Beautiful day today in Yorkshire. Warm and sunny. I walked up my hill. The verges were covered in yellow celandine with a few dandelions and some violets. I saw my first butterflies – tortoiseshell and peacocks. The birds were beginning to sing. A buzzard circled overhead with the vapour trails of jets practising for dogfights and missile launches in this new world that Putin has created. The trees and hedges were still skeletal winter mode waiting to burst into bud.
Back in Coronaland I’ve been listening to the West looking to take Putin to the international courts for war crimes. I’m all in favour. Mind you, fair’s fair. We have to do all the other war crimes too – that includes Bush and Blair in Iraq, Putin and Bashir in Syria, the Saudis in Yemen and then the USA, Saudis and Iran in various other arenas. Until we have the UN with enough clout to take all the perpetrators to court we’re going to have this ongoing brutal, primitive behaviour. It’s madness. If all these leaders of superpowers knew they would end up being scrutinised before an international court they might be more careful. What is going on in Ukraine is obviously a war crime on a huge level, but it’s no worse that Iraq, Syria, Yemen and others – yet few are ever brought to justice.
Amazingly, John Peachey sent me through this snippet from a Russian spokesman who was obviously either in complete denial or else a complete bloody liar! He denied that Russia was deliberately bombing women and children, destroying schools, hospitals and theatres or shooting fleeing civilians.
Russian spokesman_ 2 – Small.mov
Former Putin spokesman audio 21 March. 5 min approx Radio 4.
He claimed that this was all being carried out by neo-Nazis Ukrainians. The Russians were trying to liberate the oppressed Russian Ukrainians. He’s nuts.
Let the evidence be collected and the courts decide!!!
Here in the UK the Tories continue their lying ways. They claim to be sanctioning the Oligarchs but they’re not. Because they gave them so much warning they have had time to put their property and bank accounts into Trusts to avoid the sanctions. It’s a joke.
Exactly the same tactics with the obnoxious P&O sackings. The Tories were all acting with shock and horror as 800 mariners were unceremoniously sacked to be replaced with Indian crew being paid £1.80 an hour. Now it turns out that the Tories were informed days ago and could not be bothered to act. All this shock and horror was an act.
Tories simply don’t care!
They are all the same. They make promises, they feign compassion, they say they are going to do things but they never do. It’s a farce – but people still fall for it.
What they have really been doing for twelve years is to cut public services, cut the money going to the needy and give more and more to the wealthy. The result is a huge increase in inequality, more rough sleepers and more food banks. Millions more kids and pensioners live in poverty.
It is a farce!! They are getting away with it!
Johnson is so keen to make the most of this terrible war that he wants to go to the Ukraine so he can have plenty of photo ops and pretend to be Churchill. I think we should give him the chance. It would be great to see him parading up and down on the front line waving a huge Ukrainian flag and goading the Russians. Unfortunately, I’m sure they’d all be laughing so much they’d fail to shoot him. I’ll contribute to send him there! (One-way ticket of course!).
Incredibly, the MET are grinding slowly to some conclusion. They’ve started interviewing a 100 of the party-goers. I wonder if they all have their stories straight? Are they going to lie to the police?
It’s very strange. The MET seemed to have no trouble dishing out penalty notices to everyone else. Thousands of people were fined for breaching Covid rules. There was none of this huge drawn-out process. What’s going on??
Rees-Mogg tries to make light of this Partygate – but he’s wrong. This goes right to the nub of everything that is wrong with Tories. They are so horrendously arrogant. They really do feel superior to the rest of us. They make rules for us to follow (or we’ll be heavily fined) and they really do not believe these laws apply to them – they are for the plebs. The sheer hypocrisy and arrogance is startling. To make light of this casual law-breaking is just wrong. To make matters worse Johnson then repeatedly lied about it both to parliament and the public. Lying has become second nature to these people.
If you can’t trust anything our leaders say or do that goes straight to the heart of democracy. This is far from a small thing. They’ve hidden the disaster of Brexit behind Covid and tried to spin the incompetence and law-breaking of Covid and now they are trying to hide the lying and law-breaking behind the Ukrainian war.
These people are immoral. They shouldn’t be allowed to govern. They are not honourable in any respect – slimy, greedy, dishonest profiteers.
If the MET fail to hand out penalties to Johnson and all the others it will be a complete travesty. Once it’s done we can get the full Sue Gray report. Then we’ll see if the Tories do the honourable thing – if the lying law-breaker resigns, or if the Tories discover what honour is and kick the incompetent clown out.
Meanwhile, in the Coronavirus pandemic that no longer exists, because Save the Big Dog Turd is in full swing. Yesterday, despite the government’s attempts to suppress testing there were 226,000 new cases with 168 more deaths and increasing hospital cases. This huge upsurge in cases is being blamed on a new variant. Of course, it’s nothing to do with the removal of all restrictions. Perhaps distancing and masks should have been retained for a while longer?
I’ve instituted a no-fly zone over my house! Stay safe!! We haven’t been fried alive yet!!
The weather was nice down here yesterday, too. And yes, the butterflies were out – mostly small, drab ones, but one huge bright yellow monster fluttered past as I walked along the towpath. A Brimstone, maybe?
You’re right that all the warmongers deserve to be tried for their war crimes, Opher. But the UN isn’t the right vehicle to make that happen. It will have to be up to the people of each country to deal with their own war criminals. Let’s start with Blair!
And as you say, Partygate goes right to the nub of everything that is wrong with the current political system. To deny its seriousness is to trash the whole idea of the rule of law. But then, no politician cares about the rule of law – they think they’re above it.
As to COVID, that 226,000 figure represents 3 days – Saturday, Sunday and Monday. From the UK government’s dashboard, it looks as though, while new cases are still going up each week, the rate of increase of new cases is now coming down. I’ll wait another week or so, and then take another look at Our World in Data.
Cheers Neil. The three day total – that wasn’t at all clear on the site. It’s becoming more and more difficult to get data. I don’t trust any of it!
Opher, I get my UK specific data from:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases. The second set of data, “Cases by date reported,” is the relevant one.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths. The data is called “Deaths within 28 days of positive test by date of death.”
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare. The hospital occupancy data is called “Patients in hospital.” The ICU occupancy data is called “Patients in mechanical ventilation beds.”
You can get all of these either for the UK as a whole or broken down by country. You can even download the data in CSV format and then look at it in Excel.
The way thinks work out, it looks as though Our World in Data gets aligned (eventually – when late reports have come in and spurious positives removed) with this dashboard. I wouldn’t trust the UK figures on Worldometers at the moment, they seem to be going haywire after each week-end.
BTW, you might enjoy my latest rant – not about COVID, but about “culture wars” – here: https://libertarianism.uk/2022/03/23/some-thoughts-on-the-uks-culture-wars/. (The website has been re-branded and re-formatted, but it’s the same site underneath).
Cheers Neil. Reliability seems to have gone out the window!! I’ll check them out.
I’ll have a look at your rant. I enjoy those!!