End the Lockdown

HarperCons

Council Member
Oct 18, 2015
1,865
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48
how do you benefit from opening the country you halfwit. you increase your chances of getting a virus, of more people getting the virus, overburdening the health care system, then that's when you'll see a real economic crash. people can't work when they're sick. seriously sick people can't get better with no healthcare available.
 

pgs

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 29, 2008
28,500
8,098
113
B.C.
The guy who wants everyone in Ontraio to die from covid19 is worried about everyone's health and welfare?
I also hope all residents of Vancouver Island have the same fate . I really wouldn’t want you to feel left out.
 

pgs

Hall of Fame Member
Nov 29, 2008
28,500
8,098
113
B.C.
how do you benefit from opening the country you halfwit. you increase your chances of getting a virus, of more people getting the virus, overburdening the health care system, then that's when you'll see a real economic crash. people can't work when they're sick. seriously sick people can't get better with no healthcare available.
Great , let’s all stay home , all of us .
 

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
49,906
1,905
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Boris's 'whack-a-mole' strategy to get Britain back to work and school



The Prime Minister is expected to reveal his roadmap of proposals to very carefully and slowly lift the restriction in place since late March, but come down hard on any secondary hotspots that emerge. The first easing of restrictions is not expected to come into force until June, and will be accompanied by the stricter enforcement of breaches of the remaining rules, with fines rising from the current £60 to more than £3,000 for repeat offenders. It will include a massive PR blitz urging people who cannot work from home to go in where they can safely, and urging key workers to send their children back to school to free them up for vital tasks. Ministers are concerned that the public have gone beyond the letter of the law introduced when the pandemic began to sweep the nation, according to the Sunday Times.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8281785/Boriss-whack-mole-strategy-Britain-work-school.html
 

Walter

Hall of Fame Member
Jan 28, 2007
34,887
126
63
how do you benefit from opening the country you halfwit. you increase your chances of getting a virus, of more people getting the virus, overburdening the health care system, then that's when you'll see a real economic crash. people can't work when they're sick. seriously sick people can't get better with no healthcare available.
Official prog talk.
 

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
49,906
1,905
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PETER HITCHENS: We're destroying the nation's wealth - and the health of millions

By Peter Hitchens for The Mail on Sunday
03 May 2020

Why do I bother? For six weeks now I have been saying that the Government’s policy on Covid-19 is a mistake.

Most people do not agree with me, and many are angry with me for saying so.

Others, bafflingly, don’t care about the greatest crisis I have seen in my lifetime, and regard the debate as a spectator sport.

Let me say it again: the coronavirus is not as dangerous as claimed. Other comparable epidemics have taken place with far less fuss, and we have survived them.


Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who returned to Downing Street this week after recovering from Covid-19, said the country needs to continue lockdown measures to avoid a second spike

The death rate is lower than the Government believed. It passed its peak in this country on April 8, well before the crazy measures introduced by the Government on March 23 could possibly have affected matters.

The actions we are taking against it are gravely out of proportion and will destroy the lives of thousands and the prosperity and health of millions. This is not life versus money. It is life versus life.

It has not been much fun fighting this. In fact, it has been exhausting and dispiriting.

I feel as if I am in a nightmare where I can see a terrible danger approaching but when I cry out in warning, nobody can hear me. Can’t you see? I yell in the dream.

If you don’t defend your most basic freedom, the one to go lawfully where you wish when you wish, then you will lose it for ever.

And that is not all you will lose. Look at the censorship of the internet, spreading like a great dark blot, the death of Parliament, the conversion of the police into a state militia?


A man in Oxford wears a face mask as he walks through the city, past many businesses that have shut shop amid the coronavirus pandemic

Aren’t you alarmed by the creation of a creepy cult of state-worship, celebrated every Thursday night – in a country where church services and normal public gatherings are banned?

When did you last hear an anti-government voice on the BBC, now little more than a servile state broadcaster?

And then can you not see the strangling of the prosperity on which everything we hold dear is based?

I mentioned the other day to a hard-working small business owner that a shop well known to me was down to ten per cent of its normal takings.

‘Lucky him!’ exclaimed the businessman, ‘I have had no income at all for weeks, and I have no hope of any. But I am still having to pay my rent and power bills, and interest on my loans.’

In the poorer districts of my hometown, scrawled notices are starting to appear telling tenants: ‘If you can’t pay your rent, you can’t be evicted during Covid Lockdown.’

I have no idea if this is true but I am sure that plenty of tenants are not paying and plenty of landlords are losing what they thought was guaranteed income. You don’t care? You will.

In these and so many other cases, the normal flow of money in exchange for work, services and goods has just stopped.


A man tries to adhere to social distancing rules while showing his phone to KFC staff to pick up food from their restaurant in Leicester

Imagine if something similar were happening to your own body. You would be desperately sick and only urgent aid would save you from long-term damage. But where is that urgent aid?

The country is having a gigantic self-inflicted heart attack and stroke combined. Heaven knows what sort of trembling, weakened shadow of its former self it will be when this is over.

I think I can guarantee that it – and we – will need to take many doses of very bitter medicine for as far into the future as it is possible to see.

And yet no help comes. The absurd jocular Mr Bumble who we have chosen to be our national leader at this time has no sense of urgency at all.

As he stammers and brays, and does his Churchill impression, it is clear that he has no serious plan to bring this nonsense to an end.

Well, this is where it really starts to matter. We are about a fortnight from the moment when huge numbers of jobs will be in danger of permanent extinction.

The only choice will be to spend so much non-existent money that even the wild gamblers who have taken over HM Treasury are scared to do it.

But here’s the problem for Mr Bumble. He did not just panic himself. He spread fear far and wide. More than half the population have been literally scared silly.

You meet them on pathways and pavements, flinching with real alarm at the approach of another human being as if bubonic plague were abroad. They genuinely fear to go back to normal life.


A Pret a Manger shop was closed after their first day of service since lockdown on May 2 as concerns spread that lockdown will take its toll on the economy

And Mr Bumble dare not take them on. For to do so he would have to admit that he had been wrong, and the great pyramid of fear on which his authority is based would crumble away.

He is like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in the Disney film Fantasia, who casts a spell to summon an army of automatons to carry water for him, and is almost drowned because he cannot undo the incantation.

He cannot stop what he began. If someone else cannot stop it for him, it may destroy him.

So we face months of continuing idiocy, as the wealth of centuries is frittered away for nothing and we sink into a grim penury, made worse by the increasing lack of freedom and the insolence of authority.

Eventually there will be an accounting for this. It ought to be soon, and I hope it will be.

But if not, it will be important that protests such as mine were made and heard at the time.

Nobody will be able to say, when the much-needed inquiry eventually sits in judgment on these times and on those responsible, that criticism is just hindsight and that nobody pointed out at the time that a grave mistake was being made.

Blood bigots circulating nonsense



I have tried to get some sort of answer out of the Blood Transfusion Service, which – as I explained last week – has joined the general wave of bigoted prejudice against people who have celebrated their 70th birthdays.

It is, as so often with official bodies these days, like speaking to a computer. The ban on over-70s giving blood is ‘for their protection’ and based on ‘government advice’, which they appear to have accepted without a second’s thought.

This infuriating assumption that arriving at 70 means instant, doddering senility is just as bad a prejudice as all the others we rightly ban. So why is it permitted?

Unmasked: The humiliating truth

Face masks have become a good symbol for our current era, gags which turn speech to mumbling and rob us of individuality. But are they any use?

Dr John Lee, a distinguished pathologist, says not really: ‘When a person is infectious with a virus it is estimated that they may shed one hundred billion virus particles a day – that works out at about ten million per breath.


Face masks have become a good symbol for our current era, gags which turn speech to mumbling and rob us of individuality. But are they any use?

‘A mask won’t stop you putting these particles into the air around you. In fact, with a damp mask you’ll be blowing aerosols and larger particles sideways, directly at your socially distanced colleagues.’

Compulsory masks, if they happen, will just be another humiliation, along with the loss of freedom and income.

I suspect the thing to do, to mock this twaddle, will be to get hold of one of those mediaeval doctor’s plague masks like a huge bird’s beak, and go around in that, perhaps also swathed in a cloak and clanging a bell to warn of your approach.

Or perhaps I could dig out that old Red Army gas mask I (literally) picked up after a small skirmish in Vilnius in 1991.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/...estroying-nations-wealth-health-millions.html
 

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
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DAVID BLUNKETT After 9/11 we agreed lockdown was more damaging than the terror attack…the same is true now

COMMENT
David Blunkett, Home Secretary, 2001-04
2 May 2020
The Sun

THE founding father of the NHS in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Aneurin Bevan, pronounced that socialism is the language of priorities.

Substitute the word politics for socialism and it is immediately obvious that prioritising in the coronavirus crisis poses almost impossible choices for the leadership of our country in moving to recovery.


Almost 20 years ago when Islamist terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the Cabinet had to decide whether to lock down the capital for fear of another attack Credit: Getty


Steady nerves prevailed as we realised that the damage we would do to ourselves would be far greater than that which might be inflicted by our enemies

Recovery not just for our economy, but also for our social well-being and the normalisation of everyday life which makes living worthwhile.

This week Boris Johnson promised that in the coming days he would set out a menu of options for a phased return to some form of normality in the weeks ahead.

But the balance between lifting the lockdown too quickly and failing to appreciate the long-term detrimental impact on every aspect of our lives, of the delay in returning to near normality, requires the wisdom of Solomon.

Almost 20 years ago, when I became Home Secretary, Islamist terrorists launched their attack on the World Trade Center in New York.

Almost 3,000 people lost their lives in one day and the immediate expectation was that there would be an attack here in the UK, most probably in London.

When we met as a Cabinet, decisions had to be taken immediately as to whether to lock down the capital in the anticipation that lives might be lost in the days ahead.

Steady nerves prevailed as we realised that the damage we would do to ourselves would be far greater than that which might be inflicted by our enemies.

That is why, with our hearts in our mouths, we encouraged people to go to work and continue their lives as normal while taking every possible step behind the scenes to put in measures to protect us from attack.


Politicians face an impossible decision - as Winston Churchill knew, they must listen to the public while also balancing alternative conclusions from the experts Credit: PA:press Association


Boris and his government must now lead us out of the unsustainable lockdown or it could become a more damaging medicine than the original disease Credit: Crown Copyright

The virus is very different and the choices to be made are more difficult.

Distancing and social isolation were clearly the right measure to put in place six weeks ago to reduce the transmission of infection, the pressure on the NHS and, above all, the loss of life.

Whether or not the organised supply of PPE and the rapid expansion of testing was a failure of government is for another day — but what isn’t is the careful steps needed to get us out of this lockdown.

Because while opinion polling shows not only public support for caution, but also anxiety about returning to work and social contact, the potential irreparable damage to our economy will hurt all of us.

The job of politicians is to hear but then to balance alternative conclusions from the experts — as Winston Churchill put it: “Scientists should be on tap, but not on top.”

DO RIGHT THING

In our democracy, leaders need to gain consent but they also have to assess and take risks. If the current measures start to erode, unforeseen dangers could arise.

Yet, move too quickly and you risk being blamed for getting it wrong.

In some form continuing to isolate without isolation will be necessary, but avoiding great damage to the most disadvantaged children, many of whom are receiving no schooling at all, is vital for our future.

Equally, preventing the potential shortening of the lives of older people through continuing inactivity and lack of social contact must form part of the equation.

In the end it isn’t those appearing on TV and radio, often with contradictory analysis and advice, but elected politicians who must do the right thing.

Carefully, conscientiously but bravely they must now lead us out of the unsustainable lockdown which, while necessary at the time, could, if prolonged, be a more damaging medicine than the original disease.


David Blunkett was the former Labour Home Secretary


https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11534025/david-blunkett-lockdown-decisions-government-must-make/
 

Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
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TONY PARSONS We’ve done our duty to protect the NHS but we can’t afford a curfew


COMMENT
Tony Parsons
2 May 2020
The Sun

THROUGH no fault of their own, millions of British working men and women are currently watching their livelihoods destroyed.

Many of them will have watched the Prime Minister’s comeback speech on Thursday with a quiet dread — even if they were delighted to see Boris bouncing back, and even if they agreed with every word he said about the importance of crushing this virus before we even think about ending lockdown.


We've done our duty to protect the NHS but we can't afford a curfew Credit: Crown Copyright

Because the brutal truth is that it is far easier to survive lockdown if you know that you are going to get paid at the end of the month.

But there are millions of hard-working British grafters who do not have that luxury, and who do not get paid if they do not go to work.

As Boris explained that nothing much is going to change any time soon, those millions of forgotten grafters will have had a single thought.

How are we going to survive? The British working man and woman have done their duty over recent weeks to ensure that our NHS was not overwhelmed by new cases of infection.

The violations of the strict new rules have been few and far between. This unprecedented lockdown has been respectfully and rigorously observed.

But there are many people who simply can’t afford to remain locked down for much longer.

The household bills do not stop because there is a global pandemic. The children still need to be clothed and fed. The rent or the mortgage rolls around very quickly.

This week, London saw its first traffic jams for months.

And I bet many of those drivers stuck in those traffic jams would much rather have been safe at home with their loved ones.

We all appreciate how deadly serious Covid-19 is now. The early delusion that it is just like a bad case of the flu is long gone.

We know that it kills, and we know it can kill anyone. But millions are desperate to get back to work because if they do not support their family, then nobody will.

This country has come together in a show of national unity to enforce the Government’s plea to stay home, protect the NHS and save lives.

We understand that if the lockdown is lifted too much or too soon, then a second murderous wave will sweep through the population.

But does the Government understand that millions of British workers are worried sick about their livelihoods? I sometimes doubt it.


Chancellor Rishi Sunak has helped one million small and medium businesses and their workers Credit: AFP

I am reluctant to criticise a British government when my country is fighting for its life. But it has to be said that our elected leaders sometimes display a lack of empathy for the real-life problems of the working class who gave Boris Johnson his thumping 80-seat majority.

Does this Government understand how badly home education works for a child who does not own a laptop? Do they understand the problems posed by a drive-in testing centre for a nurse who doesn’t own a car?

Do they understand that millions of our people feel the cold, dark shadow of unemployment falling over their homes? There will be few “sunlit pastures” in their future, Boris.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak has held out a helping hand to one million small and medium businesses and their workers. But the banks and the bureaucracy have miserably failed our well-meaning chancellor.

That has left millions knowing that if they do not look after themselves, then nobody will. The banks are not going to do it.

We know that any easing of the lockdown must be slow and carefully calibrated. But the bitter truth is that millions cannot afford to stay home for much longer.

And an economy in ruins will kill our people too.

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11534102/we-cant-afford-curfew-tony-parsons/
 
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Blackleaf

Hall of Fame Member
Oct 9, 2004
49,906
1,905
113


We Will Regret Our Reaction to COVID-19

The state-imposed #quarantine and business closures are an obvious expansion of government power and set a dangerous precedent that will not be forgotten. Once the Rubicon is crossed it cannot be uncrossed, and this is becoming the #tyranny of #coronavirus

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HBWWqCYDyHw&t=3s