The Digger

Thanks to Maxwell for recommending this interview.   ‘This is international hysteria’ Lionel Shriver and Brendan O’Neill discuss the irrational response to Covid-19 and the cruel regime of social distancing. 5th May 2020 Novelist Lionel Shriver joins  spiked ’s editor for the latest episode of  The Brendan O’Neill Show . They discuss the catastrophe of lockdown, the horrors of the ‘new normal’, and our society’s immature response to death. Spiked

Another good article recommended by Starfire.  Thank you... Britain Descends Into Despotism as Government Wages “Historic” Assault on Personal Liberty – Former Supreme Court Judge Lord Sumption We are witnessing "the stuff of tyrants" Lord Sumption Editor’s note:  Sumption is not just a leading legal mind, but also a much-respected historian. It would be foolish to shrug off this well-argued call for sanity.  COVID-19 is not the greatest crisis in our history.  It is not even the greatest public health crisis in our history.  But the lockdown is without doubt the greatest interference with personal liberty in our history. It is normal at this point to add ‘in peacetime’. But we can forget that.  Even in wartime, we never confined the entire population to their homes, 24/7, if they did not have some excuse acceptable to a Minister. States have always tried to confine people known to be carrying dangerous infections. But we live in...

“I Sent Them” James Howard Kunstler “Our utter incompetence actually helps us,” declared Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI Peter Strzok to his confidante (10,000 text messages) and paramour, FBI attorney Lisa Page, when he discovered on January 4, 2017, that the agency had omitted to close the barren Crossfire Razor case against General Michael Flynn. There you have a perfect summary of the fantastic hubris at work in the agency-gone-rogue under then-FBI Director Jim “I sent them” Comey days before the swearing-in of a president somehow mistakenly elected by bamboozled voters — or so the thinking apparently went at the highest level there. Or what passed for thinking. General Flynn, you see, having been anathematized by Barack Obama, and black-spotted by the so-called  Interagency  (i.e. the giant hairball of competing spy shops set up after the 9/11 fiasco), was about to assume the pivotal job of White House National Security Advisor, and it was known that he wa...

This is from The American Conservative... The New Class War Comes For The Economy Class, more than partisanship, drives our response to coronavirus.      People in their vehicles protest against excessive quarantine orders from Michigan         Governor Gretchen Whitmer around the Michigan State Capitol. (Photo by JEFF             KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images) JOHN A. BURTKA IV T he coronavirus is being  politicized . We hear it all the time. A recent  headline  at  The Atlantic  reads: “The Social-Distancing Culture War Has Begun.” On the  New York Times  opinion page, a contributor  laments : “The reopen America protests are the logical conclusion of a twisted liberty movement.” And Vox  suspects  that GOP megadonors backed recent protests in the Midwest in hopes of starting a new tea party movement that could ...

May 8th, 2020 A health professional told me back in March that face masks were ineffective but that respirators (the N95) were. Because of the source, I thought there must be validity to this. However, it seemed counterintuitive. I reasoned that there would be differentials between using any type of mask versus no mask because no mask usage would allow aerosols to penetrate unabated, whereas a mask should capture much of the aerosol and reduce risk of spread to others and presumably should also function to mitigate breathing in viral-laden droplets. Because of the greater density of respirator material, the prophylactic would be reasoned to be greater. However, what I had not considered was how extremely small the virion was in relation to the porosity of the material in the masks and respirators. I also had not looked at the scientific literature on the subject … until now. Denis Rancourt Denis Rancourt, an eminent physics professor , former anarchist, and a...