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Britain is among the least lockdown sceptical of 20 European countries – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,682
edited August 2021 in General
Britain is among the least lockdown sceptical of 20 European countries – politicalbetting.com

% who think the health risk from coronavirus is overstated: ?? 46%?? 41%?? 38%?? 36%?? 36%?? 33%?? 32%?? 32%?? 30%?? 27%?? 24%?? 23%?? 21%?? 21%?? 21%?? 20%?? 17%?? 16%?? 15%?? 14%https://t.co/2WMOTlhJRx pic.twitter.com/AAVsYgwy5l

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • Options
    Test to see if vanilla is working correctly.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,737

    Test to see if vanilla is working correctly.

    No raspberry sauce on the cone.
  • Options
    IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,280
    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138
    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,737
    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
    As he landed his crew with care;
    Supporting each man on the top of the tide
    By a finger entwined in his hair.

    "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
    That alone should encourage the crew.
    Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
    What I tell you three times is true."

    The crew was complete: it included a Boots—
    A maker of Bonnets and Hoods—
    A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes—
    And a Broker, to value their goods. [...]
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    Some quirk of formatting is showing the countries' flags as ?? for me, though you can see them if you click through to the tweet.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    Some quirk of formatting is showing the countries' flags as ?? for me, though you can see them if you click through to the tweet.

    It’s a comment on the impermanence of all formal political structures
  • Options
    IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,280
    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    https://www.specsavers.co.uk/
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    edited August 2021
    DougSeal said:

    Some quirk of formatting is showing the countries' flags as ?? for me, though you can see them if you click through to the tweet.

    It’s a comment on the impermanence of all formal political structures
    Or one world government NOW!
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    LeonLeon Posts: 47,182
    Carnyx said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
    As he landed his crew with care;
    Supporting each man on the top of the tide
    By a finger entwined in his hair.

    "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
    That alone should encourage the crew.
    Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
    What I tell you three times is true."

    The crew was complete: it included a Boots—
    A maker of Bonnets and Hoods—
    A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes—
    And a Broker, to value their goods. [...]
    I shall refrain, probably, from posting it four times. I just had to tell you all I love you.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    edited August 2021

    Some quirk of formatting is showing the countries' flags as ?? for me, though you can see them if you click through to the tweet.

    I can see them in PB, not on vanilla. But 95% of them are still ?? to me. How are we meant to know what the Slovakian and Belgian flags look like?
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
    *Resentfully note omission from list.*
    **Resolve in future to be more distinctively annoying.**
  • Options

    Some quirk of formatting is showing the countries' flags as ?? for me, though you can see them if you click through to the tweet.

    It's a vanilla quirk.

    The flags are visible via the main site but via vanilla they appear as ??

    I'll ask Robert to see if this is something that can be fixed.
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    LeonLeon Posts: 47,182
    edited August 2021
    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20
  • Options
    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.
  • Options
    IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,280
    edited August 2021
    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,182
    IshmaelZ said:

    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
    *Resentfully note omission from list.*
    **Resolve in future to be more distinctively annoying.**
    I actually tried to compose a description of you, IIRC, but it was quite hard, even tho you are a distinct character on PB

    You're interesting - but somewhat inscrutable (to me). That is a compliment!
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.

    Wasn’t it agains Southampton that they used the infamous grey kit?
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138
    IshmaelZ said:

    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
    *Resentfully note omission from list.*
    **Resolve in future to be more distinctively annoying.**
    Was thinking the same.
  • Options
    DougSeal said:

    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.

    Wasn’t it agains Southampton that they used the infamous grey kit?
    It was when they got humped 6-3.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    A typical Cambridge and the Guardian scientist: goes straight to: Which theory sends the right kind of political message? rather than, Which theory is true? This is the legacy of 20 years of scientists not being sufficiently confident that global warming would actually make itself manifest, and therefore thinking they had to lie about the evidence to be on the safe side.
  • Options
    maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391
    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    Pretty gaslighty to talk about people being biased by their political desires when it's an article in the Guardian saying the problem is a lack of environmental focus rather than scientists playing with coronaviruses a few hundred yards from the claimed ground zero point.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    DougSeal said:

    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.

    Wasn’t it agains Southampton that they used the infamous grey kit?
    It was when they got humped 6-3.
    That’s right
  • Options
    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.

    Wasn’t it agains Southampton that they used the infamous grey kit?
    It was when they got humped 6-3.
    That’s right
    Man Utd kit has the whiff of a building supplies depot about it. I like it. #grout #sealant #putty

    https://twitter.com/RealBobMortimer/status/1429431304551022594

    Though this reply said it reminds of them of the Midland Bank colour scheme/logo.

    https://twitter.com/IanConningham/status/1429432794502115333
  • Options
    maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391
    edited August 2021
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    A typical Cambridge and the Guardian scientist: goes straight to: Which theory sends the right kind of political message? rather than, Which theory is true? This is the legacy of 20 years of scientists not being sufficiently confident that global warming would actually make itself manifest, and therefore thinking they had to lie about the evidence to be on the safe side.
    Deleted - wrong Dr Wood!
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    edited August 2021
    IanB2 said:

    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
    Aye.
    Have any of the prominent early C21st warmongers done a mea culpa, or is it at best 'it was the right thing to do imperfectly carried out'? I think even Christopher Hitchens (for whom I have a regard) stuck with it to the end.
  • Options
    Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,951
    Global Britain latest...

    Former Chief of the General Staff Lord Dannatt on evacuation of Afghan interpreters: “Many of us have been pleading with the government in the last two or three years and more vociferously in the last month or two to get this aspect of it right...”#bbcwtw

    “...because our reputation will be trashed, our moral position compromised and in future conflicts people will be very wary about potentially coming to work with us.”

    “When 45 senior military retired officers including many ex chief of defence staff write an open letter to the PM, Foreign Secretary, Home Sec, Defence Sec- [on interpreters] and it’s not really taken seriously then I think there’s a gap in who’s listening to whom in govt atm.”


    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1429426363065409538
  • Options
    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    tlg86 said:

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is no longer a major issue

    Food manufacturers and restaurants are scrambling to recruit prisoners to help ease the “desperate” shortage of workers caused by Covid-19 and Brexit.
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shops-farms-and-restaurants-turn-to-prisons-to-fill-staff-shortages-j2qgd38td
    We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.

    We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
    Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.

    This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.

    When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
    How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
    Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.

    If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
    The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.

    Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
    As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
    As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.

    For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.

    That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
    And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things.
    (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential
    (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
    1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.

    2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
    Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.

    (1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.

    (2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
    What arrogance and condescension.

    Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?

    If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.

    If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
    Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?

    My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.

    So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
    So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?

    I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
    I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.

    Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.

    But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
    Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
    Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
    [Citation Needed]
    That's Brexit. Your basic Tory parochialism. A pox on those ghastly people with the temerity to move more than fifty miles from where they were born.
    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has called a single person "ghastly" for moving more than fifty miles from where they're born.

    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has denigrated anyone who takes part in economic migration.

    Personally I welcome immigration but I think it should be on a level playing field. I don't see why those travelling 2000 miles should be any harsher treated than those travelling 200. Do you think they should be?

    Its rude to falsely claim that other people are calling people ghastly when nobody is. A pox on those who need to tilt at windmills because they can't win an argument by being intellectually honest.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,285
    edited August 2021
    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    DougSeal said:

    DougSeal said:

    That Manchester United kit is making my eyes hurt.

    They need to be relegated for such a kit.

    Wasn’t it agains Southampton that they used the infamous grey kit?
    It was when they got humped 6-3.
    That’s right
    Man Utd kit has the whiff of a building supplies depot about it. I like it. #grout #sealant #putty

    https://twitter.com/RealBobMortimer/status/1429431304551022594

    Though this reply said it reminds of them of the Midland Bank colour scheme/logo.

    https://twitter.com/IanConningham/status/1429432794502115333
    It’s the neon yellow with the more naturalistic blue that grates. They look like Lego men.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
    *Resentfully note omission from list.*
    **Resolve in future to be more distinctively annoying.**
    I actually tried to compose a description of you, IIRC, but it was quite hard, even tho you are a distinct character on PB

    You're interesting - but somewhat inscrutable (to me). That is a compliment!
    aaah! Once I have those words engraved on a custom basalt sex toy my happiness will be complete.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138
    Didn’t see that coming.
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    I'm willing to be corrected but I think this was done unironically.


  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    IshmaelZ said:

    Leon said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    DougSeal said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    Enjoyed that last night. Do you do these brief pen portraits on demand?
    *Resentfully note omission from list.*
    **Resolve in future to be more distinctively annoying.**
    I actually tried to compose a description of you, IIRC, but it was quite hard, even tho you are a distinct character on PB

    You're interesting - but somewhat inscrutable (to me). That is a compliment!
    aaah! Once I have those words engraved on a custom basalt sex toy my happiness will be complete.
    Depending on where the custom basalt sex toy is located of course.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    IanB2 said:

    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
    Aye.
    Have any of the prominent early C21st warmongers done a mea culpa, or is it at best 'it was the right thing to do imperfectly carried out'? I think even Christopher Hitchens (for whom I have a regard) stuck with it to the end.
    Easy to say, but there have been 20 years in which gays have been gay, and women have been students, and adulterers have gone unstoned and thieves remained two handed. That's not nothing.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Interesting header, TSE, and thanks.

    Personal bugbear. Can we get away from the idea that the virus 'targets' anyone. It really doesn't. Exposure of a dose capable of infecting a particular person in the right location within the body either happens or does not. It is a stochastic event. We can lower the chances of that happening by our behaviours, general health and vaccine status.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
  • Options
    TimT said:

    Interesting header, TSE, and thanks.

    Personal bugbear. Can we get away from the idea that the virus 'targets' anyone. It really doesn't. Exposure of a dose capable of infecting a particular person in the right location within the body either happens or does not. It is a stochastic event. We can lower the chances of that happening by our behaviours, general health and vaccine status.

    I will remember that future thread headers.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,737

    I'm willing to be corrected but I think this was done unironically.


    Isn't that Mr Wightman, the much lamented Green MSP (demise as MSP, not personally)? Not entirely inappropriate given his work on land ownership.
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
    Aye.
    Have any of the prominent early C21st warmongers done a mea culpa, or is it at best 'it was the right thing to do imperfectly carried out'? I think even Christopher Hitchens (for whom I have a regard) stuck with it to the end.
    Easy to say, but there have been 20 years in which gays have been gay, and women have been students, and adulterers have gone unstoned and thieves remained two handed. That's not nothing.
    I take your point but feel much of that applied in Saddam's Iraq, though I accept with an associated price in dissidents' genitals electrocuted and their families executed. My main problem is that NONE of these aims were initially even mentioned as casus bellis.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    IanB2 said:

    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
    Aye.
    Have any of the prominent early C21st warmongers done a mea culpa, or is it at best 'it was the right thing to do imperfectly carried out'? I think even Christopher Hitchens (for whom I have a regard) stuck with it to the end.
    After 9/11 I don’t think there was a choice but to take action against AQ in Afghanistan - and that included the Taliban. It was incompetently carried out long term.

    Iraq 2003 should never have happened.
  • Options
    maaarsh said:

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    Pretty gaslighty to talk about people being biased by their political desires when it's an article in the Guardian saying the problem is a lack of environmental focus rather than scientists playing with coronaviruses a few hundred yards from the claimed ground zero point.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8
  • Options
    TresTres Posts: 2,226
    edited August 2021

    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    tlg86 said:

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is no longer a major issue

    Food manufacturers and restaurants are scrambling to recruit prisoners to help ease the “desperate” shortage of workers caused by Covid-19 and Brexit.
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shops-farms-and-restaurants-turn-to-prisons-to-fill-staff-shortages-j2qgd38td
    We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.

    We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
    Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.

    This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.

    When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
    How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
    Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.

    If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
    The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.

    Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
    As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
    As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.

    For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.

    That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
    And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things.
    (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential
    (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
    1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.

    2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
    Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.

    (1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.

    (2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
    What arrogance and condescension.

    Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?

    If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.

    If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
    Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?

    My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.

    So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
    So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?

    I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
    I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.

    Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.

    But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
    Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
    Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
    [Citation Needed]
    That's Brexit. Your basic Tory parochialism. A pox on those ghastly people with the temerity to move more than fifty miles from where they were born.
    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has called a single person "ghastly" for moving more than fifty miles from where they're born.

    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has denigrated anyone who takes part in economic migration.

    Personally I welcome immigration but I think it should be on a level playing field. I don't see why those travelling 2000 miles should be any harsher treated than those travelling 200. Do you think they should be?

    Its rude to falsely claim that other people are calling people ghastly when nobody is. A pox on those who need to tilt at windmills because they can't win an argument by being intellectually honest.
    I don't know why you insist on denying the simple truth (as shown in the enthusiasm for Brexit) that the Tory party has gone from one that welcomes migration to one that demonises immigrants. You clearly noticed when Theresa May was doing it.
  • Options
    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    Totally restrict movement, confined to home with basically zero exception for being able to leave....
  • Options
    LeonLeon Posts: 47,182
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    A typical Cambridge and the Guardian scientist: goes straight to: Which theory sends the right kind of political message? rather than, Which theory is true? This is the legacy of 20 years of scientists not being sufficiently confident that global warming would actually make itself manifest, and therefore thinking they had to lie about the evidence to be on the safe side.

    Yes, I read that article and felt similarly. It is abundantly clear the evidence now points heavily to lab leak, everybody knows this. Yet that same Guardian journalist has been writing anti-lab-leak articles for 16 months, and quoting the same anti-lab-leak scientists. He can’t just turn around and say Sorry that was all shit, we were all wrong

    It throbs with nostalgic regret and denial, and, even as the fire dies out, a desperate attempt at rekindling the embers.

    And then at the end, an attempt to rewrite inevitable history: even if it did come from the lab (oh god it didn’t, did it??) this is all about our bad treatment of animals, nothing to do with science
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    Totally restrict movement, confined to home with basically zero exception for being able to leave....
    Well, it’s an idea.
  • Options
    Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited August 2021
    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    tlg86 said:

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is no longer a major issue

    Food manufacturers and restaurants are scrambling to recruit prisoners to help ease the “desperate” shortage of workers caused by Covid-19 and Brexit.
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shops-farms-and-restaurants-turn-to-prisons-to-fill-staff-shortages-j2qgd38td
    We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.

    We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
    Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.

    This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.

    When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
    How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
    Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.

    If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
    The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.

    Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
    As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
    As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.

    For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.

    That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
    And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things.
    (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential
    (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
    1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.

    2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
    Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.

    (1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.

    (2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
    What arrogance and condescension.

    Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?

    If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.

    If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
    Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?

    My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.

    So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
    So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?

    I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
    I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.

    Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.

    But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
    Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
    Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
    [Citation Needed]
    That's Brexit. Your basic Tory parochialism. A pox on those ghastly people with the temerity to move more than fifty miles from where they were born.
    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has called a single person "ghastly" for moving more than fifty miles from where they're born.

    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has denigrated anyone who takes part in economic migration.

    Personally I welcome immigration but I think it should be on a level playing field. I don't see why those travelling 2000 miles should be any harsher treated than those travelling 200. Do you think they should be?

    Its rude to falsely claim that other people are calling people ghastly when nobody is. A pox on those who need to tilt at windmills because they can't win an argument by being intellectually honest.
    I don't why you insist on denying the simple truth (as shown in the enthusiasm for Brexit) that the Tory party has gone from one that welcomes migration to one that demonises immigrants. You clearly noticed when Theresa May was doing it.
    Because its a lie not the simple truth.

    Sending vans to immigrant areas saying "GO HOME" was evil and I called that out. But what's happening now to demonise immigrants? That was a very specific example I objected to at the time.

    Should be extremely simple for you to give some examples of this fictional demonisation if its happening. Lets see some example of what you consider to be "demonisation".

    Unless of course its a figment of a fevered imagination in which case you won't have any examples. Because its not real.
  • Options
    TazTaz Posts: 11,177
    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138
    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
    Dibble Jab sounds like a Teletubby
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096
    edited August 2021
    DougSeal said:

    IanB2 said:

    FPT:

    I see imbecilic political slogan is trending. Wait till Tony hears about 45 minutes from destruction and where that led us.

    The closer our politicians have been to the Afghanistan escapade - whether as instigators, supporters, or past participants - the more virulent the language they are using to criticise the current day withdrawal.

    They might want you to think that this is merely because the withdrawal has undone all their purported good work.

    But the truth is that it is having the futility and pointlessness of everything that has gone before so brutally exposed, that they are finding especially difficult to bear.
    Aye.
    Have any of the prominent early C21st warmongers done a mea culpa, or is it at best 'it was the right thing to do imperfectly carried out'? I think even Christopher Hitchens (for whom I have a regard) stuck with it to the end.
    After 9/11 I don’t think there was a choice but to take action against AQ in Afghanistan - and that included the Taliban. It was incompetently carried out long term.

    Iraq 2003 should never have happened.
    I think that's a reasonable pov. Unfortunately Iraq was Afghanistan's confused/dishonest war aims and lack of forward planning on steroids, and the two conflicts remain forever linked because it was largely the same people who carried them out. Iraq it was that totally screwed the Middle East (& therefore the rest of us to an extent), radicalised a whole load of non ME Muslims and brought about the rise of IS.

    Incidentally only recently caught up with Generation Kill, a miniseries on a USMC battalion in Iraq from 2008, David Simon from The Wire was involved. Worth a watch if other tv options are exhausted.
  • Options
    TazTaz Posts: 11,177
    DougSeal said:

    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
    Dibble Jab sounds like a Teletubby
    Time for tubby bye bye !
  • Options
    malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,973
    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:




    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more


    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    you should insert one of your fine flint knapping products where the sun does not shine and tickle your brain
  • Options
    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    Tres said:

    tlg86 said:

    DavidL said:

    Scott_xP said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is no longer a major issue

    Food manufacturers and restaurants are scrambling to recruit prisoners to help ease the “desperate” shortage of workers caused by Covid-19 and Brexit.
    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/shops-farms-and-restaurants-turn-to-prisons-to-fill-staff-shortages-j2qgd38td
    We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.

    We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
    Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.

    This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.

    When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
    How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
    Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.

    If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
    The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.

    Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
    As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
    As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.

    For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.

    That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
    And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things.
    (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential
    (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
    1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.

    2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
    Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.

    (1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.

    (2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
    What arrogance and condescension.

    Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?

    If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.

    If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
    Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?

    My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.

    So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
    So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?

    I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
    I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.

    Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.

    But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
    Not a view I have much sympathy with. I didn't want to spend most of my working life in the sorts of dives I have had to operate - and I am not just talking about Aberdeen (that is a joke by the way, I really like Aberdeen). I would have loved to have been at home every Christmas rather than stuck in some arse end of the world. But you go where the work is. Something far too many people seem to have forgotten these days.
    Alas the modern tory party has moved on from 'on your bike' to denigrating those of us who take part in economic migration.
    [Citation Needed]
    That's Brexit. Your basic Tory parochialism. A pox on those ghastly people with the temerity to move more than fifty miles from where they were born.
    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has called a single person "ghastly" for moving more than fifty miles from where they're born.

    Neither I nor as far as I know anyone else has denigrated anyone who takes part in economic migration.

    Personally I welcome immigration but I think it should be on a level playing field. I don't see why those travelling 2000 miles should be any harsher treated than those travelling 200. Do you think they should be?

    Its rude to falsely claim that other people are calling people ghastly when nobody is. A pox on those who need to tilt at windmills because they can't win an argument by being intellectually honest.
    I don't know why you insist on denying the simple truth (as shown in the enthusiasm for Brexit) that the Tory party has gone from one that welcomes migration to one that demonises immigrants. You clearly noticed when Theresa May was doing it.
    The trouble is that the Conservative Party hasn't worked out what it wants.

    It wants to be in power, sure, but the coalition it has built post-2016 continues to have people who are united by what they're against (the EU) than what they're for. One strand thinks that we need to go more global, more migration (as long as they have the money or talent). If the Fens become a series of dormitories for Cambridge, that's fine if it increases GDP per head. The other thinks we need to go more local, the great human gains come from people staying in their hometowns. Money is worth less than community ties. One strand thought that the problem with Europe was that its thinking was too small, the other that it was too big.

    Other events have drowned that out for the last eighteen months, but the question of What are we going to do with the complete control of migration now we have it? hasn't gone away.
  • Options
    kinabalukinabalu Posts: 39,204
    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:

    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more

    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    And let's not forget you. PB without you would be like Earth Wind & Fire without the Wind.
  • Options
    IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    DougSeal said:

    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
    Dibble Jab sounds like a Teletubby
    Star Wars character.
  • Options
    Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,622
    Justin Trudeau can't be as clever as everyone thought, because he called a general election about two days before a provincial election in Nova Scotia where his party had a 28 point lead a couple of months ago and unexpectedly lost the election to the Conservatives.
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,997
    edited August 2021
    I'm surprised Leon's finding time to be on here. A rumour is that he's been hired by Elon Musk to hand-knap flint objects for exclusive models of Tesla's Bot. To be used by bots, near bots ...
  • Options
    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
    Dibble Jab sounds like a Teletubby
    Time for tubby bye bye !
    Even worse, the Teletubbies forged their vaccination cards.

    https://twitter.com/DougDodsonENews/status/1412849588646580227
    https://www.newsweek.com/teletubbies-reveal-covid-vaccination-twitter-memes-reaction-1607945
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138
    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:

    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more

    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    And let's not forget you. PB without you would be like Earth Wind & Fire without the Wind.
    I am the Water in Earth, Wind and Fire. Elemental, a force of nature, but inexplicably ignored ;)
  • Options

    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    Taz said:

    DougSeal said:

    BBC News - Covid: New Zealand pandemic strategy in doubt amid Delta spread

    Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins said the variant "changes the game considerably" and makes existing protections "look less adequate".

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-58297895

    Super maximal lockdown incoming?

    What more can they do?
    The article says the plan was to jab everyone by the end of the year, that’s a mere 5 million people. Under 20% are dibble jabbed at the moment. They need to get jabs in peoples arms as quickly as possible.
    Dibble Jab sounds like a Teletubby
    Time for tubby bye bye !
    Even worse, the Teletubbies forged their vaccination cards.

    https://twitter.com/DougDodsonENews/status/1412849588646580227
    https://www.newsweek.com/teletubbies-reveal-covid-vaccination-twitter-memes-reaction-1607945
    I never trusted them....
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216

    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson
  • Options
    JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,997
    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    I've just noticed what I posted, drunk and sentimental, late last night. lol.

    I shall repost for added schmaltz:

    I find Scott and HYUFD "useful", indeed, I find them beyond useful. I find their opinions valuable, cherishable, precious, and more

    Because they give me an insight into a Remainer centrist ex Tory brain, and a true Tory unionist brain.

    Likewise NPXMP shows me what an old eurocommie Labour loyalist ex-MP thinks, Roger tells me what a rich old europhile lefty in France thinks, Stuart Dickson tells me what a fierce expat blood n soil Scot Nat in Sweden thinks (plus he gives persuasive insights into Swedish life), TSE tells me what a sort-of ex Tory failed Muslim geeky Liverpool football fan thinks, kle tells me what a man who rarely tells us what he really thinks thinks, Pagan2 tells us what an aspiring working class native Cornish speaking linguistic-ceolacanth thinks, kinabalu tells us about his birthday, Robert Smithson tells us what a car park entrepreneur Tory Brexiteer based in Santa Monica thinks, Carnyx tells us what an urbane Scot Nat classicist with a yearning for an Athenian villa thinks, Cyclefree tells us what a newly Cumbrian lawyer with firm views of Islam, restaurants, feminism and Europe thinks, Dura Ace tells us what a greenie anti vaxxing suicidal ex-army affluent motorhead with a remarkable vocabulary thinks...

    On and on. I could mention 50 more. So. Preserve. Don't ban anyone. This site is an amazing resource of human wisdom, bigotry, insight, foolishness, knowledge, wittiness, comedy, charm, madness, friendliness and entertaining inanity. Also good for bets.

    Hats off to the Smithsons pere et fils. This site should have a Grade 1listing on the internet. I am entirely serious. Malcolm G would be the unsightly medieval "garderobe" toilet that must also be kept, for authenticity

    And let's not forget you. PB without you would be like Earth Wind & Fire without the Wind.
    But who is Rain?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox7FKgwD2E0
  • Options


    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson

    Not much has changed then....
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138


    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson

    Although I was born in 1974 (New Years Day - first time it was a Bank Holiday in England & Wales) when I see or hear BBC coverage of the time I can completely believe that.
  • Options
    malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,973
    Leon said:

    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20

    cheers, brilliant
  • Options
    TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 40,096


    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson

    Not much has changed then....
    I hope the remaining one told ol' Denis to foxtrot oscar as it wasn't any of his effing business.
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216
    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040
  • Options
    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    That is a massive and completely unfounded assumption with no real evidence to back it up at all. It ignores the fact tat these sorts of plagues have been regular features of human history for thousands of years. It also ignores the fact that the Wuhan outbreak was reportedly many hundreds of miles from where the supposed vector lives i its natural environment.

    Personally I strongly believe we should immediately stop ALL deforestation across the world but this kind of baseless claim really doesn't help that message.
  • Options
    TazTaz Posts: 11,177
    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20

    cheers, brilliant
    Yup, just followed.
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216
    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20

    cheers, brilliant
    :lol: Great fun. They've just done a place in Mongolia with a frigging huge buffet.
  • Options
    Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,304


    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson

    Not much has changed then....
    I hope the remaining one told ol' Denis to foxtrot oscar as it wasn't any of his effing business.
    I wonder if he conducted a similar survey of his fellow lags in HM Prison Belmarsh.
  • Options
    CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,737
    edited August 2021

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20

    cheers, brilliant
    :lol: Great fun. They've just done a place in Mongolia with a frigging huge buffet.
    One hopes that the goldfish two places before that one are not on the menu.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,285
    edited August 2021


    Denis MacShane
    @DenisMacShane
    ·
    5m
    1974 as producer on BBC R4 World Tonight I did survey of editorial staff and 22 out of 23 voted Liberal
    @amolrajan @bbcnickrobinson

    Not much has changed then....
    I hope the remaining one told ol' Denis to foxtrot oscar as it wasn't any of his effing business.
    I wonder if he conducted a similar survey of his fellow lags in HM Prison Belmarsh.
    Among all the 70s BBC presenters....
  • Options
    TazTaz Posts: 11,177

    malcolmg said:

    Leon said:

    ON topic, this is a brilliant Twitter account

    Random Restaurants

    Every hour or so it posts four photos of, yes, a random restaurant, harvested from the Net. Sometimes you get mad selfies or bizarre photos of beds, often you get photos of quite sad food

    And yet it is a brilliant insight into daily life around the world - it goes everywhere, from Africa to Alaska, from Bali to Bromsgrove, and in its own way it tells you more about daily life in tiny corners of the world than any number of TV documentaries

    Also, people really like chicken and chips

    "Geeta's Bar & Restaurant; Unnamed Road, Gbarnga, Liberia https://google.com/maps/place/?q=place_id:ChIJX41L-waKpg8R4PGPMZNSFrE"

    https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot/status/1429388408577794052?s=20

    cheers, brilliant
    :lol: Great fun. They've just done a place in Mongolia with a frigging huge buffet.
    Looked amazing, didn’t it
  • Options
    On topic. The stat in the header that interests me the most is not that related to the UK but that related to Sweden.

    The country that spent most of the first year of the pandemic claiming that lockdowns were not the way to proceed and then suffered as a consequence is now almost the least lockdown sceptic of the whole of Europe.
  • Options
    maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391

    On topic. The stat in the header that interests me the most is not that related to the UK but that related to Sweden.

    The country that spent most of the first year of the pandemic claiming that lockdowns were not the way to proceed and then suffered as a consequence is now almost the least lockdown sceptic of the whole of Europe.

    Bit cheeky to ignore half the survey - in terms of people who think lockdowns work they're very much in the bottom half of the western european countries there.
  • Options

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
  • Options
    state_go_awaystate_go_away Posts: 5,417

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
  • Options

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    That's not the point.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    That is a massive and completely unfounded assumption with no real evidence to back it up at all. It ignores the fact tat these sorts of plagues have been regular features of human history for thousands of years. It also ignores the fact that the Wuhan outbreak was reportedly many hundreds of miles from where the supposed vector lives i its natural environment.

    Personally I strongly believe we should immediately stop ALL deforestation across the world but this kind of baseless claim really doesn't help that message.
    This is not my direct field, but I am fairly certain the claim is not as baseless as you are indicating, and there is ample evidence of an increased rate of zoonotic spillover as (1) human proximity to and interaction with wildlife reservoirs increases and (2) biodiversity within those wildlife habitats is decreased. The latter, in particular, has been modeled to show how fewer species within an ecosystem increases the rate of viral evolution within those systems and hence could contribute to the observed increased rate of zoonotic spillover.

    But to me, the biggest risk from the research lies not in the work done in the lab, but in the virus hunting resulting in all these uncharacterized, unknown viruses being actively taken out of the wildlife ecosystems and concentrated in labs within human population centres.
  • Options
    maaarsh said:

    On topic. The stat in the header that interests me the most is not that related to the UK but that related to Sweden.

    The country that spent most of the first year of the pandemic claiming that lockdowns were not the way to proceed and then suffered as a consequence is now almost the least lockdown sceptic of the whole of Europe.

    Bit cheeky to ignore half the survey - in terms of people who think lockdowns work they're very much in the bottom half of the western european countries there.
    Erm no.

    One graph is of those who think lockdowns don't work (do more harm than good) - in Sweden that number is 15%, 3rd from bottom . The other graph is those who think the Covid risks are overstated - in Sweden that number is 14% - the lowest out of those polled.

    Neither shows them in the bottom half of those thinking lockdowns don't work. Exactly the reverse in fact.
  • Options

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    800 people in hospital who don't need to be. I would suggest that is something worth trying to avoid if all it takes is a jab.
  • Options
    PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,929

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    That's a massive non sequitur to Urquhart's point, unless you see further vaccination in the same light as lockdowns - as part of an overbearing state.
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    800 people in hospital who don't need to be. I would suggest that is something worth trying to avoid if all it takes is a jab.
    Although seems most of those in hospital are refusers hit by Delta these days.
  • Options
    TimT said:

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    That is a massive and completely unfounded assumption with no real evidence to back it up at all. It ignores the fact tat these sorts of plagues have been regular features of human history for thousands of years. It also ignores the fact that the Wuhan outbreak was reportedly many hundreds of miles from where the supposed vector lives i its natural environment.

    Personally I strongly believe we should immediately stop ALL deforestation across the world but this kind of baseless claim really doesn't help that message.
    This is not my direct field, but I am fairly certain the claim is not as baseless as you are indicating, and there is ample evidence of an increased rate of zoonotic spillover as (1) human proximity to and interaction with wildlife reservoirs increases and (2) biodiversity within those wildlife habitats is decreased. The latter, in particular, has been modeled to show how fewer species within an ecosystem increases the rate of viral evolution within those systems and hence could contribute to the observed increased rate of zoonotic spillover.

    But to me, the biggest risk from the research lies not in the work done in the lab, but in the virus hunting resulting in all these uncharacterized, unknown viruses being actively taken out of the wildlife ecosystems and concentrated in labs within human population centres.
    At the very least it is not as blazingly obvious as this very partisan commentary would like to make it. And the claim that this is definitely what caused HIV and SARS is certainly not based on fact even though it is stated as such.
  • Options

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    800 people in hospital who don't need to be. I would suggest that is something worth trying to avoid if all it takes is a jab.
    Although seems most of those in hospital are refusers hit by Delta these days.
    True. Hence my lack of sympathy with most of them. I view it as akin to someone injuring themselves through drunk driving. And with the same associated risks of injuring or killing others.
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    800 people in hospital who don't need to be. I would suggest that is something worth trying to avoid if all it takes is a jab.
    Although seems most of those in hospital are refusers hit by Delta these days.
    True. Hence my lack of sympathy with most of them. I view it as akin to someone injuring themselves through drunk driving. And with the same associated risks of injuring or killing others.
    Well, I wont be locking down to save them this winter that's for sure.
  • Options
    TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    TimT said:

    IanB2 said:

    ”As things currently stand, the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event, but nobody is yet in a position to rule out an alternative,” he said.

    This point is backed by Professor James Wood, of Cambridge University. “I think there is very strong evidence for this being caused by natural spillovers but that argument simply does not suit some political groups. They promote the idea that Covid-19 was caused by a lab leak because such a claim deflects attention from increasing evidence that indicates biodiversity loss, deforestation and wildlife trade – which increase the dangers of natural spillovers – are the real dangers that we face from pandemics.”

    In other words, fiddling with viruses in laboratories is not the dangerous activity. The real threat comes from the wildlife trade, bulldozing rainforests and clearing wildernesses to provide land for farms and to gain access to mines. As vegetation and wildlife are destroyed, countless species of viruses and the bacteria they host are set loose to seek new hosts, such as humans and domestic livestock. This has happened with HIV, Sars and very probably Covid-19.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/22/the-wuhan-lab-leak-theory-is-more-about-politics-than-science

    That is a massive and completely unfounded assumption with no real evidence to back it up at all. It ignores the fact tat these sorts of plagues have been regular features of human history for thousands of years. It also ignores the fact that the Wuhan outbreak was reportedly many hundreds of miles from where the supposed vector lives i its natural environment.

    Personally I strongly believe we should immediately stop ALL deforestation across the world but this kind of baseless claim really doesn't help that message.
    This is not my direct field, but I am fairly certain the claim is not as baseless as you are indicating, and there is ample evidence of an increased rate of zoonotic spillover as (1) human proximity to and interaction with wildlife reservoirs increases and (2) biodiversity within those wildlife habitats is decreased. The latter, in particular, has been modeled to show how fewer species within an ecosystem increases the rate of viral evolution within those systems and hence could contribute to the observed increased rate of zoonotic spillover.

    But to me, the biggest risk from the research lies not in the work done in the lab, but in the virus hunting resulting in all these uncharacterized, unknown viruses being actively taken out of the wildlife ecosystems and concentrated in labs within human population centres.
    At the very least it is not as blazingly obvious as this very partisan commentary would like to make it. And the claim that this is definitely what caused HIV and SARS is certainly not based on fact even though it is stated as such.
    We can agree on that.
  • Options
    rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,216
    Test positivity in FL is 37%.

    Yikes!
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    edited August 2021
    https://www.covid19assembly.org/2021/08/the-government-has-based-the-handling-of-the-covid-pandemic-on-flawed-assumptions-say-133-doctors-nurses-paramedics-and-midwives/

    The data on which we are basing your covid assumptions is completely flawed, say some named health professionals.

    Now I stress these are not TSE approved health professionals, nor have they been vetted by experts such as Alistair 100,00 cases. So caveat emptor, naturally.

    These are health professionals we can disregard, because, well, they are nutters obviously. Whereas the doctors we listen to, like Susan Michie and that Pagel woman, are completely above reproach.

    Andy Cook has done all the research for us anyway, and there's no point in arguing.
  • Options
    TheWhiteRabbitTheWhiteRabbit Posts: 12,388
    edited August 2021
    If you go via Oddschecker, Hills will give you 7/2 (4.5) on the SPD. You could then lay this at 3.8-4 for a few pennies or let it run as an interesting bet.

    (Hills have required more ID from me otherwise I would be taking it)
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    Prof Francois Balloux
    @BallouxFrancois
    ·
    2h
    Anecdotes about someone vaccinated getting infected by COVID, and feeling poorly for a couple of days should be presented as 'good news' stories, and a triumph of science, not as portents of the Apocalypse.

    This is why Balloux is one of my favoured academic Covid commentators.
  • Options
    FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,285
    edited August 2021

    Test positivity in FL is 37%.

    Yikes!

    The US is in for a world of hurt. Biden's modest vaccine targets have been missed and all the refuseniks don't appear to be rushing to get the numbers up.
  • Options
    DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,138

    Test positivity in FL is 37%.

    Yikes!

    Probably Key West for Christmas won’t happen this year.
  • Options
    contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818

    A concerning thread on where we are...


    Oliver Johnson
    @BristOliver
    Thread: A year ago today we saw the lowest ever recorded number of COVID hospital admissions in England. The 22nd August 2020 figure was 25. I expect 22nd August 2021 will be around 800: that's five doublings higher, and I don't think that's good news, to say the least.

    https://twitter.com/BristOliver/status/1429397533428695040

    Its why I don't understand the pissing about with booster jabs. Get em done.
    800 admissions is jut over 1 per parliamentary constituency - hardly overwhelming hospitals is it?
    800 people in hospital who don't need to be. I would suggest that is something worth trying to avoid if all it takes is a jab.
    Being double jabbed does not stop you getting covid, getting covid seriously, or passing on covid.
  • Options
    RazedabodeRazedabode Posts: 2,977

    Test positivity in FL is 37%.

    Yikes!

    The US is in for a world of hurt. Biden's modest vaccine targets have been missed and all the refuseniks don't appear to be rushing to get the numbers up.
    Quite staggering just how much of a failure Biden is turning out to be. I’d read the other day they were looking at water shortages as they have to redirect the liquid oxygen that would normally treat it to ICUs
  • Options
    DougSeal said:

    Test positivity in FL is 37%.

    Yikes!

    Probably Key West for Christmas won’t happen this year.
    I presume given how magnetic key west is for anti-government conspiracy theorist nutters, the vaccination rate might be a tad low around those parts
This discussion has been closed.