If you're interested in what it is like to fight as a junior officer in the Russian infantry, I highly recommend this video made from the videos on a captured Russian's cell phone. Compelling, depressing, sad.
He looks about 14, right down to the Stone Island t-shirt. At my advanced years a lot of young adults look about 14, mind.
Soldiers (especially officers) always look ridiculously young, I think.
I know that is a very carefully edited video, but to my untrained eye, they seem to have no idea how to respond when they start taking fire. They just sort of sit there.
I'd imagine one of the first lessons of combat training would involve not freezing and/or panicking under fire. Don't know how easy that is to do effectively..
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
That sounds like your opinion of what they are supposed to do, and what they might tell themselves they do. As far as I can see Conservative governments tell people what to do just as much as Labour governments - once you get in, policies and behaviours you would decry suddenly become acceptable. Hence why localism is constantly preached but rarely realised - because Westminster, and Whitehall, don't like giving up power. Whitehall is just more honest about that.
Agree strongly with both posts. I don't think Conservatives know they are interfering, whereas Labour are fully aware of what they are doing. Would be interesting to know if a liberal government actually was liberal.
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
An outstanding post. We need another on the zero covid types, tho.
Andy won't give you that post, GW. He's in the zero COVID club. And while those individuals were idiots, the dismissal of any concerns around the medium to long term impact of lockdown by scientists is the issue. They pushed an agenda of "no one should die of this deadly disease" and now tens of millions will actually die from famine. It's just we won't see it.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Our antipodean cousins have their own election next Saturday and PB's Aussie counterpart is the wonderful pollbludger.net which goes into over-analysis of every poll and discussion in extremis of every piece of political minutiae (so not like us at all).
Note Morrison still leads as preferred PM though, if Newspoll has the same 2PP error it did in 2019 it would actually be about Labor 50% Coalition 50%
Morrison's lead is 43-42 with Newspoll so far from convincing. The other question is the extent to which the Australian pollsters have compensated (or over-compensated) for what happened last time.
Complicating matters further is the divergence between states so piling up votes in one State isn't helpful if you are losing marginal seats on the other side of that vast country.
This piece may be of interest suggesting Labor will win 80, the Coalition 63 and the others 8.
No party leader who has led on the final preferred PM poll with Newspoll has ever lost an Australian Federal election, although a number whose party has trailed on 2PP has gone on to win.
Of course in 2019 the Coalition lost the 2PP in every Australian state and territory except Queensland and Western Australia but still won enough marginal seats elsewhere and those states by big enough margins to win
Correction, the Coalition won the 2PP in NSW in 2019 just but Labor won most seats there
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
See this thread I posted earlier. Finns have been planning for years.
Minna Ålander 🌻 @minna_alander Since many people know nothing about Finland, jump on click bait headlines and retweet without checking facts, here a short overview of the things Russia has threatened Finland with so far & what their consequences are/would be:
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
An outstanding post. We need another on the zero covid types, tho.
Andy won't give you that post, GW. He's in the zero COVID club. And while those individuals were idiots, the dismissal of any concerns around the medium to long term impact of lockdown by scientists is the issue. They pushed an agenda of "no one should die of this deadly disease" and now tens of millions will actually die from famine. It's just we won't see it.
And in any case, fundamentally the lockdown sceptics were right. The first wave probably peaked before lockdown, and the two Omicron waves definitely peaked without lockdown.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Nevertheless the Russians will cut them off.
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
See this thread I posted earlier. Finns have been planning for years.
Minna Ålander 🌻 @minna_alander Since many people know nothing about Finland, jump on click bait headlines and retweet without checking facts, here a short overview of the things Russia has threatened Finland with so far & what their consequences are/would be:
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
An outstanding post. We need another on the zero covid types, tho.
Andy won't give you that post, GW. He's in the zero COVID club. And while those individuals were idiots, the dismissal of any concerns around the medium to long term impact of lockdown by scientists is the issue. They pushed an agenda of "no one should die of this deadly disease" and now tens of millions will actually die from famine. It's just we won't see it.
Will you please quit lying about what I was saying?
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Nevertheless the Russians will cut them off.
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
It was derisively called "Finlandisation". And it was proposed to Putin by Macron for Ukraine as a way of dealing with the tensions then building up before the Russians invaded. Not even quasi-effective
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Andy, we didn't have a working health service anyway - lockdown zealots turned it into the National Covid Service. It's barely a working health service even now.
As for the different waves - all of those were associated with a specific version rather than the Wuhan original, no?
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Nevertheless the Russians will cut them off.
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
There was even a word - Finlandization - that means basically "don't upset your big neighbor."
Twitter buyout getting interesting. If the Twitter board has been ummmm under estimating the number of bot accounts then it gives Musk either an out or the chance to get in even lower and leaves the board in a difficult position.
Well, it does appear that Musk’s team are uncovering things in their due diligence, that one might not necessarily expect to find at a public company.
The other problem is that Tesla shares have fallen more than 40% from their highs, meaning Musk needs to put up a lot more of them in collateral.
That is probably the main factor imo. Funny game capitalism. No-one dips their hand in their own pocket.
Twitter buyout getting interesting. If the Twitter board has been ummmm under estimating the number of bot accounts then it gives Musk either an out or the chance to get in even lower and leaves the board in a difficult position.
Well, it does appear that Musk’s team are uncovering things in their due diligence, that one might not necessarily expect to find at a public company.
The other problem is that Tesla shares have fallen more than 40% from their highs, meaning Musk needs to put up a lot more of them in collateral.
That is probably the main factor imo. Funny game capitalism. No-one dips their hand in their own pocket.
He's trying to get the price down by grimacing and sucking in air and telling the owner how much work he'll have to do on it. Just like buying a second hand car.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3460754/#Comment_3460754 (During an argument with Topping on why we should vaccinate teens, when I emphasised: "I've stated that we are highly unlikely to want to do that - but that we should not blithely assume that it will not be an issue for them. Could you provide a link to anywhere that I've said we should lockdown again to protect the kids?
As it happens, I think that schools breaking up will do a lot to help.")
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Andy, we didn't have a working health service anyway - lockdown zealots turned it into the National Covid Service. It's barely a working health service even now.
As for the different waves - all of those were associated with a specific version rather than the Wuhan original, no?
The pandemic turned it into a National Covid service. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a problem.
Paul Mainwood came up with looking at average ambulance response times as a metric to help estimate stresses on healthcare (as these are very much driven by A&E departments being under stress and therefore giving no opportunity to offload patients into them, and by wards being under stress to not give patients into them, etc).
We can see what it looked like before the pandemic:
Category 1 ambulance responses are the ones where "someone is dying if you don't get here NOW." Someone isn't breathing, or there heart as stopped, or this is about to happen. Target is 7 minutes.
Category 2 are ones which "need rapid assessment and transport" and include strokes, suspected heart attacks where the heart hasn't actually gone into cardiac arrest, etc. Target is 18 minutes.
That graph is how things were before the pandemic. Usually hitting the target on Category 1, but Category 2 usually exceeding the target time - but not by that much.
This is what has happened since the pandemic hit.
They've managed to keep the Category 1 times down(-ish), but by sacrificing Category 2. Times have gone up towards a full hour (in some areas (South West) up past 2 hours).
You can see the original wave spike, then the growth towards the winter wave(s), then the Delta surge.
You can also see the lockdowns
If we're trying to claim the lockdowns made it worse, we have to explain why those pushed the numbers down and releasing them let the numbers spring up.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
What sort of share in the political betting on (say) a local election are here on PB? 50%? With some of the long term markets it's surely larger, and with the really big markets (Brexit etc) wildly less.
I ask this question in the light of the Burnham bubble.
(I guess someone has spent about 20k on him. Brian Rose perhaps spent 250k?)
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Someone upthread explained that failing public services need a scapegoat. Hey presto, it’s lazy WFHers.
The Tories are not interested in workers (whether from home or otherwise) anyway, so there’s no downside.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Nevertheless the Russians will cut them off.
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
There was even a word - Finlandization - that means basically "don't upset your big neighbor."
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Andy, we didn't have a working health service anyway - lockdown zealots turned it into the National Covid Service. It's barely a working health service even now.
As for the different waves - all of those were associated with a specific version rather than the Wuhan original, no?
The pandemic turned it into a National Covid service.
"The pandemic did X" always sets off alarm bells because "the pandemic" includes the virus itself and governments' disastrous measures taken in sheer panic when pretty much the whole world went mad.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
Matt's worst cartoon in a decade. Joining the nasty party in their ghastly war.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
3 was the long one Jan 21 to Jul 21 with the unlock phases wasn't it? 2 was the stupid November 20 one just after Drakeford had hidden all the paperbacks in Wales to stop the spread??
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
I haven't watched BBC football in a while. These commentators are dreadful. No personality or interplay.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Someone upthread explained that failing public services need a scapegoat. Hey presto, it’s lazy WFHers.
The Tories are not interested in workers (whether from home or otherwise) anyway, so there’s no downside.
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
An outstanding post. We need another on the zero covid types, tho.
Would be quite happy to do one on them, and the iSAGE nutters, but I don't think anyone here would be defending them, anyway.
They started out by portraying "zero covid" as a low endemic level (and the numbers they gave were compatible with the July 2020 level of infections). That was fair enough. To actually eliminate covid in a country after it had had an outbreak was to fail to grasp exponential decay as much as lockdown sceptics failed to grasp exponential growth.
You could block it from coming in and keep it zero or zero-ish (New Zealand, Australia), but especially with the later variants, there was no way NPIs could push it down enough.
Yes, the chronic effects are worrying. Yes, we have serious issues with immunocompromised people. But we can't sacrifice everything else for them, and with vaccines, antivirals (especially Paxlovid), and N95 masks which protect the wearer (as long as we don't have people trying to pressure them out of these), that's realistically the best we're going to get.
HEPA filters in busy indoor places look to be very useful (more useful than, say, masking everyone), so look to that as the next step of NPIs if needed, but I'm getting off topic.
The iSAGE people misportrayed data in a similar but opposite direction to the Lockdown Sceptics. As Christopher Snowden called them "smilies" and "frownies" and likewise wrong.
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
I haven't watched BBC football in a while. These commentators are dreadful. No personality or interplay.
Brian Moore was the man. 'Surname, surname, surname, surname, cross, surname, goal'
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
I am thinking wistfully about how much easier my life would be if that was all officials at the DfE did.
It's not their laziness but their constant inept meddling from a position of ignorance that's the problem.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
There have been plenty of chances, but neither side can hit the target.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
What sort of share in the political betting on (say) a local election are here on PB? 50%? With some of the long term markets it's surely larger, and with the really big markets (Brexit etc) wildly less.
I ask this question in the light of the Burnham bubble.
(I guess someone has spent about 20k on him. Brian Rose perhaps spent 250k?)
Your question is badly phrased. I cannot tell what you are asking. You can see matched amounts on Betfair but it is anyone's guess what the bookmakers take.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
Have you spotted TSE in the crowd?
There's an enormous number of drooling imbeciles there, how would I know which of them is Eagles?!
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Ends further apart because of the additional tax being NI rather than IT which would hit the pampered Tory retiree voters.
I'm beginning to think I've worked out football commentator speak watching this cup final. Would I be right, for example, in thinking 'ratcheting up the pressure' means 'had a chance in a very boring game'?
There have been plenty of chances, but neither side can hit the target.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
Certainly a better priority then EOTHO. Plus it wouldn't kill anyone.
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
Twitter buyout getting interesting. If the Twitter board has been ummmm under estimating the number of bot accounts then it gives Musk either an out or the chance to get in even lower and leaves the board in a difficult position.
Well, it does appear that Musk’s team are uncovering things in their due diligence, that one might not necessarily expect to find at a public company.
The other problem is that Tesla shares have fallen more than 40% from their highs, meaning Musk needs to put up a lot more of them in collateral.
That is probably the main factor imo. Funny game capitalism. No-one dips their hand in their own pocket.
He's trying to get the price down by grimacing and sucking in air and telling the owner how much work he'll have to do on it. Just like buying a second hand car.
No, it is not as simple as that. Musk is not buying Twitter with his own money, and as @rcs1000 notes, the fall in Tesla shares means he has to put up more collateral. So he might be trying to get the price down, as you say, but he might also be looking for an excuse to abandon the project. Or both.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Ends further apart because of the additional tax being NI rather than IT which would hit the pampered Tory retiree voters.
The NI rise only hits those earning over £35,000, ie especially in Labour dominated London, those earning less than that have got a NI cut ie including most red wall voters.
An IT rise would of course hit 45 to 65 year old voters far more than over 65s as they would be mainly the ones inheriting, hence it was that group which saw the biggest swing from the Tories in 2017 over May's dementia tax but returned to the Tories when Boris dumped it
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
Matt's worst cartoon in a decade. Joining the nasty party in their ghastly war.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
This misunderstands Matt's place in the universe. He's a traditional cartoonist of and for the middling sort who just happens to be a genius. If you look for his 'politics' or point making you will find him all over the place. But he isn't generally making political points as if he were harnessed to the Guardian. It's just that he is sometimes very very funny.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
Matt's worst cartoon in a decade. Joining the nasty party in their ghastly war.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
I don't think it is that either. I think people are too keen to see it as an end of the world disaster, or as significant as the birth of Christ. It smacks of ideology driving the discussion.
Finally, I would like to say that Hunt and Blair said sensible things about Covid.
Starmer and Sturgeon did not.
Johnson was full of shit, comme d’habitude.
Starmer completely fluffed his lines over the vaccine rollout and it's the one thing the government gained a lot of support for from how they portrayed and levereged it politically. It reset things in favour of big dog until Cummings/Partygate/hanging on in Batley/the porn/sleaze/arseholery of high order parade
You know, Twitter's also burning quite a lot of cash. If Musk can't turn it around quickly, he's going to need to find more money after he purchases it to keep the lights on.
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Andy, we didn't have a working health service anyway - lockdown zealots turned it into the National Covid Service. It's barely a working health service even now.
As for the different waves - all of those were associated with a specific version rather than the Wuhan original, no?
I sadly had to test the NHS during the pandemic twice. First with a paralysed vocal cord and then with 2 broken legs and they got 10/10 both times.
Re my vocal cord I had a camera down my throat and then an MRI all within 2 weeks of seeing my GP before getting the all clear.
Re my legs I had to wait 2 hours for an ambulance but that was after being assessed after answering lots of questions and I was perfectly comfortable and not in too much pain and they turned up spot on time. I didn't have to wait a second on arrival at hospital for treatment.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
Certainly a better priority then EOTHO. Plus it wouldn't kill anyone.
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
A better priority than giving schoolchildren an ipad would have been just keeping schools open. I can see, just about, the case for closing hospitality, given that people were voluntarily avoiding hospitality and some means of keeping the sector afloat needed to be found. But closing education didn't make sense at the time and makes even less sense in retrospect.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I'm only in hospitality because I make money in tech!
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I'm only in hospitality because I make money in tech!
The labour shortage is chronic, though.
That is quite a pivot. I would be terrified of getting into hospitality, personally.
I’ve never understood the fantasy of “opening a restaurant (or pub)”.
I admire those who do though, like Cyclefree’s daughter. It still disturbs me that she was effectively closed down by government policy.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
Matt's worst cartoon in a decade. Joining the nasty party in their ghastly war.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
This misunderstands Matt's place in the universe. He's a traditional cartoonist of and for the middling sort who just happens to be a genius. If you look for his 'politics' or point making you will find him all over the place. But he isn't generally making political points as if he were harnessed to the Guardian. It's just that he is sometimes very very funny.
He's usually funny, including today. Of course there are people who use WFH as an excuse to take the piss, just like there are people who are more productive at home.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
Certainly a better priority then EOTHO. Plus it wouldn't kill anyone.
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
A better priority than giving schoolchildren an ipad would have been just keeping schools open. I can see, just about, the case for closing hospitality, given that people were voluntarily avoiding hospitality and some means of keeping the sector afloat needed to be found. But closing education didn't make sense at the time and makes even less sense in retrospect.
You were lucky in the UK.
Schools were closed for a full twelve months in Los Angeles (through until Easter 2021). Then there was hybrid until the Summer holidays. Masks were mandated for all until March this year.
On the other hand, there were never any restrictions on parks or exercise or visiting people in their homes. And outdoor dining, except for a few weeks, was basically allowed throughout.
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Lockdown sceptics were right about many things IMO.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I'm only in hospitality because I make money in tech!
The labour shortage is chronic, though.
That is quite a pivot. I would be terrified of getting into hospitality, personally.
I’ve never understood the fantasy of “opening a restaurant (or pub)”.
I admire those who do though, like Cyclefree’s daughter. It still disturbs me that she was effectively closed down by government policy.
Basically, I am the greasy element beside a friend who has had a Michelin star in the past, but didn't own the business. He is a massive talent who deserves a go of it, and we spent 3-4 years figuring out how to make it happen. The business model looks superficially familiar, but we took a lot of ideas from outside hospitality to change the way we do things and build a more sustainable business.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I'm only in hospitality because I make money in tech!
The labour shortage is chronic, though.
That is quite a pivot. I would be terrified of getting into hospitality, personally.
I’ve never understood the fantasy of “opening a restaurant (or pub)”.
I admire those who do though, like Cyclefree’s daughter. It still disturbs me that she was effectively closed down by government policy.
Basically, I am the greasy element beside a friend who has had a Michelin star in the past, but didn't own the business. He is a massive talent who deserves a go of it, and we spent 3-4 years figuring out how to make it happen. The business model looks superficially familiar, but we took a lot of ideas from outside hospitality to change the way we do things and build a more sustainable business.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
Certainly a better priority then EOTHO. Plus it wouldn't kill anyone.
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
A better priority than giving schoolchildren an ipad would have been just keeping schools open. I can see, just about, the case for closing hospitality, given that people were voluntarily avoiding hospitality and some means of keeping the sector afloat needed to be found. But closing education didn't make sense at the time and makes even less sense in retrospect.
You were lucky in the UK.
Schools were closed for a full twelve months in Los Angeles (through until Easter 2021). Then there was hybrid until the Summer holidays. Masks were mandated for all until March this year.
On the other hand, there were never any restrictions on parks or exercise or visiting people in their homes. And outdoor dining, except for a few weeks, was basically allowed throughout.
Masking small children is the very worst (policy) of this wretched pandemic. Whilst I'm not a fan of the zealotry behind the follow the science acolytes, that LA policy sounds decidedly evidence-based response light
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
We took the keys to our new restaurant 2 weeks before lockdown and had already planned to do home deliveries; which we continued for a long time after we could in theory have opened, because we figured pivoting in and out of opening would kill us - so Eat Out To Help Out didn't make any difference to us. Speaking to other friends in the industry, it didn't seem to do much for them either. It was VAT and then pent up demand that saved them.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
Oh I didn’t know you were in hospitality. Interesting. How is the labour shortage?
I'm only in hospitality because I make money in tech!
The labour shortage is chronic, though.
That is quite a pivot. I would be terrified of getting into hospitality, personally.
I’ve never understood the fantasy of “opening a restaurant (or pub)”.
I admire those who do though, like Cyclefree’s daughter. It still disturbs me that she was effectively closed down by government policy.
Basically, I am the greasy element beside a friend who has had a Michelin star in the past, but didn't own the business. He is a massive talent who deserves a go of it, and we spent 3-4 years figuring out how to make it happen. The business model looks superficially familiar, but we took a lot of ideas from outside hospitality to change the way we do things and build a more sustainable business.
And yes - hospitality is a great way to go bust quickly. It wouldn't be my choice if I wanted to make money. But "make a pound not lose a pound" is very possible until you come up against insurmountable obstacles. I really felt for cyclefree's daughter.
Am I the only PBer who things we were too late to lock down for lockdowns 1 and 2, but too late to unlock for lockdowns 1, 2 and 3?
Too late to start for 1 & far too late for 2 with no excuse. Too late to unlock on 2, but not 1.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Pretty much.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
Although giving everyone schoolchild an iPad would have been a somewhat better one.
Certainly a better priority then EOTHO. Plus it wouldn't kill anyone.
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
A better priority than giving schoolchildren an ipad would have been just keeping schools open. I can see, just about, the case for closing hospitality, given that people were voluntarily avoiding hospitality and some means of keeping the sector afloat needed to be found. But closing education didn't make sense at the time and makes even less sense in retrospect.
Well, it did make sense if only because there was a close and not otherwise easily explained correlation between places of education including unis being open and cases rising. Which is not surprising given the appalling state of most of our school buildings, which are grossly overcrowded and inadequately ventilated.
It also made sense because even with the increasingly bizarre and contradictory instructions from the DfE that bore zero resemblance to reality* huge numbers of children and staff were repeatedly having to isolate, which was buggering the whole thing up anyway.
Whether it was done adequately or intelligently is a different issue (it wasn't). Easy to identify numerous failures. The biggest one if we wanted to avoid lockdown was not trying to open nightingale schools in closed office spaces, staffed by people brought in on furlough, teaching much smaller groups. Cancelling exams repeatedly without warning or consultation was another shambles (although truthfully that was as much an indictment of our woefully stupid and totally outdated system of assessment as of Covid planning). Not issuing tech in a timely or useful fashion is undoubtedly a third.
But most of all from a government point of view the lack of any form of contingency planning along these lines was a shocking indictment of their stupidity and complacency.
*my favourite remains the instruction for staff to wear masks when not teaching, 'especially in the staffroom at lunchtime.'
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Lockdown sceptics were right about many things IMO.
Certainly on the key point that the politicians never considered the costs of lockdown.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
If Matt is on it, then people are noticing.
Matt's worst cartoon in a decade. Joining the nasty party in their ghastly war.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
This misunderstands Matt's place in the universe. He's a traditional cartoonist of and for the middling sort who just happens to be a genius. If you look for his 'politics' or point making you will find him all over the place. But he isn't generally making political points as if he were harnessed to the Guardian. It's just that he is sometimes very very funny.
He's usually funny, including today. Of course there are people who use WFH as an excuse to take the piss, just like there are people who are more productive at home.
The LDs were consistently sound on Covid. Nobody noticed, though.
Who?
I am getting a weird synaesthetic effect. I can see huge orange diamonds and a voice whispering "a penny on income to tax to pay for a golden age", but I don't know why.
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Lockdown sceptics were right about many things IMO.
I'm struggling to think of any.
- They were the ones pushing the "IFR is only 0.1%" line. - And the "False Positives" line. - And the "PCR tests pick everything up" line - And the one that it's impossible for a second (or later) wave to occur. - Or that deaths were all incidental and people who tested positive kept getting hit by buses. Young even put on an expose "from a hospital" that they were empty and the only people in ICU with covid were over seventy or at death's door (from a hospital that was carefully described - and happened to not exist. A hospital with exactly that description was planned and came up high on Google, but cancelled). - That waves coincidentally peaked just before lockdown and it was always an amazing coincidence that infections started to fall as lockdowns hit. - That everyone should always be in a lower Tier than they were - That vaccines wouldn't help - That vaccines didn't reduce serious illness - That vaccines were dangerous for pregnant women, or children, or damaged fertility, or caused waves of death
These two sides are just playing for penalties now.
How often the cup final turns into an anticlimax on the pitch.
These two teams in particular seem to be built to cancel each other out. 0-0 over 120 minutes in the League Cup final, and both PL games were drawn too.
The Republicans have held their lead of about 2.6 percent since near the beginning of this year. The lack of an abortion effect does not surprise me because years ago a Gallup study of the intense minorities who vote on the abortion issue showed that there were more pro-life voters than pro-choice voters. I don't know any reason that would have changed, given the stability of opinion o the issues in recent years. (There is a similar intense minority on guns.)
The result of this differential in the importance of abortion gives Republicans a small, but robust, advantage in presidential elections. As Table 1 shows, in presidential elections from 1984 to 2000, opposing abortion gave Republicans a net advantage of between 1.9 and 3.4 percentage points. As we all learned in the 2000 election, this can be all the difference in the world.
(My own semi-informed explanation for that generic vote stability is that Biden and the Democrats are getting some credits for helping Ukraine, some debits for inflation, and that the two are roughly balancing each other out.)
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Lockdown sceptics were right about many things IMO.
Personally, I think the country which did things best was Denmark.
They had the least economic impact and the fewest deaths of any European country, and beat out every US state. Now, some of this was due to luck, but most - I would suggest - was because they did a terrific job at both testing and risk stratification. This meant that they had fewer restrictions in general, but the ones they had were extremely well targeted.
I notice the Daily Mail today and Boris Johnson's latest pronouncements.
He's clearly rattled and knows his Government is sinking fast because he's fallen back on the old tactic of Conservative Prime Ministers in trouble and that's to start telling people what to do. Major did this when he was on the way out.
To be honest, coming from Johnson, this is more ninny state than nanny state but as he's no longer a proper Conservative his closet authoritarianism is coming to the fore. He can no longer argue or convince because no one will listen, instead he has to cajole and coerce.
Conservative Governments are elected to manage the country - quietly, efficiently and effectively allowing people to live their own lives and take their own decisions, spend their own money and all of this with the minimum of Government interference. The role of Conservative Governments is to empower individuals, businesses and institutions to do what they do best.
If I wanted someone to tell me what to do, where to work and what to think I'd vote Labour - the current "Conservative" Government has failed, we all know it's failed and it is now marking time until its inevitable demise. As it has nothing useful to do, it is now just shouting at people and generally making a nuisance of itself.
It's just another wedge issue. I guess they've once again been driven by focus groups from the bloody red wall where saying 'all the civil servants are sat at home in their gardens doing nothing' probably plays well with those working a 40+ hour week to make ends meet. It's another way of trying to divert people from the real issues.
Ends further apart because of the additional tax being NI rather than IT which would hit the pampered Tory retiree voters.
The NI rise only hits those earning over £35,000, ie especially in Labour dominated London, those earning less than that have got a NI cut ie including most red wall voters.
An IT rise would of course hit 45 to 65 year old voters far more than over 65s as they would be mainly the ones inheriting, hence it was that group which saw the biggest swing from the Tories in 2017 over May's dementia tax but returned to the Tories when Boris dumped it
Maybe Rishi is a political genius after all. It will be interesting to watch poll changes after July when the NIC threshold rise boosts payslips.
PB PA PQ = PoliticalBetting.com Pennsylvania Pop Quiz
On the license plate shown above, what is the symbol between the letters and numbers, and what does it symbolize?
A keystone from the top of an arch, as Pennsylvania is the Keystone State?
Correct! Referring to PA's strategic geographic AND psychological position in the middle of the arch of the 13 colonies on the Atlantic seaboard - similar to the actual keystone at the top of a classic arch which is essential to creating AND maintaining the structure stable and intact.
SO Ap wins first prize! Which is a free (if slightly used) hoagie next time you are in the City of Brotherly Love AND the guy at the counter gets distracted (or mugged) while taking your order.
Honorable mention to Carnyx for mention of ubiquitous trans-Atlantic brand symbol for H.J. Heinz Co. Note that founder AND company were born in western Pennsylvania and that in the last millennium, John Heinz served as GOP (old-school) US Senator from PA. HJHCo still has it's global HQ in Pittsburgh (though now part of the Kraft processed-grub empire).
So. We don't really import from India. But the world price will rise again. Not good news. But much, much worse for impoverished countries.
The last time we saw global food scarcity it kicked off the Arab spring. We haven’t even seen the beginning of this story.
The fallout from the idiotic decisions around lockdowns will end up with more dying from famine than the virus would have killed. I remember the criticism from the western world when India refused lockdowns for the the second than third waves of the virus but in retrospect the decision from the Indian government is correct. Imagine how bad things would be if the government had a second and third lockdown, there's would simply be people dying of starvation over the next year.
Yes, agreed. Covid (like Brexit!) isn’t over by a long shot.
What's extremely galling is that none of those people who lead the criticism of the Indian decision or the UK decision to reopen have apologised for being so extremely wrong. There are too many scientists who were captured by idiotic virtue signalling around "must save every life, must blame governments for anyone who dies from COVID" without thinking through the consequences of their agenda. It was plainly obvious that decisions on lockdowns would lead to global shortages of basic goods, people on PB and all across the City have been saying it for months.
I hope that we learn the lessons from this and next time governments doesn't just take advice from science and take a much wider view including the economy and ensuring future prosperity even if it means making sacrifices today.
To my mind, the worst by far were the "Lockdown Sceptics" - who were horribly wrong on every turn. And not only have they never apologised for being wrong, they've continually doubled down on it and tried to rewrite history.
- Toby Young - dishonest and stupid, and platforming the other idiots. - Mike Yeadon - Literally nuts. His made-up crap about fertility and vaccines literally killed people. - Ivor Cummins - A fraud and a grifter - Carl Heneghan - "Evidence Based Medicine" has never been so wrong - Sunetra Gupta - Seriously, why anyone was listening to this person past May 2020 beggars belief - Claire Craig and the rest of HART and its offshoots (David Paton, Ros Jones, Norman Fenton, Karol Sikora, Malcolm Kendrick, Tony Hinton, Damian Wilde, Anna Rayner, Will Jones) who have assiduously aimed to sow distrust in vaccines from day one. (Linked offshoots being Us For Them, PCR Claims, NHS100K, UK Medical Freedom, Safer To Wait, "British Nursing Alliance", Childrens Covid Vaccine Advisory Group). Have harassed schools and vaccine centres, and lied consistently to try to sabotage the vaccine rollout. - Their pets in the media, including Julia Hartley-Brewer (TalkRADIO), Lucy Johnston (Express), Allison Pearson (Telegraph), Isabel Oakeshott (Telegraph) and plenty others - The Covid Research Group of the Tories, plus the Pandemic Response and Recovery APPG (set up by the CRG and sympathisers and broadcasting HART Groups misinformation around Parliament)
I still think the Tiers system could have worked to avoid any lockdowns after the first one, if not actively sabotaged by the idiots above with their narratives around false positives, casedemics, "masks don't work", "it's a trade off between economy and health", "it's only really old people who die a little early," "did they have underlying conditions?", "the numbers on deaths are wrong", and always getting their misinformation out again and again and again. The Mail and Telegraph and Talk Radio were the worst, but other offenders are available.
And the bloody Great Barrington Declaration and the fact they actually got to brief the Government (who were listening to Gupta and Heneghan as late as October 2020!?).
To be fair, I'd put Toby Young into a gulag on St Kilda just for all the god damned antivax shite he's been spewing relentlessly for well over a year (because he had to downplay the prospect of a vaccine initially, as the idea of suppression was "until a vaccine" is available, thus "we may never have a vaccine" and "it doesn't protect against serious illness" and later "it doesn't stop infection" and all the bollocks about "it kills more than the virus, which is going away magically on its own.")
That's such a load of waffle Andy, you have been completely captured by the "must save all lives" idea. I remember when you were against the full reopening last June and then again in last July churning out data to support your position which all turned out to be wrong.
The lockdown sceptics were right, we all should have listened to them rather than dismiss their concerns as you are doing now and did all through the crisis (I also admit I did it, and it was wrong of me to do that).
We should have resisted the second lockdown entirely and the first should have ended far sooner and it was a huge error to bring back restrictions for Omicron.
As it stands hundreds of millions across the world are facing food shortages and 10-20% price inflation, this is a far, far worse outcome than anything that COVID could have inflicted directly. The obsessive attitude around ensuring all those 80+ year olds didn't die of a new disease has destroyed the life chances of young people and will result in the deaths of many, many millions from famine this summer.
You and I were wrong, they were right. At least I recognise it, sadly I think you will never be able to get away from the delusional thinking that lockdown was helpful. The scientists that backed and forced the government into lockdown two should be put on a very public trial and have all of their funding cut for good. I really can't begin to tell you how much I have come to loathe the politicisation of science and the scientists who have engaged in it. Any single one who briefed the media should be barred from any government funding or serving on any government committee again.
I'm sorry, but that's all bollocks.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening. I've gone and taken a look. I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June. As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...). They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60) They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early. They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy. They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
Lockdown sceptics were right about many things IMO.
Personally, I think the country which did things best was Denmark.
They had the least economic impact and the fewest deaths of any European country, and beat out every US state. Now, some of this was due to luck, but most - I would suggest - was because they did a terrific job at both testing and risk stratification. This meant that they had fewer restrictions in general, but the ones they had were extremely well targeted.
We can learn a lot from the Nordic countries in general when it comes to this. They managed to get far greater population adherence to Government recommendations (helped by naturally greater social distance). Smaller household units (which would require more housing) Sick pay and access to it. Trust in authorities and government (which helps also with vaccine takeup).
Denmark do stand out at doing the best. The quicker and better targeted the restrictions, the more you can retain more freedoms for everything else.
As the father of a severely autistic son, that sort of outcome would be incredibly helpful.
It's even worse that its probably not the old buffer himself writing this nonsense Ridiculous non sequitur Want lower inflation? Ban artificial grass! Provide bursaries for domestic pets! Ban eating on patios!
On topic: I would say the Republicans are a 75% chance to hold Pennsylvania. (And I would say the Dems are a 75% chance to hold New Hampshire.)
I would note that Pennsylvania is less pro-Choice than the US as a whole (albeit only modestly), so I would not expect this to save the Dems here.
Alaska - by contrast - is 2:1 in favour of abortion, which probably makes Lisa Murkowski's 70 cents on PredictIt reasonable value.
The Dems are only 59% on PredictIt for NH - and I think that's a state which doesn't throw out its Senators willy-nilly. I'd be a buyer.
Most to the point, Pennsylvania is noticeably less pro-choice than the average swing state.
Very Catholic state, so no great surprise.
Noticeable that of the nations that still ban abortion in Europe and the Americas except to save the mother's life ie Poland, Brazil, Mexico and Chile etc, all are very Roman Catholic. The Republic of Ireland of course too, very Roman Catholic until recently, was the last western nation to legalise abortion in 2018.
As you say 24% of Pennsylvanians are Roman Catholic compared to 21% of US citizens overall. Look too to US states with well above average numbers of Protestant evangelicals for an abortion ban to go down better than the US average eg Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky etc
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
And yet voters in Scotland (& Wales afaIaa) tend to differ from your opinion on the whole. Must be the one party state media propagandising the poor saps.
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
And yet voters in Scotland (& Wales afaIaa) tend to differ from your opinion on the whole. Must be the one party state media propagandising the poor saps.
The consistent public support for greater controls across the country (and I think in the US and other places too) mystified and terrified me.
Well that took them 24 hours to make an about-turn. A few words in their ear by US and UK diplomats?
No surprise, the real veto on their entry was never going to be Turkey but whether Putin decides to invade Finland and Sweden before their NATO application is completed.
Unlikely but we will find out in the next few weeks
Russia isn’t going to invade Sweden or Finland.
To have even a vague chance of that, they would have to move ground forces into position. All the build up stuff.
They haven’t done this. So they have nothing to invade with.
More likely is Russia cuts off energy supplies
The Finns are not very dependent on Russian energy as Alexander Stubb (ex pm) told R4 an hour or so ago.
Nevertheless the Russians will cut them off.
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
There was even a word - Finlandization - that means basically "don't upset your big neighbor."
Living next door to a big black angry bear.
Finlandisation was a Cold War thing.
Post Cold War - it was much less that Finland felt threatened by Russia as they were trying to have a civilised relationship with Russia.
Remember - at one point in the 90s there was talk of returning territory to Finland (by Russia)
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
And yet voters in Scotland (& Wales afaIaa) tend to differ from your opinion on the whole. Must be the one party state media propagandising the poor saps.
The consistent public support for greater controls across the country (and I think in the US and other places too) mystified and terrified me.
It didn't mistify me: they believed what all the media and all the politicians were saying, that this specific virus was the only thing that mattered.
Comments
Minna Ålander 🌻
@minna_alander
Since many people know nothing about Finland, jump on click bait headlines and retweet without checking facts, here a short overview of the things Russia has threatened Finland with so far & what their consequences are/would be:
https://twitter.com/minna_alander/status/1525397277577203713
The interesting thing is how the Russians are dismantling any leverage they had, along with political capital.
Not long ago, not upsetting Moscow over various things was the established, expected Finnish policy.
Firstly, I was not against the reopening.
I've gone and taken a look.
I was putting up graphs with phrases like "This is why this wave is not like the earlier ones," showing the disconnect between cases and hospitalisations/deaths. That was June.
As well as graphs showing how the wave was topping-out hospitalisation-wise prior to unlocking day.
Another quote from around that time: " My personal take is that as schools will be out at or around unlocking day, anyway, I’d expect infection rates to drop in youngsters, buying quite a bit of time to offer them vaccination without needing to extend restrictions."
Hell you were liking all my posts saying all of that!
Lockdown Sceptics always have to rewrite history.
The second and third lockdowns came because hospitals were looking at collapsing under the pressure and everything short of lockdowns had failed to stop the increase.
Had we not done that, we'd not have had a working health service and the death toll would have been staggering. The January/February period was astonishingly bad even so. The health service even today is in dire straits.
Lockdown Sceptics were wrong that there would not be a second wave (or a third or a fourth...).
They were wrong that only the very elderly were in intensive care (the majority were under 60)
They were wrong that PCR tests were showing 90% false positives
They're still wrong with bollocks that it's all about 80+ year olds dying a few months early.
They were wrong about the trade-off between health and economy.
They were wrong when they claimed hospitals were empty at the peaks of the waves
They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't stop serious illness
They were wrong when they claimed vaccines didn't slow transmission, or when they claimed they killed thousands and tens of thousands.
As for the different waves - all of those were associated with a specific version rather than the Wuhan original, no?
It’s the first ever NYC Japanese parade, and my doorman (Puerto Rican) is angry that this is allowed by “people who bombed us”.
All from June, prior to reopening, when I was apparently going zero covid and insisting we lock down.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3437047#Comment_3437047
" From where I'm sitting, the cases figures look rather encouraging..." "... And if cases are falling by early July, it makes opening up far easier in July, even if hospitalisations have only just flattened off by then"
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3441327#Comment_3441327
(discussing how the Delta wave won't ignite like the earlier ones due to vaccines. You liked this one)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3448148#Comment_3448148
(On models and showing how James Ward's model pointed at extending vaccination implied no big later waves)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3457817#Comment_3457817
(Comparing the previous waves with the then current one, showing the far lower hospitalisation rate and concluding: "Yeah, this time it really is very different. " Guess who liked that one as well?)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3458771#Comment_3458771
(Visualisation emphasising the differences in hospitalisation rate. You did read this one, because you liked it as well)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3460754/#Comment_3460754
(During an argument with Topping on why we should vaccinate teens, when I emphasised: "I've stated that we are highly unlikely to want to do that - but that we should not blithely assume that it will not be an issue for them. Could you provide a link to anywhere that I've said we should lockdown again to protect the kids?
As it happens, I think that schools breaking up will do a lot to help.")
Those are all just from June.
Paul Mainwood came up with looking at average ambulance response times as a metric to help estimate stresses on healthcare (as these are very much driven by A&E departments being under stress and therefore giving no opportunity to offload patients into them, and by wards being under stress to not give patients into them, etc).
We can see what it looked like before the pandemic:
Category 1 ambulance responses are the ones where "someone is dying if you don't get here NOW." Someone isn't breathing, or there heart as stopped, or this is about to happen. Target is 7 minutes.
Category 2 are ones which "need rapid assessment and transport" and include strokes, suspected heart attacks where the heart hasn't actually gone into cardiac arrest, etc. Target is 18 minutes.
That graph is how things were before the pandemic. Usually hitting the target on Category 1, but Category 2 usually exceeding the target time - but not by that much.
This is what has happened since the pandemic hit.
They've managed to keep the Category 1 times down(-ish), but by sacrificing Category 2. Times have gone up towards a full hour (in some areas (South West) up past 2 hours).
You can see the original wave spike, then the growth towards the winter wave(s), then the Delta surge.
You can also see the lockdowns
If we're trying to claim the lockdowns made it worse, we have to explain why those pushed the numbers down and releasing them let the numbers spring up.
I ask this question in the light of the Burnham bubble.
(I guess someone has spent about 20k on him. Brian Rose perhaps spent 250k?)
The Tories are not interested in workers (whether from home or otherwise) anyway, so there’s no downside.
I always get annoyed when someone hugely misportrays what I've said, or strawmans me.
3 was pointless because it was too weak a lockdown to have any positive effect.
Working from Home is a brilliant recalibration but it threatens the powers that be, the status quo, the privileged classes.
They started out by portraying "zero covid" as a low endemic level (and the numbers they gave were compatible with the July 2020 level of infections). That was fair enough.
To actually eliminate covid in a country after it had had an outbreak was to fail to grasp exponential decay as much as lockdown sceptics failed to grasp exponential growth.
You could block it from coming in and keep it zero or zero-ish (New Zealand, Australia), but especially with the later variants, there was no way NPIs could push it down enough.
Yes, the chronic effects are worrying. Yes, we have serious issues with immunocompromised people. But we can't sacrifice everything else for them, and with vaccines, antivirals (especially Paxlovid), and N95 masks which protect the wearer (as long as we don't have people trying to pressure them out of these), that's realistically the best we're going to get.
HEPA filters in busy indoor places look to be very useful (more useful than, say, masking everyone), so look to that as the next step of NPIs if needed, but I'm getting off topic.
The iSAGE people misportrayed data in a similar but opposite direction to the Lockdown Sceptics. As Christopher Snowden called them "smilies" and "frownies" and likewise wrong.
I would note that Pennsylvania is less pro-Choice than the US as a whole (albeit only modestly), so I would not expect this to save the Dems here.
Alaska - by contrast - is 2:1 in favour of abortion, which probably makes Lisa Murkowski's 70 cents on PredictIt reasonable value.
'Surname, surname, surname, surname, cross, surname, goal'
It's not their laziness but their constant inept meddling from a position of ignorance that's the problem.
I also think the vaccine strategy was excellent; PPE procurement a disaster; government comms appalling; and I still think eat out to help out was a good idea.
PredicIt, open to Brits!!!
Edit: but it would interfere in the priority given to preserving the social hierarchy in education.
On the other hand, produce quadrupling in price, as VAT also goes back up, and NI rises... That's killing the industry now.
An IT rise would of course hit 45 to 65 year old voters far more than over 65s as they would be mainly the ones inheriting, hence it was that group which saw the biggest swing from the Tories in 2017 over May's dementia tax but returned to the Tories when Boris dumped it
I feel certain that Nicola’s strategy was often based on simply trying to embarrass HMG, and some of the Welsh rules were just fucking mental, as in “in what parallel universe does a government really think this makes sense”.
Starmer and Sturgeon did not.
Johnson was full of shit, comme d’habitude.
Interesting.
How is the labour shortage?
Re my vocal cord I had a camera down my throat and then an MRI all within 2 weeks of seeing my GP before getting the all clear.
Re my legs I had to wait 2 hours for an ambulance but that was after being assessed after answering lots of questions and I was perfectly comfortable and not in too much pain and they turned up spot on time. I didn't have to wait a second on arrival at hospital for treatment.
Nobody noticed, though.
I can see, just about, the case for closing hospitality, given that people were voluntarily avoiding hospitality and some means of keeping the sector afloat needed to be found. But closing education didn't make sense at the time and makes even less sense in retrospect.
Seems to work very well.
The labour shortage is chronic, though.
I would be terrified of getting into hospitality, personally.
I’ve never understood the fantasy of “opening a restaurant (or pub)”.
I admire those who do though, like Cyclefree’s daughter. It still disturbs me that she was effectively closed down by government policy.
Schools were closed for a full twelve months in Los Angeles (through until Easter 2021). Then there was hybrid until the Summer holidays. Masks were mandated for all until March this year.
On the other hand, there were never any restrictions on parks or exercise or visiting people in their homes. And outdoor dining, except for a few weeks, was basically allowed throughout.
It's becoming old man shouts at cloud.
Whilst I'm not a fan of the zealotry behind the follow the science acolytes, that LA policy sounds decidedly evidence-based response light
How often the cup final turns into an anticlimax on the pitch.
It also made sense because even with the increasingly bizarre and contradictory instructions from the DfE that bore zero resemblance to reality* huge numbers of children and staff were repeatedly having to isolate, which was buggering the whole thing up anyway.
Whether it was done adequately or intelligently is a different issue (it wasn't). Easy to identify numerous failures. The biggest one if we wanted to avoid lockdown was not trying to open nightingale schools in closed office spaces, staffed by people brought in on furlough, teaching much smaller groups. Cancelling exams repeatedly without warning or consultation was another shambles (although truthfully that was as much an indictment of our woefully stupid and totally outdated system of assessment as of Covid planning). Not issuing tech in a timely or useful fashion is undoubtedly a third.
But most of all from a government point of view the lack of any form of contingency planning along these lines was a shocking indictment of their stupidity and complacency.
*my favourite remains the instruction for staff to wear masks when not teaching, 'especially in the staffroom at lunchtime.'
I'm sure it was a compliment.
- They were the ones pushing the "IFR is only 0.1%" line.
- And the "False Positives" line.
- And the "PCR tests pick everything up" line
- And the one that it's impossible for a second (or later) wave to occur.
- Or that deaths were all incidental and people who tested positive kept getting hit by buses.
Young even put on an expose "from a hospital" that they were empty and the only people in ICU with covid were over seventy or at death's door (from a hospital that was carefully described - and happened to not exist. A hospital with exactly that description was planned and came up high on Google, but cancelled).
- That waves coincidentally peaked just before lockdown and it was always an amazing coincidence that infections started to fall as lockdowns hit.
- That everyone should always be in a lower Tier than they were
- That vaccines wouldn't help
- That vaccines didn't reduce serious illness
- That vaccines were dangerous for pregnant women, or children, or damaged fertility, or caused waves of death
The Republicans have held their lead of about 2.6 percent since near the beginning of this year. The lack of an abortion effect does not surprise me because years ago a Gallup study of the intense minorities who vote on the abortion issue showed that there were more pro-life voters than pro-choice voters. I don't know any reason that would have changed, given the stability of opinion o the issues in recent years. (There is a similar intense minority on guns.)
Taking overall numbers on abortion issues tells you little about elections, because the issues are not settled, in most American states, by popular votes in initiatives or referendums. For those who prefer to see the work, here's anb academic paper from 2015: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12144&context=journal_articles (My own semi-informed explanation for that generic vote stability is that Biden and the Democrats are getting some credits for helping Ukraine, some debits for inflation, and that the two are roughly balancing each other out.)
They had the least economic impact and the fewest deaths of any European country, and beat out every US state. Now, some of this was due to luck, but most - I would suggest - was because they did a terrific job at both testing and risk stratification. This meant that they had fewer restrictions in general, but the ones they had were extremely well targeted.
SO Ap wins first prize! Which is a free (if slightly used) hoagie next time you are in the City of Brotherly Love AND the guy at the counter gets distracted (or mugged) while taking your order.
Honorable mention to Carnyx for mention of ubiquitous trans-Atlantic brand symbol for H.J. Heinz Co. Note that founder AND company were born in western Pennsylvania and that in the last millennium, John Heinz served as GOP (old-school) US Senator from PA. HJHCo still has it's global HQ in Pittsburgh (though now part of the Kraft processed-grub empire).
They managed to get far greater population adherence to Government recommendations (helped by naturally greater social distance).
Smaller household units (which would require more housing)
Sick pay and access to it.
Trust in authorities and government (which helps also with vaccine takeup).
Denmark do stand out at doing the best. The quicker and better targeted the restrictions, the more you can retain more freedoms for everything else.
As the father of a severely autistic son, that sort of outcome would be incredibly helpful.
It's even worse that its probably not the old buffer himself writing this nonsense
Ridiculous non sequitur
Want lower inflation? Ban artificial grass! Provide bursaries for domestic pets! Ban eating on patios!
As you say 24% of Pennsylvanians are Roman Catholic compared to 21% of US citizens overall. Look too to US states with well above average numbers of Protestant evangelicals for an abortion ban to go down better than the US average eg Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky etc
Post Cold War - it was much less that Finland felt threatened by Russia as they were trying to have a civilised relationship with Russia.
Remember - at one point in the 90s there was talk of returning territory to Finland (by Russia)
EDIT: Only kidding!