We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraphwas saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
These cases might initially read as isolated absurdities: a pensioner’s raided home, a fine for a nickname, a meme investigated as though it were genuine Nazi propaganda. Taken together, they describe a pattern in which laws designed to protect democracy from its enemies are being turned against ordinary citizens engaged in perfectly legitimate political speech.
Germany’s experience should be a lesson for other countries and their respective governments. It is a reminder that speech laws drafted with the best of intentions — to prevent a return to fascism, to protect politicians from genuine harassment — can, without firm safeguards, be distorted and become instruments of routine political policing. As Dr Zitelmann’s case shows, even a historian who has devoted his career to studying the dangers of totalitarianism is not immune from being investigated under laws that increasingly resemble the very thing they were built to prevent.
There is a Crowdfunder live at the moment which tells you everything you need to know about the government of this country. The Centre for Migration Control asked the Ministry of Justice a simple question. How many migrants have been convicted of murder, rape and the supply of weapons? Not opinion. Not spin. A number. The government collects it, sits on it, and refuses to publish it.
The CMC took the case to the Information Commissioner and won. The ICO ruled that the MoJ must publish the data for 2018 to 2024. And what did our Labour government do, faced with a lawful ruling that the public should be told the truth? It lawyered up. It is going to court, at your expense, to prevent you from knowing what it already knows. It is meanwhile withholding the 2025 figures too, presumably on the basis that if a cover-up is worth doing it is worth doing thoroughly.
Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help. https://t.co/5WAT2JdeZS
— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) July 16, 2026
“Speaking ill of the dead is not an offence, however offensive. If Heather Herbert joins the @SpeechUnion, we will do our best to help.”
Combined with the already-passed Online Safety Act and the previously announced intention to ban under-16s entirely from social media — a ban that Prime Minister-in-waiting Burnham intends to support — these laws, enacted or proposed, look to anyone except a Labour lickspittle to be a serious erosion of the rights of the British people to access information freely and express their political opinions online.
These draconian measures bear a striking resemblance to the reaction of a seemingly very different British government to ostensibly dissimilar circumstances: William Pitt the Younger’s infamous series of repressive laws enacted during the 1790s.
Pitt’s anti-radical legislation was designed to preserve elite power, control the public narrative, and protect the lower orders from ideas — what we now call misinformation — reckoned likely to lead them astray. The intent of these laws and the fears they were enacted to allay shed considerable light on Labour’s own attempts at gagging us.
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the families of the victims of horrific crime always express the same concern, word for word, every time. I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the “specially-trained” officers who support them.
This is a fine article by Nina Roberts, but it might have been nice if Guardian readers and their US equivalents had thought about the disproportionate burden of “equality” laws on small businesses (as opposed to large businesses who have whole floors full of hotshot lawyers) forty years ago.
Rodrigo Nogueira was met with a surprise in April 2025 when lawyers contacted him out of the blue. They asked whether he needed legal assistance over a summons his restaurant received for violating Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
It was the first he had ever heard of it. The lawsuit listed 35 violations against No More Cafe, his restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village.
One violation alleged a table outside the restaurant was not ADA compliant, an accusation that puzzled Nogueira: the cafe had no outdoor tables. Other alleged violations were about infractions inside the restaurant, yet the plaintiff said he was unable to enter the restaurant.
When Nogueira researched the lawsuit, he discovered that the plaintiff who sued him and the plaintiff’s lawyer had filed complaints against dozens of small businesses. The attorney who filed the lawsuit against him alone had filed more than 100 ADA lawsuits over the past nine years against storefront businesses.
Nogueira, sitting at a table in his café, said: “The [plaintiff] that’s suing me – he’s got 67 cases.”
Before possibly hiring a lawyer, Nogueira filed a motion to dismiss the case himself. But the judge said a company cannot represent itself in court. For small businesses, thousands of dollars in lawyers fees to just file a motion, can be prohibitively costly.
Frustrated with the process, Nogueira sought to speak with other small business owners. He went through public court records and found nearby businesses that were also being sued for ADA noncompliance.
“Every business owner I spoke to had opened within the last year or two. Every one of them was an immigrant,” Nogueira, who is from Brazil, wrote in a post on his website about the lawsuit. “None of us had any idea how to navigate the federal court system. Most were already several thousand dollars into legal fees by the time we talked. Several of them did not realize they had been sued until the deadline to respond had already passed.”
“We have many migrants who make a deeply valuable contribution to our country, including in our healthcare system and hospitality sector and we depend on them to make our country work. We do not want this terrible tragedy to be used to divide people or fuel hostility.”
If a member of your family had been left comatose after a Sudanese migrant attempted to behead them, is this how you’d respond? Can you imagine your own tone being so conciliatory — or your own words tacking so closely to the establishment view on migration?
Apparently, this is how the family of Stephen Ogilvie expressed themselves, after watching his attempted beheading on the streets of Belfast. The Ogilvie family’s statement is eerily similar to those issued by the family members of other victims, in cases which might be termed politically sensitive.
[…]
All we can say for sure is that the British state is secretly working to shape how you think about, and respond to, politically sensitive events. Mass migration isn’t going away and multiculturalism will be upheld, regardless of what voters may think or instinctively want.
As such, these state agencies take a keen interest in what people say online, about subjects like race, immigration and Islam. They view certain positions on those issues as inherently dangerous and extremist — and if William Shawcross is to be believed, its definition of which views constitute “extremism” is very expansive.
Michael Mosbacher, the Telegraph‘s Deputy Comment Editor, is going for the rage-clicks, but he has a point:
There are under 1,000 ponies left on Dartmoor and over 145,000 sheep. Since the 1950s, the moor’s pony population has fallen by close to 90 per cent, whilst ovine numbers have more than trebled. These divergent trajectories have much to do with one simple fact – lamb is a Sunday roast staple and we don’t eat ponies. Easter dining tables groan under legs of lamb, but pony tenderloins are only notable by their absence.
Overgrazing is the environmental sin du jour and the regulators are demanding that something be done. We indeed live on a sheep-sodden island. According to Defra figures, the ovine population of the UK was 30.5 million in June last year. Wales alone is home to over 8.5 million sheep whilst there are only around 5 million in the entire United States.
On Dartmoor, Natural England is calling for a radical reduction in stocking numbers, and that for the first time includes the semi-wild ponies. The problem for the ponies is that they are of very little commercial value and there is an abundant market for lamb. If a farmer is ordered to reduce their livestock numbers – the ponies are actually all owned – they will cull the ponies rather than have fewer of the animals from which they actually draw their living.
No Government has the right, whether to flatter fanatics or in mere vagueness of mind, to forge an instrument of tyranny and say that it will never be used.
– William Butler Yeats, written in 1928 in opposition to censorship legislation in the Irish Free State
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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