Hello to everyone who is still following our epic journey towards building a house and creating our own little slice of sustainable heaven up here on the Loch of a Thousand Winds. The last year has been challenging to say the least what with all the nonsense (see The Captain’s Log posts), the effects of all the nonsense on the availability and cost of building materials, and not least, the effects of ill health related to all the nonsense.
As you may be able to tell from my tone, I am done with all the nonsense, so I shan’t go on about the pain, division and vile behaviour it’s generating – suffice to say that it’s a gift that just keeps on giving.
Over the last year, we’ve had a big hole dug, it’s way bigger than we anticipated thanks to us not being allowed by building standards to go with the foundations we had planned. Our builder is now doing the blockwork before we can fill the aforementioned hole with rubble and concrete and make our first grant claim so that we can afford to begin the next stage of the build which will bring walls and a roof. We hope to have a weatherproof structure up by the end of this year, but we’ll see, I’m not making any more predictions about when we’ll have a house to live in. I know I sound weary, we all are, the process has been painfully slow these past 12 months and we are suffering from project fatigue.
As we were anticipating doing a lot of building work over the last year, we paid little attention to the garden and so only managed to cultivate a few delicious tomatoes. However, a completely unintended raspberry patch appeared in the summer, courtesy of the increasing number of birds who visit us I’m guessing, and observing the spread, and enjoying the fruits of earlier labours was one of the pleasures we did enjoy.
A friend came to visit in the summer and we were able to finish creating the path that winds up the croft past the mature, donated blueberry bushes to the small god of things who looks over us. We have spent a few glorious, sunkissed evenings sat up there with a glass of something warming, surveying what we have achieved so far in Bairstowpia. It really helped us remember that we started with only a bare patch of boggy hillside and now we have a sprawling, ramshackle but secure collection of self-built structures of varying shapes and sizes, our own off-grid electrical and water supplies, lots of fruit bushes that are starting to spread by themselves to provide us and the wildlife with organic edibles (mainly the wildlife to be fair), and a growing expanse of trees that will gift us with their valuable shelter as the years pass.
Another very good friend came to visit several times over the year and used his expertise in all things diesel heater to ensure that we have been warm and toasty in the yurt all winter. We spent a delightful, if surprisingly warm, winter solstice night out on the platform, with the newly revitalised Sputnik burning logs from my folk’s garden under the broad expanse of the Milky Way with the exotic sounds of Egyptian and Turkish music coming from Mick’s laptop. Truly it was a night to remember.
Despite all the nonsense, I was able to continue working with my clients and also doing some teaching of Kinetic Chain Release down at the new KCR Academy in Glasgow. We have the brilliant Seth Gardner as our creative director so I got a taste of the demands of the career I might have had if I’d followed my earliest inclinations to be a performer. Given how my life has turned out, I’m pleased with my choice.
Joe is in the final years of his time at school now and is thinking about his future plans. We hope to hold onto him for an extra year or so before he goes out into the big wide world as the time seems so short, but we’ll see what happens.
Mick has been able to restart his HEMA class in Ullapool and has a regular group of sword junkies to play with which means I no longer have to feign interest in all things metal and pointy – thank the small god of things for his small mercies. Mick was also awarded the honour of being made Sempai by the Sensei of The Cameron School of Martial Arts where he has been learning and latterly helping out in Jujitsu classes for many years now. He has also been volunteering to work with some folk who have need of long term support thanks to disabling health problems that continue to be unaddressed by our severely stretched health and social care services thanks to the willful mismanagement by successive governments. If one was prone to thinking dark thoughts, one might consider there was an agenda to impoverish the NHS and Social Services so greatly that privatisation by the back door is achieved.
On that happy thought, I’m going to sign off for this update and continue hoping that I have more inspiring updates to share in the not too distant future.
We hope you are all well and happy, much love to you all,
‘There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”’ Isaac Asimov.
“I would prefer to be honest, even against my own interests.” Professor Peter Duesberg – Molecular biologist discoverer of retroviruses like HIV. Dissenter from the orthodoxy that there is a singular viral cause of AIDS.
Does anyone else think it strange that the BBC constantly provided critics of the hypothesis of human-caused Climate Change, often people with no scientific background, in equal number to the scientists who supported the hypothesis, for ‘balance’, but are now incapable of providing a voice for the huge number of doctors and scientists criticising the current orthodoxy regarding SARS-CoV-2 Covid 19?
After all, both Climate Change and Covid are killing people and there is much less of a scientific probabilistic ‘consensus’ regarding the current management of Covid than there has been regarding Climate Change.
Kary Mullis, the man who created the PCR test stated that it should never be used as a diagnostic test to define ‘cases’ as it is over sensitive and can recognise the debris of dead retroviral material, remember that 8-10% of normal human DNA is originally derived from a retroviral source, as being part of the viral load. I.E. inert and completely safe viral material is found and can be misrepresented as if it were a dangerous active virus. Also, the PCR test can detect an active virus at such low loads that it would indicate that the immune system is dealing with, or even has dealt with, the virus perfectly adequately. That in either situation the individual is in no way a medical ‘case’. Yet despite this fact governments are using the PCR test in order to define cases! Why?
Emergent evidence seems to be indicating that the ‘vaccines’ have limited utility, certainly in preventing transmission and infection and that their effects are of limited duration with diminishing returns as the number of injections increases. I.E. the significant effect of the first inoculation seems to usually last a little more than six months, the second inoculation for three months or so and the third for six weeks or so (Clancy). It should be noted here that although there appears to be a protective effect from the most serious potential consequences of Covid, especially within this time frame, the ‘vaccines’ do not absolutely protect against hospitalisation (see Public Health Scotland, (PHS), data) as the majority of people now hospitalised with Covid have been vaccinated, the highest single group of hospitalised Covid patients being the double vaccinated. Also, there is now clear evidence that ‘natural immunity’ is superior to immunity via vaccination.
This being the case why is there such a push to vaccinate everyone, whether they are in a vulnerable category or not or have had Covid or not? Why? This being the case why was the unethical and probably illegal, at the very least it contravenes the Nuremberg Code, mandating of vaccines ever considered? Why?
To date under 18,000 otherwise fit and healthy British people have died from Covid and only Covid. This is a tragedy that has to be addressed and dealt with. Yet many have died with Covid and with Covid probably taking them over the edge. They were people with co-morbidities who were very vulnerable to Covid, or any other significant virus, and they are just as important and significant as anyone else.
Many of these people probably had low vitamin D levels according to internationally derived data, many had poor overall metabolic health and had diabetes, high blood pressure and chronic health problems indicative of a compromised or dysfunctional immune system.
What is happening is that the vaccines are being characterised as some kind of protective panacea, which there is no clear or definitive evidence of them actually being, whilst the causes of vulnerability are being entirely neglected. The key question of ‘why were some people so close to the edge that Covid pushed them over?’ is not being asked. Why?
The most recent research indicates that lockdowns were probably useless at best and possibly increased Covid infection rates whilst promoting a host of other health and social problems, from increasing deaths from non-Covid causes, increasing mental illness, increasing violence against women, primarily, and also the abuse of children. At the same time promoting fearful compliance in the population. The ‘Today’ programme reported on some of this research, on one scientific paper this morning (03/02/2022) although there is an AIER publication from December 2020 (yes that’s 2020, over 12 months ago) noting 35 scientific papers in publication regarding the ineffectiveness of lock-downs. Why are the media apparently so sluggish in drawing public attention to such factual/probabilistic research evidence? Why?
The Cochrane Collaboration have published at least two Cochrane Reviews indicating the relative uselessness of masks in terms of preventing infection. (Jefferson et al. 2020) Why has this not even been discussed in the media and why is this scientific information not being used to challenge proponents of masks? Why?
The American Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System, (VAERS), is noted as only capturing up to 10% of all actual vaccine produced adverse events. This is a fact. VAERS has recorded over one million adverse events from the Covid vaccines including over 22,000 deaths in the USA. This is a fact. In the UK the UK Health Security Agency, (UKHSA), has recorded over 42,000 Covid vaccine adverse events. This is a fact. Why, is none of this apparently even open to discussion on UK mainstream media? Why is the BBC neglecting its duty to inform the public? Whose interests does this serve?
Pfizer’s own mRNA vaccine research was cut short, from the original inadequate six months to a mere three, when it showed that the vaccine appeared to produce a statistically insignificant actual effect on protecting people from Covid (this was misrepresented in the media) at the same time it was actually increasing deaths from all other causes (this was not brought to the attention of the media). Why does this fact seem to have never made it to the mainstream media, don’t they have researchers with relevant knowledge and skills?
When the podcast pundit Joe Rogan interviews dissenting scientists and doctors (Malone, McCullough) who have looked at the wider evidence base and have misgivings about the way Covid has been managed and want a balanced fact-based discussion regarding the evidence why is he being characterised and misrepresented as spreading ‘misinformation’? Why have mainstream media’s many instances of misinformation not been taken to task with the same rigour? Whose interests does this serve?
Since when was using disinterested scientific research and medical opinion to question other scientific research or medical opinion a crime? This is how science is supposed to work, via a dialectic based upon evidence in order to determine the highest probability as there is never a fixed and singular ultimate ‘truth’ in science. Why is ‘expert opinion’, which is merely opinion after all, being prioritised over research untainted by financial interests and over proper scientific refutation? Why?
Since when, in anywhere with pretensions to democracy, was it considered right to close down or cancel discussion, particularly informed discussion in order to create the illusion of a consensus when there is none? The real question being why is this being done, whose interests does this serve?
There is supposedly, and usually according to the right-wing and paradoxically authoritarian ‘libertarians’, an ever-shifting ‘woke’ perspective that seeks to cancel any dissent from its current narrative. This ‘woke’ perspective is largely based upon how some people ‘feel’ about something at the time and their preferred narrative at the time. Of course, the critics of ‘woke culture’ are really looking in the mirror and just do not like it when they are called on their ignorance and prejudice and are losing the power to impose the narrative that best serves their interests.
The supposedly ‘balanced’ debate on the BBC regarding Climate Change ranged a few dissenting scientists, sometimes without a truly relevant scientific background, and some entirely ignorant politicians with an entirely ideological perspective, against scientists who had spent their professional lives researching the climate and also scientists who had researched environmental degradation, ecological change, loss of diversity and extinction rates etc. as if their evidence was of the same weight, of exactly the same value. The BBC were rightly pulled up regarding this sleight-of-hand misrepresentation of the balance of probabilities.
No sensible person would argue that the same course should be taken with Covid however surely scientists and doctors of relatively equal knowledge and expertise but who differ could, and arguably should, be ranged against each other so that the public are fully informed and can make an informed decision, an informed choice? After all is this not an element of the BBC’s reason for existing? Why are the BBC, amongst the other media, presenting such a singularly biased perspective? Why?
Age-adjusted death rates per 100,000 were lower in 2020 than they were in 2008. This is just a fact derived from ONS data. This measure decreased from 2009 to 2019, but not exactly year on year, being particularly low in 2019 and this fact made the 5-year average unusually low, in terms of the last fifty years at least, for the 5 years before 2020. This too is just a fact. This being the case why were the public whipped up into a frenzy of fear regarding the supposedly particularly lethal effects of Covid 19 as a pandemic?
It should be noted that actual serious illness and mortality rates have been much lower than the initial modelling predictions, as was and is the case for AIDS as it happens.
In total contrast, the modelling for Climate Change has always underestimated the actual rate of change and the severity of the impacts of change resulting from human-caused Climate Change, with the seas, according to recent research, having passed the ‘point of no return’ in 2014. A fact apparently largely unheralded in the media, just a mention of this existence-threatening fact in a by-line in the Guardian yesterday! The effects of ingested micro-plastic particles on human health are both under-researched and under-reported but from the research already extant looks potentially devastating. The effects of female sex hormones in our drinking water and in the environment, only partly but, even so, significantly from women using ‘the pill’ is similarly almost a taboo topic as even to research it might be characterised as repression in another guise. Similarly, the effects of ‘modern’ intensive farming methods tend to be hidden with the government now pursuing deals with countries with lower protective measures, regarding the effects on human health, of the means they employ to produce food. Whose interests does this serve, certainly not UK farmers?
Why are the public not being whipped up into a frenzy of behaviour modifying fear by the media regarding this factual, scientific evidence that is, in reality, about a much greater threat to human existence than Covid. After all it is a matter of fact that the world’s human population increased from 2019 to 2022. Covid, unlike Climate Change, pollution and environmental degradation is not an existential threat. Whose interests does this misplacing of what should be the real cause of concern serve?
Covid is following the pattern identified in Farr’s graph regarding the London cholera epidemic of 1849. This pattern has possibly been ‘temporally displaced’ to create several ‘waves’ rather than one via the lockdowns or, more probably, each ‘wave’ is variant specific (AIER 2020). I.E. the Covid virus is doing what any new virus does. We have known this since 1849 at least and you might have thought that science and governments would have come up with a useful plan to deal with it by now that does not generate socio-economic and further health disasters, apparently not. Why are the mainstream media not taking the government and the scientists to task for this dereliction of its duty to protect the public? Whose interests have this dereliction served? Certainly not the interests of the majority.
Heaven forbid that science should do what it ought to do and challenge preferred narratives and fixed orthodoxies in speaking ‘truth to power’.
Admittedly there is an overly sensitive form of ‘cancel culture’ from ‘the bottom’, from people who have been demeaned, abused, manipulated and particularly exploited in a culture that has racist, misogynistic, class-biased/hierarchical roots and an economic system entirely based upon extractive exploitation, from the environment down to the individual worker. This over-sensitive need to redress wrongs and seek compensating power is understandable and, arguably, even excusable to an extent although it remains a problem regarding ‘free speech’.
However, the worst of ‘cancel culture, comes from ‘the top’, from those with wealth and power, those who largely – one way or another – control the media and seek to ‘cancel’, ‘de-platform’ any dissenting evidence, no matter how factual or scientifically rigorous the evidence is. Also to destroy anybody attempting to draw public attention to any factual evidence that might possibly undermine their wealth and power. Furthermore the rich and powerful seem determined to undermine and destroy anything that might question the system that creates their wealth and power or propose any possible alternative way of organising the economy and society. (A recent English Minister of Education suggested that books questioning the current capitalist model and suggesting alternatives should be banned from schools.) They are the true sources of misinformation as they seek to confuse and obfuscate via lies or partial ‘truths’ that they elevate to the level of inviolable truth as a matter of faith. Implying that science can be fixed at one point in support of one elite. This too is a lie that is totally anti-science.
There is no need to ask the question ‘why’, just look at the vast increase in differentials in wealth since the 1980’s with fewer and fewer owning more and more of the world’s wealth and having more and more power and control of the narrative in real terms. A shift creating an increasingly authoritarian global elite who really seem to believe that any rules should be only applied to others and not to them. Oborne’s ‘The Assault on Truth’ is arguably identifying just one little tip of the iceberg and from a partial perspective.
Last night’s ‘Moral Maze’ (02/02/2022) swiftly moved from Joe Rogan, who, in relation to Covid at least, tends to recruit and question dissenting relative ‘heavyweights’ around their understanding of the science and the wider objective evidence and/or their medical experience. Instead, the panel elected to choose ‘experts’ and then discuss freedom of speech and ‘cancel culture’ in relation to people’s subjective feelings regarding race, gender and with particular reference to a book regarding the expression of the author’s feelings regarding her experience. Safe ground for the factually ignorant as it was really all about matters of subjectively informed opinion and expression. This had little or no relevance to Rogan’s input into the Covid debate and yet the conclusions of some of the panel derided Rogan in assuming equivalence. Exactly demonstrating Asimov’s point. Without reference to well-informed people, the orthodox narrative in relation to Covid was indirectly maintained. What is the BBC playing at? Whose interests does it really serve?
To date, the management of the ‘Covid Pandemic’ has been wonderful for profits. Any evidence regarding alternatives to the current management model has either been buried or discredited, sometimes by research set up to fail and which carried the risk of killing people. Do not believe me read ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ by Robert F. Kennedy Junior, ‘Pseudo Pandemic New Normal Technocracy’ by Iain Davis and even ‘Covid 19 and the Global Predators’ by Doctor Peter Breggin. If you cannot be bothered to read then look up Doctor Peter McCullough, if he has not been ‘cancelled’ for quoting inconvenient evidence and facts, as well as for his opinions, some of which I disagree with.
For the pharmaceutical industry, Covid has been business as usual on steroids, with public fear and a manufactured desperation, being the best ‘performance-enhancing drug’ possible. Normal safeguards have been thrown to the winds, adverse effect reporting minimised, misrepresented or just hidden if possible. (Look at the American Food and Drugs Administration, (FDA), taking just 100 days to make a decision to release the Pfizer vaccine whilst stating, originally, that it would take 75 years to release the data on which they based that decision due to photocopying problems! Corruption is hardly the applicable word!) This is turbo-charged profit-focused neo-liberal capitalism at its unfettered best.
It is obvious why the major long-term threat of Climate Change/environmental degradation is being brushed under the carpet, with the reality being ‘all talk and no action’, whilst the relatively minor threat of Covid 19 is being exaggerated and any discussion being suppressed in an attempt at ‘all action and no talk’.
Dealing with the environmental crisis will cost money and require a fundamental change from the environmentally and socially irresponsible form of capitalism that we have now, and accept as somehow ‘natural’ in an absurd piece of manipulated delusion. It means growing up, taking responsibility and changing the way we live, realistically quite radically. Who in the ‘developed world’ really wants that?
Exploiting the ‘disaster capitalism’ possibilities of the Covid pandemic makes the rich richer, as has been proved. The wealth of the ‘globalised’ pharmaceutical corporations, at the least, and the billionaires have increased massively, inequalities have accelerated. It has been wonderful for ‘crony capitalism’, passing public money to your mates for relatively useless PPE or other products, the biggest UK goldmine being ‘Test and Trace’, no wonder some people were having parties! Great times!
The two worst things, socio-politically speaking, have been:
Firstly the attacks of the ignorant, or partially informed, upon the ‘non-believers’ who have looked at the wider evidence base and question the narrative, and worse, act accordingly. Sometimes the ‘true believers’ are acting merely on the ‘say so’ of ‘experts’ with vested interests in the ‘narrative’, a narrative including the erroneous idea of a rigidly fixed ‘science’ of absolutes rather than probabilities.
Admittedly some of the ‘non-believers’ also have not bothered to look at the evidence and are acting on their feelings too. Feelings that fundamentally orbit around the idea that, as long as they can afford it, they should be able to do exactly what they want, especially if other people have to deal with the consequences. I consider this attitude as intolerable, but that is merely an opinion.
However, it usually appears that it is as if the ‘true believers’ consider it is unacceptable for other people to have free will and freedom of choice, indeed any form of sovereignty over their own body and responsibility for their own health. With no cognisance of the actual evidence (see ‘Pseudo Pandemic’ for starters) people exercising choice in the context of ‘informed consent’ and in line with the Nuremberg Code have been accused of selfish irresponsibility. Including by people completely invested in the individualistic selfish irresponsibility of contemporary consumer capitalism. Obviously, such people are completely blind to their own hypocrisy when their perception is of an immediate threat to themselves, or even to their perception of how (other) people ‘ought’ to be. Is this an acceptable position for people to take in regard to other people?
Secondly, there was Ian Duncan Smith’s assertion, in an interview, that he had no opinion regarding morality as this was entirely the province of religion and had nothing to do with politics. The implications of this are chilling. Outside of the religious sphere then the ideas of honesty, justice, truth, lies, right, wrong, criminality, duty, decency, and standards have no meaning, all that really matters is achieving your aims. Implicit in this is that you should not be censured in any way for anything you do if it achieves your aims. In this context all that matters is success. Did you profit in some way? Your personal ‘ends’, therefore, justify any ‘means’, justify anything you do.
Of course, it is exactly this kind of behaviour by the pharmaceutical corporations, (along with various governments seeking their own forms of ‘profit’), that is being criticised by Kennedy, Davis and Breggin listed above. Apparently, according to IDS, outside of religion this is the only logical way for a sensible person to behave, it is pragmatic and profitable. Therefore it is to be expected of the pharmaceutical corporations as they are almost entirely motivated by making profits, otherwise, they would not often charge thousands of dollars for patented medications whose research has been largely funded by the public via universities and costs a few dollars to produce. We can also expect such behaviour from self-interested academics whose careers, research grants and sometimes personal wealth, largely depends on the largesse of the pharmaceutical corporations. Nothing to see here, business as usual – see the books ‘Bad Pharma’ by Doctor Ben Goldacre and ‘Let Them Eat Prozac’ by Professor David Healy.
Only, for some magical reason and against the clear advice of IDS, this one time no one advocating or producing vaccines is motivated by anything other than noble sentiments surely? Any evidence indicating or even proving otherwise must be suppressed or somehow excused.
Even if the pharmaceutical corporations are doing the worst imaginable then the pragmatic person will buy shares in ‘Big Pharma’ and possibly a funeral directors. After all, profit is the thing, pragmatism the only sensible course and the only commandment worth considering is the 11th!
Forget about Covid deaths and what preventable, socio-economic/public health, factors made most of the people who died particularly vulnerable to being taken over the edge by Covid, ignore the increase in deaths from all other causes, at least some of which may have resulted from the vaccines themselves, forget about the people in fuel poverty and having to use food banks whilst the super-rich spend millions on just one of their homes. Forget about doing anything about Climate Change and your child being poisoned by pollutants in the environment including human faeces in our rivers and on our beaches. You never know it might all work out, or not, but if the worst is to happen after you are dead why should you care?
Are you personally alright and have enough food. If so everything is acceptable, as long as it does not directly affect you, Pastor Niemöller. Go on, just do as you are told and fit in, you keep your head down.
Is this level of cynical moral bankruptcy what we should aspire to in the UK today? In my mind, the only totally decisive argument for Scottish independence is to try to get as far away as possible from this cynicism and the socio-economic model and tendency to a wholly mercenary perspective that creates it, as identified in the book ‘The Erosion of Character’ published at the end of the 1980’s as I remember.
To date, sad to say, the SNP/Green combination provide little behavioural evidence for this kind of change. They have, in effect, selected their preferred ‘experts’ and not actively supported questioning or dissenting voices. This is so they can have a simple message and attempt to outmanoeuvre the execrable Johnson and co. while staying on-side with the mainstream media and the mainstream informed public.
The government has gone along with lockdowns, vaccine mandates for some workers, the useless vaccine passports and all the rest in an authoritarian lurch and with little or no convincing much less decisive science to underpin it. At the same time allowing the pharmaceutical corporations to be without liability for any negative effects of their drugs, with the government (I.E. public money, your money) taking a limited ‘vaccines liability’ that makes a person’s life worth £200,000 at the most. Also not, as far as I am aware, really drawing public attention to the fact that despite the mythology around ‘devolved powers’ the Westminster government had negotiated the demonstration of its rights over the bodies of Scottish citizens in its rush to be seen to obtain vaccines, any vaccine at all even ones with no long-term safety data.
Worst the Scottish government has not merely gone along with the vilification of the people who have asserted their human right to refuse a medical treatment, or who have referred to the evidence in order to ask inconveniently difficult questions, but has actively promoted the divisive aggression of ‘moral one-upmanship’ via a ‘more in sorrow than in hate’ misrepresentation of the people who do not wish to be vaccinated or have their children vaccinated and by the government’s willful ignoring of the wider evidence base. Even keeping quiet and not acting fully on the data provided via the official channels of Public Health Scotland, (PHS), the Office of National Statistics, (ONS) and the UK Health Security Agency, (UKHSA), much less the wider evidence base!
It is no virtue to be ‘on message’ when the message comprises half-truths, partial-truths, in both senses of the word, and ‘spin’ as if they were the whole truth. Where the underlying thought behind the message is that the public are too stupid to understand the complexity of the issues involved and cannot be trusted to be sensible and are too selfish to do what is ‘right’ for themselves and their neighbours. This is a combination of condescension and cynicism that should be alien to a government that believes in democracy. At the least a democratic government should respect the ‘demos’.
This suggests a future government intolerant of informed dissent, as anything that challenges their narrative will apparently be both misrepresented as ‘misinformation’ and suppressed via a governmental ‘cancel culture’. There is a vast amount of literature and dissenting research regarding Covid 19 that is easily available and you might have thought that it would be simple good sense for any government not just to rely on ‘the usual suspects’ (an appropriate term for ‘Big Pharma’) but rather to commission investigation to summarise this research and thus get informed so as to truly ‘act on the science’, changing policy as the science actually changes. There is suggestive international evidence that if they had done so there might have been fewer deaths overall in Scotland from late 2019 to 2022. (N.B. UK compare Belarus, Kenya, compare Israel, high vaccinations, with Palestine, low vaccinations. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ .)
Now we will never know and the evidence that this might have been the case is unlikely to appear in any government report on the management of Covid in Scotland, certainly not in England. If it does the excuses will include, ‘a big scientist made us do it and ran away’ and ‘this is new research, we did not know this at the time’ – even though there were dissenting voices from the very beginning and clear illustrations from some other countries after the first lockdown and that most of the pharmaceutical corporations involved had an acknowledged track record for breaking the law, falsifying data, rigging research, marketing suspect drugs in order to maximise profits and that there was no evidence that they would not use panic over Covid 19 in order to do the same. (See both ‘Bad Pharma’ and ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’.)
Indeed the evidence was that the pharmaceutical corporations would definitely do the same as they always do, as their previous behaviour indicates that they share exactly the same belief structure as IDS. Any sensible government would prioritise looking in-depth for, and at, any evidence questioning ‘Big Pharma’s’ pronouncements regarding their research. Nor do any ‘investigative journalists’ in our much-vaunted fearless ‘free press’ and largely billionaire owned media seem particularly interested. Instead, they demonstrate an all too ready and lazy preference for acting as de facto advertising for the pharmaceutical corporations and slavishly following the government Covid narrative without question. At best referencing a conveniently limited section of ‘the science’ as if it was some all-encompassing eternally fixed edifice.
People who do stick their heads above the parapet, even in a limited and fairly mainstream way totally referencing methodologically sound science and government data rather than opinion, get sniped at usually by people who seem almost proud of their inability to look at scientific literature and investigate at depth. More evidence of our current gutless moral bankruptcy and the anti-intellectual preference for deeply felt ignorance and prejudice over knowledge, as Asimov noted about America.
In a democracy we need a government that has some expansive idealism, rather than a narrow ideology, and seeks to educate and promote the best in all of us, that values all its citizens and is aspirational regarding the potential of each citizen to contribute to the whole. We will be destroyed by any government that regards its citizens with condescendingly cynical eyes, from a manipulative, divisive, exploitative or even a paternalistic perspective.
Much as I believe in and wish for Scottish independence I cannot see how the way the Scottish government has managed the Covid 19 situation bodes particularly well. I hope that they will do better, as both the SNP and Green manifestos have their hearts in the right place, and that I will prove wrong in the long term. All the same, Saor Alba.
The world seems to have gone crazy. The fundamental idealistic principles underpinning science, that everything should be doubted and questioned, that the best science is disinterested and thus untainted by ego or any form of profit, that science can only be expressed in terms of probabilities at best, that vested interests, maintaining the status quo or ‘custom and practice’ are all toxic to the dialectic at the heart of science and that the opinions of the great and ‘good’, of the ‘wise’, are only as good as the evidence they can bring to, and the logical rigorousness of, the arguments they construct upon this evidence; all of this seems to have been thrown out of the window.
Now people who have never read a scientific paper, or have the knowledge or training to read such research papers critically, seem to feel that once they have read a newspaper or seen something on TV and chatted about it with a few similar people over a meal and drawn some ill-informed conclusions that their opinions carry great weight and should be taken seriously! At least as seriously as the evidence provided by scientists, researchers or clinicians who can provide even strong evidence that differs from a popular narrative. Indeed such people seem to believe that they and their opinions should be instrumental in enforcing compliant behaviour in people who choose to differ, no matter how well-informed the latter are.
The people who loathed the economic ‘experts’ who stated that Brexit was economic nonsense and characterised the ‘experts’ predicting Climate Change as doomsters who must be wrong whatever their knowledge or credentials, now hang on the words of any doctor or academic who poses as having the expert and final answer to Covid, even when they change their minds the next week. After all you have to listen to the ‘experts’, at least when it suits your prejudices.
Indeed such would be ‘enforcers’ with their binary ‘right thinking’ urge to conform and need to feel comfortable and righteous by attempting to force others to conform now dismiss dissenting science expressed in peer reviewed journals, and even the government’s own objective evidence as expressed in the Office of National Statistics, (ONS), data as somehow just being ‘conspiracy theories’! I.E. for such people strongly ‘felt’ opinions, are somehow superior to facts!
In short , in a clear example of the Dunning – Kruger effect, uncritical thinking is now being used to inform expressions of anger and even fundamentally authoritarian controlling language and behaviours to the edge of implied, if not actual violence. Ibsen’s play, ‘An Enemy of the People’ springs to mind, and how, on the one hand the force of the state and, on the other hand, peer pressure via attempts to manufacture guilt and shame, are used to enforce compliance, even when such compliance works against the best interests of the compliant, as in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel, ‘The Dispossessed’.
People who usually complain about the ‘woke’ or about an intrusive ‘nanny state’ attempting to control or limit their behaviour, from limiting their financial agency via taxation to their personal agency via implicitly critical ‘healthy living’ or Climate Change campaigns etc. or attempting to limit how they express themselves in regard to the language they use, have discovered their apparent right to criticise and, preferably control, other people for daring to make their own informed and free choices.
This highlights the inherent righteously small-minded conservatism of what suddenly seems to be the majority of the British public. As noted by Frank Wilhoit in ‘The Travesty of Liberalism’: ‘Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect…’
Some observers have argued that we are heading to somewhere on a continuum between Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ with social media as the new Soma. I consider that it is worse than that and unless people choose to become better informed and act on the best and most critical research, no matter how uncomfortable and demanding, then we are heading to the dystopia that William Rees Mogg and his co-author identify as the inevitable end product of de-regulated, neo-liberal globalised capitalism in the book, ‘The Sovereign Individual’. A world of a few super-rich, who have worked, largely via avoiding taxation, to destroy the Western democracies, and who are now free to totally exploit the rest of humanity, outside of the mercenaries they employ to protect them and enforce their whims. Do not believe me, read the book for yourself, it is there in black and white as Rees Mogg’s considered ‘expert’ opinion.
Indeed a recent book by Whitehead and Perry, ‘Taking America Back For God. Christian Nationalism in the United States’ identifies what are fundamentally anti-democratic and racist sentiments in the American right. Sentiments expressed through violent action when Trump was voted out of office.
This might be seen as merely the last effort of what is largely becoming an aging minority, in the changing US demographic, clinging to the nineteenth century ideas that informed the concept of ‘manifest destiny’ and (white) American exceptionalism. Nonetheless, there is an anti-intellectual element who increasingly believe that if democracy does not preserve their status, associated with both their race and their religion, then democracy should be brushed aside. Presumably democracy will be replaced by a ‘Gilead’ style theocracy ironically rooted in ideas taken from Social Darwinism that supposes an inherent white Caucasian or Aryan superiority. For such people, at least a proportion of them, turning the ‘culture wars’ into a real war cannot come soon enough since they assume that they must prevail. Generally they have the guns and God is on their side after all.
However either the ‘business as usual but more so’ envisaged in ‘The Sovereign Individual’ or the ‘Godly consumerism’ of the American ethno-nationalist right will also mean maintaining most of the current economic status quo in terms of extractive capitalism, with environmental destruction, inclusive of man-made climate change, being just part of the package.
This being the case either of these dystopias might just be a brief space between now and a re-run of the Great Permian Extinction, with human beings merely being one of the many species to go. Of course the super-rich believe that even if most people die somehow they will be able to create refugium for the very few. Obviously, in reality, the well-armed mercenaries are likely to take the few places available rather than give them to their ruthlessly irresponsible masters. The American Christian right tend to disbelieve in Climate Change, portraying it as yet another conspiracy against them, and anyway, as they are the ‘chosen’ they will be saved and their lifestyles preserved, or they will be taken up in ‘the rapture’.
It strikes me that the people eager to enforce compliance to the State, currently hand-in-glove with an apparently co-dependent ‘Big Pharma’ and supra-national agencies like the WHO, at this moment in time are largely those people eager to condemn ‘big government’ and state provision usually and who cry ‘foul’ when they perceive any of their freedoms curtailed by ‘the nanny state’. These people just want the world to return to their idea of ‘normal’ and to live their lives just as they feel like doing, usually without any thought for the long-term future.
As one of these people said to me, in regard to my concerns regarding ‘climate change’ over the course of even the second half this century. ‘Oh I don’t know what you are bothered about that for, you’ll be dead by then!’ And so I will but my child will not, and if my child has children then they will be the ones to suffer the most. In short these tend to be people who only care about what affects them directly and are otherwise fundamentally irresponsible. Even their current convenience is more important to them than the quality of life for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the relatively near future.
How should we think about such people? How should we value their opinions? This is actually how people ‘normally’ are, after all, in our society with its focus on individualism (see the book ‘The Selfish Capitalist’ by Oliver James to understand some of the harm this does). Reflecting, perhaps, that ‘normality is the psychopathology of the average’.
Like most people seem to be today the ‘baby boomer’ generation in particular, and I am one of them, cling to their echo chamber and seem especially averse to reading anything that reminds them of the reality of the pre-war past (like the book ‘Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future’) or the unfolding future, or even fact-based alternative perspectives on the present. This is the richest generation of the richest and most technologically advanced society that has ever lived on the Earth and the best they, we, can do is, as one American commentator put it, create a culture of utter banality.
Cake, circuses, playing as recreation and trying to hide from the facts. How else can a history of general denial of the facts, regarding environmental degradation and climate change for example, even resistance to being honest about the effects of smoking etc., be explained?
Denial of the facts when they imply change, especially radical change in a way that compromises the present economic orthodoxy and ‘profits for the few’, is hard wired into our socio-economic system. Indeed when anything questions the obvious fantasy of infinite ‘growth’ on a finite planet, including the need to use more rare metals for items to sustain our current consumerism and ‘lifestyle’ than there actually are on the entire planet, then such questioning or suggested alternatives are derided as ‘fantasies’!
The social construct that is ‘economic reality’ is referred to as if it was an actual object that could be touched, as if it were more real somehow than the earth beneath our feet and the air we breathe. As if ‘economic forces’ were somehow the same as gravity and not just one way of organising human activity that we can keep or reject. Some people believe in ‘the invisible hand of the market’, without any understanding of what Adam Smith actually meant by that or the regulatory and moral framework he believed capitalism could not work without (see his ‘A Theory of Moral Sentiments’ as well as ‘The Wealth of Nations’), in the same way that some people believe in God. Worse, just as some people believe that they are the only ones to fully apprehend God’s otherwise ineffable purpose and are thus entitled to use coercion if not downright violence to enforce their perception of ‘God’s will’ there are also those with the same certainty in regard to economics.
The belief in capitalism is just as much metaphysics as a belief in God and, as Capra put it, as a belief in any other ‘ism’, Communism, Fascism and ‘scientism’.
‘Scientism’ is when the language of science is used within a context of corrupted scientific process to make something appear to be scientific when the real focus is on making money, on status and on taking and/or holding power, or other forms of self-aggrandisement.
‘Scientism’ has been detailed in regard to health care in books such as; ‘Schizophrenia, A Scientific Delusion?’ by Mary Boyle, ‘Let Them Eat Prozac’ by Professor David Healy, ‘Bad Pharma’ by Doctor Ben Goldacre and ‘Toxic Psychiatry’ by Doctor Peter Breggin.
‘Bad Pharma’ highlights the corruption at the heart of the pharmaceutical industry, the corruption of the research and regulatory process complete with rigging research to indicate positive results, gagging clauses in order to prevent negative results being revealed with drug companies happily marketing what they know to be useless, even dangerous drugs that will cause deaths if they know the profits will be big enough.
In terms of breaking the law, both criminal and civil law in ways that sometimes resulted in the unnecessary deaths of patients; here (below) is how the ‘Big Pharma’ criminal ‘Top Ten’ is ranked.
Biggest ever pharma lawsuits by settlement amount: Ranking the top ten
10. Amgen – $762m
9. Bayer and Johnson & Johnson – $775m
8. TAP Pharmaceutical – $875m
7. Merck – $950m
6. Eli Lilly and Company – $1.4bn
5. Abbott Laboratories – $1.5bn
4. Johnson & Johnson – $2.2bn
3. Pfizer – $2.3bn
2. Takeda Pharmaceutical – $2.4bn
1. GlaxoSmithKline – $3bn
Taken from the paper produced by Tiash Saha and updated in 2021 for ‘Pharmaceutical Technology’. All these are fines for activities breaking criminal and civil laws. Some of these activities have resulted in deaths or permanent negative effects on health.
It should be obvious that organisations indulging in criminal activities for which they are successfully prosecuted are surely to be defined as characteristically being criminal organisations.
Therefore, fundamentally, some people are criticising individuals, who do not go along with a narrative provided by entirely profit focused criminal organisations and the people within the ‘system’ they have successfully corrupted or at least duped in some way, as somehow being wrongheaded!
This corruption has also been present during the planning for and the management of the Covid Pandemic, see the BMJ editorial; ‘Politicisation, ‘corruption’ and the suppression of science’. The BMJ is not some spoof ‘conspiracy theorist’ web site but a serious medical journal.
Surely it is the people who are rejecting this evidence who are the ones who are misguided and delusional.
Note the data from the Office of National Statistics, (ONS), given below. This is official government data. As can clearly be seen death rates per 100,000 whether crude or age adjusted, are not particularly exceptional in 2020, even for the last decade when death rates have been lower than the average, although not by much, with 2019 being unusually low.
If you take the trouble to add 2019’s and 2020’s Age-standardised mortality rates per 100,000 together and then divide by two it results in a roughly average death rate per 100,000 at 984.25. Lower than 2015, 2013, or 2012 and then lower than 2010 back to 1990 at the least. Indeed most years from 2010 back to 1990, and beyond that to the 1950’s if you care to look at the ONS data, have age-standardised mortality rates far higher, sometimes several times higher, than 2020.
Admittedly a review of the ONS data suggests that, using rounded figures, around 390 (per 100,000 person-years) vaccinated people died with Covid and 939 unvaccinated people (per 100,000 person-years) died with Covid over January to November 2021. However, this hardly supports the assertion that 90% of people dying with Covid are unvaccinated. During the same period of 2021 around 1,502 unvaccinated people died of other causes compared to 2,829 vaccinated people. Remembering that Covid is not the main cause of death in the UK at this time and comes in around third. It also has to be remembered that this represents people dying with Covid not necessarily dying directly from Covid. Indeed when comorbidities, particularly diabetes, are added in along with relative poverty/deprivation then being a slim, otherwise healthy and wealthy person, preferably a woman, living in a ‘good’ area of the UK looks better than being vaccinated, and with no risk of ‘adverse events’ from any of the vaccines.
Overall the average age at death in the UK for people dying with Covid is 82.4 years whilst average life expectancy in the UK is 81.2 years. Living through the pandemic years, according to the data, has not been significantly more dangerous in actuality than any time since the Second World War. In terms of average trends 2020 and 2021 do not even represent a return to ‘normality’, as the average over the last eighty years, with death rates per 100,000 remaining lower than most preceding years.
All the above data being factual, and mainly from the government’s own data, why the massive panic any sensible person might ask?
Apparently, regarding Covid, the UK did pretty badly in comparison with most other developed, and some less developed, countries, even worse than Sweden which did not lock down and ‘crash’ its economy and trusted its citizens to be sensible. Noting that the other Scandinavian countries did significantly better than Sweden and used very quick reactions to the perceived threat of the Covid pandemic, using short focused lockdowns and protection of the vulnerable and balancing the overall health needs of their peoples, inclusive of socio-economic factors, in a more coherent way than the UK. They also felt able to rely more on the good sense of their citizens than the UK government. Again see ‘The Assault on Truth’ by Peter Oborne.
What might be the reasons for the UK’s relatively poor performance?
Firstly the NHS has been designedly under-resourced and lacking in sensible workforce planning for years, inclusive of significant bed reductions. This has been knowingly enforced by government policy.
Secondly Brexit, and a growing reputation for ‘immigrant intolerance’ if not increasing racism in the UK, especially England, plus improving job opportunities in the EU, reduced the number of non-indigenous care workers in both social care and the NHS upon which both relied to an extent.
These two factors ensured that both sectors were understaffed. Indeed the rush to ‘get Brexit done’ before new European financial regulations came in (January 2020) to prevent tax evasion and money laundering, ensured that these critical, ‘essential’, health and social care areas would be understaffed during a pandemic.
Thirdly the lack of staff and year round numerical resilience in the workforce means that the NHS is always over-stretched due to predictable ‘winter pressures’ every winter. Everyone with any knowledge of the NHS must have known that a highly infectious pandemic would push the NHS further into crisis.
Fourthly the Government’s own pandemic preparations, for the most likely threat to National Security according to COBRA and governmental assessments, had been consciously run down by the government in order to save money in the short term. This false economy was to result in massive expenditure, made worse by incompetence, wilful mismanagement and profligate ‘crony capitalism’ during 2020 and into 2021, all detailed in Peter Oborne’s book, ‘The Assault on Truth’.
Fifth, although a highly infectious SARS CoV virus had clearly been predicted as the most likely cause of a pandemic in the Government’s own plan, (which was forgotten, apparently, by the people responsible for implementing it!) the need for the space to isolate the infectious patients from others and from one another for infection management purposes, plus the possible infection of staff, and the need for infected staff to be off work and to isolate if they were infected were not accounted for. Planning for this may have been in the original Pandemic plan, but who knew as it seems to have been misplaced!
Sixth, this need to have fewer beds, for quarantine purposes, in the same space and requiring more staff (partly to compensate for those off sick) led to a shortage of beds. There were knee jerk reactions, expensive ‘Nightingale’ units that could not be staffed, shunting sick elderly out into care homes; i.e. the sick being put amongst the most vulnerable, what did they expect to happen? Also an increase in discriminatory ‘do not resuscitate’ notices that affected the old and the disabled. All of this has been documented and this magnified the death rates whether the deaths were from, associated with, or even unrelated to Covid.
However despite all this the perception of what was happening was apparently entirely dissonant with what was actually happening according to the ONS statistics. (See above.) The necessary reduction in beds plus a slight, in real terms, increase in mortality rates plus a significant increase in morbidity rates stressed some areas of the NHS to near destruction. Demonstrating the real world effects of the lack of an effective government strategy in relation to ‘future proofing’ the NHS. Even so this was not the case across the whole of the UK, some areas not doing too badly in real terms despite being Covid ‘hot spots’ for short periods. It should be noted that increased vulnerability to high levels of morbidity in reaction to any virus, inclusive of post-viral syndromes (such as ‘long Covid’) had all been predicted in the literature largely as a result of government socio-economic policies, such as ‘Austerity’ for example. Prior to the effects of Austerity see ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett and the even much earlier ‘Inequalities in Health’ in regard to this.
There was a sense of panic and what seemed to be a siege mentality along with an understandably widespread desire to exert control, over the pandemic and over those who could somehow be blamed in any way. Our society seems to have become inclined toward a ‘blame culture’ focusing on anyone perceived as ‘different’. Increasingly, in regard to the Covid pandemic, this seemed to be centred on people who had not been vaccinated although by the end of 2021 these accounted for only 35% of the people hospitalised with Covid (https://fulfact.org/health/economist-vaccination-status/) and vaccinated people were just as likely to be infected and transmit Covid as unvaccinated people.
In absolute numbers more vaccinated people were admitted to hospital because of Covid than unvaccinated, for those around 80 years of age this was 1,373 after two doses against 134 unvaccinated, ten times more vaccinated than unvaccinated people. Per 100,000 people this was an approximately two to one ratio favouring the vaccinated as the majority of the over eighties are vaccinated, i.e. being vaccinated might be the best option for the over eighties however they are also amongst the most at risk from serious vaccine-related adverse events. (Data from the UK Health Security Agency.) In short the evidence indicated that it should be left for the individual to decide what risks to take with their own life. A second consideration, noted by the UKHSA, is that the useful effectiveness of the vaccinations may be short lived (currently estimated as between 10 to 14 weeks) whilst no one knows what the long term effects of repeated vaccinations of these new, experimental, vaccines might be on the human immune system, especially of the experimental mRNA vaccines.
As one doctor put it, ‘this is the first time in medical history that the ineffectiveness of a medication is being blamed on the people who have not taken it’.
It should be underlined that being vaccinated does not stop an individual catching Covid 19, especially the highly infectious Omicron variant, or of transmitting it to other people. Since, when they are working optimally, the vaccines appear to reduce the chance of dying from Covid it would appear that the unvaccinated are more at risk from the vaccinated than vice versa.
Indeed an FDA report of Pfizer research showed 24% higher ‘all-cause mortality’ in the vaccinated experimental group than in the placebo group – see Appendix One below. This being the case it could be argued that the research seemed to indicate that it was generally safer not to be vaccinated!
However, there had been a plan that could be acted upon all along dating back, in terms of inception and pre-planning at least, to 2016. This was the plan for a ‘worst case scenario’ that relied on the most lucrative form of intervention with the greatest potential to provide the best long-term returns on any investment and to keep future research funding rolling in. The answer had to be vaccines.
This was not something hidden or any sort of conspiracy, the plan, such as it was, existed entirely in the open and might have been informed by some good intentions, or not, that happily coincided with profiteering. Anthony was a driving force behind this and his motives have been questioned (see the book ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ by Robert F. Kennedy Jnr.). The plan was entitled ‘The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) Presentation to the WHO’ and presented to the WHO in 2017. It pushed the hope of vaccines and that they should be rushed into use even if still experimental if a serious epidemic or pandemic should arise before the vaccines were proven to be safe. (See Chapter 15 in Peter Breggin’s ‘Covid 19 and the Global Predators’) This is simply a matter of documented fact. The plan did rely on convincing the WHO to ditch the evidence-based pandemic plan it already had.
Furthermore the threat was potentially, indeed most probably, global, the customer base was definitely global and the corporations were all ‘globalised’. Therefore, sensibly, the planning had to be global and thus needed to involve, if not suborn, trans-national organisations such as the WHO and persuade structures within nations, such as the American National Institute for Health (NIH) and the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), to accept and conform to the plan.
This was the beginning of an overwhelming narrative that has tended to drown out dissonant voices to the extent that the ill-read binary-thinking now perceive this narrative to be ‘common sense’ and despair at, and reflexively condemn, anyone who dares to demur.
Needless to say CEPI comprises and is funded by Big Pharma, investors in Big Pharma inclusive of Bill Gates and his associates plus the areas of Academia most likely to be involved in the research and to make careers out of such research, if not directly profit via shares in the corporations involved.
For the pharmaceutical corporations and their investors all this was just business as usual. See a health disaster in the offing, avoid any cheap preventive measures, especially by governments, whilst downplaying clear socio-economic risk factors. Recognise the probability of a pandemic as an opportunity and seek to maximise profits from it. Just doing what any sensible capitalist organisation would do. (N.B. the down to earth and irrefutable ‘Bad Pharma’ by Doctor Ben Goldacre.)
For the self-styled libertarian nationalist and reflexively Republican American right this created a tremendous sense of disconnect that could only be addressed via a counter-narrative of a sinister conspiracy. Obviously the worst run conspiracy in history being so out in the open and right in the face of anyone making the slightest effort to look for it. This had to be the result of entirely atypical bad eggs and evil people who were fundamentally out to destroy the United States of America and thus the overarching plan, of which the pandemic was just a part, had to be linked to communism. It did help to support the conspiracy theory that from Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates to Pfizer there were major financial interests in Chinese laboratories and vaccine factories indirectly connected to the Chinese Communist Party, because that is how the Chinese economy works.
In an era of globalised multi-national corporations with loyalty only to the bottom line and a history of asset stripping and out-sourcing this was bound to be the case. An authoritarian police state with modern industrial plant and a cheap, well-controlled, workforce and fewer ethical constraints is definitely the right place to research and to manufacture rather than those Western democracies, particularly the well-regulated countries with ‘workers’ rights’. Discounting this soulless economic ‘reality’ the American far right, and any fellow travellers, studiously miss-joined the dots and created the conspiracy they were looking for.
In reality all of what is happening is explicable in terms of de-regulated, neo-liberal globalised capitalism that is focused absolutely on profit at any cost and without any moral or ethical constraints. This economic ideological system, as we now know it, was the creation of the American economist Milton Friedman in his essay of 1951. Friedman’s work underpinned the position of Hayek and was the guiding principle of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, not to mention General Pinochet.
Essential to this form of free market capitalism, at one time thought to have been what destroyed communism in Russia and brought history to an end, is ‘globalisation’. The ability of money to move anywhere in the world in order to invest and make more money. As William Rees Mogg makes clear this also demands that people have no loyalty to any country, have a number of citizenships, make their main domicile in a low tax country and keep the bulk of their money in off-shore tax havens. Ultimately, that people focused on making money should have loyalty only to the money that they are making, and to themselves with a horizon no more distant than their own lifetime.
This approach to capitalism is as American as apple pie. What it is and what it leads to is made explicit in ‘The Sovereign Individual’, co-authored by William Rees Mogg. Other critiques of its direct effects include ‘The Erosion of Character’, ‘The State We’re In’ and ‘The Selfish Capitalist’, also please note any literature regarding the health effects of this model, such as ‘Inequalities in Health’, Townsend and ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett, and the works of Professors Marmot and Layard. All ‘experts’ the right do not like.
The American right have to try to blind themselves to this economic ideology’s worst effects in America and pretend something else is going on. They conclude that what is actually happening is a sinister long term conspiracy combining rabidly capitalist global corporations and billionaires and the un-Godly Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and, by logical inference, somehow tracing back to Reagan and Thatcher, obviously closet communists, who knew?!
This is conflated with the idea of Climate Change as a pseudo-scientific fiction, another conspiracy to increase the cost of ‘gas’ and ruin the God-given American way of life and even prevent any increases in the standard of living whilst increasing taxation and this is all linked to the ‘conspiracy’ of the ‘liberal woke’ to prevent President Trump from keeping office.
This nonsensical inability to place the blame where it lies, with an amoral de-regulated neo-liberal globalised free market extractive capitalism based on the fantasy of unlimited resources on a finite planet, undermines books such as Breggin’s ‘Covid 19 and the Global Predators’ as the implicit bias and misreading of actuality is painfully blatant to anyone who does not share their prejudices and world view.
However books such Breggin’s do articulate a great deal of hard scientific evidence that is easy to check, disprove or corroborate for anyone not too idle to look up their references.
As the graph below indicates most places have done better than the UK, especially India.
Taken from: ‘Our World in Data’.
Note that, between November 2020 and February 2021, Indian doctors would have had to underestimate death rates by several orders, in order to be doing as badly as the UK. The accuracy of Indian data has been questioned but earlier Indian data and reportage from India noting the massive initial impact of Covid regarding overwhelming the Indian health care system, actually supports the supposition that their data, overall, is probably relatively accurate. Certainly not incorrect by orders of magnitude.
However looking at comments on the data provided in the chart above there seems to be a determination by Western commentators to contrive to fit it to the narrative that only vaccines can be the answer via the implication that Indian doctors and the Indian state are both corrupt and incompetent. Or possibly only competent at covering their corruption. Which, one might argue, would still make them more competent than the UK government bearing in mind the range of alleged acts of malfeasance and entitlement, from PPE contracts and via suspect lobbying to ‘party-gate’ the UK government seems to be guilty of, plus its avoidance of any serious inquiry into its handling of the pandemic to date.
More worrying is the repeated misrepresentation of the research, particularly in regard to the effectiveness of the vaccines (Severe acute respiratory coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) delta variant of concern breakthrough infections: Are vaccines failing us? Ali Nowroozi MD1,2 and Nima Rezaei MD, PhD2,3,4) and their potential dangers (Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine against Covid-19 in Israel. Mevorach et al. New England Journal of Medicine) but also in relation to ‘protection’, such as the real effectiveness of masks and why the WHO did not initially recommend them then changed their minds without reference to any change in the evidence base, and in relation to potential risk reductions via ‘treatment’ inclusive of vitamins.
Many, if not all, Indian states provided a prophylactic treatment regime containing high dose Vitamin C plus Zinc, as Vitamin D supplementation is usually not required in such a sunny climate, plus low dose Ivermectin. In some other countries low/safe dose hydroxychloroquine has been the drug of choice. In some Asian countries, such as Japan, there has been some long term partial immunity, of immune system sensitivity/reactivity, due to previous SARS infections predating SARS CoV2 (Covid 19).
Certainly the American physician Dr. Peter McCullough, amongst others, have claimed significant successes with a combination prophylactic or initial home treatment for Covid with Vitamin D, C plus zinc and low/safe dose hydroxycholoroquine. Breggin and McCullough also reference Dr. Zelenko in terms of a cheap and effective early/prophylactic home treatment.
However the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (N.B. Professor Carl Heneghan) conducted a meta-analysis of generally poor research usually using rather dangerously high dose hydroxychloroquine treatment regimes, recorded no real benefits and definite debits. This research has been criticised, alongside research relating to Ivermectin, by doctors like McCullough and Breggin, and the human rights lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jnr. as being designed to fail, using dangerously high if not lethally toxic doses of the drugs with very ill people when they are intended as either a prophylactic or as an early treatment for people who are not seriously ill with Covid.
Also there is a lack of funding for research related to out of patent cheap medicines combined with even cheaper vitamins and minerals, nutrition and acknowledging the effects of relative poverty and other socio-economic factors. High grade double-blind randomised long term trials with huge samples are not done and it becomes easy to deny ‘real world’ results such as those that seem emergent from observing Indian data, noting the graphic evidence above.
Designing research to ‘rubbish’ any possible treatment is essential in order to obtain Emergency Use Authorization, (EUA), from the American Food and Drugs Administration, (FDA), for experimental treatments represented as vaccines without the usual safeguards. In short there is a massive financial incentive to invalidate anything but the vaccines. (Pfizer are reputed to be making $1,000,000 per minute from their problematic mRNA vaccine.)
Personally my own biases incline me toward believing the Oxford data and the more down to earth ‘good sense’ of Professor Heneghan regarding the current overreaction to the Omicron variant and the limitations of the vaccines, with a reference to developing natural immunity as the preferred option and as much as is safely possible.
I readily acknowledge that my perceptions are partly informed by my political bias against the right wing politics of people like Breggin and McCullough. Their blatant political bias seems to blind them to flaws in the pathway or direction created by the capitalism they espouse and their brand of ‘reward theology’ that sees the rich as more ‘Godly’, until they get too rich. The moral arbiters of the Godly ‘rich enough’ and the un-Godly ‘too rich’ being people like Breggin who will cut individuals like Trump a great deal of financial and moral ‘slack’ for political reasons and on a Make America More White and Christian (preferably Protestant) Again ticket.
Despite all this, all the same they may have some right on their side in terms of the wider research and evidence base. I may be wrong and for this reason the key point to reading such books by such authors is to interrogate the references they use to support their case.
I do not believe the ‘global conspiracy’ hypothesis, it is too simple and too convenient and too easy in excusing the economic system espoused most strongly by the Republicans and the American (rich) and/or ’libertarian’ if illiberal right.
That there has been a systemic overreaction and largely global mismanagement of the Covid Pandemic is without doubt, from the extant evidence base. That this has been focused in rich Westernised countries capable of paying a great deal for largely ineffective vaccines, in terms of preventing infection and transmission at least, is also without doubt.
Beyond this there is evidence of adverse effects from the vaccines. When just over 800,000 American’s had died from Covid over 940,000 Americans had had adverse effects from the vaccines, including over 4,000 deaths and a significant number of ‘serious adverse events’ with life-long impacts on health. The Pfizer vaccine alone produced over 42,000 recorded adverse events including over 1,200 deaths in the first 90 days of it use. This is from Pfizer’s own data released by the FDA after legal action and a court ruling in the US. (See the Appendix below for the reference.)
It should be noted that when a medication is ‘rolled out’ as a treatment normally only between 1% and 10% of the actual real world total of adverse events are recorded. That would suggest a possible, if hopefully improbable, real world effect of at least 420,000 adverse events and 12,000 deaths for just one of the vaccines!
At this point is should be remembered that if a (presumably fully insured) person in America is diagnosed as needing hospitalisation because of Covid 19 then the hospital receives an extra payment in excess of $13,000. If the patient has to go into intensive care then this results in a payment of over $35,000. Thus there is a very strong financial incentive to over diagnose and over treat Covid in America. This may, or may not, have an impact on reported and apparent case levels in America.
Here it should be noted that the PCR test is being used to identify ‘cases’ and is therefore being used as a form of diagnostic tool, a role it was not designed for.
It is normal in Western medicine to define a ‘case’ as comprising an individual who requires medical treatment, probably hospitalisation, for a diagnosed disease, with the diagnosis being based upon symptoms and clearly measureable signs. This is not true for Covid where a person with traces of the virus but no symptoms and no other measurable signs can be, totally abnormally, classified as a ‘case’.
This will obviously lead to a massive over statement of ‘case’ levels in countries using the PCR as if it were a diagnostic tool. This would include the UK. Also where traces of the Covid virus are found in people just pre or post mortem this can lead to an over-rating of Covid-related deaths. I.E. someone dying from a heart attack with traces of the Covid virus via a positive PCR test in the last twenty-eight days can be recorded as a Covid death! The current data suggests that the numbers of people dying from Covid is routinely being over-rated in the UK and some other Western countries, including Sweden. I add this since Sweden has out-performed the UK in having less deaths from Covid.
This is combined with the noted reality that adverse vaccine-related effects will be routinely, and quite normally, underrated.
A number of individuals are highly at risk, for a number of health reasons, from a Covid infection (although the Omicron variant may not pose as great a risk). For the highly at risk individual it is probable that the risks inherent in taking the vaccine might be less than not taking it and that they will benefit from the vaccine. However there remain a significant number of people in the general population who will probably be more at risk from the vaccine than from Covid.
This would probably be true of most fit people, below fifty at least, and most probably/almost definitely true for healthy children.
This is my reading of the wider evidence base and expressed on a continuum of probability.
This being the case it should be left to the individual to become informed and then left to their judgement whether or not they choose to take a gamble on the vaccine totally based upon their individual circumstances. People should not be criticised for not making the choice you would make and vice versa.
For the State to directly pressure people via mandating vaccines as a condition of employment for public sector jobs or indirectly via vaccine passports or generating peer pressure is to contravene the Nuremberg Codes and, in relation to jobs, UK employment law (see Appendix below for reference). That the government is prepared to recourse to such behaviour, inclusive of illegality, in the context of lower annual mortality rates, per 100,000 of population, in 2020 and 2021 than in the 1990’s should be of concern to anyone with an interest in human rights, or even in good science, who lives in the UK.
However even more worrying is the apparent readiness of British people to turn their backs on the facts in order to judge and attempt to assert some form of moral superiority and even control over other British/UK citizens from a position of arrogant ignorance. It is not just intellectually pathetic it is a clear threat to rational discourse in favour of feelings and prejudice. Not a sound basis for any democracy and a state of mind more conducive to fascism, even in the form of ‘state capitalism’ as espoused by a supposedly communist China.
Fascism wrapped in a red flag is still fascism and is where the aims of the State and the interests of powerful individuals and corporations in the private sector are conflated to benefit some individuals in the State and in the private sector. In this case the State has to delude the people, via ‘bread and circuses’ usually combined with appeals to ethno-nationalism as ‘patriotism’ and/or other forms of prejudice, that what is good for the people running the ‘Party’ is good for the nation.
Fear is also a good motivator, from fear of the ‘other’, of ‘foreigners’ to fear of disease, usually linked to some ‘othered’ sector of the community or to said ‘foreigners’.
What is most disturbing for some of us is that the Left in the UK seems all too keen to jump on this bandwagon with an authoritarian and judgmental bent, eager to manufacture and then occupy some faux moral high ground.
People who have exercised the free choice rooted in the sovereignty over their own body fundamental to medical ethics in practice and fundamental to any democracy are being derided and attacked. The selected ‘othered’ minority are simply people who have elected to assert their obligation to themselves in making an informed choice not to be vaccinated, or not to continue to be vaccinated into an apparently never-ending course of relatively ineffective experimental vaccines with no long term safety data.
Indeed in normal times the rate of adverse events in the first 90 days of the Pfizer vaccine would have resulted in the American Food and Drugs Administration withdrawing it from the market as too dangerous! What has changed? This question is especially relevant after the publication of this BMJ investigation: BMJ INVESTIGATION Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. By Paul D Thacker. BMJ 2021; 375: n2635.
The Pfizer whistle-blower alleged that Pfizer, true to form in relation to previous fines for criminality, undermined the research methodology and corrupted the data to provide a false impression of both the efficacy and the safety of its mRNA vaccine. Noting that the mRNA vaccine relies on an artificial replication of the spike proteins on the Covid virus and that no one knows what repeated exposure to such experimental vaccines might have on the human immune system. However there is some evidence, quoted by both Doctor McCullough and Doctor Breggin, the latter in the book ‘Covid 19 and the Global Predators’ that such artificial organic structures can cause inflammatory problems, amongst other health effects, and, paradoxically, undermine the body’s immune response to Covid!
Certainly the ONS data does not justify retaining this problematic experimental vaccine in use in an attempt to address mortality rates per 100,000 of the UK population that are less than any time before 2008 and where it is a treatment for the third listed cause of death in the UK and where the average age at death from Covid is higher than average life expectancy. (See above.)
The study by Talic. Et al. published in the BMJ in 2021 (Effectiveness of public health measures in reducing the incidence of covid-19, SARS-CoV-2 transmission, and covid-19 mortality: systematic review and meta-analysis) basically concluded that all the research was flawed and that all these public health measures were, in effect, unproven and only ‘associated with reductions in the incidence of Covid 19.’ This was in combination although handwashing seemed the most effective individual behaviour from the data. Nonetheless they recommended conformity, presumably to be ‘on the safe side’ and to avoid attracting criticism.
Other research related to masks, includes a fairly open and apparently un-stratified meta-analysis that is laid out in tabular form in the paper: ‘More than 150 Comparative Studies and Articles on Mask Ineffectiveness and Harms’. BY PAUL ELIAS ALEXANDER DECEMBER 20, 2021
This is supported by other research given in greater detail e.g. Masks, false safety and real dangers, Part 1: Friable mask particulate and lung vulnerability Boris Borovoy, Colleen Huber, Q Makeeta, see also Part 2.
However even as I write someone has been on the radio advocating extensive use of masks, aligned with a narrative unsupported by wider research. It reminded me of a very minor controversy in my own profession, physiotherapy, in the 1980’s. Some physiotherapists in my specialism were determined that only the contract-relax form of relaxation should be used as other forms of relaxation had not been proved by research and therefore contract-relax must be the best. However the actual history of this was that the first relaxation researched by psychologists was contract-relax. After this any psychologist wanting to do research involving relaxation could save a lot of time and effort by using contract-relax. Thus through repetition the false impression was given regarding the superior efficacy of contract-relax.
This was like the creation of a reality by the Bellman in ‘The Hunting of the Snark’; the idea that if a figure of authority repeats something often enough with conviction it becomes true! Interestingly the efficacy of masks is being accepted, after the WHO changed its mind, with reference to the WHO as an ultimate authority. I can remember British psychiatrists rejecting direction from the WHO after a massive study linking neuroleptic medication to more frequent and severe relapses and poorer outcomes in schizophrenia, even though this was backed up by a retrospective study of American data. The WHO were not authoritative enough then, why now, and without really convincing, much less definitive, evidence?
Every health care profession’s history is littered with similar examples, as is all science and this is described at length by the philosopher of science, Kuhn. Also some diseases, or conditions or syndromes become iconic in some way and attract mythologies. This has been written about in regard to the social construction of illness and in relation to both tuberculosis and HIV. To imagine that this process would not be affecting any socially constructed mythologies and judgements around Covid would be naïve to the point of stupidity.
Due to the lack of clear supportive evidence for the course of action being taken by most governments, including the UK there is a legal case from Lawyers for Liberty currently at the International Criminal Court at The Hague, for the Court’s consideration (Case 143/21) taking the UK government to court for contravening the Nuremberg codes and for Crimes Against Humanity. Doctors for Covid Ethics have sent: OPEN LETTER AND NOTICE OF LIABILITY FROM DOCTORS AND SCIENTISTS TO THE EMA AND THE MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT REGARDING COVID-19 VACCINATION notifying them of their personal liability for any and all untoward effects of the vaccines they are mandating, or coercing people into taking.
It would seem that political games are being played with people’s health, well-being and even lives in a way that is creating aggressive ill-will and fomenting division in an already fragmented and increasingly unequal society. In this the Left are as much at fault as the Right as being without thought for the damage that might result from these attempts to wrong foot the current Tory government for political gain and via appealing to prejudice. Appealing to an ill-informed populism making use of only a small segment of the available wider research and via misrepresentation of the overall available data.
Poor research, often merely indicating ‘associations’ or being based on corrupted data or indicating fairly low level probabilities is being misrepresented as definitive and absolute via an ‘either – or’ binary mind-set and being increasingly used in an authoritarian, rather than authoritative, way.
The ‘Left’, the more supposedly liberal and ‘green’ parties are being drawn into adopting a more dictatorial and authoritarian position, ultimately dependent on a narrative increasingly demanding a ‘nurturing parent’ role from an apparently incompetent and self-centred government. The Left are doing this merely in pursuit of a lead in the polls and is beginning to look more illiberal and condescending.
Fear is being used as a means of manufacturing consent: N.B. the book ‘A State of Fear’ by Laura Dodsworth, whilst people too worried by the lack of a true scientific consensus are increasingly taking the tack of wanting answers, like a child, rather than evidence upon which to make an adult choice.
Worse some people appear to be stating, more or less, that they do not care about the facts a person brings to the argument, they would rather cling to their opinion, a rather adolescent perspective at best. In actuality their opinion seems to boil down to, ‘You should do what you are told to do, be unthinkingly compliant and do what the majority are doing.’
This is a grim reminder of Emily Dickinson’s poem:
‘Much madness is divin’st sense,
To a discerning eye,
Much sense the stark’st madness.
‘Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevail.
Assent and you are sane,
Demur you’re straightway dangerous
And handl’d with a chain.
That there are obvious dangers in such a conformist state of mind should go without saying.
However, there is already a backlash on the libertarian Conservative right and should the Omicron variant, and any subsequent variants, prove relatively benign as they become endemic and should the evidence referred to in this document become better known the public will lose their fear, return to ‘adult’ mode and, with the aid of the billionaire owned mainstream media, the curtailing of freedom via lockdowns and mandating behaviours and potentially dangerous vaccines will be characterised as a fundamentally left of centre/socialist madness that temporarily afflicted an otherwise far right, pro-consumerism, low tax, small-state and austerity inclined libertarian Tory party.
This narrative is already being rehearsed by Tory back-benchers who are beginning to seize upon the research I have referred to in this document. This is obviously a clear danger to any left wing party and especially the Scottish Greens and a SNP in pursuit of decisive support in an independence referendum with the aim of creating a Scotland with a ‘greener’, fairer and more egalitarian economy.
Those members of the public currently keenest to browbeat or bully fellow citizens into compliance will never own their culpability but will blame the politicians they usually do not support for somehow being responsible for misleading the public via a policy of misinformation, manipulation and control. This will serve to reduce public trust in politicians and in science, further prioritising opinion over facts.
Politicians of all stripes are currently manufacturing divisive intolerance via misinformation in the guise of safeguarding ‘the public’, with the ‘side effect’ of social control in the present. This is a very old tactic that usually proves effective in the short term, look how well it worked for Hitler, and disastrous in the long term. Whoever gets the blame it is least likely to be those supported by the mainstream media. In Scotland it will be the SNP and then the Greens who, it has to be said, have shown authoritarian impulses, who are lining themselves up to take the blame.
A plague on all their houses.
APPENDIX 1:
SHORT SUMMARY OF DATA WITH TWO QUESTIONS.
(N.B. This represents only a fraction of the available data.)
ONS data suggests death rate per 100,000 in 2020 are on the high end of average for the last decade, lower than most previous years when the demographic was younger. I.E. 2020 was not particularly exceptional. See: Comparing age adjusted all-cause mortality rates in England between vaccinated and unvaccinated Norman Fenton and Martin Neil. Survival rates estimated as over 99% decreasing to around 96% for over 80’s. ‘Case’ criteria is altered from someone requiring medical treatment to anyone with any trace of the virus creating an artificially inflated perception of the Covid threat. (See main paper above.)
Evidence emerges that Pfizer has falsified research results and science and doctors who question the rapid roll out of experimental treatments are suppressed in the interests of the pharmaceutical corporations who have a track record for just this. 1)BMJ Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports. 2) BMJ Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science. When good science is suppressed by the medical-political complex, people die. Kamran Abbas. 3) The Safety of COVID-19 Vaccinations—We Should Rethink the Policy Harald Walach 1, 2, 3,*, Rainer J. Klement 4 and Wouter Aukema. Paper forcibly retracted against the authors’ wishes. This censorious behaviour is normal for pharmaceutical corporations: see ‘Bad Pharma’ by Doctor Ben Goldacre and ‘Let Them Eat Prozac’ by Professor David Healy.
Pfizer data forced by legal action to be released by the FDA reveals over 1,200 killed by mRNA treatment in first 90 days and further ‘serious adverse events’. (See immediately below.)
BNT162b2 5.3.6 Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports CONFIDENTIAL Page 7 Table 1 below presents the main characteristics of the overall cases. Table 1. General Overview: Selected Characteristics of All Cases Received During the Reporting Interval Characteristics Relevant cases (N=42086) Gender: Female 29914 Male 9182 No Data 2990 Age range (years): 0.01 -107 years Mean = 50.9 years n = 34952 ≤ 17 18-30 31-50 51-64 65-74 ≥ 75 Unknown 175a 4953 13886 7884 3098 5214 6876 Case outcome: Recovered/Recovering 19582 Recovered with sequelae 520 Not recovered at the time of report 11361 Fatal 1223 Unknown 9400 a.
Evidence for protective measures being effective is too poor to be conclusive. BMJ ‘Investing in public health is our best route to sustainable healthcare.’ Fiona Godlee.
Real efficacy of ‘vaccines’ is not proven, BMJ ‘Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us. The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are.’ Peter Doshi reports.
RCT funded by pharmaceutical corporations endorsing boosters actually reveals high levels of ‘adverse events’ but concludes the risk levels are acceptable, to whom? ‘Safety and immunogenicity of seven COVID-19 vaccines as a third dose (booster) following two doses of ChAdOx1 nCov-19 or BNT162b2 in the UK (COV-BOOST): a blinded, multicentre, randomised, controlled, phase 2 trial’. Reinforced by Israeli trial: ‘Myocarditis after BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine against Covid-19 in Israel.’
Please note: 1) Letter of liability regarding vaccines sent: OPEN LETTER AND NOTICE OF LIABILITY FROM DOCTORS AND SCIENTISTS TO THE EMA AND THE MEMBERS OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT REGARDING COVID-19 VACCINATION. 2) International Criminal Court is notified of illegality of governmental actions: ‘Tuesday the 17th of August 2021 Additional claim made to the International Criminal Court On the 20th of April this year we the undersigned, issued a 27-page ‘Request for Investigation’ (Request), to the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague, alleging that certain members of the UK government and its advisors, were complicit in genocide, crimes against humanity and breaches of the Nuremberg Code. On the 28th of April 2021 we received a formal acknowledgement from the ICC and were assigned a case number (143/21). 3)’ ‘FIFTY YEARS LATER: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NUREMBERG CODE’ EVELYNE SHUSTER, PH.D. New England Journal of Medicine.
mRNA experimental treatment a particular risk to boys: SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccination-Associated Myocarditis in Children Ages 12-17: A Stratified National Database Analysis.
Sweden has less deaths per 100,000 than the UK without lockdowns and significant harm to the economy and despite over-recording of Covid deaths. Sweden does less well than Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark. They have the most effective model.
FDA resignations demonstrate disquiet about the vaccines and are after evidence of an FDA ‘cover up’. ‘The Meaning of the FDA Resignations’ BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER SEPTEMBER 14, 2021
Unvaccinated are no threat: ‘COVID-19: stigmatising the unvaccinated is not justified’ Günter Kampf guenter.kampf@uni-greifswald.de
Evidence that vaccinated are less at risk is questioned: FDA REPORTS ALL CAUSE MORTALITY HIGHER IN VACCINATED THAN UNVACCINATED ETC. 1) Natural infection vs vaccination: Which gives more protection? Nearly 40% of new COVID patients were vaccinated – compared to just 1% who had been infected previously. David Rosenberg , Jul 13 , 2021 9:24 AM FDA report finds all-cause mortality higher among vaccinated 2) FDA report shows Pfizer’s clinical trials found 24% higher all-cause mortality rate among the vaccinated compared to placebo group. Rosenberg. 3) Thousands of Medical Professionals Declare COVID Policies “Crimes Against Humanity” Sep 28, 2021 WASHINGTON, D.C. — As of 7 p.m. ET on Monday, September 27, 2021, more than 5,200 doctors and scientists have signed the “The Physicians Declaration,” condemning policymakers for authoritarian approaches of forcing a “one-size-fits-all” COVID treatment strategy which is resulting in “needless illness and death.”
Questions in the light of the above.
If my son develops a ‘serious adverse event’ from the mRNA treatment he feels constrained, by both the threat of the vaccine passport and peer pressure, to take, who will be held legally liable?
Why is the Scottish government apparently prepared to violate the Nuremberg Code and UK employment law, especially as this apparently may imply a significant risk to public finances?
The scientific evidence remains conflicting, sometimes apparently a victim of self-interested ‘confirmation bias’, nonetheless the principle of informed consent and that experimental treatments should not be imposed by any means of coercive persuasion remains paramount. There is no good scientific evidence to support the unethical mandating of any medical intervention, much less what are actually, in law, experimental treatments. There are also significant political risks to the SNP, in particular, in pursuing such a policy. See the main document.
I wish you well.
Mick Skelly. MSc. MCSP.
Last year, well before Christmas, I sent this short summary with a longer E-mail, containing the same two questions, to the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.
In one sentence: the history of cultural appropriation is the history of the human race.
Cultural appropriation is one of the founding impulses for international trade. Cultural appropriation is one of the main engines of progress. Cultural appropriation is a potential gateway for future inter-cultural understanding and trans-cultural cooperation. I.E. cultural appropriation can contain the seeds of cultural appreciation.
Cultural appropriation has always been an element of every culture, probably even before the dawn of civilisation. The human ‘monkey-mind’ is a creative thief and always has been. The ‘monkey mind’ copies and pastes from what it sees and from what it otherwise experiences. The ‘inappropriate’ use of individual elements of this rag-bag has always been a fundamental element of creativity from art to fashion to ‘self-expression’. For good, and sometimes for ill, this has always been the way. Perhaps especially so now as this is a main element of post-modernism, where every culture across all time is open to being referenced in allusion to our shared humanity.
Being overly disturbed about this entirely natural human process is about something else. It is about power, about the assertion, if not aggression, of people who feel disempowered, disregarded or discriminated against in some way. The concept of cultural appropriation is a weapon in the struggle that has become a bandwagon, a cause and an end in itself.
However it becomes more complex in discriminating cultural appropriation from cultural appreciation, with religion, as ever, throwing a spoke into everything. Furthermore in discriminating cultural appropriation from cultural denigration or disrespect.
Apparently intention is everything, although there is usually a moral judgement implied. I.E.:
Cultural appreciation = adopting ideas, activities and material objects from a culture that can be defined as not your own as part of studying that culture from a perspective of respect and attempting understanding. This may incidentally involve some form of personal advantage (such as ‘spiritual development’ or being able to fight) and/or making money out of it; e.g. a Caucasian teaching an oriental Martial Art such as T’ai Chi Ch’uan, and/or supplying Eastern Martial Arts equipment.
Cultural appropriation = adopting ideas, activities and material objects from a culture that can be defined as not your own purely for personal advantage especially for profit without any other involvement in, and with complete ignorance of or disregard for, the xeno-culture from which the appropriation is being made.
Cultural denigration/disrespect = adopting ideas, activities and material objects from another culture with the intention of attacking that culture or more correctly the people most strongly associated with that culture largely via the realisation of derogatory cultural or racial stereotypes.
For a casual observer it may be difficult to clearly differentiate between the three. For someone determined to be offended, and unable to fully know, or not bothering to find out, the intentions of the other person, the default judgement is likely to assume cultural appropriation and/or cultural disrespect. The offended person gets to indulge in that pleasant sense of ‘righteous anger’, and who doesn’t love that?
Should white men sing the blues? To paraphrase the ‘Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’. Not an altogether ridiculous question as apparently it has been suggested that white people listening to ‘rap’ or ‘hip-hop’ are guilty of cultural appropriation and should not listen to black music. Why stop there? From the 1930’s at least western popular music has largely been based on music first created by Afro-Americans, who also borrowed from European folk/traditional styles of music, to create blues, jazz, big band, Lindy-Hop (ironic, Lindbergh being a fascist), rock-n-roll and on to the present day. Should white people be entirely excluded from listening to such music or only those who fail to pass the cultural appreciation exam? Should black people, or those from other ethnicities, be excluded from listening to the canon of European/Western classical music? Will they have to pass a classical music appreciation exam?
From the age of fifteen I have been either bad or inadequate at a wide range of fundamentally oriental Martial Arts; Karate, Tai Chi, Kick-boxing, Kung Fu, Aikido, and, now, Ju Jitsu. Except for the odd visiting instructor all my instructors have been very white and fairly local.
Is this cultural appreciation or cultural appropriation? Bearing in mind that some of my fellow students just wanted to be able to beat people up in emulation of Bruce Lee etc. A few were even quite racist and these individuals, in general, were under the impression that ‘foreigners’ of all stripes were somehow inferior, except for their martial arts skills, if they had them. If a person is fundamentally a xenophobe should they be banned from taking up an Eastern martial art, even if taught by a fellow Caucasian? If so, how could this be enforced in an objective way?
In a quid pro quo should non-Caucasians be banned from pursuing Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA)? Apparently there are some HEMA clubs in China, should they be disbanded on principle? Speaking of China apparently at one point Western style ‘movement to music’ was more popular as exercise for the elderly than Tai Chi, (go Rosemary Conley!) indeed this may still be the case, is this cultural appropriation?
Should non-Caucasian business people be banned from wearing Western business clothing? Or is this somehow acceptable without them demonstrating an understanding of the development of Western business clothing, especially the ‘business suit’ from 1850 to the present?
Let’s take the turban, or not. Turbans have been worn from southern Spain (Andalus) to China (who could forget the revolt of the ‘Yellow Turbans’?) probably since the Bronze Age in some places. Indeed Captain Nolan suggested them for the British Cavalry in the nineteenth century after his experience in India. The turban has a religious relevance for Sikhs who seem to have appropriated it in a particular way. This may apply especially to a singular style of wearing the turban, as videos on Youtube seem to attest. Similarly Shastar Vidiya has combined a wide range of fighting techniques, stretching back possibly to the Bronze Age regarding some of the sword and buckler techniques, to form a coherent whole. Most of these techniques pre-existing the Sikh religion. Is it a form of cultural appropriation to claim this system exclusively for Sikhs?
One way or another I would suggest that we have a lot to learn from the Sikhs and from their religion, which seems so open-handed, generous and compassionate. Indeed also filled with humour, like every Sikh I have personally come across. Should we risk any potential for such learning in favour of manufacturing spurious ‘culture wars’ even where engendered by the casual and often unconscious xenophobia of a majority population who themselves feel oppressed? Yes they need pulling up on any racism, and on any misogyny for that matter but surely not battered into a reflexive defensiveness that prevents progress and change.
All cultures are inventions, often rooted in mythologies of the past and usually more recently created, or re-created, than people like to think. N.B. ‘The Invention of Scotland’ by Murray Pittock, ‘Scotland’s Future History’ by Stuart McHardy, ‘Scott-land The Man Who Invented A Nation’ by Stuart Kelly, ‘The King’s Jaunt’ by John Prebble and ‘The Invention of Scotland, Myth and Reality’ by Hugh Trevor-Roper, etc.
Most of the invention, or re-invention, started in the nineteenth century and seems to be progressing into the realms of cultural exceptionalism and forms of excuses for exclusivity that gloss over embryonic racism in the conflation of cultural identity and ethnicity. In the brilliant but flawed ‘Celtic Identity and the British Image’ by Murray Pittock he notes ‘the racist tendencies always implicit in any dominantly ethnic account of cultural identity’. Also that; ‘This obsession with ancestry as the mark of authenticity is the dark side of ethnic tourism:’ Fundamentally it is an individualistic existential search for a sense of special superiority in terms of ‘Social Darwinism’, ultimately in terms of a supposed race.
With few exceptions most cultures are created via a process of cultural appropriation over time, from food ‘culture’ to clothing to ideas and values.
This is especially the case in terms of the current Western civilisation that has begged, borrowed or stolen from other cultures, often by an ongoing fashion for the exotic that has existed over millennia, whilst, at the same time, exporting its own culture via trade, travel and conquest.
In a ‘globalised’ rather than a localised or tribal world this must increasingly be the case. If only because the alternative extreme would be human silos rooted in the lies of racism. As if we do not all need to work closely together in the face of the existential threat of the ongoing environmental crisis. A world where increasing inequality remains the greatest social threat. Indeed ‘culture wars’ simply serve to divert attention and energy from tackling these real problems and we must ask whose interests does this really serve?
Where does all this leave the individual who aspires to be a culturally promiscuous xenophile?
Currently my wardrobe largely consists of references to British/European and Eastern cultures, including a black turban along the lines of the one worn by that well known Berber, Sean Connery, in ‘The Wind and the Lion’. I wear this with some black Indian pyjamas, black Russian army jackboots, a robe made from a largely black blanket my wife found in a charity shop, a Middle-East style dagger that actually stylistically dates back to Roman times, and a Persian style scimitar. Great if absurd fun and why not?
I have kimonos and hakama etc. plus some Chinese and Korean style clothing. When our house is completed our bedroom will have a Sino-Japanese theme. The HEMA group I work with is based around the Linn nan Creach and the local battle of Leckmelm (1586) and I will be making myself some plaid clothing of a 16th Century cut to go with the period and the swords. And why not?
I would also argue, with reference to ‘Celtic from the West. Vol. 1. Chapter Two: The Celts from everywhere and nowhere A re-evaluation of the origins of the Celts and the emergence of Celtic cultures’ by Raimund Karl, I have as much right to take on the mantle of ‘the Celtic’ as anyone in Britain. I know that some people would be much affronted by this assertion as for them it is about difference and being special. In reality they are being distinctive in a way that relates to ethnicity and race, exactly as described by Murray Pittock. Thus there are people of my acquaintance who would argue that any claim to ‘Celticity’, despite my having a fair claim to a genetic link via the paternal line and ancestors amongst the Erse, would be cultural appropriation.
Perhaps at this point in human history people need to get a grip, to treat one another with respect, to search hard for what links us rather than what separates us, but to stop fighting over the arrangement of the deckchairs on the Titanic and start saving the bloody ship! I am opposed to homogeneity but in favour of inclusivity. Perhaps we should lighten up and stop sweating the relatively small stuff, for humanities sake.
You cannot miss our post box, it references Ashur and thus ancient Assyria and also has Chinese ideograms painted on it. At the moment I am mainly wearing oriental style clothing round the croft, so I’ll be the old bloke in that stuff possibly practicing with a jian, or dao or tachi. Unless some other whim takes me.
Where I am on the continuum from cultural appreciation to cultural denigration/disrespect (or eccentricity to a boringly comfortable ‘normality’) will be in the eye of the beholder, no doubt. But perhaps have a drink and a chat with me first, you’ll always be welcome, before acting on prejudice and jumping to conclusions. Surely it is best to look to cut people some slack, to assume the best and seek common ground and understanding, to act with compassion rather than to look for a fight.
It’s May 5th and you have to wonder if the world has gone mad, that it is snowing outside and that April has managed to be both largely cold and unusually dry is just a tiny part of it.
In Brexit Britain we have a proven liar as PM (sacked twice for the offense) who is asking for sympathy, and charity, because he cannot possibly manage on £150,000 per annum (a mere £95,000 after tax but then he has around £25,000 per annum from book royalties plus usually receiving around £28,000 of gifts, including that £15,000 trip to Mustique courtesy of the guy who owns the Carphone Warehouse – obviously no expectations there then – and he gets a free flat with £30,000 towards decorating it plus the use of grace and favour country house at our expense). But with all this the poor man just cannot manage.
Recently, obviously to his great surprise, Sunak discovered that his multi-millionaire wife’s building firm could also magic up things the government needed and that she had added ‘Medical’ to the name of her company so that Hancock surely just had to buy from her, and his mate down the pub, instead of the NHS’ usual suppliers. Plus the non-existent Dyson ventilators when a British based company that makes ventilators, with ventilators available for supply could not get a reply from the Department of Health because they were too busy dealing with the ‘VIP’ (I.E. Tory donors, family and friends) supply channel.
To be fair I was thinking of ‘phoning young Matt and saying that if he put a few billion my way I get could get an order for PPE from the China based Ali BaBa and let the NHS have them for only ten times the amount I paid as I really need to build a home never mind decorate it.
The ghouls crying out for Sturgeon to resign because she was suspected of breaking the ministerial code have been strangely quiet all along regarding Patel who was proven to have broken the ministerial code.
However the Patel issue did provide the opportunity to further cow an overstretched and stressed Civil Service already being reduced to apparatchiks ticking boxes in line with the ‘regulations’ and on their way to becoming, ‘mindless myrmidons’. It might be possible to do a great deal of the work civil servants do via AI and algorithms but machines would probably be more difficult to corrupt via fear, bullying or favours, e.g. private sector work or honours etc.
As for Johnson’s lies just read Oborne’s book ‘The Assault on Truth’. So an entirely self-serving lying liar and his cabinet of the entitled but talentless (I know that is not entirely fair as they all have a great talent for enriching themselves and avoiding responsibility, and being ‘economical with the truth’) are running the country apparently to the delight of those without any critical faculties or moral compass. The obvious misbehaviour being excused by the cynical and untrue litany of ‘they’re all the same’ in regard to politicians of all stripes.
Unfortunately Oborne is slightly compromised by his cleverly worded assertion: ‘Like a majority of the British people I voted for Brexit’. In the Brexit referendum approximately 70% of the people entitled to vote actually voted. Of these a majority of voters, in the main English people not all of whom were resident in England at the time, voted for Brexit. This was 36% of the total British electorate but the people with most investment in the future, teenagers between fifteen and eighteen, were not allowed any say in their future whilst those Brexit was least likely to affect were the most likely to vote. By using ‘a majority’ instead of ‘the majority’ Oborne manages to misrepresent actuality without actually lying. A neat piece of reality construction. Arguably Johnson’s incompetently told bald lies are less subtle and possibly less likely to mislead all except the most prejudiced and wilfully stupid.
The little cabal of the entitled obviously hold the public in contempt telling lie after lie. Bercow’s interview on LBC, available on Youtube, provides some illustrations for those who cannot be bothered to make the effort to read Oborne’s otherwise brilliant little book.
Then there is the big fat lie that Britain is a meritocracy where people really do get what they deserve. Of course Prince Charles is likely to become King because he has studied and worked so hard to learn the relevant knowledge and skills, working his way up from the bottom, and his Kingship will have nothing at all to do with who his parents were! We are about an age so in meritocratic Britain if I had only worked hard enough at the right things I could have been King. (See ‘Snakes and Ladders, The Great British Social Mobility Myth’.)
Of course the entitled and completely shameless Old Etonians (see the book ‘One of Them’ written by the Old Etonian Musa Okwonga) who are the establishment and who benefit most from the system and run the country along with their greedy mates push the lie very strongly.
Their wealth, privilege and their connections, plus a healthy if sick sociopathy, have nothing to do with their success. It is all because of their great talent, an inherent talent that usually precludes them actually working hard for anything. They are there ‘because they’re worth it’, as if! It is partly down also to a tacit acceptance of a brainless concept of Darwinism related to ‘breeding’ in the context of the pathetically deferent British class system.
This is an interesting concept since on William and Harry’s mother’s side of the family they are descended from two prostitutes, sorry ‘courtesans’, who each had a kid by Charles II. (So, a bit of consanguinity thrown into the mix.) All the same how does this imply ‘superior blood’? Noting that with all her advantages poor Princess Diana could apparently only manage a few GCSEs, bless her.
Thus it is that the average to intellectually sub-average are ‘crammed’ for and supported through exams and ‘connected’ to the ‘well-connected’ in private schools and come out with not only a sense of shameless entitlement but also with a misplaced sense of confidence that borders on, or frankly is, arrogance and a pecuniary attitude to life that seems to regard compassion and altruism as a form of character flaw. The moral rightness of self-interest being a concept central to the neo-liberal inequality promoting agenda (explicit in ‘The Sovereign Individual’ and implicit in ‘Britannia Unchained’).
Yet the great British public seemed determinedly happy to be ruled by Forrest Gump’s totally incompetent evil twin and his equally narcissistic and morally challenged cronies!
It cannot be for reasons of patriotism because these people avoid paying taxes where they can, stash money amongst the money launderers in offshore accounts and move as much of their businesses abroad as they can, Dyson and Rees-Mogg spring to mind, (and what about Landrover?), and prefer to employ almost anyone rather than British people as the latter might have some kind of protection against ruthless employers. Although ‘fire and re-hire’ and exploiting ‘zero hours’ contracts is all the rage and how dare Amazon employees ever need the toilet or garment makers expect to get the legal minimum wage?
A real patriot cares for their country and all the people in it and seeks to serve the country and make it a fairer and overall better place for every citizen to live within.
Sorry, apparently a real patriot stands in front of one or more big flags, hates anyone not quite like them, wants to say exactly what they want but block anyone criticising the status quo – the latter in the name of ‘free speech’! They also see nothing wrong at all in lying to and ripping off their fellow citizens.
Johnson is also indecisive and incompetent, see the book ‘Failure of State’ for details of just how incompetent he and his government have actually been in managing Covid. For example spending £37 billion (the equivalent of 12 new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers) on a test and trace system that is far less effective than the German test and trace system that came in at around one and a half billion pounds, noting that Germany has a bigger population! According to the public accounts committee ‘Harding’s folly’ has been a complete waste of money, your money.
Both Leicester and Newham local authorities with the NHS have created much more effective local test and trace systems that are cheaper than and, as effective as the German system. No wealthy people or overpaid ‘consultants’ have made a load of money from Leicester and Newham like they have from the government’s test and trace system. As for the vaccine roll out the Tory government were rescued by the NHS, a socialist project created by a Labour government, which the Tories have tried to run down and have underfunded for over a decade. Indeed from when Thatcher became Prime Minister if not before. Yet Johnson tries to claim credit for other people’s hard work, something that has nothing to do with him! Worse, people apparently believe this gross misrepresentation!
Now this is where I own up to some wrong-thinking. This is about being British.
Admittedly Murray Pittock is all over the place about the Celts who are strangely considered as the original Britons without actually leaving any distinctive genetic marker. Indeed there are no distinctive ‘Celtic’ traits from a genetic perspective: e.g. there are more people with the gene for red hair in Yorkshire than in the whole of Ireland, with a Germano-Scandinavian link presumably. Both Welsh (Brythonic) and Gaelic (Goidelic) seem to stem from the Spanish ‘Tartessian’ language according to Koch and were probably an Atlantic zone ‘trade language’ in the early Bronze Age before splitting to become Welsh/Brythonic and Gaelic/Goidelic. They were called ‘Celtic’ in the early 18th Century by a Welsh man who had a political agenda and who thought that the better alternative ‘Gallic’ sounded too French. (Those ‘Frogs’ were supporting the ‘Pretender’ after all.)
I consider that where Murray Pittock is closer to being 100% correct is in his characterisation of what is actually meant by the term ‘British’.
When I was a lad (I know, ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’) ‘English’ and ‘British’ were synonyms with ‘English’ being associated with the ‘received pronunciation’ epitomised by the BBC announcers of the time. The Scots, Welsh and Irish were kind of exotic, cut me a break it was 1950’s/60’s Barnsley, but attitudes were best summed up by Flanders and Swann’s sung lampoon of English exceptionalism, ‘The English are best’, and by George Mikes book, ‘How To Be Inimitable’.
As Murray Pittock notes in this context being ‘British’ was really some fantasy of a middle aged, public school educated, decent ‘Tom Brown’ type of chap who lived in the ‘Home Counties’ and reflected all that person’s assumptions and prejudices but, at least, was possessed of ‘British Values’.
I remember, on a beach in Spain in the 1970’s, a rather posh sounding southern English man explaining to a Spaniard about the realities of Yorkshiremen not, it transpired, that the English bloke had ever been to Yorkshire. Apparently all Yorkshiremen lived down to the stereotype. They did all wear flat caps, race pigeons and/or whippets, they had a definite tendency for mindless violence (which is why he wouldn’t go to Yorkshire on principle) they were rather lazy, rather stupid and most of them sponged off nationalised industries, especially mining. Mining, it seemed, was now completely safe, at least as safe as working in an office (pneumoconiosis being some sort of mass hysteria apparently) and it was mainly done by machines with the miners having little to do but drink out of their pint enamelled tin tea mugs, thus the miners were definitely overpaid. They were also politically suspect as they were virtually all as bad as Communists. In Franco’s Spain this was damning stuff indeed.
As such, people from Yorkshire did not really meet the criteria for being truly British as they were not quite English enough and had a funny accent. In that man’s world I think that people living beyond Yorkshire hardly met his criteria for being truly human.
I have heard similar, if more coded and less extreme, self-serving fantasies, usually related to class and education, from some supposedly well-educated but snobbish people even in fairly recent years. Or otherwise expressed in action, by commission or omission, even by some status-conscious ‘caring professionals’, rather than merely being articulated in words.
As for the much vaunted ‘British Values’ what exactly are they? We might refer back to fiction, ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’, perhaps some of Kipling, possibly H. Rider Haggard and even some of Bulwer Lytton. The writers of a kind of aspirational heroic fiction and ‘ripping yarns’.
As an aspiration then ‘British Values’ begin with:
Honesty, especially Veracity and telling truth to power,
Courtesy along with Chivalry, extended to enemies as well as friends and especially women – see the film ‘The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’. Being a ‘gentleman’ or a woman of high moral fortitude.
Stoicism and calmness, being phlegmatic especially in a crisis.
Fairness with a very strong sense of justice.
Loyalty, not least to ‘British Values, to one’s country, both land and people and to one’s family and friends. This includes being absolutely trustworthy and ‘above board’ in all your dealings with other people.
A casual, if deep-seated, contempt for the avaricious, the greedy and anyone primarily focused on making money.
Being self-deprecating and modest, never being boastful.
A sense of ‘fair play’ and ‘playing with a straight bat’, never ever even approximating cheating. Gallant sportsmanship being more important than winning at any costs, that kind of ruthlessly caddish behaviour was for lesser peoples such as Americans, Australians and other foreigners.
A strong sense of duty to the collective and putting the collective before oneself, ‘I may be some time’, ‘women and children first’ etc. To the point of self-immolation. Especially ‘noblesse oblige’, that sense of duty to those in any way weaker or less fortunate than oneself. This includes the duty to be compassionate even at one’s own expense. A lovely nostalgic and light-hearted, if touching example of this is given in the film ‘Genevieve’ when the key protagonists get trapped in conversation with an elderly man at traffic lights.
Respecting others in thought, language and action.
‘Sprezzatura’, being the excellent amateur and ‘all-rounder’. The amateur who gets professional when they need to.
Neither being a bully nor tolerating bullies or bullying.
Being quietly and casually/light-heartedly courageous, exemplifying courage by one’s actions, a ‘British Value’ lampooned in the ‘Flashman’ series of books. (‘Flashman’ being a kind of English ‘Justine’ (de Sade) and a model for Johnson, but with more of a heart than the latter.)
A commitment to doing ‘the right thing’ and taking the moral high ground in all circumstances.
Taking full responsibility for oneself and the consequences of one’s actions. N.B. Conrad’s story ‘Lord Jim’.
Taking pride in living up to ‘British Values’, whatever the cost, as the very essence of being British.
All the above may be a total fantasy in reality but the above indicates the romantic aspiration implicit in ‘British Values’. Obviously anyone who has even briefly looked at Victorian and Edwardian society and any honest history of the British Empire will recognise this as complete tosh. Britain or the UK was never really a shining beacon to the world but, at least the aspirational, and almost never realised, ‘British Values’ were a wonderful fantasy that attempted to combine the best of Christian and Classical thought, possibly with a minor influence from the further reaches of the Empire via the ‘Orientalists’.
But seeing these ‘British Values’ written makes you think and immediately begs the question, are Johnson and his crew of chancers, all like Del Boy without a heart, really British?
Obviously their behaviour, as exemplified by their leader, demonstrates almost the exact opposite of ‘British Values’.
This begs the next question, can the Tory party membership that voted for a man like Johnson and have lauded his cabinet, (or have pretended that they were somehow beyond criticism, almost as a patriotic duty) truly be British as they too have lost sight of ‘British Values’?
It would appear that, as a general rule and with a few honourable exceptions, the Tory party from top to bottom have nothing but a pragmatic and avaricious contempt for ‘British Values’, sacrificing any pretension to such values on the altar of short-term self-interest and opportunism. This includes a total readiness to lie and cheat and to embrace the worst prejudices of populism, inclusive of xenophobia and racism, in a race for the moral low ground, anything to win.
This surely says something about the people who vote for them and the people who are disgusted by and vote against them.
The fact that the mainstream media is run by billionaires with the agenda of making the world ever better for billionaires and stuff the rest of us (once again see ‘The Sovereign Individual’ and also ‘Heroic Failure’, ‘Stolen’ and ‘The Establishment and How They Get Away With It’) and thus assuming that most of the people are blinded by clever propaganda, bless them, is both condescending and wearing a bit thin.
There is obviously a significant element of British society with contempt for the truth, and with distrust and dislike for deeply educated and dedicated, hardworking professionals. People who think that the way they feel is more important than facts. People with enough self-contempt to keep electing an elite of public-school educated though, taken all round, sub-standard human beings who quite obviously have nothing but contempt for their social and material/financial ‘inferiors’. I do not think that this is merely masochism or being lost amongst myths and lies regarding ‘Empire’. Although this may play a part, see the book ‘Rule Britannia’ by Dorling and Tomlinson.
Perhaps when the mythical ‘man in the street’ sees the likes of Johnson and Co, in power the casual arrogant selfishness and stupidity, the incompetence and sociopathic cunning they demonstrate gives the average person a sense of moral equivalence if not superiority.
‘They have had that expensive education and all the advantages of being a scion of the rich but look what idiots they are, and how lacking a moral compass. No matter how awful and unpleasant, how selfish and callous I am I will not be worse than them. They provide a kind of excuse for my worst side and my failings. They do not merit their positions, they were just lucky in the lottery of life, so maybe I will win the lottery, hopefully the Euromillions, after all.’
Since a narrow majority, at least of people prepared to vote and, implicitly of the people who cannot be bothered to vote, obviously perceive ‘British Values’ as totally irrelevant to modern life, to being ‘British’ even, then the honest thing to do would be to never mention ‘British Values’ again. Especially when using the concept of ‘British Values’ to verbally beat up anyone perceived as ‘other’. But perhaps it is already too late to expect honesty.
I suspect that those least likely to even attempt to live up to ‘British Values’ are the ones most likely to talk about them. Indeed it is obvious that the right wing of the Tory party, in particular, see espousing and attempting to live by ‘British Values’, especially compassion, as character flaws that might prevent you, as an individual without real social responsibilities, maximising your wealth, status and power.
As a person born and bred in Yorkshire, Scando-Irish in my origins (my mother’s ‘maiden name’ has a Norse root and my father’s has an Irish root) and as I am now living in the Highlands of Scotland I feel completely alienated from the Tory Home Counties idea of what it is to be British (but living without any practical reference to ‘British Values’ of course).
Fortunately I have a clear alternative. The original name of the mainland of these isles was Pretan. The Roman’s misspelled it hence Britain. Of course the slavish, the cowardly and the natural serfs amongst the tribes went along with the wealthy and powerful as they always do to this day. Thus Pretan became Britain. Therefore, with reference to one half of my roots at least, I can claim to being, ‘Pretanni’ (I ditched ‘Pretish’ from the start.)
Obviously in a purely tribal Pretan the name meant little at the time, people recognised themselves as their tribe and there were no nations, nothing beyond the wider kindred of the extended tribe. (Noting that nations were fictions created to justify centralising power in the hands of land-grabbing kings and their wars.) Just as obviously this tribal-mindedness lasted the longest, for whatever reasons, amongst the ‘Erse’, who included the Highland Clans. This was finally crystallised in Scotland by the romantic fiction of Scott, the fraud that was the poetry of Ossian and the further fantastical activities of the Allen brothers, the English con-men who posed as the Sobieski-Stuarts and created the first book of supposedly ‘traditional’ clan tartans for a Victorian audience long after the success of ‘The Kings Jaunt’ (Prebble). This tribalism may, in general, have usually included a strong sense of ‘place’, at least amongst ordinary Highland clan members. (See the book ‘Scottland’ also Pittock’s ‘The Invention of Scotland’.)
With reference to ‘Celtic from the West’ (Volume One) I have as much right to claim a ‘Celtic identity’ as anyone else in Pretan. As a Scottish citizen I doubly have no loyalty to a UK that is disloyal to its own values, with a ruling elite indifferent to those poorer and/or less privileged than themselves, ruthless shysters with a sense of entitlement and a misplaced notion of their own value, abilities and importance. A UK that increasingly disdains education and facts, that has no regard for truth or justice and that puts prejudice and, increasingly, jingoistic English nationalism above all else.
I realise that in general terms nationalism and a ‘my country right or wrong’/’our nation is superior’ or represents a ‘superior breed’ is intrinsically ridiculous, narrow minded if not fundamentally racist. Indeed it is destructive for one human race on one planet where we are facing the existential threat of an ever-increasing multi-faceted environmental crisis. Climate change being just one element of this environmental crisis. Individual nations looking for some form of advantage, claiming some form of exceptionalism and focusing on economic competition with socio-economic policies long past their ‘sell-by’ date will merely ensure that the human race is likely to be flushed down the toilet of evolution.
Having said that, increasing sustainable regionalisation in a context of re-distributive international cooperation could be a key component of the remedy to the environmental crisis and the increasing inequality and other ills resulting from the current neo-liberal socio-economic orthodoxy. This is not merely the old cry of ‘power to the people’ rather it is a concept of the ‘responsibility of the people’ wherein there are no rights without obligations, without responsibilities. Basically an intention to create greater self-sufficiency in localised terms with ‘the nation’ being just one element in an interlinked, if not interdependent, tiered structure of functional syndicates. In business the analogue is ‘lean thinking’ structures. Basically ‘lean thinking’ is ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ as a structured system of cooperation to meet needs that are beyond the resources and abilities of any one individual.
The aim being to provide a just society and a just socio-economic system with rewards corresponding with the value of the individual to society overall. This would mean that ‘essential workers’ would no longer be usually amongst the worst paid. A society where people are respected and rewarded for their contribution to the commonwealth rather than for their sociopathic ability to extract money from others without any consideration for the ultimate outcomes and without taking responsibility for those outcomes.
Everyone behaving responsibly in the context of a just society, would that really be so bad?
The idea of Scottish independence must be considered in this light, in terms of localised sovereignty and responsibility. If such arguments were at all valid in regard to Brexit, where the UK remained a sovereign nation within the EU in actuality, then they are even more valid for Scotland. A Scotland completely curtailed and with comparably very limited sovereignty. A Scotland ultimately ruled by an explicitly English nationalist right wing Tory party in the context of a ‘first past the post’ system where every vote does not count, a voting system that undermines true democracy at anything other than a committee level.
The support of the Union is based, at a fundamental level, on the myth that Scotland is an inferior and dependent colony of England. Underpinned by attitudes not so far from those expressed by that southern English bloke on that beach at Tarragona in regard to Yorkshiremen nearly fifty years ago. At best it harks back to ‘Burt’s Letters’ in the early 18th Century where the Highlanders are perceived as impoverished, if proud, beggars in need of aid and helpful instruction from a far richer and superior culture. Scotland as the Englishman’s burden.
Surely Scotland can do much better than that?
An independent Scotland with its own currency and national Central Bank that was a member of the EFTA, and the Customs Union would have more cards in its hand in relation to the shrunken UK than the current ‘third country’ UK has in relation to the EU. Admittedly that would not be too difficult.
Scotland has 85% of the UK’s fresh water, the majority of the UK’s overall fishing grounds, will soon be producing sustainable energy in excess of current needs, plus other natural resources with the potential, via additional ‘agri-environmental’ focused land reform, to become self-sufficient regarding basic food production in terms of a healthy diet. Also, it has the UK over a barrel regarding Trident, as long as the realists keep their eyes on the prize and do not allow the purists to have their way too soon.
Just as the UK seems to be determined to be the money-laundering capital and dodgy money centre of the world, making extensive use of ‘protectorates’ etc. a hard border ‘twixt Scotland and England may make smuggling a great career option for Borderers. This should please the Rees-Moggs and their ilk as it would be taking us back to the sixteenth century if we add in a bit of reiving!
Further de-regulation and the proposed erosion of many standards (‘Britannia Unchained’) with trade deals dictated to the UK by India and the US (for example), paralleling the one the UK has recently made with Japan giving away advantages to Japan, will be finalised over the next decade. These will be largely disadvantageous overall for the UK, especially for lower paid UK workers, and will not compensate for not being in the EFTA and CU.
Brexit is, apparently, set to bite deepest in about five years and in the meantime there is a bonfire of Small to Medium Enterprises that have dealt with the rest of Europe prior to Brexit getting done. To be fair Brexit is apparently making multinational corporations and very big business even more profitable and is set to make the rich even richer whilst increasing inequalities. As foretold in William Rees-Mogg’s ‘The Sovereign Individual’, amongst other books, see ‘Heroic Failure’.
An independent Scotland as a member of the EFTA and the CU will be a magnet to small scale entrepreneurs who want to trade with Europe, the kind of capitalists beloved of Adam Smith. Remember he disliked and prescribed high levels of regulation and taxation for ‘rentier capitalists’. The best Adam Smith read, as seems to be the consensus, is Jesse Norman’s excellent ‘Adam Smith, What He Said and Why It Matters’.
Small to Medium Enterprises contribute most to the communities in which they are based and help to create a dynamic and creative local economy. Furthermore developing infrastructure, from the large scale such as extending the Scottish rail network, to the electronic via an improved and faster broadband network has the potential to bring young families into the Highlands, returning the school rolls to something closer to their nineteenth century levels and preserving, enhancing and developing currently dying communities.
The potential is there for creating a Highlands for people to live in rather than for a mix of the wonderfully community minded, the misanthropic who moved to the Highlands for the increasing emptiness and to get away from people, and the tourists or those holiday home owners with no commitment to, or real concern for, the communities their houses are in. To note that this is not all tourists or holiday home owners but the Covid pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of a Highland economy largely dependent on state subsidised agriculture, tourism and the gradually disappearing ‘baby-boomer’ ‘grey pound’.
Of course it means that a visit to relatives south of a hard border with England/rump UK may mean checks for contraband, such as breathable air, but surely it will be worth the price?
In real terms a vote for the Tories is a vote to reject ‘British Values’ in pursuit of more of the same only worse. A vote to preserve the Union is surely along the same lines, as well as preserving the English indifference to, and casual denigration of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The rubbish and, all too literally shit thrown out by, mainly English, camper vans as they travelled the Highlands last summer is surely indicative of real underpinning attitudes. It is not revealing of even bad intent but rather more subtle assumptions regarding the worth of the local people and their environment.
Obviously there would be ‘teething problems’ caused by Scottish Independence, but the Scottish government has learnt lessons from both Brexit and Covid and will not be repeating the mistakes made by the hard line English nationalist and right wing Tory government and would make good use of any transition period to fully prepare.
It may be unfair to call the current government English nationalists as, in reality they have no regard for even the English nation as represented by the real interests of the majority of the people living within its borders.
Obviously if you want to be a disregarded serf in an increasingly feudal economy, if you actually believe that some people are born to be your superiors and that you should know your place. If you believe that ‘success’ in life and as a human being is having more than the rest of your family, than your friends and neighbours then voting Tory is for you.
If you actually think that the economy is more real and more important than the natural environment and if you are status conscious then voting Tory is for you.
If you are in truth opposed to acting on the hopeful pretensions of ‘British Values’ because they are romantic, unrealistic and not pragmatic then voting Tory is for you.
If you don’t give a damn for the long term future and think that nothing matters after you are dead, including the environment for your children and grandchildren, so long as your financial situation is ok while you are alive, then voting Tory is for you.
The great irony for me is that the SNP Manifesto has greater aspirations in terms of supposed ‘British Values’ than anything the Tories have done since the 1960’s!
Makes you think.
Vote for Forest Gump’s evil twin or wee Krankie? One is in a permanently dangerous state and the other is a stateswoman.
No contest really.
(Editor’s note: all linked book titles are purely for educational purposes, buying them through the links supports independent book shops and we receive no financial gain from promoting them)
6th May
The rain is lashing down upon the yurt. I have just been to vote and, with reference to Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’ exercised the force I can exert as a citizen in a democracy. It feels good to have done so, it is a responsibility and an obligation and surely an essential part of the social contract. My great grandfather’s generation fought for universal suffrage, my grandfather’s generation fought class prejudice and the attempts of employers to prevent working men and women from becoming engaged in politics. These recent struggles and the vulnerability of our democracy seems forgotten on a rising tide of consumerism, magical thinking and prejudice, sadly across the political spectrum but especially the right.
In terms of geologic time and evolution all the above is less than a storm in a teacup. The rain, I have to say, is better than snow at this time of the year, noting that snow has been forecast for the Highlands today. I am glad for the rain. A few days ago I planted fifteen downy birch and fifteen blackthorn. The rain will both water them and feed the water turbine providing us with electricity so that I can write this.
Overall and over the last five years we have planted over one thousand and three hundred trees and bushes across our wee croft inbye land. Seventy to eighty per cent of these have survived. Added to this about three hundred rowan and goat willow have simply sprung from the ground. Some of the plants, the few aspen, the blackthorn and the alder, will sucker and ‘spread like weeds’ once they are well-established.
We have also planted some herbs and some other edible plants, like the rhubarb, but mainly fruit trees, currently only apple has survived, and bushes such as blueberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants, redcurrants and more. Many of the ‘arboreal infrastructure’, like the rowan, the blackthorn and the juniper also produce useful fruit. Once the house is built we will plant more apples and fruiting cherry. Eventually our whole croft will largely disappear into the tree-scape, especially our wood-clad, turf-roofed house. We will become woodlanders, aging amongst new growth and natural glory.
After planting I walked up and around our inbye land, savouring the views. Eventually I sat upon the section of a tree trunk, amongst a future circle of mighty oaks, beneath a future great ash tree and besides the small god of things. Alex made a wee joke offering of a hand-made bead necklace to the ‘god’ the other day and later the same day found that she had had a small windfall!
The small god of things – our protector and provider it seems
Wyrd bith ful araed, as we say. I sat there in woolly Viking style britches I made myself from an old blanket some years before, wearing layers of similarly themed clothing, albeit with modern working boots, and with Star the dog cuddled up to me, looking down on the future, seeing the trees grown in my mind’s eye with words curling like smoke about my brain.
The digger was there excavating and clearing for the foundations of the house, built and solid in that same imagined world to come.
I looked out in space and forward in time. The dog looked up at the crazy Michael Lothbrok both sitting there and wandering lost in my imagination. How good it is to have a dream and to build towards it through the storms and tempests and buoyed by all around, quite often by the kindness of strangers as a happily unexploited Blanche Dubois. One day the hawthorn, blackthorn and cherry blossoms will actually make these largely ‘white woods’, with touches of pink and red, yellow and meadow flowers amongst green richness. One day.
Eventually the words began to coalesce and I returned from my briefly sunlit uplands to the yurt, to my laptop and, for what they are worth, I let the words flow from my fingertips.
I will finish this by submitting these poor lines in the hope that you, the reader, can find something of some worth within them.
Love to you all, each and every one, including Tiny Tim.
Hello to everyone out there who is still interested in our extended adventure up here on The Loch of A Thousand Winds. We hope that you are all doing ok and surviving these insane times we’re living in. We have had it easier than most up here and are very grateful for that – despite being flung into Tier 4 from Tier 1 at a few days notice!
On the house front, it’s been a frustrating time as our building warrant wasn’t awarded until September – a full 13 months after we applied for it. However, we now have an expensive hole in the ground/quarry thanks to our good friend and digger driver, Alan, and will hopefully have a sewage treatment plant in situ and block foundations before Spring is out.
Progress on the house at last!
When digging out the back wall, part of a drainage ditch, that Mick had dug out by hand a couple of years ago, was damaged so we had a waterfall coming down onto the site for a while which was very pretty but not great in reality. When Mick managed to get up and spend the day re-digging the ditch, he had a momentary loss of balance at the top and nearly ended up at the bottom of the hole! We’ll definitely get some fencing at the top there in the very near future!
Mick has continued planting trees and bushes this year – some are cuttings of willows we planted a few years ago that have really taken off this year, others were gifted by friends. Mick completed a circle of oak seedlings with an ash at the centre and we erected ‘the small god of things’, who faces the sunrise on the winter solstice, just to the east of the ash. The community we live in has also successfully completed a community woodland project which means we now have several blocks of thousands of young trees totalling 20 hectares growing throughout the township that will provide future shelter for livestock, better quality grazing over the long term, help to prevent erosion and promote stability for the hill whilst encouraging the development of greater biodiversity in our environment.
More wonderful people have arrived to live in Badrallach, all with the same agri-environmental/green agenda which bodes well for an ever more harmonious future for the township. If there was anywhere to be this year it felt like it was here, a positive oasis of calm and hopefulness in an apparently mad world.
During lockdown, it was wonderful to have the time and space to observe the massive increase in birdlife that now visits our croft as the plantings of previous years are reaching a level of maturity that proves useful for perching and foraging. There was even at least one scurrying lizard and the troll (toad I think) that lives beneath our bridge plus frogs a-plenty and too many mice! I planted a few veggies and had grand plans to have flourishing vegetable beds come Autumn, however, I ended up spending most of lockdown developing another blog about overcoming comfort eating instead. It was information I had, that I wanted to make available to as many people as possible so took the unexpected gift of 3 months off work to do that instead. You can take a look at www.overcomingcomforteating.com if you’re interested.
After my abortive attempt at generating rush light candles as a saleable product from our croft last year, I looked again at what we have an abundance of. After planting a single mint plant a few years ago, we now have a mint forest. We also have a beautiful rose bush that flowers for about 9 months of the year with no input from us at all! After a little internet research for what to do with these ingredients, I made lots of lovely mint sauce and dried rose petal and mint tea. Both of which are delicious and a possible viable small business product for the future. I’m all in favour of working with nature and what is bountiful in your surroundings rather than trying to force a crop that really doesn’t want to be there.
When you have a mint forest, what else can you do but make mint sauce?
Mick’s lockdown projects were many and varied – he has been literally shielding and, as a result we now have a significant collection of historical shields in the barn ready for when his Historical Fencing (HEMA) group can restart. The shields are stunning to look at but I haven’t had a chance to take photos of Mick modelling them yet so here is a picture of his first project, which was to repaint our post box. It is quite something and we love it!
Our one of a kind post box flourishing with Assyrian and Chinese influences.
Joe found lockdown a generally positive experience and thoroughly enjoyed virtual schooling as it meant he could get up at 8.30 am instead of 6.15 am and still be at school on time! He turned 15 this year and his circadian rhythms appreciated the later morning start for sure. He is growing into a fine, articulate young man, with excellent wood chopping skills, who doesn’t hesitate to remind us that we uprooted him from a cosy little cottage with all mod cons in the Borders to a windy hillside in the Highlands with few facilities and that he’s now spent nearly half his life without living in a proper house! This makes it all the more important for us to make real progress on our house in 2021. Thanks to Brexit, we are looking at around a 20% increase in the cost of building materials apparently, so that’s fantastic news!
We are currently having a couple of months reprieve from our rustic accommodations and have gratefully moved into a friend’s flat until the end of February. Central heating and hot water that comes out of a tap is a real gift that you only come to appreciate when you don’t have regular access to it!
Mick in his Chinese/Japanese phase of lockdown and Joe embracing mask culture!
After 3 months without working, I was able to return in July. I have been working flat out since then and am grateful to be able to do so, even though I have to dress up like an oversized crisp packet to do it safely and make sure my insurance is valid. I am also doing more cleaning than I have ever done in my life before! Wearing full PPE allows me to continue helping my clients get better, but is taking a shocking environmental toll and it distresses me enormously to have to continue with it. I’m not going to get into what I believe are the rights and wrongs of the situation, suffice to say that, according to the research I’ve looked at, everyone living at UK latitudes should be taking Vitamin D, C and glutathione supplements so that if they get a dose of Covid19, their immune systems will be in good shape to deal with it. At the risk of being branded a tin foil hat wearing, anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, I will say this, the virus is real, we have lost a close family member to it this year, but there is a lot that we can do to protect ourselves besides being isolated from family and friends, getting a vaccine and polluting our environment with millions of tons of single-use plastic.
Full moons through the seasons
Well that’s it for this most peculiar of years dear friends, we look forward to easier times ahead and possibly a house in which to lay our heads in 2021. We hope you all managed to have a jolly Christmas and send you our heartiest best wishes for the New Year. With much love,
…when did that happen??? Is it just me or is time speeding up? Maybe it’s just my perception as the world moves so very fast these days. I caught something on the radio yesterday about how we have reached “Peak Hype” or the epitome of consumerism – apparently, the latest whatever is now only fashionable for a week or so before the next big thing hits the stores. I fear I may be joining the ranks of the crusties but I think that this is a particular cliff edge we need to be backing away from really quickly – the planet is burning due to our rape and pillage of her resources and our inability to deal with our own detritus – FFS.
We have had another interesting and challenging year here on the Loch of a Thousand Winds. Unlike previous years, our weather patterns have been characterised by lack rather than excess – it’s been exceptionally dry meaning that our water turbine has been mostly under-performing. That certainly wasn’t a possibility we’d considered here on the West Coast of Scotland when we installed it! Still, we have been buoyed up by our Solar PV array doing the business and have now had a full year of electricity. As we are not connected to the national grid, when we over produce electricity it gets dumped into the electrical heaters in our yurt which made for sweltering conditions over the summer. Eventually I twigged that we could connect fans to the system instead of the heaters – our sultry summer nights became immediately more bearable and better sleep patterns and moods were restored.
This year we have again had a steady stream of friends who have helped us out with their generosity and skills. We built a shed around the water turbine in an attempt to muffle the noise somewhat. However, because of the lay of the land around it, the shed was much bigger than required so we roofed it with polycarbonate sheeting and grew tomatoes in there too.
Turbine/Tomato Shed
Our first crop
The shelter it provides was most appreciated a few days ago when we had to flush the hydro pipes to clear out some small stones that were blocking the jets and reducing the turbines power output. Outside it was lashing down (finally!) and blowing a hooley but inside the turbine/tomato shed we were dry if not warm. We are now overproducing electricity again and the yurt is toasty warm.
We also upgraded our composting toilet shed as the winter rains here laugh at and leak straight through the woefully inadequate wall panels, so we have re-clad the whole structure with overlapping sarking and extended it across the back of the yurt to provide a bike storage area. We also strengthened its roof to accommodate two solar panels that charge a battery to power our diesel heater which provides back-up heating to the yurt. We stood back to admire our handiwork and decided it looked a little like a clinker built boat – we plan to add a ships wheel and fly a Jolly Roger for decoration. My dearest sister, who has a way with words, has named it the ‘Piratical Shitter’ – it makes me giggle every time I go to the loo now.
The Piratical Shitter under construction
With Andrew’s help, we also managed to rabbit proof the vegetable beds this year and I planted a few bits and pieces, however, due to my taking on some teaching work, I wasn’t around too much at weekends so they became overgrown with the tall grasses and reeds that flourish on this land and we didn’t have much of a harvest. My guess is that (along with my lack of attention) the nutrient levels of the peaty land are not conducive to excellent vegetable growth. We will have to experiment with soil treatments next year, I hear that rock dust is a good thing.
Our first batch of humanure will be suitably mature in another 12 months and we will be able to put that around the bases of our fruit trees to help them along. Despite the inconvenience of an outdoor toilet and hauling the poop barrels up the hill to the midden every couple of weeks, I love that our waste will be put to good use instead of flushed away.
I experimented with making beeswax candles using our rushes for wicks this year in an attempt to make use of the only plant that currently grows in abundance on the croft grown along with a non-fossil fuel. The result was quite frankly dangerous and filthy! The rushes do burn well – sometimes too well with flames of over 2 inches high but the wax drips profusely down the candles onto whatever surface is below it and the resulting mess and waxy sooty residue of the rushes just isn’t worth the effort. I have resorted to buying my wicks on the internet so will continue to make them for our own personal use but have kissed my dream of Bairstowpian Beeswax Rush Lights being our first commercial croft product goodbye. Time to go back to the drawing board.
Try to restrain your mirth
We had hoped to be well underway with digging our house foundations by this point in the year as we have been awarded a croft housing grant which will help us out with the build. However, we are still awaiting our building warrant due to a lack of urgency on the part of our Structural Engineer whose report we are still anticipating. We have our digger driver on standby but alas are tied up in the complicated web of expensive paperwork that is the reality of building a house. We are hopeful that by this time next year, we will have some thing that looks like a house here in Bairstowpia, at least from the outside.
In February, I was lucky enough to go on a work related course in Hawaii – yes it was work, honest! I had a marvellous time and saw some fabulous sights, organic farms and wondered at the abundance that a more favourable climate can bring. I also was caught in wonderment at the similarities…
Bairstowpian sunrise
Hawaiian sunset
We also managed a family holiday in London for a few days in the summer, we had a super time and walked our legs to death. It was wonderful to visit museums, exhibitions and The Globe but we were also pleased to leave all the busyness behind.
The Globe
Millenium Bridge
Mick, Joe and I continue to thrive here in Bairstowpia. Despite all the challenges, we love it. The air and the water are clean, the view is always spectacular and the community we live in is exciting and progressive. We are very lucky. The challenges of living far away from the bright lights of Ullapool remain and as Joe grows up we are very fortunate to have my folks living there so that Joe gets the best of both worlds. It is truly a gift to have them so near. We would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. With love from Alex, Mick and Joe xxx
I have not written for some time and such a lot has happened, a hip replacement for one. That was an interesting experience, rather overshadowed by Prince Philip who was having his hip replacement at about the same time and who, I feel, rather unfairly got a lot more publicity than I did – although to be fair he is a lot older and everyone in the Ullapool area seems to know about my hip replacement.
Needless to say I talked with the very nice anaesthetist all the way through the operation and was only momentarily mildly worried when the read out on the monitor that I thought was my heart rate flat-lined and no-one seemed to notice I was dead. The ward staff, OT’s, physios and Doctors etc. were all brilliant, especially the night nurses who did one monitoring check as a musical! The next morning I thought that it was an opiate-stoked hallucination until one of the other patients confirmed it! As bad experiences go it was really on the top end. Having lots of physical hobbies and a wife who is a physio plus a croft to work on has been really helpful, to say the least.
I got rather put out regarding the social construction of ethnicity in relation to the myth of a Celtic Britain last year. This brought out the pedant in me, always relatively easy, as in terms of the archaeology and biology Celtic Britain has about as much validity as ‘British values’ does in relation to actual British behaviour over our history. Having read Murray Pittock, a wonderful writer with a brilliant use of language and an apparent contempt for anyone who isn’t Murray Pittock or a clone, I now feel I could make a pretty convincing case for Klingon ethnicity for people who speak Klingon and have the inclination to wield a ‘Baatlek’, or whatever it is that Worf uses, feel part of a persecuted minority and vote Klingon Nationalist. (Apparently there is, or used to be, an American University course in ‘conversational Klingon’, presumably with a ‘Professor of Klingon Studies’!)
Certainly that the tribal peoples who lived in the Pretanic isles from the arrival of the Beaker People through the Bronze Age and Iron Age to the arrival of Scando-Anglo-Saxon peoples would not have thought of themselves as Celts seems to be the consensus so why should we?
This is something I will return to.
My personal felt ethnicity is usually ‘working class’, although because of my last job – listed as a profession – and some of my pretensions, there may be a queue to call me middle class or even an intellectual snob. Over Christmas I read, ‘Don’t Let My Past Be Your Future’, and absolutely heart-rending and uplifting book written by a man born in Barnsley and brought up during the post WW1 depression and that previous era of ‘austerity’, I agreed with the conclusions that he drew from his experience at a visceral level, not just intellectually. Generally I feel I have more in common and am more comfortable with people who are working class or from a working class background and who come from anywhere than I do with people born in Barnsley but who consider themselves as intrinsically a class above working folk.
I say ‘usually working class’ in the paragraph above because I am infected with a post-modern perspective in relation to ethnicity, something that really attracts Murray Pittock’s disgust.
I am NFE, suffering from ‘No Fixed Ethnicity’ from a felt perspective. I partly blame this on Netflix, (by the way Netflix where has ‘The Magnificent Century’ disappeared off to? Bring it back!). When I was watching ‘Ertugrul’, with occasional dips into ‘The Magnificent Century’, I felt Turkish – well up to the end of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent at least, although you have to feel conflicted by the siege of Malta and the Battle of Lepanto. Hence the shamshir and some of my clothing including a kind of Kayi hat I made out of the remnants of an old sheepskin jacket.
Fortunately I discovered that Barnsley, where most of my family still reside, has three Turkish restaurants, three! The food is great at all three. Last summer I was sitting in the sun at one of these restaurant. The waiter was friendly, solicitous and looked very Turkish and every so often someone would turn up and there was a ‘Salaam al malaikum’, (I may have the spelling wrong), with an answering ‘Malaikum salaam’ and it seemed like I was in that place we call ‘abroad’. The illusion was shattered when an obviously Barnsley born and bred woman walked past and the waiter, with a big smile, said ‘Ayup love, ars tha’ bin?’
Barnsley even has two Latin American restaurants. Alex and I went to one over Christmas, on a Saturday night when they have live music. The woman singing had a wonderfully smoky voice. I said that she reminded me of Astrud Gilberto at which point she gave me a hug and went on to sing ‘the girl from Ipanema’ for us and Alex and I got up and danced round the restaurant, doing a variation of a Cha Cha Cha in slow motion as it were. So if you see something on you-tube with this middle-aged geezer in a tuxedo and young woman in a lovely dress dancing in a restaurant to ‘the girl from Ipanema’ it’s probably us.
Of course ‘Quin Empire’ and ‘War of Kings’ makes me feel rather Chinese however at the moment the wonderful looking ‘pro-blades’ Chinese swords and pudao are not full tang – can you believe it? I know! Nonetheless my combined Christmas present was a jian and the brilliant Iain of Glasgow’s Armour Class Swords is fitting a full tang blade as I write.
Of course in relation to fencing I am trying to locate in the Highlands during the Linn nan Creach, mainly the 16th Century as the local ‘Battle of Leckmelm’ was in 1586. Clothes wise this means leinne and brat and early ‘brogues’. (Arguably the most long-lastingly fashionable of shoes, in Western Europe at least, as the design was more or less the same from the BA to the 18th Century.) Optionally plus hosen-like trews, cut on the bias and shrunk to fit. Add sword, targe and long hafted axe, with some optional armour and there we are. To note that if you have the kit, i.e. some of the material cultural signifiers, and if you speak Gaelic or had ancestors who did then apparently you are Celtic, ethnically speaking according to some. As a Skelly of fairly recent Irish descent I find I meet the criteria. I think that this might upset Murray!
Also Arturo Perez Reverté via ‘Capitan Alatriste’ is giving me a definite Spanish inclination. Any holidays abroad will now have to be to warm Spanish speaking countries. In effect this means the cheapest holiday we can find in Spain! I have become a fan of Lope de Vega and have reading glasses and facial hair that attempt to make me look like Don Francisco de Quevado, I sometimes even limp a bit like him. In terms of the fencing this is obviously pushing me toward ‘Spanish Circle’. This all stems from an interest in naval history and a mild obsession with the Spanish Armada of 1588. Much misrepresented by English writers I find, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto provides a more realistic, balanced and less mythic history than most.
The real excitement just before Christmas was due to Matt Knight, another really sound person and happens to be the curator of the Bronze Age at the National Museum of Scotland, who arranged for Reuben, who is part of the fencing group I facilitate in Ullapool, and I to handle one of the Yetholm shields! Around three thousand years old, weighing only 1.27 kilos and elegantly designed to be functional in highly dynamic combat. It is an incredibly sophisticated piece of combat equipment contemporary with the Type IV rapier and the partisan-like Yetholm spear. I have a proposal to research a standardised methodology for combat archaeology which I hope to get off the ground with replica Yetholm type shields, (around £3,000 a pop), that could be used by the museum for travelling/outreach display and educational purposes after the research since the originals could not be risked. I reckon that the total cost of the research would be around £20,000, just a rough idea – so if you know anyone with that amount of money just hanging about please put them in touch!
Thanks again to Matt Knight for a brilliant experience, it was truly thrilling.
I am in the process of reading ‘The Lies We Were Told’. There may be good reasons for ‘Austerity’, for Scottish independence and for ‘Brexit’ but none of them are economic or for the financial benefit of the many. All of them would be or have been disastrous and ‘Austerity’ has slowed economic growth. The worst, most cynical and cruel of the three, to date, is ‘Austerity’. Even before it was introduced it was widely known that it would have terrible economic effects on the poorest and financially least resilient with knock-on effects on health, wellbeing, morbidity and mortality rates, inclusive of suicide, and especially having a negative effect on Mental Health. Worse still ‘Austerity’ has been accompanied by tax cuts to the rich and a totally unjustifiable flow of wealth to the already obscenely wealthy.
See also the book ‘Breadline Britain’ and to connect these fully to health outcomes look at ‘The Spirit Level’ by Wilkinson and Pickett – which also references ‘The Black Report’ and ‘The Health Divide’, published together, in the book ‘Inequalities in Health’ around 1983! I.E. successive governments have known since the 1980’s exactly how their economic policies would impact on the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society but carried on anyway for ideological reasons. I think it was the Rowntree Foundation that estimated that from 1983 to 1997 this resulted in at least 6,000 excess deaths per year! The last two Tory governments have happily presided over increasing wealth differentials, dragging their heels over real tax and social reform, in the full knowledge of the damage this would do!
Surely this is the triumph of ideology over compassion and if anything is evil it is this. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would conclude that the Tory party, and some other politicians, have major shares in drug companies – especially in anti-depressants (see ‘The Emperor’s New Drugs’).
Postcard of the month:
Anyway don’t believe me read the books and form your own opinions. The consensus seems to be that we are being royally screwed by ‘globalisation’, the over-mighty and totally self-interested people who run the multi-national corporations and the media that these people control. Add in short-sighted nationalism, with ‘ethnicity’ as proto-racism, and the accompanying culture of ‘I’m a victim’ and ‘blame the other’, and we have a ‘perfect storm’, where the economy is conceived of as being analogous to the weather and totally beyond human control.
“Damn them all, damn them all to hell.” To quote Charlton Heston, more on the nose in Sci Fi than in real life.
John Major was also on the nose this last week on the Today Programme. Look it up on BBC Sounds to get what he actually said, I will try to give you the gist. He spoke to the interviewer something like this: ‘Let’s face it. If there is a ‘no deal Brexit’ people like you and I will be alright. The top ten to five per cent will be alright, it will not really affect us and we will not particularly notice as we will be able to absorb the higher costs. But anyone on the average wage, even slightly above, will really suffer in every way. And their communities will suffer and become worse places to live.’
I think that I may have put some words into his mouth so ‘sorry Mr. Major’. I thought at the time, he really gets it, he may not have joined up all the dots as some others have done and connected it all to a form of ‘toxic capitalism’ that is a combination of mere gambling and ‘rentee capitalism’ that would surely have offended Adam Smith, who seems to have prioritised a moral and more compassionate agenda.
Some ‘well-heeled’ upper middle class woman on BH on Sunday was totally relaxed regarding a no deal Brexit. So what if the pound lost value, it was over-valued anyway, so what if prices went up in shops and we had inflation. Obviously if we had inflation then we would make borrowing more expensive etc. Presumably making poor people even poorer and even less able to afford luxuries like food, housing, heating and water etc. Such people are obviously entirely off her radar or on it but not worth considering because they are poor and by definition ‘unsuccessful’, lacking in ‘aspiration’ and inferior types who it might be better to get rid of really. This was a gobsmacking lack of empathy and understanding regarding anyone outside of her comfortable ‘bubble’.
What can we say of such people? All too common in our careless society.
Fortunately Alex, Joe and I are totally on the fringes of all that and generally see the best in people, in both little and big ways, with small and reflexive acts of thoughtfulness and kindness. It is not all perfect here in paradise, where are the Turkish and Latin American restaurants then? Generally, in terms of the people we know and who we bump into, as well as those we see regularly, the people around us make you feel glad to be human.
Now you might accuse me of a degree of hypocrisy with my obvious penchant for escapism (though only jailors would be opposed to escape) and my self-indulgence spending money on my hobbies, rather than lots of holidays and disposable fashion or necessities like most, I am certainly no better than anyone else and given enough money would I be any less self-indulgent, I rather doubt it as in some areas I can resist anything but temptation. So should I be spending all my disposable income on charity? Probably but I am just not good enough.
Although I am living in a glorified tent and we have only recently ‘got’ electricity via our water-turbine and PV array and am currently freezing to death in the yurt as our main heater, which got damaged in transit from China – Ali thought it was coming from Liverpool, easy to confuse the two as it turns out, is not working, I remain convinced that I, that we, are much better off than most. The very nice lady from Ebay is helping to sort it all out re: the heater with great advice and practical help.
The electrical system dumps electricity into our electrical yurt heaters but two days after the water turbine started working the rain more or less stopped! Sod’s law strikes again!
Last week I planted the best part of two hundred trees. In seven weeks I will plant willow and alder and possibly more blackthorn. In the early spring some juniper and blueberry bushes and later in the spring more fruiting trees and bushes as we continue to create the arboreal/horticultural infrastructure for our ‘forest garden’ ‘woodland croft’. At my age I will never live to see it get anywhere near its productive peak, neither will Alex I suspect but it will be our legacy. A sustainable climate-Change proof area of working land that will form the basis of a wonderful croft life for people in the future. People who, like us, will have the joyful responsibility for restoring and maintaining this land and on into the far future.
I will never live to see it yet I already do in my mind’s eye. The larch clad round house with a roof of wildflowers, the trees great and small, sheltering the fecund fruiting bushes around them with all the plants slowly improving the soil in quality and improving structure and the diversity and complexity of the overall ecology. With various fowl, Indian Runner ‘cross’ ducks and re-created Victorian Standard Indian Gamecock, foraging amongst the plants and leaf litter.
(Magic! It has just started raining and the rain seems to be getting heavier!)
Last night, beneath an electrum moon, I stood in the cold at the yurt platform railing, looking out over Sail Mhor, An T-Eallach and the mountains beyond, all snow-capped across the glittering loch. So bright was the moon that it was hard to look full upon and it was not night but a strange form of day, outside of time and place as if illuminating some ancient fantasy or other world. Standing within that darkly glowing landscape it seemed almost possible to believe in anything, elven folk and gods, heroes, ‘wyse women’ and my personal wyrd, even in British Celts!
We hope you’ve all had a very Merry Christmas and enjoyed some time relaxing with those you care about. We certainly have and are feeling the benefit.
It’s been an eventful year here in Badrallach and we have made significant progress.
Mick had his hip replacement finally in April (the week before we were due to move out of the cottage we had rented for the winter so that Mick would have a warm, easy place to recuperate in!) We were thankfully able to spend a few weeks at my mum and dad’s new house in Ullapool until Mick was 6 weeks post op and able to drive again. He is recovering well and is back teaching Historical Fencing and doing Jujitsu although he frequently pushes himself too hard and makes himself sore – but that’s nothing new….
We moved back into Badrallach in May and spent the glorious summer building and (rebuilding) various structures that now house our variety of off-grid electricity supply equipment. We hauled 100’s of metres of water pipe up the hill (thanks to Reuben for being amazing 🙂 ) to supply our water turbine, rebuilt the electricity shed roof that blew off over the winter as we didn’t have time to put a door on the shed before we left – we came back to visit after the snow and ice had cleared to find the entire roof on the hillside behind the shed! Another case of us underestimating the power of the wind up here – not a mistake we’ll make again.
Cunning use of guttering to divert water out of the pool so that we could build a dam.
Joe and Star help with securing the water pipe.
Reuben was fantastic help in getting the pipe up the hill.
Visiting Auntie May in San Diego. We miss her terribly xx
The finished electricity shed (complete with door!)
The porch to weather-proof the barn door.
Solar panel array all secured to the hillside.
We managed to get away for some Autumn sunshine in Ibiza.
Electricity arrives in Bairstowpia.
Destitution Road records their first CD!
Glorious Bairstowpian sunrise.
My mum and I went out to San Diego to visit Auntie May in August as she was unwell, we spent a wonderful week reminiscing, making blinis and drinking more tea than is good for you. She passed away a few weeks ago and we will miss her lovely presence in our lives.
Destitution Road – the folk band that I am a part of have recorded and produced their first CD this year. We are frequently asked by audience members for one and now we can provide it. All profits will be donated to Connecting Carers. Many thanks to Erik and Jen Knussen for all their help and time in making it a reality.
Mick, Joe and I were able to get away for a week in October and soak up some sunshine in Ibiza before coming back to the croft for the final push to get the electricity installed.
Our off-grid electricity supply was finally completed and switched on in December, we now have a fridge, a freezer and electric lighting. It’s amazing what you can do without when you have to but by golly having these little luxuries in our lives again is phenomenal. The electric heating in the yurt can only operate on the dump load so only works when we are producing excess electricity. On these shortest of days around the winter solstice we pray for rain – oh how your perspective changes when your heating depends on it!
I do apologise for the sparse reports this year, it’s been a long haul and I have been developing several online businesses as well as running my private practice. Spare time has been virtually non-existent. Here’s hoping that I am able to make more time in 2019 but seeing as we are finally hoping to get started on the house, I suspect not.
We wish you all the best in 2019 and hope that at least some of you will be able to come and visit.
2017 saw the completion of the barn, the rebuilding of the superyurt, more tree planting and the near completion of the shed that will house our electricity supply when it arrives in March. All of this cost us a fortune and the quotes for getting our detailed plans and building warrant totally floored us – we won’t see any change out of £5000 just for a few bits of paper! I have had to take on more work to try and build up our pot of money to afford the aforementioned bits of paper and Mick’s hip has deteriorated to the point where he was questioning his ability to take part in the build at all. On top of everything else, Mick lost his mum in January and his Dad in November. It’s been a dark time and we have spent many long nights considering our position and whether to jack it all in and move to Ullapool. We have been generally uncommunicative with a lot of people as we were fed up moaning about stuff and for those of you who are interested in our progress I apologise for the lack of updates here. Thankfully, we have some fantastically supportive friends who have seen us through with their technical know how, kind words, generous deeds and the occasional bottle of whiskey – you know who you are and we are very grateful to have you in our lives. On balance, we have decided to carry on with our project and make some thing beautiful and productive in Badrallach.
We are currently spending a cosy winter in a little rented cottage in Leckmelm as the prospect of another winter with no electricity was a bridge too far – what we save in diesel is pretty much paying for the rent 🙂 We will return to Badrallach in April with renewed vigour and are hoping that Mick will have begun his transformation into the Bionic Man and be sporting a shiny new hip by then – we’re still waiting for a date but it can’t be long now.
Which brings us to now, the beginning of 2018, our plan for this year is to get those bits of paper, install some electricity and rabbit proof our planting beds so that we actually produce some edible goodies this year, we also plan to plant significant wind breaks and stands of bamboo to provide us with plant supports as well as being beautiful when the breeze blows through them. We have a preference for black bamboo (Phyllostachys Nigra) like we planted in Ednam but it has been very hard to get hold of so far.
Phyllostachys Nigra
Electricity shed
Superyurt
Our goals for next year are fairly modest but given that Mick will be recuperating and I’ll be working more, we think they’re realistic.
So to all our friends, near and far, we send you lots of love and hope that you have a wonderful 2018.
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