A Perfect Storm Coming Down Under

A half-Italian, half-Irish Republican of limited intellectual ability given control of a constitutional monarchy with no experience of government, and whose only real policy is to empoverish the people via neo-religious climate change extremism.

What could possibly go wrong?

Rowing Back on Abortion

You might think that racism is a black and white issue. You would be wrong, but that might well not stop you thinking as much. And you might think that abortion is a “right or wrong’ kind of thing as well. And you would be wrong about that too.

But not so wrong, perhaps, as the judges in Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court case back in the 1970s, which said that US States were not free to legislate about abortion, save within the rules that SOCUS then invented. Is it really a case of sausages? I will get onto that in just a moment, but first a quick look at the law. For that, we need to start in 1868, the date of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and in particular section 1 of it. Bear with me. It is quite short:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And the relevant bit here is just this bit in that section:

…nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.^[5]

Let us start by clearing something up. A foetus is not a “person” for the purpose of this section. At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, an unborn child has not been not born in the United States, or anywhere else for that matter. Nor,

Robert Fenwick Elliott is Unwell

It was very welcome to get an aeroplane get out of the State last week, in order to attend – in person – the Society of Construction Law Australia’s annual conference in Hobart. Hobart is rather nice. We like Hobart. I was delivering a paper on Extra-Contractual Recoveries. It was, to be honest, a bit of an advertisement for my book, which I’m happy to say is selling well, but I have no objection at all to it selling even better.

A day or so after getting back, it was evident I had a stinking cold. At least, I think it is a stinking cold. It started out pretty much like every cold over the whole of my adult life. But could it be the near cousin of the common cold, Covid? I’m not entirely sure. With the common cold, one’s nose runs like a torrent with unspeakable yuck. This time it is more like a stream. You don’t need to know this. I’m sorry that this post is of a poorer quality than usual. I am unwell, the world swimming quite a bit in front of my eyes. I charge quite a lot for my legal services: there is no way that I impose that charge until my brain get back to normal. And things stop dancing around in my concentration stream.

My world has been submitted to new challenges. My Chambers has superimposed a portal policy. To be honest, I’m not really entirely sure what this means, except that I have had to change my password to something much more complicated, my computers have slowed down and a whole load of weird stuff is going on when I surf the net. It is perfectly possible that I do not understand quite how to adapt by these increased security considerations. Maybe next week?

The 5% problem with Covid vaccination

Like the vast majority of the population, I am in no position to make an assessment of the science concerning the mechanism of Covid 19 vaccines. There are clearly experts who have very technical explanations as to why they think that Covid 19 vaccines are dangerous in a way that the other, well established vaccines are not. They might be right. They might not be.

But for me like anyone else who makes a living in a technical field, and who is regularly required to evaluate expert reports and opinions, it is possible to take a “black box” approach. Never mind the reasons: is it in fact the case that the Covid vaccines cause collateral damage on a scale that is different in kind from other vaccines?

The answer rather seems to be “yes”, not least because of the figures available from the United States from the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). That system is not perfect, of course, but it is nevertheless useful. Evidence from it has recently been considered in the paper Innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccinations: The role of G-quadruplexes, exosomes, and MicroRNAs by Stephanie Seneff,^a,∗ Greg Nigh,^b Anthony M. Kyriakopoulos,^c and Peter A. McCullough^d. One of the points made there is that the number of adverse reactions which are reported is a small fraction of the actual number of adverse reactions. It seems that as sophisticated as possible an analysis of this is that VAERS underreports adverse reactions by a factor of 31.[1]  Some of the reports come from members of the public, including perhaps some anti-vax nutters, but about two thirds of the reports come from medical professionals, at any rate in cases where the adverse reaction is death.[2]

So here comes the bad news. In 2021, there were 737,689 reported adverse reactions to the Covid 19 vaccines in the United States, representing 93% of

Parish Notice

The wife of Neil Parish, who is resigning as an MP having admitted that it was he who was watching pornography on his mobile phone in the House of Commons, described the affair as very embarrassing.

She is right about that, of course, and also perhaps in going on to remark:

If you were mad with every man who looked at pornography, you would not have many wives in the world.

The whole thing is indeed unfortunate; everyone seems to agree that Neil Parish was a respected and hard-working MP who frankly admitted that he got distracted by the porn site when he was really more interested in looking up tractors. There are others in the House of Commons who really should be first out the door, including Claudia Webbe MP, who stands convicted of a particularly nasty sexually-motivated crime. It is not as though Neil Parish was seeking to sexually exploit anyone else in the House of Commons, which is more than can be said about Angela Rayner MP. There are a number of witnesses who heard her light-hearted description of how she tries to put Boris Johnson off his stride in the Chamber:

I like to do my Sharon Stone trick. I cross and uncross my legs and give him a flash of my ginger growler.

It would clearly be sexually exploitative if