BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
Trevor Noah? Is that you??
Why do all bots punctuate the same way? Two clauses, separated by an elllipsis* without preceding or succeeding spaces, no other punctuation at all apart from a capital letter at the start. Bots, if you can't punctuate, no one will listen.
Always a sign of losing the argument is nit picking about punctuation.
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
Trevor Noah? Is that you??
Why do all bots punctuate the same way? Two clauses, separated by an elllipsis* without preceding or succeeding spaces, no other punctuation at all apart from a capital letter at the start. Bots, if you can't punctuate, no one will listen.
Always a sign of losing the argument is nit picking about punctuation.
Would you please tell OFSTED that? They seem to think it's an important part of teaching.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
Why would russia blow up its own pipeline...whats the incentive
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
I'm genuinely astonished. I wouldn't have believed a Navy that has aircraft carriers that can't even float properly could do clever shit like this.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
For an "irrelevant has-been global laughing stock" we live rent free in a palatial mansion in the Kremlin's head.....
This was a fun poll that's being quoted by either side to prove whatever they want, because they have exceptionally teensy numbers for both "rejoin" and "brexit as it actually exists". The way they get these numbers is by giving the voters multiple types of unicorn, including the epically vague option of "in a new kind of association with the EU unlike anything we know today".
Not really. It's the Tony Blair Institute and the executive foreword is by the man himself.
Simply, a third want the single market, a third want a closer relationship but not that (think Richard Nabavi's article last month), and a third want the existing Brexit deal or more.
It doesn't point to Rejoin getting anywhere close in the next 10-15 years.
The trend is our friend
Lots of trends stall, reverse or don't complete in the way you expect them to.
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
Python is pipework / glue that connects different systems together. Now I hate it because of its syntax but it serves the purpose and niche that Perl and Bash used to sit in.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
Trevor Noah? Is that you??
Why do all bots punctuate the same way? Two clauses, separated by an elllipsis* without preceding or succeeding spaces, no other punctuation at all apart from a capital letter at the start. Bots, if you can't punctuate, no one will listen.
Always a sign of losing the argument is nit picking about punctuation.
I'm not nitpicking, just pointing out that you mysteriously have the same highly idiosyncratic approach to punctuation ss three of the last five bots to turn up here. Funny, that.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
I'm genuinely astonished. I wouldn't have believed a Navy that has aircraft carriers that can't even float properly could do clever shit like this.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
Trevor Noah? Is that you??
Why do all bots punctuate the same way? Two clauses, separated by an elllipsis* without preceding or succeeding spaces, no other punctuation at all apart from a capital letter at the start. Bots, if you can't punctuate, no one will listen.
That's also true for getting anywhere on dating apps.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
Why would russia blow up its own pipeline...whats the incentive
It didn't say that they did.
I suppose if you believe that blowing up the Nordstream pipes is an act of such sophistication and skill that Russia and the UK would be the only great powers capable of such a thing then the logical conclusion is it must have been us.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
They’ve done us all a favour now. The most conclusive evidence it was them, given everyone who’s been conspiracising in the West including at least one of our own number was blaming the Americans.
Cui bono? Certainly not the gas-price dependent Brits just before winter.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
I'm genuinely astonished. I wouldn't have believed a Navy that has aircraft carriers that can't even float properly could do clever shit like this.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Would have liked to see some stats about BA pilots though. That's a good sturdy one I've missed recently.
Do you think Bot Central keeps a score of how well their Trollers do? Do they have a competition to see how many posts they can get before anyone stops taking them seriously?
Do they give a prize to anyone avoiding a ban hammer for more than fifty posts?
Would have liked to see some stats about BA pilots though. That's a good sturdy one I've missed recently.
Do you think Bot Central keeps a score of how well their Trollers do? Do they have a competition to see how many posts they can get before anyone stops taking them seriously?
Do they give a prize to anyone avoiding a ban hammer for more than fifty posts?
This one only got to two before being rumbled. That's got to be a poor score.
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
Python is pipework / glue that connects different systems together. Now I hate it because of its syntax but it serves the purpose and niche that Perl and Bash used to sit in.
Hey - I was writing some Perl last week. And I can almost still understand it this week!
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
I’ve leaned that way too. Unlike the usual wild conspiracy theories this one seems to stack up better than the wet market theory.
It doesn’t even require any kind of series of improbable events to explain it. Lab leaks happen, including famously here in the UK.
The overwrought shoutiness of scientists dismissing lab leak is also odd and unnecessary. It may or may not be the right answer but its really not that “out there” as an explanation.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
Something will only happen when it becomes convenient for the west to fall out with China. At the moment it will be consigned to the fringes of the debate and dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
It is no longer a conspiracy theory. That Vanity Fair article - on top of so much other evidence - is pretty conclusive. The evidence all points to a lab leak. A small but bitter minority of virologists - nearly all (all?) linked to China - pretend otherwise. For a year there was a massive cover-up to stop us even thinking about the lab leak, involving senior scientists, politicians, et al, right across the West
I have no idea how this will play out. Unprecedented
This contradicts the last thing you thought was pretty conclusive, which was that the leak had happened 6 months earlier.
I don't have a strong opinion for against a lab leak but when stuff like this comes out I'd wait a bit for other people to look at these claims and get some other takes - for example this claims the story is based on reading between the lines of a mistranslation. My Chinese is too shitty to be sure but maybe wait and see what some other Chinese speakers think. https://twitter.com/zhihuachen/status/1586271619684896769
Would have liked to see some stats about BA pilots though. That's a good sturdy one I've missed recently.
Do you think Bot Central keeps a score of how well their Trollers do? Do they have a competition to see how many posts they can get before anyone stops taking them seriously?
Do they give a prize to anyone avoiding a ban hammer for more than fifty posts?
This one only got to two before being rumbled. That's got to be a poor score.
Would have liked to see some stats about BA pilots though. That's a good sturdy one I've missed recently.
Do you think Bot Central keeps a score of how well their Trollers do? Do they have a competition to see how many posts they can get before anyone stops taking them seriously?
Do they give a prize to anyone avoiding a ban hammer for more than fifty posts?
I think it's the same one just trying to better themselves each time since they knew who the ban would probably come from.
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
If only we were this effective in the real world. Our greatest achievement of late has been the vicarious one of seeing how dramatically better the Ukranian forces have become with some UK training. Which is, in fairness, something to be proud of.
This was a fun poll that's being quoted by either side to prove whatever they want, because they have exceptionally teensy numbers for both "rejoin" and "brexit as it actually exists". The way they get these numbers is by giving the voters multiple types of unicorn, including the epically vague option of "in a new kind of association with the EU unlike anything we know today".
Not really. It's the Tony Blair Institute and the executive foreword is by the man himself.
Simply, a third want the single market, a third want a closer relationship but not that (think Richard Nabavi's article last month), and a third want the existing Brexit deal or more.
It doesn't point to Rejoin getting anywhere close in the next 10-15 years.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when yourddd know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
You've come here to shift the Overton window so that Leon seems rational and level-headed?
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
On topic: people voted for it and it (eventually) happened. So until the federalists come up with a better plan for getting the British people to consent to joining the euro and Schengen than they had for getting them to consent to staying in six years ago, then there's nothing to talk about.
On topic: people voted for it and it (eventually) happened. So until the federalists come up with a better plan for getting the British people to consent to joining the euro and Schengen than they had for getting them to consent to staying in six years ago, then there's nothing to talk about.
Why do we have to talk about anything? People are turning against it without anyone cajoling them or lecturing them.
But it is odd that Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK still in the Single Market, is managing significantly better than Great Britain.
On topic: people voted for it and it (eventually) happened. So until the federalists come up with a better plan for getting the British people to consent to joining the euro and Schengen than they had for getting them to consent to staying in six years ago, then there's nothing to talk about.
Why do we have to talk about anything? People are turning against it without anyone cajoling them or lecturing them.
"Turning against it" doesn't do the federalists any good though, unless they can sell joining the euro and Schengen to the British people. No sign of that happening.
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
Python is pipework / glue that connects different systems together. Now I hate it because of its syntax but it serves the purpose and niche that Perl and Bash used to sit in.
Hey - I was writing some Perl last week. And I can almost still understand it this week!
That is a once in a program experience. Your next Perl program will be the usual gibberish!
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
Python is pipework / glue that connects different systems together. Now I hate it because of its syntax but it serves the purpose and niche that Perl and Bash used to sit in.
TBF to Python, it is a vast improvement on stuff like Perl (Bash I can cope with even though I hate the syntax). I think Python has also moved into the space that used to be occupied by BASIC - nice and quick to throw something together to test a concept.
Things looking bleak in Kyiv at the moment. This from the telegraph
Ukrainians will freeze to death this winter if the West does not urgently send blankets and generators to keep them warm, Vitali Klitschko has said.
The 51-year-old mayor of Kyiv, and former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, told The Telegraph that increasing Russian attacks on power plants have left his country on the brink of a fresh humanitarian crisis.
“We are doing everything we can do to save the lives of our people and to protect them,” he said, banging his huge fists on the table.
“But this winter will definitely be a huge challenge for us.”
Methinks Chris Heaton will be in receipt of a PB ban within hours.
For all the so called Libertarian facade of the site
Its not really
When as this site claimed to be Libertarian? The owner is a liberal; that's not the same thing.
You can get away with lots of things on here.
Heck, there are even three posters who are known to say rude things about Radiohead.
Really?
And do not forget that Python is a toy. Proper programming is done is Java or C.
If the Russians are going to make a baseless claim about us destroying Nordstream 2, then we should reply by blaming them for the ridiculous rise in the price of a Freddo.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Would you like to explain what you mean?
It's not remotely a honeymoon period - that requires there to be positive coverage. "Relief that Truss has gone" is not positive coverage.
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Yes.
Until Liz Truss every new leader experienced a polling lift.
Once again this is verifiable through polling and is therefore objective.
I really do hope that the closer to the next election we get those (like me) with firm desires will learn to bracket out [ ] their own beliefs in favour of as objective an analysis as possible. Not always possible but at least strive for it. This place is at its best when it's not a strident bear pit. Leave that to the likes of Guido Fawkes and Elon Musk's latest plaything.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
A few years ago (like 2014) for Halloween I dressed up as Jimmy Savile.
I wonder how that would go this weekend?
There used to be a number of DJs who made a steady living as Jimmy Saville impersonators.
Bottom rather dropped out of that market.
Ditto Gary Glitter tribute acts....
I used to do Jake the Peg for fancy dress parties. Easy to do and with a bit of practice on my part people struggled to work out which the false leg was (I think drink played a part in the failures as a process of elimination made it quite easy really no matter how good I was). I still have the leg many, many decades later. However nobody has heard of him now and if they had it is rather inappropriate.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
What I meant by "nothing else" is the circumstantial evidence relating to the work being undertaken by the lab in Wuhan, the nature of that work and its close alignment with the Covid virus and the opportunities that arose for a leak to break into the wet market.
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
For me the piece that always seemed Ill-fitting was the fact the coronavirus carrying bats associated with this virus live hundreds of miles to the South in Yunnan (whereas the lab testing them and developing SARS viruses was a brisk walk away from Wuhan market).
To explain zoonotic origin the virologists need to explain how it got from bats in caves in Yunnan either directly into a Wigan inhabitant or into an intermediate species.
There are various midway explanations which seem more credible than direct transmission with no involvement of the lab. Like a scientist catching it off a bat while doing fieldwork then coming back as a carrier, or a lab employee selling off illegal bat meat under the counter, and so on.
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
Polish the Ban Hammer for action!
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
It's interesting that Russian trolls seem to encouraged to spout anti-vax nonsense, alongside the anti-Ukraine stuff. Is it because they have found that strong anti-vaxxers will like you no matter what so long as you say something against vaccines?
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
What I meant by "nothing else" is the circumstantial evidence relating to the work being undertaken by the lab in Wuhan, the nature of that work and its close alignment with the Covid virus and the opportunities that arose for a leak to break into the wet market.
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
Fair enough. I think a lab leak is looking pretty likely. The bigger question is artificially enhanced virus escaping, or natural virus. I think I tend to the latter, but I wouldn’t rule out the former. I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Yes.
Until Liz Truss every new leader experienced a polling lift.
Once again this is verifiable through polling and is therefore objective.
I really do hope that the closer to the next election we get those (like me) with firm desires will learn to bracket out [ ] their own beliefs in favour of as objective an analysis as possible. Not always possible but at least strive for it. This place is at its best when it's not a strident bear pit. Leave that to the likes of Guido Fawkes and Elon Musk's latest plaything.
We won't be in a position to judge the Rishi effect until late November. Both May and Johnson peaked and plateaued after about a month with Johnson getting a second bounce after 3 months into the election
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
'Spending time in Asian food markets' imparts zero knowledge of virology.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
What I meant by "nothing else" is the circumstantial evidence relating to the work being undertaken by the lab in Wuhan, the nature of that work and its close alignment with the Covid virus and the opportunities that arose for a leak to break into the wet market.
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
Fair enough. I think a lab leak is looking pretty likely. The bigger question is artificially enhanced virus escaping, or natural virus. I think I tend to the latter, but I wouldn’t rule out the former. I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
The whole concept of working on enhanced function of viruses seems extremely dodgy to me, why on earth would you do it/be permitted to do it? Obviously working on existing viruses looking for cures etc is reasonable work but why the enhanced function? It is a prelude to use as a weapon and it is unacceptable.
I would like to think that our Universities would not be doing the same and I hope the obvious warning of the risks of poor biosecurity have indeed been noted and acted upon. Some of what they might legitimately be working on would be dangerous enough.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
If you don't agree with me you're in denial. What a rubbish argument.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
If the Russians are going to make a baseless claim about us destroying Nordstream 2, then we should reply by blaming them for the ridiculous rise in the price of a Freddo.
Personally, I am shocked. Putin should be ashamed.
(1) We are not rejoining (2) We are not rejoining (3) It is possible we will have a closer relationship with the EU in future (3a) We are not rejoining
It's about learning to live with your mistake, or in the case of half of us,learning to live with other people's mistake. Once you have eliminated your best option you start rejecting your most damaging alternatives.
So Britain's destiny is Vassal State, I believe.. It takes a long time for people to accept that.
It will never be "vassal state" because Britain's raw geopolitical power is equal to or surpasses the top two EU members on their level, and that will tell regardless of the formal treaty relationships that have been established.
Were we an Ireland, Belgium or Denmark I'd agree with you.
LOL, Mr Jingo personified
I thought I might have spotted Casino in Tesco the other day.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
I wouldn't be seen dead in Tesco.
Imagine trying to tell you apart from a Labour MP.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Not sure about that, after all Sunak has still got a bounce compared to Truss and offers a dynamic fresh face and the first British Asian PM to the world.
However, I also agree he still trails and unfortunately there will still be a few closet racists who won't vote for him. Let us not forget even Obama never won most white votes in 2008 and 2012, it was the black and Hispanic vote that got him to the White House. If Sunak or another BAME leader can win most of the British white vote that is when we can say we really are a completely non racial society
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
Polish the Ban Hammer for action!
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
It's interesting that Russian trolls seem to encouraged to spout anti-vax nonsense, alongside the anti-Ukraine stuff. Is it because they have found that strong anti-vaxxers will like you no matter what so long as you say something against vaccines?
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
Interesting point. On the face of it, you'd expect the Russian trolls to be pro-vax, as don't they want Russia to look like the reasonable, rational, mainstream player in all this (and then smuggle the anti-Ukraine stuff along with it)? I suppose it shows that Russia's image abroad isn't what they're about.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
And that Senator Burr report (that is behind the Vanity Fair article) seems to be coming apart already. I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours. To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts: 1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes. In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…) this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
And that Senator Burr report (that is behind the Vanity Fair article) seems to be coming apart already. I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours. To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts: 1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes. In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…) this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
<1/2>
3. There is a rather odd comparison between the COVID-19 pandemic and the H7N9 flu epidemics in China The H7N9 viruses circulate in birds many of which are farmed and come into very frequent and close contact with humans and in China there's been at least 5 H7N9 epidemics from independent sources documented in the last 10 years https://www.doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(17)30323-7 this is a different story to SARS-CoV-2's essentially one-off spillover. The genetic data support that SC2 was introduced in humans in 2 spillover events, BUT these 2 events happened at almost the same time from a single host population source:
thus the comparison to different H7N9 viruses spilling over from farmed birds repeatedly but months apart is irrelevant (not to mention the date typos that make you wonder if anyone proof-read this report...)
4. My final point is about how similar our understanding of the SARS-CoV-1 emergence origins is compared to that of SC2, since the report makes it sound like we know everything about SC1 and nothing about SC2 origins... We recently performed a very comprehensive analysis to see, once you account for the complex recombination patterns in these viruses, how close sampled animal sarbecoviruses are to SC1 and SC2 respectively: The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 Jonathan E. Pekar, Spyros Lytras, Andrew Magee, Jennifer L. Havens, Edyth Parker, Simon Dellicour, Joseph Hughes, Tetyan… https://virological.org/t/the-comparative-recency-of-the-proximal-ancestors-of-sars-cov-1-and-sars-cov-2/906 what we find is that the recombination-free closest common ancestor (recCA) to each virus is basically of equal identity ~99%, while the whole-genome similarity between SC2 and its closest bat virus (~97%) is higher than that of SC1 and its closest bat virus (~96%)
All in all, this report cherry picks data and in many cases makes assertions that completely contradict the scientific facts and data that are available. It also provides no actual evidence for a lab origin of the virus (WIV just being in Wuhan is NOT real evidence of a lab leak) and contains plenty of political 'US vs China' discussion points (that imho obstruct the scientific search for the pandemic's origins). (2/2)
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
📣BIG NEWS: Poland's PM Mateusz Morawiecki just announced Poland will select the U.S. government & Westinghouse for the first part of their $40B nuclear project, creating or sustaining 100,000+ jobs for American workers. Thank you for your hard work with @ENERGY, @USAmbPoland
This is a HUGE step in strengthening our relationship with Poland 🇵🇱 to create energy security for future generations to come. We are excited to continue this partnership to drive forward a clean energy transition with our counterparts in Europe.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Would you like to explain what you mean?
It's not remotely a honeymoon period - that requires there to be positive coverage. "Relief that Truss has gone" is not positive coverage.
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
So instead of a honeymoon bounce, you see Rishi Sunak slowly dragging the Tories back to towards 35% over the coming two years till the election?
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
The "Find someone to blame" mindset.
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Comments
https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1586317624924938240?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1586318782993399810|twgr^|twcon^s3_&ref_url=
BREAKING: Russia's Defence Ministry say representatives of a British Navy unit blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. They are calling the incident a "terrorist attack"
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/24453
Makes you proud to be British, it really does.
Particularly if you overplay your hand.
Who will be the first from the msm to accept responsibility for their part and give the many vaccine injured a platform?
https://twitter.com/mattletiss7/status/1585968248503545858?s=20&t=gqceeISOopl2FZ5EV93m7w
mRNA Vaccines Injure the Heart of ALL Vaccine Recipients and Cause Myocarditis in Up to 1 in 27, Study Finds
https://twitter.com/JamesfWells/status/1585918406720917504?s=20&t=gqceeISOopl2FZ5EV93m7w
Ladies hate illiteracy.
I suppose if you believe that blowing up the Nordstream pipes is an act of such sophistication and skill that Russia and the UK would be the only great powers capable of such a thing then the logical conclusion is it must have been us.
The defence ministry did not give evidence for its claim.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-british-navy-personnel-blew-up-nord-stream-gas-pipelines-2022-10-29/
Cui bono? Certainly not the gas-price dependent Brits just before winter.
Just before the ban hammer.
Would have liked to see some stats about BA pilots though. That's a good sturdy one I've missed recently.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alexstamos/status/1586070566221402113
I think @elonmusk has made a huge mistake, making himself the global face of content moderation at a critical moment of struggle with governments, while maintaining massive personal exposure to challenging
countries...
Do they give a prize to anyone avoiding a ban hammer for more than fifty posts?
Do the Russians really believe this stuff or do they just think it’s a useful way to sow discord in the decadent woke West?
Later peeps. Enjoy, and I hope any other Russian bots are as silly as that one.
It doesn’t even require any kind of series of improbable events to explain it. Lab leaks happen, including famously here in the UK.
The overwrought shoutiness of scientists dismissing lab leak is also odd and unnecessary. It may or may not be the right answer but its really not that “out there” as an explanation.
I don't have a strong opinion for against a lab leak but when stuff like this comes out I'd wait a bit for other people to look at these claims and get some other takes - for example this claims the story is based on reading between the lines of a mistranslation. My Chinese is too shitty to be sure but maybe wait and see what some other Chinese speakers think.
https://twitter.com/zhihuachen/status/1586271619684896769
I wonder how that would go this weekend?
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
The trend is our friend You've come here to shift the Overton window so that Leon seems rational and level-headed?
Bottom rather dropped out of that market.
But it is odd that Northern Ireland, the only part of the UK still in the Single Market, is managing significantly better than Great Britain.
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
Would you like to explain what you mean?
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
Until Liz Truss every new leader experienced a polling lift.
Once again this is verifiable through polling and is therefore objective.
I really do hope that the closer to the next election we get those (like me) with firm desires will learn to bracket out [ ] their own beliefs in favour of as objective an analysis as possible. Not always possible but at least strive for it. This place is at its best when it's not a strident bear pit. Leave that to the likes of Guido Fawkes and Elon Musk's latest plaything.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design"
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
To explain zoonotic origin the virologists need to explain how it got from bats in caves in Yunnan either directly into a Wigan inhabitant or into an intermediate species.
There are various midway explanations which seem more credible than direct transmission with no involvement of the lab. Like a scientist catching it off a bat while doing fieldwork then coming back as a carrier, or a lab employee selling off illegal bat meat under the counter, and so on.
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
lab leak hypothesis.
There’s nothing remotely improbable about an infectious disease leaking from a lab, particularly one where we know the biosecurity level researchers worked to was
not as high as you might expect. Remember this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mouth_outbreak
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS
"We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described.
And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
The reason is so they can publish on Russian media and social media that Brits were discussing the UK was behind the attack on Nordstream.
It is to sow discord.
I would like to think that our Universities would not be doing the same and I hope the obvious warning of the risks of poor biosecurity have indeed been noted and acted upon. Some of what they might legitimately be working on would be dangerous enough.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-independence/ian-murray-union-flag-jacket-photo-result-few-ciders-glastonbury-1375948
Now PBers might disagree about the lockdowns etc we are united in being pro-vaccine.
These trolls do not know their audience.
However, I also agree he still trails and unfortunately there will still be a few closet racists who won't vote for him. Let us not forget even Obama never won most white votes in 2008 and 2012, it was the black and Hispanic vote that got him to the White House. If Sunak or another BAME leader can win most of the British white vote that is when we can say we really are a completely non racial society
English Defence League
National Front
The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/28/rishi-sunak-britain-first-hindu-prime-minister-destroying-tories-pitiful-vision-of-diversity
I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
Spyros Lytras: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1585846395814412290.html
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours.
To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts:
1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes.
In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history:
https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…)
this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
<1/2>
The H7N9 viruses circulate in birds many of which are farmed and come into very frequent and close contact with humans and in China there's been at least 5 H7N9 epidemics from independent sources documented in the last 10 years
https://www.doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(17)30323-7
this is a different story to SARS-CoV-2's essentially one-off spillover. The genetic data support that SC2 was introduced in humans in 2 spillover events, BUT these 2 events happened at almost the same time from a single host population source:
thus the comparison to different H7N9 viruses spilling over from farmed birds repeatedly but months apart is irrelevant (not to mention the date typos that make you wonder if anyone proof-read this report...)
4. My final point is about how similar our understanding of the SARS-CoV-1 emergence origins is compared to that of SC2, since the report makes it sound like we know everything about SC1 and nothing about SC2 origins...
We recently performed a very comprehensive analysis to see, once you account for the complex recombination patterns in these viruses, how close sampled animal sarbecoviruses are to SC1 and SC2 respectively:
The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2
The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 Jonathan E. Pekar, Spyros Lytras, Andrew Magee, Jennifer L. Havens, Edyth Parker, Simon Dellicour, Joseph Hughes, Tetyan…
https://virological.org/t/the-comparative-recency-of-the-proximal-ancestors-of-sars-cov-1-and-sars-cov-2/906
what we find is that the recombination-free closest common ancestor (recCA) to each virus is basically of equal identity ~99%, while the whole-genome similarity between SC2 and its closest bat virus (~97%) is higher than that of SC1 and its closest bat virus (~96%)
All in all, this report cherry picks data and in many cases makes assertions that completely contradict the scientific facts and data that are available.
It also provides no actual evidence for a lab origin of the virus (WIV just being in Wuhan is NOT real evidence of a lab leak) and contains plenty of political 'US vs China' discussion points (that imho obstruct the scientific search for the pandemic's origins).
(2/2)
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
It is sad as it is predictable.
@SecGranholm
📣BIG NEWS: Poland's PM Mateusz Morawiecki just announced Poland will select the U.S. government & Westinghouse for the first part of their $40B nuclear project, creating or sustaining 100,000+ jobs for American workers. Thank you for your hard work with @ENERGY, @USAmbPoland
This is a HUGE step in strengthening our relationship with Poland 🇵🇱 to create energy security for future generations to come. We are excited to continue this partnership to drive forward a clean energy transition with our counterparts in Europe.
https://twitter.com/SecGranholm/status/1586082584919912448
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.