In less than a year, our government has dictated 1) when we can leave our homes; 2) if we can work; 3) what we can buy; 4) what we have to wear in public; and 5) who we can see in private. All from the initial ‘ask’ of a two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve”. Let that sink in.
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Samizdata quote of the dayJanuary 5th, 2021 |
 22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Sir William Blackstone declared, as long ago as the 18th century, that there were no limits on the powers of Parliament – and Chief Justice Hewart pointed out in 1929 (“The New Despotism”) that, in practice, no limits on the powers of Parliament meant no limits on the powers of the EXECUTIVE (essentially the Civil Service) – as, in the British system, Parliament is normally under the control of the government of the day.
The last large scale challenge to the idea of unlimited powers for Parliament in this country was, I believe, in 1912 – the Ulster Covenant, with about a million people declaring that they would resist Parliament (if it tried to remove their land from the United Kingdom), if need be by force-of-arms. Very hard to see any “Old Whig” thing like this happening today.
Whilst payments continue for most people, I see no chance at all that there will be widespread resistance – whether to Covid Policy, or to a “Climate Change Emergency” or anything else.
The United Nations and the World Economic Forum (and virtually every other international body – governmental or CORPORATE) worked out long ago that as long as people got enough to live on (the “basic income” idea) most people would not risk their lives to oppose government or corporate tyranny.
Of course the Roman Empire worked that out thousands of years ago. “Libertas” went from meaning liberty, to meaning free (or very cheap) bread and other material benefits. It is even on the reverse side of some Roman coins – the word libertas underneath a loaf of bread (not freedom – free, or very cheap, food for the urban mob).
It is often thought that the Green objective is for us to live with nature – in small villages and so on. But that is not the objective of the international elite – they prefer “Smart Cities” where the population would live under constant electronic surveillance, and where most people will “own nothing” (see Agenda 2030 – “sustainable development”) and live off a “basic income” provided by governments and the pet Corporations that will be joined at the hip with governments.
All a bit depressing, but I do not see anything that can be done to prevent this – after all the United States falls on January 20th. The rest of the West will fall without America standing for liberty.
A “cashless society” will be part of all this – it will make a Chinese style Social Credit system easier. People who express the wrong opinions (or whatever) will find it very difficult to buy anything – or to move about, or to have a job (even the most humble job). Everything we do will be recorded and controlled.
“But President Trump will stop it” – as I have already pointed out, there will be no “President Trump” after January 20th. People really have not grasped that yet – there is no difference in PRINCIPLE between “President Biden” and “President Xi” of China or the other world leaders. They all support the international community – government and corporate control of every aspect of life from the cradle to the grave.
It is all very unfortunate – but there we are.
As I have pointed out before – the vision of the international elite is more Saint-Simon (early 19th century French Collectivist – Technocracy with the bankers and Big Business actually being in charge of the Collectivist society) than it is Karl Marx. Although they are quite happy to work with Marxists in order to exterminate what remains of liberty and independence.
“Flatten the curve” quickly became “save the nhs” and now “save the nhs” (again).
A question:
The initial short-lived strategy was to establish herd immunity.
Being immune means that you have either been inoculated with an attenuated virus or bacteria or been infected leading to your own immune response system kicking in. Does being immune mean you give a positive or negative test result? Do the large volume of positives mean that some degree of herd immunity has been established?
There is so much I don’t understand here and other than the headline “positive test” statistics and the number of deaths where Covid was present albeit not the clear causation there isn’t much info around to help.
T cell immunity means lots of people will never test positive and will never get the virus if exposed to it.
Correct Perry – in Tokyo one study indicated that half the population had been exposed to the virus (see Ivor Cummins on this).
They do not have a high death rate because they are not fat lumps like me (i.e. they have good “metabolic health” – they are active) and because they have a good diet with lots of vitamin D. in it.
“Do the large volume of positives mean that some degree of herd immunity has been established?”
No, the large level of positives are what you would expect if you run a PCR test at 35-40 cycles, especially when the tests are processed by newly set up labs employing largely untrained staff, operating under great pressure to increase throughput. They are largely false positives. There is no ‘second wave’ of CV in the UK, there is a false positive case epidemic. Hospitalisation numbers and deaths are roughly what one would expect at this time of year. If you take away the upward spiralling number of ‘cases’ there is no other evidence that anything is out of the ordinary.
I’ll make a prediction, at some point the Powers That Be will surreptitiously reduce the cycle count on the PCR test to something approaching what the real science tells us is a sensible number if you want to detect actual cases of a disease (probably around 20-25) and this will drop the numbers of ‘cases’ massively. My guess is they won’t do this until the vaccine has been rolled out to enough people that they can then claim the reduction is due to the vaccine ‘working’.
Thank you (and thank you Perry).
Having painted himself into a corner Boris will need some convincing justification to persuade a beaten-down population to live normally again.
If cynical manipulation of test methods and data are what is needed so be it, after all that contributed mightily towards getting us into this shitstorm in the first place.
@ Jim, who wrote:
‘I’ll make a prediction, at some point the Powers That Be will surreptitiously reduce the cycle count on the PCR test to something approaching what the real science tells us is a sensible number if you want to detect actual cases of a disease (probably around 20-25) and this will drop the numbers of ‘cases’ massively. My guess is they won’t do this until the vaccine has been rolled out to enough people that they can then claim the reduction is due to the vaccine ‘working’.”
In the US, that process will likewise take place soon after Joe Biden assumes the Presidency, and the reduction will be attributed to his wise and caring judgement. Both he and Ms Harris have publicly denounced the vaccine (since it was successfully produced on President Trump’s watch) so they can’t attribute too much of the case ‘reduction’ to that.
llater,
llamas
‘I’ll make a prediction, at some point the Powers That Be will surreptitiously reduce the cycle count on the PCR test to something approaching what the real science tells us is a sensible number if you want to detect actual cases of a disease (probably around 20-25) and this will drop the numbers of ‘cases’ massively.’
They will have to do this a little at a time though, or else the COVID case and death curves are going to look very ugly!
Where I live in California seems like the number of new infections is high enough this thing is going to burn itself out in a few months regardless of what anyone does or doesn’t do. I didn’t know anyone who had it, even second hand, until November. Since then every day people I know are posting a “can’t leave the house for two weeks” message somewhere on social media.
It’s going to be difficult to convince people extraordinary measures are still necessary when we get real herd immunity and the number of new infections drops like a stone.
Paul Marks –
You basically nailed it. The corruption is now obvious, as the masks drop since they’re no longer needed. From county level to the highest levels of Tech, the media, the courts, the government, and now the executive have been taken by The Long March. Respect for the planning and execution, with minimal opposition. Prepare yourselves for the enlightened future where the self proclaimed elite operate under the philosophy that “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”. Except for the serfs who will be under constant surveillance and permitted to survive as long as we’re useful. The wide open future I grew up in here in the US has become a dystopia in my lifetime. Unduly pessimistic or realistic? We’ll know within a year, two at most.
“As I have pointed out before – the vision of the international elite is more Saint-Simon (early 19th century French Collectivist – Technocracy with the bankers and Big Business actually being in charge of the Collectivist society) than it is Karl Marx. Although they are quite happy to work with Marxists in order to exterminate what remains of liberty and independence.”
This. This. This. Exactly correct.
John Lewis, the first rate Lockdown Sceptics site will likely have the answers to your questions, with much else of immense value besides.
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
This is, of course, ultimately aimed, at the clinical level, at controlling the very air that we breathe, so as to ‘control the virus‘ (not us serfs, naturally). It was also evident right from the start in the UK that the ‘crisis’ was being used to push an agenda of cycling rather than car use (which has nothing whatsoever to do with any clinical need) and as we have seen, controlling the information that we can see and share. It is a pure totalitarian agenda, and the politicians are not bothering to hide it.
And if any Conservative MP truly believed that the measures were wrong, rather than unwise, they would surely have resigned the Whip by now and would be sitting as independents, at the very least pending a restoration of normalcy. As far as I know, none has, so they are not serious about it.
We have already have had controls on the ‘very air that we breathe”, what do you think carbon credits and all that jazz, are?
Back in the ’60s ( yes, I was very young so this could be an example of false memory syndrome ) it’s my recollection there was a saying “they’d tax the air you’d breathe, if the could”. Ta Da!, Carbon credits.
In less than a year, in response, I have evolved into…
Charlatan, misdemeanors, smuggler, blockade runner, tax evasion barterer, seditionist,….
Sadly, was unable to manage high proof hooch without a tax stamp for conversion to FDA unapproved sanitizer.
But so far, I’ve managed to avoid neer-do-well, or prancing about the forest and poaching the king’s deer.
APL,
You have been deemed a non essential source of CO2. Do you comply?
The line I remember from the sixties was “It doesn’t matter who you vote for the government still gets in.” Sadly prophetic.
“Hospitalisation numbers and deaths are roughly what one would expect at this time of year.”
I want this claim to be true. I would really like to see some sort of consistent time series of hospital numbers going back at least as far as, say, the 2019 flu season, or further.
My previous attempts to validate this sort of claim haven’t got very far. E.g. https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/uncategorised/flu-hospital-admissions-in-england-rise-by-more-than-40-in-a-week/
“PHE said there were 472 hospitalised confirmed influenza cases in the week leading up to 8 December [2019] – up from 330 cases the week before”
…but I don’t know how comparable these numbers are.
“I want this claim to be true. I would really like to see some sort of consistent time series of hospital numbers going back at least as far as, say, the 2019 flu season, or further.”
Why only one year back? The question is not ‘Is this winter worse than last?’ but more ‘Is this winter worse than the worst winter within the last (say) 10 years)?’
This chart (source ONS) shows all cause deaths for the last 5 years:
https://lockdownsceptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Deaths-201231.png
Show me the ‘second wave of the covid pandemic’ on that chart. Deaths are all we have to go by in this situation. Everything else is contaminated data, manipulated for political reasons.
George Atkinsson – yes indeed.
Shlomo M. – it does seem that they are following the ideas of Saint-Simon even if they have never directly heard the name.
As for their power – it is already essentially absolute.
For example every television station in the world pushes the same line on many matters – pro Lockdown, pro Climate Change Emergency Powers, “Trump has produced no evidence of election fraud” when he has produced vast amounts of evidence, and so on.
Essentially we have already lost.
It is time for those who can to withdraw from the wider world – and to hope they are not noticed by the powers that will rule it.
Eventually Economic Law will destroy the Collectivist regime – but that may take a very long time.
I will not see freedom again – although the young may.
I suppose that it could be claimed that the lack of a second spike on the graph proves that the lockdowns are working. That is the problem with statistics it seems, people will use them to confirm what they already believe.
Jim: “Show me the ‘second wave of the covid pandemic’ on that chart. Deaths are all we have to go by in this situation.”
That’s fair. Although all we can measure is the combined result of covid + interventions (we don’t know what the deaths from covid would be without interventions; we don’t know the cost in deaths from interventions e.g. resulting in lack of access to medical care).
That chart only goes to the end of 2020. Let’s review it in a few months. It’s possible covid cases are peaking around now, in which case deaths from it would peak 2-4 weeks from now.
I can well understand that an input into death rate is capacity of hospitals. I know the NHS is always “overwhelmed” in winter. My question related to whether it was merely “overwhelmed” before (we know administrators are motivated to find ways to get more resources so will not downplay lack of them) but might actually be overwhelmed this time.
One simple analysis I saw suggested that hospital admissions are some fixed percentage of cases two weeks ago (as measured by the flawed (but perhaps linearly flawed) PCR tests). In which case hospital admissions will continue to rise and populations increase. I have absolutely no idea what the real resource constraints are. This is the sort of prediction that can be checked in a few weeks.
I am not making any particular point, other than I want to find the truth. That approach led me to the conclusion that more freedom results in more wealth (and that more wealth is good). I don’t really know what the best policy is (other than me personally trying not to spread disease) given the current situation. I.e. a situation in which we did not spend the last 30 years following libertarian principles which would make us so rich by now that we could just buy ourselves out of this problem, which we really should start doing ASAP in time for the next disaster.