Not just flounders flounder …

 

After the August Bank Holiday – wasn’t it quite autumnal? – people are supposed to get back to work. ‘People back at work’ means ‘national news’, of which there was a huge dearth during these past weeks. The strange thing is that our dear news providers, the MSM, seem to find it hard to discern what to write about, without ‘guidance’, now that they’ve pressed the last possible drop of ‘story!’ out of Afghanistan. 

Covid is of course still ‘in the news’, albeit pushed down from the top spot on the front pages. In the absence of SAGE however, one of the Red Tops provides as beautiful a lesson on floundering as one could wish for. We were ‘treated’ to reports of sad stories of ‘anti-vaxxers’ who died of covid but had the strength to regret not having had the jab, imploring the readers not to become like them – dead. 

I leave it to you to wonder who finds these poor people, who asks the grieving families if they wanted their loved ones plastered across the nation’s papers. I leave it to you to wonder if this isn’t the most striking example yet for that SAGE ‘Nudge Unit’ to get the remaining non-jabbed to get that jab. I leave it to you to find the whole exercise in extreme bad taste. I leave it to you to wonder why we never hear about all those who are dying of cancer accusing the months of lockdowns, closed GP surgeries and hospitals turned into exclusive covid places for their death sentences. 

Under the same ‘covid banner’ we read that La Sturgeon has to self-isolate because of  you-know-what. No questions asked how come, given all that lockdown and the restrictions on freedom she has imposed on her Scottish subjects. Right next to that report we read one about a forthcoming covid spike. It’s not what you think – even though there are the first ‘you must be afraid’ reports about yet another ‘variant’ having been found in South Africa, the first ‘imports’ having been recorded here already. No – this is about that green bovine excrement convention in Glasgow:

“Thousands of people flying into the UK for the Cop26 climate summit will be allowed to dodge travel testing requirements. Unlike Britons returning from holidays abroad, delegates travelling to the conference in Glasgow this November will not need to pay for a PCR swab two days after they arrive. They will not even have to fill in the passenger locator forms millions of travellers have had to show at passport controls when returning from overseas.” (link)

Why should we be ‘furious’? Surely we’ve learned, haven’t we, that some animals are more equal than others, especially when they’re ‘green’! There’s another piece of covid ‘news’ which hasn’t made it into the papers at all. Amidst the reports about how many Afghans have been flown out, garnished with photos of the masses trying to get onto those planes, amidst the reports on ‘Taliban bad – Taliban not that bad’ and the hostile briefings against the Foreign Secretary Mr Raab not once voice has been raised from the ‘leaders’ of ‘Our Sacred Cow’, never mind SAGE, questioning if all those refugees were tested for covid, never mind jabbed.

The Border Farce allegedly does test every one of those hundreds of dinghy people coming here – something they can do because they’re only dealing with a few hundred people at a time. They can of course not test all those who simply land on the Kent beaches and then vanish without a trace. We surely might ask if being a refugee and/or a dinghy migrant means you don’t have covid and are immune to it. No – forget that: that’s racist, innit!

Let’s stay with this unprecedented ‘growth’ of our population, mentioning two other observations which our MSM are too cowardly to report outright. One is regarding the tired old wail about our ‘ageing population’. The last time this was made was before the Bank Holiday weekend when we read about the poor, overworked GPs. Odd, isn’t it, that nobody in the MSM asks if those thousands of ‘new people’ are all so healthy that they don’t need ‘our NHS’. Our GPs, our ‘NHS leaders’, certainly don’t seem to be fussed, they only want more of our money. 

Then there’s a sad little report about our oyster fisheries being under threat because untreated sewage is poisoning the oyster beds:

“Whitstable’s oyster festival ended yesterday with growers concerned that untreated sewage is still responsible for poisoning customers. The north Kent town which has been renowned for its seafood since Roman times has seen business suffer because of a series of leaks. […] Harvesting of Whitstable oysters was halted for a week at the end of June after customers reported norovirus food-poisoning symptoms. Investigations are continuing to establish if they were linked to untreated sewage. […] [Southern Water’s] website records surface and foul water overflows over the summer close to Whitstable’s west beach where oysters are farmed. The discharges continued for more than five hours on June 16, three hours on July 27 and eight hours on June 22.” (link, paywalled)

Yeah well … with the South East having become the most densely populated region of these Isles – why shouldn’t this have happened? “We” have had to save that Sacred Cow, with lots of money, so it’s easy to forget that more people means more use of infrastructure, from sewage to GPs to schools. And anyway, pointing this out would be racist.

Next to ‘racist’ we have the latest outcry of ‘sexist!’. The Times is walking on eggshells on this issue – they must be dead scared about ‘a twitter storm’. They’ve published an opinion piece by Melanie Phillips (link, paywalled) bewailing the edict of a school headmistress permitting her sixth-formers to wear any skimpy tops. For the life of me I couldn’t make out if Ms Phillips thinks this is bad or if the headmistress is bad. In any case, it’s sexist.

However, there’s also a little report in The Times’ news section about that Ch4 advert on a bus – see a photo here, not paywalled. This, we’re told, ‘puts women at risk’. Ah. In that article we’re also told about sex offenders harassing women on London buses. I’m sure the people at Ch4 responsible for that ad had no idea – how could they! The Times only writes that the Met police are looking for ‘five men’. They’re not racist, see. However, six days ago there was a report in the Evening Standard with photos of those men (link). The editors of the Evening Standard must be very racist indeed to have published those photos …

I leave you with one other, prominent example of MSM floundering. The various reporters haven’t yet had their marching orders – sorry: proper ‘guidance’ from the government about ‘our’ attitude to the Taliban. We’ve all learned that “we” had to fly out those thousands of Afghans because the Taliban would surely kill them all. Even as this went on, there were articles and reports cropping up here and there, insinuating that the Taliban isn’t as bad as they’re painted.

Today, with the dust having barely settled, there’s a report in The Times about the prison run by the USA at Bagram Airport, on how the Taliban ‘uncovered the horrors’: “USA bad”, innit. Well, given that they left that most important airport in July, during the night, leaving everything behind … well … can we at least ask how come nobody ‘knew’ about this, not even our own MoD? That surely can’t be racist!

The author is the war correspondent Anthony Lloyd who is still in Kabul. He’s also written pieces on Taliban horror for The Times. I wonder if he’s received some hints from the Foreign Office about how “we” are now going to deal with Afghanistan and best not to paint them too black, sorry: too dark. There are some ‘government sources’ who’ve let it be known that “we”will do everything to fight ISIS-K – how is anybody’s guess – while others seem to insinuate that we’ll have to recognise the Taliban as rulers of that country. The prospect of us working together with the Taliban to fight ISIS  is … delicate. It might put into question why we had to rescue so many if suddenly the Taliban isn’t ‘bad’ …

Try there are interesting times ahead – but beware: the government has learned valuable lessons about how to use plain propaganda thanks to their covid experience. Will we see a switch of ‘baddies’ back from ‘anti-vaxxers’ to the old ‘racist, sexist pigs’, perhaps by rolling them all together into one object of hate?  We better start learning quickly about how to read between the lines, just as the peoples of the Soviet Union had to learn when reading their Pravda and Izvestya, always keeping in mind the old Soviet saying:

“In Pravda (Truth) there is no news (Izvestya) – in Izvestya (News) there is no truth (Pravda)”

 

KBO!

 

 

Photo by jurvetson

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