Mad World

Far, far away from millionaire footballers kneeling down in support of an organisation that wants to end capitalism and defund the police is proper football played by proper men supported by proper fans, and that place is the National League. Bath City FC play in the sixth tier of English football, in the National League South, and until last March I ran the shop on match days on a volunteer basis. I was one of scores of volunteers who gave their time to ensure the club stayed afloat – without us it would simply cease to exist because it is heavily in debt and continues to lose £100,000 every year . The only way the club can hope to survive long-term is if the council approves its plans to install an artificial pitch, rebuild the main stand and incorporate new accommodation; devastatingly, the council rejected the plans earlier this year, but a new proposal is being prepared. By god, it's worth saving: check out this great article in the Mail on the club, and this segment from t...

  With some pubs now only able to serve alcohol with food, this might be the time for wily publicans to get creative. Have a read of the below which I've taken from the Our Community Now website.  While the 18th Amendment (which banned the sale and consumption of alcoholic drinks) went into effect during 1920, efforts to curb alcohol consumption in America has stretched back to at least the Civil War. Prohibition advocates saw excessive alcohol consumption as a growing hazard for public decency and fought to prevent bars and saloons from opening in cities. One of the most sweeping pieces of legislation was the 1896 Raines Law, which was passed to put restaurants out of business. Among several other things, it put hard limits on where saloons were allowed to open and made liquor licenses prohibitively expensive in an attempt to prevent new ones from being issued. Additionally, the law cracked down on Sunday drinking, a move that was hugely unpopular seeing as Sunday was t...

Presented without comment. Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus , but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!  Tweet by US Surgeon General, 29 February We do not recommend the use of face masks as a means of protection from coronavirus. Public Health England, March [Wearing a face-mask] is not a good idea and doesn’t help. UK Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Jenny Harries, 11 March It seems kind of intuitively obvious that if you put something – whether it’s a scarf or a mask – in front of your nose and mouth, that will filter out some of these viruses that are floating around out there. [If it were effective against respiratory illnesses like the flu and Covid-19] the CDC would have recommended it years ago. It doesn’t, because it makes science-based recommendations. Dr William Schaffner, professor of medicine in the division of inf...

2020 is the year long-brewing madness truly engulfed the human race. It’s happened fairly frequently of course, but none more so than this year in our response to this virus. This has been no more evident than in our own government’s response, which borders on the farcical. Actually, it’s way beyond farcical. Here are a few examples. Travel quarantines You have to quarantine on return from a country that has far lower cases per 100,000 than Britain; and airline travel, following a foreign holiday abroad, has been shown to be responsible for around 3% of new ‘cases’. The only result of these quarantines is to blight people’s lives who can’t escape from this soul-destroying madhouse of a country and to ruin the livelihoods of those who work in the travel industry and other associated industries.  Local lockdowns and tiers These are simply criminal, and wildly inconsistent. Areas are locked down that have lower case rates than others that are not. And has been pointed out, they ...

Never in our lives have our rulers reached a more catastrophic philosophical and moral conclusion than to ‘lock down’ (horrible expression) their people in response to a virus, particularly one that is not in the top 18 plagues mankind has faced. It is not a just or proportionate response, to put it mildly: in fact it’s the most bizarre and vile thing our government has ever enacted. Done in a [misguided] attempt to give a very small amount of people a few more months of life, the lives of many millions of people have been blighted for a very long time. The calculation that has been made displays the most twisted use of ethical logic that we have seen in the history of the civilised world. The collateral wreckage of lockdowns becomes more evident by the day, but it’s still impossible to overstate the carnage created on a multitude of levels - there are known levels of collateral damage and there are unknown levels of collateral damage. Our government appears oblivious to the known l...

Or: Let’s pretend Or: Lies, damned lies!  We live in age of falsity. We pretend things aren’t so because to confront the reality of them would be too upsetting for our delicate, pampered, silly selves. Philip Larkin called religion “that vast moth-eaten musical brocade designed to pretend that we never die” , and although we are more secular now, the denial of death is stronger than ever. Women used to wear black for months or years following the death of a family member, with the custom dying out around a hundred years ago. My late grandpa, who was the manager of collieries in the north east, would sometimes have to inform wives of his workers that their husband had been killed in an accident in the pit. The harsh realities of life and death were considerably more visible in days gone by. We couldn’t pretend as much then. These days, with our needs taken care of by consumer capitalism, with virtually no one in the West wanting for things that those throughout the entirety o...

They say making predictions is a mug’s game, but I’m a mug so here we go on what I think may happen to the UK in the next year or so. If for no other reason than my own curiosity , I want to come back to this in the future and see how much I got right or wrong. Unemployment will keep climbing, perhaps peaking around five million in late spring of 2021. I think by Christmas we may not quite reach the four million some economists like Liam Halligan are predicting, if only because of the desperate measures the government is putting in place to slow the rate of job losses (which ruinously deplete the nation’s finances, of which more later). Despite these stop-start lockdowns (more start than stop in most cases) having a catastrophic effect on pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres, events, retail and more, there will be be a few more jobs on offer in the lead-up to Christmas, not least weary Amazon van drivers criss-crossing the land due to customers being too scared or uncomfortable with m...

  Here are just some of the things that you either can’t do in much of Britain at the moment (can we retire the ‘Great’ forever, please), or only in a very limited way, or only with extreme difficulty. So government says No to: Meeting in groups of more than six Mixing with other families Hugging your grandparents or, in some cases, parents Drinking in a pub or eating in a restaurant after 10pm Attending spectator sports like football and rugby, except in very small numbers Seeing a GP face-to-face Going into a shop, gallery, cinema or many other places without a mask Getting a dentist appointment Having casual sex Going on a foreign holiday Going to a funeral Going to a wedding Accessing content online that does not fit with the government narrative  Planning Christmas, or any travel anywhere ENJOYING LIFE The notion of personal choice and responsibility have gone the way of the Dodo. Remember that Covid deaths in this country peaked on April 8 and we were told we had to have...

  This sign is up outside my GPs (photo taken on 12th October). That counter-productive, debunked slogan ’Stay Home, Save Lives’ lives on, six months after the death rate from Covid peaked. When we look at the huge cancer death rates next year let's remember just why they are so. When we wonder why so many people didn't get minor pains that later turned into major pains checked out, we should just turn our attention to pervasive government messaging that is doing such terrible damage. Incidentally, inside the pharmacy attached to the surgery there were seven staff and only one had a mask on. It’s almost like they know that masks don't actually do much good…

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It bruises the brain to catalogue the terrible and crazy actions of the British government in 2020, but here are just a few of the bizarre episodes in this year of hysteria and mind-boggling incompetence: 1 ‘Professor’ Neil Ferguson’s predictions Professor Pantsdown is one of the main villains of 2020. It was his computer modelling, out by a factor of 10, as Nobel Laureate Stanford Professor Michael  Levitt pointed out at the time, that was more responsible than anything for Joker Johnson’s disastrous lockdown (instigated after infection rates had started falling). Sheep-murderer Ferguson’s CV should have meant he wasn’t listened to within a country mile of SW1. This is a man who said in the past: 50,000 would die from mad cow disease.  The final UK toll was 177. 150 million would die from bird flu. In eventuality, there were 282 worldwide.  There would be 65,000 swine-flu fatalities. There were 457.  2 Nightingale hospitals Seven ‘Nightingale’ hospitals...