Monthly Archives: July 2021

Long Live the Great Victory of Complacency!!

If all your friends and all my friends, most of the media and sober-minded people everywhere are to be believed, the COVID-19 crisis is an unfortunate natural bump in the road which looks likely to sort itself out fairly soon, giving us plenty of breathing space to sort out the longer-term bijou problemette that the world is dying from industrialisation and overpopulation. All will be well just so long as we decarbonise by 2030.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

Background anti-knowledge

Regular readers will know how interested I’ve become over the years in the way that our society gets to adopt general assumptions that are plain wrong, and how these are inculcated by propaganda of one sort or another.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 9 Comments

School statistics lessons

During the Black Death [t]he people of the Mediaeval Ages were uneducated about diseases and cleanliness. Many thought it was caught through the air, so they would burn incense like juniper and rosemary to try to prevent infected air. People would dunk their handkerchiefs in aromatic oils to cover their nose and mouth from the air. But now there is Test and Trace.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

Vaccine Passports -Incompetence, Groupthink, Psyops or Conspiracy?

At the level of public discussion, the question of vaccine passports for internal use has been a roller-coaster of rumours and about-turns, not only in the UK but across the world. Their necessity was trumpeted almost as early as the first COVID cases, and their similarity to (and potential evolution into) Internal Passports in the Soviet tradition was soon noted by opponents.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

The scale of the PCR problem

I, and others, have long been pointing out that, quite apart from the intrinsic specificity (false positive) rate of the PCR tests it has been very difficult to get hold of details on how many amplification cycles are being used in real life. The original British standard was 45 cycles (to be “on the safe side” over the WHO’s recommended 40 back last year).

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

An appeal to Better Builders everywhere

We still hear optimistic souls saying that, out of the wreckage of the totally unexpected (but extensively patented) COVID, a brighter future will emerge. And some of them, and most of the politicians, are still using the slogan “Build Back Better,” the notable recent example being Boris Johnson’s gobbledegook statement at the G7, where (perhaps rightly) most of the attention was focused instead on how he thought the improved society could be more feminine and more gender-neutral at the same time.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

OK, where’s my Aston?

On March 18th 2020, shortly before the first world-orchestrated lockdown, I sketched out its likely effects on the blog with some fear and trepidation.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

Why test and trace cannot POSSIBLY work

OK, I refer you to another excellent post by John Dee entitled False Positive Refresher. In it he talks about the PCR test’s sensitivity (which is the nominal percentage of true cases it spots). A sensitivity of 80% means that if you test 100 sick people, it will miss 20 of them. More importantly, in this context, is the specificity (which is the nominal percentage of genuine negatives it spots). So a specificity of 99% means that if you do the test in 100 well people, it labels one as sick, ie as a false positive.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

Still a casedemic?

This is an update of things I wrote last summer to remind folks of how a high rate of false positive COVID tests falsifies all the statistics, and not just the case numbers. It’s relevant because SAGE and others are making dire forecasts about the dire effects of repealing our now sketchily-observed restrictions.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

Hows about that there, then?

SIR NHS ABUSE SCANDAL DEEPENS Daily Mail, September 13, 2022 The scandal surrounding the discredited celebrity health provider, Sir NHS G.C., deepened today when another 50,000 whistle blowers made allegations of abuse and neglect. These included claims from patients that he failed to give treatment, and reports of bullying and censorship from former staff-members.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 5 Comments