“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is of course arrant nonsense.
Mostly because in its original context Benjamin Franklin meant something very different indeed. He was supporting the right to purchase security:
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
It is an incredible little collection of paintings. Almost every one a masterpiece, or at least deeply interesting
And all of it in that fabulous Robert Adam house, in that location, overlooking London, and a garden by Repton
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
He is. And he's right.
tra la.
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
God no, they're not good plots. lol
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
What about those who give up liberty for a measure of sanity?
In this kind of context, I think of a chap I read about.
His hobby was to give speeches on a topic that he knew to be so offensive to the locals that they nearly always resulted in violence.
He killed several people over the years in the ensuing fights. And proudly published a booklet on how to kill people with a knife.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
Which is where the pulse oximeters come in handy. On the Tuesday morning mine was flirting with telling me to dial 999. Felt OK though, other than very tired.
No paracetamol, decided to follow Dr Campbell's advice and let the fever run hot. I did weaken and take a couple of Ibuprofen for headache, though.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Sorry, but it's unclear from your post: do you like her?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
🔥🔥🔥
No, duh, my sufficiently obvious point was: have you read it and do you therefore realise how dreadful it is? You are not having a good day.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
There’d be no liberty and a whole lot of security, of the “state security” variety, if MTG and her ilk get their druthers.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is of course arrant nonsense.
Mostly because in its original context Benjamin Franklin meant something very different indeed. He was supporting the right to purchase security:
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
Which is where the pulse oximeters come in handy. On the Tuesday morning mine was flirting with telling me to dial 999. Felt OK though, other than very tired.
No paracetamol, decided to follow Dr Campbell's advice and let the fever run hot. I did weaken and take a couple of Ibuprofen for headache, though.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
But that’s not most people is it? I worry that perfectly well people waste money on making expensive pee.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Sounds vile.
So fight her. Combat her lies convince her acolytes that she’s a poisonous individual.
Banning her from the mainstream just reinforces the belief that they are the righteous oppressed
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
God no, they're not good plots. lol
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
Do you think I am made of money? Tesco had a mispricing glitch last month and were knocking out Argentinian Malbec, 91 points from Tim Atkins whatever that means, at £4 a bottle. As I am on a meter I reckon that is pretty much the same price as tap water, and am acting accordingly.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Naah, because you need a critical mass before word of mouth takes off, and attaining critical mass without being properly published is I would have thought virtually impossible. Though I think The Martian may have managed it.
Doesn't word of mouth work a lot like the exponential growth of a pandemic virus?
It starts off with one infection/impressed reader, and for a long time it looks like nothing is happening, because exponential growth looks slow at first, but as long as R stays above 1 (if each reader recommends it to an average of more than one other) then as sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually explode into crazy numbers.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Sounds vile.
So fight her. Combat her lies convince her acolytes that she’s a poisonous individual.
Banning her from the mainstream just reinforces the belief that they are the righteous oppressed
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
What about those who give up liberty for a measure of sanity?
In this kind of context, I think of a chap I read about.
His hobby was to give speeches on a topic that he knew to be so offensive to the locals that they nearly always resulted in violence.
He killed several people over the years in the ensuing fights. And proudly published a booklet on how to kill people with a knife.
What should we have done about him?
If you'll let the Republicans know where he is, they'll nominate him for POTUS.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
There has been very little research into how well we can make excess Vit D in the summer and store it in adipose tissue. Which for us Northern Europeans has to be the mechanism. Otherwise our ancestors would have all got rickets.
I run, so I am out in the sun several times a week Apr-Sept, and rarely use sunblock. And try to eat good food sources such as oily fish a couple of times a week, plenty of free range eggs, etc.
I once had some bloods taken at the end of January and my Vit D was on point, so sun & diet works for me, at least.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Absolutely - if a child gets hooked on HP and then moves on to a lifetime of reading, that’s a good result.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
He is. And he's right.
tra la.
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
I'm not the world's biggest Beatles fan, but I acknowledge their greatness, and their importance, the same way I acknowledge Beethoven even tho I much prefer Bach or Mozart
AND they do have those songs that make me tingle. For me they are:
Let it Be (I don't know how anyone can listen to that without a little choke) Yesterday (tho others have covered this eternal song better) Hey Jude Long and Winding Road Something Eleanor Rigby Paperback Writer (brilliant driving guitar) Help Norwegian Wood Here Comes the Sun
to quote ten. I may have missed a couple, but those ten do it for me
Very very few artists or bands can give me Ten Songs that Tingle
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
These are both very enjoyable (if a bit weird) and you are probably too young to remember them 🙀
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is of course arrant nonsense.
Mostly because in its original context Benjamin Franklin meant something very different indeed. He was supporting the right to purchase security:
Yes indeed. But its modern usage is nonsense. We willingly give up liberty for security every day in numerous ways.
In its modern usage it might have an idealistic kind of appeal, but as you point out it's actually pretty dumb when you think about it. Like that silly saying about 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help', when it is easily shown that whatever problems can arise in our societies from overeager government, as a general rule weak government being able to do little, even keep you safe, is far worse.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
Owen Jones has moved sharply against lockdowns (if he were ever for them, I dunno)
Lockdown is a transfer of "life" from the young to the old. They go against everything a proper lefty should stand for and it's unsurprising that so many on the actual left have been moving away from them.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
I see that, although I would prefer to see Alice in Wonderland or even Harry Potter as "starters". I hope Brown doesn't try his hand at writing conspiracy theories.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
That little Dutch girl taught me A lesson that I liked If you want to save the country Stick your finger in a Dyck!
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Sounds vile.
So fight her. Combat her lies convince her acolytes that she’s a poisonous individual.
Banning her from the mainstream just reinforces the belief that they are the righteous oppressed
People are able to exclude themselves from the mainstream by their actions. It puts far far too much on those opposing such to act like it is responsible for the self righteousness of people who think similarly. Such people appear to be reinforced by people fighting them just with words (see how extremists all over love to rail against 'main stream media' attacking them), so your suggestion seems pretty meaningless to me.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
He is. And he's right.
tra la.
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
Fool on the Hill famously has a recorder solo.....
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Yes, that is true. I have been a lifelong bookworm and that sort airport novel is no longer my cup of tea, but the books that started me reading were no better. Biggles, Willard Price's "Adventure" series, then Alastair McLean and so on. A lifetime of reading needs a first step.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
What about those who give up liberty for a measure of sanity?
In this kind of context, I think of a chap I read about.
His hobby was to give speeches on a topic that he knew to be so offensive to the locals that they nearly always resulted in violence.
He killed several people over the years in the ensuing fights. And proudly published a booklet on how to kill people with a knife.
What should we have done about him?
As a Stoic, I would say that the locals were rational actors, who could, and should, choose not to behave that way.
I am not sure I believe in a crime of incitement, and certainly don't believe that it should be available as a defence.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
He is. And he's right.
tra la.
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
Fool on the Hill famously has a recorder solo.....
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
God no, they're not good plots. lol
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
He is. And he's right.
tra la.
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
I'm not the world's biggest Beatles fan, but I acknowledge their greatness, and their importance, the same way I acknowledge Beethoven even tho I much prefer Bach or Mozart
AND they do have those songs that make me tingle. For me they are:
Let it Be (I don't know how anyone can listen to that without a little choke) Yesterday (tho others have covered this eternal song better) Hey Jude Long and Winding Road Something Eleanor Rigby Paperback Writer (brilliant driving guitar) Help Norwegian Wood Here Comes the Sun
to quote ten. I may have missed a couple, but those ten do it for me
Very very few artists or bands can give me Ten Songs that Tingle
I don't listen to a lot of The Beatles, but Eleanor Rigby is just about perfect.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Yes, that is true. I have been a lifelong bookworm and that sort airport novel is no longer my cup of tea, but the books that started me reading were no better. Biggles, Willard Price's "Adventure" series, then Alastair McLean and so on. A lifetime of reading needs a first step.
Roald Dahl filled that niche for a lot of my generation, Matilda in particular. I'd be interested if his books are considered good (children's) literature or not, notwithstanding him apparently being a wrong 'un. Edit:
Also the Redwall series was pretty influential for me, though I've heard Brian Jacques was also a racist, so children's literature is obviously a minefield there.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
Believing in her being anointed is not quite the same thing as divine right I'd say - since as you say you accept she is a constitutional monarch so presumably believe whoever gets to be anointed has to meet whatever criteria or limitations within that constitution first.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
But that’s not most people is it? I worry that perfectly well people waste money on making expensive pee.
The levels set by the UK Government in relation to sufficient intake of Vitamin D are low compared to most other countries; I believe that they were set there (for whatever reason) as the minimum level needed to avoid rickets. I'd say Vitamin D deficiency in the wider population, but especially within ethnic minority communities, is a widely acknowledged issue.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
I've read Middlemarch, and Madame Bovary, a few other dull 19th century novels, possibly as many as six pages of Ulysses, (and some good ones too, I guess), and there is zero chance of me re-reading any of the dull ones, despite them appearing on lists of Great Literature, while I regularly re-read the Harry Potter series, because it's a great story, and it tells the important stories about life, love, courage, etc, that people want to read. I also love that Harry grows up during the series, to the extent of including large periods in books 4-6 where I don't like him because he's an impossible teenager.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Yes, that is true. I have been a lifelong bookworm and that sort airport novel is no longer my cup of tea, but the books that started me reading were no better. Biggles, Willard Price's "Adventure" series, then Alastair McLean and so on. A lifetime of reading needs a first step.
Roald Dahl filled that niche for a lot of my generation, Matilda in particular. I'd be interested if his books are considered good (children's) literature or not, notwithstanding him apparently being a wrong 'un.
Biggles and Willard Price are really quite unacceptable nowadays, full of racist stereotypes etc. They were of their time, like Enid Blighton, Roald Dahl, JK Rowling all are, and as such fall from favour as fashions change.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
I got twice-daily texts to submit blood sats and pulse readings (and an annoyed follow-up text if I didn't do so promptly enough). Not sure what would have happened if I had persisted in not doing so.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Absolutely - if a child gets hooked on HP and then moves on to a lifetime of reading, that’s a good result.
Yes. My daughter is still an avid reader. Books develop imagination in a way that cartoons can never do. How many of us are disappointed when watching a film after we have read the book of a story.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is of course arrant nonsense.
Mostly because in its original context Benjamin Franklin meant something very different indeed. He was supporting the right to purchase security:
Yes indeed. But its modern usage is nonsense. We willingly give up liberty for security every day in numerous ways.
In its modern usage it might have an idealistic kind of appeal, but as you point out it's actually pretty dumb when you think about it. Like that silly saying about 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help', when it is easily shown that whatever problems can arise in our societies from overeager government, as a general rule weak government being able to do little, even keep you safe, is far worse.
As per the earlier discussion about violent crime in South Africa.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
What was God playing at when he anointed Edward VIII?
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
What about those who give up liberty for a measure of sanity?
In this kind of context, I think of a chap I read about.
His hobby was to give speeches on a topic that he knew to be so offensive to the locals that they nearly always resulted in violence.
He killed several people over the years in the ensuing fights. And proudly published a booklet on how to kill people with a knife.
What should we have done about him?
As a Stoic, I would say that the locals were rational actors, who could, and should, choose not to behave that way.
I am not sure I believe in a crime of incitement, and certainly don't believe that it should be available as a defence.
Their traditional culture *demanded* the violence. What was bing spoken of was fundamentally offensive to them....
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is arrant nonsense.
Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet… Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet….
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
God always backs the winner. I'm sure we can appreciate a canny gambler who is green on any outcome.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
A company I used to work for pivoted partly into that area. But the human body is massively more complex than a fridge, and the metrics to measure hazy.
Earlier on in the pandemic, I heard interesting interviews with people who said smart watches could detect infection by covid/flu days before anyone became overtly symptomatic by monitoring their heart rate. If I go to the doctors to have my heart rate measured, then there's a chance that just being there will affect my heart rate. Or that my heart rate is higher when I wake up then when I go to bed, and my natural rhythms different from yours. By constantly monitoring your heart rate, the software can see what *your* individual rhythms are, and detect a tiny difference. It can also ignore large differences, e.g. when you are moving around or exercising.
And, they claimed, infections raise your heart rate just enough to be detected by this sort of monitoring.
It may be b/s; it may prove unworkable. But it isn't outside the realms of possibility, and could have really interesting and useful consequences.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
I was impatient to read and write. Apart from books from our school library about how to make things the 1st books of literature I remember were "Og Son of Fire" and "The Hobbit". The latter was definitely a 1st edition hardback, long gone into dust no doubt.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
It is an incredible little collection of paintings. Almost every one a masterpiece, or at least deeply interesting
And all of it in that fabulous Robert Adam house, in that location, overlooking London, and a garden by Repton
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Maybe God had a change of heart?
Quite plausible. Jehovah in the Old Testament is horribly and infamously bipolar. And contradicts himself from one book to the next, virtually changing his identity at various points
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
There has been very little research into how well we can make excess Vit D in the summer and store it in adipose tissue. Which for us Northern Europeans has to be the mechanism. Otherwise our ancestors would have all got rickets.
I run, so I am out in the sun several times a week Apr-Sept, and rarely use sunblock. And try to eat good food sources such as oily fish a couple of times a week, plenty of free range eggs, etc.
I once had some bloods taken at the end of January and my Vit D was on point, so sun & diet works for me, at least.
Great news. Vitamin D enhanced mushrooms (they are flooded with fake sunlight) are also becoming widely available, though they only provide D2, which is a bit less effective than D3 in increasing levels in the blood. But still a delicious and probably very effective way of topping up.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
Yebbut now that most of us have had several 5G chips injected, remote control should start working soon.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is arrant nonsense.
Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet… Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet….
Yep. Going with Ben Franklin
Did you read the link to see it in context? Or do you dispute the context?
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Fun fact - Henry Tudor was the third consecutive crowned king to be a usurper, after Edward IV and Richard III (Edward V was not crowned).
He was also the first adult male to be legally succeeded by another adult male since 1413 and only the second since 1307.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
That little Dutch girl taught me A lesson that I liked If you want to save the country Stick your finger in a Dyck!
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
🔥🔥🔥
No, duh, my sufficiently obvious point was: have you read it and do you therefore realise how dreadful it is? You are not having a good day.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
It is an incredible little collection of paintings. Almost every one a masterpiece, or at least deeply interesting
And all of it in that fabulous Robert Adam house, in that location, overlooking London, and a garden by Repton
Up there with the Jacquemart-Andre, the Frick and the Huntingdon IMV
Yes, we've had this enjoyable discussion, I believe. The small but high quality collections are the best. No slogging for hours around enormous halls, including Assyrian statues and obscure pottery. Just a short burst of extreme quality, then a boozy lunch. Perfect
Talking of which they have apparently rehung the Courtauld and it is said to very good, have you been?
PS I would add this to our list of great small museums of the word. Magical. And still privately owned by the family that assembled the collection, you can see their vintage cars and impressive new motorbikes parked casually in the drive
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
I've read Middlemarch, and Madame Bovary, a few other dull 19th century novels, possibly as many as six pages of Ulysses, (and some good ones too, I guess), and there is zero chance of me re-reading any of the dull ones, despite them appearing on lists of Great Literature, while I regularly re-read the Harry Potter series, because it's a great story, and it tells the important stories about life, love, courage, etc, that people want to read. I also love that Harry grows up during the series, to the extent of including large periods in books 4-6 where I don't like him because he's an impossible teenager.
I'm apparently related to George Eliot. I've never read Middlemarch.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
The only one of the Beatles with any real talent was Yoko.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
What was God playing at when he anointed Edward VIII?
It was Edward VIII's decision not to respect the position he got from God and marry divorcee Wallace Simpson.
So God then anointed George VIth, father of our current Queen, instead
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
Yebbut now that most of us have had several 5G chips injected, remote control should start working soon.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
The devine right thing was revisionist crap peddled by Charles I. The truth is that our monarchy is quasi-elective, settled on protestant heirs of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, by Parliament. Which is why Edward VIII needed an Act of Parliament to abdicate.
So the anointing is part of the induction process, nothing to do with the choosing.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
What was God playing at when he anointed Edward VIII?
It was Edward VIII's decision not to respect the position he got from God and marry divorcee Wallace Simpson.
So God then anointed George VIth, mother of our current Queen, instead
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Fun fact - Henry Tudor was the third consecutive crowned king to be a usurper, after Edward IV and Richard III (Edward V was not crowned).
He was also the first adult male to be legally succeeded by another adult male since 1413 and only the second since 1307.
Mind, Scotland had it far worse...
But now we call them the Secretary of State for Scotland.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Arguably until the Reformation English Kings were acknowledged by God but not anointed by God as the head of the English Church was the Pope, not the Monarch. Cromwell was never King
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
A company I used to work for pivoted partly into that area. But the human body is massively more complex than a fridge, and the metrics to measure hazy.
Earlier on in the pandemic, I heard interesting interviews with people who said smart watches could detect infection by covid/flu days before anyone became overtly symptomatic by monitoring their heart rate. If I go to the doctors to have my heart rate measured, then there's a chance that just being there will affect my heart rate. Or that my heart rate is higher when I wake up then when I go to bed, and my natural rhythms different from yours. By constantly monitoring your heart rate, the software can see what *your* individual rhythms are, and detect a tiny difference. It can also ignore large differences, e.g. when you are moving around or exercising.
And, they claimed, infections raise your heart rate just enough to be detected by this sort of monitoring.
It may be b/s; it may prove unworkable. But it isn't outside the realms of possibility, and could have really interesting and useful consequences.
Interesting. Two anecdotes. A friend once had a medical in starting a job. All good except an alarmingly high BP for a man in his early 30’s. Doctor asked him to wear a BP monitor for 24 hours to get a baseline reading, which he did. Completely, totally, utterly normal BP right up to the point of walking in to see the doc again. Classic ‘white coat syndrome’. Another friend went to the go seven times over several months because he wasn’t quite right. He is a bloody good runner, ran with Paula Radcliffe for most of her last London marathon. He knew his body. The go kept saying that maybe he was just getting older etc. In the end, he was referred and needed heart surgery. The moral is small details of how your body works can be really small changes but from really important.
BREAKING: A very serious situation at hospitals across Lincolnshire tonight as @ULHT_News declares a 'critical incident' over "extreme and unprecedented" staff shortages. It says it is "unable to maintain safe staffing levels" leading to "compromised care" across its sites: https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1477711272384909314/photo/1
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
God always backs the winner. I'm sure we can appreciate a canny gambler who is green on any outcome.
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
God always backs the winner. I'm sure we can appreciate a canny gambler who is green on any outcome.
"Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."
Indeed yes. I seriously pissed off many Wokeists on Twitter who were calling for statues of Lee to be removed by saying that Washington was just as big a traitor and a much worse slaveholder.
And a worse general, of course.
The difference is, he eventually won. With a little help from the French.
Writing for most folks is HARD work, and the better a writer you are, the harder it is, at least 99.46% of the time for 99.46% writers.
Anyway, that's what I tell myself!
An old friend recently published a study of the role of music in the Soviet Union during WW2. Based of research, including numerous interviews with Russians and Russian emigres of that vintage. Plus learning, singing and performing scores of songs from the Great Patriotic War - a big hit with the Ruskis.
Indeed, in her book, she writes about meeting a woman in New York City, who left the USSR in the 1970s and was extremely & outspokenly anti-Soviet. Yet when my friend sang one of the most popular Russian WW2 ballads, the same woman broke into tears. Fortunately tears of joy - she loved that song, and the whole repertorie, including a few that the author had NOT heard previously.
The most amazing thing about this book - "Sing to Victory" by Suzanne Ament - is the fact that the author is blind, and has been since childhood. Notwithstanding, she did an immense amount of archival research in Russian, and distilled this down to a great narrative chock full of facts, insights and, above all, heart and soul.
Among the most interesting things mentioned, is that while the Soviet State and Communist Party were intent on closely supervising and directly managing popular song as part of culture in general, there was a countervailing and at times superior pressure from the bottom up, in favor of certain key themes and even specific songs. In one instance, a song that was panned and purged by the powers-that-be was resurrected due to popular demand by Red Army soldiers; it ended up becoming a big hit across the USSR.
Writing is hard, and writing a book is stupendously so. My hat is off to my friend, and her fellow authors. Especially when they've got something (at least semi-) worthwhile to say.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
The devine right thing was revisionist crap peddled by Charles I. The truth is that our monarchy is quasi-elective, settled on protestant heirs of Sophia, Electress of Hanover, by Parliament. Which is why Edward VIII needed an Act of Parliament to abdicate.
So the anointing is part of the induction process, nothing to do with the choosing.
Given the common revolts, rebellions, coups, overthrows etc, the idea people believed in divine right of a king in any practical way (as in preventing any of the former actions) seems like it would amuse most nobles throughout history.
I do like the idea of it being part of the induction process, not selection.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Arguably until the Reformation English Kings were acknowledged by God but not anointed by God as the head of the English Church was the Pope, not the Monarch
I thought the God's Anointed thing was *proven* by all the "monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc."
1) When the monarchs in question got to be monarch, that was proof that they were God's anointed. 2) But when they later strayed (God, free will etc) their downfalls proved that they had lost God's grace..... 3) Their successor was obviously the new Anointed (see 1)
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Arguably until the Reformation English Kings were acknowledged by God but not anointed by God as the head of the English Church was the Pope, not the Monarch
That aspect of the coronation rite didn't change at the Reformation. Kings of England were always anointed.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Arguably until the Reformation English Kings were acknowledged by God but not anointed by God as the head of the English Church was the Pope, not the Monarch
I thought the God's Anointed thing was *proven* by all the "monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc."
1) When the monarchs in question got to be monarch, that was proof that they were God's anointed. 2) But when they later strayed (God, free will etc) their downfalls proved that they had lost God's grace..... 3) Their successor was obviously the new Anointed (see 1)
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Yes, that is true. I have been a lifelong bookworm and that sort airport novel is no longer my cup of tea, but the books that started me reading were no better. Biggles, Willard Price's "Adventure" series, then Alastair McLean and so on. A lifetime of reading needs a first step.
I tried re-reading my Dad’s GA Henty collection (the books that I devoured as a kid). Man, are they hard work!
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is arrant nonsense.
Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet… Ben Franklin… anonymous bloke on the internet….
Yep. Going with Ben Franklin
Knowing what Franklin said is not really enough, though. Understanding what he meant and whether it is relevant are important parts of the puzzle.
I did read The Da Vinci Code some time ago. Couldn't put it down, but felt a little silly as if taken in by a circus barker to buy some patent medicine or adopt Homeopathy. Sometimes I get the same queasy feeling as when singing "Happy Birthday".
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
I've said this story before, but years ago I was staying in a B&B in North Yorkshire. One breakfast, the owner's teenage daughter was reading the Da Vinci Code. I'd never read it, so I asked her what it was like. She said she loved it, but it was the first book she had ever read. She then added she would read more.
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
Yes, that is true. I have been a lifelong bookworm and that sort airport novel is no longer my cup of tea, but the books that started me reading were no better. Biggles, Willard Price's "Adventure" series, then Alastair McLean and so on. A lifetime of reading needs a first step.
Roald Dahl filled that niche for a lot of my generation, Matilda in particular. I'd be interested if his books are considered good (children's) literature or not, notwithstanding him apparently being a wrong 'un. Edit:
Also the Redwall series was pretty influential for me, though I've heard Brian Jacques was also a racist, so children's literature is obviously a minefield there.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
The whole idea of who is the anointed falls apart for me when throughout history we’ve had monarchs usurped, replaced, murdered, chosen by committee etc. What is the chain of succession that gets Henry Bolingbrook to the throne, or Henry Tudor, or King Oliver?
Maybe God had a change of heart?
Quite plausible. Jehovah in the Old Testament is horribly and infamously bipolar. And contradicts himself from one book to the next, virtually changing his identity at various points
Bit of a hero of mine, actually
Isn't it Yahweh? I thought Jehovah had all the wrong vowels put in.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
One would have a pulse oximeter, and access to a healthcare practitioner, perhaps by video call, who could tell you quite quickly if continuing to treat at home was no longer viable. Your post suggests that 'continuously monitored professional healthcare' guarantees or even makes a good outcome more likely. I don't see the evidence of that.
In 1984, the refrigeration company I worked for introduced a remote monitoring system that monitored and reset, if necessary, clients’ refrigeration plant. It also alerted a engineer to visit site if necessary. In 2022, we still haven’t introduced a similar system for our bodies.
A company I used to work for pivoted partly into that area. But the human body is massively more complex than a fridge, and the metrics to measure hazy.
Earlier on in the pandemic, I heard interesting interviews with people who said smart watches could detect infection by covid/flu days before anyone became overtly symptomatic by monitoring their heart rate. If I go to the doctors to have my heart rate measured, then there's a chance that just being there will affect my heart rate. Or that my heart rate is higher when I wake up then when I go to bed, and my natural rhythms different from yours. By constantly monitoring your heart rate, the software can see what *your* individual rhythms are, and detect a tiny difference. It can also ignore large differences, e.g. when you are moving around or exercising.
And, they claimed, infections raise your heart rate just enough to be detected by this sort of monitoring.
It may be b/s; it may prove unworkable. But it isn't outside the realms of possibility, and could have really interesting and useful consequences.
I will happily vouch for this. I have been dieting (low carb permanently and 2 fasting days a week) and exercising (daily 5 miles walk religiously) in earnest for about a year and in that time have lost about 4 stone. I use a fitbit and also monitor blood pressure once a week. In that time my resting pulse has dropped from 85 bpm to 65 bpm and my blood pressure dropped from average 135/80 to average 120/65. Needless to say I am chuffed.
The two times when I have seen a very clear deflection from the trend is when I had covid and when I recently had a very bad cold. No real change in BP but my resting pulse in both cases rose from around 65 back up to around 80, peaking when I was most unwell and then dropping back again steadily to normal as I got better. It was a really good measure of the progress of my illness.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
True indeed.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I certainly believe the Queen is anointed by God as our monarch and to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Even if I also agree she is a constitutional not an absolute monarch
What was God playing at when he anointed Edward VIII?
It was Edward VIII's decision not to respect the position he got from God and marry divorcee Wallace Simpson.
So God then anointed George VIth, mother of our current Queen, instead
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
Are ‘most’ in the U.K. genuinely deficient in vitamins? D is complicated by ethnicity, but even there it’s not clear that most are deficient?
A recommendation by the Scxottish Gmt that people take some supplementary D in winter when daylight is very low in northern latitudes; there is also a possible interaction with genetics leading to MS. I take small levels myself.
There has been very little research into how well we can make excess Vit D in the summer and store it in adipose tissue. Which for us Northern Europeans has to be the mechanism. Otherwise our ancestors would have all got rickets.
I run, so I am out in the sun several times a week Apr-Sept, and rarely use sunblock. And try to eat good food sources such as oily fish a couple of times a week, plenty of free range eggs, etc.
I once had some bloods taken at the end of January and my Vit D was on point, so sun & diet works for me, at least.
Great news. Vitamin D enhanced mushrooms (they are flooded with fake sunlight) are also becoming widely available, though they only provide D2, which is a bit less effective than D3 in increasing levels in the blood. But still a delicious and probably very effective way of topping up.
Yes I would go for those, but I don't recall seeing them in the supermarket yet. Will do some research.
BREAKING: A very serious situation at hospitals across Lincolnshire tonight as @ULHT_News declares a 'critical incident' over "extreme and unprecedented" staff shortages. It says it is "unable to maintain safe staffing levels" leading to "compromised care" across its sites: https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1477711272384909314/photo/1
Distressing to hear, and good luck to the staff and patients, but isn't this basically the situation in every hospital in the country? Sadiq Khan declared a "critical emergency" (or similar) in London over Christmas
We know the NHS is under the cosh, there's not much we can do now. Apart from try not to slip over and break an ankle and get sent to A&E?
Restrictions won't do anything. It is too late, I doubt if they would ever work against Omicron anyway, in a UK democratic context
We are a bit like the British people in the Battle of Britain, staring up at the sky, willing on the RAF, but not able to do much more
Comments
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century?t=1641156675923
And all of it in that fabulous Robert Adam house, in that location, overlooking London, and a garden by Repton
And completely free. Just breeze in. Marvellous!
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/kenwood/history-stories-kenwood/history/description/
https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/kenwood/history-stories-kenwood/history/significance/
Like everybody else I listen to radio 2 in the car. There's lots of songs that, no matter that you have heard them 1000 times and if you want to hear them again you can put them on spotify, you get a genuine uplift when r2 plays them. blowing in the wind, brass in pocket, after the gold rush, losing my religion, born to run, time after time, satisfaction - long long list. I have just thought, none of the beatles songs r2 plays affect me that way. then I thought, What beatles songs that r2 plays anyway? And they don't. and the reason they don't is because nobody wants to hear them, because at their very best they sound like songs you would write to teach very unmusical and stupid people, how to play the recorder.
One can imagine a game to pass the time when traveling thinking of slogans that have stuck---say "Go to work on an egg"---and so forth.
His hobby was to give speeches on a topic that he knew to be so offensive to the locals that they nearly always resulted in violence.
He killed several people over the years in the ensuing fights. And proudly published a booklet on how to kill people with a knife.
What should we have done about him?
Humpty Dumpty didn't fall, he was pushed...
No paracetamol, decided to follow Dr Campbell's advice and let the fever run hot. I did weaken and take a couple of Ibuprofen for headache, though.
But its modern usage is nonsense. We willingly give up liberty for security every day in numerous ways.
Shout out to @Foxy
Pulse oximeters saved family members in Peru. And helped a good few friends here.
So fight her. Combat her lies convince her acolytes that she’s a poisonous individual.
Banning her from the mainstream just reinforces the belief that they are the righteous oppressed
It starts off with one infection/impressed reader, and for a long time it looks like nothing is happening, because exponential growth looks slow at first, but as long as R stays above 1 (if each reader recommends it to an average of more than one other) then as sure as eggs is eggs it will eventually explode into crazy numbers.
Though I do think it a bit silly and disingenuous when people pretend monarchists cannot criticise members of a royal family because the point of monarchy is you get what you get. That's never been how monarchy worked in practice, even when people did believe (or claimed to believe) in divine right, anymore than people who nominally believed the pope was God's representative on earth could not oppose them on many temporal and spiritual matters. Our monarchy might well keep religious titles, but no one of any sense believes in divine right - parliament and outside forces essentially deposed one monarch, invited in another, set rules for it which excluded those who would otherwise have been in the succesion - and one can very easily believe in the system, without supporting everyone involved.
So the 'the point in monarchy is you don't have a say' thing is just being absurd and silly - if our monarchy steps out of line of what is expected of it it would be changed or abolished pronto, and that doesn't even touch upon the issue of embarrassing members of a royal line, who have always been able to be dealt with one way or another. In what monarchy on earth was every member of a line sacrosanct?
I've read it since, and it's poor literature. But if it helped one girl to start loving reading, then good on it.
Perhaps HP and DVC are just gateway drugs to better literature. If so, then that's fine.
https://www.jasperfforde.com/special.html
I run, so I am out in the sun several times a week Apr-Sept, and rarely use sunblock. And try to eat good food sources such as oily fish a couple of times a week, plenty of free range eggs, etc.
I once had some bloods taken at the end of January and my Vit D was on point, so sun & diet works for me, at least.
AND they do have those songs that make me tingle. For me they are:
Let it Be (I don't know how anyone can listen to that without a little choke)
Yesterday (tho others have covered this eternal song better)
Hey Jude
Long and Winding Road
Something
Eleanor Rigby
Paperback Writer (brilliant driving guitar)
Help
Norwegian Wood
Here Comes the Sun
to quote ten. I may have missed a couple, but those ten do it for me
Very very few artists or bands can give me Ten Songs that Tingle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Strange_&_Mr_Norrell
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash:_A_Secret_History
A lesson that I liked
If you want to save the country
Stick your finger in a Dyck!
I am not sure I believe in a crime of incitement, and certainly don't believe that it should be available as a defence.
It's not the greatest wine in the world (it is only £13.95), but it is lovely. Let it breathe for an hour
To my mind the best wine you can easily buy in a British supermarket at the moment (at least under £20) is this. A Phenomenal Amarone:
https://www.vivino.com/GB/en/tesco-amarone-della-valpolicella/w/7037572
Rich, serious, chocolatey, coffee-ish, ooooooh
Edit:
Also the Redwall series was pretty influential for me, though I've heard Brian Jacques was also a racist, so children's literature is obviously a minefield there.
It’s just that he invented them…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassius_Marcellus_Clay_(politician)
Yep. Going with Ben Franklin
Earlier on in the pandemic, I heard interesting interviews with people who said smart watches could detect infection by covid/flu days before anyone became overtly symptomatic by monitoring their heart rate. If I go to the doctors to have my heart rate measured, then there's a chance that just being there will affect my heart rate. Or that my heart rate is higher when I wake up then when I go to bed, and my natural rhythms different from yours. By constantly monitoring your heart rate, the software can see what *your* individual rhythms are, and detect a tiny difference. It can also ignore large differences, e.g. when you are moving around or exercising.
And, they claimed, infections raise your heart rate just enough to be detected by this sort of monitoring.
It may be b/s; it may prove unworkable. But it isn't outside the realms of possibility, and could have really interesting and useful consequences.
Edit: like this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-symptoms-smart-watch/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6
Bit of a hero of mine, actually
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century?t=1641156675923
He was also the first adult male to be legally succeeded by another adult male since 1413 and only the second since 1307.
Mind, Scotland had it far worse...
It’s not always about you.
Yes, we've had this enjoyable discussion, I believe. The small but high quality collections are the best. No slogging for hours around enormous halls, including Assyrian statues and obscure pottery. Just a short burst of extreme quality, then a boozy lunch. Perfect
Talking of which they have apparently rehung the Courtauld and it is said to very good, have you been?
PS I would add this to our list of great small museums of the word. Magical. And still privately owned by the family that assembled the collection, you can see their vintage cars and impressive new motorbikes parked casually in the drive
https://www.rome.net/palazzo-doria-pamphilj
https://ianleslie.substack.com/p/64-reasons-to-celebrate-paul-mccartney
So God then anointed George VIth, father of our current Queen, instead
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2GC1dFjeZU
So the anointing is part of the induction process, nothing to do with the choosing.
Another friend went to the go seven times over several months because he wasn’t quite right. He is a bloody good runner, ran with Paula Radcliffe for most of her last London marathon. He knew his body. The go kept saying that maybe he was just getting older etc.
In the end, he was referred and needed heart surgery. The moral is small details of how your body works can be really small changes but from really important.
And a worse general, of course.
The difference is, he eventually won. With a little help from the French.
Anyway, that's what I tell myself!
An old friend recently published a study of the role of music in the Soviet Union during WW2. Based of research, including numerous interviews with Russians and Russian emigres of that vintage. Plus learning, singing and performing scores of songs from the Great Patriotic War - a big hit with the Ruskis.
Indeed, in her book, she writes about meeting a woman in New York City, who left the USSR in the 1970s and was extremely & outspokenly anti-Soviet. Yet when my friend sang one of the most popular Russian WW2 ballads, the same woman broke into tears. Fortunately tears of joy - she loved that song, and the whole repertorie, including a few that the author had NOT heard previously.
The most amazing thing about this book - "Sing to Victory" by Suzanne Ament - is the fact that the author is blind, and has been since childhood. Notwithstanding, she did an immense amount of archival research in Russian, and distilled this down to a great narrative chock full of facts, insights and, above all, heart and soul.
Among the most interesting things mentioned, is that while the Soviet State and Communist Party were intent on closely supervising and directly managing popular song as part of culture in general, there was a countervailing and at times superior pressure from the bottom up, in favor of certain key themes and even specific songs. In one instance, a song that was panned and purged by the powers-that-be was resurrected due to popular demand by Red Army soldiers; it ended up becoming a big hit across the USSR.
Writing is hard, and writing a book is stupendously so. My hat is off to my friend, and her fellow authors. Especially when they've got something (at least semi-) worthwhile to say.
I do like the idea of it being part of the induction process, not selection.
1) When the monarchs in question got to be monarch, that was proof that they were God's anointed.
2) But when they later strayed (God, free will etc) their downfalls proved that they had lost God's grace.....
3) Their successor was obviously the new Anointed (see 1)
Simple, really.
van Dyck btw
The two times when I have seen a very clear deflection from the trend is when I had covid and when I recently had a very bad cold. No real change in BP but my resting pulse in both cases rose from around 65 back up to around 80, peaking when I was most unwell and then dropping back again steadily to normal as I got better. It was a really good measure of the progress of my illness.
We know the NHS is under the cosh, there's not much we can do now. Apart from try not to slip over and break an ankle and get sent to A&E?
Restrictions won't do anything. It is too late, I doubt if they would ever work against Omicron anyway, in a UK democratic context
We are a bit like the British people in the Battle of Britain, staring up at the sky, willing on the RAF, but not able to do much more