So why, of all the places in London, on all the days of the year, was this one targeted on Good Friday?
I don’t think much thought went into it. I think deep down in the brain of the state is an idea that religious people, especially Christians, shouldn’t think they have any special position in Britain any more.
Worship the new Health and Safety State first, and when you’ve done that we might allow to you worship God, not in the way you want to, but in the way we let you.
If they’d come in with clubs swinging and Communist emblems on their cap-badges, I suspect the Poles of Balham would have thrown them out. But, like so many of us, they still treasure the illusion that this is a free country.
And so they submit to things they’d never take from an invader or a more obvious oppressor. It turns out that free countries are incredibly easy to turn into despotisms, because nobody can believe what is happening.
Life under what The Times calls, quite accurately, “the plandemic”. (DBx: Most Americans have not been subjected to the extraordinarily high degree of Covid tyranny still crushing down the British people. But capacity limits in many of these United States nevertheless make dining out or going to a bar for a drink much more difficult than before the plague of Covid Derangement Syndrome.)
Britain is no longer a free country. A slice:
Under severe restrictions on our freedoms, government told us that locking us down was the only way to save the NHS and save lives from the virus. The lockdowns have clearly not worked in the unrealistic aim of eradicating the virus, nor in coping with the virus, and the NHS hospitals, while coping heroically with the winter surge of cases, also acted as major spreaders of Covid. Florence Nightingale knew about isolation hospitals for highly transmissible diseases but our health bureaucrats ignored her wisdom and did not use the Nightingale Hospitals for this purpose, nor did they deploy the reservoir of student nurses – and for the next winter surge we will have no isolation hospitals and no accessible pool of extra emergency nursing staff. Nothing has changed. The fact is that if we do get a surge in the winter, when respiratory cases rise, the government is keeping the lockdown hammer as its one instrument of response. We were told ‘test and trace’ would turn the tide and control the epidemic, but that has been described as a ‘mess’ and even counter-productive.
We were told that the first lockdown was a gain in the battle, then another surge brought another lockdown. Then we were told a vaccine was to be our salvation, then despite a surprisingly efficient vaccination programme, and ‘the data’ showing that we are on the way out of the epidemic, it was announced that the lockdown restrictions can only be very slowly lifted, with small businesses and pubs being sacrificed as we speak. And these restrictions of social distancing and mask wearing will be kept after the ‘end’ of lockdown. We are not going to be free for a long time; we are being dragged back as we are told we are free.
And we are told that we will have to have vaccination passports, and will need to test ourselves twice a week, despite being fully healthy! It seems that our government is now addicted to micromanaging our lives in totalitarian, bureaucratic fashion. Just as with our semi-escape from Brussels technocracy, so with our semi-escape from uniquely repressive restrictions on our lives in all aspects, this is a fake and we will be stuck with loss of freedoms for an unspecified time. The depth and width of the freedoms lost include those of religious practice, social life, family life, freedom of speech to criticise the restrictive laws, travel within and out of the country, stopping basic schooling, the misuse of the police in enforcing these restrictions. The public has been psychologically coerced and scared into accepting all this with little complaint. The MSM has acted as government loud-hailer with little criticism, despite what is now a tsunami of high-quality scientific evidence against lockdown and devastating criticism of the ‘modelling’ that lies behind the harsh totalitarian regulation of life. We have been manipulated into compliance in an abusive fashion.
Karol Markowicz reasonably wonders if Covid-19 hysterics will ever let children lead normal lives. Two slices:
The end of the pandemic is nigh. Americans continue to get vaccinated at a rapid clip. Life will be moving on. Except, it seems, for children. For more than a year, they have suffered from irrational, unscientific and downright superstitious policies inflicted upon them by adults — and there is no end in sight.
…..In November, Maria van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization’s emerging-diseases unit, clarified that “for children under 6 years old, we don’t recommend the use of masks.” This, she said, was “for many reasons — because of the way children are developing” and because enforcing adherence is a fool’s errand. She added: “Between 6 [and] 11, we recommend taking a risk-based approach depending on where the children are, the types of activities they are doing.”
Yet last week, YouTube removed a video of scientists from places like Stanford saying much the same to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The Google-owned video service called it “medical misinformation.” This, even though last April, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcocki said her site would interdict “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations.” In this case, it’s YouTube itself that was contradicting WHO.
As Phil Magness would say, the straw man continues to romp.
Vaccine passports: What price in terms of freedom? A slice:
According to The Ada Lovelace Institute report “What place should COVID-19 vaccine passports have in society?”: “The expert group came to the view that at present vaccination status does not offer clear or conclusive evidence about any individual’s risk to others via transmission. Without that it cannot be a robust basis for risk-based decision making, and therefore any roll out of a digital passport is not currently justified.” They concur with the European Data Protection Board which points out the dangers of unintended secondary uses resulting in widespread discrimination and inequality.
But who cares about all that when you could be launching an app? When we look at death tallies and population level vaccination rates one has to question the motivation of the rush to implement this kind of technology. Take Brunei with a grand total of three COVID-19 deaths. It already has its app, BruHealth, which is used to restrict access to business premises and shows the “activity trace” of any nearby confirmed cases. They even used it for a while to control access to Friday prayers. Finland, with 868 deaths and 2% of its population fully vaccinated, has joined with Estonia (1,006 deaths, 5% vaccinated) to be one of the first to pilot a WHO scheme involving showing your immunity status to your employer. What could possibly go wrong? Australia, with 909 deaths and only 4% of its population vaccinated, is working with unions to determine domestic restrictions based on its Medicare Express Plus app which can access the national Australian Immunisation Register. The data suggests these countries do not have a problem that merits deploying technology to restrict the lives of 95% of their citizens for an indefinite period.
Those of you who doubt that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real and that much of humanity is now insane, ponder this fact: “Boris Johnson has decreed that vaccinated people must not meet indoors because jabs ‘are not giving 100% protection’.” And remember, the fully vaccinated Fauci remains so frightened of Covid that he’ll not resume a normal life.
Here’s a letter from Lisa Dickmann in today’s Wall Street Journal:
If I’m fully vaccinated, why should I care whether the guy sitting next to me is? Once everyone who wants a vaccine has had the chance to get it, the risk to the unvaccinated isn’t society’s problem, and all pandemic-instituted restrictions should end.
Let’s hope Americans will see vaccine passports for what they are: the government’s attempt to cling to power granted by us to battle a threat that, very soon, will no longer be much of a threat.
