News Round-Up
- “Jacob Rees-Mogg declares war on ‘three-day week’ for the Civil Service” – Working from home is being used as an excuse for long weekends, says Cabinet minister in charge of efficiency, according to the Telegraph.
- “Rees-Mogg defends brutal cull of Civil Service jobs to save £3.5bn” – The Prime Minister announced plans to axe up to 91,000 jobs over the next three years to save £3.5billion and give his Government space for a pre-election tax cut, the Mail reports.
- “Disaster in the Rye” – The cost of living crisis has only just started, and is nowhere near its peak; any political forecast that does not take this into account is worthless, argues Colingwood in Bournbrook.
- “Baby drowned in bath when mother fainted a day after taking Covid jab” – Lawyer Louise Atkinson blacked out as she bathed nine-month-old Eleanor, nicknamed Ellie at her home in Christchurch, Dorset, the day after receiving the first dose of the jab, the Mail reports.
- “North Korea ‘treats’ 187,000 people for fever after first Covid cases” – North Korean state media reports that the country has treated 187,000 people for fever after the country reported its first Covid cases, the Mail reports.
- “No.10’s Covid inquiry will probe impact of lockdowns on mental health and young people” – The long-awaited inquiry will examine the impact of lockdowns on the nation’s mental health and children, the Mail reports.
- “CDC: No Documents Supporting Claim Vaccines Don’t Cause Variants” – The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says it does not have documents backing its claim that Covid vaccines do not cause variants of the virus that causes COVID-19.
- “The Left always wanted to pay people to do nothing and now we are seeing the results” – Far from being harmless, the ‘progressive’ economic theories trialled during the pandemic have been tested to destruction, writes Juliet Samuel in the Telegraph.
- “Lockdown and vaccine fanatics – we shall remember them” – How can we trust journalists who failed to challenge the Covid narrative to hold those in power to account over other issues, asks Romy Cerratti in TCW Defending Freedom.
- “Working from home doesn’t work, says PM” – In an interview with the Daily Mail, the Prime Minister says full workplaces will lift productivity and revive town and city centres.
- “How some elite universities are still teaching online” – Universities that are still giving lectures online have been challenged to justify fees of £28,000 for three years’ tuition, the Mail reports.
- “The soul of a people” – Omar Khan with an update on the situation in Sri Lanka, where violence has been prompted in part by the ruinous and authoritarian response to Covid.
- “Natural gas to be classed as ‘green’ investment to boost North Sea” – Proposals to bolster U.K. energy security by drilling for the fossil fuel risk angering climate change activists, the Telegraph reports.
- “Net Zero? India Plans to double Coal Use by 2040” – As the USA and Europe retreat from prosperity, India seems determined to overtake China, with a 400 million ton boost to coal production in the next two years, and a massive relaxation of environmental rules and other incentives to boost coal mining and industry, writes Eric Worrall in WUWT.
- “Finland and Sweden should not be allowed to join NATO, says Turkey” – President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses Nordic countries of being a “guest house for terrorists” – a reference to their support for the PKK – as he refuses to back their membership bids, the Telegraph reports.
- “Elon Musk and the battle for control of the internet” – The globalist elites are determined to crush Musk’s dream of a freer social media, says Brendon O’Neill in Spiked.
- “Share slump wipes billions off Twitter as Elon Musk halts takeover” – Elon Musk has put his £36bn takeover of Twitter “on hold” amid concerns over fake accounts in a move that wiped billions of dollars off the social media company’s share price, the Telegraph reports.
- “J.K. Rowling praises three women standing up for ‘women’s rights and freedom of speech’ in face of ‘gender identity ideology’ and says history will remember them as heroines” – The Harry Potter author took to Twitter to heap praise on Allison Bailey and Sonia Appleby, as well Keira Bell, reports the Mail.
- “Trans activists have wrecked all the good work of Stonewall” – “I poured all my energy into making the organisation a formidable force for gay and lesbian rights. All that work is now in danger of being wrecked,” writes Stonewall co-founder Simon Fanshawe in the Mail.
- “QC: Govt’s Online Safety Bill ‘incompatible with human rights legislation’” – A top lawyer has warned the Government that its Online Safety Bill will breach citizens’ human rights by unlawfully restricting their free speech, reports the Christian Institute.
- “The Daily Signal Podcast: Doctor Reveals How Woke Activists Have Infiltrated Medicine” – Dr. Stanley Goldfarb joins the show to discuss the consequences of woke ideology in medicine and how to bring health care back from the cliff.
- “More front than fantasy” – Laura Dodsworth says the new Calvin Klein underpants ad stirs controversy by putting a pregnant trans man (i.e., biological woman) at its centre.
- “Why a free Press is a vital part of our democracy” – Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere delivers a passionate defence of free speech and family values in an address to celebrate the newspaper’s 125th anniversary.
- “Netflix tells ‘woke’ staff to tolerate diverse opinions or find new jobs” – Some staff walked out in protest last year over comedian Dave Chappelle’s comments on gender, but bosses are trying to regain control, reports the Telegraph.
- “‘The trans lobby tried to cancel my book – they don’t want people asking questions’” – When Holly Lawford-Smith’s work on gender incurred the wrath of activists, it put the New Zealand academic in the eye of a publishing storm, the Telegraph reports.
- “‘Woke’ is more than an insult, it’s a threat to our freedom” – It’s tempting to use the word flippantly, but we must never forget the destructive onslaught against liberal society that it represents, writes Inaya Folarin Iman in the Telegraph.
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“Disaster in the Rye” – The cost of living crisis has only just started, and is nowhere near its peak; any political forecast that does not take this into account is worthless, argues Colingwood in Bournbrook. Yes. My theory was that we are at the start of prolonged global economic contraction that has been a long time coming, and is to a considerable degree demographic. Seems to me that after the global birth rate started to fall in 1969, we had three decades of generally increasing prosperity (during which inevitably some bad habits took hold) as a result of lower child care costs. Then from about 1999, a decade of treading water as the costs of an ageing population with not enough people coming into the workforce started to become a more significant factor than this. From 2009, when the effects of the financial crisis started to kick in, there followed a decade of kicking the can down the road. The current financial and political crisis then started in 2019 with the emergency, apparently, of a novel coronavirus in China, and the increasingly unhinged reactions of governments across the world to this. As if that wasn’t enough, we look likely to… Read more »
Food crises are notoriously prone to different interpretations, for obvious reasons!
This has just appeared:
Medvedev warned of a large-scale food crisis due to sanctions against Russia – ePrimefeed
There is an almost 1:1 correlation between energy consumption and economic growth. As th energy cost of energy has risen – due tot the easy stuff being depleted first – the amount of energy available for things other than extracting energy from the ground has fallen.
The cost of energy has risen in large part because the political powers have forced prices up with all the all the green energy crap.
The UK has hundreds of years worth of known coal reserves much of which could be extracted and used to provide relatively cheap (compared to unreliables) energy that could be depended upon.
There is also a shed load of known UKgas that could be fracked, but no, our globalist masters want us reliant on expensive eco unreliables.
Very few people actually want to be down there in the bowels of the Earth digging coal and spending their pension days with silicosis.
And fracking causes earthquakes and lowers the value of house in the area as their foundations have been shattered.
Russians work in appalling conditions to bring gas and oil to Europe.
Ha ha: fracking causes VERY minor earth tremors, much like a lorry driving past the end of your garden. You REALLY should like at the numbers – remembering of course that the Richter scale is logarithmic.
UK workers on North Sea platforms work in often appalling conditions, too. Most are comparatively well paid for it, which is why they continue to do it.
If you really believe that fracking causes ‘earthquakes’ I should smoke somewhat less of whatever it is you’re using.
As for ‘very few people’ wanting to be miners, don’t I remember there being a big fuss when the UK mines started to close?
Despite all the images of eco friendly cosy local farms, much of the World’s food supply now depends on large scale agri-business growing a small range of grains, wheal, rice corn and soya beans. The asset price inflation following the financial crisis means that cash rich players (Big Agri-business, Bill Gates and China) have been buying up farmland for large scale intensive farming based on extensive use of chemical fertilisers. As we can now see this is a high risk strategy. India has just announced an import ban on wheat exports; https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-bans-wheat-exports-with-immediate-effect-101652499000681.html If this approach spreads and one of the major rice exporters like Vietnam bans exports and they have done this before, then it is likely that food difficulties will become a contagion and a catastrophe. France is a usually a moderately exporter of wheat to the rest of Europe but they are now predicting a bad harvest this year. All the signs look bad and it is hard to predict where this is going and how it will play out but does not look good. Meanwhile China is currently holding huge stockpiles of Rice and other commodity foods and will be in a strong position to call the… Read more »
Japan has ‘borrowed’ far more than the UK.
Therefore, according to that belief, Japan must be far more immoral and deserving of punishment than the UK.
They really should have considered things like this in their non-existent cost-benefit analysis before locking us down. Actually, if they had looked at the history of the German Democratic Republic, which had sky high suicide rates, they would have known that widespread human rights abuses are extremely damaging for mental health.
I see there’s also a report of another child dying as a result of the dangerous “vaccines”. Never again must children be harmed like the last two years.
My kids are in their mid 20’s, but have become introverted and isolated by lockdown. I have sat with each of them and given them the talk about getting out and socialising, taking holidays and travelling, even in the UK, but they’ve formed habits that will be hard to break. What its done to younger kids is a disgrace.
One point of view could be that people have suddenly realised they have no say in the matter but that the Government are in charge and tell them what they must do, aided by their henchmen the Police, with their hi-viz jacketed minions the ‘Covid marshalls’ wandering around as a reminder that they must behave themselves.
If Boris and pals say you have to put your face masks back on – you will!
And that’s not even speculation, as we saw that happen before last Christmas.
First (after a delay!) you are given ‘Freedom Day’.
Then you are told to wear face masks again (and nearly everybody put them back on again).
I’m an oldie, but I don’t much like walking in this small town. Going unmasked, it’s the Mexican Wave of curtain-twitching that seems depressing.
“I see there’s also a report of another child dying as a result of the dangerous “vaccines”. “
Is this the one where the mother fainted and you just assume it was ‘because of the vaccine’? Hardly a ‘scientific approach’.
You weren’t there, and you don’t know that the ‘vaccine’ was responsible for her fainting.
I wasn’t on the grassy knoll or even in Dallas, but I’m confident that it was a rifle bullet that killed JFK. I guess I’m just not being scientific.
Whereas, you don’t know that it wasn’t, of course.
‘Working from home doesn’t work says PM’.
A man who ‘works’ from home as a matter of routine.
A man who spends most of his time pissing it up when ‘at work’.
Boris is a bit of a fool, but let’s not go down the road of rhetoric. If we want meaningless rhetoric we can read above and below the line in the Telegraph and the Guardian.
He can jog on. I can spend 3 hours a day travelling to and from work, or spend those 3 hours on a combination of working and life-enhancing activities that make me less stressed and more able to work efficiently. Instead of reviving the centre of London I can stay local and revive the town centre where I live, which is in much bigger trouble than London.
I’ve looked at the Calvin Klein “pregnant man” advert, along with the blurb about this person “giving birth” to “his” son shortly. What on earth comes over companies that makes them retreat so far from reality?
It must be self evident that in order to get pregnant and carry a baby, you need a womb, ovaries and a vagina. Biologically, you need them, and women have them. Men have the other parts to complete the job, testicles and a penis. These were designed/ evolved to work together to effect reproduction naturally. (Yes, I know about medical intervention, but I’m talking about the biological basics.)
However much the ultra woke companies may try, they can’t beat biology. They just make themselves look ridiculous. And they want the rest of us to buy into the fantasy too. Yet all it does is underline the idiocy of their stance and turn people off. Because the immediate response of most people is “hang on, a pregnant man? Hahaha!”
World’s gone bonkers.
I also had a look at CK’s post on instagram, and the majority of the 8,000 comments reveal many now boycotting the brand; go woke, go broke as they say.
What I don’t understand is why someone who identifies as male, and has her breasts cut off, then wants to experience the most egregiously feminine of experiences by getting pregnant? Although she’s denied that poor child of her milk and lord knows what that presumably genderless upbringing will entail.
No doubt I have just revealed my TERF ignorance 🙄
‘Woke’ is more than an insult, it’s a threat to our freedom
What is woke? It may be everywhere but I haven’t personally experienced it. Is it societies equivalent of a fake virus? If so can we please move on quickly before the government decide to waste another fortune trying to protect us against it.
“It may be everywhere but I haven’t personally experienced it.” Then you are fortunate in that your workplace and other social circles are yet to succumb, but they may do in future.
Retired, so out of loop.
Just asked my 9 year old granddaughter if she had come across the word. No……she asked whether it had something to do with eggs.
Asked my daughter, a school teacher, she doesn’t understand it but thought it bloody annoying.
They may not know what the word means but anyone involved in education as a giver or receiver will be experiencing its effects now, in the way many subjects are taught.
Egg woke. Laid by a cockerel.
Or in ‘woke’ terms, a Hen that identifies as a Cockerel… I think the ‘woke’ agenda is a creeping phenomenon in that it is slowly, and slyly, introduced into our normal lives by little bits here and there that we don’t really notice unless we are paying attention. I think this nonsense about ‘Happy holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’ was one of them.
MSM must be getting desperate now:
“2 more cases of monkey pox reported”
YE GODS,ETC.
Yikes! Monkey pox, salmonella – it’s all happening!
From the British state broadcaster, which experts say has close links to 10 Downing Street:
In other words,
“A state official says the new monkeypox cases aren’t linked to the previous case. According to him, the authorities don’t know how on earth the new cases got infected but they’re trying to find out. He says not to worry, though: monkeypox is infectious but it’s not highly so, so the plebs aren’t in much danger.”
Chortle!
Is someone doing a “barium test” with salmonella – watching where it flows, watching orders of battle in response to it?
Note to politicians: make sure not to open your big mouths in a way that upsets your paymasters, as John Major’s lover Edwina Currie once did. She got the sack for warning people about salmonella in eggs.
Edit: today I learnt that some types of salmonella cause typhoid. A case of “watch this space”?
Note: typhoidal salmonella is apparently different from the kind of salmonella that causes food poisoning. But who knows what “creative” work has been done in biowar laboratories?
Tesco is selling oil that isn’t sunflower oil inside containers labelled “sunflower oil”.
It’s boasting about it.
It’s saying its aim is to allow the products “to remain on sale” [sic].
And it’s saying the real cause is “the war in Ukraine” (which in fact really has caused a shortage of sunflower oil).
The company says it was given the OK by the Foods Standards Agency and its be-tartaned analogue, Food Standards Scotland.
Who do you vote for if you want food labels to tell the truth even when foreign countries are fighting a war against each other thousands of miles away, indeed even if Britain itself were at war?
Tell me and I will vote for them.
If any lawyers are in the house, can they please comment on what statutory power the FSA is exercising when it gives a company the okay to sell food items labelled as something they’re not? Or is it acting under the royal prerogative?
For its next trick, could it rule that sugared slices of swede (US: rutabaga) may lawfully be sold as “pineapple”?
That the FSA “advised” that “allergic reactions to rapeseed oil are very rare” means that public health officials must have been involved.
How rare is “very rare”?
What public good is served by this?
And once there is an answer to that question, we can then ask how many children it’s worth letting die of allergic reactions in order to achieve that supposed public good.
What kind of thing is going on here?
I’ll tell you what: the rule of law is getting thrown out of the window.
From the Food Standards Agency:
Emily Miles, Chief Executive of the Food Standards Agency said:
This woman obviously doesn’t know the meaning of the word “absolute”.
I would like to know what statutory or prerogative power she is acting under when she tells companies they can label food items as something they’re not, whether “temporarily” or otherwise.
Another example of the rule of law being thrown out of the window: Harrods appears to be discriminating against customers who have Russian phone numbers or who say they live in Russia.
That looks very much like discrimination on the basis of national origin, which is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010.
If Britain were at war with Russia, there would be laws about trading with the enemy, and about enemy aliens too. But Britain is not formally at war with Russia. There are no British sanctions that apply generally to all citizens of Russia.
It is not up to a private-sector company to impose such a general sanction. It seems to me to be unlawful for Harrods to act the way it appears to be acting.
There may well be more examples soon of the British authorities basically saying “F*** the law. We don’t need no stinking badges!” (And they call Russia a “mafia state”!)