As the COVID crisis continues there’s a decline in public confidence in the NHS’s ability to cope –
As the COVID crisis continues there’s a decline in public confidence in the NHS’s ability to cope – politicalbetting.com
Throughout the COVID crisis Ipsos MORI has been carrying out regular surveys when the same questions are asked in the same manner so we can look at the trends. The latest polling shows:
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But being less sentimental about it would help in the long run.
But they can be useless post-op in those situations also.
Meaning that both China and us can spend in the same country and afterwards thanks to Chinese strings they benefit and besides a warm glow in our hearts for a few seconds while thinking about how benign we are we simply don't.
OK what a fantastic way to spend a morning - thinking of good books to read!
One corner of global events that I found extremely interesting is/was first the Rwandan massacres and then leading on to the issue of child soldiers and in particular the LRA.
These I found extremely engaging.
Romeo Dallaire - amazing and of course first hand knowledge.
Shake Hands with the Devil
They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children
Paul Rusesabagina - the film of course was made of this, and he's in the news again now.
An Ordinary Man
Emmanuel Jal
Warchild
Ishmael Beah
A Long Way Home
And then more general:
The Lord's Resistance Army - Myth and Reality, Ed Tim Allen & Koen Vlassenroot
The Wizard of the NIle, Matthew Green (about Joseph Kony)
Plenty of others I'm sure but those are very "enjoyable".
Prof Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson "Landmark Danish study shows face masks have no significant effect"
Unlike other studies looking at masks, the Danmask study was a randomised controlled trial – making it the highest quality scientific evidence.
Concludes:
And now that we have properly rigorous scientific research we can rely on, the evidence shows that wearing masks in the community does not significantly reduce the rates of infection.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-masks-stop-the-spread-of-covid-19-
Looking forward to seeing what this generates.
Some non-fiction I liked this year:
Bad Blood (10/10) - gripping, very fast-paced read of the dumpster fire that was Theranos. Some political themes - but more about business/ethics than politics.
Shoe Dog (8/10) - memoir of Nike co-founder. Got some interesting sports themes, famous namedrops and also fascinating to see how much America has changed in 50 odd years or so. Not the greatest writing, but definitely gives you a sense of the urgency and pressure they felt. At times a little implausible, but a good read.
The Shoemaker and his Daughter (9/10) - one family's true story to survive and thrive set in Soviet Russia and Siberia. Not highbrow history.
Nigel Farage - the purple revolution: the year that changed everything (7/10) - there's something about Nigel Farage that I find a little bit fascinating. It's pretty entertaining and it does give a good sense of how Farage views things, or how he wants to be viewed. A quick read. Available at charity shops if you don't want to make a contribution to Nige! Excellent for winding people up by placing prominently on a bookshelf.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/election-night-with-bidens-data-guru.html
And I find the idea it would be as big a news if it were Jane Doe to be utterly laughable. People get screwed over and organisations make errors all the time and it makes news, but not Diana level news.
What the solution is, is another debate. But the simple fact is what we are doing and what the Chinese are doing are two completely different methods.
How come they had such a battle over a few £100 million to feed kids but this money just plops out of thin air?
Biden 1.05
Democrats 1.05
Biden PV 1.03
Biden PV 49-51.9% 1.05
Trump PV 46-48.9% 1.06
Trump ECV 210-239 1.08
Biden ECV 300-329 1.07
Biden ECV Hcap -48.5 1.04
Biden ECV Hcap -63.5 1.07
Trump ECV Hcap +81.5 1.03
AZ Dem 1.05
GA Dem 1.05
MI Dem 1.05
NV Dem 1.04
PA Dem 1.05
WI Dem 1.05
There's a danger here of the same kind of short-sightedness you get in some US Republican circles about military aid. Defending Lithuania is not transactional; Lithuania will never be able to defend the US to the same extent it benefits from the US umbrella, but that doesn't mean it's not in the strong interests of the US to contain Russia. It's all about front lines, not just geographical but also ethical, ideological, and political. Better to be defending our way of life far, far from home than to have the barbarians at the gate. It doesn't show up on the balance sheet as a credit, but that's merely an artefact of what is measurable.
Yet the % thinking that the NHS will not be able to cope only ticked up by about 4% on the back of that.
So a few are still prepared to take the Government at their word, and most are not. What this polling shows is that the vast majority of the UK population have decided that our Government can't be trusted to level with those it governs in a national emergency. It was very different back in early Spring.
2) more importantly -> the idea behind masks is not primarily to protect the wearer, but to protect others from the wearer if the wearer is infectious.
The actual study says: "The recommendation to wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers by more than 50% in a community with modest infection rates, some degree of social distancing, and uncommon general mask use. The data were compatible with lesser degrees of self-protection."
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817
There's an extensive critique of the paper here:
Letter of concern regarding »Reduction in COVID-19 infection using surgical facial masks outside the healthcare system«
https://ugeskriftet.dk/dmj/letter-concern-regarding-reduction-covid-19-infection-using-surgical-facial-masks-outside-healthcare
...This study poses a serious risk of mistranslation, in part due to misleading statements about what the study actually measures in the protocol paper and trial registration. To most decision-makers, null or too-small effects will be misinterpreted to mean that masks are ineffective. However, the more accurate translation is that this study is uninformative regarding the benefits (or lack thereof) of wearing masks outside of the healthcare setting. As such, we caution decision-makers and the media from interpreting the results of this trial as being anything other than artifacts of weak design.
There were similar warnings about the trial long before the results came out:
https://twitter.com/NoahHaber/status/1280206598456004609
Plus it doesn't address a plethora of other studies that show that there seems to be a significant variolation effect from mask wearing that means if you wear a mask regularly and catch COVID then you could start with a lower viral load that means you get over the illness easier.
Finally the whole purpose of universal mask wearing is to protect others not yourself yet this study seems to be answering if the mask helps the wearer, not the others. The whole point is if other people are wearing masks then they protect you and if you are wearing masks then you protect others. How was this controlled for if in a study deliberately the others you're coming into contact with aren't wearing masks?
Here was my recommendation FPT (for those prepared to commit the time.)
Combining two of those interests - politics and history - Rick Perlstein's series of books on the rise of modern US conservatism is terrific.
Before the Storm; Nixonland; The Invisible Bridge; Reaganland
The series of four starts with Goldwater, and I've just received the recently published copy of the fourth book.
He writes from a liberal viewpoint, which may or may not put some off, but I guess that depends on whether one prefers histories written by apologists or critics.
Definitely long reads - particularly the last two.
I have enjoyed them all
The only way to prevent China from benefiting from its strings isn't for us to be developing other nations marginally it would be if we were sabotaging and destroying what the Chinese have done - which I don't think is appropriate.
Today is the day to turn one's back on PC liberal wokery.
The Kirsty McColl verse from The fairytale of New York has been butchered for BBC Radio 1 to satisfy PC gentility.
Christopher Chope and Phillip Davies were right all along!
The context seems to matter. Quoting the song in an academic history of attitudes is one thing. But putting it straight out as is is riskier. Of course the song itself may be providing its own context, e.g. by criticising the use of the word?
* In principle, no different from the fact that the Upkeep mines in the film were spherical, or that Lincolns were pretending to be Lancasters in some shots - details which only matter to the cognoscenti but for which there were good practical reasons at the time (security, lack of airworthy Lancs).
That's 32 years old now, old enough to be a grandparent. Still sounds good today.
I know the pox has been tough for a lot of businesses. But one party can't unilaterally change a contract without the other party agreeing. They say "you haven't made 12 payments" - true, they haven't taken payments when closed. But the contract doesn't provide any ability for them to change 12 months to an indefinite period until they claim 12 payments.
On Twitter it seems to be a standard tactic for gyms. What makes this one even sillier is that I had to use the wayback machine to find their members T&Cs - the page that hosts them has been mysteriously dropped from their website. I wonder why...
That was explicitly ruled illegal in 1997 and has been considered virtually evil for the past couple of decades. I wonder what makes it suddenly possibly a good idea?
I blame that Keir Starmer. He takes the knee and look what happened 28 years before as a result.
'UK remains world's second-biggest arms dealer, figures suggest'
https://tinyurl.com/y2opwmfg
I think I pointed out before that the UK had managed, despite sanctions, to sell arms to both sides in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh unpleasantness.
Mind me asking which company?
Where do you draw the line. Should we pretend women had the vote in the 19th century and that we didn't drown witches, because we wouldn't do that now. This is all discrimination just like language is by using insulting words for ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and disability.
It happened. Don't pretend it didn't by editing it out.
Fairytale of New York has an even more innocent and acceptable use of lyrics than that does.
F1: Mick Schumacher may be driving for Haas next year.
If a white person called somebody a nigger today, clearly it's racist, it's completely different as you well know.
As an example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigger_in_the_woodpile - this is wholly unacceptable today, if you said or used this, you'd be absolutely be being racist.
Don't start me on Dave Chappelle's latest comedy special either, there's at least a dozen 'n-words' in that.
It's a huge story, and the absolving of 'senior command' by the report seems at the least questionable. I don't expect that to go unexamined, particular if any of these cases ever go to trial (which they should).
A few months ago I did a WEA Zoom course on contrarian history; Started with 'what would have happened if Harold had won at Hastings in 1066' which inspired a lot of discussion, including 'What would have happened if Harald Hardrada and Tostig Godwinson had defeated Harold at Stamford Bridge a couple of weeks before Hastings?'
Is this appropriate to air today? I don't think so. Not without extremely, extremely clear warnings before, during and after, I would say.
Your question (in the context of talking about Fairytale of New York) was just this: "Just a question, if the radio were to play a song with the word "nigger" in it from several decades ago, do people still believe this is appropriate"
Straight Outta Compton is from several decades ago. It ticks every box of your question. And the context was immediately after discussing Fairytale of New York so don't try and change this into some twisted black versus white thing - if you meant that you should have said that but you did not.
So can you answer your own question: If the radio were to play [Straight Outta Compton which is from several decades ago], do [you] still believe this is appropriate"?
For me it feel a bit like having well-regulated finance versus loan sharks. Ideally you don't want the loan sharks to exist at all, and ensuring people have access to proper finance can reduce the temptation to rely on bad actors. It is not a prophylactic, but it helps. Cutting off all legitimate finance options, on the other hand, drives them into the arms of the finger-breakers.
(Just to be totally clear, I am using finance as a metaphor. I'm not suggesting that foreign aid is literally like lending.)
Playing Straight Outta Compton, is entirely different to say airing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nigger_in_the_Woodpile. Completely and entirely different.
Never before has a song had lyrics "ducked" or "rerecorded" for the version that is broadcast on the radio.
My liberal credentials will get a bit of a hammering here.
In which case green light for Fairytale of New York. The context is entirely fine, we all know that.
As I remember it, it was a personal statement separate from the novel, along the lines of dreadful people who want to split up my country, today's version of Nazism etc, etc.