I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82
My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.
I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.
Congratulations Nick. What lovely news!
Yes, wonderful news. Congratulations @NickPalmer to you both.
Congratulations Nick!
As you may be aware I married four years ago at the age of 72. So far so good.
Sure you'll both be fine.
Completely off topic but if you don't mind my asking: was that when you moved to Winchcombe?
Because I have just had a surreal thought...
(If you do mind my asking feel free to ignore me)!
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
Those two events look very connected - would Garland have done anything if Trump had delayed his presidential campaign a few more months ?
It then took until August 2023 for Trump to be indicted with a trial set to begin in March 2024.
It seemed fairly clear to me, that the lack of interest in prosecuting Trump was about the tradition of not prosecuting people once they are out of power. Many democratic countries drop cases after politicians return to private life.
The Trump investigation should have started on Jan 6th.
I have a problem with dropping cases when politicians return to private life. I am afraid it has been abused. Now suppose Reeves and Starmer stole £100 M while in office and put it in their own accounts, I guess there would be efforts to recover it. But if they cause £100 B damage to the nation's finances through arrogant malfeasance, as seems to be their goal and aspiration then they are let walk away with it. Is that really right ?
Not to mention that, if you drop cases when politicians return to private life, you leave yourself open to the suggestion you brought the case because they were in public life.
So compliant that they voted unanimously against Trump in 2020.
The conspiracy theorising here is becoming deranged.
Now if we want an example of a Trump enabling judge don't look at the supreme court.
Because the judge who really helped Trump was Merrick Garland with his utterly botched investigation and prosecution.
Why Garland did such a shockingly inept job is surely worthy of investigation.
The LOL bit is that some PBers thought Garland was following a brilliant strategy.
Did they? As far as I was paying attention Trump negative PBers thought he was terrible. US leftish Dems on Twitter definitely thought he was shit.
Garland's support came from 'centrist dads' who love a slow and steady process.
Garland is a centrist dad himself.
With hindsight a quick and dirty process would have been better. But there were reasons it wasn't, not least Trump's 'every trick in the book' delaying tactics.
Garland wasted so much time that Trump was able to run down the clock.
The Smith special counsel investigation was a special counsel investigation that was opened by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on November 18, 2022, three days after Donald Trump announced his campaign for the 2024 United States presidential election.
Those two events look very connected - would Garland have done anything if Trump had delayed his presidential campaign a few more months ?
It then took until August 2023 for Trump to be indicted with a trial set to begin in March 2024.
It seemed fairly clear to me, that the lack of interest in prosecuting Trump was about the tradition of not prosecuting people once they are out of power. Many democratic countries drop cases after politicians return to private life.
The Trump investigation should have started on Jan 6th.
I have a problem with dropping cases when politicians return to private life. I am afraid it has been abused. Now suppose Reeves and Starmer stole £100 M while in office and put it in their own accounts, I guess there would be efforts to recover it. But if they cause £100 B damage to the nation's finances through arrogant malfeasance, as seems to be their goal and aspiration then they are let walk away with it. Is that really right ?
A big reason for this convention is the end of the Roman Republic.
When modern democracy was established, a lot of people read up on it.
A big part of the reason for Sulla, Marius and Caesar was that they expected to be prosecuted when they stepped down from office. Sulla managed to retire - by murdering all his enemies, anyone who looked like an enemy, and quite a few besides. Then settled his army on his enemies land. So they were really loyal to him, personally.
So the idea that if the politician retired peacefully, like Cincinnatus to his farm, he should get a kind of pardon for all actions arose.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
It was genuine gain-of-function virus/vaccine research, funded quasi-covertly by Fauci, because he really believes in GoF but they had to do it in China because Obama made GoF research illegal in the USA - because it’s so fucking dangerous!
Here is Peter Daszak literally confessing what they did
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
An engineered virus that accidentally leaked from the lab is my working theory with the research being done for benign reasons such as vaccine development rather than anything like biowarfare.
Well, if it was, it wasn't very good research.
The Covid vaccine the Chinese eventually released was awful.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Death in service benefits to military personnel will potentially be chargeable to IHT after 2027. This may not have occurred to Rachel Reeves, when the changes were announced.
Incidentally; we just bought a new device from a well-known manufacturer, and it is nice and gleaming.
However, the manual is absolute pants. It is written in poor, unclear English; repeats the same points several times, and uses CAPITALS in such a way that it might have been written by Trump on a bad day. Stylistically, it is all over the place.
Manuals often get poor attention from manufacturers, and are almost always an afterthought. And yes, I often don't RTFM. But I wish people would take a little bit more pride in them.
(/rant mode)
Not a new phenomenon -- Pirsig had a bit in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about lousy manuals and the reasons behind them.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
No one has offered up a rate of ~0.01 for the competition yet anyway ;-)
Yeah, I expect I'm not understanding the notation convention of forex - but I'm right that higher number = weaker ruble?
The best way to think about it is how much can one dollar purchase, if amount is higher then the dollar is stronger (local currency weaker) and if it's lower than the dollar is weaker (local currency stronger).
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Death in service benefits to military personnel will potentially be chargeable to IHT after 2027. This may not have occurred to Rachel Reeves, when the changes were announced.
Does anything occur to Rachel Reeves?
That's a surprising comment given much recent conversation has centred around how many things occurred to her when she was writing her CV.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
They’re embarrassed and yet they are too small to admit they got it very wrong, and maybe coz it makes Trump look good, even now? Is the only conclusion i have sadly reached
Which is fucking dismally pathetic, as you rightly aver (in your normal more polite way)
Incidentally while no one was looking Peter “Wuhan lab” Daszak has been fired by Ecohealth and debarred from applying for research funds for five years - for lying through his teeth about basically everything
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
Sure, but the scale of this disaster is, as @Leon and @Cookie point out, off the scale. As a comparator the US had 400k killed in the whole of WW2. Deaths from Covid in the US are over 1.2m, 3x as many.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
It was genuine gain-of-function virus/vaccine research, funded quasi-covertly by Fauci, because he really believes in GoF but they had to do it in China because Obama made GoF research illegal in the USA - because it’s so fucking dangerous!
Here is Peter Daszak literally confessing what they did
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
I'm glad Richard has checked in. And congratulations Nick.
Just taken a quick skim through the past hour or so's posts:
@Leon: boring @Dura_Ace: brilliant @NickPalmer: many congrats @Richard_Tyndall: glad you've survived and yes I agree it would be wrong to tax death compensation payments as part of the estate of the deceased... they could though reasonably be taxed as part the estates of the descendants eventually, if not spent beforehand.
Dura Ace always is good value and I’m glad he returned after his flounce a week or so back.
I worked on some of the vehicles he talks about and he knows far more about them than I do !!
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
More evidence, if any were needed, that he is a vile c-nt and a deeply flawed human being comes to us the form of his old F430 which is up for auction.
It's Rosso Corsa with a TAN interior when, of course, it should be Rosso Corsa/Crema - the classic combo for V8 Ferraris. Tan looks stupid and wrong with Rosso Corsa even if the leather, in both shade and texture, matches the folds of his neck pussy.
I'd pay money to see the fat **** get in and out of it.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
Rather raises the question of why we are still in the WHO, doesn't it?
Completely OT. I have not really followed the news much the last few days form obvious reasons. Looking through the newspaper websites today I see that there is a developing kerfuffle about Labour deciding to count compensation payouts to the families of military personnel who die in the line of duty as taxable for inheritence tax purposes. So they could end upo getting taxed 40% on their compensation.
If true then this seem spretty fucking callous to me but it is worth asking the obvious question first.
Is this true? Or is it journalists and politicians trying to find an adverse angle for something that is not intended by the Treasury?
Until I know the detail I am not sure whether to be outraged at the Government or a those making up the stories.
At least I get to be outraged at someone whatever the answer
Death in service benefits to military personnel will potentially be chargeable to IHT after 2027. This may not have occurred to Rachel Reeves, when the changes were announced.
I think you can attach to that a lot of other people in the treasury - because it's the sort of thing that were the point highlighted - the instant response would be that we can't have that...
On the Supreme Court odds, it’s fairly likely Thomas and Alito retire during the administration (particularly if someone provides them with an incentive). Alito doesn’t matter - he’d be as likely to vote for any old shit Trump want, anyway. But Thomas, disgrace that he is, is slightly less so.
Roberts and Sotomayor are a coin flip to retire.
Apart from possibly Roberts, the only likely reliable vote on the conservative side for the constitution is ACB, who was the only one with serious qualms about granting Trump immunity.
So there’s a potential route for Trump to have a court yet more amenable to his wishes, though again it’s still unlikely. What it’s not, though, is “conspiracy theory”; there’s abundant evidence over the last for years of the Court’s direction of travel.
The legally easier route, though politically harder, would be to engineer a situation where there’s no electoral college majority for any one candidate, and the House gets to vote for whomever they choose (which the 22nd does not seem to bar).
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
It was genuine gain-of-function virus/vaccine research, funded quasi-covertly by Fauci, because he really believes in GoF but they had to do it in China because Obama made GoF research illegal in the USA - because it’s so fucking dangerous!
Here is Peter Daszak literally confessing what they did
It’s all so incredibly blatant. Hiding in plain sight
If thats the case Fauci belongs in jail.
Why do you think Biden has given a “pre-emptive pardon” to Fauci which dates back to 2014?
“The fact that Fauci's pardon specifically and explicitly addresses his Covid-related offenses, while being backdated to 2014—the year the gain-of-function ban took effect, which Fauci circumvented by outsourcing experiments to China—speaks volumes as to what this is really about”
If we're being charitable we can say that Elon is just indulging in a bit of juvenile wind up. Nevertheless, I bet our Nige is pleased that he no longer has to pretend to like him.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Tough on those living alone too. For them lockdown 1 was virtual solitary confinement. Lockdown 3 wasnt much better.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
A fear of murderous global revenge is also a great motivator, and I suspect that motivated quite a lot of scientists to lie and conspire about Covid origins
Imagine YOUR fuck up killed twenty million people. Imagine if you were in any way associated with a disaster like that, and imagine you were even 0.001% culpable. You’d move heaven and earth to shift the focus on to someone - anyone - anything - else. You’d literally be in fear of your life
In a way I don’t blame the boffins for lying. It’s human nature, they were terrified of worldwide anger. But it’s now long past time they fessed up
And on that conciliatory note, I’m off to watch Kaos. Night night from The Goon
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was purely zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
A fear of murderous global revenge is also a great motivator, and I suspect that motivated quite a lot of scientists to lie and conspire about Covid origins
Imagine YOUR fuck up killed twenty million people. Imagine if you were in any way associated with a disaster like that, and imagine you were even 0.001% culpable. You’d move heaven and earth to shift the focus on to someone - anyone - anything - else. You’d literally be in fear of your life
In a way I don’t blame the boffins for lying. It’s human nature, they were terrified of worldwide anger. But it’s now long past time they fessed up
And on that conciliatory note, I’m off to watch Kaos. Night night from The Goon
If we're being charitable we can say that Elon is just indulging in a bit of juvenile wind up. Nevertheless, I bet our Nige is pleased that he no longer has to pretend to like him.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
The firing and debarring of Peter Daszak is new ground - happened a week ago. The CIA’s changed opinion - based on a re-evaluation of Biosafety in Wuhan, in part - is new ground
You’re not gonna get a smoking gun. It happened five years ago. What you will get is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence until the preponderance to one side is overwhelming. That’s where we are, you just can’t admit it, because you are what you are
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority. (I think it likely that Mitch McConnell could have found another "no" vote, but preferred, instead, to fire a shot across the Loser's bow, by providing the 50th vote against Hegseth, but not the 51st.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/24/hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote/
The Senate is designed to slow things down, and often succeeds at that, brilliantly.
(I was going to ask why TSE thinks the Supreme Court will be "compliant" -- and then realized that he is still, to some extent, under the malign influence of the Guardian.)
On the Supreme Court odds, it’s fairly likely Thomas and Alito retire during the administration (particularly if someone provides them with an incentive). Alito doesn’t matter - he’d be as likely to vote for any old shit Trump want, anyway. But Thomas, disgrace that he is, is slightly less so.
Roberts and Sotomayor are a coin flip to retire.
Apart from possibly Roberts, the only likely reliable vote on the conservative side for the constitution is ACB, who was the only one with serious qualms about granting Trump immunity.
So there’s a potential route for Trump to have a court yet more amenable to his wishes, though again it’s still unlikely. What it’s not, though, is “conspiracy theory”; there’s abundant evidence over the last for years of the Court’s direction of travel.
The legally easier route, though politically harder, would be to engineer a situation where there’s no electoral college majority for any one candidate, and the House gets to vote for whomever they choose (which the 22nd does not seem to bar).
It doesn't need to. In that scenario, under the Twelfth Amendment the choice is restricted to the three candidates that got the highest vote share in the electoral college, which couldn't include a term-limited candidate.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
I'll happily volunteer to be a test case
You'll have to get in line behind me.
I am quite happy to prove £200k isn't enough to corrupt me.
I would however demand that we go on a full, in-depth exploration of what sum would be sufficient, to a total not exceeding £7 billion.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was purely zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
There’s also the obvious point that lab leak, and lab leak of virus from gain of function research aren’t the same thing, Lab leak is quite plausible (as is zoonosis), but all the evidence I’ve seen doesn’t really support the theory the virus was produced by the gain of function research that was going on.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
We should now, I think, pay more attention to the variations in the responses to COVID than its origins. In the US, for example, the death rates were much lower in Hawaii and Vermont than the nation as a whole. Hawaii is easy to explain, and Vermont is partly easy to explain: Rural areas did better here, for obvious reasons. But I think Republican Governor Phil Scott also deserves some credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Scott
In Europe, the variations between the death rates in, for example, Austria and the Czech Republic can tell us something, if we are willing to think about them.
(The answers may be as much cultural as political; Belgium would be an excellent place to test that hypothesis.)
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
The firing and debarring of Peter Daszak is new ground - happened a week ago. The CIA’s changed opinion - based on a re-evaluation of Biosafety in Wuhan, in part - is new ground
You’re not gonna get a smoking gun. It happened five years ago. What you will get is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence until the preponderance to one side is overwhelming. That’s where we are, you just can’t admit it, because you are what you are
I'm nothing like as invested in lab leak being wrong as you are in it being right. This is why I can make a better assessment of the probabilities and see that we are not at the point where the evidence for it is overwhelming. We just aren't. And even if we do one day get to that position you will still have been wrong to be certain now and I'll have been right not to have been. So there'll be no use coming on and "lol"ing all over the place should that happen.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
USD/Ruble exchange rate at London FOREX close on 31/12/2025 (31/12/2024 = 114 USD/RUB): 143 (but isn't this RUB per USD? So a weaker RUB has a higher number?)
{Snip]
IANAE but I believe USD/RUB is meant to represent USD 'divided by' RUB, so a ruble goes into a dollar 97.79 times currently.
No one has offered up a rate of ~0.01 for the competition yet anyway ;-)
Yeah, I expect I'm not understanding the notation convention of forex - but I'm right that higher number = weaker ruble?
The best way to think about it is how much can one dollar purchase, if amount is higher then the dollar is stronger (local currency weaker) and if it's lower than the dollar is weaker (local currency stronger).
Right. So this is what breaks my brain, because we're assessing the strength of the ruble, not the dollar...
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
The question now is Leon was it accidental or deliberate.
Accidental. 99.7%. China would surely have had a vaccine ready to go if this was some bioweapon
And if you are using a bio weapon you do not build it to a critical mass using your own people, not even in China.
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
They asked "can we do this?" rather than "Should we do this?"
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
THIS is a fair point, and well made
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
To be fair the MAGA movement is based on not trusting scientists. Its very easy to corrupt people with money. Most are easily bought. I would estimate 200 grand would corrupt 90% of people in the UK.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority. (I think it likely that Mitch McConnell could have found another "no" vote, but preferred, instead, to fire a shot across the Loser's bow, by providing the 50th vote against Hegseth, but not the 51st.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/24/hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote/
The Senate is designed to slow things down, and often succeeds at that, brilliantly.
(I was going to ask why TSE thinks the Supreme Court will be "compliant" -- and then realized that he is still, to some extent, under the malign influence of the Guardian.)
Yes, he still has work to do. He’s come a long way from the days when about 2/3 of the GOP couldn’t stand him, to now when there remain a handful of holdouts.
I think where he goes from here - and his chances of establishing a new permanent power dynasty - will be as usual heavily dependent on the economy and the markets. If he presides over rising prosperity then his party and the public will fall into line; if the economy goes south then we might already be at peak Trump.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
If he presides over rising prosperity then his party and the public will fall into line; if the economy goes south then we might already be at peak Trump.
The first part is true, the second part doesn't follow.
Folks that voted for Trump didn't do so for rational economic reasons.
Yes, they want the economy to do well, but they will not necessarily blame Trump (or themselves) if it doesn't happen
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
That was the worst. Imagine how much good could have been done if "clap for the NHS" had been replaced with "run 5km for the NHS".
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
The firing and debarring of Peter Daszak is new ground - happened a week ago. The CIA’s changed opinion - based on a re-evaluation of Biosafety in Wuhan, in part - is new ground
You’re not gonna get a smoking gun. It happened five years ago. What you will get is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence until the preponderance to one side is overwhelming. That’s where we are, you just can’t admit it, because you are what you are
I'm nothing like as invested in lab leak being wrong as you are in it being right. This is why I can make a better assessment of the probabilities and see that we are not at the point where the evidence for it is overwhelming. We just aren't. And even if we do one day get to that position you will still have been wrong to be certain now and I'll have been right not to have been. So there'll be no use coming on and "lol"ing all over the place should that happen.
I’m not “invested”. I’m angry
I’m angry that science almost certainly - to my mind - condemned us all to a living hell for 2 years and condemned 20 million people to death
Who wouldn’t be angry about that?? Only parochial fools that think some stupid fucking post office scandal is more important than millions of deaths
And even if it turns out it didn’t come from the lab - highly unlikely, but let’s allow it - I’d still be violently angry because there is no doubt that there was a massive cover to to stop us even talking about this, and this cover up by itself stopped us finding the truth
But that’s it. Thats me done. You can go ahead and have the last word as you like
Kaos is good it’s a damn shame they didn’t renew it
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
They reliably gave him the majority he needed.
Trump would appoint his horse as consul if he had one.
He's taking the piss, and also packing the cabinet with his numpties to prevent a 25th amendment section 4 defenestration.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
That was the worst. Imagine how much good could have been done if "clap for the NHS" had been replaced with "run 5km for the NHS".
That would have killed more people than Covid did.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority.
They confirmed the worst candidate since Trump himself.
They reliably gave him the majority he needed.
Trump would appoint his horse as consul if he had one.
He's taking the piss, and also packing the cabinet with his numpties to prevent a 25th amendment section 4 defenestration.
If he presides over rising prosperity then his party and the public will fall into line; if the economy goes south then we might already be at peak Trump.
The first part is true, the second part doesn't follow.
Folks that voted for Trump didn't do so for rational economic reasons.
Yes, they want the economy to do well, but they will not necessarily blame Trump (or themselves) if it doesn't happen
I think that's right although if the economy tanks his popularity will probably decline back to his base. But that's still a lot of people unfortunately.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
Tell me William, what do you see in the Billionaire Donald Trump?
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority. (I think it likely that Mitch McConnell could have found another "no" vote, but preferred, instead, to fire a shot across the Loser's bow, by providing the 50th vote against Hegseth, but not the 51st.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/24/hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote/
The Senate is designed to slow things down, and often succeeds at that, brilliantly.
(I was going to ask why TSE thinks the Supreme Court will be "compliant" -- and then realized that he is still, to some extent, under the malign influence of the Guardian.)
The Supreme Court will be compliant imo because it is largely corrupt, has no firm principles, little integrity, is vulnerable, and in measure cynical. There are Judges on it who said one thing testifying to the Senate eg on Roe vs Wade, then did the opposite when they had been appointed.
Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, received between 2 and 4 million dollars of gifts without declaring them over 2 decades. He is still in post.
The only factor working in the other direction afaics is the desire of the Trump Justices not to be thrown under the bus by Trump, so they can't be fully compliant or they cut their own throats.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
That's pretty much how I feel too.
Let's get back to Donald Trump. Jeez, what a piece of work.
But why? It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy. If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim. And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was. This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime. And yet you're bored by it? You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know. I just don't get it.
I'm exercising my judgement. That's all I can do. It tells me -
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo." "We don't know that." "Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility." "And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
The firing and debarring of Peter Daszak is new ground - happened a week ago. The CIA’s changed opinion - based on a re-evaluation of Biosafety in Wuhan, in part - is new ground
You’re not gonna get a smoking gun. It happened five years ago. What you will get is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence until the preponderance to one side is overwhelming. That’s where we are, you just can’t admit it, because you are what you are
I'm nothing like as invested in lab leak being wrong as you are in it being right. This is why I can make a better assessment of the probabilities and see that we are not at the point where the evidence for it is overwhelming. We just aren't. And even if we do one day get to that position you will still have been wrong to be certain now and I'll have been right not to have been. So there'll be no use coming on and "lol"ing all over the place should that happen.
I’m not “invested”. I’m angry
I’m angry that science almost certainly - to my mind - condemned us all to a living hell for 2 years and condemned 20 million people to death
Who wouldn’t be angry about that?? Only parochial fools that think some stupid fucking post office scandal is more important than millions of deaths
And even if it turns out it didn’t come from the lab - highly unlikely, but let’s allow it - I’d still be violently angry because there is no doubt that there was a massive cover to to stop us even talking about this, and this cover up by itself stopped us finding the truth
But that’s it. Thats me done. You can go ahead and have the last word as you like
Kaos is good it’s a damn shame they didn’t renew it
I'm mature enough not to insist on having the last word.
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
Tell me William, what do you see in the Billionaire Donald Trump?
“I saw the emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it … this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.”
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
Different areas under different restrictions. When we drove down to Bradford on Avon for a holiday, all legal, we could meet my sister for a catch up in Worcestershire but not in Brum where she lives.
On that holiday where we were staying had a pool. We were allocated an hour and a half each day to use 😂
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyf or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
Moonshines barb at you was uncalled for and unfair but was witty. Your response was just rude and unsophisticated.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyle or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
ISTR I had my run-ins with him. But if you think that burn was a 'classic', then you've obviously not progressed past year two in primary school... :
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyle or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
ISTR I had my run-ins with him. But if you think that burn was a 'classic', then you've obviously not progressed past year two in primary school... :
Classic for here, yeah, why not and Given I am 59 years old and four weeks off from retirement I clearly have 😂😂😂😂
Reeves adamant she will not tweak or change the IHT for farms.
She'll be forced to u-turn eventually. Why spin this out?
Why would she be forced to? The government has a majority. The policy isn't noticeably popular but the election is a long way off. It is likely to be a flawed policy in terms of raising cash but it only negatively affects small numbers of people.
As with VAT on private schools, it may be a bad idea and it probably won't raise much net revenue but there's no reason to think it will be reversed.
She is going to have farmers protesting for the next four years and there's quite a few Lab rural seats these days.
It 'aint worth the candle.
Not sure a u turn is going to win her any votes, and would mean she has to cut spending/find some other tax to raise. And she believes (rightly in my view) that it's the right policy.
It doesn't raise any money though and all of the supermarkets have come out and said it will put long term food security at risk. I guarantee you that people are more likely to trust farmers, Tesco and Sainsbury's on food matters than the government. It's a such an odd policy hill to die on unless it's ideologically driven in which case Labour will get spanked at the ballot box because largely the British public supports farmers more than they support politicians.
The ineptitude of Reeves is that she's wasting time and political capital on things which raise/save trivial amounts of money - farmers inheritance, VAT on school fees, WFA.
She is just targeting those who mostly don't vote Labour ie farmers, pensioners, private school parents and business owners (who have been hit by the rise in employers NI too)
Except for school fees, I doubt this is politically targeted at all. This to me looks uncannily like George Osborne's omnishambles budget, where a new and naive Chancellor mindlessly packages up the Treasury's hit list of anomalies.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
The queuing to get into the supermarkets early on was my pet hate. Remember this was the highlight of the day in those 1st weeks of lockdown.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.
ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)
The thing about statistics is that they are mostly gained after the event. Back in early 2020, we had f-all idea of how Covid was spreading, and there were plenty of fit and healthy young people who were affected, as stories from Italy and China seemed to indicate. Yes, it seemed it *mostly* affected the elderly worse, but we unsure by how much.
My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.
But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
The queuing to get into the supermarkets early on was my pet hate. Remember this was the highlight of the day in those 1st weeks of lockdown.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.
ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)
The thing about statistics is that they are mostly gained after the event. Back in early 2020, we had f-all idea of how Covid was spreading, and there were plenty of fit and healthy young people who were affected, as stories from Italy and China seemed to indicate. Yes, it seemed it *mostly* affected the elderly worse, but we unsure by how much.
My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.
But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.
During the first few weeks, before any lockdown measures were taken, the most dangerous occupation to have was being a male security guard.
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
The queuing to get into the supermarkets early on was my pet hate. Remember this was the highlight of the day in those 1st weeks of lockdown.
Exacerbated by the supermarkets cutting their opening hours.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.
ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)
The thing about statistics is that they are mostly gained after the event. Back in early 2020, we had f-all idea of how Covid was spreading, and there were plenty of fit and healthy young people who were affected, as stories from Italy and China seemed to indicate. Yes, it seemed it *mostly* affected the elderly worse, but we unsure by how much.
My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.
But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.
The first lockdown was probably unavoidable because of the media hysteria. But it was known within a few weeks that it hadn't been necessary - remember that in all three lockdowns transmission peaked before lockdown, showing that voluntary measures worked - but it should have been imposed with much more "we're erring on the side of caution until we know more, but there's no need to panic" than "DO YOU WANT TO KILL GRANNIES?" - which made the second and third politically unavoidable too.
And as for the last bit - yes, that's the whole point. The vulnerable should have been protected, which demonstrably didn't happen with bundling most of them into care homes where a single case would lead to rapid transmission.
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
Tell me William, what do you see in the Billionaire Donald Trump?
“I saw the emperor—this world-soul—riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it … this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.”
And then a little boy shouted out, 'Look, he's naked, I can see his willy!
On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
A result of having a government that didn't believe in (1) but was pressured into doing more than (2).
What do people think were the most idiotically excessive measures of the whole lockdown era?
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense - the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense - the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
The queuing to get into the supermarkets early on was my pet hate. Remember this was the highlight of the day in those 1st weeks of lockdown.
I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.
I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.
The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious
The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable
We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like
Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed
A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.
Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".
Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.
ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)
The thing about statistics is that they are mostly gained after the event. Back in early 2020, we had f-all idea of how Covid was spreading, and there were plenty of fit and healthy young people who were affected, as stories from Italy and China seemed to indicate. Yes, it seemed it *mostly* affected the elderly worse, but we unsure by how much.
My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.
But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.
A lot of the complaints about COVID measures fall into two categories: the wisdom of hindsight, and fundamentalist libertarianism (from the same sort of person who's still bitter about indoor smoking bans and mandatory seatbelts in cars.)
What did happen a lot in that period is useless measures dragging on much longer than they should, because they fell within the remit of being seen to be doing something. An obsession with surface cleaning persisted long after it became obvious that the infection was almost exclusively airborne, rules on meeting and socialising outdoors could've been discarded a lot earlier, and the less said of paper face masks the better.
Whoever mentioned the Omicron panic has it spot on when they say the Government was right to resist the baying for a third lockdown (I seem to recall at the time that the Dutch gave in on this one and all it did was delay the peak of infections by about five days,) and it's possible that the schools stayed shut for too long, though I've forgotten all the gory details of how long it took to get them up and running again so can't say much more than that.
I've a lot of sympathy in principle for a government having to muddle through the danger and uncertainty of a pandemic, though none in practice for Johnson and the other perpetrators of the numerous partygate scandals, because of that behaviour.
The vote confirming Hegseth as Defense Secretary was revealing; it showed, to anyone paying attention, that Trump does not have a reliable Senate majority. (I think it likely that Mitch McConnell could have found another "no" vote, but preferred, instead, to fire a shot across the Loser's bow, by providing the 50th vote against Hegseth, but not the 51st.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/24/hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote/
The Senate is designed to slow things down, and often succeeds at that, brilliantly.
(I was going to ask why TSE thinks the Supreme Court will be "compliant" -- and then realized that he is still, to some extent, under the malign influence of the Guardian.)
The even more worrying one is Tulsi Gabbard. Hopefully McConnell can find another senator and shoot down her nomination. Having someone who repeats Kremlin talking points as head of US national intelligence is not optimal.
On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
After 1st (March-April 2020) lockdown it was pretty clear that the transmission problem was mostly relating to crowded indoor venues. For most of the country the restrictions were fairly minor, and probably ineffective until the winter lockdown of Dec 2020.
The really stupid thing was to allow schools back for a single day in Jan 2021. The death rate peaked at the end of Jan 21 at around 4000 per day. It was totally grim to be helping on ICU then, with 3 times the number of patients to regular capacity, with no one over 60. Over 60% the hospital beds in Leicester occupied with covid patients. Oxygen capacity was significantly stretched. I never want to work in such a situation again.
This was concurrent with the vaccine rollout so there was real light at the end of the tunnel. The restrictions probably lasted too long, and should never have been applied to outdoor socially distanced activities, particularly after the over sixties
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyle or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
ISTR I had my run-ins with him. But if you think that burn was a 'classic', then you've obviously not progressed past year two in primary school... :
Classic for here, yeah, why not and Given I am 59 years old and four weeks off from retirement I clearly have 😂😂😂😂
Sometime in the next month there will be an unsolved murder, the chief will ask you for your gun, you will say you are too old for this shit and, at the end, throw your badge into the river.
On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
Ultimately the biggest factor was did you get covid before you were vaccinated or after. Sadly the speed of uk vx rollout was more than counterbalanced by fact we allowed a second larger covid wave just before the vaccines happened.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyle or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
ISTR I had my run-ins with him. But if you think that burn was a 'classic', then you've obviously not progressed past year two in primary school... :
Classic for here, yeah, why not and Given I am 59 years old and four weeks off from retirement I clearly have 😂😂😂😂
Sometime in the next month there will be an unsolved murder, the chief will ask you for your gun, you will say you are too old for this shit and, at the end, throw your badge into the river.
I reached that point a few years ago. I’ve been, like Gillian McKeith in her channel 4 days, going through the motions.
On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
After 1st (March-April 2020) lockdown it was pretty clear that the transmission problem was mostly relating to crowded indoor venues. For most of the country the restrictions were fairly minor, and probably ineffective until the winter lockdown of Dec 2020.
The really stupid thing was to allow schools back for a single day in Jan 2021. The death rate peaked at the end of Jan 21 at around 4000 per day. It was totally grim to be helping on ICU then, with 3 times the number of patients to regular capacity, with no one over 60. Over 60% the hospital beds in Leicester occupied with covid patients. Oxygen capacity was significantly stretched. I never want to work in such a situation again.
This was concurrent with the vaccine rollout so there was real light at the end of the tunnel. The restrictions probably lasted too long, and should never have been applied to outdoor socially distanced activities, particularly after the over sixties
I suspect that the restrictions were counterproductive in that once one person from a household caught it, the lockdown pretty much ensured that entire household would get it with people spending 23+ hours a day shut away together.
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
Rory Stewart made himself a laughing stock commenting on US politics over the election.
Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,
For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light
"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"
"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."
"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."
"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."
Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along
I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?
We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.
The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏
This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were
And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea
But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters
FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs
Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league
"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"
Why?
I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.
If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?
Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?
I mean, lol. Stupefying
Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.
Really unnecessary.
@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.
Oh give over
We lay into each other all the time. We’d all die of pious boredom otherwise. @moonshine put the boot in with skill. His insult is deft, not randomly nasty, it’s the OPPOSITE of pointless abuse
Parse it
“Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, @JossiasJessop is here”
Why is that effective? Because it’s economical, it scans, it’s got rhythm and punch, and it feels fresh. And ALSO - importantly - it tells a truth, with a dash of hyperbole. We all love @JosiasJessop but he’s not one of the site’s intellectual titans, is he? Indeed he’d be the first to admit that, in his simple, affable, good natured provincial way. He IS self aware, even if he’s really not very bright
It would be like me saying
“Often I come to the site looking for pithy and concise headers. And other times, @Cyclefree is the writer”
Which you've said ad nauseam over the years.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
Moonshine certainly is a rank amateur, although his burn of JJ was a classic, when compared to Ishmael who could be bludgeon or rapier dependent on the ABV of his blood at the time.
A comment that says more about you than it does about me.
Not really, and when people like myself, Gin, Kyle or any of the others who were on the receiving end of Ishmaels invective, which could be rather barbed, where were people like you exactly to object to it ? Keeping your heads down in case he had a go at you, no doubt.
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
ISTR I had my run-ins with him. But if you think that burn was a 'classic', then you've obviously not progressed past year two in primary school... :
Classic for here, yeah, why not and Given I am 59 years old and four weeks off from retirement I clearly have 😂😂😂😂
Sometime in the next month there will be an unsolved murder, the chief will ask you for your gun, you will say you are too old for this shit and, at the end, throw your badge into the river.
Avoid the last patrol. According to various documentaries from Holyweird, the “one last time” is 100% fatal.
Comments
But it still raises some very serious questions. Like WTF were they doing trying to develop viruses with gains of function in the first place? A question to which not nearly enough attention has been paid, in my opinion and moves to the next question, why are we still trading with a country that behaves like that?
Because I have just had a surreal thought...
(If you do mind my asking feel free to ignore me)!
When modern democracy was established, a lot of people read up on it.
A big part of the reason for Sulla, Marius and Caesar was that they expected to be prosecuted when they stepped down from office. Sulla managed to retire - by murdering all his enemies, anyone who looked like an enemy, and quite a few besides. Then settled his army on his enemies land. So they were really loyal to him, personally.
So the idea that if the politician retired peacefully, like Cincinnatus to his farm, he should get a kind of pardon for all actions arose.
Here is Peter Daszak literally confessing what they did
https://x.com/graduatedben/status/1399770379334397953?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
Here is Daszak talking proudly of his killer coronaviruses
https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1777716689804628210?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
It’s all so incredibly blatant. Hiding in plain sight
The Covid vaccine the Chinese eventually released was awful.
It looks to me more likely than not that it came from a lab. Finally governments appear to be agreeing. If it wasn't released deliberately, then at the very least it came from the fact that research was being offshored to China because there were rules against it being done in the west in case as a by-product a global pandemic was caused killing 20 million people and impoverishing the global economy.
If it wasn't deliberate, it seems highly likely it was caused by massive negligemce - a looking-the-other-way on a quite criminal scale, not just by individual Chinese scientists and politicians but also by western scientists who aent research that way. Essentially, if the answer is Lab Leak - which looks increasingly likely - this is institutional wickedness on a scale which makes the Post Office scandal look like a bit of minor rounding-up-to-the-next-mile in an expense claim.
And Facebook wouldn't let you talk about it. Google wouldn't let you search for it. Whether Lab Leak is true or not, the cover up certainly was.
This is pretty much the biggest scandal in my lifetime.
And yet you're bored by it?
You were a voice of sanity on lockdown. You were as angry about the abandonment of freedom of association as any reasonable person. And now you just want to shrug your shoulders and move on? The people covering this up haven't gone away, you know.
I just don't get it.
And it's not something China suffers from alone, as examples from the past and present show all too well.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1883412365498003505
Which is fucking dismally pathetic, as you rightly aver (in your normal more polite way)
Incidentally while no one was looking Peter “Wuhan lab” Daszak has been fired by Ecohealth and debarred from applying for research funds for five years - for lying through his teeth about basically everything
https://x.com/hansmahncke/status/1880479128366756128?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
I predict he will end up in a courtroom
“Sane people do not build weapons like this.”
The problem is not just China, the problem is with science in general - as well as China
American scientists wanted this, and paid for it, and circumvented American law to get it done in China. UK scientists were complicit in the ensuing cover-up - Daszak is half British, Jeremy Farrar is deeply implicated (and is now CEO of WHO, what a turnaround eh)
The Lancet published that mendacious letter. Nature published that fraudulent early paper. All of science is corrupted and devalued by this. Which is one more reason why this is so important. If we can’t trust scientists to tell the truth, where are we?
I worked on some of the vehicles he talks about and he knows far more about them than I do !!
Alito doesn’t matter - he’d be as likely to vote for any old shit Trump want, anyway. But Thomas, disgrace that he is, is slightly less so.
Roberts and Sotomayor are a coin flip to retire.
Apart from possibly Roberts, the only likely reliable vote on the conservative side for the constitution is ACB, who was the only one with serious qualms about granting Trump immunity.
So there’s a potential route for Trump to have a court yet more amenable to his wishes, though again it’s still unlikely. What it’s not, though, is “conspiracy theory”; there’s abundant evidence over the last for years of the Court’s direction of travel.
The legally easier route, though politically harder, would be to engineer a situation where there’s no electoral college majority for any one candidate, and the House gets to vote for whomever they choose (which the 22nd does not seem to bar).
Reform are on the march, will be leading all polls in coming weeks imo & totally reflects what I’m hearing from everyday people.
They want change.
LAB 28% (-1)
REF 27% (+3)
CON 21% (-2)
LD 11% (+1)
GRN 8% (-1)
Via
@OpiniumResearch
22 Jan (+/- vs 15 Jan)
https://x.com/EssexPR/status/1883465648615129313
“The fact that Fauci's pardon specifically and explicitly addresses his Covid-related offenses, while being backdated to 2014—the year the gain-of-function ban took effect, which Fauci circumvented by outsourcing experiments to China—speaks volumes as to what this is really about”
https://x.com/hansmahncke/status/1881374058161594846?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg
Imagine YOUR fuck up killed twenty million people. Imagine if you were in any way associated with a disaster like that, and imagine you were even 0.001% culpable. You’d move heaven and earth to shift the focus on to someone - anyone - anything - else. You’d literally be in fear of your life
In a way I don’t blame the boffins for lying. It’s human nature, they were terrified of worldwide anger. But it’s now long past time they fessed up
And on that conciliatory note, I’m off to watch Kaos. Night night from The Goon
It was not the deliberate manufacture and release of a killer virus. That can be discounted as far as anything in this world can. Its origin was purely zoonotic or by laboratory accident. Both of these are plausible. There's no clinching evidence for either which precludes the other one.
Yes, it's important, course it is. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just not that interested in hearing opinions on it unless it's new ground.
"It was Lab Leak. Defo."
"We don't know that."
"Lol, only morons still think wet market is a possibility."
"And only axe grinding conspiracy nuts think it isn't."
Sorry to give myself the last word there but the point is this is not new ground. It has the comfort of ritual but it's not new ground.
And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?
You’re not gonna get a smoking gun. It happened five years ago. What you will get is an accumulation of circumstantial evidence until the preponderance to one side is overwhelming. That’s where we are, you just can’t admit it, because you are what you are
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/24/hegseth-senate-confirmation-vote/
The Senate is designed to slow things down, and often succeeds at that, brilliantly.
(I was going to ask why TSE thinks the Supreme Court will be "compliant" -- and then realized that he is still, to some extent, under the malign influence of the Guardian.)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Additional_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution
I am quite happy to prove £200k isn't enough to corrupt me.
I would however demand that we go on a full, in-depth exploration of what sum would be sufficient, to a total not exceeding £7 billion.
Lab leak is quite plausible (as is zoonosis), but all the evidence I’ve seen doesn’t really support the theory the virus was produced by the gain of function research that was going on.
They reliably gave him the majority he needed.
I don't lay into people BTL here. If I did, I can assure you I'd make @moonshine look like a rank amateur.
It makes PB and social media generally incredibly tedious.
Still I enjoy you using 7 (SEVEN) paragraphs to analyse 16 words. And you accuse me of being prolix ....
In Europe, the variations between the death rates in, for example, Austria and the Czech Republic can tell us something, if we are willing to think about them.
(The answers may be as much cultural as political; Belgium would be an excellent place to test that hypothesis.)
https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-sex-assault-payment-trump-6674cc8cfee654c374725948e01ff666
I think where he goes from here - and his chances of establishing a new permanent power dynasty - will be as usual heavily dependent on the economy and the markets. If he presides over rising prosperity then his party and the public will fall into line; if the economy goes south then we might already be at peak Trump.
Now we're all happy (but not gay)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfIneIoAWw
There are so many to choose from, including:
- the travel and quarantine restrictions, that never stopped or even notably delayed the spread of any of the variants (as the WHO used to advise, at least until the Chinese started implementing them) and did so at vast expense
- the lunatic furlough system that paid my perfectly healthy 20-something neighbours to sunbathe all summer at huge public expense
- the moronic proposal for a final lockdown after most people had been jabbed, which obviously SKS enthusiastically backed, but the government, in an uncharacteristic and belated act of common sense, rejected.
But I'm sure there are plenty of other examples.
Probably my favourite one for sheer counter-productive idiocy, though a relatively minor one, was fencing off outdoor gyms, for a a virus that didn't spread outdoors but did target fat people.
I can't think of more of a parody of a terrible public health measure than that.
Folks that voted for Trump didn't do so for rational economic reasons.
Yes, they want the economy to do well, but they will not necessarily blame Trump (or themselves) if it doesn't happen
I’m angry that science almost certainly - to my mind - condemned us all to a living hell for 2 years and condemned 20 million people to death
Who wouldn’t be angry about that?? Only parochial fools that think some stupid fucking post office scandal is more important than millions of deaths
And even if it turns out it didn’t come from the lab - highly unlikely, but let’s allow it - I’d still be violently angry because there is no doubt that there was a massive cover to to stop us even talking about this, and this cover up by itself stopped us finding the truth
But that’s it. Thats me done. You can go ahead and have the last word as you like
Kaos is good it’s a damn shame they didn’t renew it
https://x.com/rorystewartuk/status/1883446667133005868
Trump is quite different from almost all previous leaders since the early Middle Ages. He does not even pretend - with Greenland or Gaza or international aid - to be acting for just reasons. The impact of this naked abuse of power will be staggering.
He's taking the piss, and also packing the cabinet with his numpties to prevent a 25th amendment section 4 defenestration.
Proper gangster oligarchy.
Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, received between 2 and 4 million dollars of gifts without declaring them over 2 decades. He is still in post.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/06/supreme-court-justices-millions-dollars-gifts-clarence-thomas.html
The only factor working in the other direction afaics is the desire of the Trump Justices not to be thrown under the bus by Trump, so they can't be fully compliant or they cut their own throats.
The USA is rotting from the head.
On that holiday where we were staying had a pool. We were allocated an hour and a half each day to use 😂
I rather miss Ishmael.
He may have been abusive but he had class with it.
Moonshines barb at you was uncalled for and unfair but was witty. Your response was just rude and unsophisticated.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported-sars-cov-2-deaths-in-england/covid-19-confirmed-deaths-in-england-to-31-december-2022-report
ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)
My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.
But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.
Absolutely useless wankstains.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-52228475
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertsmithson1/p/the-other-impact-of-tariffs?r=2a9ngu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Please like and subscribe (it's free!)
And as for the last bit - yes, that's the whole point. The vulnerable should have been protected, which demonstrably didn't happen with bundling most of them into care homes where a single case would lead to rapid transmission.
Do all grownups' willies look like mushrooms?'
(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)
(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.
What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.
* I have my doubts about the latter as his punctuation was generally very good. .
What did happen a lot in that period is useless measures dragging on much longer than they should, because they fell within the remit of being seen to be doing something. An obsession with surface cleaning persisted long after it became obvious that the infection was almost exclusively airborne, rules on meeting and socialising outdoors could've been discarded a lot earlier, and the less said of paper face masks the better.
Whoever mentioned the Omicron panic has it spot on when they say the Government was right to resist the baying for a third lockdown (I seem to recall at the time that the Dutch gave in on this one and all it did was delay the peak of infections by about five days,) and it's possible that the schools stayed shut for too long, though I've forgotten all the gory details of how long it took to get them up and running again so can't say much more than that.
I've a lot of sympathy in principle for a government having to muddle through the danger and uncertainty of a pandemic, though none in practice for Johnson and the other perpetrators of the numerous partygate scandals, because of that behaviour.
The really stupid thing was to allow schools back for a single day in Jan 2021. The death rate peaked at the end of Jan 21 at around 4000 per day. It was totally grim to be helping on ICU then, with 3 times the number of patients to regular capacity, with no one over 60. Over 60% the hospital beds in Leicester occupied with covid patients. Oxygen capacity was significantly stretched. I never want to work in such a situation again.
This was concurrent with the vaccine rollout so there was real light at the end of the tunnel. The restrictions probably lasted too long, and should never have been applied to outdoor socially distanced activities, particularly after the over sixties
Sadly the speed of uk vx rollout was more than counterbalanced by fact we allowed a second larger covid wave just before the vaccines happened.
It's remarkable he still expects a hearing.