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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » London Calling. The clash over the Tory candidate in London
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » London Calling. The clash over the Tory candidate in London
? Exclusive: Shaun Bailey, the Tory candidate for London mayor, has lost the support of senior party officials and donors.Some are keen to see him replaced by a prominent name – such as former chancellor Sajid Javid.Latest with @GeorgeWParker https://t.co/kAGkRW4yvg
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Johnson’s team would have been more concerned still if they had known the details of a recent conversation between a senior member of the Sage advisory group of scientists and a representative of one of Britain’s leading business groups. “We have had enough of being treated as human shields by the prime minister,” the scientist complained.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/boris-johnson-is-tied-up-in-knots-over-the-coronavirus-7t6h9jl3z
A modelling framework to assess the likely effectiveness of facemasks in combination with ‘lock-down’ in managing the COVID-19 pandemic
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0376
... Here, we report the results of two mathematical models and show that facemask use by the public could make a major contribution to reducing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our intention is to provide a simple modelling framework to examine the dynamics of COVID-19 epidemics when facemasks are worn by the public, with or without imposed ‘lock-down’ periods. Our results are illustrated for a number of plausible values for parameter ranges describing epidemiological processes and mechanistic properties of facemasks, in the absence of current measurements for these values. We show that, when facemasks are used by the public all the time (not just from when symptoms first appear), the effective reproduction number, Re, can be decreased below 1, leading to the mitigation of epidemic spread. Under certain conditions, when lock-down periods are implemented in combination with 100% facemask use, there is vastly less disease spread, secondary and tertiary waves are flattened and the epidemic is brought under control. The effect occurs even when it is assumed that facemasks are only 50% effective at capturing exhaled virus inoculum with an equal or lower efficiency on inhalation. Facemask use by the public has been suggested to be ineffective because wearers may touch their faces more often, thus increasing the probability of contracting COVID-19. For completeness, our models show that facemask adoption provides population-level benefits, even in circumstances where wearers are placed at increased risk. At the time of writing, facemask use by the public has not been recommended in many countries, but a recommendation for wearing face-coverings has just been announced for Scotland. Even if facemask use began after the start of the first lock-down period, our results show that benefits could still accrue by reducing the risk of the occurrence of further COVID-19 waves. We examine the effects of different rates of facemask adoption without lock-down periods and show that, even at lower levels of adoption, benefits accrue to the facemask wearers. These analyses may explain why some countries, where adoption of facemask use by the public is around 100%, have experienced significantly lower rates of COVID-19 spread and associated deaths. We conclude that facemask use by the public, when used in combination with physical distancing or periods of lock-down, may provide an acceptable way of managing the COVID-19 pandemic and re-opening economic activity. These results are relevant to the developed as well as the developing world, where large numbers of people are resource poor, but fabrication of home-made, effective facemasks is possible...
If, as is reported, the Chief Nursing Officer isn't being given the (doubtful) honour of flanking a Minister at the daily Covid Press Conference because she wasn't sufficiently supportive (or something) of Cummings, and Prof. van Tam hasn't been back since taking a similar stance, is one surprised?
Ladbrokes offers 1/5 Sadiq and 6/1 against Shaun Bailey so, as with the Presidential betting, there is a priced-in assumption one or both men might not stand next May, otherwise you could back both for a profit.
How many more days of riots over the summer, before the incumbent mayor starts to feel the heat politically?
The arguments against masks look to have been fairly comprehensively knocked down. Given it’s a simple and low cost intervention, which is both effective on its own, and additive to any other intervention, I don’t get the lack of enthusiasm for them.
(edit) And, of course, least economically disruptive.
Or outright hostility...
https://twitter.com/bungdan/status/1271861460407160832
https://twitter.com/DrTomFrieden/status/1271850296101285888
Most of the arguments against them are either supply issues (governments wanted to prevent panic buying of them during the early stages, when they were needed urgently for clinical settings) and user training issues (people wearing disposable paper masks for a week, not washing re-usable masks etc).
AIUI they're being made compulsory on London transport (and handed out for free) so we should be seeing an uptick in mask use in crowded environments in the UK - certainly lots of masks visible among the various groups of protesters in the news yesterday.
Then, yes, there's the USA - where many people are hyper-partisan, contrarian, individualistic and completely distrustful of authority, a mindset not really suited to dealing with a pandemic on a number of levels.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#definition-of-hcid
Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.
Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment
And Thailand, in spite of it's large Chinese-related population and proximity to China, has relatively few cases.
Interesting that they seem to use "Britisher" not "Brit".
https://atom.bamptonarchive.org/uploads/r/null/7/e/0/7e0d35405512ae7d0ad1c98fc2094e47396eedf1896c23bcfd8a6a5e427d85e5/Instructions_for_American_Servicemen_in_Britain_1942.pdf
Many of the larger states (Texas, Florida) are already re-opening themselves quite dramatically, one Texan comedy club re-opened on Friday for example - not much evidence of social distancing or mask wearing here, in a small and crowded venue that's probably one of the most likely places to spread a virus around. IMO comedy clubs and nightclubs should be the very last places to re-open.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXihNDsoqtE
The re-openings in the Southern states seem to be in the face of as yet inadequate testing and tracking, and a relatively high rate of ongoing new infections.
It has proved the behavioural scientists right - for at least some populations - that lockdowns can’t be tolerated for any length of time.
If there's one thing likely to change my sympathies and bring me out onto the streets, it's targeting him.
Which is precisely why some are, of course.
Osborne I would be tempted by if Shaun Bailey were hit by a bus. But not Javid. That’s somebody in the Tory party being stupid.
Try it yourself.
I know nothing about them being handed out for free though.
He’s been on the London Assembly for five years, but no-one has found anything notable he has done there to add to the article. Under political views there are just a few fragmentary thoughts about links between childhood sexual activity and crime.
That’s it. DYOR.
However, if there is not clear guidance on where to get them, you wonder how effective punitive fines will be.
(Yes, I know it’s very patronising to suggest people are incapable of finding that out themselves. Unfortunately, it’s also true.)
IIRC he is somewhere expat. Out East?
HYUFD will have a fit.
Wonder how it'd be reported if a mob entirely obscuring their identities showed up and attacked police.
"A protest has taken place in London. We're waiting to discover the political affiliation of the protesters to find out if the protest was largely peaceful, or mostly violent."
https://twitter.com/dizzy_thinks/status/1272054315855814656
Turns out submitting to mob rule encourages mobs. Gasp!
Edited extra bit: weird thing just confirmed. Google 'British Prime Ministers' and you get mugshots of them. Except Churchill who has a blank space. Apparently his image is verboten.
So. Fucking. Stupid.
The media and big platforms are utterly complicit in this.
Masks are on sale in supermarkets and pharmacies, cost $15 for 50 or $0.5 each. Anyone working has to be provided them by their employer.
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-12/transport-secretary-grant-shapps-leads-government-s-daily-coronavirus-press-conference/
1) The ‘mask’ is a ‘face covering’ and a scarf would do.
2) There will be face coverings handed out at key hubs - I imagine that means major railway and bus stations.
So there is method in this.
Penalty for failing to observe on being given warning - £100.
https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1270711809905790976
“If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you [Mussolini] from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism."
(Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini)
So the equivalent of say £250 here vs income.
They've taken advantage of tens of thousands of people whose hearts are in the right place and genuinely want to help do something to end racism, and build a better future.
So far, they've raised almost a million pounds through their website.
This is a huge injection of funds that will fund their anti-capitalist, anti-western and radical identity politics campaigns for years and years to come.
They can argue it's all legitimate because it's all set out publicly on their website, and it is. But any criticism of it is met with a chorus of "you're either with racists, or against them", which is quite brilliant when you think about it. It leaves people nowhere to go.
Don't give your money to them. Give it to grassroots community charities only.
However, to quote Robert Blake, ‘he was right about Hitler, and that mattered more than anything else in 1940.’
Turns out normalising political violence, bowing down to far left idiots, and submitting to mob rule and desecration of history isn't terribly clever. As predicted by everybody with enough of a backbone not to get down on their knees before a cause that thinks capitalism and Churchill are evil.
But enough such that you know about it.
Two consistent "glitches" not very likely imo.
Idiots like you are part of the problem.
You applaud any symbol of the British state that is attacked, because you are a fanatical nationalist - regardless of who it is and excuse those who do it - because of your simplistic enemy of my enemy is my friend attitude.
You know not what you unleash. You are storing up hell for yourself for the future.
And this is an administrative fine from a policeman, every expat has a national ID card so it will simply be added to your record next time you need to interact with the government. If you want to challenge it, expect to turn up in court with your own lawyer and translator, so always easier just to pay it.
As you might expect, observance is high
Somewhat more difficult to enforce in more liberal jurisdictions such as the UK though, and almost impossible in somewhere like the USA - where there would be an organised campaign to clog up the courts with appeals and primary any politician who was involved in the process.
And then he woke up..
Churchill later said if he had to pick between two unpalatable alternatives of communism or fascism he'd, reluctantly, choose communism as the lesser of two evils.
Funny how that one doesn't get much of a look in at times like this.
No...
But he was right about what really mattered when it mattered and did what needed to be done, which the whole world benefited from in the short, medium and long term.
That makes him a great man.
How the police react to the next far left march of the iconoclasts may well determine whether this escalation continues or things start to calm.
If Britain had been knocked out or pacified in 1940 then no meaningful level of Arctic conveys could have got to the Soviet Union, a fifth to a quarter of Axis divisions wouldn't have been preoccupied defending western Europe from British agitation and incursion and you could have forgotten the Americans coming in to save Europe from Nazism.
And a Nazi victory supreme in Europe wouldn't have stopped there.
Unless they really do want a full-blown culture war, which some do of course.
There's nothing better calculated to piss off a majority of British moderate opinion and turn them against the movement.
https://twitter.com/triggerpod
It's quite amazing how much independent content online is now so much better that what is available through more mainstream channels.
We have comedians like Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin who have turned long-form interviews into an art form not seen in a world of five-minute shouting matches on TV, and independent journalists like Tim Pool in the US who can see and explain both sides of almost any story - in sharp contrast to the openly biased news networks over there.
The huge difference in the last few years, is that these independents can now make a good living from publishing their own content (although they all have very strong opinions about technology platforms and freedom of speech).
Topped with the likes of Peston's rambling opinions and regurgitated rumour-mongering and Maitlis kindly using her taxpayer-funded platform to let us know her own very important views.
Also the difference in tone from the BBC to describe the two groups is absurd.
Do they take us all for idiots?
Of course the Cultural Revolution had nothing to do with the Four Olds. It was Mao’s way of hitting back and regaining power, and particularly of getting at Liu and Deng for daring to have been right about how incompetent he was.
Whether Halifax's 'negotiated peace' would have worked we'll never know. Hitler would still have attacked Russia.
The worrying thing is that the bosses of Peston, Kuenessburg and Rigby obviously think they've been doing a good job. Although even the BBC have had to admit that the Maitlis diatribe against the government was somewhat out of order.
As someone who works in IT and has a keen interest in aviation, almost every single MSM report on those technical fields contains many and often serious inaccuracies, yet I am somehow expected to take the rest of their content - where I am wanting them to inform me - as gospel? On subjects like epidemiology?
As I've said many times before, the government briefings should have been attended by scientific journalists, and that still holds. Having political journalists, mostly still very sore from Brexit, lead the questioning is worse than useless when it comes to actually informing the public, but does a great job for their own egos.
Even now, with the emergence from lockdown much more political by nature than going into lockdown, there's still no genuinely critical thinking going on within the media, and international comparisons are only being made as reasons to attack the government. Why is no-one asking why in the UK school reopening has become a political issue because of activist unions, whereas elsewhere in the world schools are already back open?
Watching from afar, it appears that only in the UK and USA are the media so unthinkingly critical of government in the face of a pandemic, in most other countries there is much more of a war spirit and a collective wish to get things back to normal.
Anyway, only 21 days now until the first Grand Prix of the season. Nyyooommmm!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
It's definitely worth asking Google for an explanation though, even if it's more likely to be cock-up than conspiracy.
Poland accidentally invading Czechia last month caught my eye too!
We counted five errors in six lines.
Turns out the law should be enforced and enforced equally. If only people had said...
Interestingly Halifax himself wasn’t considered an arch appeaser. He isn’t mentioned in Guilty Men, for example. He was the key driver of the guarantee to Poland. He also became Churchill’s deputy for a brief time after Chamberlain’s death. There is a suggestion that he wanted to make peace not because he was sympathetic to Hitler, whom he knew well and despised utterly* but because he believed Britain had no choice and that the war was over. In this he proved, fortunately, to be wrong, but it wasn’t a ridiculous position at the time.
*Oddly though - and it says much about him and not in a good way - he rather liked Goebbels.