Random thoughts 3

As has unfortunately often been the case for the last year and a half I've been too depressed and/or furious to summon the energy to write a new, full post, so here I'm once again posting random thoughts and rants that I've put on various messageboards on the internet. Some are rougher hewn than others, and there's inevitably some repetition (mostly of my hatred for the government). The ones at the top are the most recent - they get older as you move down the page. There's quite a lot here: just stop reading when you get bored.

I'd like to ask Hancock why my double jabbed friend living in Switzerland can't see his double jabbed 81-year-old mother in England, and hasn't been able to do so for a year. Why, Hancock? It's PR, basically, isn't it? To make it look like you're DOING SOMETHING. Originally it was to protect the Tory party's reputation in not having a dysfunctional NHS, and now... well, you are a pitiful little man drunk on power, oblivious of the real human misery you are causing.

'Self isolate' is such a vile phrase. Spot that 'self' has been put in front of 'isolate' to make it sound less bad, to make it sound like you're doing something for the community. I wonder if it was a phrase thought up by one of the govt's 42 behavioural scientists.

We live in times of medieval-science madness.

These footballers [who had to 'self-isolate'] are healthy, very healthy young men. It is INSANE that they should to do solitary confinement for 10 days. That does hideous things to the mind, much, much worse than the effects the virus would have on them (which is probably zero).

We have a bug-eyed focus on ONE single thing. We have never done mass testing like this before for a reason - it destroys society.

We have gone literally mad as a country.

Hancock, you foul little man, you must hold one of the two positions:

a) You don't believe the vaccines work so that's why you're not letting people travel abroad.

b) You do believe the vaccines work but because you're a vengeful, stupid person you're still not opening international travel.

Logically, it has to be one of the two. Which?

It interests me why more people don't find it strange that before 2020 we never:

Had mask mandates for healthy people

Quarantined healthy people

Stopped healthy people from seeing other healthy people

Did mass testing for a virus 

Did mass testing for a virus using PCR tests

Did mass testing for a virus using PCR tests at 40 cycles

Closed schools

Closed businesses

Thought that asymptomatic transmission was a major issue

Closed borders

Used ghastly phrases like social distancing and self isolate.

But we do now. I wonder when more people will not wake up to this scandal, disaster and tragedy?

The court jester of Downing St is doing all he can to stoke the inflation which will lead to interest rate rises: stopping everyone but the elite going abroad this year will mean more people holidaying in the UK, which will mean much higher prices in the services industry (already being seen).

He really is a total intellectual mess.

Big tech was in on this too - those almighty fact checkers from above would come down and delete any posts that so much as mildly questioned the narrative.

You also had the ASA banning adverts from the HART Recovery Group that highlighted the mental health problems brought on by these lockdowns.

This has indeed been Our Darkest Hour.

This awful govt will always highlight the worst news, not the best. Take hospital admissions. Who knows, maybe some Covid patients might be in for an hour! Who knows? Maybe not, but they don't tell us. That would mean the fear meter would drop, and they don't want that.

Absolute villains, the lot of them.

It's the cold, stupid, 'sci-fi' approach to this that gets me (among other things).

For instance, in the good old days of us possessing agency and being trusted to use our judgement and common sense, if you met someone and then a day or so later you came down with an infection you'd tell them, you might say 'I'm not feeling too good, I might have passed it on to you, so maybe don't go around doing stuff'. And if you were ill you'd stay at home, certainly rather than go to places of leisure like pubs or restaurants.

But our multi billion pound Track and Trace system says it will do all this for us - and it can't even do that well. 

We are living in a dystopia.

A six-year-old could see that the data being given to the PM was bogus (more deaths in summer than the January peak?!).

Sadly, it seems that our Oxford educated leader cannot. I simply despair.

If you're going to make 67 million people's lives much, MUCH worse for a year and a half you'd better be damned sure that what you're doing will have an overall net positive effect. Are we sure it has? Of course it hasn't!

And you'd better be damn sure you other places that didn't do what you're doing aren't in a better place. And yet they are.

You'd better have done a detailed cost-benefit analysis too. Did they do that? No they did not.

This is the cruellest, most stupid, most corrupt and most incompetent govt in history. 

In one sense, Johnson is spectacularly thick: how could anyone, never mind a prime minister, think that deaths in SUMMER, a YEAR AND A HALF after the virus came in, with massive vaccine coverage of the population, with much better treatments, could possibly be anywhere near as high as they were in March 2020?

It beggars belief. Yet again it utterly damns this miserable excuse for a leader.

Rejoice, rejoice!

A Tory party that has betrayed virtually every single Tory principle has lost [in the Chesham and Amersham by-election]!

First good political news in ages: the party that made thousands of people die alone; that gave us a dementia and cancer crisis; that smashed the travel and hospitality businesses to smithereens; that masked children and constantly isolated them from their friends and teachers; that gave us a national debt we'll be paying for decades; that broke people's heads by acting like the cruellest jailer imaginable - LOST. Good. Wish they'd lost by even more.

This government's treatment of the arts has been a disgrace.

Who goes to the theatre or cinema (or a restaurant or a pub) when they're feeling very ill? Not many people. They might stagger to work if ill because they wouldn't get paid, but rarely out socialising. And so Covid transmissions at such events would be very, very low - which is backed up by official data, which shows that only around 2 to 4% of transmissions come from such places.

The government KNEW this and yet in their infinite evil they shut such places down - DESPITE these places spending millions on becoming 'covid secure' (which they barely needed to do), and despite the fact that in a grim year it would have been nice for people to still have some fun.

A delay to removing restrictions? No problem! Unless you are…

…waiting for NHS treatment

…waiting to get married

…waiting to see family who live abroad

…waiting to open your hospitality business that has been levelled by the government

…waiting to open your travel business that has been levelled by the government

…a shop worker or hospitality worker who has to wear a stifling mask in the hot weather all day long

…or just someone who cares about freedom and liberty, and has been worn down by this prime minister’s constant lies, U-turns, cruelty, stupidity and incompetence.

So many of the government’s decisions are based on bad science, or a bad reading of the science. Take just one thing, asymptomatic transmission in hospitality settings. Not unknown, but very rare, and certainly not enough to justify obliterating the industry (it’s looking like one transmission in ten may be due to asymptomatic infection).

There was one US state, one of the Dakotas I think, where in four different counties they had four restaurants, one running at 25% capacity, one at 50% capacity, one at 75% capacity, one at 100%. And guess what? The transmission figures, which were all low, were nearly the same!

Why might this be? I have an idea: when people feel ill they are very rarely inclined to go out and socialise. It might be different if they felt ill and had a job they HAD to go into, or wouldn’t get paid. So that’s why a) lockdowns are ineffective and b) hospitality shouldn’t have been crushed.

Yet from what I can tell the government are planning to continue restricting theatres, cinemas, restaurants and pubs to a minimal occupancy - which is insane.

Does that prat Shapps actually understand the concept of vaccinations? That if you’re jabbed then, if they work as well as they say they do, it doesn’t matter where you go? It wouldn’t matter if they went to a Covid ward and sucked in all the air you could? He appears not to understand this very simple thing.

One despairs at the state of our rulers.

"Protect the NHS": by not going to seek treatment if you're ill. Like saying "Protect the Fire Service" - by not calling the fire brigade if your house is on fire.

Of course, it's done the exact opposite, and there are now 12 million on waiting lists, a record.

Lockdowns: truly the biggest public health mistake in history. Let's hope the guilty are punished.

Many of these so called variants from South Africa and India etc have also been found in countries that have cut themselves off from the world (Australia, South Korea, Taiwan etc) thereby proving that it is pointless to keep these draconian travel restrictions.

All they do is destroy thousands of jobs and give people extreme cabin fever. A compassionate or logical government would drop them all immediately.

Imagine the hideous groupthink that goes on in the discussions about rules and regulations.

With the Portugal decision last week, I wonder if A SINGLE minister said 'but isn't this going to cause pain, heartache and enormous hassle for thousands for almost certainly no discernible medical benefit?'

Or with the whole pubs debacle, would any of them have piped up with the arguments the author makes here?

I very much doubt it. We are ruled by ninnies, stupid, cowardly ninnies with minimal experience of real life.

If we hadn't used PCR tests jacked up to 40 cycles to measure this virus; if we hadn't classified a Covid death as someone who dies within 28 days of getting a positive test; if we'd have looked at death figures adjusted for age (showing that prior to 2009 EVERY year had higher population-adjusted death figures than 2020); if we looked at Sweden where not a single child missed a day of school, or died of covid, in 2020... then we wouldn't have this continuing, mad, bizarre, sinister, hysterical madness.

Modellers pay no price for overestimating; that's why they do it. No matter how many times their predictions prove catastrophically wrong, they will still be invited on to the BBC and Sky and such like.

The price they would pay for UNDERestimating would be much, much higher - they might lose their job.

Of course the barrier we need between them and us is a strong, principled, wise political leader who drills down into the detail. But we don't, we have a comedy PM on a wire.

And yet still the excessive, some would say insane, caution goes on.

Look at what they did with Portugal. If Portugal had remained on the green list rather than going amber, there was only a tiny, tiny, almost infinitesimal risk than even ONE person would die because of this. Nearly INFINITESIMAL.

And yet thousands of people are given massive stress, hassle and hardship.

The philosophical balance of this whole thing from March 2020 has been absurd and even now, despite us having masses of data, still the precautionary principle is what guides us.

If this govt had an ounce of compassion it would drop mask mandates for hospitality staff instantly.

I know many who work in the industry who detest having to wear one for hours on end - it makes them feel extremely poorly - but are reluctant to say so because it makes it looks like they're not part of the 'fight', or part of 'the team'.

This is entirely the result of the govt's black ops propaganda. This is an administration that is rotten the whole way through, like in a stick of Blackpool rock.

Masks are a social and psychological disaster, and most probably a health disaster too. They are one of the very worst things about this year and a half of near-totalitarian rule.

Yes, the unions were appalling but it is govt who must take most of the blame. If Johnson had a fraction of the gumption of Mrs Thatcher he would have stood up to them and the children would not have missed a single day of schooling (as in Sweden).

And what does this appalling administration plan to do next? Vaccinate children. Children who are at virtually no risk from the virus, jabbed with a vaccine that doesn't end its clinical trials until 2023.

What you must remember is that these restrictions have a minimal amount to do with public health and a lot to do with black ops psychology.

As just one example, note how so much of the messaging is that things are in place to stop you from affecting OTHERS adversely. So a mask protects others; you take the vaccine to protect others; you are a good little boy or girl and sit at home on your sofa to protect OTHERS.

A child could see through what they are doing. Or, could they? Perhaps not. We seem to be a nation of children and so few have seen through this dastardly and dumb government's awful policies.

Considering Boris Johnson is a 'shopping trolley' and is devoid of principles and courage, and tends to agree with the last person he speaks to, I suggest the CRG should get in very late, perhaps on June 14 just before he makes his latest haughty proclamation to the nation, in order to ensure that the clueless clown for once does the right thing and lifts ALL restrictions on June 21.

This virus - which is of little harm to the vast majority of healthy people - is now endemic. Travel restrictions are pointless. 'Scariants' can arise anywhere at any time.

All it is, is a semi-fascist government making it look like they care and are DOING SOMETHING. But like lockdowns and masks, it does little good, and very much harm.

I'm not sure we'll ever get out of this.

Just heard the news report from my neighbour's radio. Their virus headline? That the R rate is above 1. Not that there are more UK hospitals than there are Covid patients, or anything good like that.

If it airs it scares. So yes, our govt is deeply lamentable, useless and probably maladroit, but it is our media that pushes them on to ever greater caution (aka huge collateral damage).

It's incredible that people take this (Tories 16 points ahead in polls at the moment). We were told to cancel November to save Christmas; to cancel Christmas to save February; cancel February to save Easter; cancel Easter to save the summer; and now cancel early summer to save late summer.

THIS IS PURE INSANITY.

Can we throw the whole Cabinet in jail?

The amount of scientifically illiterate puritans on here is deeply depressing.

So, say you support travel restrictions from Portugal: what do you think would happen if there weren't any? Variants can and do arise anywhere, it is IRRELEVANT that there MAY be some in Portugal. And do you not believe that these vaccines are as good as they say? Have you studied the data which show that Portugal is safer than anywhere in Europe? Have you studied the data that shows that covid is only a mild illness for the vast majority of healthy people? Can you not have sympathy for people getting a well-deserved break, or for the thousands who work in international travel?

They've kicked you in the face again.

But you didn't expect rational decisions from this nightmare administration, did you? They just play to the crowds, or think they do. 90 per cent of what they do is pure theatre. They don't care how many lives they smash on a micro level because it's Covid innit, and unlike anything else in the history of the world it's so so SO important.

Covid is basically a religion now; lockdowns and the like are followed with the same adherence that Allah is by Muslims.

We are ruled by very cruel, very stupid people. It feels like the walls are drawing in.

This is the Cabinet who meekly nodded through the most cruel, most stupid, most anti-freedom policies ever enacted by a British government. They are beyond redemption.

They masked the country; they kept healthy people from seeing one another; they let thousands of old people die alone from dementia; they turned half the country into paranoid hypochondriacs; they deliberately conflated guidance and law; they wrecked young people's lives, who were under no threat from this virus; they crushed thousands of small businesses; they inverted the principles of the health service; they sent thousands of ill pensioners into care homes; they trampled on the travel industry; they censored what you could say on TV and the internet; they cancelled elections; they hobbled Parliament; they have done more damage to this country than a foreign enemy ever would do.

The bar for future pandemics has been set pretty low.

Let's not forget that this virus has a 0.2 IFR, the average victim is 82.4 years old and will have had about 2.6 co-morbidities.

Most of the damage 'caused' by the virus is in relation to the foolish actions taken to try and counter it: the medicine did more harm than the disease. Non lockdown Sweden's death rate last year was no more than in 2015.

I dread to think what will happen when the plump, complacent, lazy, spoilt West encounters a virus that is REALLY bad.

The most depressing aspect of all this is that this virus has been used as an excuse for all sorts of totalitarianism all around the world.

Here in Britain we've seen a massive extension of the State into our lives; personal responsibility and choice seem to have gone the way of the Dodo. Just look at travel: layers and layers of stupid, excessive caution. And it damages lives on the micro level: I heard that hundreds have been turning up at airports ready to go on holiday only to be told that their free NHS test isn't a valid test, so are sent home. Horrible, horrible stress and pain for the passengers and the staff.

We're now in pure Monty Python land where the doom-mongering 'scientists' say that we must stay in lockdown to avoid going into lockdown.

You really couldn't make up their garbage.

Lockdowns MIGHT, very SLIGHTLY delay the spread of the virus for a SHORT TIME.

But they cause terrible loneliness for many, and loneliness is known to be appalling for both mental and physical health. And then there's always the undiagnosed cancers, heart conditions, strokes, alcoholism, depression, domestic abuse, ruined education, cratered businesses and more.

They are therefore a sort of whack a mole policy - you (sort of, possibly) hinder one health problem, but exacerbate so many others.

That they were used by a mature democracy and by politicians who should BY DUTY seek to govern for the long term, not the short term, is astonishing and disgusting.

I salute anyone who defies this draconian, mendacious and unpleasant government who have probably broken international human rights laws a hundred times in the last year.

The reaction to this virus has been so disproportionate it would be laughable were it not so tragic.

Personally speaking I'm probably not going away until the insane masks, testing, quarantines and passport queues have gone or almost gone.

This will one day make Blair's WMDs look trivial.

The books are starting to arrive, including A State of Fear, and there will be many, many more to come, all exposing this tragic debacle, this public health issue turned into something far, far worse by ignorant politicians, inhuman scientists and devious international organisations.

I guess this is what life feels like when a country is run by evil bureaucratic morons.

But for a clever person [Dominic Cummings] he makes big mistakes. There was no way we could have done a Taiwan. Even in late January the WHO was saying this was a virus that didn't pass between humans. The WHO is controlled by China, who ostracise Taiwan, and the West listen to the WHO, not Taiwan.

The virus was already endemic in Europe before we could have shut borders. The Chinese lied and lied and lied again.

Going into the office last week and hearing some of my co-workers talk about this, it struck me how incredibly casual so many are about freedom.

They'd say things like 'The rules go on until September don't they?' and 'They will lock us down again in the winter', and they were so relaxed about it. They don't appear to give a damn about freedom, it's all about safety, or perceived safety.

We've come to a terrible position when basic rights and freedoms are treated as optional extras. I don't know who to loathe most: the government (and its puppetmasters) for doing this, or those that have rolled over and gone along with it.

I tell you, they had better get rid of masks in June. They are not so much emasculating as dehumanising.

Nothing better illustrates our slide into madness and tyranny than the fact that going abroad this summer involves testing, quarantines, red lists etc, when last summer - WITH NO VACCINES - we could go almost anywhere.

This government has learnt nothing. Do prats like Hancock not realise how reprehensible it is coming out with a comment like 'spread like wildfire'. Does he not realise how some people have been reduced to terrified blobs?

This truly is an evil administration, with no shame.

We should have had 'Keep Calm and Carry On'; instead, from this tyrannical govt we got 'Panic and Go Crazy'.

One of the big problems is Johnson. He turns on a sixpence. His words are literally without value. We cannot believe a word this man says. He has broken so many promises and dashed so many hopes - very typical of a man who cheated on his last wife with at least five different women.

It keeps us in a state of uncertainty, of worry, of angst.

Johnson is a cruel and mendacious jailer. It is a tragedy that he was at the head of our nation when this thing struck.

You won't do it Johnson, you clueless scaremongering maniac. You now know what a catastrophe your long and hard lockdown has been and you daren't keep it going any longer, despite the armies of credulous morons that you have supporting you thanks to giving them tons of 'free' money and infecting them with hideous scare stories.

Then when things open fully on June 21 we will all be oh so grateful to our beloved master for allowing us this freedom.

So pathetic, so disgusting, so sinister. I detest the political class.

Masks are a huge symbol of the madness of what we have allowed to be done to us: most masks worn by most people in most ways do the wearer more harm than good.

Their breathing is restricted and they breathe in tiny bits of fabric. Try telling this to the scores of idiots I see around Bath in them.

Oh but they protect others, some say. Firstly, doubtful given the tiny size of viruses, and secondly, even if they did, they make the wearer more ill. So people will still get ill at the same rate!

This has truly been one of the most shameful episodes in British history, with no end in sight thanks to our cowardly, credulous, clueless PM.

The cruel garbage of lockdowns has wrecked this country so much more than a virus ever could have done.

Sage really are shameless. As is the government (unless you count them AS the government), because this is just such obvious spin:

They are making us grateful for the restoration of freedoms that should never have been taken away in the first place, and this drip drip drip of gloomy news is to make us feel great when June 21 does indeed become 'freedom day'. Rather than 'why the hell did it take so long?'

Make no mistake, evil behavioural psychology runs deep through Boris Johnson's administration.

The government could have gone down a humane and compassionate 'focused protection' route - instead it decided to go with the brutal sledgehammer of lockdown, an extremely cruel response.

Millions of lives have been blighted in a myriad of ways because of this thoughtless public health response borrowed from a communist state that right now must be laughing its head off at our credulous madness.

This was a lockdown by the middle class FOR the middle class. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic.

How long would it have lasted if the dustbin men hadn't worked, or the postmen hadn't worked, or the street cleaners hadn't worked, or the people making sure you had electricity and the internet hadn't worked? Not long, I can tell you.

The tragedy of all this is that we protected the laptop class, who didn't need protecting, and threw some vulnerable people to the wolves.

Trouble is that public health employees are naturally authoritarian. We ended up living in a deeply unpleasant semi totalitarian police state, with swathes of terror propaganda, because the barrier between them and us was the PM, and he is a woefully weak figure not interested in doing detailed analysis but who loves goofy photo opps. He has no real principles and is libertarian only in the sense that he does whatever the hell he wants to do.

The officious and the meddlesome will be gutted when all this is finally over.

The sort of person who notes down your number plate if you're doing 72mph on the motorway has had the time of his life since March 2020.

It's a shame Johnson doesn't stand up to BLM and XR; it's a shame he is fiscally incontinent; it's a shame his green agenda will lead to massively higher prices; it's a shame he turned Britain into a semi totalitarian state because of a virus about twice as bad as flu; it's a shame he hasn't protected British soldiers from prosecution; it's a shame he hasn't scrapped the BBC's licence fee; it's a shame he's a serial liar and adulterer.

Johnson, despite his horrendous crimes of the last year - turning a nation into mask-wearers and hypochondriacs thanks to relentless terror propaganda; wrecking the high street; wrecking hospitality; wrecking the travel industry; psychologically scarring children for life and torpedoing their education; turning a blind eye to cancer sufferers, the depressed, the mentally unwell, alcoholics, wife-beaters, and more besides - he comes out smelling of roses.

He is truly the Teflon PM.

The likes of Ferguson will always over estimate, rather than underestimate. This is because it would be vastly more harmful to their career if they underestimated. If they overestimate, they pay no reputational price.

In typical Johnsonian fashion - ie no eye for detail; all woolly compromise - the PM plotted a middle course.

He should have gone much faster, but hasn't. I guess the best we can hope for is he brings June 21 forward by a couple of weeks, but even that seems unlikely.

It's insane. Check out Julia Hartley-Brewer eviscerating a totally clueless Liz Truss yesterday. To be fair I suppose Truss wants to keep her job and knows that this is all madness but dare not say it out loud.

This is what happens when politics gets too big.

The notion of personal choice has gone the way of the dodo under this govt (having its strings pulled by international organisations).

Why should a person, if they want to take a 'risk', not go abroad? It's on them. Even if he comes back ill, which is unlikely, the most vulnerable here are vaxxed.

So-called variants can arise anywhere, you don't have to go abroad to find them.

Wider international travel is actually good in the long term because it spreads immunity.

We have gone back to the Middle Ages when it comes to making scientific sense.