Whom and what to believe on this matter?

In an exercise in stating the bleeding obvious, there is a crisis of confidence and trust going on during these times.  For example, there is this:

The discovery was made in the first deep sequencing of the mRNA products, carried out by Dr. Kevin McKernan of Medicinal Genomics and his team. The researchers found that the vaccines were contaminated with significant quantities of biological agents known as plasmids.

Dr. Anthony Brookes, Professor of Genomics and Health Data Science at the University of Leicester, told the Daily Sceptic: “This is a solid piece of research by a very knowledgeable team.”

Are you, personally, expert enough to take that idea and run with it, quoting from this or that study to support your findings?  What will you conclude, personally?  It's obvious to someone from a different field, or even a different branch of that same field, that we just don't have the knowledge ourselves, so we must gather it from 'trusted' sources.

What are these trusted sources?  For me, it starts with those from within the medical profession vaguely in this area.  Even Leggy needs to be considered.

But the Fauci/Whitty/Hancock side trot out all sorts of studies with charts to argue the opposite, ignoring studies such as these above as aberrations. Logic would seem to indicate you don't run with something as dangerous as injecting an entire population on the strength of one side's politicised, govt preferred data, when there is more than enough counter-data to demand thorough 'independent' investigation over five to ten years.  Remember thalidomide?

 And you especially don't trust a govt which ups the ante with bull-in-a-china-shop rushes at this mass solution or that ... internment camps (otherwise known as care homes or nightingale hospitals), straight out of the USSR or nazi Germany and loss of jobs, refusal of medical treatment for other ailments ... and so on.

People who are perfectly happy to turn savagely on those questioning anything, screaming that we're far right fascist, racist, disablists.  I'm not an anti-vaxxer from some sort of camp?  I'm a 'gather all available data-ist' and see which way the discoveries lead. Empirical science in other words.  Officially, in NHS records, I'm 'vaccine hesitant'.

I Don't Think You're Making The Argument You Think You Are, Laila...

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, then perhaps coming to the Baftas looking for diversity is an exercise in madness.

Well, yes, Laila, since it's just a luvvie's award show. If you want diversity, trip down your local enriched high street (if the cops haven't sealed off the road for another machete attack) instead and marvel...

...awards are fundamentally subjective exercises. Trying to get film fans to unanimously agree that Cate Blanchett was more convincing as a lecherous conductor than Deadwyler as the bereaved mother of a lynched child, or vice versa, is a fool’s errand.

And yet here you are, a fool... 

Some of our best filmmakers, such as Terence Davies and Joanna Hogg, are studiously ignored by Bafta voters, and Black British directors Menelik Shabazz, Horace Ové and Ngozi Onwurah innovated without the support of many of the bodies that purport to champion British film.

Excellent! They can be scrapped then. Since they are obviously not required. Eh, Laila..? 

Awards are only as prestigious as the public perception of them, and by the time the Bafta inclusivity targets are met in 2025 it may be too late to claw back any cultural relevancy.

Guess the public have spoken. 

The tightening of the ratchet by the Statists

A few years back ... maybe even a decade or more ago ... I was speaking with my mate in Russia about how things were.  There was no need to remind him of the secret police and the climate of "denunciation" which meant that you watched your words ... very, very carefully.

In every town, in every kvartel or subsection of a huge block of houses bounded by main roads, were all sorts of things ... a crisscross of narrow lanes, open play areas with playing equipment and railings for beating rugs ... and always, near the school, the little office where you went to denounce your neighbour for absolutely anything at all.  Could be that he/she walked past you offensively.

Which then kicked off a bureaucratic nightmare for the accused. Paperwork was the least of it ... the main issue was that the laws were so many, so extensive, so overlapping, that not only could anything at all be a pretext for "the visit" (as in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil") of the equivalent of the Stasi but it was actually impossible by then to keep the law at all ... one law conflicted with another and so they had you. In complying with one traffic regulation, you could well be breaking another.

This was still so in my time there ... there was a particular corner near the city which the police watched by rotation and it meant that to get by some parked cars and the near side of a tram, you, by definition, had broken two or three laws or regulations.  They could have you if they wished but mostly they did not wish.

Unless they were on a revenue drive that week or they needed their quota by month end.

Anyway, I said we in the west were approaching that point, maybe around 2010-12, following on from Gordo's RIPA extensions and that the Tories had no intention whatever of reining in such excesses. I'd blogged about it, losing many Conservative party friends in the process.  My mate over there was in denial and comparatively (the USSR had had quite a head start), he had a point but it was certainly heading in that direction here ... the buzzword we used at the time was Statism ... and thus Orphans was born on WordPress.

Then I watched as the Libertarian Party itself ripped itself to pieces over a sheer impossibility. The issue was that the anarchist end, though in denial, were for "don't dare try to stop anything whatever I do, think or say, for any reason, in other words do as thou wilt" ... through to the more small "c" conservative classical liberalism, anti-statist, which nevertheless recognised "some" constraints of "harm to others".  The example Inused was your next door neighbour blasting music and partying to 3 a.m. every night, when you yourself had to work next morning.

Softspoken classical liberals called it "respect" and "disrespect", respectively.  And now here's the next turn of the ratchet. Interestingly, Kemisabi was the preferred choice for PM of a close friend and colleague, on libertarian grounds. Hmmmmm.

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/26/new-harassment-laws-will-turn-business-owners-into-banter-police/

The Government is introducing new legislation aimed at protecting employees from harassment in the workplace.

But critics fear the change will have far-reaching consequences for free speech and will lead to employers having a “legitimate legal interest in policing what members of the public say”.

An amendment to the Equality Act, backed by ministers, will make employers liable for third-party harassment – meaning from members of the public, as well as from their fellow staff members.

Under clause one of the Bill, employers will be required to take “all reasonable steps” to protect their employees from harassment of any kind, and failure to do so will leave them vulnerable to being sued by their employees in the Employment Tribunal.

The ratchet lock is never released in a statist society, it's only ever paused, pending a more conducive time to give it another wind.

Maybe They Are All In A River Somewhere..?

It'd explain their failure to find them, wouldn't it?

It has emerged that senior officers believe there are still “many” firearms in the hands of people who should not have them, despite the former home secretary Priti Patel ordering them to look again at cases where they returned firearms to people after confiscation.

If I disobeyed my boss I'd expect to have a very uncomfortable conversation. Why is that never the case for failing police farces? 

Alarm bells have also been rung because the number of shotgun certificate applications Devon and Cornwall are rejecting has doubled since the Plymouth shootings but the rate in the rest of England and Wales has remained at just 3%, suggesting some forces may still be looking too leniently on applications.

Maybe. Or maybe Devon & Cornwell, realising they had not just dropped the ball but then drop-kicked it into their own goal, were overzealous? 

The new chief constable of Devon and Cornwall, Will Kerr, who came into the post the year after Davison’s attacks, is among those calling for fundamental change.

He said the firearms legislation, introduced in 1968, was “no longer suitable”, arguing that the emphasis was on “permitting rather than preventing gun ownership”.

As indeed it should be. In a modern capitalist democracy, that should always be the default, shouldn't it? Whether we are talking about cars, second homes or guns... 

Killing the elderly

Wasn't sure where to run this ... across the way or at OoL.  Because of our Grandpa here, let it be here.

Rolf (Sackerson) has written a chilling post:

https://rolfnorfolk.substack.com/p/our-dying-rooms

Is it incompetence or is it official policy for hospitals to kill the old?

Actually, not just the old. Long pre-Covid times, the wife of a friend of mine contracted an infection and was taken to hospital. When her husband got there he found her unattended and untubed in bed (this was when hospitals had beds.) She needed fluids to flush out the toxins, but had nothing and the nurses seemed unable or unwilling to do anything and there was no doctor in sight.

More at the end of that link.

The vital importance of the definite article, geopolitically

 Zelensky threatening the American people for not paying enough:

In the Russian language, there are no articles “the” and “a(n)”.  Therefore, in any translation into English, e.g. book, meal, road, the article needs to be inserted to precede the noun.

In the Russian language and also in the Ukrainian, the word root is (transliterated) “u krai-enya” or “at the edge”, perhaps “on the edge”.  It means at the edge or border with Russia or historically, the edge of the land of the tribe Russ, Kiev being the parent city. 

In the very name is the geopolitical situation.  In both languages, the translation is the same into English … the Ukraine.

Zelensky though, installed puppet of 2014, found it politically expedient to do as the CIA and NATO wished him to when speaking in English and call it without “the”, meaning  a western-aligned new nation (Timoshenko etc.)  However two regions in the east are majority Russian speaking, plus they sit on the remaining natural resources. And they translate it as “the Ukraine”.

Thus, if you are aligned with the CIA, Washington, NATO and the Ukrainian fascist organisations such as Azov battalion, then you’ll drop “the”.  If your sympathy is more for the Russian stance on the matter, you’d use “the”.

No Doubt Lockdown Will Be Blamed For The Delays...

 Boy, don't those wheels of justice grind slowly...for some?

A coroner who bullied staff and lost sensitive documents about murder of a schoolgirl on a train has been sacked.

Don't rush to judgement, eh? 

Chinyere Inyama was dismissed from his position after an investigation was carried out into claims he misled the Chief Coroner.

The controversial coroner has been the centre of several scandals since he was appointed in 2013, including in 2014 when he left a sensitive police document about the murder of 14-year-old Alice Gross on a train.

Screw with the public, no-one seems to care much. But mislead the Chief Coroner? That's a no-no, even if you do hold a RaceCard™... 

The vastly funded "fact check" industry

Consider, dear reader:

https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/fact-check-fact-checkers-falsely-claim-they-are-fact-checkers

It would be a herculean effort for the conservative movement to scale up anything close to the left’s fact-check industry. The mainstream media, social media, and most other media channels have pretty much been captured by the left already.

And to be honest, conservatives are less apt to spend their days churning out clickbait for use in Twitter warfare. It’s a tactic much more in vogue with the self-righteous left, who can’t imagine that anything but its preferred policy is the scientific truth above all else, despite what the actual truth may be.

Much credit can be given to failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who endlessly called for fact checks during her debate with then-candidate Donald Trump. When you aren’t winning a policy debate, it’s much easier to appeal to a supposedly “third party” judge who is on your team already.

https://www.ncregister.com/blog/taking-a-closer-look-at-snopes-and-debunking-the-debunkers

Note very well that Clinton didn’t simply say that she wanted laws to be enacted and enforced even if religious believers disagreed with them. She went much further and specifically said that religious beliefs—and by extension the believers—have to change. Make no mistake, Clinton and her confrères have in mind a worldwide mission of “religious reform.”

Snopes:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/snopes-suspends-co-founder-mass-plagiarism-staff-revolts

Firstly, they're accused, not of false debunking, the real claim, but of a side issue. The article's been archived but in a post at N.O. in March, 2021, I quoted the article:

Five years later, and Mikkelson's just been suspended by Snopes after BuzzFeed uncovered massive plagiarism - including instructing other Snopes writers to 'cut-and-paste' mainstream breaking news stories without attribution, and then alter them after the fact.

Then we get into Factcheckdotcom ... one of many supposed "fact check" services, all funded by someone not stated and they got stuck into a Daily Mail article, which in my eyes is shoddy anyway, going off at tangents and not nailing Mikkelson for outright unsupported declarations of "false".

At this point, I'm inserting in this post my own claim that the antiWoke are often lazy in their digging, not comprehensive, easily bored and not willing to follow through and then archive. Just the DM gap between the article and comments is filled with huge, lurid adverts but if you do spend time in comments beyond commenters just chorusing the "Snopes are leftwing fraudsters" trope with no facts to back it up, a really dispiriting response, upon which the left can immediately say, "Aha, there's the quality of rightwing debate," and on the strength of that article, they have a case for saying that.

Until we get to one commenter midway:

I emailed them at snopes one day when they had an article denying purina dog food was poisoning dogs. They responded that I was incorrect so I replied and attached a jpeg of my check from the class action suit that purina paid out. They never responded.

But even there, he has no facility, in a controlled comments section, to run that jpeg.

Sometimes though, a serious site gives chapter and verse on shoddy "fact checking", e.g. today's Daily Sceptic:

https://dailysceptic.org/2023/02/22/fact-checker-disseminates-misinformation-about-vaccines/

... and immediately, the issue of nailing the bastards, the Herculean task, the need for resources and database we unherdable cats simply do not have ... which if you read throught that, they do seem to nail ... is a small victory on a peripheral issue, major to Toby but minor to the world.  And what will now happen to Toby's post? Well, if you yourself archive the url, it's something I suppose, but hardly earth-shattering.

I myself can be accused, by myself, of lazy archiving and filing, despite a legit counter claim that N.O. has been taken down four times and though I do have, somewhere, on a stick, something on Snopes, it's not retrievable.

Why not?  Because I'm one man only, of a certain increasingly mentally doddery age, as are most on this side of politics now, who is actually running a blog or two daily, which requires my attention on that.  Julia here has her own blog, full time work, p,us a homelife.  In short, we're not set up, as funded "fact check" sites are, with the database access they have.

They win, if only through the vast organisational capacity and narrative capture of hearts and minds. Example?  Rewriting Roald Dahl, right at this moment. At least we were outraged enough to post posts on it showing how the revisionists had altered Dahl's texts.

Now what everyone should be doing is at least keeping a copy on file of that comparative jpeg of the alteration, in order, five years from now, to have something to point to.  Frankly, this is a young person's game, polit-blogging ... but where are these required young people?

They're on Twitter and Gab with the 140 character limits, not researching but simply retweeting and liking.2

Lazy.

No, say the young ... we have families, jobs, home renovations, driving the kids here and there, football, there's so little time. 

Well, I counter ... how come Snopes and so many others can find the time?

Answer ... they're funded to research fulltime.  Look at Media Matters, Demos, Information Awareness ... they appear, fully funded, do their damage, disappear and new ones appear.  Are any individual young people in their 30s and 40s in such a position?  Of course not.

And finally in this post, the very fact that I have spent an hour and a half finding urls for the post is a vital hour and a half I've not spent on N.O., plus the email load of the morning.  The good side is that we at least have three or four people sending material, which keeps us ticking over. And Julia?  She sticks to her rails and keeps on ticking over too.

So, given all the aforementioned, how can we moan that the globo Woke left have captured the narrative and the hearts and minds of the population, when so few on our side are doing the hard yards?

Plus look at the length of this post itself. Anyone still with me here?

Always Finding The Cloud In The Silver Lining...

During the past few years, we have witnessed a revolution in working life. When home working became more common during the Covid pandemic, many assumed this would be a temporary change. Yet according to data released this week by the Office for National Statistics, between September 2022 and January 2023, 16% of the workforce still worked solely from home, while 28% were hybrid workers who split their time between home and the office.

Hurrah, the 'Guardian' has found a success st...

Oh, wait! 

But what the data makes starkly clear is that the working from home revolution has not touched everyone’s lives equally. The ONS survey found that workers on salaries of more than £50,000, people with degrees, Londoners and white people had the highest rates of home or hybrid working – and were less likely to be required to go in every day.

So..? Isn't that a function of the jobs they tend to be concentrated in, more than anything else? 

There are many people working in the service, care and transportation sectors, for instance, who can’t work from home at all.

Well, yes.  

Overall, though, this revolution could change work and our lives outside work for the better – but to do so, it must be accessible to more than just the highest paid, most privileged workers.

How do you plan to allow a black Northern plumber to work from home to balance it out then? 

In the end, the faceless ones get to everyone

The story breaking just now:

O'Keefe says he's packing his personal belongings and no longer has a job at Project Veritas following the board's actions. "I don't have the answers to why they've been doing this...but I'm confident those reasons will come to light."

Time for anyone following veritas to unfollow them.

Continued:

Sorry but I do feel that James is making a tactical error here.  Apart from the egregious toads who did it, there are good staff too. He feels for them, ergo he hesitates to go … just as the toads are counting on.

Thus he’s locked into an organisation we’ve stopped following. If he posts under the Veritas banner now, he is compromised. Someone needs to take him aside and explain this.