I assume most readers know the following well-known quote;
I mention this because I’m becoming increasingly concerned at the way the Russia/Ukraine situation is being reported by the British press.
But let’s start with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
Who started the Cuban Missile Crisis?
If I remember correctly, the narrative we’re given in the West was that the evil Soviets starting positioning nuclear missiles in Cuba putting them within reach of major US cities. However, what tends not to be mentioned was that the Soviets did this in response to the US putting Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey. Moreover, the Cubans were keen to have Russian protection following the US-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
After several days of tense negotiations, an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement to not invade Cuba again. What is not so well known is that secretly, the United States agreed that it would dismantle all of the Jupiter medium range ballistic missiles, which had been deployed in Turkey against the Soviet Union.
So, who really started the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Who started the current Russia/Ukraine crisis?
From what little I remember, when the Soviet Union agreed to the reunification of Germany in 1990, the then US Secretary of State James Baker did mention in a conversation with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO’s military jurisdiction was not expected to extend beyond Germany’s eastern border.
A year after German reunification, the Soviet block collapsed. Taking advantage of Russian weakness, NATO began aggressively hoovering up countries that had previously been part of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. And now NATO is encouraging two countries bordering Russia – Georgia and Ukraine – to join the NATO military alliance.
There was no formal agreement made in 1990. But recently Putin referred to what he believed was an understanding in 1990 “We said not an inch to the east – that was a NATO guarantee in 1990. So, what became of that? They fooled us. We’ve seen five waves of NATO expansion,” Putin said in his annual press conference.
The toothless West?
NATO’s continued expansion eastwards towards Russia’s borders was all fine and dandy while Russia was an economic basket case, China was a poverty-stricken Third-World dump and the West, particularly America, was all powerful.
But things have changed. China is aggressively and successfully working towards replacing the US as the world’s major power, Russia has rebuilt its economy by selling its vast natural resources and the West is collapsing in self-loathing, cultural wars, net-zero stupidities and unrepayable debt.
So, Putin has decided to get into bed with Xi’s China and face down a weakened West by demanding assurances that Ukraine and Georgia will never join NATO
Beating the drums of war?
This brings me to the way the current Russia/Ukraine problem is being reported in the British press. Obviously I haven’t read all the reports. But the main ones I have read in the Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail make no mention of the reason the conflict has arisen – NATO’s expansion towards Russia’s borders. Instead they all seem to focus on what an evil tyrant Putin is and vilify Putin’s supposed “henchman” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
Most articles I’ve seen are the kind of simplistic jingoistic nonsense that would have been appropriate at the height of the last Cold War. But I have not found any balanced attempt to explain the background to the current crisis.
For some reason, the British press seem to be eagerly beating the drums of war.
Thank heavens for Fox News
Here’s a shortish (9 minutes) piece from Tucker Carlson on Fox News. The best bit is at around 4 minutes where he interviews Tulsi Gabbard an American politician and United States Army Reserve officer who served as the U.S. representative for Hawaii’s 2nd congressional district from 2013 to 2021.
In spite of being a Democrat, Gabbard has some pretty clear views on why the US seems to be hurtling towards a new Cold War with Russia:
I admit some bias as I studied Russian language, literature and history and spent several months there when it was the Soviet Union.
But, knowing a little about Russian history, I believe that in the current more than minor contretemps between Putin and the West, Putin is quite justified in demanding that NATO stops its expansion eastwards towards Russia’s borders.
I do realise that Vlad ‘the Impaler’ Putin may not be the kind of person you would invite round to your mother’s house for tea and cucumber sandwiches as he has an awkward habit of having people killed – often rather painfully using radioactive isotopes. But Putin’s tendency to murder people he doesn’t like doesn’t mean that he’s not justified in his current opposition to further NATO expansion.
After its formation in 1949 with twelve founding members, NATO grew by including Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955, and then later Spain in 1982. After the Cold War ended, and Germany reunited in 1990, there was a debate in NATO about continued expansion eastward. In 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined NATO, amid much debate within the organization and Russian opposition.
Another expansion came with the accession of seven Central and East European countries: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. These nations were first invited to start talks of membership during the 2002 Prague summit, and joined NATO shortly before the 2004 Istanbul summit. Albania and Croatia joined on 1 April 2009, prior to the 2009 Strasbourg-Kehl summit.
Looked at from the Russian point of view, I can understand Moscow’s increasing nervousness as NATO troops moved ever closer to Russia’s borders. Meanwhile, I believe NATO has shown extraordinary arrogance and stupidity as it continuously expanded, contemptuously ignoring Russian concerns. Moreover, by constantly moving of its military forces ever closer to Russia’s borders, NATO has pushed Russia into the arms of our real enemy, the Chinese Communist Party. Dumb!
The most recent member states to be added to NATO are Montenegro on 5 June 2017 and North Macedonia on 27 March 2020.
This map shows how NATO has expanded ever further East towards Russia’s borders since it was formed in 1949:
(map from Wikipedia section on NATO expansion – By User: Patrickneil, based off of Image:EU1976-1995.svg by glentamara – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4794601)
As of 2021, NATO officially recognizes three aspiring members: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, and Ukraine.
All three are uncomfortably close to Russia’s borders.
I can fully understand Russian unease as NATO moves its tanks, missiles, divisions and military bases ever closer to Russia’s borders. And I can understand that NATO’s attempts to get countries like Georgia and Ukraine to join are a step too far for the Russians.
After all, the USA wasn’t too pleased when Russia started putting its missiles into Cuba in 1962:
And I suspect the USA would be more than peeved if Russia or China entered into a military alliance with say Venezuela or Mexico and suddenly well-armed Russian or Chinese divisions were within spitting distance of the USA’s southern border.
And now Putin has decided to face down the West, there is wild panic as our third-rate, net-zero-obsessed leaders try to work out what to do.
Boris’s and Biden’s deflection tactics?
Worryingly, both bumbling Bunter Boris and senile Joe Biden are in trouble domestically as both are seen to be incompetent, dishonest and are increasingly unpopular. How convenient it would be for both if they could stir up a little conflict with Russia. This would deflect from their domestic political failures and allow both to posture as great Churchillian international statesmen.
Meanwhile our mainstream media do everything they can to portray Putin and Lavrov as the villains of the piece and Boris and Biden as plucky defenders of democracy and freedom.
But as Samuel Johnson warned us:
The only adult on the West’s side at the moment seems to be the puffed-up, vertically-challenged, gerontophiliac French popinjay Macron. He seems to be trying to find a diplomatic solution to ease Russia’s (IMHO genuine) concerns. As for our would-be mini-Thatcher Foreign Secretary, Elizabeth Truss, Sergei Lavrov met his British counterpart, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, for talks in Moscow and said the talks were, he said, ‘a bit like talking to a deaf person. It’s like they’re listening to us but not hearing.’
Crestfallen Cressida
So, it appears that the ghastly Cressida Dick, promoted (I believe) because she ticked a few of the right ‘diversity’ boxes – female and married to another woman – rather than for any skill in catching wrong-uns has finally been booted out.
Though I note that the main reason given for her welcome departure is apparently her failure to deal with racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, discrimination and misogyny etc etc etc in the Met and not the politicisation of the Met – giving up catching real criminals to focus on politically-correct woke nonsense like taking the knee to BLM rioters and scouring the Internet for anyone committing ‘thought crimes’.
This suggests that Cressida’s replacement will not be some hard-nosed, crime-fighting traditional policeman. But instead he/she/ze will be even more politically-correct, more woke, more Common Purpose, more allergic to catching and prosecuting real criminals and more inclined to allow the BLM and eco-loon mobs to run riot than even the utterly useless Cressida.
Here’s a video I wrote and produced in 2018 about Cressida’s astonishing rise through the ranks:
There’s a saying “Scratch a liberal, find a fascist”. The logic is clear. While those on the right believe in individual freedom and personal choice, the liberal left believe that the state knows best and that the state should be given total control over people’s lives.
Here’s another quote: “Liberal Fascism (Leftism) is a fascism with narcissistic appeal, universally adaptable to all people who will submit, and therefore is more dangerous than any fascism before, as it will find fewer opponents and is already accepted by millions world wide.”
Britain’s chief scientific advisers
That brings us to Britain’s Chief Scientific Advisers. We’ll start with Sir David King
The Bonking Boffin’s predictions
Britain’s favourite bonking boffin, Imperial College’s Professor Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths.
If I remember correctly, in 2002 Professor Neil Ferguson predicted that as many as 50,000 people could die from the human form of mad cow’s disease, under a “worst-case” scenario of a BSE-infected sheep epidemic:
The final human death toll from BSE was 177. The government’s Chief Scientific Adviser at the time was Sir David King – Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government and Head of the Government Office for Science from 2000 to 2007. During this time Sir David also worked to raise awareness of the need for governments to act on climate change:
Sir David King hit the news again in 2008 when he was, I believe, reported to have claimed that if global temperatures kept increasing, by the end of this century climate refugees would be fleeing to Antarctica:
There are only 72 years to go and the temperature in Antarctica is still around minus 54 degrees. So, these supposed climate refugees had better take some warm clothes with them.
‘Independent’ SAGE
More recently, Sir David has been almost constantly in the media as the founding chairperson for the self-styled “Independent SAGE”. This bunch claims on their website: “Independent SAGE is a group of scientists who are working together to provide independent scientific advice to the UK government and public on how to minimise deaths and support Britain’s recovery from the COVID-19 crisis.”
Though, as far as I know, there have never been any key meetings between “Independent SAGE” and government ministers. Moreover, if my fading memory serves me correctly, throughout the Wuhan lab-leaked Chinese plague, Sir David and his “Independent SAGE” colleagues continuously called for more lockdowns and more restrictions. Yet the most recent actually independent research has suggested that the economically- and societally-catastrophic lockdowns only reduced death rates by around 0.2%.
The Twins of Doom
The Covid con trick?
Now let’s briefly look at Britain’s current Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance. In my ignorant humble opinion, for two years Sir Patrick and his lookalike, Sir Chris Witty, have been scaring the public into accepting more restrictions on their freedom than were ever imposed even in WWII. The Twins of Doom have done this (IMHO) using Covid death figures that were (IMHO) grossly misleading as they didn’t distinguish between deaths from Covid and deaths with Covid.
Moreover, throughout this period, the average age of people dying from/with Covid was actually higher than the average life expectancy. I humbly suggest that this fact wasn’t made sufficiently clear by the Twins of Doom.
Then, as far as I remember, Vallance and Whitty, using the Bonking Boffin’s predictions warned of up to 6,000 deaths a day from Omicron. They achieved this by using Omicron’s increased infectivity while at the same time keeping Delta’s death rates even though it was (if I remember correctly) blindingly obvious that Omicron was far less dangerous than Delta.
Boris’s Damascene Conversion on climate change?
Now I’ve finally reached the purpose of this blog – a meeting organised by the office of Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, in the Cabinet Room of Number 10 Downing Street on 28 January 2020. The “teach-in” consisted of 11 slides showing key aspects of climate science and its impacts and the presentation was led by Prof Stephen Belcher, the chief scientist at the Met Office:
“I got them to run through it all and, if you look at the almost vertical kink upward in the temperature graph, the anthropogenic climate change, it’s very hard to dispute. That was a very important moment for me,” Boris Johnson told journalists afterwards.
In my book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS, I provide evidence that all the arguments presented to our scientifically-challenged PM were total climate-alarmist nonsense that will be used by the pleb-hating, freedom-loathing liberal elites to restrict our freedoms and impoverish our lives – less power for homes, rationing electricity, punishing people deemed to be using too much power, fewer people allowed cars, cutting consumption of meat, restricting flights and holidays and increasingly confining us to our insufficiently-heated homes.
Welcome to the Paradise the liberal elites are preparing for us. We accepted their fascist rules under Covid. They believe they can now get away with imposing even worse restrictions on us using the cover of supposed man-made catastrophic climate change.
You can fool me once, shame on you. If you fool me twice, shame on me.
We’re now more than two years into the Chinese Wuhan lab-leaked plague and so can start to look at what effect, if any, the miracle vaccines have had.
There are various figures we could use – overall infections, hospitalisations, ICU numbers, Covid deaths etc etc. To simplify things, I have chosen hospitalisations per million of the population.
Israel
Let’s start with Israel. If I remember correctly, Israel struck a deal with Pfizer giving the country early access to the vaccines in return for the country providing Pfizer with continuous statistics on things like infections, hospitalisations, ICU numbers and deaths.
Here are the weekly hospitalisations per million of the population for Israel:
(As usual, to see more clearly left-click on the image and then left-click again)
Israel + UK + US
To put the Israeli results into some context, here is Israel compared to the UK and US:
While Israel, now into its fourth dose, is probably the most vaccinated of these three countries, the UK’s booster (third dose) programme is struggling and the US is probably the least vaccinated of these three countries.
Looking at this chart, it seems that the hospitalisation rates are similar for the most vaccinated country (Israel) and the least vaccinated (US) and much lower for the UK
Israel + France + Germany + Netherlands
Now let’s look at Israel compared to three Northern European countries – France, Germany and the Netherlands:
This may be telling us that Germany and the Netherlands are just behind the curve and will soon go the same way as France and Israel – a massive rise in Covid hospitalisations. Or it may be telling us that France and Israel have become too reliant on vaccination as the solution to Covid whereas Germany and the Netherlands have found better ways to cope with the Chinese plague.
Israel + Italy + Spain
Now let’s try Israel compared to two large southern European countries – Italy and Spain:
Both Spain and Italy had fairly disastrous starts to the pandemic. But despite being less vaccinated than Israel, they now seem to be performing better than highly-vaccinated Israel.
Conclusion?
Vaccinophiliacs have tried to explain away the Israeli situation by claiming that the rise in hospitalisations is due to insufficient take-up of the fourth shot by vulnerable people. And there was a truly dreadful article in the Sunday Telegraph about what lessons the UK could learn from Israel. The conclusion was that it was important for people to keep getting booster shots.
But there are quite different conclusions which could be drawn from Israel’s situation. These include:
Insufficient natural immunity – it’s possible that those countries, which were slower to vaccinate, initially had higher hospitalisation and death rates. But that the delay allowed many people to build up natural immunity which lasts much longer than vaccine-induced immunity
Pathogenic priming, known as Antibody Mediated Enhanced Disease (ADE) in the scientific community. “ADE occurs when the antibodies generated during an immune response recognize and bind to a pathogen, but they are unable to prevent infection. Instead, these antibodies act as ‘Trojan horse,’ allowing the pathogen to get into cells and exacerbate the immune response.” This was well documented with a vaccine used in the 1960s
Damaged immune systems – there are theories that excessive vaccination may be damaging people’s immune systems giving them short-term protection against serious illness from Covid but making them more vulnerable once the vaccine-acquired protection fades. Canadian stats suggest the immune systems of the fully vaccinated have lost 80% of their potency, and that the fully vaccinated are 5x more likely to catch Omicron than the unvaccinated.
What is this telling us? Obviously we can’t draw any clear conclusions in a short blog showing just a few charts using just one indicator – hospitalisations. But it does seem that Israel’s heavy reliance on vaccines has not given the country fewer hospitalisations per million of the population than countries which have done many fewer vaccinations. Moreover, Israel’s death rates are also shooting up. But I’ll spare you from more charts.
All this suggests that those branded vaccine sceptics and anti-vaxxers may have some valid arguments for questioning the “no jab, no normal life” policies of countries like Austria and France and even for halting the vaccine roll-outs in other countries.
My achy breaky heart
In my weekend blog, I suggested without any strong evidence that healthy people under forty years old shouldn’t be vaccinated against Covid as the risks from the vaccinations outweighed the benefits.
During the weekend I stumbled across this TalkRadio interview with a cardiologist who had come to exactly the same conclusion. If this cardiologist is correct – and I’m sure there are many cardiologists who would disagree with him – then governments like France and Austria, which are making vaccinations mandatory, may be committing crimes against humanity rather than protecting their populations’ health. The same accusation could even be levelled against governments like the UK which have put heavy pressure on people of all ages to get the vaccines.
I wonder if the families of people killed by the vaccines will start to bring court cases against their governments? That would be interesting:
I’m no statistician, so I might have got this all wrong. But I’ll try to explain it anyway.
The figures below all come from a recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) report which looked at death rates by age group for the vaccinated and unvaccinated:
(left-click on image, then left-click again to see more clearly)
I believe the key column is the one on your right – Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years.
As you’ll see, for the age group 18-39, the Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the unvaccinated at 25.6 is much lower than the Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for three of the four groups which have had either one or two vaccinations – 65.6, 47 and 55.2.
On the other hand, the Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the 40-49 age group is almost twice as high for the unvaccinated (221) than for the vaccinated (average – 115).
And in the 50-59 age group, the Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the unvaccinated (717.2) is about three times higher than for the vaccinated (average – 239).
If I have understood the figures correctly, there seems to be a pattern emerging – the older the age group, the more beneficial the vaccines are. And in the 18-39 age group, the vaccines seem to be doing more harm than good.
But what about our children?
Please bear with me a little longer. Now we come to the next bit of this puzzle. A slightly non-establishment website has calculated the Age-standardised mortality rate per 100,000 person-years for the 10-14 and 15-19 age groups:
I struggled a little trying to follow their calculations. Moreover, the sample sizes of those children who died were possibly too small to be statistically significant. I wouldn’t know. But here’s their conclusion:
(left-click on image, then left-click again to see more clearly)
This suggests that for the younger age groups, vaccination may actually be doing much more harm than good.
Who can we trust?
But can we trust a ‘conspiracy’ website? After all, when the whole scientific community condemned any suggestion that the Chinese Wuhan plague was accidentally released from a Chinese military bioweapons programme funded in part by Dr Anthony Fauci, we all knew the scientists were right and the conspiracy theorists were crazy. Didn’t we?
So here are some other data points:
When formulating advice in relation to childhood immunisations, JCVI (Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation) has consistently held that the main focus of its considerations should be the potential benefits and harms of vaccination to children and young people themselves. The JCVI has stated that benefits and risks from COVID-19 vaccination in children and young people are finely balanced largely because the risks associated with SARS-CoV2 infection are very low. Of all age groups, children aged 5 to 11 years are those at lowest risks of serious COVID-19
The JCVI have therefore recommended that only children in high-risk groups should be vaccinated: “Children aged 5 to 11 years in a clinical risk group (as defined in the Green Book), or who are a household contact of someone who is immunosuppressed (as defined in the Green Book), should be offered two 10 micrograms doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine (Comirnaty®) with an interval of 8 weeks between the first and second doses. The minimum interval between any vaccine dose and recent COVID19 infection should be 4 weeks.”
Vaccination with mRNA-1273 was associated with a significantly increased risk of myocarditis or myopericarditis in the Danish population, primarily driven by an increased risk among individuals aged 12-39 years
But still our great knowledgeable rulers, those who assure us that man-made climate change will wipe out the human race, press ahead with their ‘vaccinate the children’ campaigns.
Various countries are now recognising that the vaccines are next to useless more than nine months after vaccination. For example, the French have declared that people are only fully vaccinated after nine months if they have had a booster shot. And I believe the Israelis are now into their fourth round of vaccinations – the two initial vaccinations plus two booster shots.
While the evidence suggests that the vaccines have been effective for older age groups, it would possibly be useful if our scientific experts were to look again at whether it is wise vaccinating our children. Even worse, with the emergence of the less deadly flu-like Omicron variant, I get the feeling that anyone in good health below the age of say forty, shouldn’t risk vaccination at all.
But that won’t happen as vaccinations have become an issue of political control rather than a pure health issue and our politicians don’t dare allow any doubts to be raised about their coercive vaccination campaigns.
After all, what would happen to the vaccination campaigns if people started to look at the benefits vs the risks? A complete collapse in confidence.
Meanwhile the vaccine manufacturers work to have their vaccines approved for ever younger age groups, the mainstream media continue to promote the ‘vaccinate vaccinate vaccinate’ propaganda and anyone questioning the benefits of mass vaccination gets immediately cancelled by social media for being a right-wing, anti-vaxxer nutjob.
I’ll just add a recommendation to have a look at the Zerohedge article mentioned in a reader’s comment:
It seems that US life insurance companies have noticed a significant rise in deaths of younger people in the fourth quarter of 2021. This rise in deaths of younger people coincided with Covid becoming less virulent but vaccination becoming more widespread due to ‘no jab no job’ vaccine mandates. This rise in deaths could be due to delayed medical procedures from Covid filling up hospitals or it could be the miracle vaccines. You decide.
Wednesday/Thursday/Friday blog. I’ll leave this up for 3 days as it might be more than mildly important.
Wikipedia describes societal collapse as follows:
Societal collapse (also known as civilizational collapse) is the fall of a complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government and the rise of violence. Possible causes of a societal collapse include natural catastrophe, war, pestilence, famine, population decline, and mass migration. A collapsed society may revert to a more primitive state, be absorbed into a stronger society, or completely disappear.
Virtually all civilizations have suffered such a fate, regardless of their size or complexity
Plenty of journalists and mainstream-media commentators have opined at length about the problems facing the West – government waste, our useless political leaders, the climate change doomsday cult nonsense, the BLM crazies, out-of-control immigration, our ultra-woke ineffective police and civil service, Afghanistan or whatever. But very few seem to have joined the dots and realised these are all part of one overarching scenario. That scenario is the ongoing implosion, decline and collapse of Western civilisation and the rise of competing civilisations such as an ever more powerful totalitarian Chinese empire and violent, radical, West-hating, anti-progress Religion of Peace fanaticism.
Eminent historian and anthropologist Sir John Glubb wrote The Fall of Empires in 1976 and said this:
“The life expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.”
Various historians have developed different models describing the rise and fall of previous civilisations. For example, in his acclaimed 12-volume work, A Study of History (1934–1961), the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee explored the rise and fall of 28 civilizations and came to the conclusion that civilizations generally collapsed mainly by internal factors, factors of their own making, but external pressures also played a role. He theorized that all civilisations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.
Each civilisation, before its collapse, has believed that it was the ultimate in human achievement.
Such is our conviction that ours is the ultimate civilisation that there was even a bestselling book in 1992 titled The End of History and the Last Man by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama which argues that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy — which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached “not just… the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
What arrogance. What hubris we had. But now some of us unfortunately know better.
As for Mr Fukuyama, I believe he is still making millions from the lucrative lecture circuit, though I have no idea what theory he is peddling now and I can’t be bothered to find out.
None of these models seems to precisely describe the current disintegration of the supposedly democratic West. But as Mark Twain wrote:
By this I believe he meant that no historical situation will be exactly the same, but that we can still see the same basic patterns in historical events.
However, whichever model you choose, they all show a similar trajectory for each civilisation – rise, plateau and collapse.
Western civilisation probably should have collapsed in the appalling destruction of WWII. That the West managed to rebuild so quickly and then bring along the former communist states after the fall of the Soviet Union is an extraordinary achievement. This shows what can be achieved by cohesive societies with competent leadership. That the West has now decided to self-destruct is probably well described by Sir John Glubb.
In his analysis of past civilisations, Sir John Glubb described the final phase of each civilisation as follows:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Although this was written almost fifty years ago, I think you’ll agree that every single word of the above accurately describes the West today:
Point 1: “Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population
Absolutely correct
Point 2: Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust.
Absolutely correct – just look at the bunch of lying, incompetent, scheming, self-enriching cowards running the UK. Or the senile basket-case of a US president. Or the rotten corrupt, self-serving EU. Or the totally corrupt international organisations like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation.
Point 3: A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots.
During Covid, the world’s billionaires have become massively richer while the rest of us have been burdened with huge rises in national debts the repayment of which we and our children and their children will be taxed for generations to come. Moreover, the elites are forcing their ludicrous ‘net zero’ greeny agenda on the rest of us, impoverishing our lives while they enjoy the privilege of jetting around the world to lecture on us on why we should be happy giving up many of those very things which make life worth living
Point 4: The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities
You only need to look at the endless stream of z-list supposed celebs on cooking or dancing or reality TV shows and see how many millions follow the inane witterings of their social media heroes.
Point 5: The majority shirk duties but insist on entitlements.
With one in five Brits claiming they are disabled, with hundreds of thousands of Third-Worlders flooding into European countries with the most generous welfare systems and over two million crossing into the US since cognitively-challenged Joe Biden was wheeled into the White House unaware of where he was, why he was there and what day of the week it was, I hardly need to comment on this. Though I’ll mention Milton Friedman who famously once said something like, “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state”(1999). This is something our rulers don’t seem to understand.
Don’t say you weren’t warned
So, it’s time to get in the beer and crisps, relax and enjoy watching “The Collapse of the West” – an exciting and realistic new drama performed live by the superficial, celeb-adoring, progressive, virtue-signalling, narcissistic, self-loathing, cowardly populations of Europe, the US, Australia and the Chinese socialist colony of New Zealand.
No genuine conservative would marry a ‘watermelon’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) activist like Caroline Symonds. No genuine conservative could listen, on a daily basis, to the idiocy she spouts, no matter what the bedroom benefits.
None of the three main English political parties have any policies nowadays – only the three-pronged Cultural Marxist agenda of race, gender, and ‘climate change’. And every single event that happens in the world today is reported, skewed, and interpreted to reflect that agenda.
So if Starmer’s ragtag collection of warring factions and Islington millionaire lawyers, hilariously still known as the Labour party, were to gain power, none of us would notice much difference – except that the steady transformation of this country into a Socialist hell-hole might be slowed a bit as every new attempt at the implementation of the aforesaid agenda would have to be filtered through Labour’s myriad competing Marxist, Trotskyist, 2SLGBTQQIA+, Afro-Caribbean, Islamic, and climate panic sects, before being chaotically implemented.
In the ensuing interregnum, while a Labour administration squanders even more eye-watering sums of borrowed and taxpayers’ money than the Tories’ third-world banksters have already done, Tory constituencies might just care to consider the radical idea of selecting actual conservatives to stand as their candidates. If they did, it would be the first time in many years. But someone will eventually have to clean up the mess after Starmer, or whichever beaujolais bolshevik lawyer replaces him, finally runs out of credit.
Meanwhile, we should all reflect on the fact that nations led by actual grown-ups such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping don’t appear particularly concerned about gender pronouns, white supremacy, or Greta Thunberg.
It isn’t just Boris who is weak, the Tory Party grandees and parliament are weak. We have not had an effective opposition since the Tory party gained power and it has been worse than ever under Starmer. Partygate is irrelevant considering the major issues to be resolved. The entire country is obsessed with it because they followed pointless rules and Boris didn’t. When people have been fooled, they don’t want it pointed out to them.
The Truckers YouTube channel has been taken down. The political agenda is being controlled by the digital-finance complex. I am starting to blame historians for this. They have only looked at events and leaders. They have ignored the history of ordinary people which is one of constant oppression and the theft of our efforts through forced labour or taxation. History also shows the collapse of civilisations when states required more wealth than we could create and then the centre of power moved. The west is in this situation now. China has a leader, we have no leadership, just the greed of powerful men and their corporations influencing politicians.
There is now a Spotify argument involving Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Both had Polio before the vaccine was available so it is perhaps understandable that they support vaccinations. But they have no understanding of viruses and vaccinations. The success of vaccines for Smallpox is also often quoted, and by Sarah Gilbert in the Dimbleby lecture. This is the real misinformation. Smallpox and Polio are not respiratory viruses and they have different characteristics. Most importantly, the vaccines work but still have low risks.
Aldous Huxley said that technological progress has provided us with an efficient way of going backwards. Never has it been more obvious. We have too much knowledge and it is impossible for anybody to understand more than a fraction of it. Education fails to teach us how to think when there is so much information and how to avoid being misled by those who have power over us, or mislead us through ignorance (celebrities and the media). The powerful need us to be ignorant.
However, technology via the internet also gives all of us the means to research but we have to somehow see through deceptions. The only way is to look for evidence and if we cannot find it, or do not understand it, then we should not accept it. I do not understand why people have accepted mass vaccination with no evidence the effectiveness or of long term safety. It shows that generation of fear can override rational thinking. That becomes more difficult when mass opinion is formed through the media, especially social media and celebrity influence. I’m pleased to see a book by Susan Crockford “Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception”. His influence over people is astonishing.
Plato was right. We don’t want responsibility for ourselves and we are incapable of electing competent leaders. We must eventually suffer the consequences.
I’d like to start this weekend’s blog by continuing the theme of my previous blog about how Lady Carrie Macbeth is almost single-handedly destroying Johnson’s premiership and wrecking what little is left of British democracy in the process.
I haven’t been following the details, but I believe Boris Johnson offered at least one serious political operator the job of sorting out Downing Street and possibly someone else as well. As far as I understand, both turned the job down. Why? I suspect because they realised it was a hopeless task. Had either taken the job, they knew that Johnson is so weak, vacillating and devious that, whatever they agreed with Boris, would be immediately blocked during ‘pillow talk’ between Boris and progressive, lefty, ecoloon, wallpaper-loving, nonsense-peddler Princess Nut Nut.
For example, former cabinet minister and Brexit negotiator Lord Frost is quoted in several papers as saying Boris Johnson needs to axe ‘all the neo-socialists, green fanatics and pro-woke crowd’ in Downing Street to reset his premiership after the Partygate scandal. But Boris won’t dare do that as that would upset Carrie Nut Nut meaning no more bjs for BJ.
And so I believe we’re stuck in a self-destructive stasis – our whole democratic system stymied by Boris’s fawning obedience to Princess Nut Nut’s pillow talk. I struggle to believe that our enemies – Vlad “the Poisoner” Putin of Russia and Chinese mass murderer Xi Pingpong – have to consult their wives before making any decision.
In my last blog, I described Boris Johnson’s dramatic rise and fall as resembling a Greek or Shakespearian tragedy. I’ve changed my mind. Now it more resembles a farce. Dictionary definition of farce: “Farce is a comedy that seeks to entertain the audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable”.
And to add to the impression of farce, we have the ludicrous shenanigans around the Sue Gray Partygate report. At first we were told this would be published in full. Now we learn that the useless Met boss Cressida Dick has demanded that the Partygate report should make “minimal references” to the events it is investigating. FFS! How can you publish a report which only makes “minimal references” to the events it is supposed to be investigating?
While Whitehall insiders and journos may obsess over the details of what will or won’t be published and when it will be published, most ordinary people won’t be fooled – they will conclude that somehow the greased piglet Johnson has managed to wriggle out of trouble yet again thanks to yet another establishment whitewash and cover-up.
The longer the Tories allow this farce to continue, the greater will be ordinary people’s disgust at their arrogant dishonesty and the worse will be the electoral wipe-out they will face at the next general election. Johnson must go! And he must take his (IMHO) unhinged, interfering wife and all her eco-idiot chums with her.
The truckers revolt
As the UK government applauds itself for sacking about 40,000 much-needed care workers who weren’t vaccinated and prepares to sack up to 70,000 even more-needed NHS workers who won’t allow untested drugs to be injected into their bodies, here’s a story from Canada which I haven’t seen mentioned in the UK mainstream media.
Right now there are reportedly 50,000 truckers and 1.4 million people in a 20km convoy – “The Freedom Rally” – headed to the parliament in Ottawa to protest about mandatory “no jab no job” vaccinations. The truckers’ spokesperson explained that the truckers are not against the vaccination per se and that many are vaccinated. What they are protesting about is totalitarian government over-reach and destruction of people’s freedoms:
And in the USA, judge after judge after judge are blocking Biden’s “no jab no job” mandates.
Meanwhile, the UK mainstream media still tries to brand anyone refusing the experimental and largely ineffective vaccines as crackpots, conspiracy theorists, mental retards and a danger to society. None of the media seems willing to question why over 70,000 frontline NHS workers, who will have more experience of the Wuhan lab-leaked plague than most of us, don’t want Pfizer’s chemicals pumped into their bodies. Nor will the UK media question why vaccinations are even necessary now that Covid has evolved into just a form of the flu.
And in some countries, like Austria and France, they’re treating the unvaccinated similarly to the way we used to treat lepers – confining them to their homes except for in emergencies and banning them from most bars, restaurants, cinemas and much else.
North Americans still believe in freedom
While we in Europe and Australia and Chinese colony New Zealand, cower terrified as our partying governments strip away the most basic freedom – the freedom to choose what medical interventions one undergoes – it seems that in the USA and Canada, people are prepared to fight back against Orwellian oppression:
The main purpose of this blog is to try to pass on information that the mainstream media either won’t cover or else about which the mainstream media lies. Oh, and I also hope that the occasional reader might be tempted to buy a copy of my latest book – THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS – either for themselves or to send to a friend or enemy or even to their local MP.
It is not my intention to give opinions on stories the mainstream media is covering. There are already enough attention-seeking, overpaid buffoons voicing off on 24-hour news. But today I thought I’d deviate from my main purpose and suggest an explanation for the disastrous failure of our current government
A Greek Tragedy?
Collins dictionary defines a Greek Tragedy as: (in ancient Greek theatre) a play in which the protagonist, usually a person of importance and outstanding personal qualities, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal.
A successful PM?
I believe that the (IMHO) currently lying, squealing, wriggling, greased piglet Boris Johnson could have been a successful PM. He has repeatedly shown – in two London mayoral elections and one general election – that he can reach parts of the population that no other Conservative since Thatcher could reach. Moreover, given the disaster he was handed by the horrific Theresa May, who sacked two Brexit Secretaries in her desperate attempts to keep Britain in the EU, I believe Johnson did the best that could be done in the circumstances. Yes, Brexit is an unseemly mess. But we are more or less out of the EU and will over time drift further apart.
Chaotic, incompetent, priapic and vain
Unfortunately Boris’s weaknesses – his fatal flaws – are probably too numerous to list fully here. So, I’ll just mention incompetence, indiscipline, a lack of attention to detail, vanity, a congenital liar and a tendency to follow the demands of his helmeted warrior of love rather than his brain.
But these weaknesses could have been compensated for if Johnson surrounded himself with a competent, effective team of underlings. I believe he had that when he relied on the Dominic Cummings team which helped win the Brexit referendum and then helped carry Johnson to a massive 80-seat general election victory.
Lady Macbeth?
As the wife of the play’s tragic hero, Macbeth (a Scrottish nobleman), Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes Queen of Scrotland.
Enter Carrie Johnson (aka Princess Nut Nut)
Just as Lady Macbeth goaded her husband to kill the Scrottish king, I believe that (IMHO) ecoloon Princess Nut Nut goaded Johnson into firing the Dominic Cummings team and replacing them with her progressive, liberal, lefty, holier-than-thou, virtue signalling, BBC-adoring lickspittle chums. Given Boris BJ Johnson’s many fatal flaws, this was a recipe for disaster. Not only did Johnson lose an effective team that could counterbalance his many fatal flaws, but he was also pushed into abandoning any semblance of being a Conservative. This was perhaps best seen by his obsession with supposed catastrophic climate change and his Flop 26 Glasgow conference. Had Flop 26 been a success, vain, self-regarding Johnson would have turned up at the final session to claim all the glory. His absence tells us all we need to know about the Glasgow disaster.
Moreover, I suspect that Carrie Macbeth’s influence was so great, that many Downing Street staff were unclear who they were actually working for – Lady Macbeth or the greased piglet. And no man can effectively serve two bosses.
We know how Greek tragedies end
As a Classics scholar, BJ must be uncomfortably familiar with how Greek tragedies end. I’ve no idea whether he will survive the next few weeks as PM or will soon be humiliatingly booted out of Downing Street. But in his rise due to his many strengths and his fall due to his fatal flaws, in particular his fawning obedience to his Lady Nut Nut Macbeth, I see all the elements of a classic Greek or Shakespearian tragedy.
It may take days or weeks or even months. But with Johnson’s inevitable fall, Britain’s catharsis is coming.
You’ll all know that the figures used by the recently honoured Twins of Doom – Vallance and Whitty – regarding lab-leaked Chinese plague deaths are complete nonsense. This is because they include anyone who has died within 28 days of a positive Chinese plague test. So, if you have a heart attack, stroke or car accident and die in hospital having also tested positive for the Chinese lab-leaked plague, you’re counted in the “deaths with Covid” figures even if your death had nothing to do with Covid. This has allowed the Government and supinely obedient media to conduct their Project Fear campaign claiming Covid deaths of over 150,000 to bludgeon us into cowering in terror in our homes while they partied.
GB News’s Freedom of Information request
While almost all the media have screamed for more lockdowns and faster lockdowns and more restrictions, GB News is probably the only media which has dared question the garbage being spewed out by the Government, the Twins of Doom and their sycophantic supporters in the rest of the media.
You probably also know that GB News made a Freedom of Information request to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) asking how many people had died where Covid was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. The answer was not anywhere near Whitty’s and Valance’s 150,000+ deaths. The answer was just 17,371 over the two years of the Chinese lab-leaked plague. To put this 17,371 into some context, it is estimated that on average 17,000 people have died from the flu just in England annually between 2014/15 and 2018/19 – with the yearly deaths varying widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 3,966 in 2018/19. Moreover, the deaths from Covid over two years are about the same level as the 9,700 or so who die prematurely each winter because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly.
Which is it? 17,371 or 153,000?
So, how do we find the real figure for Chinese lab-leaked plague deaths? The 17,371 only includes deaths where Covid was stated as the only cause. But there may be many other cases where people with comorbidities kicked the bucket slightly earlier than expected thanks to Xi Pingpong, enthusiastically assisted by the lying scum at the pathetically misnamed, Chinese-run World Health Organisation (WHO), unleashing the lab-leaked plague on the world.
Perhaps this ONS website gets us nearer the answer?
It lists deaths and death rates for England and Wales over the last 30 years.
The key column is the one on your right – the age-standardised mortality rate. This adjusts the death rates for both population size and for age difference.
As you can see, the age-standardised mortality rate in the 18 years from 1990 to 2008 was higher than during the first year of the Chinese plague (2020). After 2008, the age-standardised mortality rate seems to have been on a downward trend reaching a record low in 2019. Then in 2020 there was clearly an increase we can ascribe to Xi’s and the WHO’s magnificent efforts to practise ways of wiping out mankind.
I suspect that the falling age-standardised mortality rate until Covid is due to things like improved medical care and a decrease in smoking since the 1960s.
Just eyeballing these figures suggests that the increased number of deaths either fully due to Covid or slightly hastened due to Covid may be around 60,000 to 70,000 – fewer than half the number used by the Government and the Twins of Doom.
This might mean that the the age-standardised mortality rate might fall during the next couple of years as thousands who would have died anyway from comorbidities chose to leave us slightly earlier than they otherwise would have done thanks to the WuFlu. The figures I’ve seen for the last 4 months of 2021 suggest that the death rate was below the average for the 5 years prior to Covid which seems to confirm that many of the 60,000 to 70,000 would have departed this planet in 2021 if it hadn’t been for Covid.
On the other hand, the complete collapse of the NHS, which (as we all know) is the envy of the world, might mean that the failure to diagnose and treat people with life-threatening conditions may increase death rates for the next few years?
Was it all worth it?
I can understand that the Government and the supposed ‘experts’ panicked at the end of 2019 as they saw people dying of asphyxiation from a hitherto unknown disease in the corridors of Italian hospitals. But what is unforgivable is the Government and ‘experts’ then launching Project Fear using death rates “with Covid” which they knew were complete statistical nonsense to create an Orwellian state depriving us of our liberties, locking us in our homes and forcing us to wear dehumanising masks while small businesses were crushed and big companies, chums of Tory politicians and the rich make an absolute killing.
I saw this comment by a Daily Telegraph reader: “During 2020, I was living next door to a Coop funeral home. They had only 2 clients and eventually CLOSED! Make of that what you will”.
And here’s the magnificent Neil Oliver from GB News asking whether the panic and lockdowns were really necessary:
David Craig, on February 13th, 2022
No genuine conservative would marry a ‘watermelon’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) activist like Caroline Symonds. No genuine conservative could listen, on a daily basis, to the idiocy she spouts, no matter what the bedroom benefits.
None of the three main English political parties have any policies nowadays – only the three-pronged Cultural Marxist agenda of race, gender, and ‘climate change’. And every single event that happens in the world today is reported, skewed, and interpreted to reflect that agenda.
So if Starmer’s ragtag collection of warring factions and Islington millionaire lawyers, hilariously still known as the Labour party, were to gain power, none of us would notice much difference – except that the steady transformation of this country into a Socialist hell-hole might be slowed a bit as every new attempt at the implementation of the aforesaid agenda would have to be filtered through Labour’s myriad competing Marxist, Trotskyist, 2SLGBTQQIA+, Afro-Caribbean, Islamic, and climate panic sects, before being chaotically implemented.
In the ensuing interregnum, while a Labour administration squanders even more eye-watering sums of borrowed and taxpayers’ money than the Tories’ third-world banksters have already done, Tory constituencies might just care to consider the radical idea of selecting actual conservatives to stand as their candidates. If they did, it would be the first time in many years. But someone will eventually have to clean up the mess after Starmer, or whichever beaujolais bolshevik lawyer replaces him, finally runs out of credit.
Meanwhile, we should all reflect on the fact that nations led by actual grown-ups such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping don’t appear particularly concerned about gender pronouns, white supremacy, or Greta Thunberg.
It isn’t just Boris who is weak, the Tory Party grandees and parliament are weak. We have not had an effective opposition since the Tory party gained power and it has been worse than ever under Starmer. Partygate is irrelevant considering the major issues to be resolved. The entire country is obsessed with it because they followed pointless rules and Boris didn’t. When people have been fooled, they don’t want it pointed out to them.
The Truckers YouTube channel has been taken down. The political agenda is being controlled by the digital-finance complex. I am starting to blame historians for this. They have only looked at events and leaders. They have ignored the history of ordinary people which is one of constant oppression and the theft of our efforts through forced labour or taxation. History also shows the collapse of civilisations when states required more wealth than we could create and then the centre of power moved. The west is in this situation now. China has a leader, we have no leadership, just the greed of powerful men and their corporations influencing politicians.
There is now a Spotify argument involving Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Both had Polio before the vaccine was available so it is perhaps understandable that they support vaccinations. But they have no understanding of viruses and vaccinations. The success of vaccines for Smallpox is also often quoted, and by Sarah Gilbert in the Dimbleby lecture. This is the real misinformation. Smallpox and Polio are not respiratory viruses and they have different characteristics. Most importantly, the vaccines work but still have low risks.
Aldous Huxley said that technological progress has provided us with an efficient way of going backwards. Never has it been more obvious. We have too much knowledge and it is impossible for anybody to understand more than a fraction of it. Education fails to teach us how to think when there is so much information and how to avoid being misled by those who have power over us, or mislead us through ignorance (celebrities and the media). The powerful need us to be ignorant.
However, technology via the internet also gives all of us the means to research but we have to somehow see through deceptions. The only way is to look for evidence and if we cannot find it, or do not understand it, then we should not accept it. I do not understand why people have accepted mass vaccination with no evidence the effectiveness or of long term safety. It shows that generation of fear can override rational thinking. That becomes more difficult when mass opinion is formed through the media, especially social media and celebrity influence. I’m pleased to see a book by Susan Crockford “Fallen Icon: Sir David Attenborough and the Walrus Deception”. His influence over people is astonishing.
Plato was right. We don’t want responsibility for ourselves and we are incapable of electing competent leaders. We must eventually suffer the consequences.