Scrapbook for November 2020

27.11.2020 – Pricks R Us

If someone is vaccinated against COVID, why should they worry whether the sniffling refusenik standing next to them has been vaccinated or not? Assuming that the vaccines are substantially effective – a very big assumption at the moment, however – the vaccinated ones have seemingly nothing to fear.

Choosing whether to receive the vaccine is thus a completely personal choice that affects no one else. Refuseniks can only do harm to like-minded refuseniks. Restricting their civil liberties as a sanction for not being vaccinated is outrageous bossiness and quite without purpose.

It appears that the vaccination campaigns will start with children, the group that has the least to fear from COVID. Whether governments get round to vaccinating the wrinklies who are bed-blocking, requiring care-home provisions and even receiving state pensions towards their useless, unproductive existence – well, we shall see. Even the medical dimwits realise that provoking an immune response in an aged person with existing health concerns is the last thing one should do. In fact, we shall probably get to the point where the very people who are most at risk from COVID are also the very people who are most at risk from the vaccines' side effects.

No economist has yet calculated the economic benefits of wiping out the wrinkly drones who cost the nation so much, possibly because COVID has had barely any impact on the overall age-related mortality, it has just taken its turn with its colleagues flu, pneumonia and sepsis in this important eugenic task of protecting pension systems from pensioners and the health services from patients.

05.11.2020 – Captain Foresight

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, that master of playground name calling, chooses to call the Leader of the Opposition, Sir Keir Starmer, 'Captain Hindsight', when the government's errors of omission and commission are being forensically questioned. It's an easy jibe for a leader to make who has only a nine-month record of one bad decision after another to his name.

For anyone wondering, this website has been consistent on the COVID-19 issue since we first mentioned it on 25 February this year. We wrote more on the subject on 28 February. Our response to Johnson's masterful strategy of 'protecting the NHS' by 'flattening the sombrero' was given on 10 March. That article in particular makes an interesting read in hindsight.

Our theme was followed up a few days later on 12 March and a few days after that on 24 March and then passim in our Scrapbook for March as well as the Scrapbook for May. Although tiring of the whole opera buffa, we wrote another article on this theme on 17 August, but a point comes at which ennui overtakes our continued amazement at the level of incompetence on display.

Nine months of stating with complete consistency the bleedin' obvious; nine months of watching the governments of Europe in general and the government of the UK in particular batter themselves like rats against the walls of the maze into which they themselves blundered.

Governments have managed to crank up so much fear in a majority of their citizens in order to gain obedience to their nonsensical edicts that they have effectively blocked off the exit from the maze. It looks as though that escape is a long way off without a suitably impressive Act of God.

03.11.2020 – Election eve

Whoever wins the US election, there will be some legal battling during the transition period, but after the swearing in of the President, the victorious side will takes its revenge on the losers.

Donald Trump failed to do this when he won in 2016: Hillary was never locked up, the FBI, many other organs of state and almost all the media were left intact to run a highly coordinated resistance movement against his presidency. He paid for this with three years of political trench warfare.

Large parts of the swamp are still holding out. If he wins a second term he must immediately and decisively purge these remnants. In order to do this he will need at a minimum a supportive Senate.

If Biden wins there is no doubt that extreme revenge will be taken on all remains of Trumpism. The purge will be complete and extend into the farthest outposts of Trump's legacy.

The organs of state will be co-opted into this task without difficulty – they still contain even now many Obama-era holdovers at their lower levels. Remember how the IRS scythed down Tea Party members? We can look forward to more of that kind of thing.

The Trump remnants will be purged with great efficiency – every dealing of theirs will be inspected, investigated and prosecuted, the punishment being the process. Donald Trump himself will not be immune. All the Democrat scandals of the Trump presidency will be whitewashed over; we shall hear no more of mail servers, FISA applications and Hunter's laptop.

Update 08.11.2020:

It's started. It's called The Trump Accountability Project. 'There's a man going round takin' names' …

Biden: 'It's time to heal'.

02.11.2020 – Nigel Farage in search of a cause

It's difficult to see what Nigel Farage expects to achieve by rebranding the Brexit Party as Reform UK, apart from obtaining some occupational therapy to pass his time as the forgotten man of UK politics.

After a very brief flash of glory, UKIP crashed and burned in blazing acrimony; its nominal successor, the Brexit Party, never got off the ground high enough to crash and has now fizzled out in pointlessness at the end of the runway.

Now Reform UK is ready to turn over the prop and reach for the sky. It will almost certainly end up in plumes of smoke at the end of said runway alongside its two earlier incarnations – assuming it gets that far, that is.

It doesn't matter whether we are well disposed or not towards Reform UK and the ideas behind it. It's not at all clear what those ideas are: at the moment the buzzword is 'anti-lockdown'; but it seems a bit fishy that this grumble, however serious it is, has been given the bombastic and generic label 'Reform UK'. Other issues such as the reform of the voting system and the House of Lords are currently being kicked about – the tiny newcomer is certainly not lacking in hubris, but nemesis (a.k.a hard reality) is just around the corner.

Experience has shown many times over that it is impossible for a single issue party – however vaguely its issue is formulated – to be electorally successful in the UK's first-past-the-post system. Impossible.

The new party might pick up a few local councillors, but who cares? Power in UK politics has become even more concentrated in central government than it ever was. In these COVID days even Parliament seems to have become an obedient accessory of government.

There is hardly any chance that the new party will win even one seat in a general election and no chance at all of its gaining a politically significant number of seats.

Hence our opinion that the new party can only be viewed as occupational therapy for Nigel Farage.

Whether Reform UK will even come into existence or not depends on the Electoral Commission, which now has to decide whether the new party can be allowed to be cobbled together from the remains of the Brexit Party.

We are on tricky legal ground here: how far can the organization of one party and the assets and infrastructure that were donated to it for its stated purpose be simply transferred into another, completely different entity – different apart from the presence of Farage and Tice, that is? Will the party calling itself Reform UK even be able to pass the sniff test of its creation?

Afterthought

Some are saying that UKIP's formula consisted of frightening the Conservative Party with the prospect of losing susceptible constituencies to the Labour Party. However, it has still to be explained how sabotaging a number of Conservative seats in favour of Labour, a party even more inimical to the aims of Reform UK, could possibly benefit the new party.

In all this tactical ducking and weaving, we must not lose sight of the fact that in UK elections, the only thing that matters is the number of seats a party gets in parliament.

For a further dimension of pointlessness, we could add what we might call the Peter Hitchens' perspective, that both major parties now represent soft to hard left ideological viewpoints, so that it doesn't really matter which one is elected, the end result will be much the same. In this broader view, whatever Reform UK will attempt to do will be nullified whatever the outcome of a general election.

01.11.2020 – Deniers

The technique worked well for the climate alarmists: claim for your orthodoxy the status of truth – whether self-evident or 'the science' (97%) – and brand all heretics, whatever their objections, as 'climate deniers'. As such they can now be smeared with every stupid utterance imaginable, cancelled and thrown into the outer darkness.

Now we see the same technique being applied in parts of the European media by the COVID-19 alarmists against the dissentients: we are now 'Corona deniers'.

Both terms are cheap propaganda slapstick intended to shut down debate, not further it. We who are cursed with sceptical natures are generally a cheerful lot – we have to be – who take the use of these terms as a sign that our opponents have run out of real arguments.

We have known since the beginning of 2020 that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is highly infectious but relatively harmless: many won't experience any appreciable symptoms at all, some may have an unpleasant experience to some degree, a few vulnerable people will be pushed over the edge by it; some special cases, who have been subjected to a massive infectious load, may die too. In essence, all of this is no different from the other viruses that sweep through the herd. No one wants to catch COVID-19, but then, no one wants a cold or flu either.

We sceptics watched the alarmists pick up the issue and run with it: it was branded; scientists – people who opine for money – crawled out in search of research grants; politicians put their deep ignorance on display yet again. Oh, and we deniers got another badge of honour.

It's disappointing to us that the media are generally so compliant to the orthodoxies and that so many of the population turn out to be terrified snitches, not the bloody-minded and bloody-handed citoyens we had hoped they would be, but we'll do our best to stay cheerful.

Mustn't grumble.