WHY I WON’T BE WEARING A FACE MASK, AND WHY YOU SHOULD THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE DOING SO.

It is only a matter of time, probably about three weeks, before wearing a face mask will become compulsory in the UK for anyone leaving their home, with journalists, medical practitioners and politicians demanding that everyone do so. This development is also accompanied by a media campaign that attempts to demonise anyone uncomfortable with this, or who chooses not to wear a face mask, as “anti-maskers”, “mask mockers” and inevitably, “mask deniers” with articles suggesting that one’s freedom not to wear a face mask is somehow compromising someone else’s health. Anyone not wearing a face mask is now a selfish idiot who has no regard whatever for his fellow man.  All this has been, until now, advised against, on the grounds that it does not work, see Public Health England’s former statement: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff in any of these settings.

Facemasks are only recommended to be worn by infected individuals when advised by a healthcare worker, to reduce the risk of transmitting the infection to other people.”

 

Here are a few things researchers have had to say responding to mandatory face mask wearing on public transport:

 

“Although a medical mask can offer some protection, the use of masks in a community setting is not supported.” Prof Nicola Stonehouse, Professor of Molecular Virology, University of Leeds.

 

“The issue of face coverings in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic is very controversial. While no ad-hoc studies with a correct design have been carried out, it is now commonly accepted that face coverings provide very little protection, if any.” Dr Antonio Lazzarino, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, UCL

 

“Wearing a basic face mask does little or very little to prevent the wearer from getting infected by others, but there is some limited evidence that wearing one can prevent others from being infected by the wearer. I have seen no new evidence to suggest why the government is reversing its previous policy, and ignoring its previous scientific guidance and the guidance of the WHO. I’m left wondering if this is a political decision, rather than one based on science.” Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology, University of Reading.

 

An article on https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/ which is aimed at dental practitioners concludes: “The primary reason for mandating the wearing of face masks is to protect dental personnel from airborne pathogens. This review has established that face masks are incapable of providing such a level of protection.” For the full sources quoted and to see everything in context please see the links at the end of this article. There are also many concerns that face mask wearing can endanger the wearer by breeding bacteria, that people don’t know how to use them, that face-mask culture, once here, will never go away.

 

 

I lived in Asia for three years and was there when COVID-19 first appeared. Face mask culture is endemic in Asian countries especially those with a poor human rights record at least from a Western point of view. When I was there, I was continually stopped and had my temperature taken with a gadget that looks like a gun pointed at my head. I wore a face mask whenever I went out: now was this because I thought it would protect me from being infected?  Of course not. I did it because if I didn’t I risked being detained or not allowed into my apartment. One thing I can tell you is that it is hideously uncomfortable and makes breathing difficult.  I became consumed with worry, paranoid about going out which I  only did to buy food, and I lived in fear. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, I got out and only made it by the skin of my teeth.

And this is the most important point to be made about this entire development. Mask wearing is a symptom of fear. It is the hallmark of repression, of invasion of your most fundamental existential liberties. The best case made for wearing masks seems to be a lack of evidence that they don’t work at all, in other words it’s hard to say one way or another. The best case against has to be the same as for every other government intervention in the name of “stopping the spread of coronavirus”. It may not be worth it. We have reached the point in which anything is now justified in the name of “stopping the spread of coronavirus”. There is already a deep suspicion in the minds of the British and many Western people that lockdown will never, in any meaningful sense, come to an end and that we will spend the rest of our lives in a state of semi-incarceration all over the world. Far from easing the lockdown, introducing Asian face-mask culture to the UK will only deepen it, especially in the minds of the public. There can be little doubt that following this media campaign   (“WEAR A MASK, YOU DUMMY! NOW!” ) face mask wearing will become endemic and our streets will be filled with mask-wearing, glowering, frightened-looking people  standing outside shops because they don’t know whether to go in or not. We will be reduced to living in fear, of regarding each other with suspicion and hate, depending on whether we are or are not wearing a virtue-signalling, mark-of –the-beast face covering. The general consensus that anyone who thinks they may have symptoms should be wearing a mask is self-defeating because in this case why in the world would you be going out anyway?

I’ve seen face-mask culture first-hand and it’s deeply dehumanising effects. I escaped. Now it’s here in my homeland. It is ugly, frightening and has practically zero potential to make any difference. You must make up your own mind but I personally will not be wearing one any time soon. I’ll get my shopping delivered. I’ll get people to do it for me. I’d rather avoid going out. I’ve decided to leave the last comment to someone who is not a doctor, politician or journalist but a great actor, sadly no longer with us. At the end of the film Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer, who plays the android Roy, says to Harrison Ford: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”

https://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-inevitable-face-mask-u-turn.html

https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont-work-revealing-review/

 

https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/mask-respirators/cloth-masks-are-useless-against-covid-19

 https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-mandatory-face-masks-on-public-transport/

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/21/face-mask-rules-more-political-than-scientific-says-expert#maincontent

 

Climate Alarmism is a dangerous dogma: we need to wake up to this before it’s too late.

Climate Alarmism is a dangerous dogma: we need to wake up to this before it’s too late.

Imagine  a future in something like 2094, 75 years hence. Energy, water and food are  rationed, private transport and flying are virtually banned, meat is outlawed, there are no livestock farms, industry no longer exists, homes are collective, and population reduction policies have led to euthanasia being legal and encouraged whilst childbirth is limited. Government is regional across the globe with regional co-ordinators of Asia, America, Europe and the Eastern Bloc. Even this may be optimistic.

This of course is possibly a bad imitation of George Orwell’s 1984 and other dystopian futures. And yet whilst it can never be used as a definitive model, I contend that many of these scenarios could possibly become reality if we continue along the path of unfettered climate alarmism, now espoused by government and media around the world. According to the IPCC, a body set up to promote climate change advocacy, “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to deal with climate change” are required. One of the foremost of these is an insistence that we abandon the use of fossil fuels, and even nuclear power to rely entirely on so-called “renewable” forms of energy.  Everything promulgated by global warming advocates points to nothing less than a project to destroy our entire technological civilisation for some sort of pastoral fantasy which essentially means returning to medieval times.  It’s worth looking at some tactics and arguments used by climate change advocates to try to force this agenda.

Firstly, the mendacious attempt to portray the climate change agenda as scientific. Very few people are equipped to use the scientific method to analyse and evaluate the claims of the climate advocates. Climatology is a highly complex and unpredictable field of science, requiring the assimilation of vast amounts of data. To expect most people to look at the evidence and draw their own conclusions is unrealistic and so what actually happens is the mass media regularly peddles the unverifiable narrative of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” as fact, making the public unable to question it. It’s far easier to accept it. In  reality, there exists an enormous body of research that calls the co2 narrative of climate advocates into question. It points out that there has been no significant planetary warming since 1998,  that evidence exists that co2 levels rise after temperature changes and not before, that changes in the activity of the sun can cause changes in the atmosphere, that the earth has been warmer before now, that there was an argument in the 1970s that the earth was getting cooler, that even if the earth were getting  warmer there isn’t enough evidence to suggest human activity is responsible,  that there is evidence the polar ice-caps especially Antarctica are growing or at least remaining stable, not shrinking, that the hole in the ozone layer is closing. The list goes on and on, and using the scientific method would mean looking into all of this information  Added to this are the numerous predictions of climate disaster that failed to materialise, , such as the Ice Age predicted in the 1970s and the complete  loss of  Arctic ice by 2013.

Secondly, the admission by many climate advocates that their agenda is not motivated by concern for the environment at all but a wish to impose a radical political agenda,  manifest in statements from UN climate guru  Christiana Figueres postulating “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world,” and  Dr. Ottmar Edenhoefer, stating that  “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Thirdly, the emotive and misleading language used by the climate advocates. They claim that “the planet is in danger.”  This is rubbish. An ecosystem that can recreate itself after ice ages, asteroid impacts, periods of high temperature and humidity, all of which have happened in the past is not in imminent danger from human activity. Even if we blew ourselves to smithereens in a nuclear war the planet itself would reform as an ecosystem within a few hundred thousand years. We may be in danger ourselves but the advocates prefer for us to think about “the planet”, spouting the usual tosh about how we borrow it from our children. This is a meaningless use of language that avoids the need to stand closer scrutiny. Anyone with the courage to question the global warming narrative is now called a “denier”, being compared to those who claim the Holocaust didn’t happen. This is a tool designed to close down debate. Research scientists whose work questions this narrative lose their funding and are ridiculed by the media. The expression “climate change” is itself misleading. It derives from the original  speculation of AGW, anthropogenic global warming, and was changed once it became evident that first there was not enough compelling evidence for AGW and second that most people didn’t believe in it. Calling it “climate change” justifies anything. Warmer, cooler, windier, wetter, drier etc.etc weather can now all be attributed to human activity.

No sane person would willingly vote for a government that proposed to remove highly efficient and inexpensive energy sources to replace them with inefficient, woefully expensive and environmentally damaging alternatives, ban flying, ban automated transport, ban meat eating, restrict reproduction, create unemployment on a scale never before seen, levy unsustainable tax levels, dismantle industry and censor academic research. Yet all of these are policies being considered and postulated in the name of climate change and young people in particular are seemingly accepting this totally.  Many economists point out that you simply can’t maintain a technological civilisation at the present level using wind and solar power. Don’t take my word for it; there’s plenty of information out there. Tellingly, internet searches by those interested in questioning this entire hypothesis yield results pointing towards censorship. Browsing “climate change scepticism” led me immediately to climate alarmist websites like skepticalscience.com, and numerous blogs that informed one how to refute “climate change deniers.” Finding data, research and argument that facilitates debate is much harder than looking for articles that promote climate alarmism. One of the most sinister developments in this entire narrative is the emergence of a movement led by schoolchildren staging school walkouts and demanding urgent action: this is a shameful exploitation worthy of Nazism.. As an educator I know that children’s logic is impenetrable: they will argue that the sky is green and there’s often no way you can persuade them otherwise. What is more, they cannot possibly have examined all the data at hand and drawn their own conclusions. They are simply parroting propaganda learned on social media, news outlets and in schools. Again, this shuts down debate because how can you  engage kids in this kind of complex discussion? The only historic precedents I know of for the kind of far-reaching changes demanded by these teenage turkeys voting for Christmas happen to be in Maoist China during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, and Stalinist Russia during the purges and Five Year Plans. One wonders if they’ve read their history?

Peaceful public protest is the cornerstone of democracy and of Western civilisation. Yet now we begin to see a fundamental difference in that public protest is rapidly becoming something it has never been before: a tool of the state. Those agitating for climate change alarmism are actually pursuing the state’s agenda: if such protests were staged to defend our economic well-being and our technological civilisation, would they be as well attended, organised or even permitted?  An analogue exists in the fact that the only mass demonstrations following the 2016 British Brexit referendum are by those opposing the result. It is clear that that the majority who voted to leave the EU are too confident in the common- sense of humanity. Public protest is the stuff of  offended and vigorous minorities, and historically challenged the state. The offended minorities remain but  we live in an age where true dissent  is censored by placard-waving virtue-signallers, defenders of the state and where true debate is stifled by mob fear.

The consequences of this unprecedented acceptance of a political dogma should be obvious: economic implosion, environmental damage on a huge scale (mining for magnets to use in wind farms, pollution caused by wind farm manufacture, landscape and wildlife destruction to name but a few). These threaten the economic well-being of ordinary people in developed nations and actually have genocidal implications for those in poor and developing nations.  It is staggering to contemplate the draconian measures people seem willing to accept in the name of this colossal non-solution to a non-existent emergency.

I can’t prove that anthropogenic global warming caused by human-produced carbon dioxide doesn’t exist, any more than I can prove the non-existence of  God. It may possibly exist, however in light of the conflicting data available I think it’s very unlikely. There is too much evidence of manipulated and manufactured data which doesn’t suit the scientific method, too much evidence of censorship and dissent. When a scientist of the calibre of James Lovelock, arguably the godfather of modern environmentalism, says “It’s a religion  really, it’s totally unscientific,” this should give grounds for pause. However climate alarmism is all too  real, and poses a far greater threat than the problem it purports to solve. It’s also not the same as caring for natural resources. Most people would agree with having cleaner power stations and vehicles, less rubbish that can’t be disposed of and better food hygiene among other things. This isn’t the same as saying we should kill off  the meat and livestock industry because of an imminent danger from  fart gas created by cattle.

Important questions need to be asked. Perhaps the most pressing is this: In light of conflicting data available, is there enough compelling  evidence for anthropogenic global warming to justify dismantling our current industrial civilisation? The answer to this for every thinking person who doesn’t choose to employ impenetrable child’s logic that permits anything, has to be, no.