With all the news about the Chinese Covid-19 plague and the confected fury of the Labour-loving, Brexit-loathing media (yes, IMHO that’s you Emily Maitliss) over a 30-mile car journey taken by the PM’s key advisor, you might all be wondering what our friends from the Religion of Wonderfullness and Peacefullness have been up to over just the last few days.
A couple of blogs ago, I brought you the latest score from the Ramadanadingdong mass murderthon. And here are a few other leading stories from the last few days of love and peacefulness:
Aasia Bibi’s brother-in-law slaughtered
You’ll probably all remember Aasia Bibi – the Pakistani Christian woman who spent years in prison awaiting execution for supposed blasphemy:
On Monday this week Younus, the brother-in-law of Asia Bibi, was killed in Sheikhupura city of Punjab province in Pakistan on Monday. Younus had gone to his farms on May 24 and did not return home at night. His body with throat slit was traced in the farm the following morning.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
Gay man beaten up by migrants in Belgium
The Belgian police are asking for the public’s assistance in tracking down three migrants who tricked, beat up, and robbed a gay man in Antwerp. Three men who the police describe as “young men of foreign origin” saw the gay man, 24, on the Nationalestraat; he was wearing make-up. They followed him home, attacked him, beat him up, robbed him and ran away laughing.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
Woman in Iran sentenced to blinding
An Iranian woman convicted of blinding a man in an acid attack was sentenced to blinding, local media reported on Tuesday. The 30-year-old woman in the city of Mashhad threw acid in the face of a 33-year-old man she had been involved with, according to the state-run Rokna news agency. The man was blinded in both eyes following the attack.
The woman was seeking revenge, according to Rokna. During interrogations, the woman said that she had ended her marriage and had given custody of her child to her ex-husband in order to be with the man who would become the victim of the acid attack. The Islamic Republic views blinding as an effective deterrent against acid attacks, but rights groups, including Amnesty International, condemn it as barbaric.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
Iran – 13-year-old girl beheaded by her father
A 13-year-old Iranian girl was beheaded in her sleep by her father on Thursday in a so-called “honor killing”:
The incident occurred in the city of Talesh in the northern province of Gilan. The victim, Romina Ashrafi, had run away from home following her father’s opposition to her marrying a man she had “fallen in love with,” according to local media. The man Ashrafi wanted to be with is reportedly 35 years old, according to local Iranian media outlets.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
Don’t go to the Greek Islands any more
As Greece opens up its islands to tourists, there’s a worse menace than the Chinese Covid-19 plague awaiting visitors. Many Greek islands are now over-run by gangs of Middle-Eastern migrants – most of them young men and most armed with knives and other weapons.
The murder of a Syrian man in Chlorakas in Paphos is the most violent in a growing number of incidents that is spreading fear among residents and has forced the community leader to appeal for state help over groups of young, armed, single migrant men. Police patrols have increased, and the community board is also paying for three private security guards to monitor the area in the wake of the murder of 20-year-old Jamal Alhadzi who was killed in Chlorakas after being stabbed multiple times.
A total of 11 suspects, all Syrian, face murder charges over Alhadzi’s death, apparently over matters of ‘honour’.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
Syrian rapists in Germany get derisory prison sentences
Meanwhile three Syrian men who raped a 14-year-old German girl were given prison sentences of around three years each. So, just like many ‘Asian’ rapists in the UK, these men will be out on the streets again in a few months and be able to harrass and molest the girls they originally raped.
I don’t suppose the BBC and C4 News will be reporting that.
And more and more and more
I could go on. There are so many more stories of enrichment and enlightenment being brought to our world by our favourite religion. So let’s all give thanks to Priti Patel for providing a free ferry service from France to the UK to bring many more members of the world’s favouritest religion on comfort and safety to our shores:
Today’s sensationalist-generating, clickbait, self-serving, dishonest, news-twisting media has a tendency to brand anyone it features as either a ‘hero’ or a ‘villain’.
All NHS workers, for example, are heroes even though some were complicit in turfing over 15,000 patients out of hospital (without testing them for the Chinese Covid-19 plague) to make room for a flood of expected Covid-19 victims. Some (many?) of these evicted patients went into care settings – either care homes or their own homes where they were visited by carers – causing a spread of Covid-19 amongst the most vulnerable in our society and the avoidable massacre of over 20,000 innocents.
The lesson here is if the media happens to set its sights on you, you have to ensure that you are a ‘hero’ and not a ‘villain’. There is no middle ground. There is no moral ambivalence in today’s simplistic reporting.
This brings me to two fairly recent cases where I believe the people involved made a total hash of how they were portrayed by the media – the coughing major and supposed evil mastermind Dominic Cummings.
The coughing ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ major
When this guy got caught allegedly cheating his way to win a million pounds on Who Wants to be a Millionaire he had, in my humble opinion, a wonderful chance to be a hero. I believe he should have quickly gone to the TV studios and fessed up. He should have sad ‘yup, I did it. I planned to take a million quid from a wealthy TV company that could easily afford it by bending the rules a bit’. He could have appeared as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood – taking from the rich to give to himself. It could have been a great David vs Goliath story – the small guy vs the big TV company. It’s not even certain he committed a criminal offence unless having a friend coughing in the audience is a crime. And even if he did commit a criminal offence, nobody was harmed, nobody injured, nobody dead, no damage to anyone at all. Moreover, the Great Train Robbery robbers are still seen as heroes for many people.
If he had done this, he’d have become a folk hero. He’d have been admired as a cheeky chappie who took on the rich and almost won. There would have been TV interviews, magazine interviews, a book, a film and invitations to appear on brainless celeb programmes like Celebrity Bake-off and I’m a Celebrity get me out of here and so on.
He didn’t get his million quid from the programme. But he could easily have made much more money from becoming a ‘celeb’. He had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to manipulate the media to his advantage. But he blew it. Muttonhead.
Oh Dominic – you’re meant to be a genius
Which brings us to Dominic Cummings. I believe he could have calmed the media storm and been portrayed as a hero rather than a villain if he had just used a bit of common sense. Most of his story held together pretty well except for one thing – the 30-mile trip to Barnard Castle on his wife’s birthday supposedly to test his eyesight after having been afflicted by the Chinese plague.
In my very humble opinion, Cummings should have admitted that yes he did break the lockdown rules by taking his family on a short trip on his wife’s birthday and admitted this was a mistake and apologised for it. I believe that if he had shown some contrition for this minor incident – the trip to Barnard Castle – he could have avoided much of the damage he caused. He could even have come across as a sympathetic caring father and husband by admitting and apologising for this mistake.
Why he didn’t take this simpler route, we’ll never know. Muttonhead.
A message from Xi Pingpong – “Go f**k yourselves”
Meanwhile, a monster has arisen in the East. In the last month, China has threatened any country criticising the Chinese response to the Chinese Covid-19 plague. Australia has been described as ‘a piece of chewing gum on China’s shoes that needs to be scraped off’ and some key Australian exports to China – beef and barley – have either been banned or had 80% tariffs imposed. Germany, France and the EU have all been threatened with economic sanctions by China and have all crumbled and grovelled to their Chinese overlords. And now China has threatened the UK should the UK limit Chinese company Huawei’s participation in the UK’s 5G network.
Meanwhile Chinese companies have been pouncing on businesses weakened or destroyed by the Chinese plague. Large parts of Venice are being bought by Chinese companies with most tourism souvenirs including supposed ‘Murano glass’ being made in China, a Chinese company has become a major shareholder in Norwegian Airlines, it looks like a Chinese company will buy the airline Virgin Australia out of administration, the Chinese have been buying land and water rights throughout Australia and I’m sure there are many other Chinese takeovers we haven’t heard about.
On the military front, China is hugely increasing its military budget, has carried out military exercises in preparation for an invasion of Taiwan, has built more military bases in disputed areas of the South China Sea, China is fortifying airfields near to its disputed border with India (see link below) and President Pingpong has just told the Chinese armed forces to prepare for war.
I think the message from China’s President Xi Pingpong to the rest of us is “we’re the most powerful country in the world now. So do as we order or else go f**k yourselves”
Millions of sports fans must be gutted, sick as a parrot etc etc that there has been no proper sport in Western countries for at least two months because of the Chinese Covid-19 plague. But fortunately our friends from the world’s peacefullest religion have not been put off from their favourite sport – mass murder by beheading, hacking to death with machetes, crucifying, blowing up with IEDs, shooting, burning to death, running over with a tank and so on and so forth. So, snouts-in-the-trough can now report on the final score for Ramadanadingdong 2020’s murdermania:
Looking at 2020’s results, it does seem that the Chinese Covid-19 plague has had a dampening effect on our religion of peacefulness friends’ opportunities to go out and kill innocents in the name of their god. After all, this year’s results were disappointingly below what the lads achieved in previous years. There were a few more attacks in 2020 than in 2019. But there were over 100 fewer kills – only four kills per attack:
In 2019, there were over five kills per attack. So this year the lads were getting fewer confirmed kills per attack. Clearly their ability to score was slipping.
The 2019 results were also disappointing, but pretty much in line with those from 2018:
Just 182 attacks and only 854 kills – just under five kills per attack. In fact, the lads have had around three years of fairly disappointing results.
Oh how I miss the good old days of mass slaughter. For example, in 2017 the lads were really putting in an effort:
There were only 174 attacks in 2017. But these 174 attacks managed to send no fewer than 1,595 innocents to Paradise or wherever. That’s over nine kills per attack. A pretty good score.
And then there was 2016:
In 2016 the lads notched up 238 attacks dispatching a much more impressive 1,850 innocents.
And let’s not forget 2015 – that was a time when the lads really knew how to score:
Yup, in 2015 the lads managed to whack 2,988 innocents in 314 religiously-inspired attacks.
I think the problem is that the First Team – ISIS – haven’t been in action so much over the last three years. The years 2015, 2016 and 2017 were when ISIS were at the top of their game. But since then the second team – the Taliban, Boko Haram, Ansar al-Sharia, Abdullah Azzam Brigades and others – just haven’t shown the same ability to score as ISIS.
Let’s hope the lads can up their game in 2021 so we can get that scoreline back up to 2015, 2016 and 2017 levels. After all, less than a thousand murdered in the 2018, 2019 and 2020 Ramadanadingdongs is a pretty pathetic result.
Oddly, the BBC and C4 News and other mainstream media don’t mention these important sporting results.
This week two bits of Chinese Covid-19 plague news combined to make me realise that I am incredibly stupid – far too stupid to ever become a government minister.
The two bits of Chinese Covid-19 plague news were:
a new test for Covid-19 is being rolled out which doesn’t need to be sent to a lab and which gives a result in about 20 minutes
that great genius, Home Secretary Priti Patel, is instituting compulsory 2-week quarantine for anyone arriving in the UK from abroad (with a number of exceptions)
Now I admit I’m no expert in airports. But having taken about 80 flights a year for around 15 years – over 1,200 flights, I have seen a few airports. And I distinctly remember that most airports have big room thingies where passengers go to collect their luggage.
So, being incredibly stupid and obviously not as clever as Home Secretary Priti Patel, it occurred to me that there was really no need for Priti’s 2-week quarantine which would decimate what little is left of Britain’s aviation industry and result in further many thousands of job losses. Instead of Priti’s quarantine, testing stations could be set up in airport baggage collection halls and all arriving passengers could be tested before going to collect their luggage. Those who didn’t have luggage would also be tested and made to wait for the results before being allowed to leave the airport. Then those who tested negative for the Chinese plague could go on their way and those who tested positive driven to quarantine centres in one of the many hotels situated near our airports. Arriving passengers could even be charged say £20 each for the test which would amply cover the cost of the testing.
I’m sure a similar arrangement could be put in place for passengers arriving by ferry and rail.
It may be that I’m not the only person who had this idea. There may be many thousands or tens of thousands who had the same idea. But if you, like me, thought there was no need for Priti Stupid’s quarantine as arriving passengers could be tested on arrival, then that just shows that you’re as stupid as I am. And it definitely shows that we’re not as clever as the redoubtable Ms Patel and therefore we would never be clever enough to be a government minister.
The problem now is that, having announced her great policy, Priti Dim cannot abandon it however dumb it actually is – to abandon it and replace it by testing on arrival would make Priti Useless lose face. So, the quarantine policy will be implemented however much damage it causes to British jobs.
And while we’re on the subject of stupidity, let’s lighten the mood with a brief look at the functioning, or otherwise, of what Labour MP David Lammy uses as a brain.
Is David Lammy one of the stupidest men in Britain?
I presume you all know who David Lammy is. He’s a Labour MP who seems to have made a career of jumping on any bandwagon he happens to see and of screaming “racism” at every possible opportunity.
In 2014, the great Lammy appeared on Celebrity Mastermind. Hopefully you know that Celebrity Mastermind is nothing like the real Mastermind. In Celebrity Mastermind the questions are made really easy so that the supposed ‘celebrities’ won’t be embarrassed by their stunning ignorance.
Some of the highlights of Mr Lammy’s performance were
believing that the surname of the French lady ‘Marie’ who did research into radiation was ‘Antoinette’
‘knowing’ that a fortress in Paris which was also used as a prison was ‘Versailles’
revealing that American actor James Gandolfini appeared as a mafia boss in “The Godfather” when most of us probably thought it was “The Sopranos”
informing us that Henry VIII was succeeded by Henry VII (clearly Lammy had been taking maths lessons from the Abbopotamus)
announcing that a blue-veined British cheese was called ‘Leicester’
Anyway, here’s the mighty Lammy putting his ‘brain’ to work. Enjoy:
Britain proudly shoots up the world premier league
As you’ll all have probably noticed – in the daily Downing Street briefings, our rulers no longer show us the chart with the trend of Chinese Covid-19 plague deaths by country. The list below probably shows why. With 542 deaths per million of population, the UK is number three in the world. We’ve already overtaken Italy (537 Covid-19 deaths per million) and are fast catching up with Spain (598 Covid-19 deaths per million), but we’ll struggle to match Belgium’s truly impressive 804 deaths per million of population:
Confirmed deaths (absolute)
Population (in millions)
Deaths per million
Belgium
9,186
11.42
804.23
Spain
27,940
46.72
597.98
United Kingdom
36,042
66.49
542.07
Italy
32,486
60.43
537.57
France
28,180
66.99
420.68
Sweden
3,871
10.18
380.14
Netherlands
5,775
17.23
335.15
Ireland
1,583
4.85
326.16
United States
94,590
327.17
289.12
Please also note that although the BBC and C4 News ridicule President Donald Trump’s handling of the Chinese Covid-19 plague and orgasm when mentioning the total number of US Covid-19 deaths, the USA actually has just over half the number of deaths per million of population compared to Spain and the UK. But I guess you can’t expect the BBC or C4 News Trump-hating reporters to know that the population of the United States is somewhat larger than the population of the UK or Spain.
Oh, and by the way, the BBC and C4 News constantly discuss South Korea as the country which has handled the Chinese Covid-19 plague best. Yet South Korea has had 264 Covid-19 deaths (5.11 deaths per million) yet despite being close to China, Taiwan has had only 7 Covid-19 deaths for a population of 23,7800,000 – a rate of deaths per million that is so small I can’t even work it out. But I guess that fear of upsetting China means that our media deliberately choose to never mention Taiwan.
A few more Covid-19 jokes?
In Friday’s blog, I featured a few pathetic, depressing Covid-19 jokes. Here’s one:
and here are another couple of possibly even more pathetic and depressing Covid-19 jokes:
At first I tried watching the daily Downing Street briefings. But with all the lies and cover-ups and denials of reality by establishment political and medical pygmies, the briefings became so farcical that I just can’t be bothered. In fact, the briefings are so painful to watch, I’m embarrassed to think that this might really be the best a once great country like Britain can offer.
Day after day after day, some schoolboy or other, pretending to be a politician, trots out the same old garbage – “we have a plan – we are following our plan – we are in control of the situation – we are guided by the science – etc etc”. And to support them, the schoolboys (plus Priti Patel) drag along some supposed scientists or medical professionals to back up the Government’s ludicrously dishonest claims that they haven’t made a complete cluster-f**k of the Chinese Covid-19 plague.
I admit that it’s easy to be wise in hindsight. But anyway, here are a few things which our out-of-its-depth Government seems to have got right and wrong over the last couple of months:
What the Government got right:
Rapidly expanding the provision of critical care beds to handle the expected Covid-19 tsunami of patients
Err, um, I think that’s about it.
What the Government got wrong:
Throwing possibly 15,000 hospital patients out into care homes or their own homes to free up hospital beds without testing them for the Chinese plague. Some of those who went to care homes carried the infection to those care homes. Some of those going back to their own homes were visited by carers once or twice a day and thus passed the infection on to those carers who then passed it on to other vulnerable and elderly people. Result – a considerable reduction in our country’s pension bill
Believing the shock/horror projections of death rates from Professor Penis, the bonking boffin from Imperial College without looking at his past record of monumental exaggeration and failure from his model written in Fortran – a computer coding language that went out about the same time as the dinosaurs
Giving responsibility for organising testing to the useless over-paid, over-pensioned bureaucrats at Public Health England. Anyone who has ever worked with the British public sector will know that utter incompetence and avoidance of responsibility is widespread. In normal times, the uselessness of the British public sector isn’t a great problem. But in times of crisis, when you need to get things done, the only way is to draft in someone from the private sector
Giving responsibility for procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) to the utterly useless, incompetent 421 NHS procurement managers whose salaries cost us taxpayers about £20m a year. To repeat the point above. In normal times, institutional incompetence just wastes tons of our money. But in a crisis, you cannot, repeat cannot, ever rely on public-sector bureaucrats to do anything other than sit on their arses passing paper around to fill out their days. I’ve had many meetings with public-sector procurement managers and………. I’ll leave my experiences for another day
Not taking the Chinese Covid-19 plague seriously – we now all know that Boris Johnson didn’t even bother turning up to the first five COBRA meetings about the plague
Filling the Government with lightweight nonentities. Desperate to get rid of any Europhiles, Johnson and Cummings relegated any possible ministers with any competence or gravitas to the backbenches and populated the Government with obedient but third-rate rubbish who were totally overwhelmed by the Chinese plague. For example, I suspect that Jeremy Hunt would have made a better job of the catastrophe than the flopping, floundering Hancock
Arrogant dismissal of anything done by ‘Johnny Foreigner’. Taiwan, South Korea, Germany Thailand and other countries showed how to get the Chinese Covid-19 plague under control. Our Government ignored the lessons to be learnt from other countries and thus managed to achieve some of the highest Covid-19 deaths per million of population in the world.
Allowing flights from plague hotspots to continue to arrive in the UK without any checks or quarantines
And so on and so forth
But perhaps the Government’s greatest mistake was to continuously deny having ever made any mistakes. I think people might have forgiven our weak, arse-covering politicians and supposed ‘experts’ if they just once admitted that they got some things wrong because of limited knowledge of the Covid-19 virus. But the daily, increasingly incredulous claims of our politicians and their lapdog lackeys to have done everything right according some great plan makes them into a confederacy of dunces and I suspect that, at the next election, they will not be forgiven for their incompetence and lies and will reap what they have sowed.
Absolute horror at the BBC this week as brilliant President Trump sent a letter to the useless, China-ass-licking, incompetent, corrupt, self-serving, ludicrously misnamed World Health Organisation (WHO) giving an ultimatum – either the WHO reforms within 30 days or else the US will withdraw all funding.
Quickly the BBC rushed to defend the WHO against the hated Trump. The BBC’s strategy had two parts:
heap ridicule on Trump for taking the anti-malarial drug Hydroxychloroquine to protect himself against the Chinese Covid-19 plague
finding supposedly ‘independent’ international experts to praise the WHO and claim that the WHO was doing such a great job controlling the Chinese plague that now was not the time for any distractions like the reforms demanded by Trump
On the Hydroxychloroquine story, the BBC claimed that there was no evidence that the anti-malarial could protect against Covid-19 and that taking it could be dangerous. Of course, there’s no evidence as there haven’t been any studies of the drug’s effectiveness in preventing the Chinese plague. The only studies of the drug (as far as I understand) have been when it was given to Covid-19 patients in intensive care. A French study said the drug was effective. A Chinese study said it wasn’t. And I think another study suggested the drug caused Covid-19 patients heart problems.
Hydroxychloroquine has been used for over 30 years to guard against malaria and it’s well known that it can cause heart arrhythmia and other unpleasant side effects. So it’s hardly surprising that it might have caused problems to Covid-19 patients who were already at death’s door. But while ridiculing Trump, the BBC failed to mention that there have been no studies of whether Hydroxychloroquine can help protect healthy people from the Chinese plague. Oh, and as a reader has just pointed out, the Grandian has an article today about the UK Government stocking up with Hydroxychloroquine in case it does actually work. Perhaps the Gurandian-loving BBC ‘forgot’ to mention that when mocking Trump?
As for the experts the BBC found to praise the WHO, the BBC never seems to have thought of asking them questions like why the WHO’s boss, Dr Tedros Whatever, was in Beijing praising China’s President for life, Xi Pingpong, for his brilliant handling of the Covid-19 plague just a couple of weeks after China was arresting any doctors who dared mention the existence of the new virus or why China stopped all internal flights from Wuhan to other parts of China while allowing tens of thousands of people from Wuhan to travel abroad.
Anyway, here’s the text of Trump’s letter to the utterly rotten, China-run WHO detailing all the mistakes the WHO made while helping China cover up China’s guilt for inflicting the Covid-19 disaster on the rest of the world. You won’t find the BBC mentioning any of the criticisms of the WHO that are made in Trump’s letter:
Dear Dr. Tedros
On April 14, 2020, I suspended United States contributions to the World Health Organization pending an investigation by my Administration of the organization’s failed response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This review has confirmed many of the serious concerns I raised last month and identified others that the World Health Organization should have addressed, especially the World Health Organization’s alarming lack of independence from the People’s Republic of China. Based on this review, we now know the following:
The World Health Organization consistently ignored credible reports of the virus spreading in Wuhan in early December 2019 or even earlier, including reports from the Lancet medical journal. The World Health Organization failed to independently investigate credible reports that conflicted directly with the Chinese government’s official accounts, even those that came from sources within Wuhan itself.
By no later than December 30, 2019, the World Health Organization office in Beijing knew that there was a “major public health” concern in Wuhan. Between December 26 and December 30, China’s media highlighted evidence of a new virus emerging from Wuhan, based on patient data sent to multiple Chinese genomics companies. Additionally, during this period, Dr. Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that a new coronavirus was causing a novel disease that was, at the time, afflicting approximately 180 patients.
By the next day, Taiwanese authorities had communicated information to the World Health Organization indicating human-to-human transmission of a new virus. Yet the World Health Organization chose not to share any of this critical information with the rest of the world, probably for political reasons.
The International Health Regulations require countries to report the risk of a health emergency within 24 hours. But China did not inform the World Health Organization of Wuhan’s several cases of pneumonia, of unknown origin, until December 31, 2019, even though it likely had knowledge of these cases days or weeks earlier.
According to Dr. Zhang Yongzhen of the Shanghai Public Health Clinic Center, he told Chinese authorities on January 5, 2020, that he had sequenced the genome of the virus. There was no publication of this information until six days later, on January 11, 2020, when Dr. Zhang self-posted it online. The next day, Chinese authorities closed his lab for “rectification.” As even the World Health Organization acknowledged, Dr. Zhang’s posting was a great act of “transparency.” But the World Health Organization has been conspicuously silent both with respect to the closure of Dr. Zhang’s lab and his assertion that he had notified Chinese authorities of his breakthrough six days earlier.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly made claims about the coronavirus that were either grossly inaccurate or misleading.
On January 14, 2020, the World Health Organization gratuitously reaffirmed China’s now-debunked claim that the coronavirus could not be transmitted between humans, stating: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) identified in Wuhan, China.” This assertion was in direct conflict with censored reports from Wuhan.
On January 21, 2020, President Xi Jinping of China reportedly pressured you not to declare the coronavirus outbreak an emergency. You gave in to this pressure the next day and told the world that the coronavirus did not pose a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Just over one week later, on January 30, 2020, overwhelming evidence to the contrary forced you to reverse course.
On January 28, 2020, after meeting with President Xi in Beijing, you praised the Chinese government for its “transparency” with respect to the coronavirus, announcing that China had set a “new standard for outbreak control” and “bought the world time.” You did not mention that China had, by then, silenced or punished several doctors for speaking out about the virus and restricted Chinese institutions from publishing information about it.
Even after you belatedly declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, 2020, you failed to press China for the timely admittance of a World Health Organization team of international medical experts. As a result, this critical team did not arrive in China until two weeks later, on February 16, 2020. And even then, the team was not allowed to visit Wuhan until the final days of their visit. Remarkably, the World Health Organization was silent when China denied the two American members of the team access to Wuhan entirely.
You also strongly praised China’s strict domestic travel restrictions, but were inexplicably against my closing of the United States border, or the ban, with respect to people coming from China. I put the ban in place regardless of your wishes. Your political gamesmanship on this issue was deadly, as other governments, relying on your comments, delayed imposing life-saving restrictions on travel to and from China. Incredibly, on February 3, 2020, you reinforced your position, opining that because China was doing such a great job protecting the world from the virus, travel restrictions were “causing more harm than good.” Yet by then the world knew that, before locking down Wuhan, Chinese authorities had allowed more than five million people to leave the city and that many of these people were bound for international destinations all over the world.
As of February 3, 2020, China was strongly pressuring countries to lift or forestall travel restrictions. This pressure campaign was bolstered by your incorrect statements on that day telling the world that the spread of the virus outside of China was “minimal and slow” and that “the chances of getting this going to anywhere outside China [were] very low.”
On March 3, 2020, the World Health Organization cited official Chinese data to downplay the very serious risk of asymptomatic spread, telling the world that “COVID-19 does not transmit as efficiently as influenza” and that unlike influenza this disease was not primarily driven by “people who are infected but not yet sick.” China’s evidence, the World Health Organization told the world, “showed that only one percent of reported cases do not have symptoms, and most of those cases develop symptoms within two days.” Many experts, however, citing data from Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere, vigorously questioned these assertions. It is now clear that China’s assertions, repeated to the world by the World Health Organization, were wildly inaccurate.
By the time you finally declared the virus a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it had killed more than 4,000 people and infected more than 100,000 people in at least 114 countries around the world.
On April 11, 2020, several African Ambassadors wrote to the Chinese Foreign Ministry about the discriminatory treatment of Africans related to the pandemic in Guangzhou and other cities in China. You were aware that Chinese authorities were carrying out a campaign of forced quarantines, evictions, and refusal of services against the nationals of these countries. You have not commented on China’s racially discriminatory actions. You have, however, baselessly labeled as racist Taiwan’s well-founded complaints about your mishandling of this pandemic.
Throughout this crisis, the World Health Organization has been curiously insistent on praising China for its alleged “transparency.” You have consistently joined in these tributes, notwithstanding that China has been anything but transparent. In early January, for example, China ordered samples of the virus to be destroyed, depriving the world of critical information. Even now, China continues to undermine the International Health Regulations by refusing to share accurate and timely data, viral samples and isolates, and by withholding vital information about the virus and its origins. And, to this day, China continues to deny international access to their scientists and relevant facilities, all while casting blame widely and recklessly and censoring its own experts.
The World Health Organization has failed to publicly call on China to allow for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, despite the recent endorsement for doing so by its own Emergency Committee. The World Health Organization’s failure to do so has prompted World Health Organization member states to adopt the “COVID-19 Response” Resolution at this year’s World Health Assembly, which echoes the call by the United States and so many others for an impartial, independent, and comprehensive review of how the World Health Organization handled the crisis. The resolution also calls for an investigation into the origins of the virus, which is necessary for the world to understand how best to counter the disease.
Perhaps worse than all these failings is that we know that the World Health Organization could have done so much better. Just a few years ago, under the direction of a different Director-General, the World Health Organization showed the world how much it has to offer. In 2003, in response to the outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in China, Director-General Harlem Brundtland boldly declared the World Health Organization’s first emergency travel advisory in 55 years, recommending against travel to and from the disease epicenter in southern China. She also did not hesitate to criticize China for endangering global health by attempting to cover up the outbreak through its usual playbook of arresting whistleblowers and censoring media. Many lives could have been saved had you followed Dr. Brundtland’s example.
It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world. The only way forward for the World Health Organization is if it can actually demonstrate independence from China. My Administration has already started discussions with you on how to reform the organization. But action is needed quickly. We do not have time to waste. That is why it is my duty, as President of the United States, to inform you that, if the World Health Organization does not commit to major substantive improvements within the next 30 days, I will make my temporary freeze of United States funding to the World Health Organization permanent and reconsider our membership in the organization. I cannot allow American taxpayer dollars to continue to finance an organization that, in its present state, is so clearly not serving America’s interests.
Why are you giving your money to corrupt UN bureaucrats?
In my previous blog, I tried to convince readers that they should never give any of their money to UNICEF.
UNICEF is an agency of the United Nations (UN) and the UN is probably the most corrupt, self-serving organisation in the world. You usually don’t get a job at the UN due to your qualifications. The whole place works on the principle of Third-World nepotism – if you have family or connections at the UN, that’s how you get a well-paid, taxfree job for life.
But today let’s move on from the (IMHO) utterly corrupt and worthless UNICEF.
Wateraid or Water rip-off?
During the Chinese Covid-19 plague lockdown, we seem to be getting more charity ads on TV than usual. One of the most heart-breaking has been from Wateraid. It features a little African girl forced to walk for hours each day to fetch water for her family. The water she collects is clearly polluted with human and animal urine and faeces and all kinds of other nasty stuff.
I’m sure Wateraid do excellent work and I’m sure they do provide clean water and sanitation for hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t otherwise get them. But should we be donating at all?
Little boss, big salary?
Wateraid raises and spends about £82m a year, has 806 staff and its chief executive gets a remuneration package of £148,204 (salary of £134,123 and pension contribution of £14,081). Just to put this into some context, from what I can see the newish big boss of Oxfam gets a salary of about £120,000. One might wonder why Wateraid’s chief executive should get bigger salary than the chief executive of Oxfam which has a budget (£434m) five times as large as Wateraid and over 5,100 employees compared to Wateraid’s 806 employees.
What about the workers?
Now let’s look at staff costs. Wateraid’s 806 staff cost an average (including social security and pensions) of £32,500. Oxfam’s 5,101 staff cost an average each of £23,170. So, Wateraid’s staff seem to be rather better paid than those at Oxfam.
Who gets the money?
Of the £82m a year we give to Wateraid, around £60m theoretically reaches the Third-world poor and the other £20m goes on fundraising and managerial and administrative support. So, about £7.50 of every £10 raised supposedly goes to providing water and sanitation.
The largest recipients of Wateraid’s (our?) money are Mozambique, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia. I have a feeling that the current Wateraid ad campaign is filmed in Ethiopia. But I’m not sure.
I’m sure we’d all agree that these four countries are pretty poor. Or are they?
Let’s have a look at supposedly poverty-stricken Ethiopia. Here are some figures of the estimated wealth of Ethiopia’s five richest people from 2013, all of whom appear to be part of or have close relations with the Ethiopian Government:
The 5 Richest Ethiopians in 2013
1. Mohammed Al Amoudi – Controls gold mines and massive tracts of fertile lands that were handed to him by Meles Zenawi, after their owners were kicked out and displaced. Estimated net worth: $10bn.
2. Azeb Mesfin – Widow of the late dictator Meles Zenawi, commonly known as the “mother of corruption” has ownership interests in many of the biggest companies in Ethiopia. Estimated net worth: $4bn.
3. mBerhane Gebrekiristos – The closest and most trust friend of Meles and Azeb; allegedly laundered their loot out of the country. I think he’s the current Ethiopian ambassador to China. Estimated net worth: $2bn.
4. Sebhat Nega – His fortune reportedly declined after he was kicked out of the TPLF politburo and the Endowment Fund for the Relief of Tigray (EFFORT) by Meles and Azeb; he later rebounded. Estimated net worth $2bn.
5. Seyoum Mesfin – Former foreign affairs minister and former Ethiopian ambassador to China, accused of using his chairmanship of Ethiopian Airlines and diplomatic status to smuggle illegal drugs between Africa and Asia. Estimated net worth: $1.8bn
There would probably be different names on the list this year as there are now at least 15 billionaires in Ethiopia and an estimated 4,700 millionaires.
It would seem that the Ethiopian elites have more than enough money to provide clean water and sanitation for all their people without Wateraid’s help!
As in so many Third-World countries, the aid we give is just allowing the corrupt, kleptocratic elites to steal money from their countries as they know that we stupid, gullible westerners will look after their impoverished people.
Don’t mention over-population!
Let’s look at the population of Ethiopia:
When Saint Bob did his BandAid gig, there were about 40 million Ethiopians. Now there are at least 110 million. No wonder they don’t all have clean water and sanitation.
Moreover, in Wateraid’s latest ad they claim to be aiming at eradicating water poverty “within a generation”. But while making this claim, Wateraid seem to gloss over the fact that unsustainable rates of population growth mean that water poverty will never be eradicated so Wateraid’s lucky employees are pretty much guaranteed a job for life.
What about corruption?
Although about £60m of the £80m we give to Wateraid supposedly reaches the hell-hole countries to which it is intended, how much actually reaches the poor?
It’s difficult to know. But occasionally we get glimpses of who is really benefiting from our charity and foreign aid.
After the 2004 tsunami, customs clearance for relief consignments in both Sri Lanka and Indonesia was delayed for months, while food and medications perished. One non-governmental organization (NGO) responding in Sri Lanka (I think it was Oxfam) was required to pay $1m in customs duties on the vehicles it imported for its operations. If I remember correctly, the $1m had to be paid in used (and therefore untraceable?) $50 and $100 notes – perhaps not the normal way one would pay customs duties?
In Eritrea, hundreds of tonnes of UN food aid for drought-affected persons were delayed for over a month in 2005 due to government demands for taxes. I wonder in whose pocket those supposed ‘taxes’ ended up?
After the 1999 earthquake in Turkey a legal storage deadline was exceeded for some relief consignments awaiting customs clearance, and as a result they were nationalized (stolen by local politicians and bureaucrats?) rather than cleared for distribution.
When asking for our money, charities like Wateraid seem to ‘forget’ to mention the scale of corruption and the rates of population growth in the countries where they work.
Likewise, when telling us that Africans drowning in the Med is all our fault, the media and the bleeding-heart, liberal, virtue-signalling opinion-formers also don’t mention the real reason for the tsunami of African immigrants – rampant corruption and unsustainable population growth.
It’s time to stop this charity and foreign aid farce. It’s time to tell the truth:
1. African leaders steal three times as much from their countries each year than we give in charity and aid. If we could just cut the level of corruption in Africa by half, we wouldn’t need to give any aid at all and the countries would still be better off
2. If Africans were to practice just a little birth control, then maybe more than 80% of them wouldn’t be living in abject poverty (less than $1.25 a day)
Probably you’ve seen a flood of ads on your TV for UNICEF. The Chinese Covid-19 plague has given UNICEF (and loads of other supposed ‘charities) a new excuse to extract money from us.
On the Charity Commission website UNICEF UK claims:
UNICEF IS THE WORLD’S LEADING ORGANISATION WORKING FOR CHILDREN. UNICEF WORKS IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FAMILIES, LOCAL COMMUNITIES, PARTNERS AND GOVERNMENTS IN OVER 190 COUNTRIES AND TERRITORIES TO HELP EVERY CHILD REALISE THEIR FULL POTENTIAL. UNICEF UK RAISES FUNDS FOR UNICEF’S EMERGENCY AND DEVELOPMENT WORK AROUND THE WORLD AND ADVOCATES FOR LASTING CHANGE FOR CHILDREN WORLDWIDE.
Here’s the usual stuff UNICEF UK uses as emotional extortion:
And we’re asked to text something like ‘hunger’ or ‘water’ or whatever to give just £3 which will apparently feed a starving child for a week.
In fact, I suspect that little if any of that £3 will go anywhere near a starving child. What UNICEF UK are probably doing is what many charities do – harvesting mobile phone numbers to put on a ‘suckers list’. Then the charities will usually hand over these mobile numbers to a privately-owned, profit-making call-centre company who will phone the numbers on the ‘suckers list’ to try and get them to set up direct debits to the charity. The call-centre staff and directors will also probably get paid bonuses depending on how many direct debits they manage to get us to set up. Many of these call-centre bosses are multi-millionaires.
Money, money, money
But I have other concerns with UNICEF UK.
UNICEF UK raises and spends about £100,000,000 a year. On the Charity Commission website, UNICEF UK claims that all this £100,000,000 is “Charitable spending”. But when you look closer, you see there is also something called “Charitable activities”. UNICEF UK only spends about £63,000,000 on ‘Charitable activities’. The other £37,000,000 goes to fundraising and management expenses. So, only about £6 out of every £10 given to UNICEF UK could possibly reach starving children.
In fact, UNICEF UK spends £3 out of every £10 it raises on raising funds. That’s not a hugely efficient way of giving your money to real charitable activities. Moreover, about £7,000,000 each year seems to go to what UNICEF UK calls ‘UK advocacy’. I think that means political activities in the UK. So, perhaps the amount possibly reaching those starving children may only be around £5.60 of every £10 raised? And once you take away the money UNICEF UK uses for stuff like ‘Gender equality’ and ‘Social inclusion’ (heaven knows what they are?) and other such fashionable woke stuff, probably only about half of all money given to UNICEF UK could possibly go to what most of us would consider real charitable activity.
Big boss – big money?
UNICEF UK’s bosses don’t seem to have huge salaries. The Executive Director only gets about £125,000 a year plus a pension contribution of just over £10,000 a year – thus around £135,000 a year. And there are 3 or 4 others on over £100,000 a year. But you have to remember that UNICEF UK employees benefit from being part of the United Nations and therefore are reimbursed any income taxes they pay in the countries where they work. That makes the Executive Director’s modest £135,000 into a more impressive pile of cash paid for from our generous donations.
Perpetuating poverty?
And finally, one could ask if UNICEF are actually solving Third-world problems or perpetuating them. You’ve seen this chart before many times:
The population of Africa is doubling about every 22 years. There are about 1.2 billion Africans now. By 2050, there will be over 3 billion Africans. How are we going to house, feed and find jobs for the extra 1.8 billion Africans who will be born between now and the middle of this century?
Maybe, instead of encouraging Africans to have ever more children, UNICEF should actually be using our money to encourage birth control?
Don’t forget corruption
I’m currently reading a book called “THE LOOTING MACHINE”. It details how Africa could be the richest continent in the world but instead is just a total sh*t-hole of misery and hopelessness while Africa’s kleptocratic rulers steal tens of billions every year. Estimates by Transparency International suggest that each year Africa’s rulers steal three times as much money as their countries receive in aid, charity and foreign investment.
If we could just cut African corruption by say half, we could stop all foreign aid and charity, Africa’s rulers could still all become billionaires and African people would be better off than they are now.
A few years ago, I made a short YouTube video about where our aid and charity money really goes:
The video below is so shockingly deceitful, it really doesn’t need much commentary.
As you all know, when President Trump called the Coronavirus “the Chinese virus” there were howls of outrage from the US and UK mainstream media calling Trump a “racist” and “xenophobe” and accusing him of spreading “hatred” and of maligning the Chinese community.
We all know that the virus did come from China, in spite of Chinese propaganda claiming it actually came from America. But strangely, the word “China” seldom seems to be mentioned in the mainstream media when reporting on the Chinese Covid-19 plague. The only time “China” is mentioned is when the media wants to lambast the Trump administration’s reaction to Covid-19 by comparing it to the supposedly much more effective Chinese response.
Moreover, you all know that anything Trump says will automatically be attacked and contradicted by the lying, self-serving Democrats. Perhaps we should thank New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, for revealing the depths Democrats will go to in order to attack Trump. In the short (less than one minute) video below, Cuomo claims that the Covid-19 virus is a “European virus”.
Though maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at this latest Democrat lie. After all, the Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, is practically a full-time employee of the Chinese Communist Party. Shortly after an official trip to China, on which Joe Biden was accompanied by his son, former drug addict Hunter Biden, a company connected with Hunter Biden was reportedly given over $1 billion by companies and banks linked to the Chinese Communist Party to buy up real estate and high-tech companies in the US. So Creepy Joe, the hair-sniffing, hands-on (or hands-up?) candidate probably has a lot of favours he owes to the Chinese. Should Biden be elected there will probably be rejoicing in Beijing as a Biden administration will do whatever its Chinese bosses order. And should Biden be replaced as candidate by Cuomo due to Biden’s worsening dementia, we can expect abject grovelling to China’s every command.
Anyway here’s honest Andrew Cuomo helping out his Chinese overlords by claiming the Covid-19 virus came from Europe. I hope this doesn’t make you choke on your corn flakes:
David Craig, on May 29th, 2020
