In Memoriam

 

FRIDAY MUSIC: Fisherman's Friends, by JD

The original ‘buoy band’, bound together by lifelong friendship and shared experience. For 30 years the Fisherman’s Friends have met on the Platt on the harbour in their native Port Isaac raising money for charity, singing the traditional songs of the sea handed down to them by their forefathers.

In 2010 they signed a major record deal and their album "Port Isaac’s Fisherman’s Friends" went Gold as they became the first traditional folk act to land a UK top ten album. Since then they’ve been the subject of an ITV documentary, released the hit albums One and All (2013), Proper Job (2015) & Sole Mates (2018) and played to hundreds of thousands of fans at home and abroad.

https://thefishermansfriends.com/

Covid and flu: new vaxx kerfuffle

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There are three new vaccinations currently on the agenda. Two are out now; the other is in clinical trials, but for how long? There is a debate about how to justify short-cuts in safety testing.

The first two are fresh booster Covid jabs which the US FDA authorised for emergency use last week. Made by Moderna and Pfizer, these are ‘bivalent’, i.e. a combination of the formulations against the original Covid-19 disease, with other ones to combat a couple of the newer Omicron variants.

Part of the information to support this decision is ‘nonclinical’ since the bivalent versions have not had the customary extensive testing, although thanks to mass vaccination there is plenty of evidence about the effects of the individual elements in them.

There is a parallel with the easier approval route for annual influenza jabs, as an article in Science magazine explains:

Influenza vaccines are updated each spring to try to match the strain most likely to circulate in the fall and winter. The reformulated shots don’t have to undergo new clinical trials unless the manufacturers significantly change the way they make the vaccine. A similar approach for new COVID-19 variants makes sense, says Leif Erik Sander, an infectious disease expert at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. The changes to the mRNA are minor and providing updated vaccines as quickly as possible is “an ethical issue,” Sander says. “We need to allow people to protect themselves from a virus that we can’t fully control.”

The speeding-up may help protect the public but raises the issue of trust, as the writer goes on to say:

But there is a potential downside: Authorizing updated vaccines without clinical data could lower public acceptance. “If a variant booster is going to reduce overall uptake, that’s a potential problem” that could offset the gains in protection from the new vaccine, says Deborah Cromer, a mathematical modeler at the Kirby Institute of the University of New South Wales.

For the drug companies, Emergency Use Approval (EUA) not only gets their product earning money sooner but indemnifies them against lawsuits for damages. This is bound to raise suspicion that for Big Pharma, given carte blanche, profits could trump safety.

It must be stressed that there are definitely risks associated with vaccination against diseases. The UK introduced a compensation scheme in 1979 and the first Vaccine Damage Payments in respect of Covid-19 jabs were made in June this year.

Public confidence has also been damaged by previous over-emphatic Covid-related communications from governments, the use of social pressure to enforce mass vaccination and other strategies, and the associated campaigns of suppression of dissident voices.

There are signs that the government has rethought its position. Last December, the House of Lords voiced concerns about making vaccination mandatory for NHS staff; this April, the NHS deemed ‘non-urgent’ and merely ‘recommended’, jabs for children aged 5-11 who are not in a higher-risk category; and although twice as many people died this summer ‘with’ Covid as in the same period last year, we are no longer forced to wear masks, observe ‘social distancing’ or endure more of the lockdowns that have caused great and lasting damage to the economy and had negative side-effects on physical and mental health. Former Chancellor Rishi Sunak has recently said he never received a cost-benefit analysis of the proposed measures to tackle the pandemic; today we are paying the price.

Now about the third newbie vaccination. One jab-dissident is Dr Vernon Coleman, a retired British GP who has long been skeptical of the safety and efficacy of vaccines in general. This and his opinions on some other matters have earned him a carefully damning opening paragraph in Wikipedia (a crowd-compiled site notoriously vulnerable to misinformation and malicious use) as well as abuse, censorship by e.g. Youtube and so on.

Nevertheless, Dr Coleman has raised concerns over a new-style influenza vaccine (BPL-1357) that, it is hoped, will protect against many or all variations of the virus. Initial clinical tests were run on mice (but in the case of the Covid boosters, only 8 of them according to this anti-vaccine writer !) and ferrets, and the formulation is now undergoing a Phase 1 clinical trial with humans.

A standard Phase 1 trial is conducted on a small number of healthy people, with a control group taking a placebo. This can’t prove that the medication is safe for everyone, but at least (one supposes) it will indicate that it’s not extremely dangerous for young-to-middle-aged people in good condition and without certain risky lifestyle factors. Larger-scale and longer-term trials (often taking years) follow.

What concerns Dr Coleman - perhaps prematurely, but we shall see - is that as with Covid/Omicron, there may be a rush to get this vaccination cleared for rollout. The motive for the government is that influenza kills tens of thousands in the UK every year; for manufacturers, the commercial incentive is obvious.

The efficacy of Covid vaccinations at least, is clearly not complete. It is generally accepted that you can get and spread Covid despite the immunisation; even quadruple-jabbed President Biden came down with the illness recently.

As to risks, I myself have had the double jab and a booster, and each time I was not advised of any potential hazards; in short, I was not put in a position to give informed consent. Nurses were injecting us as though on an assembly line, raising up to £20 a time for the group practice. GPs were earning well into six figures during the pandemic.

With all these rewards for medical professionals and product providers, there needs to be a counterweight of extra caution to protect the interests of the patient. So the real issue is Hippocrates’ principle, ‘First, do no harm.’

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Robert Lenkiewicz (1941-2002), by JD

Lenkiewicz is ignored by the 'art establishment' because his work is figurative and as such is unfashionable and not "cutting edge" or "challenging" or whatever Artspeak is currently in vogue.

Based in Plymouth, he never courted the London art establishment, and became respected solely on his own terms - through hard work, skill, and his unique vision.

Lenkiewicz could well be ignored also because he liked to paint beautiful young ladies and he often put himself in the picture.

If Lenkiewicz is known at all it will be for his association with a Plymouth tramp by the name of Edward McKenzie, known as 'Diogenes'. After McKenzie's death, and with his prior agreement, Lenkiewicz took posession of the 'vacated premises' as McKenzie had referred to his corpse and had the body embalmed. It was then kept in the studio (in a drawer according to rumour.)

The City Council were somewhat agitated by this but Lenkiewicz reminded them that they had two Egyptian mummies in the City museum asking "Is it because mine is new?"

He also painted other tramps as well as others on the margins of society and, until the year before his death, he would provide a free Christmas dinner for the homeless.

Read more about this remarkable man here

https://www.robertlenkiewicz.com/about/biography-ii.html

The painter surrounded by his muses -

And the mural he painted on the wall outside his studio in Plymouth -

https://www.robertlenkiewicz.com/about/murals.html

UK Teen ISIS Bride: should she come home?

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Homework or terrorism? Tough choice!

You are a teenage girl in a British Muslim family. You go to school, and after that it’s homework and helping your Mum with her duties. Your family keep you safe because they know what boys will do with nubile girls given half a chance, and that would ruin you and dishonour the family.

Or you could run away and f*ck a hero!

Think carefully - hey, where are you going! Wait!

And so, on 17 February 2015, Shamima Begum and two of her school pals went to Syria to have husbands allotted to them, whom they would serve as the jihadis fought for what they saw as their noble religious cause; and who used this excuse to indulge in horrible violence and cruelty.

Aged only 15, Shamima went through a form of marriage with a Dutch convert to Islam, 23-year-old Yago Riedijk, who was later captured and as of last November was in a Kurdish detention centre, facing a six-year jail term for terrorism if and when he returns to the Netherlands. They had three children together, all of whom died in infancy.

Of the other two girls who accompanied Shamima, Kadiza Sultana reportedly died in a Russian airstrike on Raqqa, Syria; Amira Abase, together with another schoolfriend called Sharmeena Begum who had gone ahead of the trio, had been seen in Baghuz, Syria, but that town was obliterated in a US airstrike (18 March 2019) that killed many civilians.

It’s the tip of the iceberg. According to JAN Trust, in the 12 months to July 2015, 43 women and girls were seduced into leaving the UK for the Syrian warzone.

Now, we discover, Canada has been implicated in this people-processing. A man called Mohammed Al Rasheed, based in Turkey, was helping people like Shamima transit from the UK to ISIS in Syria but also passing their details to Canadian Intelligence. According to George Galloway, the just-published book that reveals this says that the then British Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, was told of this by Shamima’s lawyer five years ago but sat on the information.

What Javid did instead, responding to public anger at the allegedly treasonous and culpable association of this British female with the ISIS atrocities, was to deprive Shamima of her British citizenship on 19 February 2019.

The Government argued that under the British Nationality Act 1981 the children of foreign immigrants (Shamima’s parents came from Bangladesh) have less protection against such a deprivation but that Shamima would not thereby be made stateless (which would go against the UNHCR Convention of 1954.) The UK’s Home Office expert Dr Hoque referred to Bangladesh’s Citizenship Act, 1951:

This says that “a person born after the commencement of this Act shall be a citizen of Bangladesh by descent if his father or mother is a citizen of Bangladesh at the time of her birth”. It goes on to say that dual nationality is not permitted, so someone with another citizenship “ceases to be a citizen of Bangladesh” — but that proviso only applies to people over 21.

Dr Hoque said:

Until the age of 21, therefore, a Bangladeshi citizen continues to remain a citizen alongside being a foreign citizen.

For its part, Bangladesh refuses to accept her, or any militant.

So there she remains, stuck in limbo in Syria.

The Guardian newspaper is inclined to present Shamima as a victim of trafficking; Spiked’s Editor Tom Slater and writer Rakib Ehsan take the view that she was willing and aware of what she was doing.

Peter Hitchens reminds us that Shamima would have been rather more naive when she left the UK at age 15 and that it is ‘cruel’ to leave her stateless and abandoned; rather, we should bring her to the UK to face justice. Speaking on GB News, he emphasised the importance of holding to law and institutions, especially in cases where feelings run high; we can’t give in to the mob.

FRIDAY MUSIC: The Last Rays Of Summer, by JD

Summer is nearly over: autumn arrives on the 22nd. Following on from last week's bright and breezy summer music a wistful but beautifully melancholic musical farewell to the sun. Maybe summer next year will be more joyous.

Here's a bonus track; Summer Wine by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood -

.......fits the end of summer mood beautifully.

COLOUR SUPPLEMENT: Colombian Coffee Art, by JD

We have all seen those pavement artists on their knees with boxes and boxes of chalk beavering away to produce reproductions of famous paintings. And we throw a few coppers into their hats in appreciation of their efforts and as a thank you for brightening up our day.

But this is a piece of pavement art with a difference....

The image comprises 3,604 cups of café con leche each cup with a different amount of milk in the coffee thus providing the variations in colour to produce the illusion of the Mona Lisa.

OK it was a publicity stunt for a coffee maker in Chinchiná, Colombia but no less spectacular for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinchin%C3%A1,_Caldas