archetypal example of the inversion at the heart of our global pandemic response.
Over the last two years the youngest members of society have often borne the heaviest burden of Covid restrictions, even though the risk from COVID-19 increases dramatically with age. This has created a deep and seemingly perverse inequity between adults’ and children’s lives, spanning contexts and borders. Indeed, it has become so ubiquitous that it risks becoming normalised.
At its most extreme, this upending of society’s natural responsibility to care for our young has endangered children’s lives.
In autumn 2020, U.K. university students finally returned to their campuses after months of isolation during lockdown. Even pre-pandemic, mental health issues were spiralling into a full-blown crisis for this age group. Barely out of childhood, this extremely vulnerable cohort deserves our protection and care. Yet, with a single-minded fixation on ‘protective’ measures, the institutions’ leadership too often discarded any compassion for these vulnerable teenagers in favour of decisions that can only be described as inhumane.
In November 2020, with the second lockdown underway, University of Manchester students awoke one morning to find metal barriers constructed around their halls of residence. The reported objective was to prevent student households from mixing. Horrified by the lack of prior warning, students protested by tearing down the barricades. The university backed down, but for a nervous 18-year-old away from home for the first time, the effective imprisonment must have been terrifying, and the mental health consequences could have been fatal.
Then, at the nearby University of York, during the same period, health and safety guidance decreed that in the event of a fire, self-isolating students should wait behind to allow ‘non-self-isolating’ colleagues to exit first. This ludicrous diktat not only displayed a profound lack of risk balancing, but also a dereliction of a fundamental duty of care and an ignorance of basic safety standards.
In January 2022, in a particularly shocking example, officers in Texas arrested a teacher for suspected child endangerment after her son was discovered in the boot of her car at a drive-through PCR testing site. The mother allegedly told officials that she had transported her child in this way so she wouldn’t be exposed to his infection.
These distressing cases testify to something deeply dysfunctional in our societal response to Covid. We have normalised the mistreatment of children, collectively justifying it against the backdrop of the pandemic state of exception.
This treatment of children should be unacceptable in any civilised society, no matter what respectability it is given by the cloak of ‘public health’. Much has been made throughout the pandemic response of the need for public health to act in the interests of an ill-defined concept of a ‘greater good’. Yet it’s striking that a now reengineered concept of ‘public health’ has barely acknowledged children as part of the ‘public’. In its name, we have not only marginalised our young people’s wellbeing, but often actively put them in harm’s way.
A pre-pandemic 2019 Public Health England strategy document lays out its vision and goals for the next five years. The document notes that:
Giving children the best start in life is vital for a healthy thriving society. The foundations of good physical and mental health, healthy relationships and educational achievement are laid in preconception through to pregnancy and the early years of life, which is when many inequalities in health often begin.
In crisis, we chose to cast aside these principles and priorities and inverted our public health paradigm by requiring the young to sacrifice their own health and wellbeing to safeguard that of adults. In doing so, we have shattered our implicit social contract.
In the brutal landscape of the Arctic Circle, reindeer do whatever it takes to protect their young. When the herd is threatened, the animals stampede in a cyclonic formation, making it impossible for predators to target an individual. A swirling wall of adult deer on the perimeter shields the fawns at the heart of the circle from harm.
How is it that the U.K. and most Western democracies have failed this basic tenet of nature, systematically and deliberately placing our young on the outside of our societal herd and demanding that they shoulder a burden that should never have been theirs to carry?
Molly Kingsley and Liz Cole are the founders of UsForThem, which since May 2020 has advocated that children be prioritised during the pandemic response. This is an extract from their new book The Children’s Inquiry: How the state and society failed the young during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is out now and you can buy here and here.
Commendations:
A devastating analysis of a country’s failure to prioritise its children and young people during a global disaster.
Professor Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust Settles
Brave, urgent, fierce and vital.
Laura Dodsworth, author of A State of Fear
A truly important book. It needs to be read by policymakers and parents so that never again will our children be betrayed as they have been in the last two years.
Allison Pearson, Daily Telegraph columnist and bestselling author
About the book:
Despite being least affected by the virus itself, children and young people bore the brunt of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. When schools were closed, playgrounds taped up and play outlawed, children’s lives were closed down. The catastrophic impact on children and young people’s education, mental health, wellbeing, and life chances is becoming ever clearer, with the most disadvantaged suffering disproportionately.
In May 2020 Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley founded UsForThem to advocate – in an often hostile climate – for children to be prioritised during the pandemic response. Having heard from thousands of families, and having often clashed with policymakers, they have a unique perspective on how the state’s response to the pandemic has affected our children.
Here they document their shocking findings: how completely children’s health and welfare were sacrificed for that of adults; how policymakers appeared to disregard the harms they were causing; and how adults charged with protecting the young stood by and watched as children visibly struggled or slipped out of sight altogether. This dereliction of duty should haunt us for decades to come.
With exclusive testimony from academics, politicians, scientists, educators, and parents, as well as former Children’s Commissioners, the book exposes the problems at the heart of policymaking which led to the systemic and ongoing betrayal of children. From public health to politics, and from media discourse to safeguarding, the authors show how children were too often used as the means to further adult interests. Ahead of the public inquiry, the authors call for an honest appraisal of what went wrong, and commitment from stakeholders to reimagine – not just recover – childhood.
UK’s Online Safety Bill Shields Mainstream Media & Axes Alternative News Under Guise of Press Freedom
By Ekaterina Blunova – Samizdat – July 8, 2022
The British government has tabled an amendment to the Online Safety Bill seeking to prevent social media giants from taking down mainstream news without an appeal process. While London is declaring this to be a further boost to journalism protections, this new safety net is not meant to be applied on alternative media sources.
“Social media is now the main source of information about the world for 16-24-year-olds, and for all ethnic minorities in the UK,” explained Ellis Cashmore, honorary professor of sociology at Aston University in the UK.
“Yet platform moderators have practically unrestricted power to edit, and, if they wish, remove content. This is an unheard-of censorial power. I can’t think that, in history, proprietors have ever had such colossal power to control the flow and content of information, not just to one population, but to the world.”
The Online Safety Bill was first introduced in the British Parliament in March 2022 with the aim of holding social media platforms, search engines and various websites to account for hosting illegal activities or spreading harmful content.
The newly introduced amendment is “designed to guard against the arbitrary removal of articles from journalists at recognized news outlets when shared on social media platforms,” according to the UK government’s website. The authors of the amendment draw attention to the fact that half of British adults use social media for news, with Facebook*, Twitter and Instagram* being the most popular platforms. When it comes to 16-24 year-olds, the internet is the most-used platform.
Once the bill comes into force, social media giants would be required “to ensure recognized news publishers’ articles remain viewable and accessible on their sites even if they are under review by moderators.”
The introduction of the new amendment can be explained by the fact that the tech giants have proved themselves impossible to control, the professor explained.
“Tech companies operate in a relatively unrestricted way and governments around the world usually rely on the companies’ goodwill,” he said.
Still, the new amendment is focused on so-called “category one companies”, which include “the largest and most popular social media platforms”, and is not designed to shield alternative media sources.
The bill’s selective approach has been manifested by its earlier amendment obligating social media platforms “to proactively look for and remove disinformation from foreign state actors which harm the UK.” It specifically singles out Russian news, with an obvious reference to Sputnik News and RT – both presently banned by the EU and social media giants after the beginning of the Russian special operation to de-militarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.
“Freedom of speech and expression are highly valued principles in western Europe and North America,” says Cashmore. “But it is interesting that, after the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, there were no protests at the decisions of western governments to prohibit broadcasts and news supplies from RT, Sputnik and maybe a few less important news outlets.”
The professor notes that wiping Russian news from the media sphere is senseless given that many westerners are interested in learning Russian perspectives. “This does not mean they would be persuaded or even influenced, but they feel entitled to make up their own minds independently. They have been denied that facility,” Cashmore stressed.
“Since February, Russia, its people and its values have been condemned, denounced and stigmatized,” said the professor. “Vladimir Putin has been personally vilified. It is difficult to see this ending, at least not for 30 years. Russia has been excluded from many world affairs and many believe Russia and the other BRICS countries may coalesce into an international configuration to rival NATO. This would become a new world order.”
Meanwhile, the bill’s amendments have raised concerns among British campaigners who are warning the government that in its current form the proposed internet safety laws are “on the verge of being unworkable,” according to The Independent.
In particular, campaigners have advocated for a number of measures to strengthen freedom of expression and rights safeguards to better protect people from marginalized backgrounds and expand transparency requirements on firms to boost access to data for researchers and academics.
*Facebook and Instagram are banned in Russia over extremist activities.
Iran detains UK deputy ambassador for alleged spying
Samizdat | July 6, 2022
The UK’s second-most senior diplomat in Tehran is reportedly among three foreigners who have been arrested by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) for alleged espionage activities.
Giles Whitaker, deputy chief at the UK embassy in Tehran, stands accused of taking soil samples in a restricted area, according to a report on Wednesday by Iranian state television. Video footage released by the IRGC purports to show the veteran envoy, who was accompanied by family members, gathering soil samples in Iran’s central desert, where missile exercises were being conducted.
Whitaker reportedly apologized for the infraction and was expelled from the area. The media report didn’t specify whether he and the other suspects are still under arrest. The other detained men were identified as the husband of Austria’s cultural attaché in Iran and Maciej Walczak, a Polish university professor who was visiting the country under a scientific exchange program.
The IRGC’s footage purported to show Walczak and three colleagues collecting soil samples in a restricted area of Kerman province, where another missile test was being conducted. The Polish professor is reportedly from Nicolaus Copernicus University, which the Iranian broadcaster said is “associated with the Zionist regime.”
The allegations come amid stalled talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which former US President Donald Trump canceled in 2018. Under the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – signed by Iran, the US, Russia, China, the UK, France and Germany – Tehran agreed to limitations preventing nuclear weapons development in exchange for sanctions relief.
Wednesday’s Iranian media report suggested that the alleged spies were trying to help build a new case on “military aspects of Iran’s file in the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
Whitaker has been deputy head of mission at the British embassy in Tehran since November 2018. His UK government career has spanned more than three decades and has included stints at embassies in Moscow, Berlin and Islamabad, as well as at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
The IRGC has arrested dozens of foreigners on espionage charges in recent years. Rob Macaire, then UK ambassador to Iran, was apprehended in January 2020 for allegedly inciting protests over the Iranian military’s accidental downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet.
London wants social media to “proactively” tackle would-be disinformation from states such as Russia
Samizdat | July 5, 2022
London has proposed new legislation that would require social media to “proactively” tackle “disinformation” that allegedly pours into the UK from foreign states such as Russia and harms the nation, the government said on Tuesday. Platforms failing to do so will be subject to huge fines or could be blocked.
The legislation, which is subject to parliamentary approval, would oblige social media platforms to hunt down what the government believes to be fake accounts that act in the interests of foreign states and seek to influence UK politics, including elections.
The new amendment will also compel social media, search engines and other websites to crack down on such accounts in order to minimize the number of people exposed to “state-sponsored disinformation.”
“We cannot allow foreign states or their puppets to use the internet to conduct hostile online warfare unimpeded,” said Nadine Dorries, the UK culture and digital secretary, pointing out that the Ukraine conflict has shown that Russia is ready to weaponize information.
According to the proposed law, social media will have to make creating fake accounts more difficult and will also need to fight bots used for misleading the public. Ofcom, the British media regulator, will have the authority to fine any internet resources that don’t comply up to 10% of their global turnover.
The amendment is set be included in the National Security Bill, which will be discussed by British MPs next week.
This latest move by the UK government would directly target, for instance, the Russian pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus, who had pulled a stunt on UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Home Secretary Priti Patel. As a result, their channel was banned by YouTube in late May.
On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov criticized the West for harassment of Russian journalists, saying that Western countries have “buried the freedom of speech with their own hands.” In his view, Western governments intentionally create their own laws allowing them to decide what is “freedom of information” and what is “propaganda.”
Twitter censors story of British mother who died after reaction to Covid vaccine
By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | July 4, 2022
Three children in the UK were left without a mother after she died from a massive stroke determined to be caused by blood clots that formed after she received the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, but Twitter is labeling conversations about this information taking place on the platform as “misinformation.”
Previously healthy Lucy Taberer, whose youngest is a five-year-old boy, succumbed to the consequences of the Covid shot 22 days after she was vaccinated. At first, the 47-year-old experienced mild side-effects, described in reports as common, to then develop a bruise, skin rash, and pain that the doctors at first dismissed as being caused by kidney stones.
In the end, it turned out that the victim’s reaction to the vaccine had been to develop blood clots that proved to be fatal.
Her death certificate reads that Taberer died of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis and vaccine-associated thrombosis with thrombocytopenia.
Local media, including Leicester Mercury, reported about it, and Taberer’s step daughter tweeted a link to the story, but was quickly shut down by Twitter, which labeled the post as “misleading.”
To add insult to injury, she was advised to click another link, provided by Twitter’s “fact-checkers,” that would “explain” why health officials think Covid vaccines are safe “for most people.”
Since the tweet about the woman’s death did not claim the vaccines were unsafe for most people, it remains unclear what logic drives Twitter’s censorship around the topic, other than the desire to stop any mention of the jabs in a negative context, whether true or false.
GB News reported on this, wondering if it wasn’t enough for a child to deal with the loss, but also “have to be insulted in their grief if they mention it on the internet.”
Host Mark Steyn noted that three guests who regularly appear on his show were among those awarded compensation after the UK government last week admitted Covid vaccines in some cases can be deadly. All three lost their loved ones to the vaccine.
But, he noted, social media have been slow (or not interested) in catching up, even as governments are starting to pay out compensation.
The Dutch Farmers’ Protest and the War on Food
By Kit Knightly | OffGuardian | July 2, 2022
This week, tens of thousands of farmers have gathered from all across the Netherlands to protest government policies which will reduce the number of livestock in the country by up to a third.
In a typical example of media weasel-wording, the press reports on this all headline something like “Dutch farmers protest emissions targets”, but this is a massive lie by omission.
The government policy being protested is a 25 BILLION Euro investment in “reducing levels of nitrogen pollution” true, but it plans to achieve this by (among other things) “paying some Dutch livestock farmers to relocate or exit the industry”.
In real terms, this ultimately means reducing the number of pigs, chickens and cows by about thirty per cent.
That’s what is being protested here – a deliberate shrinking of the farming sector, impacting the livelihood of thousands of farmers, and the food supply of literally hundreds of millions of people.
THE BIG PICTURE
While the scheme is allegedly about limiting nitrogen and ammonia emissions from urine and manure it’s hard not to see this in the broader context of the ongoing created food crisis.
The Netherlands produces a massive food surplus and is one of the largest exporters of meat in the world and THE largest in Europe. Reducing its output by a third could have huge implications for the global food supply, especially in Western Europe.
Perhaps more troubling is how this could act as a precedent.
This isn’t the first “pay farmers not to farm” scheme launched in the last year – both the UK and US have put such schemes in place – but a government paying to reduce it’s own meat production? That is a first.
That it is (allegedly) being done to “protect the environment” makes it a big warning sign for the future. Denmark, Belgium and Germany are already considering similar policies.
The Western world seems to be enthusiastically embracing quasi-suicidal policies.
I mean, paying farmers to reduce the amount of food they produce… while (notionally) threatened with war… in the midst of a recession… facing record inflation as the cost of living spirals.
Does that really make any sense?
That’s almost as crazy as refusing new oil and gas leases while the cost of petrol is going up.
Indeed, in a world beset by a shortage of fertiliser due to sanctions against Russia and Belarus, it would seem almost mad to complain about a manure surplus, let alone try to reduce it.
We’re well past the point where any of this could be considered accidental, aren’t we?
Put it this way – if the collective governments of the Western world were trying to impoverish and starve their own citizens, what exactly would they be doing differently?
UK cautioned about military aid to Ukraine
Samizdat | July 2, 2022
Scottish and Welsh ministers have said the British government took their budget funds for military aid to Ukraine, voicing concerns that it could set a precedent. The Treasury has told Scotland and Wales to contribute to a £1 billion ($1.2 billion) weapons package or have their budgets reduced.
Scottish Finance Secretary Kate Forbes said on Wednesday that Scotland agreed to provide the £65 million ($78.7 million) funding but only “on this occasion”. She cautioned that “this must not be seen as any kind of precedent,” while Welsh Finance Minister Rebecca Evans said she had been forced to set aside £30 million ($36.3 million) intended for “devolved areas like health and education”.
Devolved areas of the UK are controlled by ministers in the national parliaments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Evans said it was “not right” to use their funds for military aid and defense, a non-devolved spending area. At the same time, she added that Wales will continue to provide humanitarian support for Ukrainians arriving in the country every day seeking refuge from the conflict.
The Scottish government said the money would be used to help fund “sophisticated air defense systems and thousands of pieces of vital kit for Ukrainian soldiers” in order to assist Kiev in fighting off Russia’s military offensive. Scotland has previously independently provided £4 million ($4.8 million) in basic humanitarian aid – health, water and sanitation and shelter – for Ukrainian refugees.
According to Welsh Education Minister Jeremy Miles, there was “no consultation” on the question of military aid, although a UK government spokesperson told the BBC it was incorrect “to say the Welsh government was not consulted… they were consulted and agreed to make a contribution.”
Simon Clarke, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, asked the devolved administrations to contribute to a £1 billion fund to supply Ukraine with state-of-the-art equipment by either directly handing over the money from their budgets or by accepting a reduction from block grants they receive from Westminster.
The UK Treasury “strongly disagreed” with the Scottish minister’s characterization of the aid request, saying that various government departments had been urged to contribute through their underspend. It also refuted claims that the move constitutes a precedent for raiding devolved budgets for reserved spending areas. “This is a response to an extraordinary crisis”, the spokesperson was quoted as saying by The Daily Telegraph.
The British media has described the request as highly unusual, as such spending usually comes from Westminster.
The UK has been one of the strongest backers of Ukraine since the start of the Russian offensive four months ago. This week it promised to provide an additional £1 billion ($1.2 billion) to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces, taking the overall military aid given to Kiev to £2.3 billion ($2.8 billion).The package includes various types of weaponry, including M270 Multiple Launch rocket systems, light anti-tank weapons and armored vehicles.
Moscow has repeatedly warned against supplies of weapons to Ukraine from the US, UK and other allied nations, saying it will only prolong the fighting, while increasing the risk of a direct military confrontation between Russia and the West.
The concerns over devolved budget funds being used by the UK government came as Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Tuesday a target date of October 19, 2023 for a second referendum on independence from the UK.
Sanctions can be perceived as casus belli – Medvedev
Samizdat – June 30, 2022
Unilateral sanctions can be perceived as an “act of international aggression” and invoke Russia’s right to self-defense, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has warned.
Speaking at the 10th International legal forum in Saint Petersburg, Medvedev blasted the “cynical practice of unilateral restrictive measures against Russia, the illegality of which has been repeatedly emphasized at all levels.”
This practice is “somewhat akin to a declaration of economic war, as our opponents themselves say,” he added.
“Under certain circumstances, such hostile steps can be perceived as an act of international aggression. And even as a casus belli. In response to them, the state has the right to individual and collective self-defense.”
However, Moscow still holds “weak hope” that the West will abandon its “vicious practices” and “repent of its own stupidity,” Medvedev stated. “It is our hope that our former Western partners will have the courage to admit their strategic miscalculations, which, according to the UN itself, have affected more than 1.5 billion people and provoked a surge in global inflation, food shortages, and the growth of poverty,” he said.
Should such hopes not materialize, Russia “will live” on its own without the West, the ex-president explained. “Today’s world is not at all limited to the borders of Western countries,” he said.
Over the past few years, Russia has repeatedly been subjected to assorted sanctions by the US and its allies. The sanctions pressure began to grow exponentially after Moscow launched its large-scale military operation in neighboring Ukraine in late February. Since then, Russia has been hit by several waves of restrictions, ultimately becoming the most-sanctioned country in the world.
Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give the regions of Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.”
Vladimir Putin comments on Boris Johnson’s remarks
Samizdat | June 29, 2022
Speaking to journalists in Turkmenistan on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to questions about several recent remarks from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. During the latest G7 summit, the UK leader joked that his allies should take their clothes off for the photoshoot – to show that they are “tougher than Putin.”
“I don’t know how they wanted to undress, waist-high or not, but I think it would be a disgusting sight either way,” the Russian president quipped. “Everything should be harmoniously developed in a person, both the body and the soul. However, in order for everything to be harmonious, one has to abandon excessive drinking and break other bad habits, start exercising, take up a sport.”
Johnson’s another recent remark suggested that what he described as a “macho war of invasion” in Ukraine would not happen “if Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn’t.”
The Russian leader responded: “I just want to remind you about the events of modern history, when Margaret Thatcher made a decision to launch military action against Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Here’s a woman, deciding to launch military action. Where are the Falkland Islands and where is Britain? And this was dictated by nothing but imperial ambitions.”
“So coming from an acting British Prime Minister, this is not exactly a correct remark in regards to what is happening today.”
Guardian Pushes for Return of Masks, Mass Testing and Quarantine
BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JUNE 28 2022
Here we go again. It’s the middle of summer and the leading opinion piece in the Guardian today calls for the return of restrictions in response to rising infections and hospitalisations. In a piece introduced with, “a few small changes would make a big difference to millions of vulnerable people”, journalist Frances Ryan writes:
If you’re reading this in the U.K., odds are that by now you’ve had coronavirus: seven in 10 of us have watched the dreaded red line appear. You may have been stuck in bed with it twice or even three times by now; by April 2022, England alone had recorded almost 900,000 reinfections. When the public asked to “return to normal”, I’m not sure a regular hacking cough was what they had in mind.
Almost 900,000 reinfections? How will 1.6% of the population have coped with getting another cold?
Ryan continues:
It is an odd situation. Last week, Covid infections were reported to have soared by 43%, while hospitalisation from the virus rose by 23%. An estimated 1.7 million people in the U.K. tested positive over those seven days. Two million of us now have long Covid, with about two in five of those – or 826,000 people – having symptoms for at least a year.
What Ryan fails to mention is that Long Covid studies frequently find small to negligible numbers of additional symptoms compared to a control group, meaning the quoted figure is unlikely to be an accurate picture of the real impact of COVID-19.
Ryan again:
Back in February, Johnson said the Government had created a plan to start “living with Covid”, but what it really did was form a plan to catch and spread Covid. After all coronavirus prevention measures were dropped on April 1st – from the legal obligation to isolate if you had Covid, to the end of most free testing – the public were left wide open to mass infection. Even hospitals were told by ministers to ditch mask mandates, though some worried trusts have defied the rules and kept them. That all precautions were pulled back just when most people’s vaccine immunity was beginning to fade, and the virus was evolving to be more transmissible, gives a hint at how little logic ministers applied.
Since Ryan accepts that vaccine protection wanes, she evidently intends restrictions, sorry, precautions to continue indefinitely. Indeed, the plummeting of the infection fatality rate makes no difference to her argument, as “excessive focus” has been placed on deaths, she says.
One of the biggest problems facing Britain’s attempts to quell the virus is that this Government doesn’t really want to. There is hope – the number of people dying from Covid has reduced since its peak – but excessive focus on this has long hidden the fact that loss of life has never been the only thing that matters: how many people are infected with the virus matters too. A strategy that lets the virus rip through the population increases the risk we all face, be it from surges, new dangerous variants, or in developing long Covid. Fundamentally, it means accepting a reality where it is deemed normal for many of us to be (possibly severely) sick, from a virus whose long-term effects – and the effects of repeated reinfection – we still know little about.
Once again, the plight of the vulnerable is deployed to justify indefinite restrictions on everyone – a logic which would destroy most freedoms given the opportunity, as we have seen in the last two and a half years.
There will be few greater casualties though than the 3.7 million clinically extremely vulnerable people, especially the 500,000 who are immunocompromised and can’t get much or any benefit from a booster jab. Trying to avoid the virus in a country that has forgone all safety measures means risking your life when you pop to the shops. Ministers who are content for repeated coronavirus infection to just become part of British life are content for isolation to be part of clinically vulnerable people’s.
What does Ryan propose? The reinstatement of free lateral flow tests – as though there isn’t an economic crisis on, and we haven’t spent enough over-testing ourselves for colds; the return of the legal requirement to isolate for those with a positive test – a measure extremely disruptive to education, employment, health care and everything else; and financial help such as sick pay for those isolating – more magical money. Plus more of the vaccines she has acknowledged don’t work for long.
And, inevitably, masks: “Wearing masks in busy and enclosed spaces again is the right thing to do; just under half of Britons (48%) reported wearing a face covering when outside their home last month, down from about 95% during the January Omicron wave.”
From a sceptical point of view, it’s depressing that nearly half of people still say they’re wearing a mask – though since far fewer than half the people I see out and about are actually wearing a mask, this poll probably reveals more about the biases of polls (and what people say to them) than the reality on the ground.
Then Ryan lays it on thick:
Unless we wish to sign up to getting repeatedly sick for the foreseeable future, and to the risk of long-term disability from long Covid, we are going to have to bring back low-effort protective measures to curb it. A recent public health campaign in Ireland, which encourages people to think of clinically vulnerable people in their daily interactions, shows how easy it is to do things differently.
Former Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam recently said the rise in infections was nothing to worry about and that even he had stopped wearing his face mask. But will he think again now, if respectable opinion starts to shift in the direction Frances Ryan and others would like?
Let’s hope this is just an anomalous op-ed and not the start of a trend. After all, if this is what they’re saying in June, what will they be saying in December?
Climate Change Committee Warns Government Must Go Further To Limit Warming
By Richie Allen | June 29, 2022
The UK government’s official advisers on climate change have warned that much more needs to be done to persuade people to fly less and eat less meat in order to meet climate targets.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) says that unless policies are radically improved, the UK won’t achieve its target to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
According to The BBC:
The committee is an independent body advising on climate policy. This report is an annual review of progress to MPs.
It does praise ministers on two issues: it says the government’s renewable energy programme will save people £125 a year on bills by 2030.
And it congratulates ministers on promoting electric cars – even though it says more charge points and more electric vans are needed…
The committee agrees that carbon-cutting policies are now in place for most sectors of the economy – but it says there’s “scant evidence” that these goals will be delivered.
And it warns that ministers need a back-up plan, including measures they may prefer to avoid such as asking the public to change behaviour by eating less meat and flying less.
The chairman, Lord Deben, told BBC News that recent climate extremes were “very, very worrying”. He continued: “The public should be proud of the UK setting best targets but I’m very worried that there’s no convincing programme for delivering policies.
“I’m seriously worried that we are not moving fast enough to avert real catastrophe.”
Legendary Australian Geologist Ian Plimer has just published a new book entitled “Green Murder.” I’ve just finished reading it. I wish every man, woman and child on Earth had a copy to hand.
In the book, Professor Plimer forensically annihilates the claim that man-made Co2 is responsible for global warming.
He warns us that ludicrous net zero policies will result in ruined economies, the destruction of the global food chain, permanent travel restrictions, the death of civil liberties and worldwide unemployment.
Each and every claim in his book is backed up by peer-reviewed evidence, yet you’ll never hear Ian Plimer on the BBC.
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The Geopolitics behind the War in Yemen (I)
By Mahdi Darius NAZEMROAYA | Strategic Culture Foundation | 30.03.2015
The United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia became very uneasy when the Yemenese or Yemenite movement of the Houthi or Ansarallah (meaning the supporters of God in Arabic) gained control of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa/Sana, in September 2014. The US-supported Yemenite President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi was humiliatingly forced to share power with the Houthis and the coalition of northern Yemenese tribes that had helped them enter Sana. Al-Hadi declared that negotiations for a Yemeni national unity government would take place and his allies the US and Saudi Arabia tried to use a new national dialogue and mediated talks to co-opt and pacify the Houthis.
The truth has been turned on its head about the war in Yemen. The war and ousting of President Abd-Rabbuh Manṣour Al-Hadi in Yemen are not the results of «Houthi coup» in Yemen. It is the opposite. Al-Hadi was ousted, because with Saudi and US support he tried to backtrack on the power sharing agreements he had made and return Yemen to authoritarian rule. The ousting of President Al-Hadi by the Houthis and their political allies was an unexpected reaction to the takeover Al-Hadi was planning with Washington and the House of Saudi. … continue
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