Still Clapping, Are We?

Matthew Charnock, 35, was rushed to Whiston Hospital after being smashed over the head with an iron wheel brace by jealous Steven Cotterill. But despite Mr Charnock appearing extremely confused and bleeding heavily from a head wound, nurses failed to order a CT scan and instead patched up the cut and sent him home with painkillers.

Envy of the world, am I right?

Mr Charnock was found unresponsive the next day and taken back to hospital where medics discovered he had a serious skull fracture and was suffering from sepsis and meningitis. He underwent surgery but could not be saved. Last week Coroner Jacqueline Devonish ruled Mr Charnock was unlawfully killed and that his death was contributed to by neglect by triage nurse Stephanie Keelan and emergency nurse practitioner Paul O’Brien, who failed to order the scan which would have saved his life.

And the coroner was in no doubt about the potential outcome if the NHS 'workers' had done their job. But they weren't the only ones who's performance was less than it should have been. 

Following a three-week trial at Chester Crown Court, Cotterill, then 39, was convicted of Mr Charnock’s manslaughter and jailed for seven years.

And his 'accomplices' in the ER? What about them? 

Nurse O’Brien was also investigated and interviewed by police, who found Mr Charnock’s treatment to be ‘sub-optimal.’ But the nurse was never charged after the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no realistic prospect of convicting him of gross negligence manslaughter.

Some play the game. Some quit half way through. Some never even get off the bench at all. 

Just some quotes today

 a. Mark W:

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” (Sir Karl Popper, 28th July 1902 – 17th September 1994)

b. Alexandra Marshall:

Why do people want politicians to control and moderate ‘the truth’ online? No, seriously. Why are so many on the left incapable of thinking for themselves to the point the need a government to pre-edit the social conversation for them? It’s rather pathetic that a human mind could be so weak.

JH: Decades of seeping indoctrination, intergenerational.

c. Peter D. Clack:

If carbon dioxide doubled overnight it would make no measurable difference at all to weather or temperatures anywhere on earth. This is because the effects of CO2 are logarithmic & when you add CO2, the effect diminishes sharply on a sliding scale. Alarmists hope no one notices.

d. Dan Wootton:

Not just a day of shame for the BBC, but the discredited leftist pundits who defended Huw Edwards for political reasons while calling for my cancellation after a left-wing witch hunt. Notably Owen Jones, Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Narinder Kaur. (I’ll) ever listen to them again. 

e. Students for liberty:

“The greatest tyrannies are always perpetuated in the name of the noblest causes.” (Thomas Paine)

Well, They Didn't Say The Connection Would Be A Long One....

A new play area at the National Arboretum designed to help children 'connect with nature' has been built beneath trees that drop poisonous berries. Two playgrounds, called Branch Out and Holford Hollow, feature climbing poles, ropes and a giant web-like structure. But they are tucked away among yew trees, which produce small orange or red berries that are attractive to children – but deadly if eaten.

Well, really, who'd eat berries they didn't know anything about?  

It comes months after a coroner expressed concern about the hidden danger yew berries pose after a boy collapsed and died from eating them during a walk in a park with his father.

Ah.  

The source, who asked not to be named, added the site for the play area had been chosen because it was a 'natural clearing' – but pointed out it was only clear because the extremely toxic yew trees had suppressed other plants.

I guess these days, we can't even expect the people who run the National Arboretum to know anything about trees... 

Last week, bosses put up some small signs reading: 'Caution. Most berries in the arboretum are not safe to eat. If you see them on the floor or in the trees please leave them where they are.' However, staff feared these signs were not obvious or specific enough.

Stick a skull and crossbones icon on them then.  

Battle of Britain Day (1940)

Remembering those who fought for this country* …

*. unlike Starmer and his communists.

The communist with the red case

What precisely does he bring to Britain? Afa I can see … sfa.  For example:

AKH, Cap X, Pharos, NHS

Blogger AK Haart has a piece up on the NHS:

https://akhaart.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-nhs-it-really-isnt-rocket-science.html

The writer quoted wants the funding for the NHS not to come from the top down but from the bottom up.

All right, who exactly is this Neil Record?

https://capx.co/at-this-rate-labour-will-never-fix-the-nhs/

Uh huh. Note the Brexit section. 

https://capx.co/category/brexit/

Neil R is apparently in this Pharos Foundation, using this lighthouse beacon motif as our current Nourishing Unherdables does:

https://pharosfdn.org/

… but backed by a fair amount of moolah it seems, unlike us.  We’re bottom up you see.

Not making out that there’s anything untoward … juss exploring like.

Oh, Now You Want Proper Journalism?

I am going to go out on a limb and say that most Guardian readers who watch a BBC documentary called America’s New Female Right are unlikely to be in accord with the views espoused therein. We are not going to empathise with statements such as: “Women getting the right to vote has led to every form of degeneracy,” “Feminism was absolutely created to destabilise the family [and] western civilisation,” and: “Feminism is a thousand times more toxic than the ‘toxic masculinity’ we hear so much about.” We are unlikely to agree that “Satan’s agenda” is to destroy the nuclear family structure in order to control society.

But since you're the 'Guardian's TV critic, watch it you will, despite your reflexive cringing at the attitudes therein.

It’s a fascinating subject that deserves attention and rigorous interrogation of all the factors at play, especially with subjects as bright, articulate and confident as these (again, especially Faulkner). What we get instead is a cheap, shoddy programme apparently thrown together in 10 minutes, presumably on the grounds that everything and everyone is so obviously awful and evil and bad-bad-bad that it is enough just to film them, show Wright’s pained face occasionally and have her lob in a few wet questions to show that she is still listening and still on the side of right (which is, of course, left, not right).

Well that sounds like most of the ‘Guardian’s’ output, so it should be familiar!  

Sinister music is played in certain scenes, in case we are in danger of forgetting which side “we” are on – all of us, without doubt, without question, without occasionally wondering if the “other side” might have half a point buried in there that might be worth pulling out and examining in the light.

Only a Sith (and a ‘Guardian’ columnist, it seems) deals in absolutes. There’s never any chance of conceding a point from the other side. 

If you are going to interview people such as McMichael, Hutcherson and Faulkner, you need a presenter who is capable and unafraid of going toe to toe with them. These are people with sincerely held beliefs. You need someone with the intellectual and temperamental firepower to challenge them – someone who is not afraid to, in British terms at least, be “rude” to their subjects and see if they can really defend assertions that are otherwise allowed to stand as truth.

Why do you want to challenge them, when any attempt to challenge a left-wing viewpoint is treated as if heresey against truth come down from the mountain on tablets of stone? 

The pseudo-intellectual Wokerati

… touting themselves as the crème de la crème.

After having put the boot in, yesterday, to Toby Young’s TDS, today they excel themselves with two accessible articles … one on oikophobia and one on Nigeria’s Christians. This is part one.

HERE

Through that article, you can access all the rest, saves me running the screenshot. So … to business:

In his 2004 book England and the Need for Nations, the British philosopher Roger Scruton termed the rising liberal ideology of self-contempt as oikophobia. The Ancient Greek word for home is oikos; and thus oikophobia, Scruton wrote, is “(stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home. It manifests as a consolidated, wide-spanning offensive against the historical, theological, literary, legal and social inheritance that formed the modern West.“

I call that mid-intellectualism, that paragraph … in other words, accessible to a wider range of people … to those “of the people” down to the insufferably snobby upper middle or left intellectuals. This thing gets quite inverted, with educated pollies being below that, with true oiks such as Rayner and Phillips near the bottom of the heap. And at the top? Well, the Scrutons and Thomas Sowells of course. Plus the C19th working men’s clubs and evening classes:

HERE

Despite being useful on a football field, my swottery separated me from my fellow spotty herberts and why did I swot long into the evenings in secondary? Because my parents were working to put me through, not just a grammar or private but through a “public school” I’ll not name, which admittedly has opened certain doors, but my humble beginnings have turned out to be more useful in the long run.

One thing I learnt was that tradesmen were where the money was … those people were never going to starve. Back to the DS article:

As Scruton observed: “Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people — the intellectuals especially — tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers.”

Hence, the tedious political activism that was formerly confined to the university campus has now been propagated across Western institutions and corporations. Indeed, the touted ‘grown-ups’ in the West are now largely liberal oikophobes, educated at elite universities that serve, as the conservative historian Niall Ferguson has argued, to transmit civilisational self-contempt in place of the classical Western inheritance.

Nice article. I’ve told the tale before of being on the students’ swotting floor, I thought of it as, on the way to my tutorial room and a girl was struggling with what looked like Bloom’s Taxonomy … I really don’t recall which leftwing “intellectual” tome it was … I asked her about it and she showed me what she was studying … it may as well have been Greek.

Actually … to me, it may as well also have been Greek … it was the worst pseudo-intellectual claptrap, typical of the type, so beloved of curriculum departments. I translated it for her. Can’t recall if she asked … well why can’t they just say that … or maybe it was me, I, they, them its. Either way, it was that thing, starting with “w” in the vernacular, which churchmen in the day would warn a boy against … stop it or you’ll go blind. I mean it really was totally unnecessary and woolly thinking to boot.

So, to return to the article again … what are the four pillars of leftist w***erism?

First, Western history is condemned in an ahistorical, gratuitously unfair, even smirking, manner.

Second, the theological basis of the modern West – Christianity – has been assailed ferociously by the secular Left.

Third, contempt for traditional customs and simple patriotism has become a familiar and undisguised trait of the oikophobic Left. Indeed, George Orwell recognised the roots of this adolescent sentiment in his great 1941 essay, England Your England.

Fourth, as Orwell further noted in England Your England, a chief symptom of the Left’s worldview is its servility to anti-Western foreign regimes.

I’ll leave it there, otherwise this post might go on forever.

A Christmas Gift from The Labour Party

You’re Telling Us What We Already Know…

What is justice for Grenfell? After seven years of public inquiry we have a 1,700-page report and a cost of more than £200m. We have had investigations, books, plays and more than £100m spent on an ongoing police investigation. Yet so far we have no closure, no prosecutions and no convictions. The word ‘“justice” does not appear in the recommendations of this week’s Moore-Bick report of the inquiry’s findings. Ask any lawyer why, and you will get a knowing smile. Justice means trials, more delays and more fees.

Well I never! You don't say, Simon? And yet, they roll on and on and on. With the bereaved always hoping for change as a result.

The answer is that the “judge-led” public inquiry has become an embedded institution in British democracy. By postponing blame, it somehow softens the guilt and gets a generation of politicians and regulators off the hook. When the Institute for Government (IfG) in 2019 looked back at the 68 public inquiries held in the previous 30 years, it found they had cost a total of £639m.

And why worry about that? After all, it’s only taxpayer’s money. As long as it produces results, right?

The give-away in the IfG report was that one in seven inquiries took more than five years to report, while only six cases produced evidence of a parliamentary follow-up. The public inquiries had served what seemed their hidden purpose, which was to delay blame until those responsible had passed out of sight. That is the only reasonable conclusion for the seven-year Moore-Bick Grenfell enterprise.

Well, they aren’t quite out of sight yet, should Starmer wish to flex his political muscles against a worthy target for once.  

Last month came a breath of fresh air from the new prisons minister, Lord Timpson, with his company’s long record of aiding former inmates. He reckoned that only a third of prisoners should have been locked up. The rest needed the sort of remedies adopted by more progressive regimes such as those in Norway and Germany. In the cases of Grenfell, the Post Office and infected blood, this should surely mean heavy fines, dismissals and restrictions on office-holding. In most non-violent crimes, this should be coupled with various forms of restorative justice.

We’ll have to see if justice is a thing Starmer’s mob really care about as much as they claimed when in opposition, when they never had to actually do anything but snipe from the benches.