Mad World

After writing this blog about Covid and the counter-productive measures taken to ‘fight’ it for nearly two years I appear to have finally got the bug. Has it changed my mind on anything I have previously written? Will all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity? Read on. The week beginning March 21 was one of my most active in a long time. I went out with friends, visited several pubs, played football, went into the office three times, did a supermarket shop, took my car for an MOT and more. So lots of mixing with the great unwashed. By the Saturday, March 26, ambling round a village in Wiltshire, I began to feel a little ‘off’. Initially I put this down to have been bitten nine ruddy times by some pesky insect the night before - perhaps it had given me some mild fever. By the following day the bites were certainly itchy but I also felt a bit ‘flu-y’ and with less energy than normal. My back was a bit sore too, but sadly that’s nothing new. By Monday I had an occasional dr...

  Well, almost everything.    In this post, which I hope will be my last on the madness we have endured, I boast of my sagacity in seeing lockdown measures for the disasters they have been. As  more and more are waking up  to the terrible damage inflicted on countries by their own governments on the pretext of fighting a virus, I go all Trump and show off, pointing to my 2020 posts that say exactly the same things that many commentators are now saying, but certainly were not at the time.    The reason I set this blog up was Toby Young. I emailed him a piece I had written entitled ‘Whatever happened to Boris Johnson?’ and he responded to say that his website Lockdown Sceptics (as it then was) would link to it if I published it online. So I created Mad World expressly for that reason, published my Johnson article on it, sent it to Toby - and he responded: “This isn’t for us, Russell”! I was gutted! And slightly annoyed. I wanted to whimper in response “B...

Another awful year is about to end. In many ways this one has actually been worse than 2020, as global governments have turned the authoritarian screws tighter than ever before, making misery for millions for marginal gains on the viral front. The world is now run by doctors, cowards and villains. We have seen the fetishisation, politicisation and pathologization of one single virus. How on earth will people 100 years' hence - providing we still have free speech and functioning democracies, which is by no means guaranteed - view all this lunacy? Over the next few years, as more of the terrible effects of lockdowns and other measures become evident, along with scandalous exposes about the implementation of the measures, trust in government, science and the media will plummet even lower than now. This corrosive cynicism will eat away at the heart of society itself.  But then again, perhaps it won't. Because most people don't really seem to care about what's g...