Freedom, Nanny No. 10 and the Milk Protest

Nice to see that 76 MPs voted on Thursday against the extension of the Government's extraordinary power grab over the people. The honour roll is here: 

https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2021-03-25/division/7599821D-1E4C-47CD-A9CC-CB7D40185AFA/Coronavirus?outputType=Party#party-yesDemocraticUnionistPartyAyes

In fact the 484 Members voting FOR were almost exclusively Conservative and Labour, the exceptions being the DUP's Jim Shannon and the Labour expellee/resignee Claudia Webbe. Alas, neither of the latter two spoke, so their reasons are not clear to me.

But everyone else, even including a proportion of the Two Big Machines, was against. Sir Charles Walker - one of the 76 refuseniks - made a barbed and entertaining contribution and his last sentence is bang on.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2021-03-25/debates/9701394F-FF53-4364-85E1-F017B13CE921/Coronavirus#contribution-2997F299-7954-45B0-BBD3-2A3000339856

If you should happen to have a pint of milk about your person, a tip of the hat to you.

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2.32pm

Sir Charles Walker 

(Broxbourne) (Con)

As sure as eggs are eggs, we will be back here in six months, at the end of September, being asked to renew this legislation again. It is inevitable, and anyone who thinks it is not is deluding themselves. But this afternoon I am not here to talk about eggs; I want to talk about milk.

In the remaining days of this lockdown, I am going to allow myself an act of defiance—my own protest, which others may join me in. I am going to protest about the price of milk. I am not sure whether I think the price is too high or too low—I shall come to that decision later—but for the next few days I am going to walk around London with a pint of milk on my person, because that pint will represent my protest. There may be others who will choose, too, to walk around London with a pint of milk on their person, and perhaps as we walk past each other in the street our eyes might meet. We might even stop for a chat. But I was thinking to myself, and I will continue to think to myself, what will their pint of milk represent—what will their protest be? Perhaps they will be protesting the roaring back of a mental health demon, brought on by lockdown. Perhaps they will be protesting a renewed battle with anorexia, with depression, with anxiety, with addiction. Perhaps, with their pint of milk, they will be protesting the lack of agency in their life—not being able to make a meaningful decision; maybe a loss of career or job or business. Maybe they will be protesting this country’s slide into authoritarianism, or perhaps they will be protesting the fact that we allow unelected officials to have lecterns at No. 10 to lecture us on how to live our lives. But there might even be people, with their pint of milk, quietly protesting that the route out of lockdown is too slow, or perhaps even too fast. You see, the point is, Madam Deputy Speaker, that these people can project what they like—what concern they have—on to their pint of milk.

My protest, as I said, will be about none of those things. It will simply be about the price of milk and, as I said, for the next few days I will have that pint on me, it will be of symbolic importance to me, and at the end of the day it will be warm, it will have suppurated, and I can choose whether to drink it or pour it away, because it will be robbed of its refreshing elegance by the time it has been in my pocket for 12 hours. And if I pour it away, that might cause people some concern, but it does not matter because it is my pint of milk and it is my protest, and I am not seeking people’s acclaim, endorsement or support in my protest.

And you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I heard and I listened to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. This will pass; my protest will pass, the pandemic will pass, and in years to come I will be sitting at my kitchen table—perhaps with my wife, and hopefully my children, who will still want to see me—and I will break away from our excited conversation about the day because I will spot that pint of milk on the table, and that pint shall remind me that the act of protest is a freedom—a freedom, not a right, and unless you cherish freedoms every day, unless you fight for freedoms every day, they end up being taken away from you.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Chris Barber, by JD

Chris Barber, OBE (1930 - 2021)

Chris Barber, often regarded as the godfather of modern British popular music thanks to his introduction of US blues artists into the UK, died 2 March, after suffering from dementia. He had announced his retirement in 2019, having led a band almost continuously for 70 years.

He brought blues artists such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Muddy Waters to the UK, feeding the burgeoning British blues boom of the early 1960s.

https://jazzjournal.co.uk/2021/03/02/chris-barber-dies/

Barber and Monty Sunshine (clarinet) formed a band in 1953, calling it Ken Colyer's Jazzmen to capitalise on their trumpeter's recent escapades in New Orleans: the group also included Lonnie Donegan (banjo and guitar), Jim Bray (bass), Ron Bowden (drums) and Barber on trombone. Ken Colyer left in 1954 to be replaced by Pat Halcox on trumpet and the band became "The Chris Barber Band".

Hugh Laurie meets the man who brought the Blues to Britain, jazz trombonist Chris Barber.

Donald Christopher 'Chris' Barber is best known as a jazz trombonist. As well as scoring a UK top twenty trad jazz hit, he helped the careers of many musicians, notably the blues singer Ottilie Patterson, who was at one time his wife, and vocalist/banjoist Lonnie Donegan, whose appearances with Barber triggered the skiffle craze of the mid-1950s and who had his first transatlantic hit, "Rock Island Line", while with Chris Barber's band. His providing an audience for Donegan and, later, Alexis Korner, makes Barber a significant figure in the British rhythm and blues and "beat boom" of the 1960s.

Nudge, nudge: the official program of focused propaganda by 'behavioural change units'

Never mind that this video comes from Katie Hopkins who polarises opinions... 

Should governments be so keen to tailor propaganda messages in this manipulative way? Even if, as many believe (though clinicians themselves have reservations) the vaccination program is beneficial?

We like to think of ourselves as mostly rational citizens who, as Tony Benn said, merely loan power to Parliament and expect it to be returned to us. It looks as though we're to be treated as gullible jerks.

I really don't know about the safety and efficacy of vaccines or whatever these are, and Dr Vernon Coleman has doubted them for years - but layering propaganda over uncertainty is definitely to be deplored.

Htp: John Ward and 'JD'

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: The Slow Slide into Dangerous Practices, by Wiggia

You will obey………………...

On a trip earlier this week, taking the wife to the supermarket for the weekly shop, I saw one of the saddest sights it has been my misfortune to come across.

An old boy alone with a stick and a shopping trolley was walking along on the other side to the road wearing a WW1 style double respirator and what looked a lint pad beneath as it protruded slightly round the edges. As he shuffled along stooped over his trolley it was a moment when you asked yourself, what have those bastards in government done to a small percentage of the population with their and the compliant MSM continual scare stories?

The government doesn’t deny the existence of a ‘nudge’ unit: the Behavioural Insights Team was founded in the Cabinet Office in 2010 under David Cameron's leadership, now owned by the Cabinet Office, NESTA a charity, which does not show any leaning towards behavioural insights but must have some input or take out for it to be involved, and employees; makes it sound like a well meaning mutual!

BIT now operates across the globe. Joseph Goebbels would have been proud, he never managed to establish that sort of unit outside of Germany.

The Department of Health has been complicit in working with the nudge unit in applying items that will ‘encourage’ practices that promote cleanliness during the coronavirus such as the hands-face-space jingle and the use of the word 'disgust' to make people adhere to the cleanliness practices. All well and good as far as it goes, but it has gone further than that.

It is about making people make the right choices, as seen by the unit, in their own interests. An earlier example of their work was this little gem which, small as it seems, resulted in many prescription drugs being taken off the GPs' lists and the patients having to purchase them privately; despite the words in which the action is couched I know from first hand experience it is not about having to buy your own Paracetamol, it actually eats into necessary drugs that have to be taken on a regular basis:

'The unit’s successes include sending letters to British GPs who were prescribing more than their peers, cutting unnecessary prescriptions by 3.3%.'

The percentage is now higher than that.

There is also the question of how and why this was floated off from the Cabinet Office and who gained. Nothing is revealed; an old comment from the Guardian, of all places, asks the same:

'Rather than just publishing this uncritical puff piece, the Guardian of old would have at least mentioned something about the questions raised (eg in Private Eye) about how the unit was privatised, its funding, and the benefits that have accrued to its former civil servant staff.'

Its initial funding was a Lottery grant of £250 million; I always thought Lottery grants were for good causes, but that finished long ago.

The BIT has had success in several areas, such as getting in tax revenues due on time, and getting ten million to sign up to pension schemes, if you can call our state pension schemes good.

The coronavirus was a different beast and early on the head of BIT mooted 'a policy of "cocooning" groups of people who are most vulnerable to coronavirus' in an interview:

He said: "There's going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows as it will do, where you want to cocoon, to protect those at-risk groups so they don't catch the disease.

"By the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity has been achieved in the rest of the population."

Dr Halpern suggested that volunteers might be enlisted to work in care homes.

"There's a lot of active work going on at the moment about what is it the volunteers could do," he added.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51828000

About how to protect care homes, didn’t actually do too well there, did they? but they ploughed on with their radical suggestions.

From  a Tribune article:

'For them, public policy is about changing public behaviour without the public even realising you are there. This seemed a clever approach to their devotees in the early days, before the government wised up to the scale of the threat. Now we know it is exactly the wrong way to deal with the massive social changes the coronavirus pandemic requires.'

Naturally in this age the nudge unit use machine learning, the study of algorithms and statistical models.

And again we know how well those have panned out during the pandemic in all quarters, yet still they are allowed to influence policy.

The coronavirus nudging has worked:

• the carrot and stick approach, lock down now for an earlier release 
• then stay locked down and give dates into the future that have no relevance to any data that will give the populace something to look forward to
• the use of the 'you will infect someone else if you do not (fill in the blank yourself) have created for many a real fear. 

This virus is made to seem akin to the Black Death, yet it fails to kill more than 0.3% of those that get it and of those the average age at death is actually higher than the current life expectancy. All of this has been oft repeated over the last year and still it goes on despite a virtual nil rate of deaths now.

It is noticeable that certain supermarkets after dealing with the virus very successfully for this past year have suddenly ramped up the restrictions: more notices about using the provided sanitiser (it had disappeared earlier), more notices about not being allowed in without a face mask, and now more staff are wearing the things where previously many did not, the distance markings have reappeared and as with our visit to Waitrose today the announcements on distancing from the announcement system are endless, resulting in the Morris dancing in the aisles coming back with a vengeance.

This can't be a coincidence. The road map out of the virus as portrayed by Bojo contained all the carrot and stick caveats of previous announcements and the nudge unit would be behind it all, but what they have done to some older folks of which I am one, though not affected,is shameful if not downright cruel; in the case of the old man at the start of this if you told him to turn right for the ‘showers’ he would have gone - as Goebbels said, 'if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.'

BIT may have its uses but as with all these attempts to change people's behaviour there is always the risk of overreach and it becomes the norm. Subliminal advertising was the same and they banned it years ago; this nudge unit is practising the same psychology, and the temptation for immoral and dangerous usage with this type of operation is always there and it will be used for such purposes as sure as night follows day.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Sackerson adds: 

This October 2020 speech by the former Lord Chief Justice should be read by anyone concerned at the sudden and increasing loss of our civil liberty:
https://resources.law.cam.ac.uk/privatelaw/Freshfields_Lecture_2020_Government_by_Decree.pdf

FRIDAY MUSIC: Mark Knopfler, by JD

 Mark Knopfler is probably best known for the Dire Straits record called 'Sultans of Swing' but there is much, much more to his musical output than that very melodic and memorable song. A song which has an amusing back-story as Knopfler explains -"The lyrics were inspired by a performance of a jazz band playing in the corner of an almost empty pub in Deptford, South London. At the end of their performance, the lead singer announced their name, the Sultans of Swing; Knopfler found the contrast between the group's dowdy appearance and surroundings and their grandiose name amusing."

His Wiki entry lists his 'style' as being Rock, roots rock (Whatever that is), Celtic rock (actually more Celtic than rock), blues rock, country rock. I'm not sure why Wiki feels the need to add 'rock' to everything.om that it is a fair assessment of the music he has produced in his solo career.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Knopfler

Irish faeries for St Patrick's Day, by JD

The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939) https://poets.org/poem/stolen-child

"For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand."

"The greatest contribution that fairies have made to our culture is in music. Many traditional country dance tunes were copied by local musicians from music they heard played by fairies. That same music is believed by some still to be played, but modern life is no longer attuned to it."
- John Michell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Michell_(writer)

'The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries' is a book written by A. E. Evans Wentz in 1911. The book is based on his Oxford doctoral thesis, it includes an extensive survey of the literature from many different perspectives, including folk-lore, history, anthropology and psychology. The heart of the book is the ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Evans-Wentz, an invaluable snapshot of the fairy belief system taken just on the cusp of modernity.
https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/ffcc/index.htm

SOMETHING FOR THE WINE CELLAR: Organic tastes better? by Wiggia

An article in Drinks Business raises the organic biodynamic approach to winemaking to a different level by quoting research? That shows…….

 “Wines produced from organic or biodynamically produced grapes do taste better, according to two separate studies analysing the scores of 200,000 wines given by independent critics in both California and France.”

You have to read the whole article to be able to form an opinion on what is contained therein

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2021/03/study-of-200000-wine-scores-shows-organic-wines-taste-better/

If you read the article nowhere will you see if the wines were tasted blind, the rhetoric suggests they were not, which begs the question are the judges all jumping on the same bandwagon? Organic and biodynamic is increasingly part of the sales pitch in the food industry along with veganism and the increasing pressure from climate change activists that we should eat ever less meat among other ‘life’ choices they have chosen for us.

When couched as ‘saving the planet’ it is easy to express an opinion that will go unchallenged so the movement gathers momentum regardless of any side effects such as increased retail cost and bigger profits for the manufacturers and even God forbid another valid and substantiated opinion.

The problem with the article is yet another example of critics being the arbiters of taste. As with all tastings they are subjective, so I find it hard to believe, unless they knew what they were tasting, to believe the results. I defy anyone to taste two decent wines blind and state categorically that one was organic or had its grapes picked under a full moon and the other was not.

There have been enough examples of research to prove that wine critics are no better than the general public at getting consistent results when tasting wine blind and that means no clues to cost origin etc., taking that into account it beggars belief that they can add 4-6% increase in rating figures for wines that are organic or/and biodynamic; the no rise in percentage points for wines that are organically produced but do not mention the fact on the label rather gives the game away re tasting blind, and the latter biodynamic section seems to involve a lot of what can only be described as witchcraft grafted onto organics.

“Cow horns are stuffed with manure compost and buried into the ground all through the winter, then later excavated. “please………………..or……..

““Ideally, when I can, I try to harvest my grapes during fruit days; in other words, days when the moon travels in front of a constellation of fire from the zodiac calendar. For example, Lion, Aries or Sagittarius. These are more propitious days for a more expressive wine.”

Fruit is picked when it is at its best, early morning for freshness, before the rains come etc. Man or woman decides when that moment is, it has nothing to do with where the moon is at any given time, other than by pure coincidence; if you believe that you believe in Tarot cards, mediums, lucky heather and rabbits feet and being able to cross the M1 blindfold during the rush hour and live.

This article from the same publication has a group of wine makers, all organic, wanting any wine that isn’t to have a label stating the fact as though it is some sort pariah wine; well they would, wouldn’t they, it is to their commercial advantage.

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2019/10/put-chemgro-on-wines-produced-using-pesticides/

What they fail to say, as does the organic movement in general is the vast majority of pesticides and fertilisers are from organic organisms or derived from. The only thing that is wrong has been in certain areas a gross overuse of the same products, yet even now organic producers are allowed to use copper sulphites in certain cases, though to a lesser extent in Europe, and still be organic.

The communities' own Steve Slatcher did a very good piece on the subject a couple of years back:

http://www.winenous.co.uk/wp/archives/12670

I know two agronomists, one is a vineyard consultant the other is working in the more general agriculture field and both believe much, not all, of the organic movement is purely a marketing ploy, as many of the practices that are labelled organic have been part of farming for years without the label.

As stated in Steve’s piece many are of the opinion that cheaper wines are only possible because large scale producers use inordinate amounts of pesticides and fertilisers, but that is no longer true as with farming in general those amounts have through legislation been reduced dramatically over recent years, it is not a claim that can be levelled at those producers any more, as much as the organic movement would like to.

Another piece here…

https://www.wine-searcher.com/m/2019/05/organic-wines-deadly-carbon-footprint

... includes evidence that organic farming produces more Co2 which is not in line with organic thinking, yet again as the organic movement starts to get more scrutiny there is now also evidence that just maybe Co2 is not the evil it is made out to be, so we now have contradictory viewpoints.

Which is backed up by this….

https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2019/05/carbon-footprint-significantly-higher-with-organics/

Words in the context of organic are used in a way that implies that nature is part of the winemaking process; ’natural’ wine gives the impression it made itself, no human being was involved in the process, that of course is nonsense, man is the reason wine exists from the beginnings to now. 'Sustainable' is another hijacked word, there is nothing sustainable about energy production using windmills, they are about the least sustainable production method of them all but that word is attached as a badge of ‘good credentials.’ We have to be very wary of a movement that wants to be taken seriously on the strength of a green backed headline, there is on all levels huge amounts of public money being pumped into green technology which is hidden from public view. ‘What is good for you’ is not to be taken at face value, but it is also very good for them the producers; the truth is emerging on all fronts, but a juggernaut is not easy to stop.

By coincidence as I was putting this together the Times published an article about another research carried out by Jens Gaab whose main job is a placebo researcher at Basel University, who says he is interested in context effects, ‘if you reframe something’ what happens?

His study involved offering 150 people three different wines and asking them to rate them.

All were 2013 Italian reds but that is where the similarity ended. One was a £25 a bottle, one was £8 a bottle and one - La Pupille - £50 a bottle.

The first tasting was blind and all came out on an equal footing re taste. Some were told the £50 bottle was £8 and the £8 was a fine £25 wine; the results then showed the £8 wine being judged the best of the three. You can make of it what you will, similar tests have been done before and with ‘experts,’ with the same results.

As Gaab says, wine companies are clever, they know that if they make wine more expensive it tastes better- and they aim for that, because it is a huge market.

Charles Spence, professor of experimental psychology at Oxford said the findings fitted in with a growing body of research showing that price feeds into perceptions of quality, including a study in 2008 that showed increased activation in the brain's reward centres when people were told they were drinking expensive wine.

All of this can be extrapolated into the 'organic is better' push we are seeing now. Organics make people believe they are making a choice for the good and don’t mind paying for it, their comfort zone is expanded.

The Times wine critic, Jane MacQuitty defends the experts' stance by saying it takes years of practice and training to sort the wheat from the chaff, yet studies with experts when tasting blind have proved to be little different from the average wine drinker.

She then attacks the promotion of wine in heavy bottles back label hype, overly ornate labelling, with gold medals galore, ah gold medals a large part of the wine critic's folio of work.

She finishes with Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware, and I thought it was the critic's job to assist the general public in their decisions; obviously not.

On the matter of taste, again, the truth is not told, anyone who grows their own veg will claim rightly that the produce tastes better. It does; not because you are following organic practices, that part has minimal effect, but because you are growing varieties that taste better but are uneconomic for the commercial grower - yes they could grow them but no one unless they were in a higher income bracket could afford them. Organic produce from the same varieties that are grown commercially fetch a much higher retail price and taste the same,  taste is incidental to the cause.

Much of the higher retail price, and that will apply to wine as all other foods, is the extra labour involved in production: modern farming has reduced labour costs, organics increases them.

For many organics is a lifestyle choice, it is also a choice many cannot follow for financial reasons. If all goes organic many will struggle to put food on the table. The average increase over standard commercial farmed products is around 45%, some items are the same cost, but not many.

The advances in vineyard management and winery production techniques has seen enormous strides made in the quality of wine production from the humble supermarket red to the Cru-classed Château, but the organic gravy train is to good to not jump on. As the article says, it puts retail prices up as buyers perceive the statement that a wine is organic means a better tasting product and worth the extra cost; that remains unproven but peer pressure will ensure all follow that path, but not necessarily for the reasons stated.

The trouble with the green lobby it is never enough, the zealots would have everything going back to subsistence farming if they had their way.

Organic wine production promotes a similar vision: horses with ploughs in vineyards makes a wonderful-feelz advertising picture, any addition to the quality of the wine is purely coincidental.

After all that what do I buy? What I like is the simple answer, and that is a pretty broad church. If you take everything said that is bad about wine we all might as well drink Yellow Tail and forget everything else. That of course is not what it is about, but a more forensic and balanced view on all we are fed is not going to do any harm, a little cynicism never did any harm either, and the way to deal with all this bullshit is to buy what you like, drink what you like and ignore almost everyone. As Arthur Daley would say, “The world is your lobster.”