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Reviewing 2023 – politicalbetting.com
Reviewing 2023 – politicalbetting.com
Johnson subsequently proved the point by contracting Covid naturally with such mild symptoms that he was admitted to intensive care.
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On topic, the clown clearly thought that covid would be contagious but benign. A mistake so easy, it was even made on here…
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
https://x.com/kerpen/status/1740200105788199218?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Collins was pivotal in the US reaction to Covid
Recycling electrical goods could be done at kerbside and drop-off points in shops
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67830798
https://twitter.com/EuropeanDudeBoy/status/1740267595675431043/photo/1
I mean, that’s pretty much unparalleled as an event. Who was the last politician in the UK at cabinet level or equivalent to be arrested immediately after leaving office? (Salmond at least there was a bit of a gap.)
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
In Izvestya (News) there is no truth (Pravda)
With apologies to the wags of the Soviet Union.
And weatherwise, it does look a little bit better here than it did yesterday!
I suggest that when we look back on 2023, we’lll see that the brutality in southern Palestine (trying to find a neutral description), and it’s pushing the war in Ukraine a little bit down the front pages has been the most significant event.
The farrago of nonsense, which has been the Covid enquiry, will only be seen as significant in that underlines, the incompetence at the heart of government, also exemplified by the post office enquiry.
Does Chris Huhne count? He was questioned under caution whilst being in the cabinet.
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
But yes, it might have been the highlight of 2023. As already shown in this thread, I can't think of much else that has happened in 2023 but even this is pretty small beer.
The later lockdowns now seem like a kind of universal madness
Blame bellends like that for pressuring the government to lockdown.
How is your stalker going to feel when he has to write pro Muslim articles when the Abu Dhabi takes control of The Spectator?
The Lab/Con front has barely moved in 2023. People have made up their minds, and it's hard to imagine what's going to really shift them either way in 2024.
But the Tartan Wall has developed a crack, and the likely Labour gains from the SNP make a Labour majority a much simpler task.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
I lost a lot of weight during the lockdowns.
It was all the unhealthy eating/work lunches that stopped for a year or so coupled with getting a Peloton that did the trick.
But it was a struggle not seeing friends/colleagues/other halves for a year that took a toll.
The good news for the rest of you is that I won't be posting!
Political highlight at a local level was making it three out of three Labour councillors in our ward. Previously solid Tory.
We did this for a really really bad flu
They bought time to get the country vaccinated.
For the second; was it correct? It's easy to look back now and say it wasn't, because you don't have to live with the consequences of your words. Did it save lives? Almost certainly yes. Were there consequences? Yes. So how do you weigh up an unquantifiable number of lives saved versus the unquantifiable consequences, especially compared to an alternative policy that was not tried?
IMV RCS has made a good point in the past: even if we had not locked down officially, we would have locked down unofficially. And that may have caused the worst of all worlds, with *more* disruption and deaths.
It's an experiment we cannot go back and repeat, thankfully.
I'll just repeat what I've said all along: I'm blooming glad I wasn't having to make the decisions.
We could have been much more nuanced. Pumping money into the NHS to fend off collapse while still keeping schools and biz open - it would have been way cheaper than the trillions in debt we created
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Play nicely children.
Tomorrow I am going to write a header on empathy.
It makes sense. Even a war arguably isn’t as traumatic as what we did to our own societies 2020-2022
I sincerely pray that you are right in your sunny Californian optimism
A shield of electromagnetic pulses along the front lines provides troops with crucial protection to thwart Kyiv’s missile and drone attacks
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/27/russia-electronic-warfare-turn-tide-war-ukraine/ (£££)
Drones are no longer a cheap panacea for the next defence review.
Nowadays social media is a *very* different beast, and can be much nastier. I wonder if the lack of in-face socialisation caused kids to rely more on social media, with all that entails?
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/24010545.2023-review-snps-year-hell/
That long dismal early 2021 lockdown didn't happen in France or Germany, because their governments kept a better lid on things;
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?time=2020-01-03..2021-05-21&facet=none&uniformYAxis=0&country=DEU~GBR~FRA&hideControls=true&Metric=Stringency+index&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false
Turns out that desiring a lack of lockdowns isn't enough- you have to do things to enable that. Put it in a different context (the way to ensure peace is to make it clear that you are prepared to win a war), and it's the sort of thing right wingers used to understand. I blame the magazines of right wing ideas for making them all stupid.
Johnson and co weren't up to that. He so wanted to be Churchill, but against the key enemy of his Premiership he was about as effective as Chamberlain.
I have my parents visiting at the moment, and they took turns reading chapters of Nick Wallis’ book for several hours a day.
Yeah, that works. Makes a change from comparing Johnson to John Thomas.
The Covid Inquiry is doing a great deal of useful work in exposing the rottenness and inadequacy of our system of government. That needs to happen. And a great many people need to be sacked, including an enormous chunk of utterly unfit for purpose Civil Service which still seems to run on who you know rather than the innate abilities of the candidates in question. It's going a long way to explaining the enormous number of policy disasters in the last 35 years, which includes not only Covid but academy schools, OFSTED, new GCSEs, the shambolic transport network, failures in the NHS, the hollowing out of our armed forces, constant mis-spending which has left us with unsustainable debt, the poor quality of our tax system, universal credit, and so on and so forth.
But none of that is really relevant to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of our response to an infectious pandemic - which is what it's meant to be about.
Edit - unless you mean Winston Churchill's son Randolph?
I strongly recommend
He amusingly tried to forestall this by sending in a sick note describing his symptoms in graphic detail, in the hope it would prevent the Commons from actually sitting.
1. Nobody knows if they have any or not. It's just scrandies and psy-ops on Twitter. The only available facts are that the US won't train crew, the Romanian multi-national training centre (Plan A) is not open for business yet so the Danes reactivated their F-16 training cell at Skydstrup (Plan
2. The F-16AM (ie small mouth block 15/20 with an MLU) are 90s tech.
3. That Twitter clip of a Ukrainian F-16 in a shitty hangar was a 1/72 model made by a partially sighted child. It didn't even have the APX-133 IFF antennae that distinguishes the MLU Euro Vipers (except the Italian ones).
4. Like all air forces the Russians have a combination of junk and effective equipment but the Su-30/Adder combo is no joke.
6. The principle value of the F-16 to Ukraine is the totemic demonstration of support showing that the Alliance of Awesome hasn't quite given up on them yet.
It'll all be over by next Christmas.
It is a disgrace. For the first time in a while, I'm now not confident anymore that Ukraine will be able to win the war. If the West stood behind Ukraine unequivocally, then they absolutely could, the combined West has a far, far superior logistical system than isolated Russia does.
But if the West turns its back on Ukraine? That's a different story.
Its a disgrace.
*Grabs tinfoil hat and ducks*
Which should be pretty bloody obvious. If I don't take my kids to school for a week as I want to take them on holiday then I'm breaking the law and can be fined, as its so crucial that children don't miss even a week of schooling - but we shut schools for months and people have a ladida its all fine attitude to it.
No its not all fine. What we did to children was terrible, unforgiveable, and all to save some people from a natural end to their life from a natural virus. It will affect children for decades to come.
There are children approaching GCSEs etc now who missed absolutely crucial formative time at school and never caught up.
Maybe we can thank those maligned civil servants for managing it somehow.
Incidentally, Labour sees schools as glorified childminders, or at least that is the impression from their proposal to provide nursery places in schools.
And to my shame I agreed with lockdown at the time. Something I bitterly regret.
The fact that Johnson and his cronies - Cummings, Hancock, Williamson, Gibb etc - were even worse does not give the likes of Case a free pass for their own uselessness.
Also right was my half mad brother, who raved at me from his Peruvian hilltop - “what are you doing, this is crazy, you’re fucking up humanity to save the very old and very fat”
They kept primaries open as far as possible, but that was easier for them given they tend to be much smaller than ours ( and have smaller classes than ours) anyway.
Edit - and Peru had one of the worst death rates in the world and not just among the elderly.
Disadvantaged children who get popped in front of the TV and left to their own devices, or with parents who can't comprehend what the teachers should be teaching them etc - they did not.
Children of educated, 'middle class' parents are already very advantageous before they even start school - schools are tasked in part with trying to close that gap by giving everyone an opportunity. Instead we did the polar opposite for years and aggravated that gap turning it into a chasm. Which was loudly supported and still defended primarily by those who claim to support equality.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/27/biden-endgame-ukraine-00133211
Belfast might have had a football team playing in England’s Premier League if Tony Blair had got his way, newly released documents show.
The then prime minister was keen to relocate Wimbledon FC to the Northern Irish capital in the late 1990s, hoping it would be a unifying force in the divided city.
There was talk of a 40,000-seater stadium being built, as well as a sporting academy, if the south-west London side moved to the province and changed its name to Belfast United.
Previously confidential state papers include a note from 1997 described as “following up earlier informal discussions about the possibility of an English Premier League football club relocating to Belfast”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/28/tony-blair-wanted-to-relocate-wimbledon-fc-to-belfast/
The teachers I know went into education because they want to help children and care for the children they teach - people like that probably choose to stay teaching rather than get involved as much with union politics. They could see the harm that was done by shutting schools.
Which the DfE were unable or unwilling to put in place, leading to constant conflict. Not helped by the increasingly bizarre behaviour of the DfE itself, which on one memorable occasion issued four contradictory sets of instructions before 9am *on the same day*.
This, in turn, made managing schools in the face of soaring infection rates utterly impossible and meant that the only realistic outcome was closure.
This was explained more clearly when we found that senior officers at the DfE had been drinking throughout the process, and that their 'senior education adviser' was a twenty-something public schoolboy whose only experience of state education was when he had spent two not very successful years on the infamous TeachFirst programme.
A good LOTO has a great deal of power in setting the mood and trajectory of discussion - and I'd argue that Starmer did reasonably well during the crisis. But he also made some absolute howlers.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Zombie deer disease’ could spread to humans as cases surge across US
Experts say lab research indicates the chronic wasting ailment will spread to people in the future
“Zombie deer disease” could spread to humans, scientists have warned as cases surge across the United States.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), which causes infected animals to become listless and jittery, often drooling and grinding their teeth with a zombie-like blank stare, has spread to 32 US states and four Canadian provinces, according to the United States Geological Survey.
The deadly disease has cropped up in Kansas, Wisconsin and Nebraska, where more than 40 counties have reported cases, USA Today reports, and has also been found in 800 samples of deer, elk and moose throughout Wyoming.
“We’re dealing with a disease that is invariably fatal, incurable and highly contagious,” Dr Cory Anderson, the co-director of a CWD programme at University of Minnesota, told The Guardian.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/27/zombie-deer-disease-spread-humans-cases-surge-us/?li_source=LI&li_medium=for_you
This is at heart a governmental failing - a failure of governance of a state owned institution, a failure of the criminal and civil justice system and a continuing failure by the government to put this right. So yes taxpayers will have to pay the compensation bill.
But they have already been paying the Post Office's unjustifiable bills - including large bonuses for their staff - for years. There is absolutely no justification for private citizens (the subpostmasters) who have done nothing wrong to bear - alone - the costs of the Post Office's and government's failings. They have already borne a far too heavy price already.
The current Post Office should be closed down, its existing management and most of its staff removed and they should start again. Its reputation is irretrievably ruined and, judging by its continuing behaviour, none of its management has a handle on the mess they've made let alone how to put matters right. They simply do not get it. A few new procedures and a pro forma apology simply will not do. A wholesale clear out is needed.
That's a symptom of a wider question- has the UK got the balance of lean efficiency and resilience right? I'm not saying it hasn't, maybe running things tightly 95 percent of the time is worth the risk of collapse in the other 5 percent, but we ought to check.
More productive than assuming we can get what we want by saying it loudly enough.
1) Failing to lock down quickly enough, both in March and December 2020, which meant that the lockdowns were longer that they would otherwise had to have been.
2) The prioritisation of pubs and restaurants over schools. It seemed insane at the time that adults were encouraged to socialise while kids were kept isolated.
For that I say no, should have let young people get on with life.
We chose the former, with massive government support for jobs and companies.
Alternately we could have told people to keep calm and carry on. Covid tears massive holes in workplaces which shut themselves down due to a lack of healthy workers willing to take the risk. With no massive financial support and thus the rapid collapse of a whole stack of businesses big and small that summer.
I have no problem with people arguing against lockdown. But they need to recognise that there was no alternative scenario where things carry on as normal.
Good luck with things in 2024.
It will be a very very long time before a UK government can use lockdown again after the Johnson revelations.
Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And
We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67658106
In the week before lockdown clinics were like a ghost town, with half or more not attending. Pubs and restaurants were the same. Without a formal structure of closures and economic support there would have been mass business failures.
I think it worth reviewing what worked and what did not, but keeping calm and carrying on was not a viable plan.
We even had one PB'er panic-buying PPE then fleeing to a cottage in Wales. I bet that person has changed their tune and is full of pompous bravado now.