As Steyn says, it’s been postponed till further notice.
To our readers in the United Kingdom Happy Freedom Day! By proclamation of “Boris” Johnson (phoney name, phoney guy), today was supposed to mark the end of all lockdown restrictions in his benighted land. Unfortunately, freedom has had to be “postponed” until July 19th, supposedly because of the “Delta variant”, which is puttering along nicely while the ChiComs fine-tune the Epsilon variant in time for its soft launch in Chad or Bolivia around July 12th.
On the surface, naming the day “Freedom Day” concedes the case of old Boris chums like Toby Young and James Delingpole that the year-plus lockdown is a massive unprecedented assault on free peoples’ core freedoms. On the other hand, naming the day “Freedom Day” also reminds the masses that freedom is not an inalienable right but the gift of the state, and the state giveth and taketh away and in this third decade of the third millennium inclines more toward the latter.
The citizenry (if it is not entirely risible so to dignify them) is getting used to it. One almost suspects the now routine leaked video of our rulers “accidentally” whooping it up maskless at the G7 or Nato cocktail soirées mwa-mwa-ing each other with triple-kisses and hugs and Uncle Joe sniffing the Euro-chicks’ hair while their experts recommend masks for the rest of us in perpetuity is intentional: it is designed to accustom the Great Tested & Jabbed Unwashed to the distinction between us and them.
Anthony Fauci has been in his present job since 1967. When he was first appointed, he reported to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who has since become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But, whatever you call them, there have been twenty of them since Fauci took lifetime office: Does it really make any difference to him who’s attending Cabinet meetings? A year or two and some other transient schlub will be there; what’s the diff?
Oh, well, ultimately the Secretary of Health and Whatever reports to the President, who is chosen (mostly) by a self-governing people. But Fauci took office when Lyndon Johnson was president. So he has “served” a quarter of all presidents in the history of the republic. Last year I started joking that Fauci was the J Edgar Hoover of public health, but the gag does him an injustice: He has already outlasted three more presidents than Hoover and he intends to be here for President Kamala, President Ocasio or whoever’s next.
As you know, I get complaints that I don’t write more about Mitch McConnell or Joe Manchin – and the short answer is it’s because it’s like following an exciting badminton match during the Blitz. The Fauci emails are fascinating because they reveal the corruption of the bureaucracy. We babes in the wood assume that when you want to infiltrate and compromise a government you try to wangle somebody into the laughably misnamed “intelligence community” – as Hillary did with dossier boy Christopher Steele. But the sophisticates in Beijing figured out the opportunities in infiltrating as boring a backwater as public health. The key revelation in the emails concern the bureaucracy’s determination to quash any suggestion that Covid might have originated in the lab of their Chinese-controlled/US-funded friends – to the point where by last summer all meaningful investigation by the United States Government of the origin of an ongoing global pandemic had ceased…because it was stymied not by the ChiComs but by US bureaucrats.
You don’t need a presidency-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life – and, if you’ve got the right bureaucracy-for-life, you don’t need life, as the good folks of many parts of the “free world” have come to accept.
The greatest day in the lives of our globalist, authoritarian oligarchs was the day they all learned that they wouldn’t need to bother taking anybody’s freedom; we were perfectly willing to hand it over quietly, with no resistance, out of sheer panic.
What the hell happened to Boris Johnson after he got WuFlu?
It’s like he died and they’ve replaced him with a look-alike.
I think it made him become Boris Johnson.
He was a Brexit partner with Farage and a Trump advocate.
Maybe, but I think he was those in name only.
Liberties are always *taken*, never granted.
As for the rest of it: “”The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. It is useless and cruel to put a man on his legs, if the next moment his head is to be brought against a curbstone.
A man of that type will never lay the world under any obligation to him, but will be a moral pauper, a drag on the wheels of society, and if he too be identified with a peculiar variety of the race he will entail disgrace upon his race as well as upon himself. The world in which we live is very accommodating to all sorts of people. It will cooperate with them in any measure which they propose; it will help those who earnestly help themselves, and will hinder those who hinder themselves. It is very polite, and never offers its services unasked. Its favors to individuals are measured by an unerring principle in this—viz., respect those who respect themselves, and despise those who despise themselves. It is not within the power of unaided human nature to persevere in pitying a people who are insensible to their own wrongs and indifferent to the attainment of their own rights. The poet was as true to common sense as to poetry when he said,
Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.”
And further:
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-frederick-douglass-if-there-no-struggle-there-no-progress/