By the way, if anyone comes up with a jab that cures hayfever (as opposed to fucking useless anti-histamines that don't do anything) they WILL BE THE BESTEST EVER
Nike (NKE) and other major sponsors have come out in support of tennis star Naomi Osaka following her decision to withdraw from the French Open.
'The sports apparel giant — who signed a sponsorship deal with Osaka in 2019 — applauded the athlete in a statement on Monday for opening up about her struggle with depression. "Our thoughts are with Naomi. We support her and recognize her courage in sharing her own mental health experience," Nike said. . . .
"Naomi Osaka's decision reminds us all how important it is to prioritize personal health and well-being," Mastercard (MA) said in a statement. "We support her and admire her courage to address important issues, both on and off the court."
Swiss luxury watchmaker TAG Heuer said that it supports its brand ambassadors "in triumph but also during challenging periods."
"Naomi is going through difficult times and we truly hope to see her back soon. She is a great champion and we are convinced that she will come out of this period stronger, be it professionally or personally," the company said in a statement. . . .
Nissan, the Japanese automaker, also threw its weight behind Osaka. "We support the right of our ambassadors to express themselves and stand by her decision," the company said in a statement. All Nippon Airways, a Tokyo-based airline, said that it, too, would continue to support Osaka "as a sponsor."
Sweetgreen, a US restaurant chain of which Osaka is a brand ambassador and investor, said: "Our partnership with Naomi is rooted in wellness in all its forms. We support her in furthering the conversation around mental health and are proud to have her as part of the Sweetgreen team." . . .
Lewis Hamilton has delivered a scathing criticism of the backlash against Naomi Osaka after her withdrawal from the French Open. Hamilton, speaking before this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, praised her brave stance, condemned the organisers of the French Open for their treatment of the Japanese player after her decision not to speak to the press at the tournament and admitted he too had struggled with the demands that come with competing on a global stage.
It was always going to swing in her direction. I doubt any sports stars enjoy those commitments, and whilst they absorb the material it's not as though the media comments are a huge draw with viewers, and then you throw in references to mental health and the media/organisers wanting to stick to letter of the requirements people sign up to were very quickly going to be on the backfoot.
In the last 24 hours the kitchen of my flat has partly flooded with water from upstairs, I now have no electricity there because it has shorted, someone smashed into my car when it was parked in the Chilterns, and then I chipped a front tooth chewing a thumbnail from anxiety
I am now on the gin
The moral of (part of) this story is: if you're going to live in a flat, always opt for the top floor.
And chew your fingers with your back teeth, they are stronger.
Hold the fucking phone. Oxford and Cambridge are only 44% first doses?
Is there something weird with students goin on here?
Surely a large proportion of the population are very young (i.e. students) and therefore are ineligible for their first dose.
Diggin into the number it looks to be a bit of that but uptake across older groups is also significantly lower.
East of England 1st dose for 50-54 year olds - 86% Cambridge uptake for 50-54 year olds - 76%
Even in the 70-74 year olds in is 88% in Cambridge rather than the East of England 95%
Get out of your ivory towers and get vaccinated you academic wankers.
Middle class anti-vaxxers definitely exist.
I wouldn't be surprised if a former landlady of mine was one. She would poach fish for her ancient cat, had a room full of empty tetrapak fruit juice cartons waiting to be sent somewhere to be recycled, laughed about failing to throw the mice from the live traps over the stream at the bottom of the garden.
I could see her being suspicious of a vaccine and being sure that it would all be over if people would just stay at home. Sort of person who is confident there must be something beneficial about homeopathy, that sort of thing.
Society can't be constructed entirely around the needs of minorities, either.
I feel extremely sorry for severely immunocompromised people who are at great risk from Covid, and would desperately wish to have the vaccines, but can't. If they receive medical advice to keep shielding for a long time and decide to do that, then they should be supported. But does it therefore follow that the whole population should have to spend their entire lives walking around in hazmat suits, in order to protect leukaemia patients from germs when they feel confident enough to sally forth from their homes?
I don't have an answer but at least you've recognised the issue which is more than many have or do.
I hope science can come up with an answer for those who want the vaccine but cannot have it - I'm sure it will happen in time.
As for those who refuse the vaccine - my hope is each and every one of them has been able to make their own decision based on the information available - the truth is I'm far from convinced. In some families, the writ of an individual (male or female) will be absolute and if they decide not to be vaccinated, none of the family will be vaccinated.
Between familial, religious and peer group pressures, I fear there may be thousands who perhaps secretly want to be vaccinated but cannot for whatever reason get somewhere to be vaccinated.
I looked in to visiting friends in Iceland, supposedly a 'green' country and concluded no. Too many possible problems - it could go from green to amber so risk of quarantine on return. Not sure if I will be 'fully vaccinated' by time of departure so possibility of having to take a private test before going, so that could be £125, then I get there and need to take another test at the airport then wait in the hotel for up to 24 hours, so uncertainty about that; then what happens if it is positive? This is not going to be a relaxing normal holiday, with all these procedures in place. Everyone should just basically give up on foreign holidays.
The problem is that the media want to go on holiday. Also, not letting people from the 3rd world come and go as they please is racist. As a result, we're using most of the headroom the vaccines have given us on mopping up imported cases plus the cases they have seeded, instead of returning to real normality.
Consider this - if around 3/4 of current cases are the Indian variant, and are thus seeded from cases which only arrived here in March/April, if the government had actually controlled the borders properly (I.e. real hotel quarantine for all incomers), we would be looking at cases rates 25-35% of where they are now. We could definitely ditch all the rules (except the hotel quarantine), including the stupid masks etc, and actually have proper normality.
This was all pretty predictable in February/March, however as the honourable member for Central Stupid is currently leading HM opposition, he said nothing at the time, so now can't hold fools in power accountable (neither can the morons in the media, who were mostly fretting about their wretched summer holidays at the time).
I must say, the increasingly fashionable spectacle of city-dwelling graduates vaguely involved in the media generalising about senior citizens in often deprived, neglected post-industrial places is quite a thing
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
East Lancs hospitals (the Blackburn / Hyndburn / Burnley / Pendle / Rosendale areas) are slowly increasing but look like they will peak at around 15% of the January peak.
In the last 24 hours the kitchen of my flat has partly flooded with water from upstairs, I now have no electricity there because it has shorted, someone smashed into my car when it was parked in the Chilterns, and then I chipped a front tooth chewing a thumbnail from anxiety
I am now on the gin
The moral of (part of) this story is: if you're going to live in a flat, always opt for the top floor.
Then the flat roof leaks, and it is too hot on a sunny day...😦
I must say, the increasingly fashionable spectacle of city-dwelling graduates vaguely involved in the media generalising about senior citizens in often deprived, neglected post-industrial places is quite a thing
Society can't be constructed entirely around the needs of minorities, either.
I feel extremely sorry for severely immunocompromised people who are at great risk from Covid, and would desperately wish to have the vaccines, but can't. If they receive medical advice to keep shielding for a long time and decide to do that, then they should be supported. But does it therefore follow that the whole population should have to spend their entire lives walking around in hazmat suits, in order to protect leukaemia patients from germs when they feel confident enough to sally forth from their homes?
I don't have an answer but at least you've recognised the issue which is more than many have or do.
I hope science can come up with an answer for those who want the vaccine but cannot have it - I'm sure it will happen in time.
As for those who refuse the vaccine - my hope is each and every one of them has been able to make their own decision based on the information available - the truth is I'm far from convinced. In some families, the writ of an individual (male or female) will be absolute and if they decide not to be vaccinated, none of the family will be vaccinated.
Between familial, religious and peer group pressures, I fear there may be thousands who perhaps secretly want to be vaccinated but cannot for whatever reason get somewhere to be vaccinated.
I hope I'm wrong.
If your final point is true, the very last thing we should be doing is indulging those pressures and shielding those who exert and give in to them from the consequences of their own actions. If 'the writ of an individual' causes thousands of families to eschew life-saving medical treatment, then only exposure to reality has a hope of changing that sad state of affairs.
United States President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip beginning next week will include a meeting with Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and an audience with Queen Elizabeth, the White House announced on Thursday.
I must say, the increasingly fashionable spectacle of city-dwelling graduates vaguely involved in the media generalising about senior citizens in often deprived, neglected post-industrial places is quite a thing
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Hold the fucking phone. Oxford and Cambridge are only 44% first doses?
Is there something weird with students goin on here?
Surely a large proportion of the population are very young (i.e. students) and therefore are ineligible for their first dose.
Diggin into the number it looks to be a bit of that but uptake across older groups is also significantly lower.
East of England 1st dose for 50-54 year olds - 86% Cambridge uptake for 50-54 year olds - 76%
Even in the 70-74 year olds in is 88% in Cambridge rather than the East of England 95%
Get out of your ivory towers and get vaccinated you academic wankers.
Middle class anti-vaxxers definitely exist.
The Corbyn family. Tip of the iceberg of the moron “educated but still very thick” class.
I thought Corbyn managed to get expelled from a polytechnic?
Which is quite impressive on its own, but I’m not sure I’d call him ‘educated.’
According to Wikipedia (so I'm not saying this is right, but it sounds plausible) " Corbyn began a course in Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic but left after a year without a degree after a series of arguments with his tutors over the curriculum."
It also says he spent two years doing Voluntary Service Overseas in Jamaica (which is good) as a geography teacher (which is horrifying).
That’s his story. A second version is he was expelled for refusing to submit any work.
No idea which is true.
I can see him getting very worked up about the tutors refusing to do a lecture on MI5’s infiltration of the trade Union movement
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I must say, the increasingly fashionable spectacle of city-dwelling graduates vaguely involved in the media generalising about senior citizens in often deprived, neglected post-industrial places is quite a thing
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
Shut down twitter and Facebook. Shut down news 24 and sky news. Let's get rid of all the poison.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
No it isn't. 26m people within groups 1-9 are fully vaccinated, a week from now that number will be 29m. Who exactly is going to end up in hospital? People who rejected the vaccine? Fuck that, let them die.
Ollie Robinson is likely to be dropped by England for the second Test against New Zealand next week, in the wake of the row over his racist and sexist tweets.
Robinson impressed in taking two more wickets on his Test debut on Thursday, ending with figures of 4-75, but the England and Wales Cricket Board is understood to be determined to make an example of him as it tries to root out discrimination in cricket.
The ECB launched an investigation into Robinson's conduct - centering on tweets he sent in 2012 and 2013 which included racist and sexist language - on Wednesday night and is set to drop him from the squad for the second Test, which begins at Edgbaston next Thursday. The investigation could yet lead to him being ruled out of some of the series against India too.
I just don't see how it makes an example of someone when they've already apologised for their historic actions - if they'd apologised for something they had literally just done it'd make a bit more sense, to reinforce that they shouldnot do it again.
The bigger problem is that if they ban Robinson for the next Test his replacement is most likely to be Overton, who is still denying the on-pitch racial abuse he was banned in 2015 for two matches for. How can they credibly replace someone who has apologised with someone who won't?
I don't have an answer but at least you've recognised the issue which is more than many have or do.
I hope science can come up with an answer for those who want the vaccine but cannot have it - I'm sure it will happen in time.
As for those who refuse the vaccine - my hope is each and every one of them has been able to make their own decision based on the information available - the truth is I'm far from convinced. In some families, the writ of an individual (male or female) will be absolute and if they decide not to be vaccinated, none of the family will be vaccinated.
Between familial, religious and peer group pressures, I fear there may be thousands who perhaps secretly want to be vaccinated but cannot for whatever reason get somewhere to be vaccinated.
I hope I'm wrong.
If your final point is true, the very last thing we should be doing is indulging those pressures and shielding those who exert and give in to them from the consequences of their own actions. If 'the writ of an individual' causes thousands of families to eschew life-saving medical treatment, then only exposure to reality has a hope of changing that sad state of affairs.
You're absolutely right, of course, and I hope I'm wrong but it's a possibility we have to consider.
I know a number of agencies are trying desperately to reach people in certain "groups" who have been shown to be more vaccine-hesitant (or resistant) than the general population but the evidence in Newham for example is some 10,000 adults over 60 have yet to have a first vaccination.
Now, I don't have a breakdown by ethnicity but I bet someone will - we also have those who "don't exist" officially but live here (I was in Chinatown last week when the "vaccine bus" arrived and there were hundreds trying to get a vaccination).
I think perhaps I've used some poor terminology - perhaps the real enemy is the tyranny of ignorance.
I must say, the increasingly fashionable spectacle of city-dwelling graduates vaguely involved in the media generalising about senior citizens in often deprived, neglected post-industrial places is quite a thing
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
80 in England, which is flat. Scotland is distorting things at the low levels we are at. Numbers in hospital in U.K. pretty flat despite the growth of delta and the spikes in places.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
80 in England, which is flat. Scotland is distorting things at the low levels we are at. Numbers in hospital in U.K. pretty flat despite the growth of delta and the spikes in places.
There's also a slight drop off in the hospitalisation rate in the hotspot areas. Severity also seems to be going down a lot as mostly younger people are getting it.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Why ARE people so irrationally allergic to the Lab Leak Hypothesis?
The first reaction of the director of the Wuhan lab, Shi Zhengli, when she heard about Covid, a novel bat coronavirus, was to think "OMG maybe it came from my lab", and she rushed home from Shanghai to check
Her first reaction was not "oh lab leak plagues never happen, all pandemics have come from natural zoonosis".
She thought the idea was highly plausible.
And yet so many people in the West are utterly averse to the notion. To the extent they don't even want it discussed.
Why is this? Hatred of Trump, who espoused the theory? I can believe that in the USA, in very liberal circles - but not in the UK. Fear of being racist? Fear that a proven lab leak will upend the world? Destroy virology? What?
This is a serious point. We have reacted so irrationally Facebook censored any mention of this hypothesis for a year, exactly as the Chinese wanted
1) because humans are irrational. 2) because the truth doesn't exist anymore
IN THE WEST
We are willingly abandoning the Scientific Method, Free Speech and the Enlightenment, on the altar of anti-racism, crap science, perverse social media (quasi-owned by China), and horribly polarised politics
It is a tragedy unfolding in real time, in plain sight.
It's a tragedy unfolding in your head more like.
The lab leak theory is a plausible theory. Nothing more, nothing less. Your unwillingness to think in terms of probabilities, instead opining in terms of utter certainty about whatever has most recently crossed your frontal cortex is why no-one is engaging with you on this.
Did you see what he said?
About new religions if little green men exist?
Yes. No way he’d say all this - to the New York Times - unless he felt something big was trundling in our direction. Buckle up
Are some people on social media enjoying their exploiting of the poor media literacy skills of others, such as being able to identify misinformation, or is this stuff, pushing the line governments hiding evidence that aliens have visited earth [or insert anything] just harmless fun?
Is it really wrong and harmful to indulge in such pastime of conspiracy theories ? Are there social consequences? Could conspiracy theories undermine democracy? Undermine internal relations in a country or internationally? If it’s health base conspiracy for example, will it lead to deaths? Undermine trust in authority, where trust is needed?
Does it all work on basis it can’t be proved, but damn hard to utterly disprove too, that is actually part of an absolutist anti-governmentalism agenda to undermine a regulatory state and credentialed experts, leading us to an undemocratic and elitist future?
You, Leon, are pushing two simultaneously - UFO conspiracy - China Virus conspiracy. You do it like you hold all the facts, bare assertions, so it’s open and shut case. Though you obviously haven’t heard the Scientists playing with COVID in the lab used to meet children in subterranean room of a sushi restaurant, in their private life.
Ask yourself, which of the two books you are going to write next, what do people want to read and which gets Hollywood interested - how it was actually impossible for Elizabeth l to keep up the secret she was a man throughout her life and after - or that it’s credible a child under care could die from something and be swapped out with a boy from Bisley? we even have a skeleton.
You appreciate you have a case to answer?
I shall print and frame this comment and put it on the wall of my loo
East Lancs hospitals (the Blackburn / Hyndburn / Burnley / Pendle / Rosendale areas) are slowly increasing but look like they will peak at around 15% of the January peak.
And Bedford hospital has new patients and total patients now falling having peaked at around 8% of the January peak.
What's particularly encouraging about Bedfordshire is that (a) there's little sign of spread into the areas immediately surrounding Bedford, (b) Bedford itself already appears to be past peak caseload, and (c) the local hospital trust - which covers both Bedford and Luton - currently reports a grand total of just 12 Covid patients.
Bedford Borough has also had no Covid deaths within 28 days of a positive test in the last seven days. In fact, it's only had two since the beginning of April.
Now, cases are still climbing at a fair rate in Luton, so the authorities will need to keep an eye on what's going on there - but, that notwithstanding, the situation in that part of the world is very encouraging. Dastardly Delta has effectively done little more than shut down one of the local schools for a week.
To the doommongers about the cricket. It was very hot at Lords today, sitting there in the new Edrich stand seats at ground level with the heat cooking you like bacon wasn't v pleaaant. Loads of factor 50 needed applying. Re the game. Eng did well to recover. It could end in a tight finish. Ball is doing the odd thing .. keeping low occasionally... moving off the pitch.once in a while Its not that awkward . ...
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
I think I’ll endure
How are you gonna recharge your phone or whatever?
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
Yes, the Equality Act 2010 which contains the provisions that used to be in the Disability Discrimination Act. France should have the similar laws the UK’s enactment covered off our EU obligations in that regard. The equivalent here of “Reasonable Accommodation” is “Reasonable Adjustment”
I looked in to visiting friends in Iceland, supposedly a 'green' country and concluded no. Too many possible problems - it could go from green to amber so risk of quarantine on return. Not sure if I will be 'fully vaccinated' by time of departure so possibility of having to take a private test before going, so that could be £125, then I get there and need to take another test at the airport then wait in the hotel for up to 24 hours, so uncertainty about that; then what happens if it is positive? This is not going to be a relaxing normal holiday, with all these procedures in place. Everyone should just basically give up on foreign holidays.
The problem is that the media want to go on holiday. Also, not letting people from the 3rd world come and go as they please is racist. As a result, we're using most of the headroom the vaccines have given us on mopping up imported cases plus the cases they have seeded, instead of returning to real normality.
Consider this - if around 3/4 of current cases are the Indian variant, and are thus seeded from cases which only arrived here in March/April, if the government had actually controlled the borders properly (I.e. real hotel quarantine for all incomers), we would be looking at cases rates 25-35% of where they are now. We could definitely ditch all the rules (except the hotel quarantine), including the stupid masks etc, and actually have proper normality.
This was all pretty predictable in February/March, however as the honourable member for Central Stupid is currently leading HM opposition, he said nothing at the time, so now can't hold fools in power accountable (neither can the morons in the media, who were mostly fretting about their wretched summer holidays at the time).
(1) Are three quarters the Indian variant today?
(2) So what if the Indian variant takes off? The reality is that CV19 is disappearing, as we continue to vaccinate people. Only 247 people who'd been double vaccinated have even tested positive for it.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
I hope you’re overly pessimistic, but yes, the outlook is dark
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
I don't think that's true. The ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration may not have been the best possible response to the pandemic, but it wasn't the work of a bunch of cranks and loons either. We have the benifit of hindsight now - we know now that a bunch of very high effecacy vaccines turned up, but in a counterfactual where that didn't happen, sooner or later Great Barrington approach (doubtless suitably rebranded) would have been inevitable, and if that was the case, the sooner we got it over and done with the better.
There should have been a proper public debate last summer about this, and how long we hung on with restrictions hoping that the vaccines came good - and for Google to have attempted to block it was frankly appalling.
Incidentally, if all the lockdown enthusiasts could care to explain why lockdown heavy Peru did so badly even compared to Brazil (no lockdowns), I'm all ears, but doubtless that just makes me a conspiracy theorist for thinking that lockdowns don't actually make all that much difference.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
I think I’ll endure
How are you gonna recharge your phone or whatever?
I’m quite anal about keeping fully charged power packs around the flat. Got about 8, and each can wholly charge an iPhone 4 times or an ipad at least once. My anality will save me
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
857 people hospitalised in the last week, that's a 3% rise on last week, at this rate it will take 57 weeks before we get back to the level we where at Christmas, 57 weeks!
and 12 million new does expected to be injected in the next 3 weeks.
I looked in to visiting friends in Iceland, supposedly a 'green' country and concluded no. Too many possible problems - it could go from green to amber so risk of quarantine on return. Not sure if I will be 'fully vaccinated' by time of departure so possibility of having to take a private test before going, so that could be £125, then I get there and need to take another test at the airport then wait in the hotel for up to 24 hours, so uncertainty about that; then what happens if it is positive? This is not going to be a relaxing normal holiday, with all these procedures in place. Everyone should just basically give up on foreign holidays.
The problem is that the media want to go on holiday. Also, not letting people from the 3rd world come and go as they please is racist. As a result, we're using most of the headroom the vaccines have given us on mopping up imported cases plus the cases they have seeded, instead of returning to real normality.
Consider this - if around 3/4 of current cases are the Indian variant, and are thus seeded from cases which only arrived here in March/April, if the government had actually controlled the borders properly (I.e. real hotel quarantine for all incomers), we would be looking at cases rates 25-35% of where they are now. We could definitely ditch all the rules (except the hotel quarantine), including the stupid masks etc, and actually have proper normality.
This was all pretty predictable in February/March, however as the honourable member for Central Stupid is currently leading HM opposition, he said nothing at the time, so now can't hold fools in power accountable (neither can the morons in the media, who were mostly fretting about their wretched summer holidays at the time).
(1) Are three quarters the Indian variant today?
(2) So what if the Indian variant takes off? The reality is that CV19 is disappearing, as we continue to vaccinate people. Only 247 people who'd been double vaccinated have even tested positive for it.
Yeah it was something like 80% in the latest random sample.
Agreed on point 2 and our vaccine programme is going to finish COVID off for good. One of the happy accidents/better moves has been to switch under 40s to the more efficacious ones which are proven to prevent spread and hit high efficacy very quickly rather than AZ or J&J which take 4 weeks to get to decent levels of efficacy and require at least 8 weeks between doses to hit 90%+ overall efficacy. In raw number terms we need to do 30m more vaccine doses to get 48m adults vaccinated (90% of adults, 71% of the population) we're currently vaccinating at a rate of 4m doses per week. That's 7.5 weeks to get 90% of adults to both doses. However, we're also getting a lot of Pfizer vaccine doses and Moderna are set to complete their deliveries by the beginning of July so we will have a lot of room to reduce that 7.5 weeks to something like 5 weeks with a few surge days.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Set up a lottery. Free trips to the Balearics for the lucky winners.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
I think I’ll endure
How are you gonna recharge your phone or whatever?
I’m quite anal about keeping fully charged power packs around the flat. Got about 8, and each can wholly charge an iPhone 4 times or an ipad at least once. My anality will save me
Gallic anal insouciance. les piles = the batteries
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
I hope you’re overly pessimistic, but yes, the outlook is dark
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
Thank you Leon, and good luck sorting out your roof leak. It is not too bad at my end. Having given up on trying to save western civilisation and the enlightenment by turning people against wokeness by posting under pretend names on obscure political betting websites, as well as on the idea of visiting Iceland due to the ongoing uncertainty around Covid bureaucracy, I have booked 3 x train journeys around the UK over the next two months. Going up to do the Far North line and the Isles of Scilly.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
I think it will once groups 1-9 have had their second doses and we have a path to get the remaining 8m first doses done. That's when second dose gaps will start tumbling, especially for the lucky few who got Moderna as they will complete their first 8.5m deliveries soon necessitating second doses.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
I don't think that's true. The ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration may not have been the best possible response to the pandemic, but it wasn't the work of a bunch of cranks and loons either. We have the benifit of hindsight now - we know now that a bunch of very high effecacy vaccines turned up, but in a counterfactual where that didn't happen, sooner or later Great Barrington approach (doubtless suitably rebranded) would have been inevitable, and if that was the case, the sooner we got it over and done with the better.
There should have been a proper public debate last summer about this, and how long we hung on with restrictions hoping that the vaccines came good - and for Google to have attempted to block it was frankly appalling.
Incidentally, if all the lockdown enthusiasts could care to explain why lockdown heavy Peru did so badly even compared to Brazil (no lockdowns), I'm all ears, but doubtless that just makes me a conspiracy theorist for thinking that lockdowns don't actually make all that much difference.
See analysis on BBC website of why Peru has high death rate particularly compared to other S American states. All seem very rational.
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
Don’t know about the EU, but in the UK (n.b. LTA) would probably contravene the Disability Discrimination Act and its requirement for ‘reasonable adjustments’.
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Yeah agree. This rigid plan of age groups is now hindering rollout. The London NHS person I know told me as much when he said that London can double its first doses but simply doesn't have enough people available to book in.
Why is this a good thing? Surely enclosing people in their own little world is a bad idea. The right thing to do would be to mix it up, so that people all over the country hear a mixture of different accents.
"BBC One will speak to northern viewers in their own accent 'Bespoke' service will employ regional announcers in bid to make corporation feel less London-centric"
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
Yes, the Equality Act 2010 which contains the provisions that used to be in the Disability Discrimination Act. France should have the similar laws the UK’s enactment covered off our EU obligations in that regard. The equivalent here of “Reasonable Accommodation” is “Reasonable Adjustment”
Interesting. Are there any UK-Euro precedents that would apply to Naomi Osaka situation?
Wonder IF legal eagles for the Grand Slams really gave much (or any) thought to this BEFORE their pronuncimento?
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Not that this stopped the Welsh health minister from flying into a panic over a minuscule cluster of Indian Plague cases in Conwy, to the extent that there was mithering about it possibly derailing the entire exit from lockdown.
As we get closer to the end of this wretched epidemic, ever smaller outbreaks will result in ever louder screaming. By August we'll have various scientists and politicians demanding Melbourne-style snap lockdowns over single cases.
I now have zero electricity and I’m wearing a head torch
Sounds like you have low self esteem? OR are you referring to your flat's water leak & power outage?
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Ta mate. There’s something quite soothing about it all. A warm summer night. Sultry zephyrs. Quiet and dark. The play of torchlight. Wine
I think I’ll endure
How are you gonna recharge your phone or whatever?
I’m quite anal about keeping fully charged power packs around the flat. Got about 8, and each can wholly charge an iPhone 4 times or an ipad at least once. My anality will save me
Leon, some how that does not surprise me.
Meanwhile I have just run out of Juice for my Vape (e-Cigarette) I'm sure there was another one hear, but as I could not find it, I've had to raid my emergency supply, a bottle of Cucumber, Apple and Aniseed. I bout it ones when I was thought I would try new flavours, now I remember why I put it in the emergency use only pile.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
857 people hospitalised in the last week, that's a 3% rise on last week, at this rate it will take 57 weeks before we get back to the level we where at Christmas, 57 weeks!
and 12 million new does expected to be injected in the next 3 weeks.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
More to the point, sports press conferences rarely provide anything more than platitudes and clichés. They are hardly riving viewing.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
I hope you’re overly pessimistic, but yes, the outlook is dark
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
Thank you Leon, and good luck sorting out your roof leak. It is not too bad at my end. Having given up on trying to save western civilisation and the enlightenment by turning people against wokeness by posting under pretend names on obscure political betting websites, as well as on the idea of visiting Iceland due to the ongoing uncertainty around Covid bureaucracy, I have booked 3 x train journeys around the UK over the next two months. Going up to do the Far North line and the Isles of Scilly.
The Scillies are magical! Try and make it to the tiniest inhabited isle. St Agnes. It has Britain’s most westerly pub. On a fine summer evening it is SUPERB
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Agreed. I also suspect it’s a cadre more likely to be keen on walk in arrangements for both jabs. The plan has worked well, but now it might be time to adapt and just focus on numbers every day.
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Not that this stopped the Welsh health minister from flying into a panic over a minuscule cluster of Indian Plague cases in Conwy, to the extent that there was mithering about it possibly derailing the entire exit from lockdown.
As we get closer to the end of this wretched epidemic, ever smaller outbreaks will result in ever louder screaming. By August we'll have various scientists and politicians demanding Melbourne-style snap lockdowns over single cases.
‘Independent’ SAGE have already announced they are going to carry on once this is over but focus On climate change.
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
Yes, the Equality Act 2010 which contains the provisions that used to be in the Disability Discrimination Act. France should have the similar laws the UK’s enactment covered off our EU obligations in that regard. The equivalent here of “Reasonable Accommodation” is “Reasonable Adjustment”
Interesting. Are there any UK-Euro precedents that would apply to Naomi Osaka situation?
Wonder IF legal eagles for the Grand Slams really gave much (or any) thought to this BEFORE their pronuncimento?
She may not be disabled for the purposes of the legislation. You're disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ' substantial' and 'long-term' negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities. Depression can be substantial and long term under that definition but it’s a question of degree.
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Not that this stopped the Welsh health minister from flying into a panic over a minuscule cluster of Indian Plague cases in Conwy, to the extent that there was mithering about it possibly derailing the entire exit from lockdown.
As we get closer to the end of this wretched epidemic, ever smaller outbreaks will result in ever louder screaming. By August we'll have various scientists and politicians demanding Melbourne-style snap lockdowns over single cases.
‘Independent’ SAGE have already announced they are going to carry on once this is over but focus On climate change.
I am struggling to believe that members of indie SAGE actually believe this will ever "be over".
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
More to the point, sports press conferences rarely provide anything more than platitudes and clichés. They are hardly riving viewing.
When news broke that Naomi Osaka was exiting French Open, immediate reaction by number of PBers was that she was violating her contract obligation. BUT if the contract, in the sense of mandatory press conference attendance despite her disability (a pre-existing condition) is NOT valid IF it contravenes the law on workplace disability, then THAT is a whole different kettle o' fish.
Regardless of what the court of sporting AND public opinion says, which also appears to be on her side.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
I hope you’re overly pessimistic, but yes, the outlook is dark
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
Thank you Leon, and good luck sorting out your roof leak. It is not too bad at my end. Having given up on trying to save western civilisation and the enlightenment by turning people against wokeness by posting under pretend names on obscure political betting websites, as well as on the idea of visiting Iceland due to the ongoing uncertainty around Covid bureaucracy, I have booked 3 x train journeys around the UK over the next two months. Going up to do the Far North line and the Isles of Scilly.
The Scillies are magical! Try and make it to the tiniest inhabited isle. St Agnes. It has Britain’s most westerly pub. On a fine summer evening it is SUPERB
The water is crystal clear, the beaches pure white* and the palm trees make it look like the Caribean, but the water is icy cold, straight off the Atlantic.
The gig races are fun, and some interesting neolithic sites on some islands.
* lots of bits washed up from old shipwrecks every day, clay pipes and Chinese porcelain fragments.
I looked in to visiting friends in Iceland, supposedly a 'green' country and concluded no. Too many possible problems - it could go from green to amber so risk of quarantine on return. Not sure if I will be 'fully vaccinated' by time of departure so possibility of having to take a private test before going, so that could be £125, then I get there and need to take another test at the airport then wait in the hotel for up to 24 hours, so uncertainty about that; then what happens if it is positive? This is not going to be a relaxing normal holiday, with all these procedures in place. Everyone should just basically give up on foreign holidays.
The problem is that the media want to go on holiday. Also, not letting people from the 3rd world come and go as they please is racist. As a result, we're using most of the headroom the vaccines have given us on mopping up imported cases plus the cases they have seeded, instead of returning to real normality.
Consider this - if around 3/4 of current cases are the Indian variant, and are thus seeded from cases which only arrived here in March/April, if the government had actually controlled the borders properly (I.e. real hotel quarantine for all incomers), we would be looking at cases rates 25-35% of where they are now. We could definitely ditch all the rules (except the hotel quarantine), including the stupid masks etc, and actually have proper normality.
This was all pretty predictable in February/March, however as the honourable member for Central Stupid is currently leading HM opposition, he said nothing at the time, so now can't hold fools in power accountable (neither can the morons in the media, who were mostly fretting about their wretched summer holidays at the time).
(1) Are three quarters the Indian variant today?
(2) So what if the Indian variant takes off? The reality is that CV19 is disappearing, as we continue to vaccinate people. Only 247 people who'd been double vaccinated have even tested positive for it.
1) Yes they are.
2) The trouble is that we are still under quite a lot of restrictions, some of which are merely removing the pleasure from life (e.g. the outrageous ban on congregational singing in churches), and some of which are doing obvious economic harm (e.g. my young lady and I seriously discussed going to the cinema last Saturday for the first time since before the pandemic - our conclusion was that it wasn't going to be worth it because of the mask wearing, so we didn't, and probably won't as long as masks are required.)
We probably could ditch all these measures anyway, given the vaccine progress, but it looks increasingly likely that the 21st isn't going to be anything like "all the rules in the bin day", because the government is too jinxed by the Indian variant, and keeps listening to the the (false) prophets of doom on Sage*.
Had they actually done the border control thing right, there would essentially be zero Covid in the UK by now, and even the most lunatic of the fake sage lot wouldn't be able to argue against ending restrictions.
*The Spectator has a pretty good graph comparing Sage's various predictions in March for cases after unlocking to reality. Would you believe, cases have actually dropped to levels considerably below their most optimistic scenario - it's almost like their modeling was just as bad as everyone on here said it was at the time.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
857 people hospitalised in the last week, that's a 3% rise on last week, at this rate it will take 57 weeks before we get back to the level we where at Christmas, 57 weeks!
and 12 million new does expected to be injected in the next 3 weeks.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
My figures are total UK but they are consistent with your figures for England.
The R for the UK is 1.04 i.e. doubling every 4 months from a low base. Hospitalisations are flat. That's fine. Need to keep an eye on it but no need for panic.
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Agreed. I also suspect it’s a cadre more likely to be keen on walk in arrangements for both jabs. The plan has worked well, but now it might be time to adapt and just focus on numbers every day.
Has the chose to not give AZ to under 40s slowed the role out at all?
There seems to have been a bit of a dip over the last week 595,000 doses to 490,000 daily average. (and the bank holiday and school half term might be part of that,)
I feel like we could be going quicker on the vax rollout, Wales is over 85% of adults for a first dose - they must be getting close to the hesitancy limit tbh.
Not that this stopped the Welsh health minister from flying into a panic over a minuscule cluster of Indian Plague cases in Conwy, to the extent that there was mithering about it possibly derailing the entire exit from lockdown.
As we get closer to the end of this wretched epidemic, ever smaller outbreaks will result in ever louder screaming. By August we'll have various scientists and politicians demanding Melbourne-style snap lockdowns over single cases.
‘Independent’ SAGE have already announced they are going to carry on once this is over but focus On climate change.
As someone who is worried about climate change, but who also thinks it can can dealt with fairly painlessly with the right tech and limited changes from the public, I get scared by zealots like them and Greta.
I get scared because of the risk of them pushing too far and creating a backlash against ANY climate adaptations. They seem to enjoy talking nonsense about global extinction and to be excited by the idea of wearing hair shirts as a penance to stave off the end of the world.
Over egg the case like they do, and you risk losing support for what’s actually needed.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
857 people hospitalised in the last week, that's a 3% rise on last week, at this rate it will take 57 weeks before we get back to the level we where at Christmas, 57 weeks!
and 12 million new does expected to be injected in the next 3 weeks.
Based on today’s PHE hospitalisation data there ain’t a hope in hell further relaxation will take place on 21 June. September at earliest and we may go back a tad before then.
Fuck that noise. No one is actually ending up in hospital.
The trend is ominous. First day in a month or so with more than 100 admissions. It’s starting to happen.
I find it very hard to get excited about an odd number here and there. The same data set also appears to show the total number of hospital patients peaking on the 2nd and coming back down again on the 3rd. Should we assign similar significance to this?
Re: Naomi Osaka, and the argument that her treatment by French Open would be actionable in USA under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), are there similar protections in UK and/or EU with respect to workplace disability and discrimination?
Yes, the Equality Act 2010 which contains the provisions that used to be in the Disability Discrimination Act. France should have the similar laws the UK’s enactment covered off our EU obligations in that regard. The equivalent here of “Reasonable Accommodation” is “Reasonable Adjustment”
Interesting. Are there any UK-Euro precedents that would apply to Naomi Osaka situation?
Wonder IF legal eagles for the Grand Slams really gave much (or any) thought to this BEFORE their pronuncimento?
She may not be disabled for the purposes of the legislation. You're disabled under the Equality Act 2010 if you have a physical or mental impairment that has a ' substantial' and 'long-term' negative effect on your ability to do normal daily activities. Depression can be substantial and long term under that definition but it’s a question of degree.
Sounds like it MIGHT make a very interesting court case IF it comes to that.
And a sorta hoping it does, because seems to me a ruling in her favor would help a LOT of other folks, and I do NOT mean top-dollar sports stars.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
More to the point, sports press conferences rarely provide anything more than platitudes and clichés. They are hardly riving viewing.
East Lancs hospitals (the Blackburn / Hyndburn / Burnley / Pendle / Rosendale areas) are slowly increasing but look like they will peak at around 15% of the January peak.
And Bedford hospital has new patients and total patients now falling having peaked at around 8% of the January peak.
What's particularly encouraging about Bedfordshire is that (a) there's little sign of spread into the areas immediately surrounding Bedford, (b) Bedford itself already appears to be past peak caseload, and (c) the local hospital trust - which covers both Bedford and Luton - currently reports a grand total of just 12 Covid patients.
Bedford Borough has also had no Covid deaths within 28 days of a positive test in the last seven days. In fact, it's only had two since the beginning of April.
Now, cases are still climbing at a fair rate in Luton, so the authorities will need to keep an eye on what's going on there - but, that notwithstanding, the situation in that part of the world is very encouraging. Dastardly Delta has effectively done little more than shut down one of the local schools for a week.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
More to the point, sports press conferences rarely provide anything more than platitudes and clichés. They are hardly riving viewing.
When news broke that Naomi Osaka was exiting French Open, immediate reaction by number of PBers was that she was violating her contract obligation. BUT if the contract, in the sense of mandatory press conference attendance despite her disability (a pre-existing condition) is NOT valid IF it contravenes the law on workplace disability, then THAT is a whole different kettle o' fish.
Regardless of what the court of sporting AND public opinion says, which also appears to be on her side.
That’s quite right. It’s a given that statutory employment (or workplace more broadly in this case) protections override contracts
The Scillies are magical! Try and make it to the tiniest inhabited isle. St Agnes. It has Britain’s most westerly pub. On a fine summer evening it is SUPERB
Walking back from the Turk's Head on quiz night, under one of the best star-scapes in the country, with migrant thrushes calling in the darkness. Yep, magical....
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Agreed. I also suspect it’s a cadre more likely to be keen on walk in arrangements for both jabs. The plan has worked well, but now it might be time to adapt and just focus on numbers every day.
Has the chose to not give AZ to under 40s slowed the role out at all?
There seems to have been a bit of a dip over the last week 595,000 doses to 490,000 daily average. (and the bank holiday and school half term might be part of that,)
But do we have AZ doses that we are not using?
This (just) under 40 year old snuck in under the wire and had AZ. I’ve yet to die of a blood clot, and since we can surely agree that everyone else is less important than me, I think they can ease those restrictions on usage now.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
The problems facing social media are an extension of the problem of having an open society and democracy in general: maybe it doesn't work, maybe it isn't the least worst option as we have been taught to believe.
I do sometimes wonder if Democracy can function as we know it, alongside social media
Well, the democracy we knew was basically all over as soon as unregulated social media got going. No one has a monopoly over the truth, so the truth can't be discerned any more. The only truth is someones private lived experience etc.
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
I hope you’re overly pessimistic, but yes, the outlook is dark
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
Thank you Leon, and good luck sorting out your roof leak. It is not too bad at my end. Having given up on trying to save western civilisation and the enlightenment by turning people against wokeness by posting under pretend names on obscure political betting websites, as well as on the idea of visiting Iceland due to the ongoing uncertainty around Covid bureaucracy, I have booked 3 x train journeys around the UK over the next two months. Going up to do the Far North line and the Isles of Scilly.
The Scillies are magical! Try and make it to the tiniest inhabited isle. St Agnes. It has Britain’s most westerly pub. On a fine summer evening it is SUPERB
The water is crystal clear, the beaches pure white* and the palm trees make it look like the Caribean, but the water is icy cold, straight off the Atlantic.
The gig races are fun, and some interesting neolithic sites on some islands.
* lots of bits washed up from old shipwrecks every day, clay pipes and Chinese porcelain fragments.
Scillies were a wreakers' paradise all right. Just ask the ghost of Sir Sir Cloudesley Shovell, Admiral of the Fleet in 1707 when his flagship and others hit the rocks and sank within minutes.
From his wiki entry -
"Local legend has it that Shovell was alive, at least barely, when he reached the shore of Scilly at Porthellick Cove but was murdered by a woman for the sake of his priceless emerald ring, which had been given to him by a close friend, Captain James Lord Dursley. At that time, the Scillies had a wild and lawless reputation. It is claimed that the murder came to light only some thirty years later when the woman, on her deathbed, confessed to a clergyman to having killed the admiral and produced the stolen ring, which was sent back to Dursley.
Weirdly we're still at an average of 76 days between doses. I'd have thought that would drop as our mix is more mRNA heavy.
Fox Jr got his today, aged 26 as a walk in. Anyone over 18 can get Pfizer in Leicester now.
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Agreed. I also suspect it’s a cadre more likely to be keen on walk in arrangements for both jabs. The plan has worked well, but now it might be time to adapt and just focus on numbers every day.
Has the chose to not give AZ to under 40s slowed the role out at all?
There seems to have been a bit of a dip over the last week 595,000 doses to 490,000 daily average. (and the bank holiday and school half term might be part of that,)
But do we have AZ doses that we are not using?
This (just) under 40 year old snook in under the wire and had AZ. I’ve yet to die of a blood clot, and since we can surely agree that everyone else is less important than me, I think they can ease those restrictions on usage now.
I agree they can, and perhaps they should, but I think the ban of AZ to under 40s is still in place.
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
That is a bad ruling. Under the most gruelling conditions, lets say 35 degree heat and sunshine for several days on a hilly course tournament golf is both physically and mentally demanding. Mickelson's recent win was notable because very few golfer past early forties could concentrate as consistently in those conditions and faded at the end of the tournaments as a result.
Your view is interesting, though I personally disagree. But neither of our opinions in a binding legal precedent.
It may not be physically demanding to the extent of physical exhaustion but the slight physical deterioration has a significant impact on a game where the margins between a good and bad swing are so fine. It is a clear advantage to use a buggy instead of walking in the most gruelling conditions.
Again, neither here nor there re: legal ruling by SCOTUS.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
More to the point, sports press conferences rarely provide anything more than platitudes and clichés. They are hardly riving viewing.
When news broke that Naomi Osaka was exiting French Open, immediate reaction by number of PBers was that she was violating her contract obligation. BUT if the contract, in the sense of mandatory press conference attendance despite her disability (a pre-existing condition) is NOT valid IF it contravenes the law on workplace disability, then THAT is a whole different kettle o' fish.
Regardless of what the court of sporting AND public opinion says, which also appears to be on her side.
That’s quite right. It’s a given that statutory employment (or workplace more broadly in this case) protections override contracts
You are assuming her condition is a disability. It may well be but (1) has she registered as such before so that there is clear evidence and (2) should we accept her word as Gospel.
Last summer, she was very vocal and upfront at attending political rallies and using her fame to support causes. For some reason, her “disability” didn’t seem to cause her problems then but now seems to have flared up when it’s an issue with which she is not comfortable.
There is also a more serious point here. I don’t know Osaka’s true mental state, and nor does anyone else on here, but this behaviour where she goes “I can’t do an interview because of mental issues” risks undermining general support for those with mental health problems. If the perception grows that mental health is used as a handy excuse to get out of situations people don’t like, then that is negative - most of all, for people with mental health problems.
When the director of America's CDC said he believed the Lab Leak hypothesis was plausible, this is what happened
"After the [lab leak] interview aired, death threats flooded his inbox. The vitriol came not just from strangers who thought he was being racially insensitive but also from prominent scientists, some of whom used to be his friends. One said he should just “wither and die.”
Remember when they told us: Just listen to the scientists
These are the wankers they told us to obey.
Yes, but they didn't say *which* scientists.
The reality is that the lab leak hypothesis remains a hypothesis.
The evidence for it is that the epicenter of CV19 is Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
But while that is compelling circumstantial evidence, it is far from overwhelming. The reality is that viruses make the leap from animals to humans all the time. And it's often the case that we never find the animal from whence the virus came.
Er, yeah. Fascinatingly new insight
What is interesting here is the way many scientists totally lose it when confronted with the plausibility of the Lab Leak hypothesis. They can't cope with it, they want it suppressed, not just dismissed, but actually censored - as Facebook did for a whole year.
If a bunch of concerned citizen journalists hadn't badgered away (Google "DRASTIC") 99% of people would still be parroting the bullshit about the lab leak being a debunked, racist conspiracy theory - as if blaming the Chinese for eating bats is somehow better?
Science has been badly exposed by this whole pandemic. There have been triumphs - the vaccines, of course - but also disasters, from the revelation about "gain of function" to this new calamity around censorship and groupthink
Your posts seem mostly to involve conjuring up an enemy who you can then get really angry with.
They really aren't. Really.
I find the psychology of this fascinating, and disturbing. There is an enormous resistance to facing a possible but uncomfortable truth - such that the Scientific Method has been suspended in parts of the West. The Facebook censorship is particularly startling. We have allowed our discourse to be taken over by private social media companies which are happy to cancel wholly plausible ideas about the most important subjects of the moment. And the true origin of Covid is definitely one of those
And you join in this dim, weary, timid, small-minded complacency! I am genuinely shocked
Shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED
Facebook acting as agent for the thought police, trying to impose right-think by denying realistic possibilities for the origins of the global Covid calamity is really disturbing.
Yes - there's been a lot of this. See also Google blocking searches of the Great Barrington Declaration, and Twitter blocking links to studies which raised doubts about the efficacy of masks. Now the rightness of otherwise of these views is open to question. Or should be. But big tech has enforced a frightening orthodoxy in which any questioning of the consensus is simply barred. Which is just about the opposite of how science should proceed.
‘Big tech’ was just trying to protect people from blatant lies and misinformation. It isn’t some big conspiracy in favour of the ‘consensus’. See the US and the attempted pro-Trump insurrection and the QAnon stuff if you allow people to spread dangerous nonsense without fetter.
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
I don't think that's true. The ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration may not have been the best possible response to the pandemic, but it wasn't the work of a bunch of cranks and loons either. We have the benifit of hindsight now - we know now that a bunch of very high effecacy vaccines turned up, but in a counterfactual where that didn't happen, sooner or later Great Barrington approach (doubtless suitably rebranded) would have been inevitable, and if that was the case, the sooner we got it over and done with the better.
There should have been a proper public debate last summer about this, and how long we hung on with restrictions hoping that the vaccines came good - and for Google to have attempted to block it was frankly appalling.
Incidentally, if all the lockdown enthusiasts could care to explain why lockdown heavy Peru did so badly even compared to Brazil (no lockdowns), I'm all ears, but doubtless that just makes me a conspiracy theorist for thinking that lockdowns don't actually make all that much difference.
See analysis on BBC website of why Peru has high death rate particularly compared to other S American states. All seem very rational.
I read that, but couldn't see much that probably doesn't also apply to Brazil...?
Incidentally, if all the lockdown enthusiasts could care to explain why lockdown heavy Peru did so badly even compared to Brazil (no lockdowns), I'm all ears, but doubtless that just makes me a conspiracy theorist for thinking that lockdowns don't actually make all that much difference.
You are a bright guy.
The reality is that the government response (lockdown or otherwise) is only going to explain part of the number of cases and deaths. And even once you account for that, luck is going to play a massive role. Do you remember when India seemed to have avoided Covid? People postulated that it was all to do with Vitamin D.
You know what it was?
It was luck.
Lockdowns work. If they didn't, countries like Australia and New Zealand wouldn't have been able to use them to actually wipe out Covid.
Now, we can argue about whether the additional benefits of lockdown over either (a) more minimal restrictions (like Sweden or Arizona) or (b) no restrictions at all (like Brazil) are worth the economic and mental health costs. But to suggest that lockdowns (which inhibit social interaction) don't have any impact on the spread of a disease (that spread through...errr... social interaction) is absurd.
Comments
I could see her being suspicious of a vaccine and being sure that it would all be over if people would just stay at home. Sort of person who is confident there must be something beneficial about homeopathy, that sort of thing.
I hope science can come up with an answer for those who want the vaccine but cannot have it - I'm sure it will happen in time.
As for those who refuse the vaccine - my hope is each and every one of them has been able to make their own decision based on the information available - the truth is I'm far from convinced. In some families, the writ of an individual (male or female) will be absolute and if they decide not to be vaccinated, none of the family will be vaccinated.
Between familial, religious and peer group pressures, I fear there may be thousands who perhaps secretly want to be vaccinated but cannot for whatever reason get somewhere to be vaccinated.
I hope I'm wrong.
As a result, we're using most of the headroom the vaccines have given us on mopping up imported cases plus the cases they have seeded, instead of returning to real normality.
Consider this - if around 3/4 of current cases are the Indian variant, and are thus seeded from cases which only arrived here in March/April, if the government had actually controlled the borders properly (I.e. real hotel quarantine for all incomers), we would be looking at cases rates 25-35% of where they are now. We could definitely ditch all the rules (except the hotel quarantine), including the stupid masks etc, and actually have proper normality.
This was all pretty predictable in February/March, however as the honourable member for Central Stupid is currently leading HM opposition, he said nothing at the time, so now can't hold fools in power accountable (neither can the morons in the media, who were mostly fretting about their wretched summer holidays at the time).
https://twitter.com/johnharris1969/status/1400532504289873924?s=20
At the end of the day social media is the enemy of truth and reason with restrictions and without restrictions. They cannot win.
Bolton hospital had new covid patients peak 25/05/21 and total covid patients peak 27/05/21 at about 30% of the all time peak.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=Bolton NHS Foundation Trust
East Lancs hospitals (the Blackburn / Hyndburn / Burnley / Pendle / Rosendale areas) are slowly increasing but look like they will peak at around 15% of the January peak.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust
The Pennine hospitals (the Bury / Rochdale / Oldham) areas are pretty flat at around 5% of their December peak.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust
The Mid Yorks hospitals (which would cover the Dewsbury and Batley outbreak) is only slowly increasing and at around 5% of the December peak.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
And Bedford hospital has new patients and total patients now falling having peaked at around 8% of the January peak.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare?areaType=nhstrust&areaName=Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust
It's being so cheerful what keeps me going...
United States President Joe Biden’s first overseas trip beginning next week will include a meeting with Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and an audience with Queen Elizabeth, the White House announced on Thursday.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/6/3/in-first-overseas-biden-to-meet-turkeys-erdogan-britains-queen
@EricTopol
When PCR covid tests are reported the cycle threshold (Ct) values are not provided, no less aggregated for the population. Yet they have marked value in tracking viral load & an outbreak's trajectory
Just out
@ScienceMagazine
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/06/02/science.abh0635.full
@michaelmina_lab
@jameshay218
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglaswigdor/2021/06/01/naomi-osaka-and-the-french-open-a-tale-of-disability-discrimination/?sh=257922882a65
. . . . Though Roland-Garros takes place in France, the tournament’s brusque treatment of Osaka would have likely run afoul of the disability discrimination laws had it taken place in the U.S.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 bans discrimination against individuals with disabilities in the workplace or in places of public accommodation, meaning any business or enterprise that opens its doors to the general public. The ADA covers both physical disabilities and various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression. . . .
Is a reasonable accommodation possible for Osaka, or would it “fundamentally alter” the game of tennis to allow her to step away from press conferences?
The Supreme Court took up this exact issue in May 2001 when it decided the case of Casey Martin, a professional golfer with Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber Syndrome, a condition that caused progressive degeneration of his right leg and made it painful for him to walk. . . . [T]he PGA Tour refused to allow him to use one during its tournament, citing the rules of that particular contest. Martin filed a lawsuit in Oregon federal court, claiming the PGA Tour discriminated against him based on his disability. . . . .
In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court’s ruling and found that the PGA Tour was required under the ADA to grant Martin a reasonable accommodation based on his disability. . . .
. . . [T]he Court said that a reasonable accommodation could fundamentally alter the game by giving the accommodated individual an unfair advantage. In Martin’s case, the Court said there was no evidence that the walking rule had any serious impact on the game of golf in that way. Even under the most grueling conditions, it was still far from physically demanding. Many competitors saw it as a way to blow off steam or get to know the course. Skipping the walk between holes gave Martin no clear advantage over competitors, the Court found.
The Court further noted that the walking rule was “not an indispensable feature of tournament golf,” and that the fundamental aspect of the game is shot-making, or “using clubs to cause a ball to progress from the teeing ground to a hole some distance away with as few strokes as possible.”
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. . . .
While the French Open is not subject to American laws, the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments would have to be circumspect about rash actions like this one in an American tournament, as they carry the risk of a successful challenge in federal court.
I know a number of agencies are trying desperately to reach people in certain "groups" who have been shown to be more vaccine-hesitant (or resistant) than the general population but the evidence in Newham for example is some 10,000 adults over 60 have yet to have a first vaccination.
Now, I don't have a breakdown by ethnicity but I bet someone will - we also have those who "don't exist" officially but live here (I was in Chinatown last week when the "vaccine bus" arrived and there were hundreds trying to get a vaccination).
I think perhaps I've used some poor terminology - perhaps the real enemy is the tyranny of ignorance.
https://twitter.com/clarkemicah/status/1400434422319570945?s=21
Can emphasize, having had to deal with several leaks from upstairs apartment into my own humble abode. Know from sad experience, these things can be difficult to trace. Hopefully in your case, and your landlord is on top of things and able to get you back to state of quasi-normality.
Yes. No way he’d say all this - to the New York Times - unless he felt something big was trundling in our direction. Buckle up
Are some people on social media enjoying their exploiting of the poor media literacy skills of others, such as being able to identify misinformation, or is this stuff, pushing the line governments hiding evidence that aliens have visited earth [or insert anything] just harmless fun?
Is it really wrong and harmful to indulge in such pastime of conspiracy theories ? Are there social consequences? Could conspiracy theories undermine democracy? Undermine internal relations in a country or internationally? If it’s health base conspiracy for example, will it lead to deaths? Undermine trust in authority, where trust is needed?
Does it all work on basis it can’t be proved, but damn hard to utterly disprove too, that is actually part of an absolutist anti-governmentalism agenda to undermine a regulatory state and credentialed experts, leading us to an undemocratic and elitist future?
You, Leon, are pushing two simultaneously - UFO conspiracy - China Virus conspiracy. You do it like you hold all the facts, bare assertions, so it’s open and shut case. Though you obviously haven’t heard the Scientists playing with COVID in the lab used to meet children in subterranean room of a sushi restaurant, in their private life.
Ask yourself, which of the two books you are going to write next, what do people want to read and which gets Hollywood interested - how it was actually impossible for Elizabeth l to keep up the secret she was a man throughout her life and after - or that it’s credible a child under care could die from something and be swapped out with a boy from Bisley? we even have a skeleton.
You appreciate you have a case to answer?
I shall print and frame this comment and put it on the wall of my loo
I am not @Leon
Bedford Borough has also had no Covid deaths within 28 days of a positive test in the last seven days. In fact, it's only had two since the beginning of April.
Now, cases are still climbing at a fair rate in Luton, so the authorities will need to keep an eye on what's going on there - but, that notwithstanding, the situation in that part of the world is very encouraging. Dastardly Delta has effectively done little more than shut down one of the local schools for a week.
Johnny Cash - Loading Coal (by Merle Travis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__3wWqMKg4I
I think I’ll endure
All this won't last very long; we either end up losing most of our freedom and subjugated to some powerful interest, or otherwise defeated and enslaved.
(2) So what if the Indian variant takes off? The reality is that CV19 is disappearing, as we continue to vaccinate people. Only 247 people who'd been double vaccinated have even tested positive for it.
Perhaps the aliens will save us
And welcome to PB! We’re a friendly bunch, apart from TSE, who is unwholesomely obsessed with the pelvic flexibility of waterfront prostitutes
There should have been a proper public debate last summer about this, and how long we hung on with restrictions hoping that the vaccines came good - and for Google to have attempted to block it was frankly appalling.
Incidentally, if all the lockdown enthusiasts could care to explain why lockdown heavy Peru did so badly even compared to Brazil (no lockdowns), I'm all ears, but doubtless that just makes me a conspiracy theorist for thinking that lockdowns don't actually make all that much difference.
and 12 million new does expected to be injected in the next 3 weeks.
Agreed on point 2 and our vaccine programme is going to finish COVID off for good. One of the happy accidents/better moves has been to switch under 40s to the more efficacious ones which are proven to prevent spread and hit high efficacy very quickly rather than AZ or J&J which take 4 weeks to get to decent levels of efficacy and require at least 8 weeks between doses to hit 90%+ overall efficacy. In raw number terms we need to do 30m more vaccine doses to get 48m adults vaccinated (90% of adults, 71% of the population) we're currently vaccinating at a rate of 4m doses per week. That's 7.5 weeks to get 90% of adults to both doses. However, we're also getting a lot of Pfizer vaccine doses and Moderna are set to complete their deliveries by the beginning of July so we will have a lot of room to reduce that 7.5 weeks to something like 5 weeks with a few surge days.
les piles = the batteries
It is not too bad at my end. Having given up on trying to save western civilisation and the enlightenment by turning people against wokeness by posting under pretend names on obscure political betting websites, as well as on the idea of visiting Iceland due to the ongoing uncertainty around Covid bureaucracy, I have booked 3 x train journeys around the UK over the next two months. Going up to do the Far North line and the Isles of Scilly.
Under this standard, it is nearly impossible to argue that a press conference is an indispensable feature of tennis. In fact, the walking rule in golf has a much stronger argument in its favor; it is at least integral to game time and requires physical endurance. A press conference has neither quality. It is not remotely athletic in nature.
AND note this except from the Forbes commentator:
"It is also difficult to conceive how failing to participate in a press conference would give one tennis player an advantage over another. At its core, tennis is also about shot-making, or using tennis rackets to move a ball into an opponent’s court in a way that prevents them from making a valid return. Speaking to the media is totally separate from gameplay and has no discernible impact on the outcome of a tournament. One could even argue that forcing athletes with mental disabilities such as anxiety or depression to participate in press conferences could actually give players without those disabilities an unfair advantage."
This is the latest government data for the UK
Rather than drop it a year or two per day, why not just open up to all over 18s and get them booked. It is not as if there is a real risk differential between covid risks at 18 or 30.
Edit. Sorry. See DougSeal got there before me.
Wonder IF legal eagles for the Grand Slams really gave much (or any) thought to this BEFORE their pronuncimento?
As we get closer to the end of this wretched epidemic, ever smaller outbreaks will result in ever louder screaming. By August we'll have various scientists and politicians demanding Melbourne-style snap lockdowns over single cases.
Meanwhile I have just run out of Juice for my Vape (e-Cigarette) I'm sure there was another one hear, but as I could not find it, I've had to raid my emergency supply, a bottle of Cucumber, Apple and Aniseed. I bout it ones when I was thought I would try new flavours, now I remember why I put it in the emergency use only pile.
Rare exception the legendary Nigel Pearson:
https://youtu.be/nnlm_DPVpng
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g488310-d1569967-Reviews-Turks_Head-St_Agnes_Isles_of_Scilly_England.html
St Martin is also memorable
Regardless of what the court of sporting AND public opinion says, which also appears to be on her side.
The gig races are fun, and some interesting neolithic sites on some islands.
* lots of bits washed up from old shipwrecks every day, clay pipes and Chinese porcelain fragments.
2) The trouble is that we are still under quite a lot of restrictions, some of which are merely removing the pleasure from life (e.g. the outrageous ban on congregational singing in churches), and some of which are doing obvious economic harm (e.g. my young lady and I seriously discussed going to the cinema last Saturday for the first time since before the pandemic - our conclusion was that it wasn't going to be worth it because of the mask wearing, so we didn't, and probably won't as long as masks are required.)
We probably could ditch all these measures anyway, given the vaccine progress, but it looks increasingly likely that the 21st isn't going to be anything like "all the rules in the bin day", because the government is too jinxed by the Indian variant, and keeps listening to the the (false) prophets of doom on Sage*.
Had they actually done the border control thing right, there would essentially be zero Covid in the UK by now, and even the most lunatic of the fake sage lot wouldn't be able to argue against ending restrictions.
*The Spectator has a pretty good graph comparing Sage's various predictions in March for cases after unlocking to reality. Would you believe, cases have actually dropped to levels considerably below their most optimistic scenario - it's almost like their modeling was just as bad as everyone on here said it was at the time.
The R for the UK is 1.04 i.e. doubling every 4 months from a low base. Hospitalisations are flat. That's fine. Need to keep an eye on it but no need for panic.
There seems to have been a bit of a dip over the last week 595,000 doses to 490,000 daily average. (and the bank holiday and school half term might be part of that,)
But do we have AZ doses that we are not using?
I get scared because of the risk of them pushing too far and creating a backlash against ANY climate adaptations. They seem to enjoy talking nonsense about global extinction and to be excited by the idea of wearing hair shirts as a penance to stave off the end of the world.
Over egg the case like they do, and you risk losing support for what’s actually needed.
And a sorta hoping it does, because seems to me a ruling in her favor would help a LOT of other folks, and I do NOT mean top-dollar sports stars.
https://truesportsmovies.com/original/rudy-gobert-and-corona-virus-fact-vs-fiction/
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Luton
likewise Central Bedfordshire:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=ltla&areaName=Central Bedfordshire
From his wiki entry -
"Local legend has it that Shovell was alive, at least barely, when he reached the shore of Scilly at Porthellick Cove but was murdered by a woman for the sake of his priceless emerald ring, which had been given to him by a close friend, Captain James Lord Dursley. At that time, the Scillies had a wild and lawless reputation. It is claimed that the murder came to light only some thirty years later when the woman, on her deathbed, confessed to a clergyman to having killed the admiral and produced the stolen ring, which was sent back to Dursley.
Last summer, she was very vocal and upfront at attending political rallies and using her fame to support causes. For some reason, her “disability” didn’t seem to cause her problems then but now seems to have flared up when it’s an issue with which she is not comfortable.
There is also a more serious point here. I don’t know Osaka’s true mental state, and nor does anyone else on here, but this behaviour where she goes “I can’t do an interview because of mental issues” risks undermining general support for those with mental health problems. If the perception grows that mental health is used as a handy excuse to get out of situations people don’t like, then that is negative - most of all, for people with mental health problems.
The reality is that the government response (lockdown or otherwise) is only going to explain part of the number of cases and deaths. And even once you account for that, luck is going to play a massive role. Do you remember when India seemed to have avoided Covid? People postulated that it was all to do with Vitamin D.
You know what it was?
It was luck.
Lockdowns work. If they didn't, countries like Australia and New Zealand wouldn't have been able to use them to actually wipe out Covid.
Now, we can argue about whether the additional benefits of lockdown over either (a) more minimal restrictions (like Sweden or Arizona) or (b) no restrictions at all (like Brazil) are worth the economic and mental health costs. But to suggest that lockdowns (which inhibit social interaction) don't have any impact on the spread of a disease (that spread through...errr... social interaction) is absurd.