The only thing stopping Biden at the momenent is Manchin and Sienma.
The American public voted for hard core socialism and Biden is eager to provide.
They didn't, had Sanders been the nominee Trump would probably have been narrowly re elected.
They voted for Biden as he was a relatively centrist not too woke alternative.
31% of Americans have a favourable view of socialism, 47% have an unfavourable view.
By contrast 55% of Americans have a favourable view of capitalism, only 24% unfavourable.
There is a reason the US, unlike Europe or Australia and New Zealand does not have a major Socialist or Labour Party and nor does it even have a major social democratic party like the NDP in Canada or the SPD in Germany.
The battle in the US is between liberals and conservatives, socialists don't really get a look in.
That just confirms if Starmer becomes PM in 2024 he would likely allow a legal indyref2, especially as he would be reliant on SNP confidence and supply most likely to get to No10.
However as long as we have a UK Tory majority government there will be no legal indyref2 allowed for a generation
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
You just wrote THIS
‘Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today’
You’re a drooling nitwit, with bits of three day old scrambled egg on your chin. I’m putting you on IGNORE
That's exactly what a doddery old fool who doesn't like having his views challenged would say.
Go on, say "it was better in my day" give us all a laugh.
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
I fear that the impact of mutations may have been underestimated. If so, it will take about a year for the reality of the situation to become apparent. I think that the potential consequences may not be limited to regular revaccinations, huge investment in vaccine production facilities, and compulsory vaccinations. In addition, we could have to live with and accept a substantial ongoing death toll due to COVID, just as other countries must live with various tropical diseases. There have been few guarantees so far from the scientists that this will not happen.
In the longer term, evolution will cause humans to become less susceptible to COVID, but this will take at least several hundred years, assuming that the vaccines are not fully effective in the meantime.
There is no guarantee that the vaccines will be completely effective in controlling the pandemic. If we cannot eliminate COVID we will have to live with it as best we can.
Flu kills 10,000 Brits a year, often more. Overwhelmingly the old. We could easily live with that from covid, it might even be, ahem, beneficial in reducing the dependent population of wrinklies
Could we cope, however, with an annual death toll of 50,000, or 100,000? Dunno. My guess is yes, of course - eventually. However if it came with 500,000 yearly cases of Long Covid, that would be fearsome indeed
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
Todays 14% poll leads seems to be an outlier, so the next few polls will be of interest and to see if Cameron's lobbying has had any effect
I'm not sure it is an outlier.
In chasing red wall voters, labour are starting to erode their core metro and young voter base.
This poll shows Conservatives ahead of Labour in London but as @HYUFD points out there is a rise in Lib Dem support in London which seems to be coming from labour
Labour really is entering a period of pleasing nobody
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
I don't care what daft ideas the young come up with; that's sort of the point of being young. Occasionally they'll come up with something that moves society along in a big way, which is well worth the 95% of nonsense.
The problem with wokery is that it's infected the corporate world in a big way, due to companies being terrified that Twitter is going to cancel them otherwise.
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
'The spike protein' is a pretty big target, of course, so there will be a diverse set of epitopes - and a correspondingly diverse set of antibodies. And from what I've read there are neutralising antibodies which bind to other bits of the spike than the RBD. There are also distinct structural constraints on the manner in which the coronavirus RNA code can mutate (too technical for me to understand or clearly explain, but they exist), as well as the practical constraint of the spike still having to bind to its target.
I agree that complete immune evasion is highly unlikely.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
You just wrote THIS
‘Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today’
You’re a drooling nitwit, with bits of three day old scrambled egg on your chin. I’m putting you on IGNORE
That's exactly what a doddery old fool who doesn't like having his views challenged would say.
Go on, say "it was better in my day" give us all a laugh.
O Tempora, O Mores, OMFG this is the most tediously obvious point ever ‘made’ on PB
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
What these groups seem to have in common is that they value education for their children and hard work much more than the indigenous population. The proportion of ethnic children at my son's private school is many, many times higher than the proportion of the ethnic population in Dundee and its environs and it is becoming more pronounced every year.
We need to stop worrying quite so much about peoples' feelings and give our youngsters a better preparation for the world they are going to have to compete in.
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
The media are certainly pushing the ‘omg we’re fucked, again’ narrative. So I earnestly hope you’re right
I understand it’s in their interest to big this up and get us panicked. For clicks
As an added irony I read somewhere, last night (can’t find it now) that there is evidence AZ is a better defence against these new mutants than mRNA. That would be quite the outcome, especially for our EU friends
Pfizer has shown the best resilience against variants so far in terms of antibody binding efficiency against the P1 Brazilian variant and the SA variant. That's in comparison to all other vaccines. AZ does very well in generating a very wide t-cell based immunity which could be which could lead to good long term immunity from severe symptoms against a very wide variety of variants but we can't say for sure just yet.
Todays 14% poll leads seems to be an outlier, so the next few polls will be of interest and to see if Cameron's lobbying has had any effect
I predict it will have zero effect. What is the headline?
Greedy Rich Tory Turns Out To Be Rich Greedy Tory
That’s it. That’s the shocking truth of this incredible scoop.
Everyone knows Tories are greedy and venal, just like everyone knows lefties are shameless hypocrites. It’s priced in. It’s written on the tin.
The voters will continue to elect greedy rich Tories as long as they appear basically competent and sane, as well. Thanks to the vaccines the Tories give that appearance, right now. It helps that Boris is vaguely amusing (in a time of great boredom)
It helps much more that Labour is obsessed with tiny Woke ID politics in a way that mystifies or actively irritates large chunks of the electorate
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
What these groups seem to have in common is that they value education for their children and hard work much more than the indigenous population. The proportion of ethnic children at my son's private school is many, many times higher than the proportion of the ethnic population in Dundee and its environs and it is becoming more pronounced every year.
We need to stop worrying quite so much about peoples' feelings and give our youngsters a better preparation for the world they are going to have to compete in.
Indians and those of mixed ethnicity also have higher average earnings than white British at that link.
Indian families, like Chinese families, I agree promote education, hard work and family values
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Todays 14% poll leads seems to be an outlier, so the next few polls will be of interest and to see if Cameron's lobbying has had any effect
I'm not sure it is an outlier.
In chasing red wall voters, labour are starting to erode their core metro and young voter base.
This poll shows Conservatives ahead of Labour in London but as @HYUFD points out there is a rise in Lib Dem support in London which seems to be coming from labour
Labour really is entering a period of pleasing nobody
Phone canvassing locally has Lab at about the same level as LE 2017 where Tories regained the County
The leader is a drag "just as bad as" Jezza and LAB turnout could yet result in a bloodbath
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
Labour's recent history is full of duffers since Blair.
Brown (who saved the world) Miliband (the best photo op ever with the burger disaster.) Corbyn the bonkers lefty who allied himself with terrorists and now SKS who knows and lives in his own mind, devoid of what is going on outside it
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
Have to agree that I have noted for some time that every immunologist I have followed on Twitter is significantly more upbeat than the epidemiologists.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
I don't care what daft ideas the young come up with; that's sort of the point of being young. Occasionally they'll come up with something that moves society along in a big way, which is well worth the 95% of nonsense.
The problem with wokery is that it's infected the corporate world in a big way, due to companies being terrified that Twitter is going to cancel them otherwise.
Twitter is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
Based on the rest of your comment, I'm guessing you had that opinion even before watching the PPB
110,000 complaints The BBC received a record 110,000 complaints over its coverage of Prince Philip's death, according to the broadcaster's official figures. It is the highest number of complaints ever published in the UK about television programming.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
I don't care what daft ideas the young come up with; that's sort of the point of being young. Occasionally they'll come up with something that moves society along in a big way, which is well worth the 95% of nonsense.
The problem with wokery is that it's infected the corporate world in a big way, due to companies being terrified that Twitter is going to cancel them otherwise.
Twitter is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.
What larks if that's representative of the local election voting intention.
And labour have just under three weeks to their biggest test at the ballot box
The polls are based on national voting intentions when the government of the country is in play.
The locals, where turnout tends to be much lower? well........anything could happen...!!
Yes but in Scotland and Wales they are electing their Parliaments
Good point. The London mayoral is important too. Labour vote holding up much better here.
Yes but even in London there is a drift to the Lib Dems
Do you think its because young voters like the fact the liberals have rediscovered liberalism?
I am not sure it is just young London voters
Labour against rejoining the EU is not a good look in London
Labour cannot win as it cannot sit on both sides of the fence
It must be looking at a real crisis if these polls reflect in next months ballot boxes
It's always the same with political parties - they waver around trying to get votes rather than staking out principles and sticking to them come what may. At least Corbyn's Labour was authentic.
110,000 complaints The BBC received a record 110,000 complaints over its coverage of Prince Philip's death, according to the broadcaster's official figures. It is the highest number of complaints ever published in the UK about television programming.
Have they not heard of Netflix, Channel 5 or Film4? It was only one day and he can only die once
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
What larks if that's representative of the local election voting intention.
And labour have just under three weeks to their biggest test at the ballot box
The polls are based on national voting intentions when the government of the country is in play.
The locals, where turnout tends to be much lower? well........anything could happen...!!
Yes but in Scotland and Wales they are electing their Parliaments
Good point. The London mayoral is important too. Labour vote holding up much better here.
Yes but even in London there is a drift to the Lib Dems
Do you think its because young voters like the fact the liberals have rediscovered liberalism?
I am not sure it is just young London voters
Labour against rejoining the EU is not a good look in London
Labour cannot win as it cannot sit on both sides of the fence
It must be looking at a real crisis if these polls reflect in next months ballot boxes
It's always the same with political parties - they waver around trying to get votes rather than staking out principles and sticking to them come what may. At least Corbyn's Labour was authentic.
A very good point which I think @BJO would endorse
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Indeed, the way humans organize, and hence their potential to do greater things, cannot evolve unless concepts such as role of self and purpose etc... evolve. Evolution - indeed, all learning - requires challenge and dissent.
I think what this means for hegemony is that China will be great at copying and the 'filling in' type of science that Thomas Kuhn describes, rather than the great leaps forward (either scientific or societal), and thus might become the hegemon, but will be overtaken quickly by whichever empire makes that next great leap, because it won't be China as currently organized.
Every now and then I point to Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organisations. I really think anyone interested in how humans organize and work together for any purpose - economic, political, religious, military, scientific, learning - should read it.
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
The media are certainly pushing the ‘omg we’re fucked, again’ narrative. So I earnestly hope you’re right
I understand it’s in their interest to big this up and get us panicked. For clicks
As an added irony I read somewhere, last night (can’t find it now) that there is evidence AZ is a better defence against these new mutants than mRNA. That would be quite the outcome, especially for our EU friends
Pfizer has shown the best resilience against variants so far in terms of antibody binding efficiency against the P1 Brazilian variant and the SA variant. That's in comparison to all other vaccines. AZ does very well in generating a very wide t-cell based immunity which could be which could lead to good long term immunity from severe symptoms against a very wide variety of variants but we can't say for sure just yet.
It's the first time I've wished to be a couple of years older. If I were 2 years older, I'd be fifty, and eligible to be enrolled in that study for different first and second shots. With AZ first shot and Pfizer second shot, I'd have the best of both worlds (and it might explain those encouraging clinical studies that dissimilar shots from different types (adenovector plus mRNA) gave stronger and far broader-based resistance - up to and including immunity to SARS-1 itself).
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
There are many ways Woke-ness is crippling the West at the exact time the most non-Woke superpower since Nazi Germany is assuming real hegemony
Let’s take just one. Science. Woke-ness (to use the term at its widest) is against the use of primates in life science. And this is one arena where I have great sympathies with the Woke agenda. Forcing primates to smoke? Ugh. No thanks.
But the result is this: China is dominating this science because it has no such qualms
‘“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”
He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”
Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”‘
110,000 complaints The BBC received a record 110,000 complaints over its coverage of Prince Philip's death, according to the broadcaster's official figures. It is the highest number of complaints ever published in the UK about television programming.
Have they not heard of Netflix, Channel 5 or Film4? It was only one day and he can only die once
It just goes to show how thick and shallow people are when they can't cope with an episode of their favourite mind numbingly dull soap opera being delayed by a day or so.
What larks if that's representative of the local election voting intention.
And labour have just under three weeks to their biggest test at the ballot box
The polls are based on national voting intentions when the government of the country is in play.
The locals, where turnout tends to be much lower? well........anything could happen...!!
Yes but in Scotland and Wales they are electing their Parliaments
Good point. The London mayoral is important too. Labour vote holding up much better here.
Yes but even in London there is a drift to the Lib Dems
Do you think its because young voters like the fact the liberals have rediscovered liberalism?
I am not sure it is just young London voters
Labour against rejoining the EU is not a good look in London
Labour cannot win as it cannot sit on both sides of the fence
It must be looking at a real crisis if these polls reflect in next months ballot boxes
It's always the same with political parties - they waver around trying to get votes rather than staking out principles and sticking to them come what may. At least Corbyn's Labour was authentic.
Precisely why I suspect Starmer is poorly rated on metrics like "honesty".
He will say whatever he thinks will win votes, not what he actually believes.
People have seen enough of him to know they don't trust him to say the truth.
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
If it is the same one as was linked to on here it was beyond pathetic. It seemed to give up on every constituency seat, it contained no policy ideas other than stop Indyref2, it said nothing about the shambolic public services in Scotland who manage to spend 30% per head more but all too frequently do worse than their English cousins, education being an obvious example. It said nothing about how several thousand additional Scots are alive thanks to access to vaccines developed and delivered through the Union, about how the enormous fiscal strength of the United Kingdom had allowed the furlough scheme, the grants, the support for the self employed and funded public services through this travail. Just nothing. I wasn't happy.
This is not what a competent opposition looks like.
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
Was it Plato who complained that the young just wanted to sing songs and hang around the scent shops, instead of having serious philosophical discussion about the nature of Truth?
I don't care what daft ideas the young come up with; that's sort of the point of being young. Occasionally they'll come up with something that moves society along in a big way, which is well worth the 95% of nonsense.
The problem with wokery is that it's infected the corporate world in a big way, due to companies being terrified that Twitter is going to cancel them otherwise.
Twitter is a problem. What the solution is I have no idea.
Regulating social media to the point where either it's forced to stop being a problem on its own, or it's no longer fun and the nutters have to find a new outlet.
I'm actually now a bit more optimistic that the Twitter problem will resolve itself - things like football clubs boycotting social media until they take action to stop routine racist abuse of their players is a good start. That's good wokery for you.
Anyway, Twitter is not the problem as such. I'm a a bit concerned about whether the long standing natural link between big business and the political right may be broken and the consequences of that.
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
Bit sparse, Betway or Betfair (Lads may have something but they're off Oddschecker)
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
Have to agree that I have noted for some time that every immunologist I have followed on Twitter is significantly more upbeat than the epidemiologists.
I thought everyone on Twitter was simultaneously both an immunologist and an epidemiologist?
Maybe the way to tell who's genuine is whether they stick to their originally claimed specialty when everyone else changes.
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
If it is the same one as was linked to on here it was beyond pathetic. It seemed to give up on every constituency seat, it contained no policy ideas other than stop Indyref2, it said nothing about the shambolic public services in Scotland who manage to spend 30% per head more but all too frequently do worse than their English cousins, education being an obvious example. It said nothing about how several thousand additional Scots are alive thanks to access to vaccines developed and delivered through the Union, about how the enormous fiscal strength of the United Kingdom had allowed the furlough scheme, the grants, the support for the self employed and funded public services through this travail. Just nothing. I wasn't happy.
This is not what a competent opposition looks like.
With regret David you're not likely to get a competent opposition until you're independent and there's nowhere to hide on these measures - or at the very least the Yes campaign lose another referendum killing the issue off.
If you want to take the constitution off the table and get people talking about education, healthcare, the economy etc then the constitutional issue needs to be settled. There's one way to do that, but you may not like its result.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Leon also misses the point that "Asia, more widely' is becoming less well disposed to China, rather than more. They've severely pissed off everyone in the region over their territorial claims, and might end up not dissimilar to the old USSR, encircled by potential enemies. That's a dangerous thing, but it doesn't make them any kind of incipient hegemon.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
There are many ways Woke-ness is crippling the West at the exact time the most non-Woke superpower since Nazi Germany is assuming real hegemony
Let’s take just one. Science. Woke-ness (to use the term at its widest) is against the use of primates in life science. And this is one arena where I have great sympathies with the Woke agenda. Forcing primates to smoke? Ugh. No thanks.
But the result is this: China is dominating this science because it has no such qualms
‘“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”
He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”
Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”‘
This is just one of multiple areas where China isn’t just eating our lunch, it is stealing our ability to make a decent lunch tomorrow.
Or its wasting its time. One of the more significant stories for me this year was the one explaining that Moderna had managed to develop a highly effective vaccine without ever having any of the virus. It was a "software" problem once they had the virus's genetic code. Torturing monkeys looks pretty bloody archaic, let alone morally repulsive, compared to that.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Indeed, the way humans organize, and hence their potential to do greater things, cannot evolve unless concepts such as role of self and purpose etc... evolve. Evolution - indeed, all learning - requires challenge and dissent.
I think what this means for hegemony is that China will be great at copying and the 'filling in' type of science that Thomas Kuhn describes, rather than the great leaps forward (either scientific or societal), and thus might become the hegemon, but will be overtaken quickly by whichever empire makes that next great leap, because it won't be China as currently organized.
Every now and then I point to Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organisations. I really think anyone interested in how humans organize and work together for any purpose - economic, political, religious, military, scientific, learning - should read it.
Believing the Chinese are ‘incapable’ of *real* innovation is, basically, racist bullshit dressed up as disapproval of their regime.
They will innovate in ways that are different, but just as valid. For instance, they innovated the idea everyone should wear a damn mask to protect OTHERS, even as our brilliant individualistic scientists were saying MASKS ARE BAD
They also innovated, perhaps accidentally, a virus which curiously attacks western countries more than the East
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
Was he not gifted it ? I think the concern is rather that it was a firm controlled by close member of his family, and he had not previously declared that as an interest. The declaration only came about, belatedly, as a result of the gift.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Leon also misses the point that "Asia, more widely' is becoming less well disposed to China, rather than more. They've severely pissed off everyone in the region over their territorial claims, and might end up not dissimilar to the old USSR, encircled by potential enemies. That's a dangerous thing, but it doesn't make them any kind of incipient hegemon.
Exactly!
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
110,000 complaints The BBC received a record 110,000 complaints over its coverage of Prince Philip's death, according to the broadcaster's official figures. It is the highest number of complaints ever published in the UK about television programming.
Have they not heard of Netflix, Channel 5 or Film4? It was only one day and he can only die once
True, but the BBC broadcasted 100% about it and shut down all other channels to show a blank screen if not covering it.
They could have dedicated 100% of BBC1 and R4 and left the other channels for normal use, with maybe extended news broadcasts, for those of us who don't want to hear about it non stop.
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
Why shouldn't he cash in? Nobody gives a fuck and it's not going to be an issue.
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
If it is the same one as was linked to on here it was beyond pathetic. It seemed to give up on every constituency seat, it contained no policy ideas other than stop Indyref2, it said nothing about the shambolic public services in Scotland who manage to spend 30% per head more but all too frequently do worse than their English cousins, education being an obvious example. It said nothing about how several thousand additional Scots are alive thanks to access to vaccines developed and delivered through the Union, about how the enormous fiscal strength of the United Kingdom had allowed the furlough scheme, the grants, the support for the self employed and funded public services through this travail. Just nothing. I wasn't happy.
This is not what a competent opposition looks like.
Ross is the the choice of your boy Boris though, and has had plenty of input from Baroness Ruth, to the point of her face being plastered over Tory bumpf. Where is this competent opposition in waiting of which you speak?
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
There are many ways Woke-ness is crippling the West at the exact time the most non-Woke superpower since Nazi Germany is assuming real hegemony
Let’s take just one. Science. Woke-ness (to use the term at its widest) is against the use of primates in life science. And this is one arena where I have great sympathies with the Woke agenda. Forcing primates to smoke? Ugh. No thanks.
But the result is this: China is dominating this science because it has no such qualms
‘“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”
He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”
Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”‘
This is just one of multiple areas where China isn’t just eating our lunch, it is stealing our ability to make a decent lunch tomorrow.
Or its wasting its time. One of the more significant stories for me this year was the one explaining that Moderna had managed to develop a highly effective vaccine without ever having any of the virus. It was a "software" problem once they had the virus's genetic code. Torturing monkeys looks pretty bloody archaic, let alone morally repulsive, compared to that.
Read the article. Primates are still - regrettably, of course - extremely valuable in medical research. We have abandoned this to China, out of a mixture of complacency and moral distaste. I share that moral distaste with you. But it comes at a cost
O/T — In London today I was surprised to find myself giving directions to Japanese tourists. I had thought that all tourism from other countries was off the cards atm.
It would appear that the Government is, in essence, operating an open door policy for visitors from the whole world, except those travelling from red list countries (and presumably visitors from e.g. Brazil could just get around the feeble rules by travelling via a third country and lying on whatever declarations they have to make when they get here, if sufficiently determined to do so?)
Like I said the other day, it's so reckless and illogical a policy that it only really makes sense if one assumes that ministers want to import variants, in order to have surge testing, panic in the press, and thus to maintain the general atmosphere of emergency. The emergency is wildly popular with the Tories' frightened elderly supporters, it gives them cover to act with impunity, and it serves further to neuter an already ineffectual Opposition. Why would they ever want it to end?
... but would ensure no mutations.
This is nonsense - but an assumption you come across time and again.
A mutation is just as likely to occur in your next door neighbour as in some random visiting German.
We could wall off the country and still be subject to potential future mutations - at least until the point at which the country is covid-free; which is a theoretical but probably unachievable position.
Travel restrictions make sense while there are places with significantly higher incidence than here and largely unvaccinated populations. But they come at an economic and social cost.
Reactions to the plagues of the middle ages were to shun or persecute foreigners, strangers, and various minorities - a response based on emotion not logic.
That's absolutely untrue!
The case rate is miniscule in this country so the odds of your next-door neighbour and the odds of a random German being infected are completely different.
The odds of your next door neighbour and the odds of a random German coming into contact with someone else being infected and capable of infecting them is completely different.
Travel restrictions absolutely make sense until other nations have eliminated the virus like we have.
There is absolutely no justification for not having travel restrictions unless we have zero other restrictions too.
p.s. and we haven't "eliminated the virus", nor likely will we ever (most likely it eventually mutates into a progressively milder form and ends joining the portfolio of minor infections we call the common cold).
We could have a 99% vaccinated population with the virus popping up only occasionally here and there in isolated outbreaks, yet it could mutate inside a homeless tramp from Glasgow into a form to which the current vaccine is not (or is less) resistant, and the whole cycle starts again. We got where we are from an infection within a single Chinese person.
No it doesn't work that way and this completely misunderstands (AFAIK) how vaccines, mutations and protection work.
Its worth recalling that the reason this was such a huge problem last year and now is because there was no protection.at all. We had zero immunity against this virus.
Mutations may reduce but are unlikely to eliminate the protection - I note you covered that a touch with "(or is less)" but that doesn't mean "the whole cycle starts again".
We need to keep things in perspective, even if a mutation evolves its going to still be protected against in a way that the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 never was.
When cases are negligible that "homeless tramp in Glasgow" isn't going to be a patient zero sparking a whole new global pandemic resetting the clock back to 2019, this is Leon-levels of hysteria.
Why are you so confident? Viruses mutate all the time, and there's not some magic that keeps them similar enough that the vaccine is no longer effective. All you need is for the spike protein to change sufficiently that no-one's immune system recognises it anymore and you have another pandemic on your hands, possibly worse than the first if it's more infectious.
Unless you know something more about the limitations of how spike proteins mutate that prevents this, that you'd care to share with the group?
It's not just the spike protein (as I understand it).
Firstly - they need to find a mutation where the spike protein can still do its job and be unrecognisable to the immune system. Should it pull this off, the antibodies will no longer be effective. This is a challenge - while it can mutate a bit to erode the effectiveness of the current antibodies, they still have some neutralising effect, and it may not be possible to go far enough to be completely unrecognisable:
“There is not an infinite number of possibilities,” he said. “It is like putting your foot in a shoe. It still has to be basically the right shape and size and it still has to be recognizable as a shoe.” "
However, the T-cells have a swathe of epitopes (protein fragments) from far more than just the spike protein (if I understand it correctly), and the virus will need to mutate far more than that to change all those various proteins within itself to now be unrecognisable to the T-cells as well as the antibodies.
To evade both of those components of the immune system simultaneously would be needed to set us back far enough to start the whole cycle again. A partial reduction in immunity is very possible, but resistance to serious illness looks far less unlikely to be significantly eroded than resistance to mild or asymptomatic illness.
And, of course, tweaking the vaccines to deal with the mutations can be done far far faster than the original setup of them; they've already agreed that full trials will be unnecessary; it'll follow the flu vaccine tweaking method instead.
Don't the vaccines (as opposed to covid survivors) only expose patients to the spike protein, so T cells have no memory of other viral protein?
I rather assumed it was wider than that, based on the fact that B.1.351's antibody evasion seems to have not reduced T-cell protection at all. It's perfectly possible that it's just the spike protein, but from a lot more than just the binding points that antibodies target, I suppose; we'd need an immunologist to say. Which would imply that the spike protein changing sufficiently would help, but due to the number of potential chunks of protein that the T-cells use, it'd have to change enormously to do so.
I think. Again, an immunologist would be useful here (although every immunologist I've followed seems extremely upbeat about our prospects now).
I did read research early on where they were looking for T-cell epitopes to inform the immune response, which is probably what got me thinking in that direction.
Yes, it reaches the limit if my understanding of viral vaccine immunology, but I understood that Pfizer and Moderna are based on the mRNA of the spike protein. I am not sure how much other protein on top of the spike protein is in the viral vector vaccines, AZN, J and J and Sputnik.
That is also my understanding - that the viral vector and mRNA vaccines all target the RBD of the spike protein, which makes a lot of sense as almost all (not all) evolutions in this domain will reduce infectivity, vastly reducing the possibility of vaccine escape over other viral antigen targets.
However, I do not believe that is the case for the protein vaccines, where the evidence seems to be that using up to 20 peptides in the vaccine is required for a strong enough immune response.
I will put this question to the group I am in at its next meeting on Tuesday.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
There are many ways Woke-ness is crippling the West at the exact time the most non-Woke superpower since Nazi Germany is assuming real hegemony
Let’s take just one. Science. Woke-ness (to use the term at its widest) is against the use of primates in life science. And this is one arena where I have great sympathies with the Woke agenda. Forcing primates to smoke? Ugh. No thanks.
But the result is this: China is dominating this science because it has no such qualms
‘“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”
He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”
Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”‘
This is just one of multiple areas where China isn’t just eating our lunch, it is stealing our ability to make a decent lunch tomorrow.
Or its wasting its time. One of the more significant stories for me this year was the one explaining that Moderna had managed to develop a highly effective vaccine without ever having any of the virus. It was a "software" problem once they had the virus's genetic code. Torturing monkeys looks pretty bloody archaic, let alone morally repulsive, compared to that.
Incubating viruses without using animal test subjects does seem like a plausible forward step.
However, new chemicals do still need to be tested for their side effects on humans, and I'm not sure how you gain comfort that process will go well without some animal testing first. And the neurobiologists trying to understand the human brain are probably better off doing cutting up animals than humans.
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
The US are absolutely not going to get themselves into another NATO situation in the Pacific. They'll do a series of bilateral defence agreements with carefully calibrated levels of obligation that serve their interests.
Significant falls in the latest ONS survey (as of week ending last Friday). Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England. Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
He did not buy them
His sister is a director of the company and she gifted the shares to him after he had cleared it with the cabinet office and declared it
The recent contract was with Wales NHS that has nothing to do with him and as Labour in Wales awarded the contract what is the problem
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
The US are absolutely not going to get themselves into another NATO situation in the Pacific. They'll do a series of bilateral defence agreements with carefully calibrated levels of obligation that serve their interests.
At the moment while the US alone are a match for China its less of an issue.
If China continues to be revanchist and starts to reach a point where the US alone isn't a match, that's when I suspect some form of NPTO might be considered.
Significant falls in the latest ONS survey (as of week ending last Friday). Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England. Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
Excellent news, what a shame the govt have committed to not looking at such evidence for examining our roadmap until mid May. Dates not data for them.
Having witnessed last night's Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Scottish Tories [where basically they asked for "your List vote", and then put forward NO policy other than Let's Stop a Referendum] it is clear this is a party on its last legs. I'd like advice about a betting site where I can put money on Labour ending up the 2nd-biggest party in Scotland after the May elections. The Tories are sad, led by a schoolboy so confident of his chances that he's not even standing in a constituency seat. Backed up by a has-been who is running off to the House of Lords.
If it is the same one as was linked to on here it was beyond pathetic. It seemed to give up on every constituency seat, it contained no policy ideas other than stop Indyref2, it said nothing about the shambolic public services in Scotland who manage to spend 30% per head more but all too frequently do worse than their English cousins, education being an obvious example. It said nothing about how several thousand additional Scots are alive thanks to access to vaccines developed and delivered through the Union, about how the enormous fiscal strength of the United Kingdom had allowed the furlough scheme, the grants, the support for the self employed and funded public services through this travail. Just nothing. I wasn't happy.
This is not what a competent opposition looks like.
Ross is the the choice of your boy Boris though, and has had plenty of input from Baroness Ruth, to the point of her face being plastered over Tory bumpf. Where is this competent opposition in waiting of which you speak?
Boris is not "my boy". I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the current Tory MSPs have simply failed to develop it and it is a shameful dereliction of duty.
This government is a disgrace, in government 14 years, tired, corrupt, dishonest, appallingly profligate with public funds, overseeing an educational disaster to which their only response is to withdraw from Pisa and hide the OECD report until after the election, misusing public funds to give a 4% increase paid for out of one off payments to health workers (I can hear the wails of Tory cuts next year already) and none of the Tories, Labour or Lib Dems have laid a glove on them. They don't even talk about it.
It makes SKS's efforts look good and they are rubbish.
Significant falls in the latest ONS survey (as of week ending last Friday). Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England. Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
Excellent news, what a shame the govt have committed to not looking at such evidence for examining our roadmap until mid May. Dates not data for them.
It is absolutely insane that restrictions on the border and being illegal to go into a relatives home are both being considered for the same date. 🤦♂️
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Leon also misses the point that "Asia, more widely' is becoming less well disposed to China, rather than more. They've severely pissed off everyone in the region over their territorial claims, and might end up not dissimilar to the old USSR, encircled by potential enemies. That's a dangerous thing, but it doesn't make them any kind of incipient hegemon.
Exactly!
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
None of these things are written in stone (and there are regional arguments such as the recent one between S Korea and Japan). And note that major regional economies like Taiwan and South Korea still do about twice as much trade with China as they do with the US, even if they don't much like the regime.
But it's interesting that even Vietnam is now a more likely future ally of the US than China.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
The ridiculous woke crap includes treating minorities with respect, rather than subjecting them to genocide. I'd say that's a competitive advantage for the US.
There is a sweet midpoint between ‘stopping police from shooting black people all the time’ and ‘burning down Portland because we don’t need police at all’
Unfortunately, America seems determined to miss that sweet spot, and swing wildly and dangerously to the burning cities bit
(CNN)Major American cities saw a 33% increase in homicides last year as a pandemic swept across the country, millions of people joined protests against racial injustice and police brutality, and the economy collapsed under the weight of the pandemic — a crime surge that has continued into the first quarter of this year.
No one's arguing the US is perfect, least of all me. But I'm pretty clear which of the two countries smart immigrant engineers and scientists might see as the more attractive destination.
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I'm not convinced that Chinese genocide of Uighurs in Xinjiang is likely to deter promising non-Uighur scientists from moving to Beijing or Shanghai, which are thousands of miles away geographically, and even further in societal terms.
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
Look at the list of authors on pretty well any US research publication, and compare with those on Chinese research papers. And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch. (indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
Wow, that last sentence boggles my mind, not something I was expecting to read.
I know Boris might choose to live across the pond after his current role, but still.....
If already discussed my apologies, but what on earth was Matt Hancock doing buying 15% share in an NHS approved supplier? He declared it in March so not trying to hide it. It was bound to be an issue so why do it? Are people blind to the appearance of a conflict of interest?
Was he not gifted it ? I think the concern is rather that it was a firm controlled by close member of his family, and he had not previously declared that as an interest. The declaration only came about, belatedly, as a result of the gift.
OK so didn't know that. Not mentioned in the story I read so more complicated then. It did seem very bizarre.
I do find it strange how many don't seem to see the appearance of a conflict of interest even if very innocent. When I ran my business I made it point in my T&C to state there would be any financial relationship between myself and my clients suppliers. Often I ran conferences and my clients suppliers or potential suppliers would sponsor elements of the event. I always made sure no payment went through my books. I arranged for sponsor to pay directly the venue/speaker/bar/etc so that no money came to me that could be considered an influencing factor.
This is obviously pandemic bounce back, but it’s worth remembering China was the only major economy to grow LAST year. Whether the bug was deliberately created, accidentally leaked, or ‘spontaneously leapt from bat to pangolin to zebra to human in the middle of the city with the world’s only lab researching bat-pangolin-zebra-human Coronaviral zoonosis’, there is no doubt the bug has, relatively, benefited China
This decade will, therefore, be the decade when China comprehensively and definitively overtakes the USA as the world’s pre-eminent power
Not a great time for the USA to be led by a doddery old bloke, or be mired in culture wars around ridiculous Marxist woke-crap, but maybe they are symptoms of that same American decline, and therefore predictable, if not inevitable
That America had "ridiculous woke-crap" is why America is a more stable and healthy nation for the long-term than China, America at its healthies has always had what some would consider "ridiculous crap" being advocated by others, its how the country evolves and makes progress.
Authoritarian states like China can grow for a period but they inevitably end up in corruption, decline and collapse. America can handle a peaceful [ish] handover of power from one doddery old bloke to the next, but China is being entirely set up now in the authoritarian grasp of one man. They are losing their ability, rare in non-democracies, to see a smooth transition of power from one leader to the next.
What follows after Xi will not be success.
Nah. Wokery is burning America’s cities and will destroy its universities. eg They are abandoning SATs because they lead to ‘racial inequality of outcome’. It is pitiful. America is immolating itself.
Meanwhile China is quietly replacing the dollar as reserve currency with a new digitized Yuan (renminbi)
All done on the quiet as the rest of us freaked out about a plague from China. Sometimes you just have to admire the genius
America is challenging itself, its what America does any why it is strong.
Even though you're not you like to pretend nowadays that you're a doddery old fart who doesn't get the youth of today, and the doddery old farts of the 70s are the ones who would have been screaming against America destroying itself with counterculture etc at the same time as America was sending men to the moon.
There is nothing original about counterculture or "woke" or any of this bullshit. Its what we do in the liberal west and it is why we evolve successfully while authoritarian regimes become powerful, corrupt, ossify, collapse and fail.
Yes, I think that true. Crying over decadence in our culture, and of crazy ideas in the young is as at least a century old, probably millennia.
There are opinions, some good, some silly, some pointlessly, painfully, otiosely obvious (like this) and then are hard facts. The hard facts say China is winning.
The hard facts say that China are progressing at the minute but only because they're still relatively poor per capita and have a lot of room to grow to catch up. The only reason China's economy is remotely close to America's is because for every one American there are 4 Chinese.
If we reverse the per capita ratios between America and China then China wouldn't be about the same size as America's economy it would be sixteen times bigger, so America and the west are still doing some things right don't you think?
It may be before your time but there used to be a poster here called @SeanT whose writings you might want to look up. He used to regale us with stories of his buxom young woke women that he would ahem spend time with. The young aren't as bad as you make out and will do what they've always done which is challenge those older than them, that's not a bad thing.
You might as well say ‘super rich’ Monaco is doing better than ‘quite rich’ France, and France only *seems* more powerful because it’s bigger.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
All of that is fair enough and not in dispute but unless you have a way to "eliminate" a billion Chinese people to "even up the scales" there's really limited amounts we can do to prevent China ascending. Though its interesting that India is due to overtake China in population, potentially this year although Covid might postpone it for a couple of years. So if India per capita caught up with China then it would potentially overtake China economically. In one way we're fortunate that China for so long maintained the "one child policy" or the differential would be even greater by now.
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
Leon also misses the point that "Asia, more widely' is becoming less well disposed to China, rather than more. They've severely pissed off everyone in the region over their territorial claims, and might end up not dissimilar to the old USSR, encircled by potential enemies. That's a dangerous thing, but it doesn't make them any kind of incipient hegemon.
This is basically, laughably untrue on a factual level. Let alone everything else
Have they pissed off ‘everyone else in the region’? No
Look at their neighbours. Mongolia, a quickly enriching mineral producing state (wholly dependent on China). A loyal satellite state. Russia - happy in a broad anti-western alliance. Laos, a satellite state. Hong Kong, overrun and conquered. Bhutan, doesn’t want trouble, insignificant. Nepal, the same. Cambodia, another satellite. North Korea, an eccentric protectorate. Myanmar, loyal. Thailand, doesn’t want trouble, relies on Chinese trade and tourists. Pakistan, desperate for Chinese trade and continued investment. Bangladesh, ditto
The same goes even for potential Asian foes of China. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Philippines. They occasionally squeal about Chinese overbearance, BUT their economies are now entirely enmeshed with, and dependent on, the biggest trading power in the world. China. If China topples they implode.
The only Asian country that might one day resist is India, because of sheer size. But that’s a story for the 2nd half of the century
This is the huge, fundamental difference between the USSR (as an opponent) and China. The USSR was only ever a military superpower. Never a trading or technological superpower. China is all three. It is the biggest trading power on earth (bigger than the USA) which means it has enormous grasp over near and distant nations
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
The US are absolutely not going to get themselves into another NATO situation in the Pacific. They'll do a series of bilateral defence agreements with carefully calibrated levels of obligation that serve their interests.
At the moment while the US alone are a match for China its less of an issue.
If China continues to be revanchist and starts to reach a point where the US alone isn't a match, that's when I suspect some form of NPTO might be considered.
If I was China I would keep a careful eye on Erdogan's travails at the moment. Because of his actions, widely, around the middle east and the mediterranean, he's gone from enjoying a specially favoured status with the west, and forming a specially favoured geopolitical bridge, to having formed an unlikely alliance of France, Italy, Libya, Greece, and Israel against him in the Mediterranean, with the US largely in support. The other week even Saudi planes landed in Crete to take part in a special exercise in the Mediterranean, largely just to annoy him after his actions elsewhere.
Comments
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/04/what-do-americans-think-socialism-looks
Go on, say "it was better in my day" give us all a laugh.
You tell him Big G.
You are one of the nicest and sensible people on here. Hope you and Mrs G have a nice weekend
Could we cope, however, with an annual death toll of 50,000, or 100,000? Dunno. My guess is yes, of course - eventually. However if it came with 500,000 yearly cases of Long Covid, that would be fearsome indeed
Analogue party in a digital world.
I do not think personal insults are necessary
In chasing red wall voters, labour are starting to erode their core metro and young voter base.
As a westerner, I have no objection to China (and Asia, more widely) overtaking the west. Which they are clearly doing. Asia is huge by population (and sheer size), the rise of China means 500m have been lifted from dire poverty. Which is a wonderful thing for Homo sapiens
Empires rise and fall. Britain fell. America is obviously falling. China in time will fall, in 50 or 100 years, because of ageing or whatever
What concerns me is that, for the first time in 200 years, the world will have a global hegemon which does not even aspire to human liberty or greater freedom (and imperial Britain and America, for all their many many sins, did have those aspirations, most of the time). Instead the planet will be ruled by a power with ruthless pragmatic self-interest as its sole concern, a power harnessing modern technology in ways that have uncomfortable echoes of fascism
I guess we just have to hope a kinder China arises when Xi goes, as he will (unless the Chinese GPT4 can turn him into an immortal Xi-bot - not impossible)
Labour really is entering a period of pleasing nobody
The problem with wokery is that it's infected the corporate world in a big way, due to companies being terrified that Twitter is going to cancel them otherwise.
There are also distinct structural constraints on the manner in which the coronavirus RNA code can mutate (too technical for me to understand or clearly explain, but they exist), as well as the practical constraint of the spike still having to bind to its target.
I agree that complete immune evasion is highly unlikely.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/ethnicitypaygapsingreatbritain/2018#:~:text=There were three ethnic groups,median pay was £12.03.
What these groups seem to have in common is that they value education for their children and hard work much more than the indigenous population. The proportion of ethnic children at my son's private school is many, many times higher than the proportion of the ethnic population in Dundee and its environs and it is becoming more pronounced every year.
We need to stop worrying quite so much about peoples' feelings and give our youngsters a better preparation for the world they are going to have to compete in.
The locals, where turnout tends to be much lower? well........anything could happen...!!
*Membership may have lapsed
Greedy Rich Tory Turns Out To Be Rich Greedy Tory
That’s it. That’s the shocking truth of this incredible scoop.
Everyone knows Tories are greedy and venal, just like everyone knows lefties are shameless hypocrites. It’s priced in. It’s written on the tin.
The voters will continue to elect greedy rich Tories as long as they appear basically competent and sane, as well. Thanks to the vaccines the Tories give that appearance, right now. It helps that Boris is vaguely amusing (in a time of great boredom)
It helps much more that Labour is obsessed with tiny Woke ID politics in a way that mystifies or actively irritates large chunks of the electorate
Welcome.
Indian families, like Chinese families, I agree promote education, hard work and family values
None of that address your complaints about "woke" actions which are a complaint as old as time. It is our ability to evolve, to be challenged from within by the young that has allowed imperial Britain and America to progress and be so liberal and aspirational for the past half a millenium.
China's biggest flaw is its lack of "woke". Its lack of internal dissent and challenge. For now that masquerades as a strength but we've seen through history time and again that nations incapable of internal challenge do not progress in the same way as those who can.
If you do, congratulations on being especially brave and gifted!
The leader is a drag "just as bad as" Jezza and LAB turnout could yet result in a bloodbath
Brown (who saved the world) Miliband (the best photo op ever with the burger disaster.) Corbyn the bonkers lefty who allied himself with terrorists and now SKS who knows and lives in his own mind, devoid of what is going on outside it
The Tories must be guffawing
Labour against rejoining the EU is not a good look in London
Labour cannot win as it cannot sit on both sides of the fence
It must be looking at a real crisis if these polls reflect in next months ballot boxes
The BBC received a record 110,000 complaints over its coverage of Prince Philip's death, according to the broadcaster's official figures. It is the highest number of complaints ever published in the UK about television programming.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/britain-to-enter-recession-with-500000-uk-jobs-lost-if-it-left-eu-new-treasury-analysis-shows
A long way to go until we see the final figure, admittedly, and we'll likely never know what the real impact was, but this reaction feels premature.
2. Orbit.
3. Nuke.
Repeat as necessary to be sure.
~7/4 BF (laying Tories)
And the idea that China is a guaranteed global hegemon, as opposed to one of two world superpowers, is just silly.
I think what this means for hegemony is that China will be great at copying and the 'filling in' type of science that Thomas Kuhn describes, rather than the great leaps forward (either scientific or societal), and thus might become the hegemon, but will be overtaken quickly by whichever empire makes that next great leap, because it won't be China as currently organized.
Every now and then I point to Frederick Laloux's book Reinventing Organisations. I really think anyone interested in how humans organize and work together for any purpose - economic, political, religious, military, scientific, learning - should read it.
If I were 2 years older, I'd be fifty, and eligible to be enrolled in that study for different first and second shots.
With AZ first shot and Pfizer second shot, I'd have the best of both worlds (and it might explain those encouraging clinical studies that dissimilar shots from different types (adenovector plus mRNA) gave stronger and far broader-based resistance - up to and including immunity to SARS-1 itself).
Yep. Ignoring the democratic wishes of the majority** of one of the countries constituting the "United Kingdom" is a great look right enough.
**If indeed pro-Independence parties win a majority in the Holyrood May 6 election
Let’s take just one. Science. Woke-ness (to use the term at its widest) is against the use of primates in life science. And this is one arena where I have great sympathies with the Woke agenda. Forcing primates to smoke? Ugh. No thanks.
But the result is this: China is dominating this science because it has no such qualms
‘“With support from central and local governments, high-tech primate facilities have sprung up in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Suzhou and Guangzhou over the past decade,” he wrote. “These centres can provide scientists with monkeys in large numbers, and offer high-quality animal care and cutting-edge equipment with little red tape.”
He described how “many [researchers] have since sought refuge for their experiments in China… Some of the Chinese centres are even advertising themselves as primate-research hubs where scientists can fly in to take advantage of the latest tools, such as gene editing and advanced imaging.”
Finally, and with estimable prescience, Cyranoski concluded: “With China fast becoming a global centre for primate research, some scientists fear that it could hasten the atrophy of such science in the West and lead to a near monopoly, in which researchers become over-reliant on one country for essential disease research and drug testing.”‘
https://unherd.com/2021/02/chinas-plan-for-medical-domination/
This is just one of multiple areas where China isn’t just eating our lunch, it is stealing our ability to make a decent lunch tomorrow.
He will say whatever he thinks will win votes, not what he actually believes.
People have seen enough of him to know they don't trust him to say the truth.
This is not what a competent opposition looks like.
I'm actually now a bit more optimistic that the Twitter problem will resolve itself - things like football clubs boycotting social media until they take action to stop routine racist abuse of their players is a good start. That's good wokery for you.
Anyway, Twitter is not the problem as such. I'm a a bit concerned about whether the long standing natural link between big business and the political right may be broken and the consequences of that.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.181018769
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/british-politics/scottish-parliament-election-2021-winner-w-o-snp
Maybe the way to tell who's genuine is whether they stick to their originally claimed specialty when everyone else changes.
If you want to take the constitution off the table and get people talking about education, healthcare, the economy etc then the constitutional issue needs to be settled. There's one way to do that, but you may not like its result.
They've severely pissed off everyone in the region over their territorial claims, and might end up not dissimilar to the old USSR, encircled by potential enemies. That's a dangerous thing, but it doesn't make them any kind of incipient hegemon.
LibDems +33%
Tories +5%
Lab -14%
Greens (don't count for these purposes)
Overall, 54% think they had a good education, 31% think they had an average education and 12% think they had a bad education
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1382992528262230019?s=20
American police killing unarmed black people in Minneapolis is (arguably) as much of a deterrent to people moving to New York/LA.
They will innovate in ways that are different, but just as valid. For instance, they innovated the idea everyone should wear a damn mask to protect OTHERS, even as our brilliant individualistic scientists were saying MASKS ARE BAD
They also innovated, perhaps accidentally, a virus which curiously attacks western countries more than the East
Two nil to them, so far
I think the concern is rather that it was a firm controlled by close member of his family, and he had not previously declared that as an interest. The declaration only came about, belatedly, as a result of the gift.
Hence as well post-Brexit Britain's tilt to Asia in the strategic review, economic strategy etc - the 21st centuries arena of conflicts is far more likely to be Asia than Europe. But we are only ally of many there, between the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK, Australia and many, many more the allies coming together not yet in a full NATO style alliance are more than China alone.
They could have dedicated 100% of BBC1 and R4 and left the other channels for normal use, with maybe extended news broadcasts, for those of us who don't want to hear about it non stop.
Form a square around The Cockster.
However, I do not believe that is the case for the protein vaccines, where the evidence seems to be that using up to 20 peptides in the vaccine is required for a strong enough immune response.
I will put this question to the group I am in at its next meeting on Tuesday.
However, new chemicals do still need to be tested for their side effects on humans, and I'm not sure how you gain comfort that process will go well without some animal testing first. And the neurobiologists trying to understand the human brain are probably better off doing cutting up animals than humans.
Prevalence dropped by about 30% in a week in England.
Compatible with slowly building immunity, albeit still a fair way from herd immunity, but as per that reciprocal curve, the acceleration towards it will only increase with every step of immunity built.
His sister is a director of the company and she gifted the shares to him after he had cleared it with the cabinet office and declared it
The recent contract was with Wales NHS that has nothing to do with him and as Labour in Wales awarded the contract what is the problem
And look at what's happening in Hong Kong.
I think that's reasonable objective evidence for relative attractiveness.
That'a not to say that China doesn't have very good science, and a huge supply of domestic science graduates. The growing breadth and depth of their research efforts is extremely impressive.
But they have problems which the US does not - including a coming demographic crunch.
(indeed it's not entirely inconceivable that the US population overtakes theirs in the next half century, should the US decide once again that immigration is rather a good idea...)
If China continues to be revanchist and starts to reach a point where the US alone isn't a match, that's when I suspect some form of NPTO might be considered.
This government is a disgrace, in government 14 years, tired, corrupt, dishonest, appallingly profligate with public funds, overseeing an educational disaster to which their only response is to withdraw from Pisa and hide the OECD report until after the election, misusing public funds to give a 4% increase paid for out of one off payments to health workers (I can hear the wails of Tory cuts next year already) and none of the Tories, Labour or Lib Dems have laid a glove on them. They don't even talk about it.
It makes SKS's efforts look good and they are rubbish.
But it's interesting that even Vietnam is now a more likely future ally of the US than China.
I know Boris might choose to live across the pond after his current role, but still.....
I do find it strange how many don't seem to see the appearance of a conflict of interest even if very innocent. When I ran my business I made it point in my T&C to state there would be any financial relationship between myself and my clients suppliers. Often I ran conferences and my clients suppliers or potential suppliers would sponsor elements of the event. I always made sure no payment went through my books. I arranged for sponsor to pay directly the venue/speaker/bar/etc so that no money came to me that could be considered an influencing factor.
Sadly, it is being used for a memorial service. For a child.
There is a lesson for me about jumping to conclusions.
Have they pissed off ‘everyone else in the region’? No
Look at their neighbours. Mongolia, a quickly enriching mineral producing state (wholly dependent on China). A loyal satellite state. Russia - happy in a broad anti-western alliance. Laos, a satellite state. Hong Kong, overrun and conquered. Bhutan, doesn’t want trouble, insignificant. Nepal, the same. Cambodia, another satellite. North Korea, an eccentric protectorate. Myanmar, loyal. Thailand, doesn’t want trouble, relies on Chinese trade and tourists. Pakistan, desperate for Chinese trade and continued investment. Bangladesh, ditto
The same goes even for potential Asian foes of China. Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Philippines. They occasionally squeal about Chinese overbearance, BUT their economies are now entirely enmeshed with, and dependent on, the biggest trading power in the world. China. If China topples they implode.
The only Asian country that might one day resist is India, because of sheer size. But that’s a story for the 2nd half of the century
This is the huge, fundamental difference between the USSR (as an opponent) and China. The USSR was only ever a military superpower. Never a trading or technological superpower. China is all three. It is the biggest trading power on earth (bigger than the USA) which means it has enormous grasp over near and distant nations