Awol

I get that, same as renaming the army bases to get away from the Confederacy connections. Just saying there’s a way of doing things in a civilised society. Either you have the framework of law within which people debate and ultimately democracy rules, or you have anarchy, might is right and the world of Hobbes.

In 2008 Obama one of the policies Obama ran on was opposition to gay marriage. It’s now a social consensus that gay marriage isn’t an issue at all. That’s an evolution in what we, as society, considers to be the correct moral position. By the logic of these protests Obama should be condemned as a vile homophobe. Any other good that he did is irrelevant. Context doesn’t matter. We, here and now, will sit in judgement on people operating in a different time, to a different set of values. Wrenching people’s actions from their historical context and judging them by today’s mores and fashions is morally extremist, intellectually bankrupt, and needs calling out for what it is. If people want to have discussions about the past, what it meant, and whether on balance It is appropriate to have statue X on a plinth, or book Y in a library that’s great, moves society forward by consensus and actually serves a purpose. Scumbags appointing themselves the moral arbiters of society, then doing whatever they chose ‘because feelings’ can get to feck. If it happens again I hope they are dealt with robustly. They don’t own society, our history or our public spaces.

BLM stated goals - from their own website: overthrow the nuclear family and replace it with a commune structure built around the ‘movement‘; defund the police; overthrow capitalism. Yep, Marxist AF, hiding behind a facade of racial justice and useful idiots.

When is George Washington coming down? Jefferson? Maddison? Hopefully every statue of every figure who lived before WW2 can get in the sea, so a minority of emotionally stunted Marxists can satisfy their lust to impose modern morality on the past, retrospectively. What a bunch of absolute tools these people are.

I see the constitutional innovation of governance by Antifa is off to a good start in Seattle:

This is... interesting: When the People’s Daily is warning of a “potential second wave” in China, it means there’s already a second wave in China. Lockdown is a pause button, not a solution. Our government is trying to frame the reduction in the R0 as if we’re changing the behaviour of the virus, but we’re only limiting its ability to transmit. Out of lockdown the R0 remains 2.5 - 3.5 by most estimates. Masks, masks, masks. We can’t remain locked down forever and there’s no other way (yet) to control exponential spread except permanent lockdown, which is economic suicide. I’d really like a journalist to raise this point: Why aren’t we setting up the infrastructure to make masks in UK?

Corbyn’s mentalist brother has been arrested there today.

As long as everyone else stays away from them, I’m failing to see the downside. Was surprised to hear Jonathan Sumption arguing against the look down the other day, but aside from Peter Hitchens who makes a living off being a contrarian, I’ve not heard anyone serious arguing that it’s wrong.

Unless or until domestic production capacity is established (by government, not improvised ad-hoc with private sector firms) this problem isn’t going away. We need 10’s of millions of masks per day being produced and distributed to enable a ‘safe’ easing of lockdown. I’ve not seen any indication that this is happening.

For once I'm actually gratefully to be living in Scotland. Schools break at end of June for summer and Sturgeon has made it clear no one is going back in before then. Also noticed this Kawasaki syndrome starting to increasing where kids have a very nasty auto-immune reaction after beating Covid. Thing is it can manifest 6 weeks after being initially infected. It's rare at the moment but I'll be less concerned if its still rare in 6 weeks time.

I would hope they’d still be present (if they were there in the first place) and I don’t know if they would provide lasting/any immunity. No one does yet. Edit: obviously the same goes for anyone who has or thinks they may have already had it. The fact there now seems to be a reliable test is the rather more important bit.

This doesn’t look great though.

Yep, you, me and a few others had this conversation about 100 pages ago. I remember b/c neither of us could drink on Christmas Day!

If antibodies are present yes, because that’s when I was sick.

Times and Telegraph both carrying the story that Roche have developed a 100% accurate anti body test. Porton Down have checked and approved it, PHE talking to Roche. Hopefully we can soon get a handle on how many people have actually had the virus. Now very curious to know if I had it last December.

My bold: Agreed. I think the stock market is only holding up for now because funds can’t just sit on cash. They need to invest and there’s almost nowhere else (including sovereign bonds) to put money and make a return.

Strategy for a Pandemic: The UK & Covid 19 Article by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman drawn mostly from the primary SAGE sources, so the actual advice the government based its decisions on. He’s got no political affiliation/axe to grind and is always worth a read - full article (52 pages) linked through the above. First little bit below:

Government: You can meet your mother in the park, if she’s on her own and wearing a hat. Also Government: You can have a child minder and/or a cleaner inside your home, if you open a window. I thought transparency was supposed to apply to government actions, not motives? Not even trying to disguise the fact the rules are being written to suit middle class metropolitan types. No wonder Kier Starmer is staying onside.

How to solve a problem like Corona Government strategy on getting us out of ... everything. I’ve not read it yet (60 pages) so can’t quote from it, but linking for general info.

Some think they can do no right, others think they can do no wrong. The vast majority (imo) aren’t interested in partisan bickering but want reassurance there’s a clear plan being competently executed. That’s not the case right now.

The Nightingale hospitals are complete so the infrastructure is now ready to follow the policy they wanted to take from the beginning, but lacked the NHS capacity to pursue. It is true that we can’t suspend the economy indefinitely in the hope a vaccine comes through in 12-18 months, but the people who make that decision should be exposed to the same level of risk as everyone else. Only then will employers be forced to rigidly apply the kind of mitigation (PPE all round) necessary to minimize the chance of infection. If the whole country (including kids) wore masks it would be a different situation, as the Taiwanese have demonstrated. If that means longer in quarantine until it can be supplied, so be it. The German experience is showing how difficult coming out of lockdown will be unless everyone is masked up.

I didn’t expect all the details, I did expect it to be coherent. By next weekend expect polling to show they’ve just lost the benefit of the doubt with millions of people... ...then Hancock will go under the bus.

Too many of the great and the good need access to their summer homes in France, I can’t think of any other logical explanation. That briefing last night was absolute cake and arse. Given the time they’ve had to prepare for this the lack of clarity is unforgivable. UK is still running 16,000 new infections per day and the R rate in some places is still 0.9. Scientists are saying we now that down to 4,000 per day to give us any chance of controlling community spread by track and trace. Germany started easing off restrictions what, 7-10 days ago? The R there is already up to 1.1. From a lower base than us. We don’t have the head room yet to ease up on the current measures at all without tipping back into exponential growth in very short order. I think we’re now reaching the crunch point in that the Treasury can’t afford to keep bank-rolling the workforce and businesses will start to fail on mass if they can’t begin trading soon. On the flip-side, as soon as people start going back to work the virus will take off again. The lockdown has bought some time but hasn’t solved the central problem: either the country will grow broke (with all the implications for services across the board) or we accept a much higher number of deaths. Looks to me like we’re leaning towards the latter.

I wasn’t personally involved in the resurrection but still crack a chocolate egg at Easter. “You weren’t there, man” seems a pretty weak reason for chastising a historical commemoration. Agree it’s stupid to break social distancing, but as someone else has noted, all week the media (that Cruella De Vil looking tramp off Sky in particular) have been pushing the line that it’s all gonna be relaxed this weekend anyway. Subliminal sh*t stirring to manufacture a story. That’s a fair reason to get cross, but once you start throwing Brexit in it’s hard to believe that’s what your real beef is. It’s “them”, those people, those “words removed” again, f****** things up.

Racist little Englanders, innit? That’s why the well known British nationalist Emmanuel Macron was out celebrating it in Paris. It’s why the Russians will be celebrating (hard) tomorrow.... because it’s really all about white, middle class Brexit voters. The correlation between Anglophobia and EUphilia is uncanny - and Brexit Derangement Syndrome is a thing.