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Some of the front pages following BoJo’s big COVID gamble – politicalbetting.com
Some of the front pages following BoJo’s big COVID gamble – politicalbetting.com
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Some of the front pages following BoJo’s big COVID gamble – politicalbetting.com
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'Today's the day Boris Johnson won the next election or keeps the Tories out of power for a generation.'
I'm leaning towards the former.
If this goes totally tits up in early September he's in a bit of trouble.
"The combination of Boris Derangement Syndrome, Zerocovidianism, and the intellectual hatred of England that Orwell remarked upon is a heady intoxicant."
Made me
The frequency of mutations is a function of the number of human hosts spewing out massive quantities of the virus. Because that's what viruses do: they turn your cells into factories for reproduction.
Mutations occur when your cells chuck out a slightly different version of the virus, and that infects another cell in your body, and then it too is chucking out a different version. If that version is better able to infect and reproduce, then it will gain share.
The more people there are with chronic conditions, the more opportunities for mutation there are. This is fundamentally different to a bacterial infection where you wipe out 99% of bacteria, but leave a pristine situation for the other 1% to thrive.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I fear the UK, and indeed the world, is going to suffer a form of long-Covid with the pandemic never really finishing, just fading away. Any gains for Johnson from a perceived Covid victory will be very short-lived as the reality of dealing with the aftermath quickly bites.
There'll be another announcement next week. This isn't that important a step in the grand scheme of Covid.
The economic fallout begins.
Yes they currently have lower case numbers, but unless you run a prison island approach, COVID will find you....and of course case numbers are a lagging indicator, by the time you think you might have a problem, you have a problem.
The vaccinated world is in a damned if you do or damned if you don't situation this summer wrt unlockdown. Most countries will do what Boris has just done and remove the restrictions for fear of a much worse exit wave in the autumn.
just in the place in Europe where it is densely populated and cosmopolitan.
Following a very similar profile a few weeks behind.
And all those deliberately open borders...
The one nation the magic cloak doesn't work in is Hungary.
And this is why all lockdown polling is bullshit. People want the old life back but think it can be had without any real effect on the domestic situation.
We're in this odd situation of people saying yes to keeping restrictions but also saying yes to getting rid of all the measures.
Aw, man. Richard Donner has gone. Thanks for everything, Dick. For the best Superman, for Riggs and Murtaugh, for cutting David Warner’s head off and showing it from 278 different angles, for directing some of my favourite movies, and for teaching me what ‘verisimilitude’ means.
https://twitter.com/ChrisHewitt/status/1412136037154004998
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/05/richard-donner-dead-91-director-superman-goonies
Here it is lockdown, lockdown harder, lockdown eternity....what do you mean I can't go on my usual foreign holiday or if I want to, I have to quarantine for 2 weeks. I've been pinged and have to isolate, f##k that I'm off down to Tescos to get ice cream.
So he will likely cop a great deal of flack even if things proceed largely as expected/intended. Leaving him the the unfortunate position of secretly (from a purely political perspective) hoping that other countries get hit at least as badly if not worse*
Of course one of the almost completely unrecognised realities of the second/third wave is actually that, even despite the horrors of January, the UK have actually fared as well if not better than all of the other large European countries.
1) Lower taxes
2) Increased government spending/no cuts
3) Lower deficits
The Armed Forces' 'mental health champion' is being investigated over claims of an affair with the wife of a junior soldier who approached him for help.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9758555/Armys-mental-health-tsar-faces-probe-claim-affair-wife-soldier-wanted-help.html
“KFC on the high street between 9 and 9.30 pm”. “The number thirty bus between 12.09 and 12.29am”. “Woolworths in The Eastern district between 1 and 2pm etc”...
It is worth remembering three other things:
1. Europe is very lucky that their school holidays have pretty much all started now. That means that the biggest vector for the transmission of Delta (children at school) has now been closed.
2. They aren't so far behind us on vaccinations now. Spain now has 65% of adults with at least one dose, and 44% fully vaccinated. That's where the UK was five weeks ago, and the the EU is putting 27-28m doses in arms every week.
3. There's less of a "zero Covid" thing in the EU. Most countries are happy with higher background levels of infections and deaths than we are, and that's probably the right call.
The seminal text is to be excluded from classrooms at James Gillespie High School in Edinburgh as part of wider plans to decolonise the curriculum amid concerns over its "dated" approach to race.
John Steinbeck’s classic novel Of Mice and Men will also be phased out over its use of the N-word, according to Allan Crosbie, the school’s head of English.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/05/school-cancels-kill-mockingbird-white-saviour-narrative/
It's a real shame. It's OK to have even 50,000 cases of Covid a day *if* they are not leading to particularly heightened levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
Indeed, it would probably be more useful for the government to target hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases per se, because the reality is that people *aren't* getting really sick right now, because the most vulnerable have been vaccinated.
This is a great thread on how Donner put together this scene. https://twitter.com/tvaziri/status/905482730443386880
The intelligence he used to make movies so fantastic, without the technologies that we have now to take for granted, was really good.
Or maybe the Government is secretly buying up the entire U.K. supply to give out for free when they’ve got enough...
That is a game they have very likely played before.
Taking very high levels of Vitamin D for long periods isn't advisable, I believe one side effect is increased chances of kidney problems.
The vaccinations are pretty much done and now for those who haven't had it (hello contrarian) the virus is going to burn out over summer. Which is precisely when it should.
What's going to be left by the autumn? Virtually everyone will have had the virus or the vaccine so how would a new surge happen again to overwhelm the NHS?
To Kill A Mockingbird had a profound effect on me as a child.
The film adaptation of it made me a huge fan of Gregory Peck.
As a child there were seven films I had on a loop.
Episode IV-VI of Star Wars, The Wrath of Khan, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Inherit The Wind.
(Americans will get the joke.)
https://twitter.com/jamin2g/status/1412000436551311360?s=21
2 - Yes - 5 weeks or so is reasonable if Spain maintain their current 1% per day jab rate, and they don't slow down or hit a ceiling.
3 - Perhaps.
Sir Keir is saying it’s reckless, it should be done gradually etc, but that is what’s happening! We were meant to be fully open a month earlier, but the government were cautious. I don’t see why he is calling for even more caution on the back of the vaccines working as intended. It really is a case of being paralysed by fear. I live with an unvaccinated vulnerable person, we have to be careful, but that doesn’t mean the whole of society has to join us
Some people are still getting quite sick if not bad enough for hospital. Even when double vaxxed.
Small state view has influence on their science.
Same difference.
Madeley is Partridge.
We may strike it lucky with AZ as our domestic production is now nicely built up and slotting the new vaccine in here should be easy but AZ need to get the trial absolutely right this time. No fuck ups and "ethical concerns" about giving it to old people. They're exactly the people who need, not testing it in that cohort was probably the less ethical decision in the end.
A 65-year-old man was left with minor injuries after a reticulated python bit him while he was sitting on the toilet.
He was said to have felt a "pinch in the area of his genitals" before noticing a five foot (1.6 metres) snake beneath him in the toilet bowl at his home in the Austrian city of Graz.
The python, a constrictor native to Asia which can grow to a length of nearly 30ft (nine metres), is thought to have found its way into the toilet via the network of drains....
...A 24-year-old neighbour, who owns 11 snakes, has been reported to the prosecutors' office on suspicion of negligently causing bodily harm, the police added.
https://news.sky.com/story/nasty-surprise-as-man-bitten-by-python-while-sat-on-the-toilet-12349246
Can we put snake owners in the same category as terrorists?
Extraordinary rendition for snake owners would be a vote winner.
Of course they will implement restrictions again if a variant poses problem at the perfect time of year for respiratory viruses i.e. late autumn and heading into winter. And by problems I mean hospitalisations and deaths.
A new variant coupled with a bad flu season (there is a lot of fear that this year could be a bad one for flu) could put a lot of pressure on our health services.
But then again it could be quiet and the booster programme which is going to happen in the autumn keeps on top of it all and we carry on...
Like I said you cannot predict anything right now.
She’s not even a proper scientist. She’s not a biologist or a virologist or an epidemiologist. She’s a ‘behavioural psychologist’ and a hardcore communist
That’s not the same as being “a small state Tory” that’s more like being an Islamofascist or a BNP member with hints of Nazism. She eagerly supports a creed which has slaughtered millions and which, in China, is committing genocide today
Fuck her. Throw her off the committee. More pointedly, watch the clip. She cannot answer the question
He nails her brilliantly. I think she is actually evil
I have met Madeley, He is super intelligent, hence his success. The affable, bumbling TV persona is an act. He’s immensely sharp
That being said it's worth noting that most of the major EU countries are now level with the US for proportion of adults with at least one jab: Now, while they're behind for full vaccinations, this is a pretty solid indicator that vaccine hesitancy there is going to be no worse (and probably better) than in the US.
Plus, ultimately, once a vaccine has been offered to all adults, then those that end up with Covid... well, that's really their problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/how-donald-rumsfeld-deserves-be-remembered/619334/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB
That's quite different from saying that we know that Ferguson isn't exactly a big fan of Brexit or the Tories, but never talks about anything beyond is modelling work in interviews, let alone start espousing how we need a new world order to combat this virus. So his personal politics is absolutely irrelevant, as he has showed he is no interest in engaging in that sort of thing.
As soon as she starts to say well I only come on programmes to talk about "the science", I would be pulling out the quotes where she was happy to tell us his opinion for solving the pandemic requiring the whole country needing to be radically altered.
Madeley gets a lot of undue stick, but he doesn’t toe the line. 65 this year, incredible. And a Romford boy too, we might have been born in the same hospital!
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/14976331/phone-rung-ready-new-piers-morgan-richard-madeley/?rec_article=true
Throw him out of PMQ's.
Marxist England team doing rather well in the Euros BTW Sean
Whilst clearly this pandemic has caused many to reassess with some alarm, quite how many people actually seem to seek comfort in being told what to do by the state, if anything that only makes the case stronger because it demonstrates how many will react when faced with an apparent existential threat to their existence. The (usually) creation of existential threats, and causing people to live in fear, being a key part of how communist regimes seek to take power and retain it.
Humans are non-linear in behaviour. Basic chaos theory shows that trying to completely predict/control non-linear systems is doomed - see the butterfly effect. Therefore Communist style central control of society can't work.
2300 Google reviews. Average: 5/5
9.3 on IMDB
100% on Rotten Tomatoes
4.9/5 on amazon, after almost 4000 reviews
He’s a comic genius, and in this show he injects some pathos as well
The Guardian gave it 1 star. Lol
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Classic quotes from the Gruardian....
"There is more wearisome, meretricious rubbish in this episode – and then in the others – that there is no point detailing here."
"For every Clarkson sucking up money, resources, time and publicity, there are other, newer, brighter, more entertaining, more valuable things not getting made."
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While Amazon sit back and look at the rating and know they have the biggest show of the year.
An upsurge seems to be ongoing in the rightwing fear of "communism".
Should the same logic be applied to smokers who get lung cancer, or to fatarses who stuff their mouths with too much pasta and cake and get heart disease?
The incorrect response is to whinge about being asked the question in a manner which suggests how dare someone ask you something you don't like, without addressing it with a very simple 'no'.
Beyond thrilled that the Govt. have realised they can't wibble any more. Shame it wasn't a few weeks ago!
Mum: "There's a snake in your bath!!!"
Friend: "Ah, yes, that's Anthony, didn't we mention him? I do hope you haven't upset him."