[awakened53]

Lost children of lockdown: Classrooms of five-year-olds still in nappies, talking like cartoon characters they binge-watch and unable to feed themselves – as Mail investigation reveals the true toll of Covid… and the poorest are hardest hit

From the way she gently coaxes her little girl into smart new trainers, it’s clear that Chloe is a caring mother. And as someone who wants the best for her children, she has concerns about the development of both Jordon, six, and Mia, four.
Waving an exercise book at me, the pages covered in squiggles, Chloe, 24, a single mother who lives on the outskirts of Norwich, explains: ‘Jordon’s teacher wants him to write a poem. But he’s so far behind, he doesn’t even know what a full stop is!’
Then she glances down at her daughter, crouched at her feet, arms wrapped around her mother’s calves. ‘My youngest is so clingy, I’m having to send her to reception with her dummy to keep her calm.’
Once, dummies were the preserve of infants who would be weaned off them during the toddler years. But now they, along with nappies, bottles and other paraphernalia of babyhood, are increasingly a feature of the nation’s reception classes — and even beyond. It’s a vivid illustration of the disastrous impact the pandemic has had on the cohort of babies and young children born just before and during Covid — consequences only truly emerging as they enter education.
Certainly, teachers are in no doubt: children are arriving for school less prepared than they’ve ever been.
Once, most four-year-olds were toilet-trained and could, with help, get dressed, feed themselves and perhaps even make a fist of writing their name or basic numbers.
Now, says the Education Endowment Foundation, significant numbers of four and five-year-olds have speech and language problems, trouble with social interaction and confidence and delays in walking.
Before lockdown, about half the year group were not ready for school. ‘Now it’s more like 80 to 90 per cent arrive in a pushchair, dummy in mouth and wearing nappies, unable to take off their coat or eat with a spoon,’ one head summarised.
Shockingly, one head teacher told a recent education commission of a mother who pushed her son to school in a shopping trolley. Locked up in a small flat during the pandemic, tablet no doubt firmly in hand, he had failed to develop the muscle tone to run about.
Some children have been so isolated that they adopt the funny voices of the cartoon characters they endlessly watch.
The teachers I spoke to are clear where the blame lies — with poor parenting during lockdown.
A primary school teacher from the North-West told me indignantly: ‘The children are not potty-trained. That’s OK when you’re dealing with one child but it’s a disaster when it’s all 30. It takes away from teaching time for the whole class.’
Another confided: ‘We find all manner of things in their pants — filthy nappies or even sanitary pads as makeshift nappies.
‘It shows us what the parents consider normal at home. They leave the child to play in wet or dirty pants. They send them to school like that.’
Teaching staff feel that more than ever, parents now feel it’s OK to offload responsibility for parenting to schools.
Read More: Lost children of lockdown

[Steve]

Energy hub explosions in USA while Europe faces emergency energy cuts -

A natural gas gathering and processing facility near Medford, Oklahoma, exploded Saturday afternoon and could disrupt the flow of hydrocarbons to energy export hubs on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Oneok, Inc., a leading midstream service provider and the operator of a major natural gas liquids (NGL) systems, experienced an explosion at its NGL fractionation facility in Medford, about 85 miles south of Wichita, Kansas.

The Medford fractionation facility feeds NGL products in pipelines through Texas to Mont Belvieu on the Gulf Coast, a major export hub area for energy products.

Listen to the full podcast report here.

https://www.brighteon.com/47f5fdd1-c3b1-...deba90afc5

[awakened53]

Neil Ferguson, China and a Fanatical Socialist Health Minister: The Untold Story of How Lockdowns Came to Italy and the West

An infection, even one as lethal as cancer, often begins with a single wound. Through this wound the pathogen enters the body by way of a single cell, where it pathologically replicates and corrupts those around it until eventually it consumes the entire host.
As goes infection, so goes totalitarianism. And in 2020, totalitarianism found its wound in the free world by way of Lombardy, Italy. More specifically, by way of one Health Minister, Roberto Speranza, on whose order 50,000 Lombardy residents were placed under lockdown on February 21st 2020, the first lockdown in the modern Western world. Within weeks, lockdown had spread to cities across Italy, until the entire nation was placed on lockdown on March 9th. By April 2020, more than half the world’s population – some 3.9 billion people – had been placed under lockdown.
These lockdowns were unprecedented in the Western world and weren’t part of any democratic country’s pandemic plan prior to Xi Jinping’s lockdown of Wuhan, China. They failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed an estimated tens of thousands of young people in countries across the world, including Italy.
Worse yet, officials who led the response to Covid in several major countries have testified that Italy’s adoption of China’s lockdown policy was one of the most important events leading to their own imposition of lockdowns. As White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Deborah Birx wrote in her bizarrely self-incriminating book:

[W]e worked simultaneously to develop the flatten-the-curve guidance I hoped to present to the Vice President at week’s end. Getting buy-in on the simple mitigation measures every American could take was just the first step leading to longer and more aggressive interventions. We had to make these palatable to the administration by avoiding the obvious appearance of a full Italian lockdown. At the same time, we needed the measures to be effective at slowing the spread, which meant matching as closely as possible what Italy had done – a tall order. 

Likewise, in the words of Imperial College Professor Neil Ferguson, architect of the wildly-inaccurate Covid models that instigated lockdowns across the free world:

It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.

Read more: Neil Ferguson, China and a Fanatical Socialist Health Minister: The Untold Story of How Lockdowns Came to Italy and the West

[awakened53]

Is the Lockdown Dam About to Break?

The conventional wisdom of the past two-and-a-half years – that lockdowns saved hundreds of thousands of lives and prevented the NHS from being overwhelmed – feels as if it’s about to collapse. A leader in today’s Telegraph, reprinted in full below, is a case in point.

For much of the pandemic, critics of lockdown were condemned as selfish, stupid, uncaring or worse. Their motives were impugned. Their arguments were misrepresented. Asking whether it was proportionate to shut down the country to control a virus that was only a serious threat to the very old and vulnerable was denounced as Covid-denial. Even Tory MPs joined in the witchhunt, with one launching a website devoted to exposing the “errors” of “dangerous” lockdown-sceptics, including respected scientists.
Rishi Sunak’s interview with Fraser Nelson, in which the former chancellor reveals the extraordinary way in which decisions were made during the pandemic, therefore represents something of a turning point. Mr Sunak says that the costs of lockdown were not acknowledged by decision-makers, that raising concerns about the closure of schools was met with silence, and that dissent within Sage meetings was effectively ignored. “You have to acknowledge trade-offs from the beginning,” he says. “If we’d done all of that, we could be in a very different place.”
This is what many opponents of lockdown have been arguing since March 2020. The difference now is that the costs of that policy are impossible to ignore. The NHS is on the verge of collapse, but this time due to a tsunami of non-Covid patients who were denied treatment during the pandemic. Children are struggling to catch up with lost learning. You cannot simply switch an economy off and on again without massive collateral damage. Handouts and the rise of working from home have fuelled a culture of indolence and entitlement among hitherto self-reliant groups.
In these circumstances, it is likely that other former ministers will decide to go public with their misgivings. Mr Sunak was a member of the “quad” responsible for most pandemic policy-making, along with Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, and Michael Gove. None of them is thought to have much of a future in front-line politics, and so their former colleagues will have fewer reasons to keep quiet about the flawed processes and political cowardice that saw the UK rush into lockdown.
It is important that they do. Left-wing pundits might obsess over whether the Government failed to shut down the country early enough, but the question the public inquiry ought to answer is whether we should have been locked down at all. As the costs mount, more and more people may conclude that it was all a calamitous mistake.

Read more: Is the Lockdown Dam About to Break?

[awakened53]

Lord Sumption: The Truth About Lockdown is Becoming Impossible to Deny – It Was a Disaster

Lord Sumption has written a piece for the Sunday Times about the lockdown policy that could be called ‘I Told You So’ – or, since some anger is surely justified, ‘I F***ing Told You So’. Here is an extract:

It was always obvious that you could not close down a country for months on end without serious consequences. The shocking thing that emerges from Sunak’s interview is that the government refused to take them into account. There was no assessment of the likely collateral costs of lockdown. There was no cost-benefit analysis. There was no planning. In government the issues were not even discussed. Sunak’s own attempts to raise them hit a brick wall. Ministers took refuge in evasive buck-passing, claiming to be “following the science”.
Yet the critical question was never a scientific one. It was a political question, in which the likely hospital admissions and deaths from Covid were just one element. The scientists said it was not their job to think about the social or economic implications of their advice. They were right about that. The problem was it turned out to be no one else’s job.
We are still paying for this negligence, and our children and grandchildren will be paying for it for decades to come. In 2020, U.K. GDP fell by nearly a tenth, the biggest hit to the economy for at least a century. According to Treasury estimates, 460,000 people left the workforce never to return. The policy took a wrecking ball to the public finances. The IMF estimates that government spending rose by more than £400 billion, or about £6,000 for every man, woman and child. Most of this was unproductive spending. It went on paying people for not working and supporting businesses forced to cease operations. At one point, in the spring of 2020, the government was spending about twice as much on compensating for the lockdown as it was on the NHS. Borrowing rose to £330 billion, a peacetime record.
Then there are the non-financial costs. Other mortal conditions went undiagnosed and untreated. In October 2020, after four months of lockdown, the Office for National Statistics reported more than 25,000 excess deaths at home from conditions such as cancer, heart disease and dementia. A year after the last lockdown ended, the NHS still has a vast backlog. Excess deaths, 95% of them due to conditions other than Covid, are running at about 1,000 a week. There has been a huge impact on mental health, with children and the poor worst affected.

Read more: Lord Sumption: The Truth About Lockdown is Becoming Impossible to Deny – It Was a Disaster

[awakened53]

Hapless Trump’s ultra-Zionist son-in-law Kushner and his central role in the US lockdown (whatever HE wants the Global Cult wants and he plays Trump like a stringed instrument)

The possibility of U.S. lockdowns—never attempted on this scale in the history of pandemics—was already in the air in early March 2020. The theory of lockdown had been floating around for 15 years but now China was first to try it, and claim enormous success, however fraudulently.
Incredibly, the United States was set to try it out too but getting Trump on board was going to take some doing. The federal government had the quarantine power since 1944. That much we knew. But just how expansive could its exercise be? Would they dare quarantine the well with the sick? How far would this go?
Thanks to several journalistic accounts, we have a better idea of what went on in the White House before the dreadful March 16, 2020, press conference of Donald Trump, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx in which the lockdowns were announced. Along with that came a flier with tiny print about which the ever-trusting Trump apparently knew nothing: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”
Read those words again. Has anything like this ever been issued by any government in the history of the world, before China did it? I cannot think of a case. It shuts not only the places where people do “congregate” but also everywhere where they might congregate. Churches. AA meetings. Civic clubs. Libraries. Museums. Homes! And this happened under Trump’s watch right here in the United States! There ought to be a word to describe something more extreme than totalitarian.
There were a number of people in Trump’s circle in those days who proved panicked and confused enough to embrace the idea. But who precisely wrote those words in the sheet handed out to reporters?
We cannot say for sure but Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner played an important role. He had enlisted two close friends from college to help: Nat Turner and Adam Boehler. Both were graduates from the Wharton School, like Trump. Jared somehow believed that they knew something about pandemics because they worked in health-care delivery. So, he called them.
Boehler headed the $60 billion U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and still does. It’s one of those many agencies that throws contracts and cash to big shots within industry. Before that job, he was head of Landmark Health delivery services, which means that he knew business and finance, not public health. He is among those high-finance execs who were drawn to healthcare not for the science but for the money.
As for Turner, he is a serial entrepreneur who got his start selling snakes from his parents’ garage. Truly. He founded an ad agency that he eventually sold to Google 10 years ago, Invite Media, for more than $70 million. His company Flatiron—oncology-related electronic record software—sold to Roche in 2018 for $1.9 billion. His page at the Wharton School describes him as “Young, Entrepreneurial and Google-Owned.” He is now a billionaire investor at an implausibly young age.
And Google-owned!
The book “Nightmare Scenario” (2021) explains what happened next. On March 13, 2020:
“Boehler and Turner burrowed into a room in the basement of the West Wing and started calling people who grasped both the scale of the crisis but also the politics. Over that weekend, they put together recommendations and then circulated them with Birx and Fauci. The guidelines were refined further before being presented to Trump in the Oval Office. They wanted to recommend shutting down in-person education at schools. Closing indoor dining at restaurants and bars. Canceling travel.
“Birx and Fauci saw the guidelines as a crucial pause that would buy them some time to better understand the pandemic. Shutting down flights was not enough, they said; more would have to be done. … Boehler, Kushner, Birx, Fauci, and other aides presented Trump with the recommendations several days later, anxious over what he might say. Kushner had been preparing Trump for the possibility that they were going to need to take more ‘draconian’ actions.”
This account was not speculative. Kushner himself in his new book tells a very similar story:
“On my way to the White House early the next morning, March 12, my [billionaire investor] brother Josh called from New York City. He described the worrisome signs: the city had canceled its annual Saint Patrick’s Day parade, thousands of people were self-quarantining, and millions more were leaving the city. When I told him that I was asked to jump into the response, he made a suggestion: ‘You should call Adam.’”
Call Adam!
Why not call, oh, for example, a public health scientist? Someone with some expertise in viruses? A medical doctor? Universities are packed with them. Someone, anyone, with actual knowledge and experience? Nope. It was entirely a crony operation, privileged fools about to take over the private lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Read More: Jared Kushner and the Mystery of the First US Lockdown

[Steve]

The engineered takedown of food, water and energy infrastructure -

Observers can't help but notice that Jackson, Mississippi's water infrastructure collapse -- leaving 180,000 Americans with no running water -- was allowed to happen by withholding maintenance from the water treatment system. As even the Associated Press now reports, Jackson Mayor Lumumba says the problem resulted from, "decades of deferred maintenance."

Not to be outdone in the category of controlled demolition of infrastructure, California declared a ban on the sale of gasoline engine cars, then just a few days later declared that electric vehicles shouldn't be charged from 4pm - 9pm due to the risk of a power grid failure followed by rolling blackouts. Thus, California says you aren't allowed to buy gasoline vehicles, and you aren't allowed to charge electric vehicles.

More food facilities are being burned down as well, and the financial collapse that's coming will be devastating.

I cover all this -- plus solutions -- in today's feature podcast here.

https://www.brighteon.com/9727fa51-bdd9-...e702bdeccc

[Steve]

Massive global shutdowns are now under way for metals smelting and steel factories -

Without metals and industrial elements -- steel, copper, aluminum, iron ore, nickel, zinc, titanium, etc. -- human civilization cannot exist.

Yet right now, aluminum, copper and steel plants are shutting down worldwide. We've compiled a list of just some of the shutdowns so far this year.

Some shutdowns are happening under "force majeure" declarations. Others cite sky-high energy prices, and yet others say there's not enough demand as the global economy implodes (by design).

Listen to my full podcast here.

https://www.brighteon.com/15c11091-2f58-...29c032c412

[awakened53]

The Guilty Men Behind UK’s Lockdown

On January 23, 2020, the day that the Chinese authorities sent their dramatic message to the world by putting the sprawling mid-China city of Wuhan under lockdown, the Biotech company Moderna signed a $1 million funding agreement with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) to deliver a vaccine that would go into human clinical trials within 16 weeks.
Serious efforts had been under way at the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare SARS-CoV-2 a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) in the run-up to this Covid-19 vaccine announcement. But the WHO Emergency Committee, convened on January 22 by Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had declined to cooperate.
The WHO committee’s demurral presented a problem for CEPI’s chief executive officer Dr Richard Hatchett, who was at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in mid-negotiation with Moderna. The vaccine, which was jointly owned by the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), had been designed on January 13, the day Chinese authorities announced the first death from Covid pneumonia in Wuhan.
In the UK, in parallel with efforts to persuade the WHO to declare a PHEIC, a government-sanctioned ‘Precautionary Sage meeting on Wuhan Coronavirus’ took place the same day, January 22, in advanceof the first coronavirus Cobra meeting scheduled for January 24. The Sage meeting was co-chaired by Sir Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Officer, and Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer. Also participating by telephone from Davos was Dr Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and co-founder of CEPI.
The minutes of that Sage meeting were made public only after a disclosure request by the legal team challenging via judicial review the legality of the UK lockdown. The Johnson government put the country under house arrest on March 23, 2020 following a lobbying campaign directed at his special adviser Dominic Cummings, who eventually recommended the lockdown.
There is no mention of the Wuhan lockdown in the Sage minutes, indicating that the meeting took place before the dramatic escalation of events in China on the evening of January 22 when authorities announced its imposition from the stroke of midnight.
Sage’s terms of reference make clear that it is activated by Cobra to provide technical advice to the government in support of Level 2 (serious) and Level 3 (catastrophic) emergencies. Yet this first meeting took place when no emergency officially existed. Its timing demands answers to two questions. Who initiated the activation of Sage? And was it arranged in expectation of a PHEIC being declared by the WHO on that day? A third matter of public interest is what contact was there between Farrar and Whitty or Vallance before the SAGE meeting?
Rishi Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the Spectator last week that the Sage scientists had been given too much power to decide if the country would lock down or not, giving evidence that the minutes of the Sage meetings had been edited in the run-up to lockdown to suppress contrary opinion.

Read More – The Guilty Men Behind UK’s Lockdown

[awakened53]

Hospitals Cancel 22,000 Appointments Every Day as 6.8m Wait for Treatment Due to Lockdown Backlog

Hospitals are cancelling more than 22,000 appointments every day despite the Government’s pledge to clear the NHS backlog. The Telegraph has the story.
The average number of daily cancellations this year, so far, was up 20% on pre-pandemic figures, when around 18,000 were axed every day.
Some patients’ appointments are being cancelled multiple times, the data, revealed through freedom of information requests to English hospital trusts, also shows.
In 2021, 30,267 appointments were cancelled five times or more, compared to 17,884 in 2019, an increase of 69%.
Jeremy Hunt, former Health Secretary, said the numbers were “staggering” and warned that without a workforce plan, more appointments will be cancelled in the future.
Health Secretary Therese Coffey last week set out her “plan for patients” and promised to make progress reducing waiting times for care.
Some 6.8 million patients are currently waiting to start treatment, the highest on record, as of July.
“We expect backlogs to rise before they fall as more patients come forward for diagnosis and treatment after the pandemic,” Ms Coffey said…
Official figures released by NHS Digital this week from all NHS trusts in England show one in 10 (9.5%) appointments, 11.6 million, were cancelled by a hospital in 2021-22. In 2011-12, 6.3% of appointments were cancelled (5.8 million).
Although there have been some improvements since 2020, the number of outpatient appointments carried in 2021-22 were still below pre-pandemic levels, 122.3 million compared to 124.9 million in 2019-20…
Read More: Hospitals Cancel 22,000 Appointments Every Day as 6.8m Wait for Treatment Due to Lockdown Backlog