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The pursuit of happiness – politicalbetting.com
The pursuit of happiness – politicalbetting.com
No sparing the blushes of Matt Hancock this morning. From the rule of six to the rules of sex – what is the government advice around close relationships? RH#KayBurley pic.twitter.com/RLjBa13S0R
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You been peering in windows Meeks?
"Highway code for Covid" - I like that.
That was an interview with a journalist. To walk away from a 2 man debate is a lot more dangerous, because it allows Trump 90 minutes to say more or less what he wants.
EDIT Great thread header Alastair. Sorry to divert
Not that he'd be seen dead in Tescos.
Enforcement also an issue, as the impression is it's all basically voluntary. No reason at all not to make an example of Stanley Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn - we're not talking about sending them to Belmarsh, for goodness sake, simply a fine that they are well able to pay for breaches that are egregious and not denied. I cannot for the life of me see why this is not done.
https://youtu.be/aVIA1n5ng4Y
ironically BJ likely doesn't have a problem with Tescos when he has need of a wine box of Chateau Getwrecked and one of those terrible, terrible suits that he barely inhabits.
Thanks for your comment, Ed, and the nice compliment which I accept immodestly.
It's people like you that help punters keep straight when overexuberence threatens our objectivity. Those that haven't much experience of the US probably need it more than most. My own experiences include a short spell living there, driving from coast to coast, and some fairly lengthy visits and holidays. Yes, I've been to Pennsylvania and fairly recently Upper New York State too, which has a similar demographic and political climate. (Away from the cities it is distinctly Republican.) For those who haven't visited, the excellent Oscar-winning film Manchester By The Sea captures beautifully the spirit the author of the excellent piece you quoted was trying to convey. I have numerous US friends, some fanatical Trump supporters. I get what they see in him, but since he is widely regarded as something of a figure of fun over here, it's good to be reminded from time to time.
All the same, I can't help feeling it's close to a wrap now. Sure, you can extrapolate from some half decent polls such as the Nationals from Monmouth and Emerson a few days back, not to mention the positives from scratchier outfits like Rasmussen and Trafalgar. There are anecdotes and suppositions that can be thrown in too. Shy-Trumpers are particularly popular with those padding out an insubstantial case because, like fairies at the bottom of the garden, it is very difficult to prove they really don't exist.
The overwhelming evidence now points clearly to a Biden win, quite possibly a big one. You'd be a fool to ignore it. Of course the disappointed voters of the neglected parts of PA and elsewhere will ache for a saviour and remain sceptical of Biden and his Party. They won't give up lightly on Trump or the GoP, but they too have disappointed and it appears they cannot call on the same levels of support that got Trump over the line (just) last time around.
The models are showing the President should be 7/2, at least. They are largely fact-based. Time is running out for the Donald. Biden is a Punter's gift at 4/6. Sometimes things are as they seem to be.
Please keep posting. Helps keep us all honest.
Still has.
Plus it's got a seat cover which surely adds cool-as-fuck points.
He used to visit Morrisons a fair bit when he went to Devon and Cornwall.
Splendid. Except that the version of Tier 2 in West Yorkshire is different to that in the North East. Are they at Tier two-and-a-half?
Dildo:
Guido understands Middlesbrough and Hartlepool are to enter local lockdowns, akin to those seen in the rest of north east, as of midnight on the 5th.
Middlesbrough is only included because they asked to be included.
https://order-order.com/2020/09/30/exclusive-new-middlesbrough-and-hartlepool-to-enter-local-lockdown/
Andy Preston, Mayoral Panjandrum of Middlesbrough:
https://twitter.com/Tees_Issues/status/1311612081091809280
This could be a good project for PB. Let's think of some other ways of saying: "Another example of disconnect" when a poll which asks if people would be happy to leave the EU gets a 94% yes result.
I was thinking back to earlier years - the 1980s - through BSE and Mr Gummer trying to feed his daughter burgers in public - to the later years of Mrs T and AIDS/HIV. I seem to remember her doing much better than the current lot on HIV after - I also STR - some false steps/delay because Gays were not approved of by the Tories and nice ladies didn't talk about practices that went on in the communal bathhouses of SF and the like. Perhaps it was her scientific training, but ISTR she got things together still more quickly on the ozone layer when the scientists warned her - for which she perhapos doesn't get enough credit.
But one difference is that in those days there were only 4 TV channels and people bought and read newspapers as well. Public service messaging was surely simpler then. Though the reputed geniuses in the current lot should have been able to solve that conumdrum, they seem to spend far less emergy in dealing with coronavirus than they did with pushing to win the referendum in 2016. Or am I unfair?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moderna-ceo-coronavirus-vaccine-wont-be-ready-until-spring-2021/
And what happens when it doesn't come next spring. Another year of this?
No, we must learn to live with the virus.
I doubt they know themselves. Johnson clearly doesn't.
I wonder if the header suffers from being based on a potentially falsely optimistic premise, that we can "learn to live with" this virus by finding socially acceptable ways to live our lives in a not-too-depressingly-drab-or-economically-screwed "new normal" while keeping the virus largely suppressed, with special measures locally to tackle isolated outbreaks.
Obviously there are loads of nasty bugs we've learned to live with, and ultimately COVID will join them. This living-with is often accompanied by tools to help us, like vaccination, and/or by most of of us surviving any infection, and enough of it circulating around that we either have or are close to herd immunity. Because COVID is a novel disease we don't seem to have built up enough immunity in the population yet, judging from the recent upsurge, which means quite rapid exponential growth can still be expected once control measures are no longer sufficient. It's notable that both the early Imperial reports and NERVTAG minutes suggested we would end up with alternating periods of very strict and less strict measures, lasting for potentially months at a time, and it seems they may turn out right after all (though obviously this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy if this is what strategic thinking has been premised on).
HIV/AIDS is different in that we have managed to largely control it with a vaccine and despite herd immunity being an irrelevant paradigm, but it's been easier to control in that transmission usually takes place around discrete events and times, rather than an ever-present risk in almost all of daily life, and we have safe practices that almost, albeit not entirely, eliminate the risk during those events. As a clinically vulnerable person, it isn't clear what you can do to protect yourself if you wanted to go shopping, for example.
https://twitter.com/georgeeaton/status/1311574127162150914
Hurrah!
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1311633773214261248
Rudolf Virchow: “An epidemic is a social phenomenon that has a few medical aspects.”
Something Graham Medley has talked about is a kind of "R budgeting", whereby we find a set of restrictions we can live under that keep R at or below 1. Theoretically this sounds like a good way of producing a comprehensible code we can live by, and sounds like it should be sustainable in the long-run. But actually it would mean a bit of juggling in and out, his most famous suggestion being when schools returned after summer, some additional restriction like closing the pubs might be needed to balance things out. Winter means people spend more time indoors, so something else would have to change. Even if we had perfect knowledge of how social risks should balance, we shouldn't expect required regulations or social codes of conduct to be reassuringly stable. The darker cloud hanging over this is can we find a way of life that keeps R around or below 1 that is genuinely liveable, and psychologically and economically sustainable?
Restrictions may not need to be so onerous with other interventions like better contact-tracing, control of potential super-spreading events, maybe technological improvements like fast tests for contagiousness ... but at present, at least based on the UK and to some extent wider European experience, we should at least admit the possibility that we're not going to be able to stay on top of this thing without a bout or two more of some nasty socio-economic medicine. We can't just copy-and-paste the rules and regs from Sweden, or whoever is poster boy du jour, because of differences in everything from commuting patterns to household sizes to frequency of hugs and kisses, so what's sustainable in one country might not work in another. (Will also be interesting to see what happens in the Swedish winter when people mix indoors more.) I'm not saying we can't learn anything from other countries' experience, but I wonder if we'd ever have enough information to be able to successfully "fine-tune" an R budget - which would likely be an experimental, incremental process with further confusing rule changes and U-turns required - and we certainly can't borrow another country's wholesale.
And they will be manufacturing in the meantime.
I don't think this is a significant change from recent guidance - more a reaction to Trump saying it might be ready next week.
If Covid is present in the community, and if that community socialises indoors, then the virus will spread. In the absence of the vaccine that leaves us with three alternatives.
Catch It - We could decide that treatment options have improved sufficiently that it's now safe enough to let the virus spread relatively unrestricted.
Hide From It - We could continue in our current joyless limbo, where we use blunt rules of anti-social distancing to stop the virus from spreading too much. I reckon this is where we'd end up if we tried to go for Catch It, because people would come up with the rules themselves once they saw the hospitals start to get overwhelmed. It would just be with a higher level of virus circulation. Some people find it easier to hide than others, as well.
Kill It - We follow other island countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan (and effectively South Korea given the status of their land border), and take the short term pain to achieve zero covid, so that we can live with much greater freedom once that's achieved, albeit with a tight quarantine at the coast.
HIV is not the right model for this, since Covid spreads far too much more easily. There is no single behaviour change that will cut transmission in the same way as condom use does for HIV.
...And use your legs and leave a blank for Hogg
And put a cross for Lindsay.
There are only too many who say 'What difference does it
make
One way or the other?
To turn the stream of history will take
More than a by-election.’
So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls
And made its coward vote and the streets resounded
To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls —
The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.
And I drove back to London in the dark of the morning,
the trees
Standing out in the headlights cut from cardboard;
Wondering which disease
Is worse — the Status Quo or the Mere Utopia.
For from now on
Each occasion must be used, however trivial,
To rally the ranks of those whose chance will soon be
gone
For even guerrilla warfare.
The nicest people in England have always been the least
Apt to solidarity or alignment
But all of them must now align against the beast
That prowls at every door and barks in every headline.
Dawn and London and daylight and last the sun:
I stop the car and take the yellow placard
Off the bonnet; that little job is done
Though without success or glory...
But even that is a long way in the past now.
The UK should have gone for risk segmentation as discussed on here a day or so ago. We'd have been over it by about August bank holiday 2020. This is dragging on interminably while the UK government stands there and pisses ~£500,000,000,000 down the toilet. By Christmas I assume it'll be £600,000,000,000.
Children's show on Belarus state TV 'trolls' Lukashenka
An evening children's programme on the Belarus 3 state TV channel has broadcast what viewers have interpreted as a very thinly veiled mockery of embattled President Alyaksandr Lukashenka (Alexander Lukashenko).
The Kalykhanka (Lullaby) evening programme, which has been telling Belarusian children bedtime stories and showing animated cartoons for nearly 40 years, carried an episode featuring the puppet Bear Topa proclaiming himself king over the other residents and eventually falling off his improvised throne.
At the start of the six-minute skit, the crown-wearing Topa ousted cute little female puppet Yana the Fox from the studio's new chair, which he dubbed the throne, and declared: "Now I will be sitting on the throne and issuing orders."
“I am the only one who is allowed to sit on it. See my crown?” he added.
After the lively and cheerful Fairy (human actress) and Yana the Fox played some fun games with a balloon and went off to eat some fruitcake, the arrogant Topa got bored and hungry and demanded to be carried to the feast with his throne.
The move eventually got him toppled and he went away while Yana the Fox made herself comfortable in the chair and the Fairy put on Topa's crown.
The programme made no mention of politics or names, but one could easily make the connection to the recent inauguration of Lukashenka, which was conducted in secrecy and which many of his opponents sarcastically labelled "coronation" in the context of a disputed presidential election and continuing protests against vote-rigging.
Some other hints about the political situation could also be discerned: Fairy and Fox playing with a balloon and "going for a walk" as Belarusian protesters often do. The Belarusian word "hulyats" meaning "play" used on the show can also be understood by bilingual Belarusians as the Russian word "walk" (gulyat).
You can actually watch the full six minutes at https://charter97.org/en/news/2020/9/25/394481/ ... the "throne movement" starts just after five minutes, and looks very much like the presenter deliberately (or at least accidentally-on-purpose) tipping the king off the throne, in a move which I think is best described as "brave" (possibly in the yes-ministerial sense of the word).
Thanks yesterday evening BTW to @Anabobazina for highlighting 538 as being more reliable than RCP
(However much I might argue with him.)
Covid: Vaccine will 'not return life to normal in spring'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54371559
An endless death by attrition of our businesses is, to coin a phrase, simply an unviable strategy. Italy has, after an appalling start - and, perhaps, because of it - done well at balancing safety and the economy. Why can’t we learn from them?
Apart from all that it's the holy grail.
You would also need to offset this against any immune-waning among the previously infected (a bit of an unknown at present) and the (very small on short timescales, but relevant over years) process of births and deaths gradually causing "replenishment of susceptibles" (this phenomenon whereby immune individuals die and are replaced by susceptible children drives the long-term periodicity of epidemics for several infectious diseases).
It's also likely that adherence to rules will decline over time (something the behavioural scientists warned about early on) and if this outpaced the rate it was becoming safe to loosen up, you could even have a situation in which greater immunity means the R-budget could theoretically afford more generosity, but reduced adherence to the rules means that they're getting tightened up.
Failure of a trial would be a disappointment but it's actually all gone a little quicker than I expected.
(Cue the National Anthem and pictures of crowds waving Union Flags)
Or it could be that we just have a bunch of talentless jerks in charge who listen to few and fail to understand those that they do listen to.
Or maybe they just do not give a f***? With all the unaccountability going on, I wonder how many are feathering their nests and packing their bank accounts?
Whatever the reason, it is not good for UK plc and the average person in the street.
Boris is hardly likely to be outlawing sex.
Sometimes government is sensible and the people are stupid. When AIDs struck there was a rise in conventional venereal disease incidence in the UK.
"Scientists at the University of Oxford say they should have at least a million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by September this year."
Sarah Gilbert/Adrian Hill, 17 April 2020
So, expectations explicitly set by those best placed to set them. Some sort of vaccine will come along eventually, but we can't go further than that.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Asian food, OTOH .....
Indeed the article Francis posted talks about emergency approval next month.
An interesting dynamic with the creation and enforcement of rules, and a source of many of the present inconsistencies, is just how strong a leverage the government has over different parts of society. While there are economic reasons for keeping hospitality venues open, they're also more pliable (easy to inspect for compliance, head hovering vulnerably over the licensing chopping block if they break the rules) compared to people meeting for a drink or meal in each other's homes. "My neighbour and I can be in the same pub but not the same living room, it doesn't make sense" is a fair complaint to some extent, but makes more sense when viewed through the lens of these dynamics.
If general social compliance falls, the government is likely to start tightening the vice disproportionately on those organisations it has greater leverage over. Similarly, if there's a notable upsurge in cases and the government has been advised it needs to score a "quick hit" against COVID, the most tempting target is whoever's it's got by the balls and can basically "flip a switch" to make them comply. I'm not saying it was a great move (plenty of unintended consequences) but its obvious from how widescale and instant the pub closure time changes took effect, why there was a temptation to target them.
Ideas like the "rule of six" are closer to the general code for living that the header would like to see, but for many reasons (compliance, confusion, messaging, time to bed in) aren't so amenable to these kind of changes.
That said I think there's a reasonable balance to be reached. In Scotland we were down to single-figure infections a day before the schools went back and long after pubs were open. I don't think schools going back was the direct cause of increases by the way, I think that was because of more people going back into work when they could have been working from home, as well as some laxity in basic measures like masking and hygeine (I went into B&Q today and about 40% of the staff were doing the "nose out" style of mask wearing). Right now we're having a headache because of people mixing too much in people's houses which they weren't doing so much when the weather was warmer. We're also seeing the effect of students going back, which was a silly decision. I think we might need to accept that we aren't going to be having house parties or barbeques for the forseeable future and nightclubs are fucked (and should be given extended furlough and government support). Universities will need to be mostly or entirely online and the students should just be allowed to study from home if they want to. That way you can clear out most residences and only have them at 50% capacity for people who can't study from home for whatever reason. Pubs and particularly restaurants seem to be able to operate safely, provided they follow the hygeine rules (which should be as rigorously enforced as any other hygeine regime). The Italians and Germans seem to have done this more intelligently than we have, which is to have slowly eased restrictions one at a time while beefing up their testing. We did far too much at once frankly and now we're paying for it by having to roll things back. At least we have better data this time for what risk factors are involved in transmission. I was unhappy at the B&Q with the stupid staff, but that setting is unlikely to be conducive to spread because almost everyone apart from the mouthbreathers were masked and people only had fleeting interaction with others.