"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
I'm a recovering former scientist, and what is notable is that science works more on a collective level than on an individual level.
Individual scientists are human, and most of them become wedded to particular ideas and find it hard to abandon those ideas. The hardest thing in science I had to do was to abandon months of work that just wasn't working as I'd hoped it would. If it had initially worked well enough to publish a paper on it I would have found it a lot harder to give up on it later.
But collectively science works because other scientists don't share the emotional attachment and cognitive biases that have individual scientists stick to a dead end, because they don't have the history with that idea. They'll get attached to some other ideas in time.
So I have a lot of faith in Science, but am more wary of individual scientists...
The medical establishment seems particularly susceptible to unjustified attachments to dogma, for some reason.
One of my wife's friends is in obstetrics/gynaecology and she was over recently lamenting the militant attachment that midwives in this country have got to natural birth, often to the detriment of the mother. She's had to step in multiple times and recommend a c-section and fight the midwife on the reasoning, even though she's got 7 years of medical training and another 5 years experience being in the field she's being countermanded by someone who simply can't see beyond "yeah but natural birth is better". She was saying the whole profession has been completely and totally captured by this thinking.
Chrissy Pagel is almost as excited by this new Gauteng variant as she was by the new series of Love Island.
The last couple of series of Love Island haven’t been worth the wait IMO. Maybe it proves an adage like, you can take the lovers to the sun but can’t guarantee the chemistry, or something?
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
So... the people tasked with tax enforcement are to be housed in a building owned by major Tory donors via a shell company registered in a tax haven. They're just trolling us now, aren't they?
Anyway, today is Elimination of Violence Against Women Day, I am told.
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
How many men have been killed in the same period? I am not trying to be crass. Every murder is horrific in its own way, whether it is a knife fight among gangs, or a murdered wife at home. How about an Elimination of Violence against people day instead?
All killings are awful. We largely ignore killings unless, for some reason, they make the news. See the killings of teenage - largely black boys - in cities, for instance.
But if you and @DavidL want to focus on the elimination of the violence, then we need to focus on those doing the violence. And they are overwhelmingly men. It is men killing women. It is men killing other men.
Why is that? And what are men going to do about it?
Rather than have "Days" or men making making obvious but trite points, perhaps they might ask themselves this.
Or are we just going to get the usual "well it's all very complicated" and "it always happens" and "it's not all men" etc.
Not getting at you or @DavidL personally. But these killings are done by people, overwhelmingly male people. That would be a good starting point if we want to try and eliminate it.
I don't disagree with any of that but I do have reservations about victims of violence being more deserving or important or shocking if they are female. The obsessive focus on violence directed towards women, abhorrent as that is, actually misses the point and the bulk of the lethal violence in our society.
We need to focus on the tolerance of violence in society generally. If we succeed women will be amongst the beneficiaries. As will men, of course.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
Without wanting to repeat the tiresome oh yes it is oh no it isn't bullshit about HYUFD's unique perspectives on democracy, the "you can't have it" approach to independence only strengthens the likelihood that when there eventually is another referendum that it votes to leave.
Have the vote now - there is a clear democratic mandate for one. Write into the legislation that if the vote is no that a suitable period has to pass before the parties consider having another one. No will win and it will be legally agreed that there can't be a 3rd one quickly.
Saying that the Scots, having voted for a referendum can't actually have one . . .
. . . is as self-defeating and stupid as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg etc saying that despite having been elected promising an EU referendum, we can't actually have one.
All its doing is building up the grievance to the point that eventually the dam will break.
I expect HYUFD to be so silly as to not understand that - I'm surprised though that Leon can't grasp the concept since he can see it so clearly with Europe.
Unlike Nat appeasers like you who would give the Nats a referendum on independence every year until they get the result they want I and Leon fully support telling Nats they had their once in a generation referendum and lost so can suck it up for a generation!!
No means No! At minimum they can wait 15 years for their second like Quebec (which was still a No by the way), Leavers had to wait 41 years for their second EU referendum after the 1975 EEC referendum
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
I'm a recovering former scientist, and what is notable is that science works more on a collective level than on an individual level.
Individual scientists are human, and most of them become wedded to particular ideas and find it hard to abandon those ideas. The hardest thing in science I had to do was to abandon months of work that just wasn't working as I'd hoped it would. If it had initially worked well enough to publish a paper on it I would have found it a lot harder to give up on it later.
But collectively science works because other scientists don't share the emotional attachment and cognitive biases that have individual scientists stick to a dead end, because they don't have the history with that idea. They'll get attached to some other ideas in time.
So I have a lot of faith in Science, but am more wary of individual scientists...
The medical establishment seems particularly susceptible to unjustified attachments to dogma, for some reason.
One of my wife's friends is in obstetrics/gynaecology and she was over recently lamenting the militant attachment that midwives in this country have got to natural birth, often to the detriment of the mother. She's had to step in multiple times and recommend a c-section and fight the midwife on the reasoning, even though she's got 7 years of medical training and another 5 years experience being in the field she's being countermanded by someone who simply can't see beyond "yeah but natural birth is better". She was saying the whole profession has been completely and totally captured by this thinking.
Its the same with breastfeeding.
My wife really, really struggled to feed both our children. It happens to a certain proportion of women but there is so much dogma attached now to "breast is best" that when faced with the need to go for an alternative, it is very hard to get objective information on what alternatives to go for etc
We found there is very little in the way of support for people who can't breastfeed - and immense pressure of "oh you just need to keep at it" as if we hadn't tried that already.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
Without wanting to repeat the tiresome oh yes it is oh no it isn't bullshit about HYUFD's unique perspectives on democracy, the "you can't have it" approach to independence only strengthens the likelihood that when there eventually is another referendum that it votes to leave.
Have the vote now - there is a clear democratic mandate for one. Write into the legislation that if the vote is no that a suitable period has to pass before the parties consider having another one. No will win and it will be legally agreed that there can't be a 3rd one quickly.
Saying that the Scots, having voted for a referendum can't actually have one . . .
. . . is as self-defeating and stupid as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg etc saying that despite having been elected promising an EU referendum, we can't actually have one.
All its doing is building up the grievance to the point that eventually the dam will break.
I expect HYUFD to be so silly as to not understand that - I'm surprised though that Leon can't grasp the concept since he can see it so clearly with Europe.
Unlike Nat appeasers like you who would give the Nats a referendum on independence every year until they get the result they want I and Leon fully support telling Nats they had their once in a generation referendum and lost so can suck it up for a generation!!
No means No! At minimum they can wait 15 years for their second like Quebec (which was still a No by the way), Leavers had to wait 41 years for their second EU referendum after the 1975 EEC referendum
I wouldn't "give" anyone anything.
We have elections and people choose what they want to vote for. If they choose to revisit an issue that was deemed settled in the past, even just two years ago, then that's their choice.
Its called democracy. You might want to familiarise yourself with the concept and it isn't a "gift".
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Chrissy Pagel is almost as excited by this new Gauteng variant as she was by the new series of Love Island.
It is unsettling news. Twitter seems divided on its potential danger. Looks like it might evade vaccines, but has low transmissibility, so Delta Plus should outcompete?
But does Delta Plus provide immunity against this new strain?
FFS. If we get a nasty new variant, that's it. Humanity is done. Switch off the sun
Don't worry about it, I think the key thing to remember is that any variant which has sufficiently diluted binding efficiency to antibodies will also have extremely diluted binding efficiency to the ACE-2 receptor making it much less effective.
Delta seems to be particularly successful because of mutations to the coding for the nucleocapsid protein (it's fantastically more efficient at packaging viable copies of the virus), so beyond getting over the basic hurdle of getting in to the cell, mutations to the spike aren't necessarily the determining factor anyway.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
No, their future in the union can only be changed if the BRITISH parliament - including Scotland - agrees. This is far from impossible, it happened in 2014. I am sure it will happen again, at some point, just as it did in Quebec
But a generation needs to elapse. The fundamental structure of the nation cannot be constantly menaced
Of course the future can be constantly menaced every time we have an election. That's democracy. We don't wait a generation between elections, we wait no more than five years as a maximum.
So if the Scots want, they can have a referendum every year? Every six years? Why five? Because that's one parliament? But why not every other year during the parliament? Once a week?
No nation can endure such a constant endangerment, it's bad for business, for a start
Quebec waited a generation: 15 years, they have not had one since. That is the correct timescale
But you and I are never going to agree on this, and you have never been known to change your mind, so I suggest we talk about something less boring. Even my state of post-vax malaise is more interesting than this endlessly repeating debate
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
I'm a recovering former scientist, and what is notable is that science works more on a collective level than on an individual level.
Individual scientists are human, and most of them become wedded to particular ideas and find it hard to abandon those ideas. The hardest thing in science I had to do was to abandon months of work that just wasn't working as I'd hoped it would. If it had initially worked well enough to publish a paper on it I would have found it a lot harder to give up on it later.
But collectively science works because other scientists don't share the emotional attachment and cognitive biases that have individual scientists stick to a dead end, because they don't have the history with that idea. They'll get attached to some other ideas in time.
So I have a lot of faith in Science, but am more wary of individual scientists...
The medical establishment seems particularly susceptible to unjustified attachments to dogma, for some reason.
An increased attachment to dogma is understandable when dealing with life and death issues, because of the cognitive bias that penalizes change that results in harm more than not avoiding harm by not making a change.
The problem for HYUFD saying "they had their once in a generation referendum" is that it was no such thing. Had it been passed into law on that basis then fine. It was not.
Anyway, I hope that Epping Conservative Association is planning to do some charity outreach during the cold days to come. Take HYUFD out harrumphing on a cold evening and he will generate sufficient heat to keep at least 3 homeless people warm.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
"Chris Philp @CPhilpOfficial · 5h I’m deeply concerned by this photo of French law enforcement officers standing by doing nothing while migrants embark on a dangerous, illegal and unnecessary Channel crossing - putting lives at risk as we tragically saw yesterday"
Headline: Why Didn't France Stop Them
The migrants are actually carrying a toddler. Les Gendarmes do F all
So you have 2 French policemen and 30 refugees carrying a boat - what exactly can those 2 policemen actually do?
Walk up to boat, draw guns, back the refugees away, shoot the engine, shoot the boat to puncture it on the beach so it can’t go in the sea, return to call and radio in a report….!
Not overly serious but If the French govt is about to pay French fishers who haven’t been given licences €60m to compensate them then maybe instead they could hire them to patrol the coast and radio in if they see dinghies on the beach so the French navy/coastguard can intercept them in time….. as there are apparently so many French fishermen unable to fish then between them covering the 200 mile coastline isn’t much of an ask.
The videos - multiple - of armed French cops in numbers doing sod all as tiny children are loaded onto these boats are absolutely appalling, in retrospect. How is that not manslaughter by negligence?
They can stop the boats and save innocent lives, they do not. Surely that is a crime?
Because it is the view of most French people that if asylum seekers wish to self deport by boat, the government should not seek to stop them.
France breaks no treaty by allowing them to board the boat, nor any international law, nor any French law.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
I think the main reason the UK is so attractive to migrants is probably the fact we don't have ID cards. And most people don't want to introduce them, so that pull factor isn't going to change.
Either that or the worlds most international language and a top 3 in international culture through music, film and existing global connectivity in business and migration.
We also falsely assume all migrants prefer to come here, that is certainly not true, many prefer Germany, the US or Scandinavia, and I would be surprised if others don't prefer countries either more local to them or with similar climates and cultures. In our media we nearly only see the migrants desperate to come here, and assume there is something unique about here that makes them want to come. We are high on the list of desirable countries but not particularly unique.
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
"Chris Philp @CPhilpOfficial · 5h I’m deeply concerned by this photo of French law enforcement officers standing by doing nothing while migrants embark on a dangerous, illegal and unnecessary Channel crossing - putting lives at risk as we tragically saw yesterday"
Headline: Why Didn't France Stop Them
The migrants are actually carrying a toddler. Les Gendarmes do F all
So you have 2 French policemen and 30 refugees carrying a boat - what exactly can those 2 policemen actually do?
Walk up to boat, draw guns, back the refugees away, shoot the engine, shoot the boat to puncture it on the beach so it can’t go in the sea, return to call and radio in a report….!
Not overly serious but If the French govt is about to pay French fishers who haven’t been given licences €60m to compensate them then maybe instead they could hire them to patrol the coast and radio in if they see dinghies on the beach so the French navy/coastguard can intercept them in time….. as there are apparently so many French fishermen unable to fish then between them covering the 200 mile coastline isn’t much of an ask.
The videos - multiple - of armed French cops in numbers doing sod all as tiny children are loaded onto these boats are absolutely appalling, in retrospect. How is that not manslaughter by negligence?
They can stop the boats and save innocent lives, they do not. Surely that is a crime?
Because it is the view of most French people that if asylum seekers wish to self deport by boat, the government should not seek to stop them.
France breaks no treaty by allowing them to board the boat, nor any international law, nor any French law.
I find it extremely hard to believe there is no law in France obliging cops to step in: when a child's life is being gravely endangered, and that danger can easily be prevented
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
That at leastr makes a change from arguing no to indyref because you like Spanish police smashing grannies in the face with batons.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A future HYUFD classic, on a par with the Francoist shite.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
Chrissy Pagel is almost as excited by this new Gauteng variant as she was by the new series of Love Island.
It is unsettling news. Twitter seems divided on its potential danger. Looks like it might evade vaccines, but has low transmissibility, so Delta Plus should outcompete?
But does Delta Plus provide immunity against this new strain?
FFS. If we get a nasty new variant, that's it. Humanity is done. Switch off the sun
Don't worry about it, I think the key thing to remember is that any variant which has sufficiently diluted binding efficiency to antibodies will also have extremely diluted binding efficiency to the ACE-2 receptor making it much less effective.
Delta seems to be particularly successful because of mutations to the coding for the nucleocapsid protein (it's fantastically more efficient at packaging viable copies of the virus), so beyond getting over the basic hurdle of getting in to the cell, mutations to the spike aren't necessarily the determining factor anyway.
That's what becomes the issue, if it can't easily get into cells then it can't easily start replicating, mutations to the spike protein will inhibit cell invasion, ideally to the extent that it becomes inert as seems to have happened in Japan.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
HYUFD believes in God, therefore he is a Socialist
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
No, their future in the union can only be changed if the BRITISH parliament - including Scotland - agrees. This is far from impossible, it happened in 2014. I am sure it will happen again, at some point, just as it did in Quebec
But a generation needs to elapse. The fundamental structure of the nation cannot be constantly menaced
Of course the future can be constantly menaced every time we have an election. That's democracy. We don't wait a generation between elections, we wait no more than five years as a maximum.
So if the Scots want, they can have a referendum every year? Every six years? Why five? Because that's one parliament? But why not every other year during the parliament? Once a week?
No nation can endure such a constant endangerment, it's bad for business, for a start
Quebec waited a generation: 15 years, they have not had one since. That is the correct timescale
But you and I are never going to agree on this, and you have never been known to change your mind, so I suggest we talk about something less boring. Even my state of post-vax malaise is more interesting than this endlessly repeating debate
If every Parliament elects a government pledging a referendum then you can have a referendum every Parliament, yes. That's what the people voted for.
If people decide they don't want to be constantly bothered by new referenda, if they think "oh not another one" then they can vote against the party pledging to have one at the next election.
That is what happened with Quebec. The Quebecois voted down the second referendum and then ultimately voted out the PQ who have never won a majority this century.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A future HYUFD classic, on a par with the Francoist shite.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Jesus wouldn’t have looked black at all. I remember when small people coming to the school to tell us Jesus was not white he was black, and I argued with them he was more white than black. He wouldn’t even have looked like a North African?
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A future HYUFD classic, on a par with the Francoist shite.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
Anyway, today is Elimination of Violence Against Women Day, I am told.
I am not, on the whole, a fan of all these "Days".
But it is worth remembering that, as of today, in Britain so far this year 127 women have been killed.
328 days of the year. 127 women killed.
1 woman killed every two and a half days.
Most do not even make the local let alone national news. If this number were killed in one go, we'd never hear the end of it. But one here and there all over the country every few days, most in domestic settings, most by people known to them, overwhelmingly by men - well they just become routine, part of the daily background, unknown, forgotten and not cared enough about for anyone to do anything effective to understand why this happens and what can be done to change it.
And this rate of killing is broadly the same year after year.
Let's compare it to the 20 years the British Army spent in Afghanistan - a largely pointless undertaking, mostly remembered for the sad convoys through Wootten Bassett and people paying their respects.
457 soldiers killed, 405 through enemy action. Ca. 23 a year.
I do not diminish their sacrifice or the loss their loved ones suffer.
But these women too have a name and people who loved them and miss them and this weary acceptance of their deaths really will not do.
Still, we have a "Day", I suppose. Must we be content just with that?
How many men have been killed in the same period? I am not trying to be crass. Every murder is horrific in its own way, whether it is a knife fight among gangs, or a murdered wife at home. How about an Elimination of Violence against people day instead?
All killings are awful. We largely ignore killings unless, for some reason, they make the news. See the killings of teenage - largely black boys - in cities, for instance.
But if you and @DavidL want to focus on the elimination of the violence, then we need to focus on those doing the violence. And they are overwhelmingly men. It is men killing women. It is men killing other men.
Why is that? And what are men going to do about it?
Rather than have "Days" or men making making obvious but trite points, perhaps they might ask themselves this.
Or are we just going to get the usual "well it's all very complicated" and "it always happens" and "it's not all men" etc.
Not getting at you or @DavidL personally. But these killings are done by people, overwhelmingly male people. That would be a good starting point if we want to try and eliminate it.
I don't disagree with any of that but I do have reservations about victims of violence being more deserving or important or shocking if they are female. The obsessive focus on violence directed towards women, abhorrent as that is, actually misses the point and the bulk of the lethal violence in our society.
We need to focus on the tolerance of violence in society generally. If we succeed women will be amongst the beneficiaries. As will men, of course.
Undoubtedly. But I think you are missing four key points:
One reason for the focus on violence against women is that it is not a fair fight - in the sense that a man's superior strength will almost always overwhelm a woman. That is not the case with male on male violence. There is something peculiarly abhorrent about violence directed at a weaker party. It is one reason, for instance, that we find violence against children particularly shocking.
Two: violence against women is often accompanied by sexual violence as well. That is very very much less likely to be the case with male on male violence.
Three: domestic violence against women is a good indicator of other more serious forms of violence, specifically, terrorist violence. There have been studies showing this. It is often a warning sign of someone susceptible to radicalisation.
Four: male on male violence is largely a young man's game. But violence against women does not stop with age. Again, attacks on weaker and older women seem to me to be particularly revolting.
So we should pay far more attention to it than we do. And we need to pay far more attention to male behaviour, what drives me to violence, why and and the images, messaging, lessons that men are taught and see around them.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
But you're the one backing artwork being cancelled because you don't like it? Because you find it blasphemous?
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
HYUFD believes in God, therefore he is a Socialist
On your logic Thatcher was a socialist and Mao and Corbyn are capitalists
"Chris Philp @CPhilpOfficial · 5h I’m deeply concerned by this photo of French law enforcement officers standing by doing nothing while migrants embark on a dangerous, illegal and unnecessary Channel crossing - putting lives at risk as we tragically saw yesterday"
Headline: Why Didn't France Stop Them
The migrants are actually carrying a toddler. Les Gendarmes do F all
So you have 2 French policemen and 30 refugees carrying a boat - what exactly can those 2 policemen actually do?
Walk up to boat, draw guns, back the refugees away, shoot the engine, shoot the boat to puncture it on the beach so it can’t go in the sea, return to call and radio in a report….!
Not overly serious but If the French govt is about to pay French fishers who haven’t been given licences €60m to compensate them then maybe instead they could hire them to patrol the coast and radio in if they see dinghies on the beach so the French navy/coastguard can intercept them in time….. as there are apparently so many French fishermen unable to fish then between them covering the 200 mile coastline isn’t much of an ask.
The videos - multiple - of armed French cops in numbers doing sod all as tiny children are loaded onto these boats are absolutely appalling, in retrospect. How is that not manslaughter by negligence?
They can stop the boats and save innocent lives, they do not. Surely that is a crime?
Because it is the view of most French people that if asylum seekers wish to self deport by boat, the government should not seek to stop them.
France breaks no treaty by allowing them to board the boat, nor any international law, nor any French law.
I find it extremely hard to believe there is no law in France obliging cops to step in: when a child's life is being gravely endangered, and that danger can easily be prevented
Why did no one check for their operators licenses?
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A future HYUFD classic, on a par with the Francoist shite.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
One less than a decade ago
Poor, colonised English, bullied by constant demands into having one referendum in 314 years. The heart bleeds, it really does.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
HYUFD believes in God, therefore he is a Socialist
On your logic Thatcher was a socialist and Mao and Corbyn are capitalists
If you believe in God, you are a Socialist! Just accept it!
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
But you're the one backing artwork being cancelled because you don't like it? Because you find it blasphemous?
You object to one religion yet back the other?
If forced to choose a religion, would I choose Christianity (post-Enlightenment) over Woke? Of course I would. Woke is the antithesis of the Enlightenment, it seeks to crush incredibly valuable freedoms that took many centuries to achieve
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
Indeed. If the left want to erect a statue of “George Floyd Jesus”, then so what, let them be idiots talking to themselves. Freedom of speech lets these idiots be idiots, trying to ‘cancel’ them just puts you in the same pile of stupid as them.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
A future HYUFD classic, on a par with the Francoist shite.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
One less than a decade ago
Poor, colonised English, bullied by constant demands into having one referendum in 314 years. The heart bleeds, it really does.
That reminds me, I must put some shallots down on the shopping list.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
To be fair to Sunil Prasannan point, believing in Marxism is not so that different than believing in Scientology? Marxism is supposed to be scientific?
Though my understanding of dialectic as in Dialectical Marxism is argumentative and contrarian, which to me doesn’t make the phrase much sense
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Jesus wouldn’t have looked black at all. I remember when small people coming to the school to tell us Jesus was not white he was black, and I argued with them he was more white than black. He wouldn’t even have looked like a North African?
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
This is the same logic as Twitter objecting to Gal Gadot playing Cleopatra, on the grounds that Cleo was Egyptian, Egypt is in Africa, and Africans are black. Two of those assumptions are wrong, and the third is only true geographically, not culturally.
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
I'm a recovering former scientist, and what is notable is that science works more on a collective level than on an individual level.
Individual scientists are human, and most of them become wedded to particular ideas and find it hard to abandon those ideas. The hardest thing in science I had to do was to abandon months of work that just wasn't working as I'd hoped it would. If it had initially worked well enough to publish a paper on it I would have found it a lot harder to give up on it later.
But collectively science works because other scientists don't share the emotional attachment and cognitive biases that have individual scientists stick to a dead end, because they don't have the history with that idea. They'll get attached to some other ideas in time.
So I have a lot of faith in Science, but am more wary of individual scientists...
The medical establishment seems particularly susceptible to unjustified attachments to dogma, for some reason.
One of my wife's friends is in obstetrics/gynaecology and she was over recently lamenting the militant attachment that midwives in this country have got to natural birth, often to the detriment of the mother. She's had to step in multiple times and recommend a c-section and fight the midwife on the reasoning, even though she's got 7 years of medical training and another 5 years experience being in the field she's being countermanded by someone who simply can't see beyond "yeah but natural birth is better". She was saying the whole profession has been completely and totally captured by this thinking.
Its the same with breastfeeding.
My wife really, really struggled to feed both our children. It happens to a certain proportion of women but there is so much dogma attached now to "breast is best" that when faced with the need to go for an alternative, it is very hard to get objective information on what alternatives to go for etc
We found there is very little in the way of support for people who can't breastfeed - and immense pressure of "oh you just need to keep at it" as if we hadn't tried that already.
I found that too. I was unable to feed my eldest. The midwife insisted. Eventually, the GP - furious at her behaviour - put my son on bottle feeding and the poor child was starving. I had mastitis by this point and was really quite ill so spent the first few weeks after the birth ill and then on antibiotics. The GP - an old-fashioned but very experienced sort - told me he was fed up with the way young midwives, with no experience of giving birth, bullied mothers into feeling guilty if they could not breast feed. My mother was very supportive but the midwives were no good at all.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
Quite right. No good skank ho's should know their place. Just cos I shagged her best friend and started slapping her round a bit whilst drunk she has no right to ask for a divorce because she already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago,
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding.
"Novel" just means new. It doesn't mean "unusual" or "abnormal". It was called "novel" just because this particular virus hadn't been seen before.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
But you're the one backing artwork being cancelled because you don't like it? Because you find it blasphemous?
You object to one religion yet back the other?
If forced to choose a religion, would I choose Christianity (post-Enlightenment) over Woke? Of course I would. Woke is the antithesis of the Enlightenment, it seeks to crush incredibly valuable freedoms that took many centuries to achieve
Post Enlightenment Christianity is a pretty broad church. I'd have you down as Exclusive Brethren if forced to guess which sect. Either that or a suicide sex cult of 20 people living in a bunker in Nevada.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
To be fair to Sunil Prasannan point, believing in Marxism is not so that different than believing in Scientology? Marxism is supposed to be scientific?
Though my understanding of dialectic as in Dialectical Marxism is argumentative and contrarian, which to me doesn’t make the phrase much sense
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
I'm afraid the Mel Gibson version has somewhat taken over the embodiment of JC in my mind. That the actor playing him has turned out to be a QAnon loon somehow seems entirely appropriate.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
But you're the one backing artwork being cancelled because you don't like it? Because you find it blasphemous?
You object to one religion yet back the other?
If forced to choose a religion, would I choose Christianity (post-Enlightenment) over Woke? Of course I would. Woke is the antithesis of the Enlightenment, it seeks to crush incredibly valuable freedoms that took many centuries to achieve
Post Enlightenment Christianity is a pretty broad church. I'd have you down as Exclusive Brethren if forced to guess which sect. Either that or a suicide sex cult of 20 people living in a bunker in Nevada.
Well, the former would include Aleister Crowley, Tony Crosland and Haigh the acid-bath chappie. Quite a variety.
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
I'm a recovering former scientist, and what is notable is that science works more on a collective level than on an individual level.
Individual scientists are human, and most of them become wedded to particular ideas and find it hard to abandon those ideas. The hardest thing in science I had to do was to abandon months of work that just wasn't working as I'd hoped it would. If it had initially worked well enough to publish a paper on it I would have found it a lot harder to give up on it later.
But collectively science works because other scientists don't share the emotional attachment and cognitive biases that have individual scientists stick to a dead end, because they don't have the history with that idea. They'll get attached to some other ideas in time.
So I have a lot of faith in Science, but am more wary of individual scientists...
The medical establishment seems particularly susceptible to unjustified attachments to dogma, for some reason.
One of my wife's friends is in obstetrics/gynaecology and she was over recently lamenting the militant attachment that midwives in this country have got to natural birth, often to the detriment of the mother. She's had to step in multiple times and recommend a c-section and fight the midwife on the reasoning, even though she's got 7 years of medical training and another 5 years experience being in the field she's being countermanded by someone who simply can't see beyond "yeah but natural birth is better". She was saying the whole profession has been completely and totally captured by this thinking.
Its the same with breastfeeding.
My wife really, really struggled to feed both our children. It happens to a certain proportion of women but there is so much dogma attached now to "breast is best" that when faced with the need to go for an alternative, it is very hard to get objective information on what alternatives to go for etc
We found there is very little in the way of support for people who can't breastfeed - and immense pressure of "oh you just need to keep at it" as if we hadn't tried that already.
I found that too. I was unable to feed my eldest. The midwife insisted. Eventually, the GP - furious at her behaviour - put my son on bottle feeding and the poor child was starving. I had mastitis by this point and was really quite ill so spent the first few weeks after the birth ill and then on antibiotics. The GP - an old-fashioned but very experienced sort - told me he was fed up with the way young midwives, with no experience of giving birth, bullied mothers into feeling guilty if they could not breast feed. My mother was very supportive but the midwives were no good at all.
That's not nice at all, but I can relate.
Our experience was similar, we ended up with my wife and our eldest daughter both in the hospital but we got some really nasty remarks from some of the younger (and more dogmatic it seems) people working there especially. It was only when we were eventually seen by the head of the unit who was quite reassuring that things became more pleasant, until then we were treated almost like we were deliberately starving our child.
As a first time parent its quite intimidating and nobody ever does anything to prepare you for that possibility. Instead its nine months of "breast is best" dogma but nothing about "what about if you can't?"
When we struggled with the second child feeding again we were much quicker and much more confident to switch to the bottle. Breast may be best, but bottle is better than not feeding.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
But you're the one backing artwork being cancelled because you don't like it? Because you find it blasphemous?
You object to one religion yet back the other?
If forced to choose a religion, would I choose Christianity (post-Enlightenment) over Woke? Of course I would. Woke is the antithesis of the Enlightenment, it seeks to crush incredibly valuable freedoms that took many centuries to achieve
Post Enlightenment Christianity is a pretty broad church. I'd have you down as Exclusive Brethren if forced to guess which sect. Either that or a suicide sex cult of 20 people living in a bunker in Nevada.
Well, the former would include Aleister Crowley, Tony Crosland and Haigh the acid-bath chappie. Quite a variety.
I know a few too. They are all persistently and resolutely mad.
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Are we talking about the Botswana variant?
Yes but it has been rebadged as Gauteng, or South African, or the nu variant (the Greek n presumably, though I'd have skipped to xi to avoid confusion and to troll China).
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
Quite right. No good skank ho's should know their place. Just cos I shagged her best friend and started slapping her round a bit whilst drunk she has no right to ask for a divorce because she already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago,
Her constant demands for divorce are not helpful
I would not stop the legal right to a divorce, which was not granted in the UK until 1857 with divorce still illegal in Ireland until 1995. However I would leave it as a last resort, not something to be constantly demanded every 5 minutes rather then preserving your union
This bit was particularly hilarious/depressing (delete as appropriate)
"...while a southern Pennsylvania district banned a lengthy list of titles almost entirely by or about people of colour, by acclaimed authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi. (The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour.)"
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding.
"Novel" just means new. It doesn't mean "unusual" or "abnormal". It was called "novel" just because this particular virus hadn't been seen before.
The virus had never been seen before because it was engineered in a Wuhan lab to be perfectly adapted to humans, via humanised mice, from the get go
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
That isn't going to make a difference because the virus has animal reservoirs now. Even if we vaccinated every single human three times, there are billions of wild and domesticated animals which have it as well.
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
That isn't going to make a difference because the virus has animal reservoirs now. Even if we vaccinated every single human three times, there are billions of wild and domesticated animals which have it as well.
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
That's less cheering
So, in your opinion, a vax mandate like Austria's - coming in Feb 22 - is pointless?
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
Quite right. No good skank ho's should know their place. Just cos I shagged her best friend and started slapping her round a bit whilst drunk she has no right to ask for a divorce because she already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago,
Her constant demands for divorce are not helpful
I would not stop the legal right to a divorce, which was not granted in the UK until 1857 with divorce still illegal in Ireland until 1995. However I would leave it as a last resort, not something to be constantly demanded every 5 minutes rather then preserving your union
The problem - to continue with this analogy - is that once we go to couples councilling you are sitting there with your arms folded telling the wife that whatever she wants and whatever she says she can't have it and thats final. Which pretty much guarantees that divorce follows.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Jesus wouldn’t have looked black at all. I remember when small people coming to the school to tell us Jesus was not white he was black, and I argued with them he was more white than black. He wouldn’t even have looked like a North African?
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
This is the same logic as Twitter objecting to Gal Gadot playing Cleopatra, on the grounds that Cleo was Egyptian, Egypt is in Africa, and Africans are black. Two of those assumptions are wrong, and the third is only true geographically, not culturally.
Some Eqyptians were black, "Egypt" continued quite far south, into Nubia (now Sudan). But inbred members of the Ptolomy clan... no. They were Greek.
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
That isn't going to make a difference because the virus has animal reservoirs now. Even if we vaccinated every single human three times, there are billions of wild and domesticated animals which have it as well.
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
That's less cheering
So, in your opinion, a vax mandate like Austria's - coming in Feb 22 - is pointless?
We're talking across problems here. Austria and other countries may make vaccines mandatory to ensure they relieve pressure on medical facilities, not to eliminate the chance of any future mutations. The first is a valid issue and while I don't agree with mandatory vaccines, it is something countries can turn to in an attempt to reduce the number of hospitalisations. On mutations, the die is cast and the virus already seems to have a common evolutionary pathway so it's not exactly an unknown quantity either.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Jesus wouldn’t have looked black at all. I remember when small people coming to the school to tell us Jesus was not white he was black, and I argued with them he was more white than black. He wouldn’t even have looked like a North African?
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
This is the same logic as Twitter objecting to Gal Gadot playing Cleopatra, on the grounds that Cleo was Egyptian, Egypt is in Africa, and Africans are black. Two of those assumptions are wrong, and the third is only true geographically, not culturally.
Cleopatra was Greek and could hardly speak Egyptian? Did they have the same concept of Africa as a continent beginning and ending as we know it today two thousand years ago? Genuine question, because wasn’t the Orient everything from Alexandria to Japan and they didn’t say Far East?
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
Quite right. No good skank ho's should know their place. Just cos I shagged her best friend and started slapping her round a bit whilst drunk she has no right to ask for a divorce because she already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago,
Her constant demands for divorce are not helpful
I would not stop the legal right to a divorce, which was not granted in the UK until 1857 with divorce still illegal in Ireland until 1995. However I would leave it as a last resort, not something to be constantly demanded every 5 minutes rather then preserving your union
The problem - to continue with this analogy - is that once we go to couples councilling you are sitting there with your arms folded telling the wife that whatever she wants and whatever she says she can't have it and thats final. Which pretty much guarantees that divorce follows.
The wife agreed to stay just 7 years ago and has contol over much of her own affairs now anyway
Fuck... This guy is usually on the we should be calm, things are going ok, no need for more lockdowns end of spectrum:
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 25m OK, it looks like we may have a Nu Variant of Concern on our hands ... 😕
We all had this same panic over the beta variant, bloody South Africa chucked out millions of AZ doses over it and ultimately the AZ vaccine was still highly effective against it.
Let's wait for lab tests on antibody binding efficiency first.
Richard Madeley has slid head first into a sewer of rotten fruit and vegetables. Fell ill as a result but is going to be ok.
Surely time for this programme - I'm a Celeb - to ask itself some questions.
Yes, ‘games’ that regularly induce the contestants to vomit probably need looking at.
We seem to both elevate and despise celebs and they for their part wallow in our attention and humiliate themselves to sustain it. It's like a BDSM relationship, sort of, with the roles fluid on either side. Certainly when I (accidentally) watch a prog like I'm a Celeb I feel I'm being sadistic but at the same time I feel like I'm being given a good thrashing.
A poll by YouGov for The Times finds that 40 per cent of people say they would vote yes in another referendum, a drop of one point compared with the company’s last survey in May.
The proportion of people who would vote no remained at 46 per cent, while 9 per cent said they were unsure, up by one point. The remainder would not vote or refused to say.
Astonishing that despite Brexit and PM Boris Sturgeon has actually managed to see Yes fall by 5% below the 45% it got in the 2014 referendum.
No wonder Salmond and Alba are so furious and of course no prospect of a legal indyref2 under this Tory government either
The actual Yes figure is 46.5% - which is above the 2014 referendum figure.
But of course you are muddling figures which include and which exclude DKs.
Professor Curtice would not be impressed.
It is 40% including DKs, so in terms of all voters below the 45% from 2014 as I said
Here we go again. So you agree that a majority do not explicitly support the Union?
The majority explicitly supported the Union in 2014 in a once in a generation referendum and this Tory government as long as it remains in power will not allow another indyref2 for at least a generation until 2014 has elapsed
So democracy doesn’t apply to Scotland. The very essence of colonialism.
No, colonialism is when a foreign power occupies your land, without your permission, and then rules it without giving you equal representation in the legislature
Scotland willingly entered the Union with England, and it is fully represented at Westminster, as WELL as having highly significant autonomous powers at Holyrood. Indeed Scots are able to vote on some English laws when the opposite is not the case. If there is any hint of colonialism here, it is Scottish power over the English
That's true as long as its a voluntary union.
If Scotland can not vote its way out of the union, it ceases to be voluntary.
Scotland can vote itself out of the union by persuading MPs at Westminster, which is Scotland's own sovereign, shared parliament, where Scotland is equally and fully represented, that Scotland needs an indy referendum
We know this works because the Scots thus persuaded Westminster in 2014. A referendum was granted, the Scots said No, that is the end of the matter for a generation UNLESS Westminster can be persuaded, again. Perhaps the Nats should try that instead of moaning
48 of the 59 MPs Scotland elects were elected on a manifesto of having another referendum. That is a very clear overwhelming majority of their MPs in Westminster.
Unless you're saying it doesn't matter a jot what the Scottish voters say, their future in the union can only be changed if the English MPs agree. Is that what you're saying?
Yep. You can have whatever you want if we agree with you. If we disagree you can do one.
When the union was formed it was mutual - like a marriage. What Leon and HYUFD are saying is that Scotland can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees.
In many countries you can't have a divorce unless the husband agrees, especially in the Middle East. The Roman Catholic church also greatly discourages divorce.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
Quite right. No good skank ho's should know their place. Just cos I shagged her best friend and started slapping her round a bit whilst drunk she has no right to ask for a divorce because she already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago,
Her constant demands for divorce are not helpful
I would not stop the legal right to a divorce, which was not granted in the UK until 1857 with divorce still illegal in Ireland until 1995. However I would leave it as a last resort, not something to be constantly demanded every 5 minutes rather then preserving your union
The problem - to continue with this analogy - is that once we go to couples councilling you are sitting there with your arms folded telling the wife that whatever she wants and whatever she says she can't have it and thats final. Which pretty much guarantees that divorce follows.
The wife agreed to stay just 7 years ago and has contol over much of her own affairs now anyway
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
That isn't going to make a difference because the virus has animal reservoirs now. Even if we vaccinated every single human three times, there are billions of wild and domesticated animals which have it as well.
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
Sky News Oz is a curious beast. It has elements of Fox News - which is bad - but it is willing to report news that others won't touch - which is good. One example is the Lab Leak Hypothesis - the Sky News Oz journo Sherri Markson doggedly pursued this story for a year, even when it was getting other people cancelled, labelled a racist, and so on. She may not be entirely right, but without people like her we would still be in total, enforced denial of a highly plausible Covid origins story
"'There was no evidence that this virus arose naturally.'
Journalist Sherri Markson is the author of What Really Happened in Wuhan, a book featuring documents exposing China’s early cover-up of the virus and fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors and eyewitness accounts."
Fuck... This guy is usually on the we should be calm, things are going ok, no need for more lockdowns end of spectrum:
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 25m OK, it looks like we may have a Nu Variant of Concern on our hands ... 😕
We all had this same panic over the beta variant, bloody South Africa chucked out millions of AZ doses over it and ultimately the AZ vaccine was still highly effective against it.
Let's wait for lab tests on antibody binding efficiency first.
I think Pagel is right here. Red list SA while we await developments.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
I see him as looking like Robert Powell. I try to conjur up other visions in a quest for diversity but none of them will stick.
Jesus wouldn’t have looked black at all. I remember when small people coming to the school to tell us Jesus was not white he was black, and I argued with them he was more white than black. He wouldn’t even have looked like a North African?
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
This is the same logic as Twitter objecting to Gal Gadot playing Cleopatra, on the grounds that Cleo was Egyptian, Egypt is in Africa, and Africans are black. Two of those assumptions are wrong, and the third is only true geographically, not culturally.
Cleopatra was Greek and could hardly speak Egyptian? Did they have the same concept of Africa as a continent beginning and ending as we know it today two thousand years ago? Genuine question, because wasn’t the Orient everything from Alexandria to Japan and they didn’t say Far East?
Except the more er... enthusiastic Greeks regarded Macedonians as barbarians not Greek.
Didn't Cleopatra actually bother to learn Egyptian, which was an unusual thing for those of her line?
On vaccine efficacy dilution, the more detailed version - one for @Leon:
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
That's soothing and enlightening - thanks
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Again, those usual suspects are seizing what they think is an opportunity to get everyone in the world locked in their homes again. I don't understand their obsession with lockdowns. They were a necessary evil in 2020 and earlier part of this year, now they are, at least for the UK, completely unnecessary.
Some ominous reportage, however
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
That isn't going to make a difference because the virus has animal reservoirs now. Even if we vaccinated every single human three times, there are billions of wild and domesticated animals which have it as well.
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
That's less cheering
So, in your opinion, a vax mandate like Austria's - coming in Feb 22 - is pointless?
We're talking across problems here. Austria and other countries may make vaccines mandatory to ensure they relieve pressure on medical facilities, not to eliminate the chance of any future mutations. The first is a valid issue and while I don't agree with mandatory vaccines, it is something countries can turn to in an attempt to reduce the number of hospitalisations. On mutations, the die is cast and the virus already seems to have a common evolutionary pathway so it's not exactly an unknown quantity either.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
But the Woke do not do debate. That's the whole bloody point. They impose their belief, heresy is not allowed, and blasphemy will get you cancelled. That is one way it is akin to a religion.
You don't seem to have been cancelled.
He'd love it though, wouldn't he?
Well it can be a boost for a foaming reactionary's career. We've seen this a few times.
Pretty bloody ropey after my Moderna booster jab. Seriously sore and frozen arm, general malaise and fatigue. Much worse than AZ, which caused a tiny bit of tenderness in the shoulder...
That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID.
I am now near-certain that I did have Covid way back in January 2020, caught in Thailand. That's what Public Health England thought, that's why they sent me to be tested in UCLH, tho a SNAFU prevented any actual test
It would also explain why I haven't caught Covid since, despite taking many risks in recent months: pubs, bars, restaurants, planes, the works
"That's a sign that you've probably previously had COVID."
Is it? First I've heard of that idea.
Yes it has been punted before, by proper scientists, tho there are also other explanations, ofc
Hey, my Chemistry degree still just about qualifies me as a "proper scientist" just not a practicing one.
You never lose the scientific training.
You know a junior asked me earlier this year whether or not I thought my degree was useful, I was going to say "not really" as always but actually after having a short think about it, I think it is pretty useful. Not the chemistry because fuck that noise, but the methodology of being a scientist and being open to any and all criticism of a theory, idea or model. I think a lot of our more public scientists, especially those in iSAGE, seem to have forgotten that a big part of science is having regular retrospectives on current theories vs real life data. It's something I've noticed myself doing over the course of this pandemic, go back on old ideas and make sure they are still relevant.
Too many of the public scientific advisors aren't doing that exercise right now. Just today I read that some SAGE scientists are calling for the immediate implementation of plan b, despite there being not very much evidence to support that. They're stuck in a timeloop of a political agenda that lockdown measures are the only way to combat this. I'm sure when Germany, France and other major European countries go into a full lockdown in two weeks those same voices will condemn the government as irresponsible and callous for not doing the same here and in the process completely ignore the available real world data on infection rates, testing and hospitalisation.
Agree - and it can have very real world consequences - take the AIDS pandemic - no one had to explain to Thatcher the horrors of exponential growth in an infection - something the current incumbent seemed to have difficulty getting his head around.
Favourite observations on science "Many a grand beautiful theory has been destroyed by a single ugly fact" (yes, iSAGE, I'm looking at you - and these aren't "single" facts but whole battalions of them.)
And of the French (which may be playing a part in the NI problems) - "it's all very well it working in practice - but does it work in theory?" I fear the EU are hung up on the theory of the integrity of the single market, ignoring the practical solutions and the ramifications of their absolutism.
"Students at Washington’s Catholic University of America seek to remove George Floyd Jesus"
"Students at a Catholic university are petitioning to remove a “heretical” painting that depicts George Floyd as Jesus.
"Mama, by Kelly Latimore, shows Floyd being cradled by a maternal figure and evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture of Mary and Jesus after the crucifixion."
So you're on the side of those in favour of cancellations?
Cancellation culture is good now?
I am shocked! Shocked! At this revelation. 😱
It is genuinely fascinating how Woke is infesting the Christian church. And again it is an uncanny echo of Christianity's own genesis
When the early Christians wished to convert some heathen tribe, they often kept the pagan shrines intact, and simply imposed their own symbols and buildings thereupon, thus absorbing the spiritual power of the Old Faith into the New. That's why so many churches in the UK and beyond are built on pagan sites, which can sometimes still be recognised - yew trees are a telling presence. The same happened with Gods - Isis nursing Horus became Mother Mary nursing the baby Jesus.
Turning George Floyd into Jesus is Wokeness doing to Christianity what Christianity did to Zeus, Woden, Osiris and Valhalla. A pleasing symmetry, but a menacing development, which completely vindicates the prediction made in that superb Spectator essay by an ex PB-er
Leaving aside the George Floyd Jesus it is a good thing there are more black Jesus images, especially as the average Christian worldwide is more likely to be black than white now in the 21st century.
Jesus himself was Middle Eastern not European of course
SOCIALISM = RELIGION
therefore:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
What utter rubbish, when the main socialist nations left on earth eg North Korea, China and Cuba are headed by atheists and religion actually means less reliance on state welfare with more religious provision instead.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
Socialism IS a religion in itself.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
I don't think any sensible definition of the 'equals' sign allows your post to make sense.
To be fair to Sunil Prasannan point, believing in Marxism is not so that different than believing in Scientology? Marxism is supposed to be scientific?
Though my understanding of dialectic as in Dialectical Marxism is argumentative and contrarian, which to me doesn’t make the phrase much sense
Yes, but all religious people are not Socialists.
That’s true. But surely Sunil’s argument is should they be?
We sit through sermons saying “ Christ calls us to fill with empathy and fellow feeling, to be able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. To feel their cold, to feel their hunger. To bear their hardship. Yes. Our Christian faith demands deeds not just words. A calling is not just within the walls of church or abbey, it is the life and community in which a congregation resides; not just this moment, but always. Our sweet hour of prayer actually lasts the whole week long, to put our faith in action is more than just individual salvation, this our collective salvation: to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, house the homeless, not a call for isolated charity… this is the imperative of a loving community. And so our calling is to be for all eternity.”
Not really paying attention, All the time thinking how quickly we can get away to go shopping and buy ourselves things?
Comments
Abbott 37%, McConaughey 27%, O'Rourke 26%
https://nypost.com/2021/11/22/matthew-mcconaughey-ahead-of-abbott-beto-in-texas-gov-race/
As for the question, I don't think there's any proven correlation between symptomatic reaction to the vaccines and individual immunity.
Socialism is state control of most of the economy, please check your definition next time, it has zilch to do with religion
So... the people tasked with tax enforcement are to be housed in a building owned by major Tory donors via a shell company registered in a tax haven. They're just trolling us now, aren't they?
We need to focus on the tolerance of violence in society generally. If we succeed women will be amongst the beneficiaries. As will men, of course.
I now feel like I've been personally poisoned by Vladimir Putin
Seriously. That's what it feels like, that's the closest analogy. Like some bizarre poisoning
No means No! At minimum they can wait 15 years for their second like Quebec (which was still a No by the way), Leavers had to wait 41 years for their second EU referendum after the 1975 EEC referendum
To those Nats who want an indyref2 now in the words of the late Reverend Paisley 'Never, Never, Never!!'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8W6dZW218c
My wife really, really struggled to feed both our children. It happens to a certain proportion of women but there is so much dogma attached now to "breast is best" that when faced with the need to go for an alternative, it is very hard to get objective information on what alternatives to go for etc
We found there is very little in the way of support for people who can't breastfeed - and immense pressure of "oh you just need to keep at it" as if we hadn't tried that already.
We used to cal this ‘debate’, or even ‘freedom of speech’.
We have elections and people choose what they want to vote for. If they choose to revisit an issue that was deemed settled in the past, even just two years ago, then that's their choice.
Its called democracy. You might want to familiarise yourself with the concept and it isn't a "gift".
No nation can endure such a constant endangerment, it's bad for business, for a start
Quebec waited a generation: 15 years, they have not had one since. That is the correct timescale
But you and I are never going to agree on this, and you have never been known to change your mind, so I suggest we talk about something less boring. Even my state of post-vax malaise is more interesting than this endlessly repeating debate
Anyway, I hope that Epping Conservative Association is planning to do some charity outreach during the cold days to come. Take HYUFD out harrumphing on a cold evening and he will generate sufficient heat to keep at least 3 homeless people warm.
Certainly constant demands for divorce are not helpful, especially when it was already agreed to stay together once only a few years ago, divorce should be a last resort
France breaks no treaty by allowing them to board the boat, nor any international law, nor any French law.
Therefore it is legitimate to say:
RELIGION = SOCIALISM!
We also falsely assume all migrants prefer to come here, that is certainly not true, many prefer Germany, the US or Scandinavia, and I would be surprised if others don't prefer countries either more local to them or with similar climates and cultures. In our media we nearly only see the migrants desperate to come here, and assume there is something unique about here that makes them want to come. We are high on the list of desirable countries but not particularly unique.
The reason COVID is so deadly is that it is almost perfectly adapted to the ACE-2 receptor and it enters the cell by using the spike protein which binds with very, very high efficiency to those ACE-2 sites on human cells. That's not something we normally see with this kind of virus, hence the "novel"Coronavirus name at the beginning, it was essentially a completely new type of coronavirus with ACE-2 binding. The reason all of our vaccines, AZ, Pfizer, Moderna and others, are still so highly effective is that they essentially replicate the same ACE-2 receptor sites but in neutralising antibodies which allows them to bind very efficiently to the virus in the bloodstream before they enter (m)any cells.
If the virus mutates to an extent that antibodies can no longer bind to the spike protein with the same high efficiency as now, it means the spike protein will also not easily bind to the ACE-2 site present on human cells. If it can't easily bind to the ACE-2 site then it can't put it's genetic material into the cell and create virus replication factories out of those cells.
One of the Delta subvariants seems to have a minor mutation to the spike protein that has decreased ACE-2 binding efficiency by a small amount and this seems to have actually made it less deadly, it's looking like the first example of the viral evolutionary path leading to a more transmissive but less deadly variation. Happily that subvariant still has very good binding efficiency to neutralising antibodies so there's nothing to worry about in regards to immunity.
Anyway, that's the extent of my understanding on the subject, my speciality in chemistry was very much on the other side of it in creating novel types of semi-conductor!
If he does run as a Dem, then his numbers would probably slide.
On the 'constant demands' thing, how many Scottish indy referendums have there been in the last 314 years?
If people decide they don't want to be constantly bothered by new referenda, if they think "oh not another one" then they can vote against the party pledging to have one at the next election.
That is what happened with Quebec. The Quebecois voted down the second referendum and then ultimately voted out the PQ who have never won a majority this century.
Would he ever have heard the word Jesus in his life, or only Yeshua?
Twitter is actually being quite reasonable on this variant - lots of people agreeing with you re low transmissibility. But there are the usual suspects crying FIRE, and they have blue ticks. Irresponsible
Who do you think you are? Boris Johnson?
One reason for the focus on violence against women is that it is not a fair fight - in the sense that a man's superior strength will almost always overwhelm a woman. That is not the case with male on male violence. There is something peculiarly abhorrent about violence directed at a weaker party. It is one reason, for instance, that we find violence against children particularly shocking.
Two: violence against women is often accompanied by sexual violence as well. That is very very much less likely to be the case with male on male violence.
Three: domestic violence against women is a good indicator of other more serious forms of violence, specifically, terrorist violence. There have been studies showing this. It is often a warning sign of someone susceptible to radicalisation.
Four: male on male violence is largely a young man's game. But violence against women does not stop with age. Again, attacks on weaker and older women seem to me to be particularly revolting.
So we should pay far more attention to it than we do. And we need to pay far more attention to male behaviour, what drives me to violence, why and and the images, messaging, lessons that men are taught and see around them.
You object to one religion yet back the other?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnlIWpZSPXU
Surely time for this programme - I'm a Celeb - to ask itself some questions.
By the way, no matter how bad you feel, any comparisons to being in a ring with Mike Tyson are way off the mark.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=of7MCZZYLOU
Though my understanding of dialectic as in Dialectical Marxism is argumentative and contrarian, which to me doesn’t make the phrase much sense
Sometimes the most common of blooms can still delight.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2021/11/hamiltons-favourite-should-he-be.html
Been thinking of expanding/shifting my bloggery into more news and views (still be doing tips but might dial that back).
Her constant demands for divorce are not helpful
/woke
Our experience was similar, we ended up with my wife and our eldest daughter both in the hospital but we got some really nasty remarks from some of the younger (and more dogmatic it seems) people working there especially. It was only when we were eventually seen by the head of the unit who was quite reassuring that things became more pleasant, until then we were treated almost like we were deliberately starving our child.
As a first time parent its quite intimidating and nobody ever does anything to prepare you for that possibility. Instead its nine months of "breast is best" dogma but nothing about "what about if you can't?"
When we struggled with the second child feeding again we were much quicker and much more confident to switch to the bottle. Breast may be best, but bottle is better than not feeding.
"Scientists have discovered a new variant of coronavirus with "extremely long branches" and "high amount of spike mutations" that may not be stopped by existing vaccines."
https://twitter.com/SkyNewsAust/status/1463694460626235399?s=20
IF this new variant proves to be dangerous - a mighty IF - then I reckon the pressure for mandatory jabs worldwide will become irresistible, because as long as there are unvaxxed people there is a greater chance of new variants. Worldwide vax mandates will be extremely provocative. Brace
Of course we all hope this is a scare story
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/nov/25/us-libraries-report-spike-in-organised-attempts-to-ban-books-in-schools
This bit was particularly hilarious/depressing (delete as appropriate)
"...while a southern Pennsylvania district banned a lengthy list of titles almost entirely by or about people of colour, by acclaimed authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X Kendi. (The all-white school board said it was coincidence that almost all the material banned was by or about people of colour.)"
And once again, I'm generally very wary of any unscientific reporting of variants and mutations. Sky News exists to drive clicks to their websites or get people watching their news, they give no fucks about the truth.
Breast is absolutely best. If you can breastfeed its benefits both mother and baby.
And if you can't the mother is not a failure. Is not inferior. Is not a problem.
The problem is absolutism on both sides. In this as with so many other things...
So, in your opinion, a vax mandate like Austria's - coming in Feb 22 - is pointless?
Prof Francois Balloux
@BallouxFrancois
·
25m
OK, it looks like we may have a Nu Variant of Concern on our hands ... 😕
Let's wait for lab tests on antibody binding efficiency first.
Now. Not next month. Not after that trade trip that must happen because Brexit or whatever this time's excuse is.
"'There was no evidence that this virus arose naturally.'
Journalist Sherri Markson is the author of What Really Happened in Wuhan, a book featuring documents exposing China’s early cover-up of the virus and fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors and eyewitness accounts."
https://twitter.com/GMB/status/1443099370052853760?s=20
Didn't Cleopatra actually bother to learn Egyptian, which was an unusual thing for those of her line?
Favourite observations on science "Many a grand beautiful theory has been destroyed by a single ugly fact" (yes, iSAGE, I'm looking at you - and these aren't "single" facts but whole battalions of them.)
And of the French (which may be playing a part in the NI problems) - "it's all very well it working in practice - but does it work in theory?" I fear the EU are hung up on the theory of the integrity of the single market, ignoring the practical solutions and the ramifications of their absolutism.
We sit through sermons saying “ Christ calls us to fill with empathy and fellow feeling, to be able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes. To feel their cold, to feel their hunger. To bear their hardship. Yes. Our Christian faith demands deeds not just words. A calling is not just within the walls of church or abbey, it is the life and community in which a congregation resides; not just this moment, but always. Our sweet hour of prayer actually lasts the whole week long, to put our faith in action is more than just individual salvation, this our collective salvation: to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, house the homeless, not a call for isolated charity… this is the imperative of a loving community.
And so our calling is to be for all eternity.”
Not really paying attention, All the time thinking how quickly we can get away to go shopping and buy ourselves things?