The Covid Moron Home Testing Kit

People who oppose, or even worry about, the 'vaccines' developed to combat Covid-19 are all lumped together in their critics' minds as 'anti-vaxxers'. This show a deplorable lack of discrimination and also calls for some objective means of verification. 

We are glad to report that there is now a quick and easy self-test for Covid stupidity, and better still there is no need to stuff anything up yourself, unless that is your thing and if so there are already plenty of suitable materials in your house.

Simply respond Yes or No to each of the following statements and then score yourself according to the guidance given below.

1. The 'vaccines' are 100% safe. Nobody has been injured or killed as a result of one or more jabs. Any rumours to the contrary have probably been spread by the Russians.

2. The 'vaccines' are suitable for everyone, in every condition - young or old, pregnant or not, sick or well, fighting fit or immunocompromised by e.g. cancer drugs.

3. The 'vaccines' are 100% effective. Nobody who has been jabbed has been hospitalised or died as a result of catching Covid after immunisation.

4. The 'vaccines' not only protect you from catching Covid, they prevent you from passing it on to anyone else.

5. Unlike antibiotics, the indiscriminate and widespread use of the 'vaccines' will not, by eliminating competition, foster the development of new, medication-resistant strains of the disease.

6. The 'vaccines' will have no effect on genital organs or the pre- and post-birth development of unborn children.

7. The 'vaccines' will not reduce the effectiveness of your immune system, against Covid or any other infection, either temporarily or permanently.

8. The most rigorous longitudinal investigation into Covid will never show any positive correlation between immunisation and elevated likelihood of later serious illnesses or sudden deaths.

Scoring:

'Yes' to all: you are a sensible citizen. The world has always needed trusting people like you, often as infantry.

'No' to one or more, but not all, questions: you are a Common Moron. We can tell when your kind has learned to use a knife and fork from the scratch marks on your face.

'No' to all questions: you are that rare and beautiful thing, the Perfect Moron. Every government department and company board needs one of you, so they can consult you on all matters, listen attentively and do the exact opposite of what you recommend.

__________________

Test packs will be available to the general public as soon as supply line issues have been resolved.

Global rule: Fremen vs the Emperor

Independent thinker Robin Hanson has posted a an interesting - and concerning - piece on the tendency to autocratic global power: 'The Coming World Ruling Class'.

I comment there:

I fear you are correct about the tendency, and you are obviously right that entrenched power, bullying and corruption are a feature of smaller scale rule, right down to personal relations.

I have long thought that the EU is an empire and has co-opted our watchdogs the news media, who serve the elite and have started to intermarry with them. And of course there are the global treaties and organisations - WTO and all the rest.

Magna Carta, the English Civil War and the 'Glorious Revolution' gave us a political structure that built-in distrust of and opposition to supreme power. Our nationalism, and the recovery of a degree of sovereignty (in the face of the global network), is a campfire glowing in the dark.

Sadly our MPs, especially the Opposition, don't seem to understand their historic role - look at how the Coronavirus Act was refreshed without even a vote. They do not realise that they are a safety valve - as Peter Hitchens notes today:

'Unless at some point the real concerns of normal people find a peaceful, rational and responsible political outlet in countries such as ours, there will be serious trouble thanks to this chasm between what is promised and what actually happens.

'The ugly rise of Donald Trump in the USA is a rather mild and restrained warning of what lies ahead.'

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2021/11/peter-hitchens-border-chief-had-one-job-and-he-didnt-believe-in-it.html

It's all getting very Star Wars, isn't it!

Is it merely a coincidence that a remake of 'Dune' has just come out?

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Cecil Collins, by JD

The Vision of the Fool

The visionary work of Cecil Collins

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-vision-of-the-fool/author/cecil-collins/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Collins_(artist)

https://theawakenedeye.com/artisans/cecil-collins/

Art exists to destroy the world and to create a kingdom which is eternal.

Superstition in Religion is the literal acceptance of mythology and allegory and not realising that it is the significance of a myth that is its reality.

Superstition in Science is thinking that facts are reality.

Superstition in Art is believing that Art is the literal copying and imitating of nature.

The cinema and the camera have killed only that which is inessential in the art of painting.And have therefore done it a great service. For it has helped to restore the art of painting to its rightful funcion. A function altogether profounder than that of the cinema; (for it is no accident that the cinema is the most popular form of visual experience in the degenerate mechanisation of modern society, it is its rightful form of visual communication.)

There is very little on the web about Collins but I did find an excellent essay by the late Peter Fuller in an online magazine called Artinfluence.com which, sadly, no longer exists but I copied its final paragraph which sums up the importance of Art in our lives:

'[George] Steiner argues that ‘where God’s presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable’. Even if our faith has faltered we must learn to read and to look as if… We must make ‘a wager on transcendence’ or we will find ourselves cut off from the great and consoling power of art altogether. Cecil Collins’s fools and his wounded angels affirm just such a wager. Life is love (creative imagination) and absence of love is death.'

There is also this interview of Collins by Fuller from 1987: https://www.academia.edu/35721943/Cecil_Collins_Peter_Fuller_Barbican_interview.pdf

Surviving the NHS

Yesterday I went to the funeral of a friend's father at an old country church, a lovely ceremony attended by many family and friends. He was 98 and had lived a most interesting and useful life, for example having served in the Second World War as a radar expert in the Royal Navy - limited to the rank of Able Seaman so that if captured by the enemy they would not think to sweat military technology secrets out of him.

In 2009 he suddenly fell ill and was taken to hospital. When my friend got there he found his 86-year-old father lying untreated, unhydrated and basically on the Liverpool Care Pathway - a euphemism for the decision to let the patient die of planned neglect, thirst and withheld medication.

My friend spoke to the medics and the conversation went along these lines:

Why isn't my father in surgery?

- We're afraid he might die on the operating table.

What will happen if you don't operate?

- He'll die.

Get him into theatre now, or there will be consequences.

Two hours later, father was opened up; it turned out to be a burst ulcer, which was successfully treated.

He had another twelve years of fully alert life and the loving attention of his family.

And if my friend hadn't fought...

FRIDAY MUSIC: Placido Domingo, by JD

Well known in the world of opera, Placido Domingo became a household name after his appearance as one of The Three Tenors at the FIFA World Cup in 1990. A recording of their concert in Rome on 7th July 1990, the evening before the World Cup Final, sold ten million copies! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carreras_Domingo_Pavarotti_in_Concert

Luciano Pavarotti died on 6th September 2007; Pepe Carreras now devotes most of his time to the foundation which bears his name, the Fundació Internacional Josep Carreras per a la Lluita contra la Leucèmia (known in English as the José Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation) which he had established in 1988 after his own recovery from leukemia.

Placido Domingo who is now 81 years old continues to perform regularly -

"Placido Domingo returned on the stage of Wiener Staatsoper on Monday (15th November 2021) to his childhood and his artistic roots with an unprecedented Zarzuela recital at the Vienna State Opera, a stage where he has been operating for more than half a century and whose audience confirmed their absolute loyalty today with an ovation of more than ten minutes." 

(The video is not from this week's recital but is a 'medley' of previous shows at the Wiener Staatsoper.)

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 18 November 1961

Rising to  #4 this week: Jimmy Dean with 'Big Bad John':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

13 November: 'Ten days after pressure blew the cap from a natural gas well in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, the "world's biggest fire" started, sending flames 600 feet high. Firefighting expert Red Adair would extinguish the blaze on April 29, 1962, with 660 pounds of dynamite.'

The finale is here (no sound); Adair's own four-part account starts here.

14 November: 'The Shah of Iran gave Iranian Prime Minister Ali Amini the go-ahead to begin the "White Revolution", a comprehensive series of reforms aimed at improving education, combating poverty, and eliminating corruption over a period of ten years.'

16 November: 'Dr. John Lykoudis, of Missolonghi in Greece, received a patent for the antibiotic medicine he had devised to effectively treat peptic ulcer disease, thought at the time to be caused by excessive stomach acid rather than by bacteria. However, he was rebuffed by the Greek government in attempting to obtain trials and approval of the medication, which he called Elgaco, and by medical journals. In 1983, three years after Lykoudis died, Drs. Barry Marshall and Robin Warren would confirm that ulcers were indeed caused by a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, which thrived in acidic environments.'

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/helicobacter-pylori

17 November: 'The first successful launch from an underground missile silo was achieved by the United States, with a Minuteman-I missile being sent up from Cape Canaveral, Florida.'

    More on the Minuteman program here: http://npshistory.com/publications/mimi/srs.pdf

18 November:  'West German pediatrician Widukind Lenz of Hamburg appeared delivered his findings at a meeting of the German Pediatric Society, making the link between the morning sickness pill thalidomide and phocomelia, a birth defect causing missing limbs. Dr. Lenz found that in 17 out of 20 cases of defects that he had investigated in Hamburg, the mothers had used the medicine, marketed there under the name Contergan. By contrast, there had been only one case of phocomelia out of 210,000 births in Hamburg between 1930 and 1955. A reporter at the meeting broke the story the next day in the German national Sunday paper Welt am Sonntag.

(Images source)

UK chart hits, week ending 18 November 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

Covid haha - let's see if this gets through

UPDATE: Against all expectation, they did indeed publish my comment.

____________________________________________________________

Oh, how silly Covid-worriers are, according to Open Culture:

How the World’s First Anti-Vax Movement Started with the First Vaccine for Smallpox in 1796, and Spread Fears of People Getting Turned into Half-Cow Babies

I comment:

'Does this imply that there are no reasonable grounds for concern about the mRNA injections invented to combat Covid? 

'Please direct us to evidence to show that these novel treatments (a) are as safe as vaccines that have been tested and cleared for medical use in the ordinary way, and (b) that they offer effective protection against the virus to the recipient, and help prevent onward transmission to others.

'Or are we simply expected to submit to groupthink? Perhaps a test for that will be whether you allow this comment to appear.

'I write as someone who has been 'double-jabbed' and is about to get the 'booster' - as a personal calculation of the balance of risks - but feel that there are risks which have been downplayed (and benefits that have been exaggerated) under the pressure to nudge us into a rushed mass acceptance of a still-experimental intervention.

'You mention Thalidomide: coincidentally, this very week sees the 60th anniversary of West German pediatrician Widukind Lenz's public report of the association of the drug with phocomelia cases in Hamburg. In that case, the print media were quick to publish, starting with the Welt Am Sonntag.* How different from today, with widespread suppression of news and views that do not fit the official narrative.'

*https://www.welt.de/gesundheit/plus181669270/Contergan-Claus-Knapp-verhinderte-weitere-Fehlbildungen.html

Well now, let's see how open Open Culture are; or will they turn out to be more like the ignorant and arrogant Remainers in the Brexit debate?