Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
Yes, but from falling overboard rather than trawlers sinking, at least in the U.K., regulations have been tightened since a spate of such deaths in the North East… construction and agriculture are, I believe, the other two industries with most fatalities in the U.K. …
In all seriousness, isn't being a GP quite a dangerous occupation?
They tend to drink a lot, they are prone to depression - and they have ready access to dangerous pills which make suicide much easier
I read that somewhere. One day I will actually check it to see if it is total bollocks or not
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Similar to Scotland both in size and population.
The island of Ireland has about 1.5m more of a population than Scotland. Still around 2m fewer than before the potato famine, mind.
The "Famine" is slightly misnamed if you look at history. There were actually plenty of potatoes that escaped the blight, it's just that they became more expensive and got sent abroad to richer markets
So it should really be called "the Potato Price Blip", or just "The Blip", and then I think a lot of the bitterness, still sadly prevalent, in Anglo-Irish history, could be removed. We all need to move on
I'm not sure pointing out there were still potatoes but they got sent overseas would entirely dampen any lingering tensions.
But whilst things do have effects for a long time you can be pretty sure if a nation uses very historic references in a diplomatic spat they know they are on shaky ground - see any time China references their treatment 100 years ago to distract and excuse current events. Or if we genuinely tried to deflect Germany by referencing WW2.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
At the risk of falling into a logical black hole I've just invented a word. It is "categorismus" to describe the process of making something seem real by putting a name to it.
Eg. “the British Isles”.
“Scotland”
Yes Jim, we feel the love.
What I do find amusing about your love-in for Jim Murphy is that you keep reposting this photo of him in the referendum campaign suggesting that he was a negative influence.
And yet No won...
It illustrates one of the key fallacies of the BetterTogether platform: that Unionists love Scotland. As so often illustrated on these threads, Unionists often despise Scotland and do everything within their power to denigrate the country.
Why don't they say they despise it, if they despise it? They are the majority, for goodness' sake. But are you sure that by "country" you don't mean "party"? I wonder what they're scared of. Or maybe their every fibre is deceitful? How do you know your opponents don't love the country but despise the nationalist party that so often speaks in its name? Or is that not a legitimate position?
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
Yes, but from falling overboard rather than trawlers sinking, at least in the U.K., regulations have been tightened since a spate of such deaths in the North East… construction and agriculture are, I believe, the other two industries with most fatalities in the U.K. …
In all seriousness, isn't being a GP quite a dangerous occupation?
They tend to drink a lot, they are prone to depression - and they have ready access to dangerous pills which make suicide much easier
I read that somewhere. One day I will actually check it to see if it is total bollocks or not
Yes, doctors have a very high suicide rate. There’s high levels of depression in the profession, and they have both the means and knowledge of how to do the job properly.
Intrigued by suggestions that RNLI crew put their lives at risk… my impression had been that, like the emergency services, improvements in operating procedure, training, equipment and risk management generally since the Penlee disaster in 1981 mean that lifeboatmen lives are not put at risk… for example, my understanding is that if it is judged that conditions are too dangerous for the lifeboat type and experience of crew available then a rescue will not be attempted… happy to be corrected if my understanding is wrong…
I suggest you try going out on a fucking small boat* in a fucking big storm.
Or just a medium sized boat in good weather.
The sea kills really easily. And it is only safe(ish) when you remember that and prepare accordingly.
It is merely a matter of time before another lifeboat crew is lost. The improvements in equipment and training have made that less probable. But it will happen.
EDIT
* All boats are small, when a storm comes. There's a video out there of someone driving a 250K super tanker through a storm. The bridge on those things is an office building. A wave comes over the bow and takes out the bridge windows - at one stage the whole ship is a submarine. Another wave like that, and they would have been dead. All of them
I thought work at sea eg fishermen was now essentially the most dangerous jobs there are, in the West anyway
Yes, but from falling overboard rather than trawlers sinking, at least in the U.K., regulations have been tightened since a spate of such deaths in the North East… construction and agriculture are, I believe, the other two industries with most fatalities in the U.K. …
The trawlers sinking stuff rather died away when the practice of modifying trawlers without bothering with all that silly naval architecture stuff and those nonsense stability tests were insisted upon....
Strangely, after that, those "mysterious" sinkings largely stopped.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
Leads to the debate around if the Olympics is the pinnacle for a sport and its competitors. Winning a gold in taekwondo probably wont set you up for life, but it will probably help because its the pinnacle, it helps with more than just the glory of it.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Often? I now have a mental image of you having a big globe in your living room which you nonchalantly spin a few times a day, each time - when your eye alights on the emerald isle - saying "F-me, that's bigger than I thought"
I have a 5ft by 8ft map of the world displayed in my living room, and am often surprised by things on it.
But I'm mostly annoyed as South Sudan became a country like 2 months after I bought it, so it was immediately out of date.
"Historical world map". Probably increases its value
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Similar to Scotland both in size and population.
The island of Ireland has about 1.5m more of a population than Scotland. Still around 2m fewer than before the potato famine, mind.
The "Famine" is slightly misnamed if you look at history. There were actually plenty of potatoes that escaped the blight, it's just that they became more expensive and got sent abroad to richer markets
So it should really be called "the Potato Price Blip", or just "The Blip", and then I think a lot of the bitterness, still sadly prevalent, in Anglo-Irish history, could be removed. We all need to move on
Howya you million people who died of starvation, sure it wasn't a famine, 'twas a blip, don't you be worrying now.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
Leads to the debate around if the Olympics is the pinnacle for a sport and its competitors. Winning a gold in taekwondo probably wont set you up for life, but it will probably help because its the pinnacle, it helps with more than just the glory of it.
In rowing, certainly, it won't. Steve Redgrave managed to make enough money to live on, post retirement, from his Olympic success, but most rowers end up in the regular job market. Even the ones with gold medals.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
Exactly. They don’t need massive amounts of money to compete, and those who are successful often get commercial endorsements which remove the need for the stipend.
It’s set at a level where you will have no worries about shelter, food and transport, but without being affluent like professional sportspeople.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
Yes, I tend to agree. It's deliberately provocative- fuck you and your park. It will become a target for vandalism, and on we go
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
Quite a lot of Jewish opposition though
"But Jewish Conservative peer Lord Wasserman, one of David Cameron's closest political allies who lives quite near the gardens, says it is not the right location for such a symbolic and important project."
"Barbara Weiss, the architect who refurbished the Russell Square headquarters of the Wiener Library - the oldest institution for the study of the Holocaust and genocide - questioned why it could not be placed with it. "I'm not against the memorial, I just don't want any building in our park, not even a hospital or an art gallery."
"Ms Weiss is a leading light in the Save Victoria Tower Gardens campaign. She says the park is "absolutely unique, historic and gorgeous - to put something else there will totally change its character completely"."
Why on earth would you choose to build a huge memorial in a beloved park? Where it is bound to cause resentment and in the end vandalism. So you need more security. So it becomes a target for terrorists. So even more security. Right next to the House of Commons. And so on and so forth
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
Quite a lot of Jewish opposition though
"But Jewish Conservative peer Lord Wasserman, one of David Cameron's closest political allies who lives quite near the gardens, says it is not the right location for such a symbolic and important project."
"Barbara Weiss, the architect who refurbished the Russell Square headquarters of the Wiener Library - the oldest institution for the study of the Holocaust and genocide - questioned why it could not be placed with it. "I'm not against the memorial, I just don't want any building in our park, not even a hospital or an art gallery."
"Ms Weiss is a leading light in the Save Victoria Tower Gardens campaign. She says the park is "absolutely unique, historic and gorgeous - to put something else there will totally change its character completely"."
Why on earth would you choose to build a huge memorial in a beloved park? Where it is bound to cause resentment and in the end vandalism. So you need more security. So it becomes a target for terrorists. So even more security. Right next to the House of Commons. And so on and so forth
It is wilfully stupid, and potentially calamitous
Yes, I don't think it's a good idea either. I was merely countering the claim that it was a "left wing" project.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
I'm counting the BoD as implicitly left wing, which is not much of a stretch if you follow their actions. I don't know what Cameron was imagining when he proposed it, but I cannot believe it was the current plan.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
I'm counting the BoD as implicitly left wing, which is not much of a stretch if you follow their actions. I don't know what Cameron was imagining when he proposed it, but I cannot believe it was the current plan.
He proposed the commission, not the specific plan.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
I'm counting the BoD as implicitly left wing, which is not much of a stretch if you follow their actions. I don't know what Cameron was imagining when he proposed it, but I cannot believe it was the current plan.
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell an architect trying to be "cutting edge" and "brilliantly controversial"
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
Quite a lot of Jewish opposition though
"But Jewish Conservative peer Lord Wasserman, one of David Cameron's closest political allies who lives quite near the gardens, says it is not the right location for such a symbolic and important project."
"Barbara Weiss, the architect who refurbished the Russell Square headquarters of the Wiener Library - the oldest institution for the study of the Holocaust and genocide - questioned why it could not be placed with it. "I'm not against the memorial, I just don't want any building in our park, not even a hospital or an art gallery."
"Ms Weiss is a leading light in the Save Victoria Tower Gardens campaign. She says the park is "absolutely unique, historic and gorgeous - to put something else there will totally change its character completely"."
Why on earth would you choose to build a huge memorial in a beloved park? Where it is bound to cause resentment and in the end vandalism. So you need more security. So it becomes a target for terrorists. So even more security. Right next to the House of Commons. And so on and so forth
It is wilfully stupid, and potentially calamitous
Yes, I don't think it's a good idea either. I was merely countering the claim that it was a "left wing" project.
I think that's probably a fair challenge, actually. I was just trying (indelicately) to group the very few people and organisations that I know are in favour.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
You can see how it might have affected their judgement when trying to interpret a number with an error bar that large.
Is that Priti Patel in the background (wisely) declining the offer of being sheltered by the about-to-collapse umbrella?
If so, she looks really normal/likeable when she smiles/laughs after the collapse. Makes me wonder whether the normal unpleasant smirk is actually just some insecurity about smile/teeth or something. I have a friend who never does an open-mouth smile in photos as she's sensitive about her teeth and always ends up with an unpleasant looking smirk instead.
Interesting thing is, no one will care about Johnson being a clutz, it's priced in. But give Miliband a bacon sandwich and it's end of days. Maybe because he has some apparent self-confidence and we think he's finding it funny too.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Not sure if that sentence is more notable for grammatical or logical incoherence.
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
It's actually at the far end of the park along the river - this shows it better
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
They expect to have 1m visitors a year. The whole park will be transformed into a waiting zone for the bloody Holocaust Memorial, which will loom over everything
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
My theory is that it's a deliberate attempt to create more antisemitism, thus "proving" that even more memorials are needed. I cannot find anyone not affiliated with an openly or implicitly left wing organisation who wants it.
It was proposed by David Cameron, and supported by the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Not that left wing, really.
Quite a lot of Jewish opposition though
"But Jewish Conservative peer Lord Wasserman, one of David Cameron's closest political allies who lives quite near the gardens, says it is not the right location for such a symbolic and important project."
"Barbara Weiss, the architect who refurbished the Russell Square headquarters of the Wiener Library - the oldest institution for the study of the Holocaust and genocide - questioned why it could not be placed with it. "I'm not against the memorial, I just don't want any building in our park, not even a hospital or an art gallery."
"Ms Weiss is a leading light in the Save Victoria Tower Gardens campaign. She says the park is "absolutely unique, historic and gorgeous - to put something else there will totally change its character completely"."
Why on earth would you choose to build a huge memorial in a beloved park? Where it is bound to cause resentment and in the end vandalism. So you need more security. So it becomes a target for terrorists. So even more security. Right next to the House of Commons. And so on and so forth
It is wilfully stupid, and potentially calamitous
Yes, I don't think it's a good idea either. I was merely countering the claim that it was a "left wing" project.
Fair enough
If you read the details the memorial builders were offered several suitable sites, like the Imperial War Museum, but they turned them down
So it does seem like insensitive and potentially dangerous arrogance. Londoners adore the Royal Parks and jealously guard them. This is going to rile many, for a long long time
There are still a fair few undeveloped corners in zones 1 or 2 in London
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
Leads to the debate around if the Olympics is the pinnacle for a sport and its competitors. Winning a gold in taekwondo probably wont set you up for life, but it will probably help because its the pinnacle, it helps with more than just the glory of it.
In rowing, certainly, it won't. Steve Redgrave managed to make enough money to live on, post retirement, from his Olympic success, but most rowers end up in the regular job market. Even the ones with gold medals.
My colleague's son is considering giving olympic weightlifting a go. He can deadlift 180 kg (At 13/67 kg) so he's got the raw strength. He'll get the big bucks when he becomes a pro wrestler though.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
The good news is that some in the EU - like the EMA - went to the time, cost and effort of investigating the "blood clot" issue properly - rather than shooting their mouths off unattributably to a financial journalist - and concluded:
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Vaccines prevented 60,000 deaths according to Public Health England data
Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, told the BBC that PHE's analysis shows vaccines prevented 22m cases of infection and 60,000 deaths.
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
How does funding a bunch of elite fannies bring happiness to anyone but them. Spend the money on poor sods and make them happy.
Plenty of poor sods find happiness through national sport. Some millions on that probably gets you a good return vs a lot of government spending.
No it doesn't make sense, but when has sport ever done so?
There’s also very little direct government spending on elite sport. The vast majority of the funding is from the Lottery, one of few things for which we should be eternally grateful to Sir John Major.
Even that is not vast - the yearly salary of many a Premier League footballer would be larger than the amount of money spent on funding an Olympic cycle for a quite a few sports.
Major's contribution was to force through that the funding should not be absorbed back into the taxation pile.
Instead, it was distributed at grass roots levels, in many cases. Though this is being eroded, sadly....
For example, support for disabled activities in local sports clubs. Which created masses of canoeing and rowing for the disabled, in a few short years. And riding for the disabled, as mentioned the other day.
Yes, it only takes a few million to make a real difference to Olympic prospects.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Yes. 30K a year. What would a Premiership footballer do if told that the his housing budget for the month was limited to 30K?
Leads to the debate around if the Olympics is the pinnacle for a sport and its competitors. Winning a gold in taekwondo probably wont set you up for life, but it will probably help because its the pinnacle, it helps with more than just the glory of it.
In rowing, certainly, it won't. Steve Redgrave managed to make enough money to live on, post retirement, from his Olympic success, but most rowers end up in the regular job market. Even the ones with gold medals.
My colleague's son is considering giving olympic weightlifting a go. He can deadlift 180 kg (At 13/67 kg) so he's got the raw strength. He'll get the big bucks when he becomes a pro wrestler though.
You mean, when he becomes a Hollywood star after his WWF career.
New: The RNLI says it's received over £200,000 in donations yesterday alone, after lifeboat volunteers told of the criticism they've faced in rescuing people crossing the Channel https://twitter.com/elashton/status/1420734651723886596
That really is genius slapstick comedy. It's Chaplinesque! Brilliant.
Yes, what really elevates to comedy genius it is the man sat next to him displaying no problems of umbrella management whatsoever.
If 'Boris' really is an invented persona, it's one which requires Stanislavski-like levels of dedication to the performance.
He gets away with it because he makes people laugh with him rather than at him. It is quite a gift. He already laughs at himself so he creates an atmosphere of goodwill (for many, not all!)
Imagine if Theresa May had done that. Everyone would be hiding behind the sofa from the cringe
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
The good news is that some in the EU - like the EMA - went to the time, cost and effort of investigating the "blood clot" issue properly - rather than shooting their mouths off unattributably to a financial journalist - and concluded:
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
The good news is that some in the EU - like the EMA - went to the time, cost and effort of investigating the "blood clot" issue properly - rather than shooting their mouths off unattributably to a financial journalist - and concluded:
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Was there any retraction of that in the end?
No. Absolutely scandalously - no
What Handelsblatt did was - first - double down, and say Yes this is definitely true, causing incredible distress and alarm around the world - and boosting anti vaxxery everywhere
Then when they realised it was an absolute lie - not just an error, a lie - they slowly over time stealth-edited the article so it looked less and less outrageous.
No apologies, let alone resignations. It is one of the great journalistic crimes of our time. Many will have died as a result
Has Macron ever retracted the quasi-expert bullshit he spouted about AZ?
IIRC the timing seemed to suggest that he'd read the Handelsblatt article just before he tried to destroy the reputation of the vax made for the poorest people in the world..
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
You seem a little uptight. Perhaps you should take a break and go and sit in your lebensraum
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
You seem a little uptight. Perhaps you should take a break and go and sit in your lebensraum
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
You can see how it might have affected their judgement when trying to interpret a number with an error bar that large.
Possibly, but more likely a journalist got the wrong end of the stick because they thought they'd got hold of a big story. Seeing this possibility is apparently beyond someone as dull and unimaginative as Leon
The likes of Farage and Grimes need to say that the RNLI should be blocked from rescuing immigrants because their preferred option is for the immigrants to drown. If they don't say that then it's moral cowardice on their part.
"Début août, il sera également obligatoire dans les cafés, restaurants, centres commerciaux, hôpitaux, maisons de retraite, établissements médico-sociaux, ainsi que pour les voyages en avion, train et car pour les trajets de longue distance."
Translation: "From the start of August, it [the pass sanitaire] will also be mandatory in cafés, restaurants, shopping centres, hospitals, old people's homes, and care homes, as well as for long-distance travel by air, train, and coach."
I couldn't find anything on that page restricting the meaning to those who work in hospitals, or who visit patients in hospitals. If it really is unrestricted, it means "no vaccine passport, no hospital treatment", even for example if an unvaccinated person gets run over in the street.
The document continues:
"Cette obligation s’appliquera aux 12-17 ans à partir du 30 septembre."
Translation: "This obligation will apply to those aged 12-17 from 30 September."
It seems that my interpretation was correct: Macron wants to deny all hospital treatment to the unvaccinated. They simply will not be allowed inside hospitals.
"Sky News Australia host James Morrow said: 'That is just a complete violation of the Hippocratic oath. I think that any doctor that obeyed that sort of mandate would be in absolute violation of their own ethics as a doctor.
'It doesn't matter when somebody comes into the ER on a gurney if they are some horrible person, a neo-nazi skinhead, whatever, a child molester. Any sort of evil person, they still get treatment.'"
I made the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that if you wanted to do the vaxxport route then open up the Nightingales for hospital treatment for the unvaccinated, and deny them mainstream hospital entry. If they don't want to take the vaccine, then still offer treatment but do so from a tent instead.
Air circulation might be better in a tent.
Do we have a name yet for the brave "ministerial adviser" in France who told the media he wanted to create "a life of shit for the unvaccinated" ("vie de merde pour les non-vaccinés")?
Macron is reaching for shock and awe but he's not quite there yet. That's an awful combination. The approval rating for his presidency is at about -20%. He is nowhere near as strong as De Gaulle was when he called and won the legislative election of June 1968. De Gaulle wasn't even particularly strong then but he was strong enough. (He also said things as coarse as what that adviser said, but he was president, a military guy, and he said them openly.) Laying Macron at 1.92 is surely value.
One doesn't have to back Dupont-Aignan to realise he's catching the mood when he says Macron is dangerous:
IF Macron runs and IF he gets through to the second round, I could see him losing to Le Pen, Mélenchon, or Dupont-Aignan. The polls say differently about Macron vs Le Pen, but polls can get it wrong. As for Bertrand, he supports the pass sanitaire, so it's hard to see why anyone should vote for him in the first round. If you support the PS, vote Macron.
But what if this action means France has put Covid behind it, while other (more vaccine hesitant) countries still struggle with it?
If the pass sanitaire is a thing of the dimly-remembered past by the time of the primaries and TV debates connected with them then it won't be an issue. Last time the right-wing primary was held in November and the left-wing ones in January. But even if Covid cases other than very mild ones fall to zero or almost zero, the pass is likely to be subject to function creep. I doubt it will bite the dust this side of the election.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
You can see how it might have affected their judgement when trying to interpret a number with an error bar that large.
Possibly, but more likely a journalist got the wrong end of the stick because they thought they'd got hold of a big story. Seeing this possibility is apparently beyond someone as dull and unimaginative as Leon
They were probably salivating at the chance for a story that showed that AZ was crap. A shame about the consequences. But I suppose they'll never be held to account.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
You seem a little uptight. Perhaps you should take a break and go and sit in your lebensraum
Leon, please, take five and come back in a bit.
It's OK, I'm enjoying his highly original "humour".
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
You seem a little uptight. Perhaps you should take a break and go and sit in your lebensraum
Leon, please, take five and come back in a bit.
It's OK, I'm enjoying his highly original "humour".
It was for his sake as much as yours! But I’m glad you’re not too offended!
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
Probably hard for you to understand because you are such a moron, but I think you got the meaning anyway.
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Only a German could be trolled this easily into near-Poland-invading anger. And so on
Again you're making stupid assumptions about me. Who's trolling who, moron?
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
You seem a little uptight. Perhaps you should take a break and go and sit in your lebensraum
Leon, please, take five and come back in a bit.
It's OK, I'm enjoying his highly original "humour".
It was for his sake as much as yours! But I’m glad you’re not too offended!
Well I'm not actually German, for a start, except in the sense of having a German passport. Which I only got because of Brexit. Hey maybe everything is about Brexit after all.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
Only a German could write English as contorted and barbaric as this
If you think that is contorted you might want to avoid rendering Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft into English. This is pellucid and transparent by comparison
Didn't the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial meet a lot of scepticism and disapproval in advance, only for people to think it mind-blowing.
As described by Ken Burns.
Yes. The problem is now that architects for memorials sometimes seem to think that controversial is key feature.....
Yes, its success possibly set a bad precedent
The absolute model for all memorials should be Lutyens' Cenotaph. Striking, dignified, moving, rather beautiful in a deeply austere way, and it didn't obliterate Whitehall. It would not be improved by being ten times the size with a vast museum underneath.
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Yes, they have the power through the ballot box, it's the essential point of democracy, and at present politicians of the right are getting rewarded for hardball postures on immigration. I like to imagine this switching around. A mass mood change such that the common people of England - red wall, blue wall, wall to wall - rise up as one and simply demand openness and generosity towards refugees and migrants. Then woe betide any grimbo politician or commentator caught giving the wrong impression of the country by jabbering on about there being "no room" and "charity begins at home".
The problem started with lies about the desired outcome. Then trying to claim that there were absolutely no downsides to the policy. Then trying to paint anyone who had the slightest objection to the policy as racists. Then trying to claim there is no alternative.
There was no attempt to create a policy, with structure, remediation of issues and justification.
Until this is done, you won't get the reversal you desire.
It needs the rich countries to work together. A cross border (in both senses) solution. Rather like Social Care can't be resolved by one party alone. As long only some are trying others can take a pull and score cheap popularity.
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Yes, they have the power through the ballot box, it's the essential point of democracy, and at present politicians of the right are getting rewarded for hardball postures on immigration. I like to imagine this switching around. A mass mood change such that the common people of England - red wall, blue wall, wall to wall - rise up as one and simply demand openness and generosity towards refugees and migrants. Then woe betide any grimbo politician or commentator caught giving the wrong impression of the country by jabbering on about there being "no room" and "charity begins at home".
The problem started with lies about the desired outcome. Then trying to claim that there were absolutely no downsides to the policy. Then trying to paint anyone who had the slightest objection to the policy as racists. Then trying to claim there is no alternative.
There was no attempt to create a policy, with structure, remediation of issues and justification.
Until this is done, you won't get the reversal you desire.
It needs the rich countries to work together. A cross border (in both senses) solution. Rather like Social Care can't be resolved by one party alone. As long only some are trying others can take a pull and score cheap popularity.
On the question of mass economic migration - that will have to be worked out at a country level. Trying to use an international framework to create a Fait Accompli solution to impose at the country level won't work.
Reconstructing a 12th-century pipe organ discovered in the Holy Land https://aleteia.org/2021/07/24/reconstructing-a-12th-century-pipe-organ-discovered-in-the-holy-land/ ...the organ was most likely brought to the Holy Land by French Crusaders. Catalunya speculates that the organ was used for about a century at the basilica. It was not until the Muslim invasion of the 12th century that the organ was removed for protection.
The study of the organ is expected to deepen our understanding of music history and Church music practices. Before this organ was discovered there were no examples of organs from before the 15th century. The oldest playable organ has about a dozen pipes that date to 1435.
Catalunya has begun the process of restoring and rebuilding the organ. The project is expected to last about 5 years...
A short while back, there were comments on here bemoaning our poor Olympics results, saying thing slike we'd be lucky if we end up tenth in the medals table.
Seems odd, as there's some traditionally stronger areas we've lost out on. Will there be a strong finish? I think I saw a medal 'predictor' that we would meet the Team GB target (which is a range anyway), though be a few places down from last time.
But come on, we came second last time (if you go by Golds, which nations do until they dont like it) and third by overall, that seems like punching above our weight, even for a rich country with strong sporting heritage and support. So coming a bit lower is fine.
We've done VERY well in swimming and also a good performance in some other areas eg taekwondo. But we do seem to have gone backwards in areas such as rowing, and overall the apparent strong start may turn out to be deceptive.
Let's see what happens in cycling and athletics. We may also do well in boxing.
The typical projections are that we might win around 15 gold medals, should be enough for a Top 10 finish possibly higher, but the 'Top 3' finishes in the table of nations that we have had in recent Games will not happen this year.
Areas to watch: will we be no 1 in Europe? (I exclude Russia for this purpose), and of course: can we finish ahead of Australia? Both seem a reasonable chance, Australia are ahead of us at the moment but much of their strength is in swimming which is nearly complete now.
Overall Top 5 is still an excellent performance for a relatively small (in population) country like us. I think that may be beyond us but we should still get Top 10 which is also good.
Here's a question, though.
When we subsidise elite sport (even through the lottery), we're presumably doing it to increase the amount of happiness in the United Kingdom/Great Britain. Position in the medal table is one way of doing this, which leads to planning for lots of medals in a smallish number of sports.
But is that the best way of optimising happiness? Does achievement across a wider range of activities induce more feelgood, even if it leads to fewer medals?
Another manifestation of the limits of KPI culture, I guess.
A pedant notes, in relation to @londonpubman 's comment, that the UK is not really a small country in population terms - according to worldometers, we're the 21st largest of 200-odd. Granted we're a long way behind the top 6 or 7, but we're also a long way ahead of an awful lot of countries.
Surprisingly (well, to a lot of people), we're now nearly half as big as Russia in population terms.
While I'm about it, I will take the opportunity to remind people that Great Britain is not 'a small island'; it is in fact a very large and very populous island, ranking 8th by area and 3rd by population in the world.
On that bombshell, I'm often surprised at how big (physically) Ireland is.
Often? I now have a mental image of you having a big globe in your living room which you nonchalantly spin a few times a day, each time - when your eye alights on the emerald isle - saying "F-me, that's bigger than I thought"
I have a 5ft by 8ft map of the world displayed in my living room, and am often surprised by things on it.
But I'm mostly annoyed as South Sudan became a country like 2 months after I bought it, so it was immediately out of date.
Whereas this deskmat (Chinese ) hints at the future:
As other threads have commented, the UK has a growing structural problem where there is a growing percentage of pensioners needing to be kept by a shrinking number of workers. We need migration more than ever but a lengthy campaign by the right has hardened people's attitudes.
The government has solved that problem by giving asylum to 6 million people fleeing the EU's poor economy and giving asylum to 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing China.
That's 9 million people - that's plenty to arrive in a very short time.
If we weren't taking anyone at all, you might have a point. But we're at the stage where we've taken too many.
You can't just increase the population by 10% every decade - you get into problems with congestion, air quality, people getting stressed by being packed in like rats. And eventually you get a water problem. If you double the number of people living in a square mile, you don't double the rainfall falling on that square mile. With climate change coming up, people need to spread out around the world a bit instead of all trying to squash onto a small island.
Interestingly, at the peak of mass immigration (so far), we were taking in *less* people than were theoretically required to stop the population imbalance leading to pension issues etc.
Almost no one in this debate has talked about a desired population level for the country, with a desired demographic structure.
I don't know what that makes me, but that would be my starting point - then from that, immigration rates, infrastructure etc....
Because, with an aging population, what’s ‘desired’ by the politicians is completely unacceptable to the public.
Remember Blair’s comments on expecting 10,000 immigrants from Poland?
The idea that you can run a country on the basis of "we Proper People own parliament and the courts, by the time the reality hits, there will be nothing they can do", falls down on one small problem. The Head Count have votes.
And unlike Ancient Rome, the system isn't structured carefully to make their votes worthless.
Yes, they have the power through the ballot box, it's the essential point of democracy, and at present politicians of the right are getting rewarded for hardball postures on immigration. I like to imagine this switching around. A mass mood change such that the common people of England - red wall, blue wall, wall to wall - rise up as one and simply demand openness and generosity towards refugees and migrants. Then woe betide any grimbo politician or commentator caught giving the wrong impression of the country by jabbering on about there being "no room" and "charity begins at home".
The problem started with lies about the desired outcome. Then trying to claim that there were absolutely no downsides to the policy. Then trying to paint anyone who had the slightest objection to the policy as racists. Then trying to claim there is no alternative.
There was no attempt to create a policy, with structure, remediation of issues and justification.
Until this is done, you won't get the reversal you desire.
It needs the rich countries to work together. A cross border (in both senses) solution. Rather like Social Care can't be resolved by one party alone. As long only some are trying others can take a pull and score cheap popularity.
On the question of mass economic migration - that will have to be worked out at a country level. Trying to use an international framework to create a Fait Accompli solution to impose at the country level won't work.
Shaming the anti-vaxxers: A study published in the Lancet this week found similar safety profiles for the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines, and drove a coach and horses through concerns about the safety of the AZ jab by finding that incidences of blood clots were far higher among COVID cases than people who had the vaccine. The real-world study of more than a million people found the number of blood clots among AZ and Pfizer recipients was similar. It concluded that either way, you were far more likely to get a blood clot if you rejected a vaccine and caught COVID.
Blood on their hands: British government officials reacted with genuine fury at the actions of those who needlessly destroyed the reputation of the AstraZeneca vaccine — the jab that had the best chance of vaccinating the developing world but now suffers from low uptake. Earlier this week, POLITICO’s Jillian Deutsch and Ashleigh Furlong quoted a European official who “faulted EU countries for making decisions based on ’emotion’ rather than science,” revealing that “scientists and politicians quietly blamed Brexit” for the row over the AZ jab. A government official told Playbook: “The European leaders who trashed the AstraZeneca vaccine have blood on their hands. We now know what we all suspected is true, that they did it out of spite for Britain because of Brexit.” The official added: “When the history books are written, they’ll say these people were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands in developing countries who won’t take AZ because of their anti-vaxx scare stories.”
Didn't you link to the exact same article a couple of days ago?
Amazing how the evil EU were so angry with Brexit that they organised a trashing of AZ's reputation (this already makes total sense), by getting the initial trials to be totally cocked up, EU moles at AZ itself must have reported the efficacy as being 70% when Pfizer had already reported over 90%, they also persuaded the Americans and the Swiss to not give approval, EU anti Brexit fanatics forced the South Africans to dump all their AZ doses and got them to say it didn't work against the South African variant and so on and so on. Yes it all makes perfect sense, because as we know everything that happens everywhere is always all about Brexit.
However much blood is on the hands of the EU according to some anonymous official (usually code for we couldn't find anyone to actually say this so we made a quote up), surely there's also blood on the hands of a whole bunch of other people, not least AZ themselves who managed to make multiple screw ups. What idiot was responsible for giving this vaccine to astrazeneca? "Useless" Matt Hancock - maybe Dominic Cummings is right about some things.
Remember Handelsblatt. "AZ is 8% effective". Source - "a senior official in the German health ministry"
A complete lie, hatched out of spite, with no possible basis in scientific reality. Because Brexit. Why else?!?
Wasn't the single figure percentage effectiveness from the forms AZ submitted? From memory it was the central value from a calculation with stupid error bars (sort of +90% to -70%) because there was a subgroup that the trial had hopelessly underpopulated.
I think it was the lower bound. But the size of the error bar should have led to caution in the interpretation, not to headlines about how the vaccine is completely ineffective.
The fact that Leon thinks the only possible explanation for a journalist getting a scientific story hopelessly wrong is because the German health ministry had some cunning plan to sink Brexit by saying a vaccine isn't effective tells you all you need to know about how Brexit obsessed some people are
You can see how it might have affected their judgement when trying to interpret a number with an error bar that large.
Possibly, but more likely a journalist got the wrong end of the stick because they thought they'd got hold of a big story. Seeing this possibility is apparently beyond someone as dull and unimaginative as Leon
They were probably salivating at the chance for a story that showed that AZ was crap. A shame about the consequences. But I suppose they'll never be held to account.
OK maybe I'm being a bit stupid, but I just don't get why Handelsblatt and/or the German health ministry would be salivating at the prospect of showing that one of the 2 vaccines they wanted to vaccinate everyone with was crap? Talk me through it because I just don't get it. And don't just say "because Brexit"
Comments
They tend to drink a lot, they are prone to depression - and they have ready access to dangerous pills which make suicide much easier
I read that somewhere. One day I will actually check it to see if it is total bollocks or not
But whilst things do have effects for a long time you can be pretty sure if a nation uses very historic references in a diplomatic spat they know they are on shaky ground - see any time China references their treatment 100 years ago to distract and excuse current events. Or if we genuinely tried to deflect Germany by referencing WW2.
One of the first things they did with the lottery money, was to pay athletes a stipend of around £30k a year, which means they didn’t have to hold down a job and could dedicate themselves to the Olympics for four years.
Then they invested in coaches, who were also paid full time, and in sports science facilities such as those at Loughborough university, some of the best in the world.
They were also very careful in the targeting of money. They didn’t fund thousands of athletes, only dozens - but each one capable and expected to get close to the podium at the Games.
Strangely, after that, those "mysterious" sinkings largely stopped.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58012111
Look at this thing. It's massive, Ruining a beautiful green park right by the Houses of Parliament. Why? What's the fucking point? We already have Holocaust memorials and if we want another build it somewhere creative, on a brownfield site - like they did in Berlin FFS
Don't obliterate half of a precious London park. Shameful
But it's OK because this is how the actual architect of the memorial explains it
"Architect Sir David Adjaye, who has led the design team, previously said "disrupting the pleasure of being in a park is key to the thinking" of the memorial."
IIRC the playground at the end of the park where it will be placed is rather unused - bit of a dead corner.
It’s set at a level where you will have no worries about shelter, food and transport, but without being affluent like professional sportspeople.
It's just wrong. Why use up sacred park space? Why? I love that little park, so dainty and unexpected. This is a terrible idea
The Royal Parks themselves don't want it
"In a letter to the council, Royal Parks said while it "strongly supports" the principle of the project, it thought the current design would have "significant harmful impacts" on the "character and function" of the park.
"The structure will dominate the park and eclipse the existing listed memorials which are nationally important in their own right," the charity said.
Royal Parks added the number of visitors expected would create "queues and congestion" and "change the nature of what is currently a relaxed park"."
By all means create a striking new memorial. London has a zillion of underused corners where that could be done, some quite bleak and sad. I can see two or three from where I type.
WHY HERE. WHY A ROYAL PARK
Sad
Talking of dumb
https://twitter.com/eton5s/status/1420440434782912516
"But Jewish Conservative peer Lord Wasserman, one of David Cameron's closest political allies who lives quite near the gardens, says it is not the right location for such a symbolic and important project."
"Barbara Weiss, the architect who refurbished the Russell Square headquarters of the Wiener Library - the oldest institution for the study of the Holocaust and genocide - questioned why it could not be placed with it. "I'm not against the memorial, I just don't want any building in our park, not even a hospital or an art gallery."
"Ms Weiss is a leading light in the Save Victoria Tower Gardens campaign. She says the park is "absolutely unique, historic and gorgeous - to put something else there will totally change its character completely"."
Why on earth would you choose to build a huge memorial in a beloved park? Where it is bound to cause resentment and in the end vandalism. So you need more security. So it becomes a target for terrorists. So even more security. Right next to the House of Commons. And so on and so forth
It is wilfully stupid, and potentially calamitous
https://twitter.com/eton5s/status/1420440434782912516?s=20
https://order-order.com/2021/07/29/tim-yeo-loses-another-court-battle-after-making-knowingly-false-claims/
The Judgement is here, but is 702 pararaphs long.
https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2021/2033.html&query=(tim)+AND+(yeo)
If so, she looks really normal/likeable when she smiles/laughs after the collapse. Makes me wonder whether the normal unpleasant smirk is actually just some insecurity about smile/teeth or something. I have a friend who never does an open-mouth smile in photos as she's sensitive about her teeth and always ends up with an unpleasant looking smirk instead.
Interesting thing is, no one will care about Johnson being a clutz, it's priced in. But give Miliband a bacon sandwich and it's end of days. Maybe because he has some apparent self-confidence and we think he's finding it funny too.
If 'Boris' really is an invented persona, it's one which requires Stanislavski-like levels of dedication to the performance.
If you read the details the memorial builders were offered several suitable sites, like the Imperial War Museum, but they turned them down
So it does seem like insensitive and potentially dangerous arrogance. Londoners adore the Royal Parks and jealously guard them. This is going to rile many, for a long long time
There are still a fair few undeveloped corners in zones 1 or 2 in London
https://www.biopharma-reporter.com/Article/2021/07/28/AstraZeneca-and-mRNA-COVID-19-vaccines-show-similar-safety-profiles
But thats 6 months on and the damage has been done.
By the way, how much are the EU suing Sanofi for, for the non-delivery of vaccine?
Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer, told the BBC that PHE's analysis shows vaccines prevented 22m cases of infection and 60,000 deaths.
He said this was "truly massive".
https://twitter.com/Politics_co_uk/status/1420734290069966854?s=20
https://twitter.com/elashton/status/1420734651723886596
https://twitter.com/elashton/status/1420735335613485063
OK, so maybe the event wasn't completely appropriate to practice one's comic timing.
Imagine if Theresa May had done that. Everyone would be hiding behind the sofa from the cringe
You also clearly know absolutely nothing about me, but being pig ignorant about something has never stopped you comment before.
Interestingly, they are having another go - https://ipolitics.ca/2021/07/27/health-canada-considers-approving-sanofis-covid-vaccine/
IIRC the timing seemed to suggest that he'd read the Handelsblatt article just before he tried to destroy the reputation of the vax made for the poorest people in the world..
But it's true that I don't like you. You remind me of an obnoxious racist who used to post on here called "eadric" who probably got banned for being obnoxiously racist.
https://tinyurl.com/3ez4y73v
Just a few emaciated figures walking to that quay on the Liffey where the starvelings embarked for America.
Simple, unobtrusive, but it makes you choke up every time. Memorials don't have to be half a mile wide to do the job
As described by Ken Burns.
Both would have been crap PMs, too.
Edit: except for Tony Blair.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bald–hairy
The absolute model for all memorials should be Lutyens' Cenotaph. Striking, dignified, moving, rather beautiful in a deeply austere way, and it didn't obliterate Whitehall. It would not be improved by being ten times the size with a vast museum underneath.
Reconstructing a 12th-century pipe organ discovered in the Holy Land
https://aleteia.org/2021/07/24/reconstructing-a-12th-century-pipe-organ-discovered-in-the-holy-land/
...the organ was most likely brought to the Holy Land by French Crusaders. Catalunya speculates that the organ was used for about a century at the basilica. It was not until the Muslim invasion of the 12th century that the organ was removed for protection.
The study of the organ is expected to deepen our understanding of music history and Church music practices. Before this organ was discovered there were no examples of organs from before the 15th century. The oldest playable organ has about a dozen pipes that date to 1435.
Catalunya has begun the process of restoring and rebuilding the organ. The project is expected to last about 5 years...
Not even remotely acceptable.