The brevity of this post is out of proportion to the enormous importance of the subject. But I want to let you know I am thinking and working on it.
It is a recognised pattern for dictatorship to commence with emergency measures designed to combat a threat. Those emergency measures then become normalised and people exercising arbitrary power find it addictive. A new threat is then found to justify the continuation
It is by no means clear to me that it is a rational response to covid-19 to tear up all of the civil liberties which were won by the people against authority through centuries of struggle, and for which people died. To say that is not to minimise the threat of covid-19. It is also worth pointing out that a coronavirus pandemic was a widely foreseen eventuality. People keep sending me links to various TV shows or movies based on a coronavirus pandemic, generally claiming this proves it is a man-made event. No, that just proves it is a widely foreseen event. Which it is.
The lack of contingency preparedness is completely indefensible. It is partly a result of the stupidity of Tory austerity that has the NHS permanently operating at 100% capacity with no contingency, and partly the result of the crazed just-in time thinking that permeates management in all spheres and eliminates the holding of stock.
It is incredible to me that the UK is willing to throw away some £220 billion and rising on Trident against a war scenario nobody can sensibly define, but was not willing to spend a few million on holding stock of protective clothing for the NHS against the much more likely contingency of a pandemic. What does that say about our society?
Anyway, we are where we are. Nobody knows how deadly this virus is. There have not been, anywhere, sufficient reliable large general population samples to know what percentage of people who get the virus will die. We just do not know how many people in the UK have had it and not got seriously ill. My suspicion is that in a couple of years time it will be discovered the mortality rate was under 1%. But I do not know, and I do not blame the government for making worst assumptions in the absence of reliable scientific evidence. Personally, I am obeying lockdown and would advise others to do so too until the situation is clearer. But I do not want to see the police harassing people for going on a long walk or posting a letter. It really is a problem to have police empowered to stop and question a citizen for just walking in the street. It is also a problem that Peter Hitchens is being reviled for saying, in essence, little more than that. When you can’t criticise restrictions on liberty, you know society has entered a very dark phase indeed.
I would feel much more comfortable if they were open about what they do not know. All the excuses for not testing people rather than admit they did not have the tests rather rattles trust. The ability of the rich and well-connected to access tests also rattles trust.
But none of this justifies rule by fiat – if Parliament cannot sit, I personally believe it would benefit the nations of the UK to have no new laws for a while. There are too many laws already. It does not justify banning political gathering. I don’t recommend anyone to gather, and I don’t imagine they would gather, but the evil of banning political activity is much more serious than the danger of four lonely people in Solihull getting together to talk about coronavirus restrictions.
It certainly does not justify banning jury trials, which the Scottish government has just dropped from today’s Bill after a revolt led by Joanna Cherry. The bill still weakens the defence in trials by allowing pre-taped video evidence and dispensing with the right to cross-examine. If the accusers had been allowed to get away with their lies in the Alex Salmond trial without cross-examination, the result might have been very different. For God’s sake, if you cannot do justice, suspend it. Do not dispense rough justice.
This article is entirely free to reproduce and publish, including in translation, and I very much hope people will do so actively. Truth shall set us free.
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Craig writes “I do not want to see the police harassing people for going on a long walk or posting a letter. It really is a problem to have police empowered to stop and question a citizen for just walking in the street”.
Of course I agree with this, but the coronavirus regulations state that you must have a “reasonable excuse” for leaving your house, which suggests that leaving your house is an offence unless you can prove otherwise (hence the use of the word “excuse”). This must come into conflict with Human Rights Act article 5 on right to liberty. I am just wondering if there are any lawyers out there who will question or challenge the legality of the term “reasonable excuse?” as being incompatible with right to liberty?
I am not a lawyer but I think the whole terminology is imprecise and liable to interpretation and badly thought out. These instructions should be more defined and not left to individual police to apply. A similar problem also arises with advice about going to work only if you can’t work from home.
I feel that it is a deliberate ambiguity that in some ways absolves the government of making hard decisions.
I think the police need to prove that Coronavirus is really that dangerous. The evidence that it is is seriously sparse. Yes, people are dying, but no, they are not dying in radically greater numbers than a normal winter flu cull. Adult minds know that death is predictable, lots of people die every winter and there is nothing unnatural about that either.
People need to stop making out that millions ‘being infected’ is a bad thing: the vast majority are asymptomatic and will contribute to herd immunity. Not getting healthy people infected now means greater possibility for future spread next winter.
I had not long stepped out of my home yesterday for my once a day solo exercise, I almost always wear walking boots as I have the ankles of a weakling and they stop my ankle twisting, causing pain and a lay-off from normal exercise.
Anyway two posh ladies chatting at the end of a drive, commented that I seemed to be going out for a hiking session.
Thought police alert.
I said I was going out for a five mile walk, my once a day exercise.
This woman told me I was only permitted to go out once a day for one hour.
I didn’t put her straight but continued to do my five mile walk.
There will be curtain twitchers, soon, denouncing us to the police, so even more restrictions can be imposed on the willing populace.
As far as I am aware you can walk as far as you like, whilst not meeting anyone to socialize, fraternize of naziize.
Indeed. Unless you live in Wales, you can go out for exercise as often as you like. (Legally.)
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2020/350/regulation/6/made
“The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020”
That’s England, not Scotland. This is Scotland, not England
I took an educated guess, based on population numbers, that Michael Norton and/or any other readers, were more likely to be in England.
But sure, here is the Scottish equivalent: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2020/103/regulation/8/made
(Not my fault that it isn’t structured as conveniently as the English one for some reason.)
It’s the blog of a Scottish Independence supporter, so most readers will be Scottish. The blog does have a lot of articles that aren’t about Independence though, so it’s not immediately obvious.
We are where we are through nothing more than a political choice and no more so than when Prime Minister May told the NHS nurse during a television broadcast that there was no magic money tree.
This parsimonious incompetent Conservative government in Britain is now disseminating the myths of how much funding they are throwing into the fray to combat the crisis for which they are solely responsible. There is no discernible conclusion where any future monies will be spent save in the industries that are already awash with cash. Dyson springs to mind. These same people who are presently running the country have ignored health warnings for years that the NHS, if hit by a crisis, would be unable to cope and they have escaped the situation this nation is now in for the past two winters through nothing more than pure luck.
Last week the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 ran pieces showing the country applauding NHS staff for their contributions to the nation’s wellbeing and repeated again last evening in recognition of care workers. All these seemingly intelligent people duped by a media supported government that has its population acting like performing seals without the skill of simultaneously balancing a ball on their noses.
Shardlake, there is a video on Skwakbox showing Tory MPs standing and clapping when they defeated the Labour motion of giving the NHS staff greater than the public sector 1% cap on pay rises. So, to see them standing in these organised ‘applause’ propaganda is ridiculous.
The definition of deprivation of liberty and of the common law tort of unlawful arrest are a bit fiddly as soon as you’re talking about things that aren’t quite a jail with bars and guards. See the Supreme Court’s judgment in R (Jalloh) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department from last February, which was about house arrest: https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2018-0137-judgment.pdf
Long story short, given that the “reasonable excuse” includes exercise to your heart’s content, at least in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, it isn’t a deprivation of liberty.
Crispa, remember Lord Sumption’s view – the Police are citizens in uniform and are there to uphold/enforce the LAW. Guidance and regulations are not the LAW!!
Unfortunately, there is an exception in the ECHR (including others) that allow for the curtailment of civil liberties but namely: e) the lawful detention of persons for the prevention of the spreading of infectious diseases.
I mean, I get it’s important for at risk people to not catch the virus but I defy anyone that tries to argue that the police haven’t and aren’t currently acting in a tyrannical way. If this continues, it’s going to end very badly and I don’t want to stick around to see that.
Ref Scotland
The number of deaths linked to coronavirus in Scotland is now into triple figures
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, in her daily briefing, confirmed that 126 people have now died – up 50 on yesterday
She explained that the big jump in numbers was due to a recalculation of the figures
Of the 50 newly recorded deaths, 10 were based on a confirmed lab test which was in keeping with the way daily figures had been reported
Ms Sturgeon said the other 40 were cases not previously notified “due to delays in family liaison”
The number of infections globally will reach a million within days, the head of the World Health Organization says
In the UK, nearly 950,000 people have applied for Universal Credit benefits in the past fortnight
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-52096326
According to Johns Hopkins global Coronavirus infections exceeded 1 million earlier today.
What a massive surprise that the WHO continues to disseminate misinformation.
Mary …died FROM Covid19 or died WITH Covid 19 ?
Grafter. Sturgeon use the word ‘with’.
‘New figures have shown that a further 50 people with coronavirus have died in Scotland, bringing the total to 126.
Nicola Sturgeon said the figure included 10 deaths over the past 24 hours, as well as a further 40 from previous days.
The Scottish government said 2,602 people had now tested positive for the virus, up from 2,310 on Wednesday.’
From that BBBC link.
Mary
A lot of people who for example have diabetes may then die of pneumonia. Those who have heart failure may occasionally die of falling and breaking their neck. But those in here who have suddenly become qualified to make diagnoses of cause of death will argue that the first patient died of diabetes but with pneumonia, not of pneumonia, and the second patient died with a traumatic cervical spine fracture and of heart failure. These pundits of course know better than doctors and others who merely just ignorantly look after these patients.
“Linked to”.
Does this mean they died as a +direct+ consequence of contracting Covid-19?
Or does it mean that they happened to test positive for the virus at the time of death.
This is a +massive+ difference.
“Linked to” is a very vague and journalistic type of expression, which can mean whatever people want it to mean. Be careful about accepting it at face value.
Yes. “Linked to” by whom, on what grounds – and why?
Consider these statistics as of 10am today (02/04/2020):
From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
China: Deaths: 3,318. Recovered: 76,408. Recovery to death ration of 23.0.
From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
Spain: Deaths: 10,003. Recovered: 26,743. Recovery to death ratio of 2.67.
From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
Italy: Deaths: 13,155. Recovered: 16,847. Recovery to death ratio of 1.28
From https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
UK: Deaths: 2,352. Recovered: 135. Recovery to death ratio of 0.057.
For the UK, looked at the other way round, 17.6 people die for every one recovered.
Something is very wrong with the UK approach because, according to the Wayback Machine, no one has made a full recovery since 24th March. The 135 figure is not changing – can that really be true?
I’m not really sure how the recovered figure is arrived at. I wouldn’t put much stock into them. Presumably almost everyone one who had the virus more than 4 weeks ago and are not dead, have recovered.
“I’m not really sure how the recovered figure is arrived at. I wouldn’t put much stock into them”.
That being so, how much stock should we put in the other figures?
Your argument is totally fallacious, it is like trying to compare apples with oranges. Spain and Italy have had the infections longer and therefore it is not surprising that there are more people who recovered in Spain than in UK. As sickness comes first and then after a period those who die will do so relatively quickly, whilst convalescence takes a few weeks perhaps you can immediately see that these figures will be skewed. Wait and compare after a few months.
Ah well, the great slaughter of the Great War repeats itself.
The so called lions led by donkeys will repeat as the population goes without tests, masks and ventilators. The men had a good death today was a reported comment from a blimp all those years ago.
No doubt Boris Johnson and his chums will have the same blimpish honour. And yes, talking about a good death . But to quote Wilfred Owen all these years ago –
“ if you could hear at every jolt the blood come gargling from the froth corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud, of vile incurable sores on innocent tongues – my friend, you would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, the old lie, dulce et decorum est., pro patria mori.“
As true today as the UK goes without ventilators. Let us hope they die well for history repeats.
I’ve had this horrible virus and it started 4 weeks ago but still coughing, much less than previously but coughing all the same. I also have a persistent back ache and exhaustion. It’s probably the worst flu I’ve had but would rather die than see these draconian infringements on people’s right to move. I got it way before the lock down and isolated myself as most sensible people would do for 2 weeks. I had enough lemsip and cough medicine to get me through the worst because no one had stock piled at that point. There was a moment when I thought I might die. Severe stabbing chest pains. Terrifying but still I’d rather have died in agony than give up human rights. Why are people so dumb?
Ros “I’d rather have died ”
Because this is not about you or me but everyone therefore everyone need to make the effort to curb this virus.
Thanks for that Ros. I have been 8n bed sweating my cohones off, for 4 days end of Jan. Had no flue vaccibation last Nov. And i felt aweful. Still feeling tired and challenged after putting my broccoli in the ground and chopping a few logs. Breathless as well. But no temperature since, or coughs, just general aches.
The 4 days were bad and my echinecia input was high, take it regularly during winter.
I will take an antibody test when I can find a auitably priced one.
Hope you get better soon, Ros.
One must make the distinction between measures taken for public health reasons and those taken for political purposes. At present there is a public health reason to in force the measures and we must endure this but fight the continuation of these measures once the need is no longer there.
Two remarkable features of the C19 upheaval (for the moment) are
1. The high level of global coordination, with the rulers’ story varying little from country to country.
2. The absence of Christian religious leaders from the front of stage. In Britain, that the political parties are agreeing with each other on the essentials (with Nigel Farage mopping up some of the Daily Express-reading market) is hardly surprising. But the absence from the limelight of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, and the priesthood generally, is extremely salient. C19 is being sold as a pestilence that could wipe out much of the population, that could lead any among us to develop symptoms at any time, that could kill any of us within a week or so, and to which we will almost all lose people we know. If in alienated conditions there is a time for a surge in religious belief and practice – which for the majority of the British population would be Christian – here it is. The only possible reason that Welby and Nichols have more or less stayed out of it, or at least have operated only in a low key way, must be that it has been agreed between them and other figures in the ruling class – between Downing Street and the Church of England, and between the British State and the Holy See – that stay out of it for the time being is what they will do. Even if Dominic Cummings called them in and told them “No time on the BBC for you, boys, and if you resist I’ll whack you”, they are not exactly without resources and they could post videos to the internet.
Hence we get the revolting national clapping ritual, “Clap for the NHS”, obviously straight out of the Cummings playbook – a “third coming” of the “Tories Love the NHS” meme and a truly embarrassing case of the Tories smirking out of the sides of their mouths at the rest of the population.
Could it be a case of “Not IHS [1] but NHS”?
The situation will change. Christianity is bound to enter the picture. I will be amazed if I am wrong. We are 7 days from Maundy Thursday, 8 days away from Good Friday, 10 days away from Easter Sunday. It will change. [2]
Notes
1) Note to pedants: never mind that the H in IHS is a Greek capital eta.
2) Ask Mrs Cummings, Mary Wakefield.
The Christian role? In many states of the US, you’re excused from lock-down to go to church. The Bible Belt has the greatest proportion of offenders against lock-down rules. Pearly Gates, here we come.
They should contemplate Matthew Ch 6, or even Isiah 26:20.
“. The high level of global coordination, with the rulers’ story varying little from country to country. ”
Well every country is facing the same problems so what else would you expect?
The rulers of all countries lie, and they don’t always lie the same way. I might expect some by now to have said they believe or at least suspect that they are under biowar attack. This may change. Some probably will say so within a few weeks, maybe first through the mouths of “retired intelligence officers”.
Have been expecting this in some form, N_ . It has been absent from the narrative completely. Two years after Salisbury, +/- a few days. Who knows?
Why we are often wrong footed is exactly that governments don’t lie all the time but some of the time. But we don’t know at any one time whether they are lying or not.
N_ I do agree with you overall. I always am deeply sceptical of this ‘all from the same hymn sheet’ in times of political dramas. However, the internationally renowned scientists, medics and virologists are forming gradually quite a large dissenting voice to this – and they are on the ground and have expertise. So the scientists, medics and virologists are currently the dissenting voice here and all the politicians are peddling the same propaganda.
The current measures are extreme but many agree, sensible to reduce infection rates.
One thing which I feel surprised about is that religious worship is not listed as a reasonable excuse to leave the house. To many religious people this would be unthinkable. There would be howls of protest from some quarters, yet I hear nothing.
Either religious leaders respect the need for these measures, or the media are purposely ignoring the outcry from some of the more religious.
“but many agree”
Many agree that Julian Assange is a dangerous spy.
Many agree that Craig Murray is a professional troublemaker with a baseless grudge against the British establishment.
Many agreed that Joseph Stalin was the greatest socialist leader of all time.
Many agreed that Adolf Hitler was the greatest ever German.
Many agreed that Pol Pot was the rightful leader of Kampuchea.
Toby I assume that you are not one of the many that you refer to?
The measures are severe enough in some directions and not exactly severe enough in others and this is the dissonance that this is producing. It is not serious enough in that there is no proper early diagnosis of all cases and proper quarantine of these cases. This would entail the government providing proper quarantine facilities as happened in China and South Korea, and also proper curfew, which means people staying at home with home delivery arranged, again as happened in China. Proper lockdown of highly infected areas and limited transport to these areas.
Instead the government is going for coercive police measures and criminalisation of individual perceived misdemeanors.
you need another beer, mighty drunken – maybe you will see sense when you’re sober
N_
Christians believe that consenting adults can do what they like, and by extension democraticaly elected politicians can do the same. Other religions still have a concept of major sin instead if laissez faire. It is grossly insulting in a Christian society that feminist extremists invent a rule that male lasses faire is rape while female lasses faire is liberation.
Similarly , if Christian leaders started criticising Tory politicians for austerity, it would be breaking the BBC fatwa that Corbyn is spendthrift waster of taxpayers money. Tories have earned the right to waste taxpayers money by imposing austerity. Labour have not.
Every second of BBC broadcasting on radio 4 is spat at us by the right wing commentariat. I can’t listen to more than the bare headlines. People are saturated with right wing preaching from their first morning cup of tea to their last bedtime cocoa.
The pulpit is occupied , and has been for 40 years , by doctrinaire , illogical , party political, state dogma. People go to church or mosque for a rest from this gonorrhea leaking of right wing dogma.
Are you asking the church, or indeed mosque, to take a stand against this oozing Thatcherite agenda? And if they did, do you think the oozes of party political pus would stay silent about it?
Take no notice and carry on is the Human condition.
Conservatism is the incarnation of stupidity – so what?
“Christians believe that consenting adults can do what they like…”
As far as I know, that is the exact opposite of what Christians believe. On the contrary, the believe that the only way to live a good life is to resign themselves absolutely to the will of God and abandon their own selfish desires.
Tom Welsh
Correct. But N_ was talking about the gas and gaiters at the top of the C of E, like Justin Welby.
“1. The high level of global coordination, with the rulers’ story varying little from country to country.”
It is hard enough to plan and coordinate a summer beach BBQ involving two families and two cars.
Think of all the variables and potential snags involved! In situations like this, how often have you ended up with two lots of charcoal but no food – or drinks but no cups? Or maybe ended up on totally different beaches?
So this high level of international coordination and the identical narrative is NOT coincidental. And it definitely didn’t “just happen”.
As for the clapping thing, maybe we shouldn’t laugh next time we see female soldiers crying hysterically when Kim Jong Un turns up at some military camp in the DPRK – or party members clapping themselves into exhaustion at one of his speeches. We’ve got an insight into how it’s done now.
As regards your point 1.
I made a post earlier on this point – India where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands die daily of easily preventable diseases, where abandoned children roam in their thousands prey to death and abuse and the ruling elite lifts not a finger to prevent this, the idea that this ruling elite are now pulling out all the stops to “protect the elderly and weak” is risible.
They appear to have their script like the rest.
Churches are shut, so Christians have nowhere to go.
They can retreat into their own souls, you know.
Marcus Aurelius always thought that that was a very peaceful thing to do…..
Might be a bit difficult in a small flat surrounded by screaming kids and an annoying husband/wife ?
It strikes me that retreating into one’s soul would be much easier, and more attractive, for an immensely powerful emperor who need lack for nothing.
J Galt
April 2, 2020 at 18:52
Yes Jack but is it labelled correctly?
This morning on the radio I was told that Eddie Large had caught coronavirus in hospital while he was in the terminal stages of heart failure, this evening he has died of coronavirus while being “treated for heart failure”.
———————————————————————————-
Yes J Galt I agree this is not acceptable. The underlying cause of the death of Eddie Large should be Heart failure. Covid-19. which Eddie contracted while in hospital, should be registered as a secondary contributing factor.
It is likely that Eddie was infected by a member of the medical team due to the lack of testing the front line staff, so they can be isolated.
Also the government are asking for around 250,000 volunteers to help in the crisis. Will they be tested before entering hospitals?
The nurses and doctors are not being tested.
“The underlying cause of the death of Eddie Large should be Heart failure. Covid-19. ”
Yes it is considered an underlying factor, this fact has been reported back in jan/feb, nothing new:
“studies have also shown that underlying health issues such as asthma, diabetes and heart disease can also make COVID-19 more dangerous, as the disease taxes already-burdened organs.”
“More than a third of American adults — 105 million people — are at higher risk of serious illness if they get infected with the coronavirus, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of CDC data. For most of them, their age puts them in danger: More than 76 million Americans are 60 or older. The remaining 29 million people are younger but have underlying health issues”
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/01/824874977/underlying-health-disparities-could-mean-coronavirus-hits-some-communities-harde?t=1585867278737
The majority of people dying with Covid-19 are old. Where are they getting infected? Probably most of them are catching it in hospital or from other carers.
It’s almost as if the
IHSNHS is telling them “If you’re over 70 and you’ve got one of the chronic illnesses that many people over 70 suffer from, and it gets worse, your chance of getting out of hospital alive has shot down, so don’t bother coming.”N_
Indeed at the same time many governments claim the hospital care needs to be for the elder/chronic corona patients. Something do not add up.
Just curious in case someone knows.
Are hospitals really operating these days? My tests have been cancelled and no date was given. My wife’s breast cancer surgery was cancelled with no date given. What is the procedure to actually get a treatment?
I received a call yesterday from a receptionist. She told me to expect a telephone appointment with a doctor shortly as my pain has been going for a couple of months now.
“What is the procedure to actually get a treatment?”
A cynic might reply, “Be wealthy or well-connected”.
My understanding is that as an initial move hospitals cancelled virtually everything on their books. They discharged as many patients as possible. Then rearranged themselves operationally and staffing wise for the COVID-19 influx. That put them in as good a position as they could be. This of course is subject to the normal hospital inefficacy.
Now they are seeing how they are coping they are starting to start up their activities that can continue whilst the bulk of the hospital is in CORVID-19 mode, in many cases it may depend on the physical layout of the hospital. In some areas many hospitals will be functioning almost normally whilst other will not.
Your best bet is probably to be as nice as possible to receptionist or anyone who rings you, at least that way you might get to what is actually going on.
“Your best bet is probably to be as nice as possible to receptionist or anyone who rings you, at least that way you might get to what is actually going on”.
Yet another way in which the UK is coming to resemble the USSR or a banana republic.
@ Ivan Sharkov April 3, 2020 at 12:20
‘Routine’ tests and surgery have been cancelled, but emergency cases continue.
I expect this is not unrelated to the fact that Covid -19 could become a ‘hospital’ disease, like MRS, due to so many doctors and nurses spreading it due to lack of protective equipment and testing.
They don’t want (nor do we) hospitals becoming abattoirs.
Ivan
I think you will get a ‘virtual consultation’ on the phone with a doctor just for a quick check and assessment, then told that when the situation is clearer you will get an appointment.
Thank you all for the advice
Ivan, surgery for breast cancer cancelled that is a shocking disgrace to any civilised society and deeply traumatic for your wife. There is no reason why the NHS cannot undertake your tests or your wife’s surgery. They aren’t exactly overwhelmed you know. I took my neighbour to her appointment last week, hospital was like empty.
Jo Dominich
The hospital we went to was definitely not overcrowded. She had a date set for 2 April but it got cancelled two or three days before that.
And yes, it was traumatic.
Is that the Kaiser from Kaiser Permanente, the giant US healthcare insurance outfit, to whom Hunt (the would be Tory NHS privatiser) paid a visit with members of 13 NHS trusts?
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/correspondence_from_kaiser_perma
What did Hunt do to the NHS – and how has he got away with it?
There are two stories about Jeremy Hunt. The nice, sensible guy whose only mistake was upsetting the junior doctors. And then, there’s the real story.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/what-did-jeremy-hunt-do-to-the-nhs-and-how-has-he-got-away-with-it/
Doug Scorgie yes – remember also that he had kidney failure and had had a heart transplant when he was 62yrs old.
Thank you for this clear minded essay.
Yes it was foreseen and as far back as 2015 the National Institutes of Health commissioned a researcher to create a chimeric Coronavirus and here is a 34 page document which is very technical about how mice responded to this lab created coronavirus. The only way to know if this current outbreak is related to the chimeric coronavirus is to genetically sequence it which I would not hold my breath on them doing. However it is Beyond me when they knew that a pandemic was possible that they did not warn people over four years ago or at least hospital so that they could update their emergency preparedness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/
Then this from 2015
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502?fbclid=IwAR2sf94fXdg0Mgj3JKcE_vkd4GvxqhxXihenyz5xB0whH0C4Ksm8zTZdCHM
“The only way to know if this current outbreak is related to the chimeric coronavirus is to genetically sequence it which I would not hold my breath on them doing. “
But this has already been done and published by several groups. Moreover its structure was shown to be of a natural virus without any evidence of being a chimeric man made virus.
Wrong. Making bluff, sneering put downs of intelligent posts with no evidence is low quality trolling.
In my original post I made it clear that this virus wasn’t genetically engineered and that is established.You made the following up with no evidence offered.
‘ Moreover its structure was shown to be of a natural virus without any evidence of being a chimeric man made virus’.
Low quality trolling
Takes one to know one.
Mr SA and Mr Tom Welsh are possibly the most level-headed contributors here. Where did you bat in from to save the planet with your daft Tory ideas.
I don’t know who’s you’re addressing me but I am not a Tory. I’m not even from that land of romanized mongrels known as England. I am an American with Scottish Heritage praise the Lord anyway I’m a member of the green party as if that matters when we’re dealing with this situation. This is not a political matter this is an emergency matter and I have great respect for Craig Murray and I have read his blog entries for many years. And even though I am an American I do have a right to express myself here. The post was allowed to go through. I think everybody’s suffering from a little bit of cabin fever but having spent so much time at home. It’s the same way here. But the citations that I offered clearly indicate that the United States knew over 4 years ago that this was possible. That is the point I am trying to make.
“But this has already been done and published by several groups”.
Ah, at last you have made a falsifiable statement, SA.
Sources, please. Which groups? Which papers? Which can be read where? Even credible media reports of those results would be better than your unsupported, arm-waving word.
Tom
Unless you are trolling, I have not made any falsifiable statement. As you have been very active here you know I have posted links before to prove what I said, but you and your colleagues ignore them. I shall not waste my time, which is what you would like me to do, repeating myself, you could just go back and check if you are interested in the truth.
“Unless you are trolling, I have not made any falsifiable statement”.
You make my point for me. A falsifiable statement is one whose truth can be tested, and hence which has a definite meaning. Statements that are not falsifiable are, in practical terms, meaningless – although they may sound impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
Would you kindly provide me the academic citation for that including the sequencing of the proteins?
Also, my main point to posting this is that over four years ago they knew that this pandemic was possible. The organism that the engineer was even more deadly. The National Institutes of Health had halted what is called gain-of-function studies because of the risks involved but in this guy situation they allowed his research to continue. They offered no warning so that hospitals could change their emergency preparedness plan. I, as a registered nurse, would have appreciated it very much.
Also kindly ignore my dictation errors. 33 years of nursing practice serving people like you and others ruined my arms and my back and my neck so I have to dictate and I am not always the world’s best proofreader because we all have limitations
Slightly off topic, but in the authoritarian vein, has anybody seen this from arch Blair acolyte John McTernan. A memo to Kier Starmer.
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/april-2020/five-rules-for-ruling/
Thanks for sharing that Huw, an eye opener for me. I’ve heard Starmer is the short odds favourite, and establishment choice.
Huw Manoid
Excellent advice for Rebecca Long Bailey to implement on Tory Sir Keir. Goose gander . Isn’t there a place for superfluous and super annuated politicians that lost you the last election with their daft ideas?
John McTernan ran the Labour party’s election campaign in Scotland in 2015 together with Jim Murphy. They lost 40 of the 41 Labour seats. Anyone who takes advice from McTernan must be off their heads.
.
Ambassador Murray,
May I say what a brilliant and incisive mind you have?
Combined with an exquisite ability to write in beautiful, concise manner.
These talents, when joined together, produce an incredibly powerful and compelling narrative. Also a pleasure to read. Brain-food.
Two rejoinders. Firstly, you are absolutely correct about the dichotomy of current “rushed” Coronavirus legislation and the Human Rights Act. It is likely to be contested. Hopefully, with a be-spidered, broached girly swat type sitting as judge.
Secondly, and I cannot over-emphasise the gravitas, as it may, through a tortuous, chess-game style of logic, lead to the place the majority of us wish to be. Independent.
Craig, you are onto something. Within your prėcis lays a thesis which may contain the keys that will unlock Scottish Independence. In short, in time, with 50 Italian doctors now dead and a similar number to be sacrificed in the U.K., at the altar of lethal Tory incompetence and the current SNP fifth column operating our government with, forgive me, Vichy Sturgeon at the top and Back Door Boris at the rear…
There. Will. Be. A. Reckoning.
I wish.
Exactly the timid mid level apparatchiks in totalitarian China delayed the publicity of knows Covid19 facts plus risked spreading:
How relevant was the fact that Wuhan was hosting its annual Party Congress sessions from January 6 to 17 in their decision-making?
This was crucially important. This system has gotten used to the idea that you cannot allow anything to upset the political atmosphere during those times. Ironically, in 2003 during SARS, it was the national meetings that were happening.
http://wuhanmemo.com/?page_id=230929
When I first read about the attempt to remove jury trials from Scotland I thought it was a first step in bringing a second case against Alex Salmond. Even with the change to rules of evidence which prevent cross examination that outcome may still be in the plans.
The lockdown on movements which are in place in most western European countries have no valid purpose in controlling the spread of disease. When you attempt to control infection you focus your attention on those who are infected. Separate them and treat them as China has successfully done. You do not focus your strategy on, everyone else, as is the case in Britain, USA, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Now ask yourself where is Covid19 still a growing problem.
I look at this problem from the opposite side of the world in New Zealand where isolation provides some level of protection. Unfortunately our government is adopting the same un-reasoned approach to disease control. The origin of our problems is partly legal and partly cultural. Our government enlisted our Civil Defense Organisation (the only one with legislation in place to limit free movement) and Police when creating a group to deal with Covid19. They added the Health Ministry but it seems they play a smaller role.
Civil Defense and Police are organised for natural disasters. They have a common strategy which in brief is, stop all activity by the public, make everyone stay where they are until they can be marshalled somewhere else and take control of all materials so they can be rationed out. That also describes our government’s strategy Covid19.
Covid19 is a public health problem that needs a medical solution. A solution determined by doctors, public health officers and virologists. Civil Defense and the Police have nothing to contribute to that. However their presence explains why the strategy is about controlling people not viruses.
If you want to know why a Civil Defense response is the wrong one, the answer is simple. After a flood the rain stops. After an earth quake the ground stops shaking. After an epidemic the disease agent, virus or bacteria, remains. If lockdown is the answer then it has to be permanent to achieve its goal. Some politicians around the world are just beginning to realise this.
Now that we have destroyed the western economies of the world for this year the next thing we have to start measuring is the cost of that. I do not mean the financial cost, I am talking about the health costs. Medical problems, family violence suicides, drug death and death rate in total are known to rise in economic recessions. Compare that to the current year to date death rate for Europe. Including Covid19 deaths the number who have died this year are less than either of the last 2 years.
So the pass law plans are out there with Johnson’s government announcing that it is considering the introduction of immunity passports.
Having had the virus is no confirmation of anything. Indeed, different strains of flu arise every year and no one has ever suggested passports to allow people to travel, work, or whatever.
No, this is authoritarian nation ID tracking control. Tried and tested all those years ago in South Africa computer technology can take population control to a new level – and as so many of us have feared this viral outbreak, like the proposal to dispense with jury trials, is the end game of control.
Apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany its all the same and it’s here.
South Korea coped well with the virus, finding a balance between personal freedom and restrictions. They made a coronamap site.
http://coronamap.site/
The personal data of infected people are not published, only information about their location and movement.
—
This method of public awareness was developed in previous (MERS-cov) epidemy.
“For epidemiological investigations… allowed to use any personal information about potential infected people, even without their consent. … restore the exact travel routes according to GPS data from mobile phones, study recordings from surveillance cameras, purchase history from credit cards, electronic travel cards… with the exception of the name of the patient, the authorities … are obliged to make it public.”
source in russian
https://ria.ru/20200402/1569403959.html
And, oddly enough, so did Japan, sometimes decried in the west for its regimentation.
And so did Sweden and the Netherlands.
More or less business as usual in all these three, with just a few special measures for the most vulnerable.
Japan deaths/1 million= 21
South korea deaths/1 million = 196
Sweden deaths/1 million = 551
Netherlands deaths/1 million = 858
???
Deaths in Netherland 1339. Population Netherlands 17m. Deaths per million = 78.
etc.etc.
Steph
You are right, I checked the wrong column:
Here are the stats for death/1 million people.
Japan: 0.5
South Korea: 3
Sweden: 30
UK: 43
Netherlands: 78
Those statistics are only as reliable as their definitions. Deaths/million population depends on which deaths are recorded as “caused by Covid-19”. However many countries are instead recording deaths as “with Covid-19”, which may lead to grossly exaggerated figures for deaths, and thus for deaths/million.
Tom Welsh
No. These people contracted corona and died, many had previous conditions.
“No. These people contracted corona and died, many had previous conditions”.
And you know that how?
Tom Welsh
They tested these people before or after and concluded they had Corona.
As for previous conditions, it has been reported that various previous conditions is more in the risk of severe illness or death.
I.e. one person have hypertension but live a normal life, but if this person contract Corona there is a high risk of death.
Re “more or less business as usual”
It is possible to check to see if it is business as usual elsewhere, there are lots of webcams located in public spaces that you can look at to see how active they are. Having looked at a few in New York, Germany, Italy, Holland, and the UK I notice that there is very little signs of public activity anywhere, it you have a gander at flight map data sites it is a similar story, it does not look like business as usual. Lockdown is not a misnomer.
Exactly Tatyana, contact tracing and quarantine is a tried and tested public health method for infection control. All western countries seem to be studiously ignoring the lesson from South Korea – I see it included in graphs, but that’s it, no comment or questions. In Scotland we are getting extensive reporting on Spain, where things are bad. Conclusion: the media are, as usual, not even trying to hold government to account, and are spreading fear and panic on purpose. The economy is being trashed on purpose. There is not much us plebs can do though.
The assumption is that they want a worse outbreak than necessary, they want to institute draconian tracking controls on everyone.
Why deliberately do stupid things unless that was the plan all along?
Well, they already can do extensive surveillance, legally in the uk, and the population is pretty much complacent, so I’m not convinced by the tracking control argument. I think it’s more likely to do with the wealth gains the wealthy can make during a global economic crash, and then years of austerity afterwards. A certain group of people benefitted substantially from the financial crash of 2008, and why wouldn’t they want another nice little earner, and they can influence decision making because they are the wealthiest people – wealth inequality on skates. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see which it is.
Thanks for reminding us of this excellent example, Tatyana, something that could easily be implemented in rural areas here in England.
I know that a person has died in the.next village, but I could also bewarned by such a map of themovents of his/her last contacts. Transperency must not necessarrily end privacy.
Privacy in S.Korea comes second to public health and I take my hat off for their responses and examples set, equally of that in Taiwan.
Hope you are all well and life goes on as normal as can be.
All four countries in the two East Asian standoffs are well prepared for biological warfare defence (and attack). The US isn’t well-prepared to defend its own home territory against shee-yit. Deaths attributed to the coronavirus (add caveat here) are already 8 times higher in the US per population than in China, and the US graph hasn’t even reached an inflection point let alone gone close to flat. The factor of 8 is likely to double within a week. The US president said he wanted to blockade the state of New York, and the governor of New York state responded by saying that would be tantamount to civil war. That is no exaggeration. That’s how cr*p the US defence capability is. That would never happen in today’s China, Taiwan, North Korea, or South Korea.
It’s worth thinking about the effect of terror attacks attributed to Daesh too. Would there be a “F*ck all that now, just withdraw and do a Kampuchea job on the way out” response? In any case, best stock up on car fuel if you can find jerrycans.
The grisly statistic of deaths per population has now risen to 10.4 times higher in the US than in China. I can’t imagine the “oh what a terrible calamity; all countries should pull together to fight it” line holding for long if the factor reaches 20. One doesn’t even have to take account of the bullyboy culture that prevails in the US and how the country has an infantile and deranged tweeting gobsh*te as its president. Things are going to change pretty soon in how the virus is framed as regards international relations – by Easter probably.
Newcastle woman arrested on suspicion of having travelled without a ticket.
On refusing to giver her name and address to police she is arrested under the Corona Virus legislation taken to court and fined £660.00.
That the conviction and fine was yesterday quashed with the British Transport Police confirming that they will not pursue any other prosecution it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the newly empowered apparatus of the state intends to use this new legislation.
Absolutely fucking terrifying. And now we know all these years ago why the early USA wrote into their constitution the citizens rights to bear arms lest they needed them to resist a bad government who had turned against them.
Well the state here with all of its meta data surveillance and analysis, facial recognition, ANPR vehicle tracking, the linking of banking, health records, passports, driving licences, travel records, monitoring of mobile phone locations, and now these emergency powers of arrest, detention tells you exactly what is happening.
The apartheid of austerity, political class under the elites is now in place and a yoke from which the underclass of you and I will never emerge.
In cold Russia it’s easy to track a person. The authorities don’t even need meta data. Nothing of those modern surveillance!
https://cs11.pikabu.ru/post_img/2020/04/01/7/1585737346196399022.jpg
So, be grateful to Europe for the warm climate and global warming in general 🙂
The fine and her sentence haven’t been quashed, the judgement would need to be subject to appeal.
Independent: “British Transport Police said it had conducted a review with the Crown Prosecution Service that ‘established that Marie Dinou was charged under the incorrect section of the Coronavirus Act 2020’. (T)he force said it had asked North Tyneside Magistrates’ Court for the case to be relisted and the conviction to be set aside.”
Ms Dinou’s address has been published. It’s in a street with large detached houses in Strensall, a village near York with a sizeable military population. Strensall is home to the Army Medical Centre which trains part-time territorial soldiers, mainly NHS medics and nurses, for action in war zones, teaching them how to how to set up field hospitals etc., with or without electricity.
There may be more to this story.
“And now we know all these years ago why the early USA wrote into their constitution the citizens rights to bear arms lest they needed them to resist a bad government who had turned against them”.
“A man’s rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box”.
– Frederick Douglass (speech, November 15, 1867)
Douglass was merely paraphrasing – though powerfully – the views expressed by Thomas Jefferson 80 years before. Those views lie at the root of American democracy (such as it was).
“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”.
– Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Stephens Smith (13 November 1787), quoted in Padover’s Jefferson On Democracy
Very powerful words from Douglass.
And not from some parody of a white supremacist, red-neck, right wing good old boy but from an African American fighting against slavery.
Yes. No florid arm-waving speeches, of the kind that were popular at that time. Just a quiet, sober statement of the facts.
If one has ‘Information Supremacy’, and if all other qualified voices have been silenced or dulled, one can steer the public mass. Hitler knew this, Pathe News knew this, and other people know it too.
Western worldwide media sings in unison and gets its narrative from one or 2 approved sources: Reuters, Press Association. The images come from a handful of press agencies, Ghetty Images … others.
Authoritarianism is the reason for this. As with monotheistic religions.
The magnificent Aldous Huxley spent a lifetime worrying about the ‘Enemies of Freedom’. He saw and feared the approach of a ‘Scientific Dictatorship’ where the worth of the individual human being would be utterly nullified.
Listen, if you will, to the talk given by him at Berkeley University Campus in 1962 called ‘The Ultimate Revolution’. It is about the engineering of consensus to make the race of man finally and absolutely, give up its soul, its free will and surrender its liberty.
Aldous Huxley Speech at UC Berkeley, The Ultimate Revolution 1962 – YouTube
Thanks for the link. In such depressing times, with so much evidence of idiocy and dishonesty all around, nothing is more refreshing than a long draught of freezing, penetrating honesty from one of our most intelligent thinkers.
Listening to Huxley’s talk, I notice that he says that similar numbers of people are very susceptible to hypnotism, placebo and other forms of suggestion. He claims that 20% are very susceptible, 20% hardly susceptible at all, and the remaining 60% lie in between.
If true, that explains quite a lot of the comments posted to such threads as this. One person in five is very strongly inclined to believe anything told them by “authorities” of any kind. One in five is very strongly inclined to resist pronouncements of authority – although we are liable to be persuaded by facts, figures and logic.
An important post Craig. Many thanks for sticking your neck out and making it.
When the corporate media and the controlled opposition all call for draconian curtailment of civil liberties in unison, government (very) happily obliges and big corporations are very obviously waiting in the wings with all sorts of security and surveillance “solutions” (look at Bill Gates’ ID2020), you are definitely right to be concerned.
All the more so, since this virus has stubbornly refused to be as dangerous as was predicted by the likes of Neil Ferguson: 500,000 dead, then 20,000, then maybe 5700 – all from a 13-year old computer model which he admits contains all sorts of unverified code…
You don’t have to be what the elite call a “conspiracy theorist” to see how states of emergency like this could very easily be used to crush dissent when the neo-liberal corporate system begins to falter. And now, with most people having been only too willing to throw away their freedoms on the basis of “fighting” Covid-19, the elites must have been hugely encouraged. Who would defend defend the right to hold a political meeting if it “endangered public health”? Well, we know the answer now don’t we?
And although I don’t like to talk about other sites here, to conclude I would just like draw people’s attention to what Martin Armstrong has been saying about this.on his blog at Armstrong Economics. He is most emphatically not a conspiracy theorist.
He believes that there is something big going on here, coordinated across most “western” states, which will fundamentally shift the balance of power towards corporate elites and curb individual freedom. I sincerely hope he is wrong, but everything that has unfolded over the last few weeks tells me he isn’t.
Make no mistake, this does not bode well for dissenters.
The total surveillance,from birth to death,of our minds and souls.
Except the Tories didn’t want to follow the Chinese, Italians and Spanish in a lockdown policy that would savage corporate profits. Their preference was for herd immunity and the sacrifice of disposable pensioners. The idea a Tory government with a 90 seat majority was so terrified of political meetings it would disingenuously shut down the economy is a conspiracy theory that collapses under the mildest questioning..
“Their preference was for herd immunity…”
Whatever they said or thought (assuming they actually do think), “herd immunity” is inapplicable in the case of Covid-19. The virus mutates at such a rate that immunity is probably impossible to attain – just as with the common cold. The same objection applies to dreams of an effective vaccine.
Not that such facts will prevent the appearance of a “vaccine” that will appeal to the corporations that make vast profits from it, and the rulers who can use it to establish yet harsher control over their subjects.
And then they got handed their script.
So who’s pulling the strings in your mind? NWA globalists, Deep State lizards, Soros?
UK Column News…examines the maths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KmyHP5szGY
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654
“BBC HEALTH CORRESPONDENT NICK TRIGGLE:
2 April 2020 at 06:39 Coronavirus: How to understand the death toll – BBC News
What the figures do not tell us is to what extent the virus is causing the death.
It could be the major cause, a contributory factor or simply present when they are dying of something else.
Most people who die with coronavirus have an underlying health condition, such as heart disease or diabetes, that may be more of a factor.”
What an incredible admission. I do not see this as headlines on the news or from the Prime Minister or during questions to him or others
Most people in the UK have no idea that they do not know how many people have died of COVID-19
ZERO confirmed deaths from COVID-19 would be a more accurate headline.
He could have added that the number of so called confirmed cases of corona virus is equally spurious. As most tests for corona virus do not specifically identify COVID-19
Up to today there are no excess deaths (compared with the previous 5 years) in England and Wales
That is taking into account the last 2 weeks falsely attributed Covid-19 deaths in the UK
This year’s figures remain significantly below the average total death numbers for recent years
A bit fast and loose with interpretation!. As at 20 March, total weekly deaths in England & Wales were greater than a five year rolling average for the first time in two months. They had been running at 5% below the 5yr figure but are now rising. The figures are released on Tuesdays and I predict we will see a further rise above the 5 year figure this week. Total deaths is the only credible figure for any ‘significant’ changes. At approx. 10000 a week, we could expect 500-600 extra corona related deaths a day to show up fairly soon 🙂
“At approx. 10000 a week, we could expect 500-600 extra corona related deaths a day to show up fairly soon”.
That’s tidy, as 500-600 per day is about the rate of Covid-19 deaths currently being reported.
If those extra deaths do show up, it will strongly suggest that the Covid-19 deaths are on top of all the “normal” background deaths – including those from other respiratory diseases such as flu.
It seems likely that politicians and other prominent figures who have committed themselves to certain statements about the virus now have a powerful interest in making sure that they official party line is not challenged.
That could help to account for the unchanging “deaths” total of 135 – among other things.
“The primary source for all the fear porn which has been emanating from our putrid state-run media for weeks, came from United Kingdom epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, who issued a dire warning that 2.2 million could die from COVID-19 in the United States alone. Without quite the attention given his initial predictions by the hysterical media, Ferguson quietly acknowledged last week that his numbers were wrong. Very, very wrong. His weak admission that perhaps 20,000 could die was not very convincing. And a pair of Stanford professors of medicine followed that up by saying the predictions of fatalities “may be too high by orders of magnitude.”
“Instead of responding reasonably to these indications that those who initiated the alarmist talk from our journalists and politicians were utterly wrong, our leaders have doubled down on the heavy-handed, unwarranted response”.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/04/donald-jeffries/the-medically-induced-police-state/
At the outset of this pandemic, Boris wanted to let it rip through UK Inc. as did his medical advisors.
This hardly accords with the actions, of a group who wished to lock down the population of the UK, for weeks/months.
They cocked it up.
Now, we are in the deepest of shit.
So could it be that they were slightly late in implementing the script?
How It Starts
but perhaps a false start or over officialdom made to look stupid
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-52148020
Marie Dinou, 41, from York, was arrested at Newcastle Central Station on Saturday after she refused to tell police why she needed to travel.
She was fined by magistrates for breaching the Coronavirus Act.
A police and Crown Prosecution Service review said she was charged under the wrong part of the act.
Craig in respect to your article I find nothing “incredible” that we spend £220 billion on the lunacy of Trident. There’s money to be made for the few from these and similar abominations who have infiltrated the mindset of politicians ever since WW2 with an agenda of the fear of “them”. Slavishly we have followed American paranoia on this misguided path and continue to do so. The majority of the population now have a mindless acceptance of this situation in the belief that by spending these astronomical amounts of money on this madness they will be “safe”. Yet again we begin to see another form of this phenomenon of fear and acceptance with a virus whose manipulated death count has the power to confine us indoors with the same mantra of keeping us. “safe”. Politicians and those who control them have ensured that we can be coerced into whatever path the elite few wish us to take whilst we continue to live under an illusion of democracy.
The only thing Trident and other nuclear weapons can do is to paint a huge bull’s eye on the UK. We live in a small, very crowded group of islands, and modern thermonuclear delivery systems would make short work of us – leaving no survivors at all.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-estate-agent-publishes-bizarre-map-showing-safest-places-to-live-outside-of-nuclear-impact-zone-a3609581.html
Read it and move to a safer country.
There are still posters here who insist in trying to convince us that the virus was a bioweapon or that it is the Chinese who have released this virus for their own purposes. It is impossible to discuss this directly with them because my belief is that they are trolls trying to seed discord and to spread the line taken by the US government, partially to distract from the great inadequacy of how they responded to this virus. This slow and suboptimal response to the crisis and also sometimes inappropriate response is being ignored by some in order to foist an agenda. Of course it is very difficult to prove this but their insistence on diverting the argument is clear. I have posted links previously debunking that the virus is man made, or that it escaped either deliberately or through negligence from Wuhan Virology laboratory. I have also posted about the inadequacy of the government’s response. We still hear daily that supply of PPE for frontline staff are actually being distributed, whilst frontline staff deny that this is the case across the board. Matt Hancock has thrown out this idea of an immune passport without any scientific backing and even without their being solid knowledge about intermediate or long term immunity against the virus. The policy has been confused and lacking in details with lots of ambiguity.
And regarding testing, the government now promises wider testing, tomorrow, or next week or by the end of April, for NHS staff to start with. They also seem to be more concerned about antibody testing, perhaps as a way to try and prove the dead- in-the-water theory of herd immunity when as I stated above it is not yet known whether this virus causes solid immunity. But it is always tomorrow or next week that measures will be implemented, when they should have been implemented several weeks ago.
So to the trolls I say, for me the case as to whether this is a man made virus or that the Chinese are responsible for this virus, I say the case is closed, there is no use in indulging in trying to prove something to those who have a different agenda. To those who are genuinely sceptic I say please concentrate your scepticism against how certain governments, such as China, South Korea and others are succeeding to contain this virus, and reflect on how slow and inadequate the response has been in some of the richest countries in the world. Everyone can come to their own conclusions.
Conspiracy theories are always useful for those who spread them, not necessarily always successful overall, but that depends on the scope of original intent and time frame
In this case it seems reasonable that the martial law reaction was seized on by the ruling class as a chance to war game the lower downs, frightened perhaps at the resolution and success on display in China, to soften up & vector demands for reparations from China, or else, with fired up populations foaming and well under control and co ordinated
Biowar is icing on the cake – does’nt everyone know that’s our future (Life on Mars)
There are some on this site, even, who blame China and state that ‘we’, ‘the rest of the world’ will oblige this country to change
In the event that anyone reading this blog is actually interested in information relevant to forming an intelligent understanding of what is going on then you may consider the perspective of Dr John Ioannidis to be valuable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6MZy-2fcBw
Thank you so much for that link Loony. I often find myself at odds with your views, but that is, by a million miles, the most intelligent and useful contribution to this thread, and indeed to the wider debate, that I have seen.
Dr John Ioannidis is a professor of medicine at Stanford University
https://profiles.stanford.edu/john-ioannidis
Its a very interesting interview of course and Dr Ioannidis is a very respectable figure. But it is also very complex and has its limitations in a quickly moving situation. He has an important message in the start which is that the data is not solid and then starts to explain why it is so. He does not deny the gravity of the infection and the way it has spread but advises caution about jumping to conclusions. I am sort of paraphrasing what he said. Early on in an epidemic, he says you should attempt to slow down the spread by diagnosis of all cases, isolation and contact tracing, something which seems to have happened only in South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. Widespread testing has not been carried out much in Europe and USA for not very well reasons and in some way if the two months lead that we had, had been better utilised, we might have nipped it in the bud, but now prolonged agony will probably not suppress the disease enough to control it and the economic cost in terms of destroyed economies and poverty will probably kill more people than the disease. He discussed some data from one of the cruise ships which suggests that 20% of passengers were infected and a death rate of 1%. But this was a very well defined group which is easy to monitor. He claims that the data from Italy shows such high mortality because of the increased proportion of elderly patients in North Italy and that the infection rates and the deaths were fairly delimited to certain small geographic areas.
Be that as it may I found some of the things he said not entirely convincing. He described the presence of ARDS in some patients with Covid-19 as an anecdotal finding, which is not true as the Chinese have documented this well and in fact it was this that lead them to look for something other than flu, especially with the fairly recent SARS epidemic of 2003. He also seems to not mention the high multiplication rate. In fact one of his greatest commissions was that he never mentioned China at all. China is the only example of a country where the virus took hold and multiplied rapidly before being suppressed and almost eliminated. This omission I found strange.
Anyway when the picture evolves, as it is now rapidly, he may need to review his ideas.
Given that there is a shortage of testing kit, how do we know that all these deaths are from or with Coronavirus.
Are we meant to believe that these precious tests are prioritising already dead nearly dead people over for example NHS workers ?
It seems hard to believe ?
Geoffrey, exactly. We don’t and never will and it is hard to believe. This Government hasn’t got a clue what it is doing. The lock down occurred four days after the Government had declassified CV-19 so at the time of lock down, it was no longer deemed to be a High consequence infectious disease therefore, not a serious threat to public health or a pandemic. Government lies are spilling out a plenty here. Earlier this week Michael Gove said in a Briefing that testing could not be increased because of a lack of the necessary re-agents. Two Days later, hey presto, that well known incompetent liar, Matt Hancock, states that the UK are going to increase the tests to 100,000. WTF? It is a fact that the UK are conducting only a miniscule number of tests. Bozo stated they had started testing of all NHS staff. This was emphatically and soundly refuted by the NHS staff. Lie on Lie on Lie. Propaganda on Propaganda on Propaganda – Tories well known for it as the MSM in the UK is their official Propoaganda Organisation.
The pandemic of 1918-20 is a complete red herring, as if the observer wishes to identify with some kind of scientific bureaucrat who has been given an exciting assignment in a computer game. More important is to name what is happening from the point of view of those experiencing it, including oneself, and to draw social conclusions. The whole of capitalist culture discourages this. It is called asking the social question.
Basically practically all face-to-face socialisation has been stopped except
* communication through computer servers under the hand of state security agencies
* talking to close family members that you live with, inside your home
* passing other people in fear when you are out for a walk
* being bossed around in supermarkets
* pulling together in the war effort at work if you are allowed to work outside the home
If anybody is getting a lot of other socialisation, I’d love to hear what it is.
Most other attempts at socialisation are being broken up by the police, who have been instructed that anyone who tries to engage in unpermitted socialisation is an antisocial element, is scum.
That is the reason, for example, that the media have published articles describing how “buying (illegal) drugs isn’t essential”. Such articles have featured alleged incidents in Britain (Essex), in Australia, and probably elsewhere too. The message you are supposed to “take away” from such reports is an association between a) not keeping your head down and doing what you’re told and b) being antisocial scum. And most people don’t want to be thought of as (or to be) antisocial scum. Hence, do what you’re told. It’s very simple when you look at it clearly. Going out and meeting people is associated with doing a drug deal in a car park.
Meanwhile, online…
I get the feeling that a crackdown is underway on the main internet forum sites, all of which were already under direct state security control (and even those that “respectable people” are discouraged from going to because they are slotted as “conspiracy theory” are heavily manipulated). I mean a tightening of the ratchet.
This makes sense in line with what is happening offline (police crackdown), and in line with the relationship between offline and online (the state discouragement of socialisation offline pushes people to do what passes for “socialisation” online instead).
My question is this: is there a crackdown on email? Yesterday I sent a friend an executable program (.exe) I had made, as an attachment to email. Unfortunately she was using an email address “given for free” by the most evil and powerful company of all, the veritable scum of scum, Google.
Now it is obvious that Google hates people running programs on our own equipment without Google being able to spy on them, influence them, and control them. It prefers people to use programs on Google’s equipment – or at least for them to use programs which rely on constant contact with Google’s servers for running – so that they must behave the way Google wants or else have their access withdrawn, and so that Google and Unit 8200, NSA and GCHQ can spy on everything they do. (Thus Google gets told almost every time anybody in the world points their web browser at a website, for example – because the fonts are got from a Google server. Never mind that nowadays only a very small number of fonts account for those used on the vast majority of sites.) Most people nowadays in this “oh so tech savvy” culture don’t have a clue whether a program is running on their own equipment or somebody else’s. This is one of the purposes of “smartphones”, for example. That’s what a terminal program called an “app” is for – it’s when you don’t know how to wipe your own a*se but you choose to do it under Big Brother’s control, as if you want Jack London to come alive again and write some extra lines in his poem “The Scab” all about you. This is what “the cloud” is for, and so on.
So…that’s what Gmail is. But are they turning the ratchet even further right now?
Google not only refused to allow my friend to accept the attachment I sent her, but they lied in the bounce message they sent me, claiming that the attachment contained a virus. (“Reject for policy reason virus found”).
We know what has been happening to non-digital communication for the past month.
What is happening to person-to-person digital communication?
In 1939 it would have saved a great many lives if we had just given up a few of our freedom’s and let the German’s in.
Boris is absolutely right Churchill was wrong, when balancing freedoms with lives, lives must always come first.
And if you believe that you deserve to be under house arrest and never released. Those freedoms that have just been taken from us were hard fought for with lives, lots of them and we have just dismissed that sacrifice and the freedoms that those brave soul’s died for.
I am ashamed to be British.
Most countries have instituted shelter in place public safety directives. You have many more logical reasons to be ashamed to be British — laughable superiority complex, global pioneer of neoliberalism, global money laundering capital, chief lapdog in America’s illegal wars, worst press on the face of the planet, shocking greed, inequality, modern architecture, the list is substantial.
Have you noticed it’s NATO countries being hit the hardest by the virus
China’s in NATO now???
10 out of the top 12 for most numerous cases (irrespective of population) are members of NATO
Is it that NATO countries are being leaned on to exaggerate their numbers of total cases and causes of death
It certainly appears so
Perhaps you would rather be an Israeli or a South Korean ?
I was thinking of moving from England to Scotland when they become Independent but it seems the Scottish politicians are the most corrupt in the Kingdom so I might move to Ireland.
Sorry do I only get your two choices?
@Geoffrey
A curious remark
Have been born one, or move there to become one?
Or do you suggest that simply because, damnation, they both have proved better in this crisis, government actions or health or health care or more disciplined reactions, that is no reason to extrapolate to superior or preferable anything else and no need to know anything more about either cause or country
Such a comment not so long ago would have fallen into the Little Englander category, what category now are you
The ritualised collective clapping is especially scary. Volk and state as one.
Non-participating households are getting publicly condemned on participatory websites run by the security police (or “outed on social media” as a journalist would put it).
You don’t have to write a letter nowadays to report your neighbour for having a bored look on their face when they’re supposed to be adulating the Fuhrer. You don’t even have to nip down and tell the concierge sitting in the lobby. Just do it with a few clicks on your phone. The security police trust you and they’ll publish your report automatically.
At least one other person, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, is criticising the clapping, albeit in vague flowery confused language.
Every year at this time there is a spike in the number of deaths in the UK, this year the death rates are below average.
How could they not be prepared for something that happens every single year?
What is disturbing is that PPE equipment in England, which had expired by some arbitrary use-by date (though it may still have been near 100% effective) was apparently discarded, but this was done so before replacement stocks had been obtained, or even ordered. Apparently in Scotland the old-stock was retained, just-in-case according to First Minister, god herself, Sturgeon. Surely the precautionary principle should have applied and the masks I think it was should have been retained until the new stocks were in their hands and distributed throughout the country to whatever repositories. I think they’re giving us a load of flannel here, it’s more likely whatever stocks they had were completely inadequate in numbers and in quality, or had simply vanished, existed on paper, but not physically. I can’t help thinking there’s been some fraud/theft involved here. Or they simply had no such provision whatever for contingencies such as this. Apparently in Scotland the old-stock was retained, just-in-case, however it is so difficult to take anything spewed by the corporate-state media, and the muppets-in-charge, this could all simply be a piece of nonsense put out to get us all humming and hawing, frothing over something which is purely theatre. All this hand-washing, hot-water and soap will in short-order, without emollients lead to a drying-out, cracking and exposure of the raw meat below and provide another pathway for entry of this or other pathogens. Some people will have hygiene hang-ups for the rest of their lives, and all our lives will never be the same again if some common-sense does not begin to break out.
What we need is a right good few days of heavy rain, the copious amounts of industrial-waste (waste-product from mining for feed-products for fertiliser and explosives manufacture) rock-salt strewn all over the country is being blown up by the winds, that you can taste it and it stings the eyes, not to mention the effects on the flora and fauna as it accumulates in the verges it is washed into and the £billions of corrosion damage it costs us, mugs. The sooner this insane practice is stopped the better. Have the health effects of this ever been considered?
I’m still hearing from people who are convinced they had a mild version of this, identical symptoms, and for some gastro-intestinal problems, diahorreah from swallowing virus-laden catarrh, for some back in December. Who doesn’t usually in winter have a cough or the sniffles at some point. Try asking for a second-class return to Dottingham with a face-mask on, it is just getting ridiculous. Has cannabis been considered to provide relief as some strains of green buds, Bahia Blackhead for one, when smoked are fantastically powerul expectorants?
Isn’t worrying that the person running our government is known eugenicist
It makes a change from the recent genocidalists
Is Professor Neil Ferguson a known eugenicist?
His contribution to dealing with foot and mouth disease which saw the slaughter of up to 10 million healthy animals would not be suggestive of eugenics in any way.