Sunday 4 October: The Government’s top-down approach is no way to tackle Covid

Posted on by Geoff Graham

An unofficial place to discuss the Telegraph letters, established when the DT website turned off its comments facility (now reinstated, but not as good as ours),
Intelligent, polite, good-humoured debate is welcome, whether on or off topic. Differing opinions are encouraged, but rudeness or personal attacks on other posters will not be tolerated (Jennifer – please note). Posts which – in the opinion of the moderators – make this a less than cordial environment, are likely to be removed, without prior warning.  Persistent offenders will be banned.

Today’s letters (visible only to DT subscribers) are here:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2020/10/03/letters-governments-top-down-approach-no-way-tackle-covid/

840 thoughts on “Sunday 4 October: The Government’s top-down approach is no way to tackle Covid”

  2. Coronavirus news – live: UK records 12,000 new cases in highest-ever rise, amid hopes for vaccine by Easter. 4 October 2020.

    Every adult in the UK could receive a coronavirus vaccination as early as Easter under plans to roll out the jab at record speeds, new reports suggest.

    Scientists working on an inoculation at Oxford University are hoping it will be ready and approved by the end of this year.
    Once that is done, government officials believe they will be able to get the vaccine to all 53 million British adults in less than six months and potentially as quick as three.

    Morning everyone They are creeping me out with all this talk about a vaccine! How can they be so sure that there is going to be one? I’m not taking the damn thing if it does appear!

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/coronavirus-news-live-uk-update-latest-cases-deaths-today-lockdown-b754160.html

    1. Good morning, Minty.

      I doubt it will affect us; we are still
      being told by our Surgery that it has
      yet to finalise the ‘logistics’ for the
      current flu jabs … in the mean-time
      the Village Chemist is doing a great
      job, vaccinating sessions take place
      each day with an open session on
      Tuesday mornings.

      1. Good morning Garlands, we have a small Boots branch in the village, and we had our flu jabs done with ease , no phaffing around at the Doctor’s surgery .

      2. Good morning, Garlands. Off topic, I am trying to find your email in order to send you mine as you requested last night. As you may recall from previous posts, when my inbox got “jammed” a few months ago, I had to delete all of my kept emails (over half a million) so a “Search” on current emails sent and received was unsuccessful this morning. I have been methodically looking through my email address book this morning. All my contacts are labelled, for example, John Smith and Mary Brown. If two such people post on the NoTTL site as “Giraffe” and “Kitten” then I would still list them as John Smith and Mary Brown, but I would also note lower down the page that these two post as “Giraffe” and “Kitten” on the NoTTL site. So “Simon Jones” would have a note appended to say that he posts on the NoTTL site as “Peddy the Viking” (obviously Simon Jones is not the real name of Peddy – I would not reveal such information without his permission).

        Searching for “Garlands” in the email Address Book does not reveal any results, so I am slowly going through the entire list to see if I can spot you. This is a slow process as I have so many contacts and so far I have not found you (I have reached the letter D after a thorough search through A, B and C. Bear with me and I shall continue the search in the days ahead.

        PS – There is a NoTTLer who keeps a record of everyone’s email as long as they agree to this. I believe it is a female, but exactly who it is I don’t recall. If you know who she is, you can contact her and I am sure that she will help you to find me. I am happy for her to do this on my behalf.

          1. Thanks, Sos. So, Garlands, if you know Hertslass’s email address just ask her to send you my details.

      3. NHS in Scotland are in charge of flu jabs – some GPs have decided to do their own thing.
        My letter from NHS arrived – Thursday 22nd 17.30 at the local Town Hall
        My wife’ letter arrived by the same post = Saturday 24th, 18.00 in the Town Hall

        What would it have cost to add a few lines of code to enable 2 people from the same household to get appointments 5 mins apart?
        Governments & IT systems that work seemingly do not mix.

        1. Good morning Falkirkbairn! I posted last night about not using local surgeries and having all to troop off to Falkirk Town Hall, and the general consensus was that they wouldn’t be able to infect enough people if it was done locally! See you at the Cooncil!

    2. Indeed. A vaccine rushed out as quickly as possible for political reasons? Nein Danke!

    3. Morning Minty and all. The drip drip drip of talk about a vaccine being ready very soon is becoming as relentless as the “save the NHS, stay alert, save lives” original message, to soften everybody up to expect to be vaccinated. IMO There can not possibly be a vaccine produced this quickly that has been through the proper trials. And, indeed, there is a government site that talks about a vaccine being used that is unlicensed. I’m not sure how the PTB will “encourage” the public to trot along and have this jab but I’m not having it for as long as I have a say in the matter.

      1. It’s as if TPTB have decided to forget about thalidomide (and/or any other treatments ushered in without a full array of testing, such as blood donations during the HIV/AIDS scourge in the 1980s).

        The usual case of ‘lessons identified’ being mistakenly labelled as ‘lessons learned’.

        1. You are so right. IIRC the thalidomide scandal had repercussions that are still ongoing with a Trust having been set up to provide some compensation.

          However in the case of Covid19 the companies racing to come up with a vaccine have been given immunity from prosecution for adverse effects. So governments, I.e., taxpayers, would become liable for compensating anyone affected. And of course we all know how swiftly government moves in this kind of instance! Same as the NHS of course. First don’t admit liability, then argue against it for years in the courts – until the blasted patient goes away or dies!

          2. Yes. And btw another example of one rule for them, another for us, Re MPs’ pensions. They were all compensated when caught up with EL going under.

  3. News from The Rochdale Herald (It’s every bit as credible as anything written or presented in the MSM and in this instance probably more so):

    “Following reports that some people around the UK have been able to get a Coronavirus test the government has appointed the Bohemian novelist Franz Kafka to sort the service out.

    Mr Kafka will be responsible for redesigning the website, the booking system and ensuring that only people who don’t need a test can get access to one.

    “Mr Kafka’s expertise on incomprehensible bureaucracy, absurdity and existential dread clearly qualify him for this vital role.” A government spokes-hippo told the Rochdale Herald.

    “Obviously it’s vital that the UK doesn’t run out of Coronavirus tests, ensuring that nobody can access one is obviously the best way to ensure stocks last.”

    Mr Kafka has already rewritten some of the governments guidelines on testing “If you have symptoms you should try to get a test but please don’t go to a testing centre to get a test if you have symptoms because you should be isolating, but please don’t isolate unless you’ve had a positive Coronavirus test.”

    1. As clear as this grey soggy morning.
      I could take it better if the NHS was truthful: Fŭck off and die, you boring non-Covid patient.”

    1. DT seems to be in some trouble at the 3-5 day problem phase in the disease. the statements coming out are more guarded at the moment. I hope he gets over it but mustn’t get back to full speed too soon.

      2. We had a passport and a green card for the car if we drove. Otherwise we just needed a passport, which in those days could be a six-month one bought from the Post Office.

      1. Exacto (© Peddy). So if we Brits want in the future to travel to France, Spain, Italy, etc. the EU would make life difficult for holidaymakers in order to sabotage their countries’ foreign currency earning revenue?

        1. Probably the answer is ‘yes’. Never underestimate an EU buggin’s desire for revenge.
          Until the tumbrils roll up to Brussels.

  6. Good Moaning:
    A corker of a CV. One down, thousands to go. This is the departing head of the Electoral Commission.
    “Holmes was awarded the CMG in 1997 in the Resignation Honours List of former Prime Minister John Major for his service as Principal Private Secretary. In 1998 he was appointed CVO and in the New Year Honours of 1999 knighted KBE on the recommendation of Tony Blair on leaving the senior job at No 10.”

    1. ‘Morning, Anne.

      On a point of order re. this gentleman’s CVO. An appointment to any grade of the Royal Victorian Order is made by the Monarch alone – usually for some personal service – and no ministerial advice is involved.

      Not a lot of people know that…

      2. Duncan, you are really Maurice Micklewhite and I claim my five bob postal order.

        :-))

  8. Morning all.

    SIR – It is hardly surprising that the Prime Minister had trouble explaining the latest lockdown rules this week.

    As the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) discovered many years ago, it’s impossible to give instructions for every workplace activity. There are too many scenarios, too many variables and not enough warehouses in which to store the paperwork.

    So, instead of issuing top-down directives, the HSE reverted to requiring “method statements” and “risk assessments”, thereby relying on management and staff to apply common sense and bespoke solutions for their actions. The Government should do the same.

    Alan Arnaud

    Biggleswade, Bedfordshire

    SIR – It would be nice to know how the Prime Minister defines “defeating” Covid-19.

    Edward Jenner introduced the first successful vaccine ever developed, to protect against smallpox, in 1796. Smallpox was finally “defeated” in 1980. As it takes roughly 10 years to research, produce and distribute a safe and effective vaccine for any new communicable disease, we can therefore expect Covid-19 to be defeated in about 2214.

    Graham Low

    Malpas, Cheshire

    SIR – Memo to the Prime Minister: you don’t “fight” something by shutting yourself away from it.

    Phillip Crossland

    Driffield, East Yorkshire

    SIR – Like J N Sparks (Letters, September 27) – whose MP failed to answer questions about her scrutiny of the Government’s actions – I wrote to my MP, one of the “red wall” newcomers, asking whether the NHS would have adequate reserves of personal protective equipment, oxygen and other necessities in the event of a second wave.

    I received a bland reply stating that my query had been referred to Matt Hancock’s department, and that everything was under control. Not satisfied with this response, I went back to my MP. My second letter was just ignored.

    If problems do emerge in this area, ministers will have nowhere to hide. But how can I address the problem of my MP ducking difficult questions when the next election is such a long way off?

    Arthur Bayley

    Tyldesley, Lancashire

    SIR – Some years ago, there was an animated children’s series about the comic adventures of Huxley Pig (with all the characters brilliantly voiced by Martin Jarvis).

    I seem to recall that, while having a bit of a panic during one adventure, Huxley squealed the memorable couplet: “When in danger, when in doubt, / Run in circles, scream and shout.”

    Are members of the Government familiar with this show?

    Liz Grey Morgan

    Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire

  9. SIR – Dr Andrew Knights (Letters, September 27), a retired GP, was surprised that his offer to return was not followed up.

    Having also spent a lifetime in the NHS, I am not surprised. The bureaucracy is both inefficient and neglectful of patients. Even though the current circumstances are unique, Dr Knights’ experience is typical.

    On the same page, Jennifer Pearce mounts a passionate defence of the Government’s response to the coronavirus crisis, asserting that hospital provision has been assured for all. Unfortunately, she overlooks the NHS’s withdrawal of certain services – which has had sometimes fatal consequences – along with the significant delays to many treatments, for which the same deficient bureaucracy is to blame.

    S P Morris

    London W5

    SIR – Before lockdown, I volunteered as mental health peer support co-facilitator for a local charity.

    Mental health has for a long time been the Cinderella of the NHS. With a pandemic of psychological trauma about to be unleashed upon us, I approached the organisation to offer my services – only to be informed that no funds were available. Now that is depressing.

    Gordon Moser

    Barkingside, Essex

    1. In other words, Mr. Moser would sit in an office bossing other people about.
      None of that nasty business of coming into contact with actual patients.
      “My dear, the noise – the people.”

  10. SIR – The other week, I spent one hour waiting for the Dartford Crossing to be cleared of a broken-down lorry.

    During the summer I spent nine hours driving back from Cornwall to London on the A30 and A303 – dual carriageways that, at certain points, turn into single-lane roads, defeating the object of the dual carriageway.

    Why would any sensible Prime Minister approve HS2 before sorting out problems like these?

    Michael Sparrow

    Chingford, Essex

    1. HS2 was dictated from above. It’s part of a Europe-wide network of high speed rail links. Each local area seems to be protesting, but unaware of the grand plan.
      This is why I don’t trust Brexit – I see no change in strategy.

      1. I used to have my doubts about that line of thinking, but the fact that we’re still spending grillions on a transparently useless project tends to support it.

        1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#:~:text=Several%20countries%20%E2%80%94%20France%2C%20Spain%2C%20Italy%2C%20Germany%2C%20Austria%2C,are%20connected%20to%20a%20cross-border%20high-speed%20railway%20network.

          In 2007, a consortium of European railway operators, Railteam, emerged to co-ordinate and boost cross-border high-speed rail travel. Developing a Trans-European high-speed rail network is a stated goal of the European Union,
          and most cross-border railway lines receive EU funding. Several
          countries — France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Belgium, the
          Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom — are connected to a
          cross-border high-speed railway network.

  11. SIR – I have made three attempts to grow Cox’s Orange Pippin apple trees. Although the apples have been quite good, they are not the real thing.

    Has this variety joined the dinosaur, along with strong farm butter, high pheasant and other game, and the old English strawberry? The present generation can have no idea how good these things used to be.

    Neale Edwards

    Chard, Somerset

    2. I’ve heard it said that modern varieties aren’t the same as what used to be called a Cox. My parents used to rave about Coxes, I could never see what all the fuss was about.
      Maybe Mr Edwards should try a specialist orchard that has the old varieties?

  12. You will always miss your Aga……

    SIR – We used to live in a farmhouse, where we had inherited the previous owners’ ancient Aga (Letters, September 27), complete with dented lid where a workman had stood on it. One of our eight cats loved sleeping in the resulting 
well, with a tea towel to protect his nether regions.

    When we moved to our current home, one of our regrets was that we had no Aga. Then I heard that a neighbour was giving one away, and raced to stake my claim, beating other out-of-breath locals by seconds. It was lovingly reassembled and now our last remaining cat snuggles next to it on the floor, surrounded by sheets, towels and, yes, undies drying in our blissfully warm kitchen.

    Heaven. I just try not to think about the gas bill.

    Lesley Thompson

    Lavenham, Suffolk

    SIR – A friend has had much success drying her underwear by hanging 
it on deer antlers positioned near her Aga.

    S M Howgill

    Broadhembury, Devon

    1. Mrs. Mac has tried drying her underwear on deer antlers but the damn’ creatures would never stay still for long enough. At the slightest noise, or sudden movement, they were away to the hills carrying her smalls with them.
      :¬(

      1. If that is true, Duncan, how did Edwin Landseer get his animal to keep still for so long?

      2. Thank you Mr. Mac! I have a wonderful mental picture of the Monarch of the Glen trailing undies…….

    3. MOH had a Rayburn in Colwyn Bay. I, too, always fancied a Rayburn, so after we married we looked for a second hand one and found one for sale in the basement of an old house in Shrewsbury. We dismantled it and needed the help of a hefty chap to carry it up the steps and put it in my Landrover. The suspension, even with the thing dismantled, nearly hit the stops. I reassembled it and got a plumber to plumb it in and it was great. When my MiL died, we used the inheritance to buy a new, up-to-date version – and sold the old one for four times what we’d paid for it!

  13. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    From the Tellygraff…More ‘technical ishoos’ (in other words yet another cock-up) explains the jump in YooKay infections. How hard can it be to record such basic information? Banana republic, anyone?

    “Britain saw a record number of single-day coronavirus cases yesterday, with more than 12,000 new infections.

    The Government said that, as of 9am on Saturday, there had been a further 12,872 lab-confirmed cases of the disease – nearly twice as many as the day before.

    But the spike was blamed on a technical issue meant cases last week were not recorded properly.

    The official dashboard said yesterday that the error has now been resolved but that the total reported over the coming days will include some additional cases from the period between September 24 and October 1.

    As of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 6,968 lab-confirmed cases in the UK.

    Experts have previously warned that describing the daily figure as a record could be “misleading” as it is not clear how many people were actually infected during the height of the first wave due to a lack of community testing at the time.

    Saturday’s figure brings the total number of cases in the UK to 480,017.

    The Government also said a further 49 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Saturday. This brings the UK total to 42,317.

    Other figures show there were 2,194 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England as of Saturday, up from 1,622 a week ago, while 307 Covid-19 hospital patients were in ventilation beds, up from 223 a week ago.

    A total of 368 patients with confirmed Covid-19 were admitted to hospitals in England on Thursday, compared with 288 a week earlier.

    The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has noted that the R number – the rate at which the virus is spreading from person to person – has crept up in the past week.

    It is now well over the danger rate of 1.0, with scientists estimating it is nationally between 1.3 and 1.6.

    Last night, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Boris Johnson’s administration of having “lost control of the virus”, with one in three people in the UK now living under heightened social restrictions.

    Sir Keir said the Prime Minister was guilty of “governing in hindsight” and called on the Government to produce a road-map for navigating the country through the winter and to a vaccine.”

  14. 324276+ up ticks,
    Morning Each,
    Would one agree that we as a Country could alleviate a lot of the eu problems
    via this up & coming “deal.”

    Seeing as we have an daily incoming labour / military force ( the Dover campaign) which could be used as HS2 labour.

    The nearer we get to the, must have deal,
    the stronger the smell of fish, and IMO that is ALL we are going to be left with,the odour.
    ALL actions taken by UK seem to benefit brussels.
    Why are the political testicles so anxious to have a tentacle still attached to the eu ?
    Is it a future latch lifter for when re-set really takes off ?

    I do believe that the file containing the “deal” is gathering dust having been signed long ago.

      2. I has been proven beyond doubt using Pythagorean and Euclidean geometry, that in the singularity that is the mind of the Abbottess, Abbottamaths is always 100% (+or- the square root of SFA) correct.

        1. The was a fat minger called Abbott,
          Who had a mathematical habit.
          Her brain by its weight:
          Was her belly minus eight
          Of four-tenths of six-eighths of F*** all!

    2. Name that ground breaking African mathematician; anyone from 1,000 BC to the present day will do.
      p.s. being able to accurately count your finger and toes is not THAT clever.

  16. America is having a code red moment. Which of its enemies is likely to strike first? 4 October 2020.

    With Trump in hospital and the election campaign in chaos, the US has never been more vulnerable to foreign threat.

    US presidential elections and the uncertain transition periods that follow have traditionally been viewed by military, intelligence and security officials as moments of maximum national vulnerability. They will be especially worried now.

    The fact that Donald Trump is ill in hospital, presidential advisers and Republican senators are also unwell, or self-isolating, and the election campaign is in chaos will intensify a sense of dangerous exposure at the Pentagon, CIA and state department.

    This is the most unutterable tosh! The United States Military does not feel faint every time a President catches cold. If it did, the effort during WW2, where the Commander in Chief was a dying cripple, would have brought it to an end!

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/04/america-is-having-a-code-red-moment-which-of-its-enemies-is-likely-to-strike-first

    1. I think most sane, if not all World Leaders, take one look at the developing basket case that the US is becoming and wouldn’t contemplate going anywhere near it with a barge pole let alone striking it. It would be like trying to cuddle a Honey Badger that’s just taken a sizeable amount of crystal meth…..

  19. I see Charles Moore has said he doesn’t want the beeboid Chairman’s job. Thought it was too good to be tru.

    I propose Lord Lammy of the Jungle – an ideal choice,especially in History Month of Colour…..

    1. One of my favourites.

      Not for the first time (sorry Peddy) I posted it yesterday and always enjoy listening to it again.

  24. Morning all more doom and gloom, but don’t mention the weather eh !

    Have any of you ever seen anything so obviously and suspiciously poorly reported.

    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/woman-raped-while-walking-dog-in-high-wycombe/ar-BB19Gmr4?ocid=msedgdhp

    It happened on Wednesday (30/9) between 10.15pm and 11.05pm in Chiltern Avenue, near the junction with Chairborough Road.

    The victim, a woman in her fifties, was walking her dog along the road when she was approached from behind by an offender, believed to be a man, who then raped her.

    The victim managed to get away.

    Investigating officer Detective Constable Alexander Trevivian, based at High Wycombe police station said:

    “I am appealing for anyone who saw what happened or may have information about the incident, to please come forward.

    “I would also ask any motorists who were in the local area around the time that this happened to check any dash-cam footage in case it has captured something that could assist with this investigation.

    “We are also conducting extra patrols in the local area so there will be an increased police presence.

    “Anyone with information can contact Thames Valley Police by calling the non-emergency number 101, or by making a report online, quoting reference 43200308280.

    “Alternatively, if you wish to remain anonymous you can contact the independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.”

    No comments allowed

    2. The Police have also said that they have been instructed not to give any physical description of the attacker nor any mention of to which ethnic group he belonged.

      For God’s sake. If the attacker was white they would have said so and given a full physical description. The very fact that they refuse to give a proper description not only leads people to be certain that the attacker was BAME but it also poisons everybody against the police for trying to cover things up.

      1. I posted this Richard mainly because we don’t live a million miles from High Wycombe. There are elements of overseas persons slowly creeping into our own area. My wife often takes our dog for a walk alone, we live in a country side area and she often says things like “I don’t feel safe walking along certain familiar places any more”.
        I my self have seen suspicious looking single males standing around in places where they are very conspicuous and it normally never happens.
        I see many lone females out dog walking or jogging. Dog walkers always pass the time of day.
        I guess if i was to surreptitiously follow my good lady with a concealed baseball bat, it would probably be myself who would be arrested.
        Although since our village police station (a married serving coupled live in a detached house with a Lock up) was closed down and sold several years ago, the only police presence we are made aware of is from emails and when they race through the village on their way to some where else, sirens blaring.

        1. You need a tonfa stick (side-handled baton) rather than a baseball bat. Much more effective, better in defence too, as your hand can be behind the wood.

          1. Not heard of one of those Obs, some times when i see BOBS’s charging around on our local public foot paths, i pick up a large stick just in case i need to shove it in their spokes. Twice i had no warning near misses from behind and one AH almost rode into our dog and blamed me for it not being on a lead.
            BOB’s……… Bastards on Bikes. Other versions are available COB’s SHOB’s.

      2. I’ve just been looking on Google earth at the street mentioned. I would say they have better weather there, as most of the people i could see were quite tanned.

  25. First and first ‘Lemsip Max’ of the day……

    Good morning, things (I mean me) can only get better!

    I’m mindful that many face a worse situation than just a miserable heavy cold.

    1. Man flu is a terrible affliction which we gents must bear from time to time. The scientists will beat it about the same time a vaccine is successfully developed for COVID-19.

  26. Crimes against humanity.
    Scroll down to the video. It is long and detailed and it names the people involved in the Covid scam.

    See new Tweets
    Tweet
    Nigel Farage
    @Nigel_Farage
    ·
    8h
    Well done Donald.
    Quote Tweet

    Donald J. Trump
    @realDonaldTrump
    · 10h
    4:02 / 4:02
    Replies
    Britannia
    @RuleBritanniaGB
    ·
    8h
    Replying to
    @Nigel_Farage
    🇺🇲💪🇬🇧
    lynne craggs-morris
    @Cragggssyy
    ·
    8h
    Replying to
    @Nigel_Farage
    https://youtu.be/kr04gHbP5MQ

    1. Absolutely fascinating. I have to say much as I and Alf have believed all along. They’re a lot of charlatans who are in it for the money and people world wide have been imprisoned for no reason – not to mention those people locked up in care homes prevented from seeing anyone, undiagnosed diseases far worse than this virus, untreated patients, the list is endless.

      Excellent news that in the background things are happening to hopefully reverse what’s going on at the moment. The only problem is that it will take time. I wonder if BJ or any of his advisers know about this? Well done the German Coronavirus Investigative committee.
      Edit: list

    1. Hear, hear.

      So many of them, like Khan, are a disgrace to the UK.

      If Trump dies we will see thousands of the bastards in their true colours.

    2. The explanation is that there is no British Media as such. It is all under globalist Control!

    3. I can understand why the British media coverage of the USA in general, and Trump in particular, is so appalling. The dweebs of the British press dream of an assignment to New York City which has long been a hotbed of lefty drivel and artistic adventurism. The UN continues to grow like topsy and its grasping denizens are every bit as avaricious as when at home in ‘The Democratic People’s Republic of……’.

      They might branch out with a two day trip up to the hinterlands of Boston where they would find much the same with an 18 month time-lag and a colourful dose of IRA/anti-Brit fervour. Their second choice would be a few miles to the South in Washington DC. What a swamp. The lobbyists are the worst. Overall, I think it’s worse than our Whitehall/Westminster and has the seeping puss of The World Bank which nowadays is miles away from its initial laudable mission, stuffed with useless academics who wield lefty power around the globe. And the IMF. All of this is glorious oxygen for the little Brit correspondent reporters who get really excited by every invitation to a cocktail party that they receive.

      If they want to cover ‘the entertainment industry’ they head for LaLa land where everyone and everything is unreal. You are a nobody if you are not a fully paid-up lefty and probably stupid to boot. (I once sat next to the college educated wife of a very senior executive of a global engineering firm who insisted that the Sidney Harbour Bridge connected New Zealand to Australia).

      None of our media send their correspondents to spend a month or two in the bayous of Louisiana, or meandering around the Plains States, or talking to the people of the rust belt. They want them to be indoctrinated and they are.

  28. From today’s The Realslog. Interesting read here:
    https://therealslog.com/2020/10/04/the-sunday-essay-why-the-resistance-to-covidaphobia-needs-a-new-message-dealing-with-now/

    However, an enormous percentage of the UK population were toddlers when Unions were threatening our liberty to work where we wanted. They represent roughly 39% of the populace as a whole. Nearly 46% of those who inhabit the UK today cannot remember anything before Thatcher. Nine out of ten of those people underwent a State education that put no emphasis at all on liberty and freedom…but instead, stressed the existence of only right and wrong answers. I doubt if more than 1 in 10 know Orwell was a prescient writer of future fiction rather than a polluted river in Lancashire.

    Tell them about a time when one could negotiate a rolling annual contract as an employee by all means; but that isn’t going to compute with this demographic. Point out to them that Bill Gates says one minute that the planet is hugely overpopulated (and the next, wants to vaccinate to save lives) and they won’t see the dissonance. They might knee-jerk some learned-by-rote drivel about “eugenics”, but that’s about it. Most of them think The Eugenics were a new romantics band in the 1980s.

    In short, appealing to these folks on the basis of ‘vaccination is not as effective as herd immunity’, ‘totalitarianism can be most unpleasant’, ‘the New Normal is in fact utterly unnatural’ simply isn’t going to cut it. You’ll be dismissed in this ageist epoch as and Old Fart whose brain has turned to porridge…….

    https://therealslog.com/2020/10/04/the-sunday-essay-why-the-resistance-to-covidaphobia-needs-a-new-message-dealing-with-now/

      1. ‘Afternoon, AA, these supposedly educated people, distorting the English Language by making verbs out of nouns and vice versa, are ruining the awareness of yoiung people to the power of English.

        1. 324276+ up ticks,
          Afternoon NtN,
          Now I am confused, at what age level would these yoiung peoples be ?

      1. 324276+ up ticks,
        Afternoon HP,
        They cover up a multitude of badies, the establishment looks after it’s own.

    3. Already watched the video – fascinating. Deserves everyone’s support who believes we are being led by the nose to vaccination at all costs and the permanent erosion of our freedom.

  31. For those without Premium, here’s something to cheer you up on a foul day…{:^))

    It is about time we fought back against the unthinking adoption of critical race theory

    Started by academics in the 1970s, this cornerstone of the woke worldview has taken hold across society

    DOUGLAS MURRAY
    3 October 2020 • 9:00pm

    There are three letters that have recently entered the popular vocabulary: CRT. It may sound reminiscent of something like the barbaric electric-shock therapies of old. In fact it is something only mildly less painful and just as certain to be looked back on by future generations as a demented pseudoscience of a dementing time. CRT stands for “Critical Race Theory” and in recent years it has spilt out from the American leftist universities in which it was created. It has now swept through the worlds of government and business to such an extent that the British and American governments – as well as all major corporations – are having to decide what attitude to take towards it.

    The idea originates from American academia in the 1970s and ‘80s. And it came out at the same time as other “emancipation studies”. Just as “women’s studies” presumed to liberate women and “queer studies” pretended that it aimed to liberate gay people, “black studies” and the race studies courses that emerged from it were an overt part of a liberationist movement, not an academic discipline. And of course they had their point. There had been discrimination of minorities in the past. But as societal tolerance shifted the progenitors of the “studies” sought to do the opposite of the task that was assumed.

    The leaders of the discipline turned out to have a diminishing desire to integrate black thinkers and writers into the mainstream. Increasingly their desire appeared to be to cut them off. After all, if their fiefdom was not protected and policed then they might lose the career foothold that they had found, with its reputational advantages, salary and pension provisions and much else.

    As “critical race theory” grew so its practitioners came to the convenient conclusion that their ideas were not just important and vital but totalistic in their interpretation and applicability. They could in other words be rolled out everywhere. This was achieved by the claim – which increased in volume year by year – that absolutely everything in life is racist. These people ensured that rather than race being an increasingly important factor (a view which, as the polls show, most of the general public felt) race became the primary, most important prism through which to look at everything.

    CRT professionals helped their field along by asserting (never proving, just asserting) the claim that everybody who was white was racist and suffered from maladies which must be simultaneously presented as fixable and unfixable, appalling, omnipresent and unalterable. For a time it seemed laughable to outsiders. As it did in 2003 when Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Duke University (also the President of the American Sociological Association) published a book called “Racism Without Racists”.

    This has been reprinted multiple times thanks to its pushing and citation among fellow academics. It argues that the concept of colour-blindness (that is, of desiring not to see race as an important factor in a person or people) is itself a racist idea. According to Bonilla-Silva the aspiration to colour-blindness – an aspiration advocated by Dr Martin Luther King, among others – in fact comprises “colour-blind racism”.

    Over the years other hucksters moved in. One called Barbara Applebaum wrote a 2010 book entitled Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility and Social Justice Pedagogy. One of its central claims is that even white people who are avowedly anti-racist are in fact racist.

    In recent times this lucrative line of thought has been picked up by one of the greatest fraudsters of all, Robin DiAngelo, a white American academic whose 2018 book White Fragility claims that white people are racist if they say they are racist and racist if they say they are not racist. The only conclusion this produces is that white people can never stop being racist but must simply enrich Ms DiAngelo by hiring her to do deliver lucrative lectures while buying her bestselling book.

    None of this would matter if it had stuck in a corner of academia. But all of this has long-since moved out into the mainstream. In the months since the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, bosses and employees in government departments and private companies in this country have repeatedly told their employees to “educate themselves” on race by buying, reading and studying works like those of DiAngelo.

    I have received increasingly worried messages from many of them – of all political and racial backgrounds. It is clear to me that nothing could be more divisive and counterproductive than what is under way. But when your boss tells you what you are meant to read it takes an unusual type of person to stand up and say “no – we will not be indoctrinated by our bosses”. At workplaces across the UK – as in America – the offspring of this poisonous ideology are now everywhere.

    For instance there is the gigantic fraud of “unconscious bias training” – a crock discipline which is being forced on civil servants and rolled out within major corporations in this country. Believing that they are tackling some terrible dragon of prevailing “white supremacy” bosses and department heads force their employees through (and volunteer to put themselves through) a process so laughably shallow that it is scandalous it ever got started.

    One problem is that the origins are partly respectable. The most famous Implicit Association Test (IAT) was developed at Harvard University in the 1990s. It aimed to find biases in people of which they may be unaware. Combine this with the assertions of the critical race theorists however and you have a re-education (or indoctrination) tool that would thrill any authoritarian from history.

    Since it was posted online in 1998, tens of millions of people around the world have taken the test on the Harvard University website to find out if they harbour “unconscious bias”. The test has been cited thousands of times in academic papers. And it has been rolled out across swathes of the private sector and throughout national and local government. I have personally been contacted by multiple civil servants who have been put through this process. And they do not know that the whole foundation is rotten.

    Indeed it is so rotten that the people who worked to create the original Harvard test have attempted to rein in the monster they created. Two of the three Harvard academics who created the original test have publicly stated that the test cannot do what a whole generation of malcontents, mountebanks and profiteers have now claimed that it can do. One of them, Brian Nosek, now of the University of Virginia, has said that the test has been misconceived.

    The whole thing is an “incorrect interpretation” of the original work he has said. Of attempts to prove bias in individuals through the test, Nosek says, “There is some consistency, but not high consistency. Our mind isn’t that stable.” So a whole industry has been created around a test whose own creators say that it is not able to do what it is now held out to do.

    Yet at seminars up and down this country, as in America, there is an attempt to prove otherwise. One corporate indoctrination session in the US recently released online had a black female lecturing a room of white employees telling them, “All white people are racist. I believe that white people are born into not being human. You’re taught to be demons.”

    This is not confined to some wacky American firms. In the UK the situation has got so bad that the Department of Education recently had to issue some very carefully worded guidelines to remind teachers in Britain’s schools that when they produce lessons on contentious current events they must give different sides of the argument to their students. Yet it would be a brave teacher who would do any such thing. The whole CRT industry has set itself up to be unopposable. It is an unwinnable game, once it is engaged in. The CRT professionals claim they have a godlike insight into the human soul. And everybody who disagrees with them is – sometimes literally – damned as a devil.

    Donald Trump last month announced that he was planning to strip all this fallacious business out of the heart of American government. No more government employees would be put through this indoctrination on his watch, he said. We shall see if he achieves that. What is certain is that the Government of this country should follow suit. It is clear where CRT ends. It is not in harmony and fairness. It is a system that attaches electrodes to the brains of a tolerant liberal and diverse society and then fries them. It is time we stopped it.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/03/time-fought-back-against-unthinking-adoption-critical-race-theory/

    1. 324276+ up ticks,
      Afternoon C,
      Surely over the last four decades the lab/lib/con
      parties, deteriorating daily come under CRT.
      Lying & frying tonight is the lab/lib/con coalitions order of the day,every day.
      Many of their repeat supporter / voters can I am sure be ID by their deep fried stare.

    3. It is indeed total rubbish. I just did the IAT on Black/White Americans and Harmless Objects/Weapons to see what it was all about.
      My result showed apparently a strong association of Weapons with White Americans and Harmless Objects with Black Americans.

      The test assigns a letter for each category, and measures how quickly you can press the key for that letter when faced with a photo. Anyone who does word games will immediately realise that the association of White and Weapons will generate a much faster response because they begin with the same letter.

      It’s risible that anyone takes this nonsense seriously.

      1. My colleague is a pessimist. He is currently buying a house. He has looked up all sorts of details about house ownership and put a negative spin on them all.
        By last Friday evening, he had got to me to such an extent that I was panicking about being fined for all kinds of shortcomings in our tumbledown cottage, which is what the Germans call “renovierungsbedürftig.”
        Fortunately, conversations with one of my closest women friends, and with my dearly beloved over the weekend have restored my peace of mind – just in time for tomorrow morning when I will get the next episode of my colleague’s doom and gloom!

      2. oh I wouldn’t know. I wouldn’t call you lot a bunch of optimists but even so you must feel let down by what passes for life nowadays.

  34. ‘Morning, Peeps.

    From the Tellygraff…More ‘technical ishoos’ (in other words yet another cock-up) explains the jump in YooKay infections. How hard can it be to record such basic information? Banana republic, anyone?

    “Britain saw a record number of single-day coronavirus cases yesterday, with more than 12,000 new infections.

    The Government said that, as of 9am on Saturday, there had been a further 12,872 lab-confirmed cases of the disease – nearly twice as many as the day before.

    But the spike was blamed on a technical issue meant cases last week were not recorded properly.

    The official dashboard said yesterday that the error has now been resolved but that the total reported over the coming days will include some additional cases from the period between September 24 and October 1.

    As of 9am on Friday, there had been a further 6,968 lab-confirmed cases in the UK.

    Experts have previously warned that describing the daily figure as a record could be “misleading” as it is not clear how many people were actually infected during the height of the first wave due to a lack of community testing at the time.

    Saturday’s figure brings the total number of cases in the UK to 480,017.

    The Government also said a further 49 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Saturday. This brings the UK total to 42,317.

    Other figures show there were 2,194 Covid-19 patients in hospital in England as of Saturday, up from 1,622 a week ago, while 307 Covid-19 hospital patients were in ventilation beds, up from 223 a week ago.

    A total of 368 patients with confirmed Covid-19 were admitted to hospitals in England on Thursday, compared with 288 a week earlier.

    The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) has noted that the R number – the rate at which the virus is spreading from person to person – has crept up in the past week.

    It is now well over the danger rate of 1.0, with scientists estimating it is nationally between 1.3 and 1.6.

    Last night, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer accused Boris Johnson’s administration of having “lost control of the virus”, with one in three people in the UK now living under heightened social restrictions.

    Sir Keir said the Prime Minister was guilty of “governing in hindsight” and called on the Government to produce a road-map for navigating the country through the winter and to a vaccine.”

    1. My younger son has just got a temporary job at a fast food restaurant. He now believes that the whole corona thing is a hoax, because he says the hygiene is so poor in the restaurant that if corona was as dangerous and easily spread as made out, everybody would have had it by now.
      There is no hand washing because no time, between touching used trays and touching new trays going to new customers. The restaurant is very busy. Yesterday, a customer peed into a cup and left it on a tray. Plenty of opportunity for virus-spreading, yet apparently none of the staff there have had it.

    2. Morning Hugh – Starmer should publish his plan for navigating the country through Covid-19 during the Winter rather than ” criticising Boris in hindsight” .

      1. Indeed.

        Sucker’s cunning plan in full:
        Let Boris continue.
        Score political points.

        That’s all folks…

    3. We never seem to hear how many of the 480,000 cases were asymptomatic, nor whether they are fully recovered and assumed to be immune and “non-transmitters”.

  35. ROD LIDDLE
    The revolution will be televised, lefties, but a right‑wing big beast will lead it

    Sunday October 04 2020, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

    Iinvented a game some years ago that you can play this Christmas when you have the legal number of relatives round. It was called “Six degrees of Shami Chakrabarti”, and to play it, all you needed was a list of UK quangos and public bodies. What you do is pick out a name from the board of a quango and try to get to Shami in fewer than six moves.

    You could usually do it in two or three moves at the most, because the same names keep cropping up on these boards and Shami’s name occurred, back then, with award-winning regularity. So, for example, if you had picked the name Diane Coyle, of the BBC Trust, that would have taken you to the UK Border Agency, where she also had a role. There you’d have found Sir David Metcalf, a professor at the London School of Economics, where Shami was on the board of governors!

    Believe me, it’s great fun, if you’re a bitter, gammon-faced social conservative bigot. Everybody on every board, everywhere — almost always simply appointed without even needing to apply — is an agreeable middle-class liberal, very often public-school-educated. Many of them have identical views and no immediately discernible aptitude for the task at hand, and a fairly high proportion of them are honoured, for frankly mystifying reasons.

    These are the people who kind of run our country, who decide what is right — all unaccountable, unelected. Search through the list for someone who thinks we maybe have too much immigration, or believes a human being with a todger is a chap, end of, or doesn’t think the UK is riven with structural racism, and you will come up very short. There aren’t any. Nil. None.

    So it was with great pleasure I read that Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail, and Lord Moore, the high Tory columnist, were the government’s choices to, respectively, run Ofcom and be chairman of the BBC. Whatever a grotesque hash Boris Johnson is making of Covid, at least he still has a squadron to fight the culture wars — even if Moore ruled himself out of the running for the BBC post over the weekend.

    Dacre and Moore are two of the most brilliant journalists of their times. (I have never spoken to Dacre, and Moore once got me sacked from the BBC for left-wing bias, so I have no personal skin in this game.) Neither has an honorary degree or is a visiting professor or has been appointed to a public body. Much, much, lesser hacks — Owen Jones and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example — have been exalted by public bodies and given honorary degrees.

    But, of course, when the news was released, you might have thought the government had proposed Julius Streicher, the feisty editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, and William Joyce, aka Lord Haw-Haw. Alastair Campbell, for instance, tweeted that Dacre was guilty of “poisoning public debate”. Goodness, talk about a lack of self-awareness. The job for which Alastair was best known involved lying to the public, 24 hours, every day. He lied to me — affably enough — every time I spoke to him.

    The howl-round then grew in intensity. The end of democracy! A power grab by the fascist right! But it was just those frenetic leftie minions on Twitter, numbered in their hundreds at best — and for whom the appointment of a conservative to anything is the cue for hysteria and bed-wetting.

    The right has been bemused for too long. It cannot understand how it won the Cold War, supposedly consigning a vile, repressive and inefficient dogma to the spittoon of history — and yet sees cultural Marxism dominant in every sphere of public life. The answer would be — in the phrase said to be inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci — the long march through the institutions.

    The working class are too bright to be conned by Marxist idiocies, believing that all those things Marxists consider “false consciousness” — religious faith, patriotism, the family — are actually quite important. But there is an endless gullibility among the effete professional classes: their liberalism is boundless.

    It may be less glamorous than standing on a burning barricade waving a red flag, but capturing bodies such as Ofcom is the way the revolution will be won. And, you have to say, so far this approach has succeeded, despite an almost total absence of popular support.

    I hope the government is serious and not just trying to wind up the screaming mimis on the left. Personally speaking, I’d like Trevor Phillips to be made chairman of the BBC. But Moore would have done just fine. Get those producers wearing tweed and questioning those long-held asinine liberal shibboleths. Verily — bring it on.

    Liverpool lockdown latest

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Fsundaytimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fea6f1a38-058e-11eb-910e-49261a8ea333.jpg?crop=1500%2C1000%2C0%2C0&resize=1022

    Let’s talk Turkey
    Memo to the Foreign Office. When Covid has finally disappeared, can we keep in place the quarantine for people travelling on holiday to Turkey? Just on principle? Keep the returning holiday-makers in an unpleasant hotel to be lectured all day by Greeks, Kurds, Israelis and Armenians about why Turkey is the last place you should visit.

    The country’s foul regime is now intervening, with its usual malevolence, in the worsening dispute in Nagorno-Karabakh. The region is almost exclusively Armenian, but Azerbaijan has hold of it. The UK should recognise the breakaway republic and support the Armenians — victims of a genocide the Turks still refuse to acknowledge.

    A positive test for Ferrier and Labour
    By the time you read this, Margaret Ferrier, the Typhoid Mary of the Scottish National Party, should have resigned. If not, there is no shame left in the world. Hell, when Dominic Cummings drove to Barnard Castle to see if he was blind (as you do when your vision is failing), he was with his family and they kept to themselves. Then, Ferrier demanded he resign: now, she has travelled on public transport knowing she had the virus.

    If she goes, her seat of Rutherglen and Hamilton West will be an interesting test for knee-bending man of mystery Sir Keir Starmer. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour took it in 2017, and Ferrier’s majority is only 5,000 or so. With first minister Nicola Sturgeon embroiled in the Alex Salmond case, and the sitting MP in disgrace, how can Labour not win? And if it doesn’t, what does this tell you about the Labour revival?

    Smile, Jezza. It’s a social(ist) occasion
    A quick leftie checklist for those of you who have seen that picture of Jeremy Corbyn at a dinner party.

    Inexplicably, I wasn’t invited, but it appears to include: white woman with dreadlocks; universally grim expressions; large bowls of stewed vegetables; Magic Grandpa’s phone resting on Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book; fair-trade chardonnay from a state vineyard in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic; artisan-crafted kitchen tiles; and cutlery left askew on plates, rather than neatly lined up, like it would be in decent god-fearing households.

    And just out of shot, a small voodoo doll of Keir Starmer with pins in it. And seven tubs of Waitrose hummus.

    1. As regards Rutherglen and Hamilton West, the SNP is currently on the crest of a wave. Mrs Murrell has never been more popular and respected than now. Her firmness in dealing with Covid-19 has been universally recognised and applauded apparently.
      (Elsewhere in Scotland, there is a ban on “unnecessary travel”, students are literally locked in halls of residence, families cannot meet at all, etc, etc…)

    2. Rod is a NoTTler, in word, if not in deed. He sees all the things we see but is of course limited in expression by both his job and his public exposure!

    4. I should have thought William Joyce would have been persona grata in the lefties’ camp; he did, after all, do his best to destroy the UK by propaganda – much like the Bbc.

  39. Good morning, all. A cloudy, dull day; but no gale – yet.

    Discurse is still not showing some NoTTLers “attachments”. JN posted something down the page labelled “The fighter” – but beneath the words is blank. Is it just e? Or are others suffering the same thing?

    Oh, Lord – I have forgotten my mask and gloves…{:¬))

    1. The storm is over Birmingham at the moment. Be with you soon.

      I have those same problems too.

      Morning your worship.

    2. I often get the same with some posts – just blank spaces or a little thumbnail which I have to open separately.

  40. ‘Morning again,

    Fed up with record numbers of illegal immigrants invading this country? Fear not; Prit Useless is on the case as she prepares to unveil yet another cunning plan:

    From the Tellygraff…

    Migrants who use illegal routes to access the UK will be routinely denied asylum in the country, under government plans.

    Home Secretary Priti Patel is preparing to create a legal assumption that those who enter Britain illegally will not be granted asylum.

    Ms Patel will on Sunday vow to explore “all practical measures” to deter illegal immigration – shrugging off controversy over Government proposals to process migrants offshore.

    In an address to the Conservative Party’s online conference, she is expected to describe the UK’s asylum system as “fundamentally broken”, saying ministers “have a responsibility to act”.

    She will pledge to crack down on foreign offenders using “meritless” asylum claims to remain in the country, while warning that that asylum seekers who come to the country legally and would face danger if they returned to their home countries, can be left languishing in the system.

    She will also warn of the need to address migrants’ ability to “shop around” for a state in which to claim asylum, often arriving in the UK illegally having first passed through numerous safe countries.

    Ms Patel’s intervention comes after a paper prepared for No 10 on the feasibility of using islands such as Ascension, St Helena and Papua New Guinea to process asylum seekers, was leaked last week.

    The Home Secretary faced criticism that the idea was impractical, potentially illegal and expensive.

    Although dismissed by the Government, senior officials maintained it was justified for civil servants and ministers to “brainstorm” and consider all options to combat the surge in migrants crossing the Channel.

    In a speech outlining plans for an overhaul of the country’s asylum system, Ms Patel is expected to say: “I will accelerate our operational response to illegal migration. We will continue to hunt down the criminal gangs who traffic people into our country.

    “I will continue to use the full force of our outstanding National Crime Agency and intelligence agencies to go after them.

    “We will make more immediate returns of those who come here illegally and break our rules, every single week.

    “And we will explore all practical measures and options to deter illegal migration.”

    The Telegraph has previously revealed that the Conservatives have been considering curbs to the country’s human rights laws in order to help reduce spurious legal claims by migrants.

    Ms Patel, whose parents fled to the UK from Uganda shortly before Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of the country’s Asian minority community, will outline a vision for a “fair asylum system” which should “provide safe haven to those fleeing persecution, oppression or tyranny” – which she is expected to say that the UK fails to achieve.

    She will add: “Right now, the most vulnerable are stuck in this broken system, with over 40,000 other people. Almost half of these claims take a year or more to reach a decision. Costing UK taxpayers over one billion pounds each year. The highest amount in almost two decades.”

    Ms Patel will pledge to introduce a new system that is “firm and fair”.

    “We will stop the abuse of the broken system … we will stop those who come here illegally making endless legal claims to remain… we will expedite the removal of those who have no claim for protection.

    “After decades of inaction by successive governments we will address the moral, legal, practical problems with this broken system. Because what exists now is neither firm nor fair.

    “And I will bring forward legislation to deliver on that commitment. I will take every necessary step to fix this broken system. Amounting to the biggest overhaul of our asylum system in decades.”

    1. Oh come on, anyone can see how that’s going to work.

      Enter UK illegally.
      Asylum clain denied.
      Get taxpayer funded Yooman Rites lawyer.
      Waste thousands more of taxpayer money.
      Successful on appeal.
      Get flat, benefits, free healthcare.

      1. Illegals should be denied legal aid. They are criminals by entering the UK illegally from a safe country.

        1. I would also go after the so-called immigrant charidees, for conspiring with others to assist illegal entry to this country.

          1. I’d completely remove any State aid benefits, financial and in kind, for all charities. Moreover all donations and donors would have to be shown separately in full accounts to be posted at Companies House. All expenses would also require to be included and shown, with details of recipients of charity work and donations.

        2. Totally agree. Cut off the money supply to the HR lawyers, you can hear their cries of anguish.

  41. Gold Medal winner David Adjaye deserves a better brief for the Holocaust memorial. 4 October 2020.

    Yet I find myself lined up, in a public inquiry later this month, to give evidence against a project on which he is working with two other practices, the UK Holocaust memorial and learning centre proposed near the Houses of Parliament. This is not because I think Adjaye is a terrible architect, still less because I oppose the aim of remembering the Holocaust. It is because I believe that, ever since this project was announced by David Cameron in January 2016, it has had the hallmarks of too many of the former prime minister’s ideas: a seemingly cost-free political win (who could object to such a memorial?), accompanied by glibness in conception and laziness about detail.

    We don’t need a Holocaust Memorial of any description, Large Small or Indifferent. The UK is not an adjunct of the State of Israel and it played no part in the Tragedy. This is Virtue Signalling writ large by Cameron, who ironically is himself a war criminal, by his actions in Libya!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/04/gold-medal-winner-david-adjaye-deserves-a-better-brief-for-the-holocaust-memorial

    1. David Adjaye’s buildings are ugly. We don’t need any more Holocaust reminders. We still have zillions of survivors, it seems, from the numbers that keep turning up in articles and TV interviews. (I was baffled by that, as the Germans were pretty organised and efficient. Then I read somewhere that everyone alive in Europe in May1945 was categorised as a “Holocaust survivor”, including Jessie McFadjean of Achiltibuie.)
      The Holocaust was a bad thing. It subsequently had wonderful benefits for Israel and Jews in general, however. Not so good for gypsies and others.

  42. I thought it was too good to be true. The Leftie luvvies will be high-fiving today:

    A leading contender to take over the chairmanship of the BBC has pulled out of the race.

    Lord Moore of Etchingham is understood to have signalled that he will not apply to succeed Sir David Clementi when the current chairman steps down in February, due to family reasons.

    The former editor of The Daily and Sunday Telegraph had been repeatedly linked to the role, although the Government has yet to launch a formal recruitment process. A job advertisement is expected to be issued shortly.

    Lord Moore’s decision not to apply for the role follows reports that he was Boris Johnson’s favoured candidate. Baroness Morgan of Cotes, the former Culture Secretary, was also being considered as a possible successor to Sir David.

    Last week it emerged that Mr Johnson was separately considering appointing Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail and one of the BBC’s fiercest critics, as chairman of Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, in a move the corporations’ supporters fear would threaten its reputation for fairness and independence. Mr Dacre has also been discussed as a possible candidate for the BBC chairmanship.

    The Government is currently reviewing whether to decriminalise non-payment of the BBC licence fee.

    Downing Street declined to comment. A government spokesman said: “We will launch the application process for the new chair of the BBC shortly. It is an open recruitment process and all public appointments are subject to a robust and fair selection criteria.”

    1. Is everybody a lord or baron or the female equivalent these days? What a lot of pretentious crap.

    2. I’d like to propose Grizz who I am certain would make a first class Chairman of the BBC!

      2. Well he is a renowned artist, has good taste in music and is a defender of the Queen’s English. But will he be willing to have his bits chopped off so he can tick the Transgender Box?

          1. He’ll certainly be able to afford the £1700 outfit courtesy of the Chairman’s salary….

      3. Cliff? Bit of a surprise, his being a former Welsh rugby player. I suppose the sheep must have had some lingering effect.

    4. Is everybody a lord or baron or the female equivalent these days? What a lot of pretentious crap.

      1. Er … Dame Mary Berry: A boring old biddy who has spent a lifetime teaching people how to bake a Victoria Sponge?

        I saw her at the Good Food Exhibition at the NEC back in 1997. She was demonstrating Aga cookers and every sentence she uttered contained a reference to “My book”, which can be bought…”. I walked out after three minutes of listening to her repetitious boring dross.

  44. This is just a small offering from quite a large extensive critical look at the goings on in the police force .

    Premise 4: some of your hard-earned money is being re-directed by the police to LGBT campaigners
    It is becoming commonplace to see entire police forces celebrate their co-belligerence with LGBT campaigners. Many have become Stonewall allies or champions, sometimes spending tens of thousands of pounds for rainbow themed promotional items, flags, car decals, lanyards, t-shirts, and even rainbow epaulettes. The cost to a single police force for becoming a Stonewall ally is £2,500 p/a per force. In other words, police forces are using your hard- earned money to fund an LGBT campaigning organisation, and in return becoming walking billboards for that same campaigning organisation. All of this while police staff are facing cut- backs and violent crimes are surging at record rates with too little law enforcement to cope.

    The report lists the following police departments as Stonewall Champions or allies: Avon and Somerset Police, Cheshire Police, Derbyshire Constabulary, Dorset Police, Durham Constabulary, Dyfed Powys Police, Hampshire Constabulary, Hertfordshire Constabulary, Humberside Constabulary, Lancashire Constabulary, Leicestershire Police, Merseyside Police, Metropolitan Police Service, North Wales Police, Northumbria Police, Nottinghamshire Police, Police Scotland, Staffordshire Police, Suffolk Constabulary, Surrey Police , Sussex Police, West Midlands Police, West Yorkshire Police, Wiltshire Police and North Yorkshire Police.

    Recasting culture
    Beginning with the Gay Liberation Front manifesto of 1971, LGBT activists have done the seemingly impossible. They have recast culture to celebrate their lifestyles and enforce their belief systems. No corner of society has been left unaffected, not churches, the arts, media, schools, or our courts. Not even our police.

    The conflict of interest is clear. LGBT activism, participation in Pride events and direct financial and moral support of LGBT campaigning organisations is a flagrant deviation from the Police’s Code of Ethics prohibition on partisan political action. By compromising itself in this way, more and more police are being trained about what LGBT campaigners wish the law to be, rather than what it actually is. The effect is that police are increasingly enforcing campaigning goals rather than actual laws. And the victim in all of this is society at large.

    Fair Cop’s treatment of these issues, and the immense amount of research they put into uncovering the facts and financial figures involved makes Policing Through the Looking Glass a highly illuminating piece of investigative journalism. What is clear from the report is that much reform is needed to regain the public confidence in police neutrality. The separation of powers depends on it.

    https://christianconcern.com/comment/report-outs-law-enforcement-for-sexual-politicisation-of-policing/?fbclid=IwAR20FselYHIkOHrdkBl9cARI-JaAtAE-FKNpiIFyILFT35BQFTewH43-9-o

    1. ” Recasting culture ” – -exactly what is happening with the influx of the RoP. They come “needing asylum and help” – and always claiming to be the victims – and then bring us Grooming gangs/County lines drug gangs and cash for crash scams. Do they ever criticise the ones of their own culture for doing this NO. They just blame OUR culture. And with shows of ultimate violence from them – our govt bends over backwards – -calling it diversity and multiculturalism.

        1. They have shot themselves all over. When the public see a white policeman doing that to a group that want to take this country over – then It is clearly too late. I assume we agree on that we have seen the best of this country and now we can only spend the last part of our lives seeing it destroyed. I feel sorry for the young who will never know a quiet, peaceful country where just one murder took all the news for several days – and now they don’t even all make the news, because it is so commonplace – and yet we are repeatedly told that flooding us with foreigners is great.

          1. Good afternoon, Walter

            Here is backup to what you say from Shakespeare in King Lear:

            We have seen the best of our time: machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves.

          1. Apart from which, Paul, by defacing their uniform, they make themselves improperly dressed.

          1. I am exempt from taking the knee – once down, I’d have great difficulty getting up again!

        4. I had to have a minuscus shaved by a surgeon and I watched what he was doing on TV as he did it using keyhole surgery. I was finding it difficult to walk as my right knee was seizing up but now there is no problem.

          Taking the knee for BLM is a flagrant abuse of knees.

  45. I note that Saint Attenborough of David complains that, for 30 years, no one has been listening to his warnings about a manmade global warming meltdown. Perhaps it is because he is just another eco-bore who drones on endlessly? Just a thought…

      1. The climate scientists couldn’t wait for the climate to change so they have created a fake pandemic instead to bring about the change they always wanted.

    4. Didn’t stop him flying all over the world along with crew to bring us his nature programmes, did it! I wonder how many air miles he’s clocked up over the years?!

  46. Off topic
    I note that the money-making side of the London marathon is running today and that there will also be a “virtual London marathon” for 45,000 runners from around the world.

    1. It’s wall-to-wall on BBC1 & BBC2 all ‘king day, so you don’t have to miss a second.

        1. #Me too.

          I remember calling on a German friend just as the Tour de France was in the final stages; we had to sit here in silence while they raced up & down the Champs Elysees for what seemed like an infinite number of laps. When it was finally over, I got my revenge by asking if Schumi (Schumacher) had won. He was enraged, just did not see the joke.

  47. How did I not hear of Hancock’s claim?

    Hancock’s using crude propaganda

    PETER HITCHENS

    The Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, seems to be entirely unaware of many important facts which have become clear over the past few months. Especially, he has not noticed that wild predictions of mass deaths, made in Sweden and this country in March, were not borne out in reality.

    The important thing about this is that Sweden did not follow Mr Hancock’s policy of severe compulsory restrictions of normal life. The Swedes did not ‘let the virus rip’, as the zealots like to claim. They took moderate precautions. Yet the predicted deaths did not take place. In fact, evidence from around the world still shows no connection between dictatorial, punitive rules and lower deaths.

    Yet in Parliament on Thursday, Mr Hancock sneered at one of his rare Commons critics, the Shipley MP Philip Davies.

    The Minister said: ‘It is perfectly reasonable to make the argument that we should just let the virus rip; I just think that the hundreds of thousands of deaths that would follow is not a price that anyone should pay.’ Mr Hancock, whose grasp of fact seems to me to be sketchy in general, has no reason to say that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of deaths would follow a wiser, more proportionate policy.

    He could say it was possible, or that he thought it likely, but he does not know that it would happen, and he must be aware of the work of eminent scientists who think it would not happen.

    And the caricature, that critics wish to ‘let the virus rip’, is shameful, crude propaganda rather than an argument.

    https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2020/10/diddemocracy-die-the-other-night-when-donald-trump-and-joe-biden-scuffled-snarled-and-shouted-over-each-other-showing-utter.html

  48. Masks that block viruses, also block air. Wear an an effective virus-preventing mask and you will be die very quickly.

    1. I doubt that you are supposed to make a mask out of plastic cling film but hey, if it works .

      1. Sorry. I was going to make a joke, but it isn’t funny. I suffered asthma and bronchitis as a child and have remained susceptible to chest infections. I missed about a quarter of school attendance. It got better as I grew into my 20s. I played sports but any real progress was inhibited.

  49. With my tinnitus and damaged hearing the lyrics of songs are generally a mystery to me. Thanks to this young lady I can understand these songs much better now:
    https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=bbc+comedy+videos+lyrics&&view=detail&mid=26998E3F975933D14C0C26998E3F975933D14C0C&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dbbc%2520comedy%2520videos%2520lyrics%26qs%3Dn%26form%3DQBVR%26sp%3D-1%26pq%3Dbbc%2520comedy%2520videos%2520lyrics%26sc%3D0-24%26sk%3D%26cvid%3D70D099787A3046AFA0DFF6713CB6C85E

    1. I always had that problem, Ped. Came about as a result of an ear infection followed by close-up gunfire that practically blew my eardrums through my head. I understand only because there are written lyrics.

      1. It is often not the language which is confusing in French films and songs – it is the pronunciation and diction of the actors or singers.

        If we are looking at a French film it is very helpful to have a video made for the hard-of-hearing which gives the words in French. And this fantastic song is all the better if we can follow what she is singing!

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsz7IuZ3paM

      2. One of my jobs was ‘Safety’ for live firing artillery. There was only cotton wool for ear plugs in the early years. I tried wearing a hearing aid but I could hear my own footsteps. In a pub or bar I can hear everything – all the conversations in the room (and the French usually have two, three or four people talking at the same time), background music and the television too if the sound is on. I just switch off and ignore it.

        1. A profoundly deaf old man had an implant which gave him perfect hearing. The surgeon said to him in a follow-up appointment ” I bet your family are pleased too” He replied “I haven’t told them yet and I’ve changed my will 3 times since”

  50. I’ll be honest I have tears in my eyes…………

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3d633c3b0d4dd0e3d7e8a3d34e11e4a21ad23a03530589fc22e4c9221e97937d.jpg

    “The decision to place an elderly relative in a care home is a difficult
    one at the best of times, but the coronavirus pandemic and the
    restrictions on visiting make it even harder. For one family it seemed
    like the best solution before the virus arrived – but early last month
    they reversed their decision and brought 95-year-old Rita home.

    It’s late on a Saturday night, and a private ambulance pulls up outside a
    care home in Norwich. Rita Perrott, a frail 95-year-old, is helped out
    of the home in a wheelchair.

    “Grandma!” shouts her granddaughter,
    Anna, delightedly. They give each other a long hug and a kiss. It’s the
    first time in months such normal physical contact has been possible.

    Anna appears almost giddy with the audacity of what they’re doing.

    “We’ve stolen grandma!” she proclaims.

    “A kidnap?” Rita asks, playing along with the joke.

    “It’s a heist!” says Anna. “We’ve come late at night to steal grandma back!”

    3. 324276+ up ticks,
      Afternoon Rik,
      All the best to granma, would she be interested in an AK47 do you think in case the establishment / bbC come aknocking ?

  51. Noughts + Crosses’ Trailer: New Peacock Series Imagines a Europe Colonized by Africa
    The Romeo and Juliet-esque story is set in a fictional dystopia where the racial power structure as we know it is turned on its head.

    In this world, Africa — or “Aprica” as it’s referred to in the novel — invaded Europe centuries ago, enslaving its people. In present-day London (known as “Albion”), slavery is an institution of the past, but Jim Crow-esque segregation laws maintain the power dynamic: A ruling class of Black “Crosses” control the country’s politics, wealth, and culture over an oppressed, impoverished underclass of white “Noughts,” who are at the brink of revolt. Against this backdrop of prejudice, distrust and rebellion, the forbidden love between Callum McGregor (Jack Rowan), a Nought, and Sephy Hadley (Masali Baduza), a Cross and the daughter of a prominent politician, unfolds.

    Noughts + Crosses” was originally commissioned by the BBC in 2016 and premiered in the UK in March of this year. Peacock has now acquired U.S rights to the series, for an early fall premiere, against the backdrop of an America that’s still contending with a racial reckoning, following mass protests nationwide against the police killing of George Floyd. Given the provocative subject matter, it remains to be seen how the series handles the material, and whether it will make way for more nuanced conversations on the issues of race and racism.

    https://www.indiewire.com/2020/08/noughts-crosses-trailer-peacock-1234582169/

    Additionally, author Blackman hopes “Noughts & Crosses” is seen as part of a wider trend in Black stories being made for the screen.

    Well, the BBC need to be drawn and quartered.. I feel utterly depressed now.

      1. I haven’t seen it , ever, but my ears pricked up when I saw an advert for it about forty minutes ago.

        Moh has just finished watching football on line courtesy of some foreign channel, might have been American, and the adverts during half time were outrageous.. and that popped up.

    2. There’s no question of Black Africa colonising Europe if only because they can’t run their own countries. What will probably happen is that immigration will swamp Europe and it will collapse politically and economically. Whatever happens NoTTLers will have had the best of days that history has to offer. We should be thankful for that and enjoy the little that is left.

      1. Right now, I wonder how long benefits and social welfare are going to last in countries like the UK, Scandi and Germany.

        1. Out of the 3 are we the only one who punishes people by putting them in hotels – where they then complain they want better?

        2. Not long after the Economic Crunch one would have thought. Sometime next year they will begin cutting Benefits and Pensions. A crash is not unimaginable!

  52. I ran my COVID infection model based on a replication rate R=1.1 but this time I made R=1.2 but only for the first fortnight.
    This replicated the scenario that COVID-19 could have been on the loose by superspreaders a fortnight before anyone realised it was in the UK.

    I was surprised to see that it didn’t take a much shorter time to reach the whole population of over 65 million but its rate of infection was nevertheless sufficient to infect a population three times larger.

    Note: the flat line from the earlier model shows the level and start of 65 million infections with R=1.1 for the whole pandemic period.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0136410e19751abcd26e0f704f88b20bce84773120d76b382df736efc0214aac.jpg

      1. No Bob3, my model is based on not having lockdown during the pandemic – much along the Swedish lines.

        Periods of lockdown keep limited populations away from viral exposure only for them to be vulnerable again when the lockdown is terminated.

          1. I still don’t think we’ve all had it.
            This is a time for some rapid reformulations of business models.
            Some businesses are meeting the challenge of lockdowns but unfortunately many will flounder through lack of capital reserves or invalid business insurance claims.

    3. I still think it was here long before they told us – I’m pretty sure I had it in January, and probably so did lots of other people. By the time of the lockdown it was widespread – and people continued to fly in from all over the world with no checks being done or quarantining.

      1. The Chinese eventually had to admit the virus was around in October. I’m pretty certain that Mrs D and I had it in December.

  53. 324276+ up ticks,
    Is this news ? I thought it was almost taken as fact.
    Many of us predicted this on account of the odious double dealing political
    testicles needing a re-entry tentacle as a future latch lifter.

    Hence ALL the deflecting type sh!te ( chaff) many peoples have / are being made to suffer.

    Farage Predicts There Will Be an EU Trade Deal, But It Won’t Satisfy Many Brexiteers

    1. 324276+up ticks,
      O2O,
      A high level telephone call between johnson & eu
      leven on the importance of a deal, with I believe leven
      saying ” listen up johnson this is how
      it is going to go”…….

    1. Defund Legal Aid. Legal Aid is only of benefit to lawyers. You have to be completely penniless to receive Legal Aid assistance. If you have pre-tax income of about £20,000 you won’t get Legal Aid. If you are damaged by medical failures, run over by a bus, poisoned by tinned meat you will struggle to find a lawyer. If you don’t get legal assistance on a no win – no fee basis then forget it.
      Public sector organisations, big corporations can pay £500 an hour for a lawyer in a court case then will require several lawyers for four or five weeks.
      Most people cannot.

    2. 324276+ up ticks,
      Morning Rik.
      Less trouble than shooting buffalo, more monies in immigrant hides.
      De-fund on this issue &
      the bbC for a win double.

    3. I work that out at around 33p per year for every legit Brit. When you think about it it’s quite good value compared to the whole-scale damage the Government has achieved in less than one year costing us billions in the process….

        1. The answer of course is to change the law so that there isn’t a need to involve lawyers from either side…..

    4. This, from their website:
      As the largest provider of publicly funded (legal aid) services in the UK we have specialist solicitors in: Family and Child Care, Crime and Fraud, Civil Liberties and Human Rights, Housing, Immigration, Litigation, Mental Health, Personal Injury, Professional Negligence, Professional Regulation and Public Law.

      1. I believe everyone should have access to legal representation if needed.

        It’s the abuse of the system that makes my blood boil.

        1. If legal expenses on both sides were capped to what the poorest litigant could pay, it would be more fair. Of course one has to wonder why the publicly owned NHS will pay a fortune in legal fees to defend mistakes that have had adverse effects on patients, that is, members of the public.
          In New Zealand the medical services try to avoid litigation by accepting responsibility more readily.

    5. Some firms of lawyers even opened offices in hospitals so that they could scoop up business from those whose relatives were about to die and needed to change their wills. One particular firm on the South Coast, Claw and Snatch, were always keen to tout for business.

        1. Thanks, Delboy – that works – though it is a bore.

          I don;t understand why a system that was working perfectly OK until Saturday morning, should suddenly bugger about.

  56. A Remoaner hits the dust:

    Chairman of election watchdog is forced out

    It comes after the Conservatives raised “serious concerns” about the leadership and accountability of the watchdog

    By
    Edward Malnick,
    SUNDAY POLITICAL EDITOR
    3 October 2020 • 10:19pm
    The chairman of the election watchdog is being forced to stand down after the body drew fury from the Conservatives over a botched attempt to hand itself powers to prosecute political parties.

    Sir John Holmes is understood to have been told by MPs that he cannot continue in the role – after seeking to extend his four-year term beyond December.

    The Electoral Commission is also now shelving plans to acquire powers to prosecute scores of criminal offences itself, rather than referring suspected breaches to the police and Crown ­Prosecution Service.

    It comes after the Conservatives raised “serious concerns” about the leadership and accountability of the watchdog, over the proposals, which Amanda Milling, the party chairman, said would have amounted to the body “marking its own homework”.

    Writing in The Sunday Telegraph in August, Ms Milling said: “The commission should be focusing on improving its core functions, not trying to expand its empire. If the commission fails to make these changes and do the job it was set up to do then the only option would be to abolish it.”

    This weekend, a commission spokesman said the body had “paused” the move, stating that “we do not currently have broad stakeholder understanding and consent”.

    Sir John, who has chaired the commission since 2017, faced criticism when this newspaper revealed in 2018 that, months after being nominated as the body’s chairman, he said in a speech that he “regret[ted] the result” of the 2016 Brexit referendum and complained about “the panoply of Eurosceptic nonsense about the EU” heard during the campaign.

    Brexiteers have repeatedly accused the commission of bias against pro-Leave campaigners. Sir John is understood to have informed the Speaker’s committee on the Electoral Commission, which oversees the body, that he wished to continue in his role beyond the initial four-year term. His predecessor, Jenny Watson, served for two terms, totalling eight years.

    But the former civil servant’s request was turned down after members of the panel concluded that “all is not well” at the commission, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

    Last week, the committee began the process of appointing a replacement, with a public recruitment campaign expected to begin shortly. Under the Political Parties and Elections Act, the chairman cannot be a member of a political party, or anyone who has served as an MP or donated to a party in the last five years.

    Sir John gave the commissioners’ endorsement to the push by Bob Posner, the body’s chief executive, to hand itself powers to prosecute parties and campaign groups – now “paused”.

    A spokesman for the commission said: “We thank him for his leadership of and commitment to the commission over the past four years and for all his work in support of the UK’s democratic processes.”

    The spokesman added: “We planned to consult later this year on changes to our enforcement policy, which would have included a draft prosecution ­policy. However, while we have had positive discussions with a range of stakeholders, we do not currently have broad stakeholder understanding and consent.

    “We hope to build consensus in due course, but our current focus is to work to prepare for the polls taking place next May, to ensure that these elections can be delivered safely and effectively. We have therefore paused this work.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/10/03/chairman-election-watchdog-forced/

    2. Hang on, this is unconscious racist bias! There are no black persons in this picture.

          1. One imagines they would have had terrible moments of fear and panic , then been knocked unconscious in the water.

      1. Oh, it is miles away – in the Alpes-Maritimes, about 20 miles or so north of Nice. We know it well because we did lots of weekend trips in the Mercantour hills and to St Martin – when we lived at Cap d’Ail.

        However, it is very similar to what happened almost exactly 2 years ago in the Aude – just a handful of miles from Laure. At Villegailhenc every house in the village was either destroyed or damaged, as well as the bridge being washed away.

        As I said earlier – we have very rare events like this in England. In France, in my time thee have been at least four such catastrophes.

    3. If I had to guess:

      The house looks fairly modern, presumably built beside the road that continues a long way up the hill. The road may have been resurfaced recently but there are no roadside fosses, or if there are, they are not deep. There are other houses further up the hill with drives that also run down to the road. There was nowhere for the deluge to run off further up until it arrived at the road and then all the water just turned the road into a raging torrent.

      Even on our small hill, a storm after a long dry spell a couple of years ago built up enough of a head of water to flood out a house only about 400m from us and that was even with cleared fosses. The flow would have been strong enough to knock one over. It is staggering how fast it happens.

      Very bad luck for the owners/occupants

      2. A lot of the people interviewed, including the SPs and Maires are saying that it was the speed with which the water rose that was so frightening.

        In Laure, the little piddling ruisseau could rise by 12 feet in a couple of hours.

        1. Fortunately, immediately around here, the bottom of the valley is broad and flat and overflow spreads out easily.

          Even so, in the time we’ve been here, it has been noticeable that new buildings taking away land and having lots of hard-standing have made a bit of a difference to surface water on the roads

          1. In 1999, we were fortunate in Laure, that the dam at the end of the artificial lake above the village only partially gave way. The lower part of Laure was flooded up to 8 feet – and it was all over and done with in half an hour. The water reached the Aude which, obviously, burst its banks and was nearly a mile wide. Some villages nearer the sea remained flooded for two moths as the water gradually evaporated.

            Part of the problem was the motorway and railway – both built (100 years apart) on embankments which neatly blocked the obvious, natural route to the sea.

            Two years later, in Laure, on the flooded (and still liable to flooding) part of the lower village – four new houses were built…….. I ask you.

          2. People don’t learn.

            We’re having work done on the drive and the Mairie sent someone to look.

            They have insisted on new ditch work, which had not been thought necessary many years ago when the drive was last changed. I’m assuming due to the flooding decsribed earlier. At the presnet rate of rain here and looking at the forecast I’m starting to doubt it will be finished by Christmas.

      2. Rather below your normal level of erudition!

        It is her smile and her eyes and her personality that clearly light up the room.

    2. Terrific, although still have high regard for the Charles Trenet (original?) version.

        1. Trenet’s “La Merde” was very moving…

          We used to go to the café in Narbonne where he had been a regular.

          1. Did he etch his name on the back of the bog door?

            PS Bonus points for the movement reference….

    3. Tatiana Eva-Marie is a Swiss-born vocalist based in Brooklyn who sings 1930s-style swing and gypsy jazz. She moved from Paris to New York City in 2011 and formed the Avalon Jazz Band in 2014 with violinist Adrien Chevalier. Her singing has been compared to the jazz vocalists Cyrille Aimée and Cécile McLorin Salvant. She grew up in France and Switzerland. Wiki

    5. She has all the charm that is lacking in the dull, virtue-signalling liberal arts establishment. Wonderful.

    6. An excellent version of La Mer. I once sang that to a French choir I was with when we were dining in a seaside café/restaurant. She has a beautiful smile and a lovely voice. Nearly brought a tear to my eye.

        1. That’s all well and good but no one would listen to what I had to say. The Chairman is just a figurehead and doesn’t have the clout of the DG.

        2. Does Grizz still have a few set of Cuffs big boots and a baton or two ? it’s just what the BBC need, some respect for it pissed off fee payers and firm discipline……….evenin’ all.

        1. Scary times we live in, Maggie.

          I’m so happy to have lived when I did. I wouldn’t want to be starting out as a sprog in 2020.

        2. “They came to rebuild war-shattered Britain.” No they didn’t, they came here because they could no longer get into America. Britain was still on rationing – we really didn’t need any more mouths to feed.

          (Those of you with time on your hands might care to take a close look at that Nationality Act.)

          1. The tell is the fact that Britain and Australia facilitated the large scale immigration of Brits to Australia at the same time as the UK were importing these allegedly vital 3rd worlders.

    2. We have some Charles Trenet albums and we get our students to join in when we play and sing ‘Boum’

      The key changes in La Mer make it interesting and fun to play on the guitar.

  62. Prepare for a tough Covid Winter.
    UK sees another 28 hospital deaths.
    Panic stations continue and the NCHS takes precedence above all else.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8803221/Boris-Johnson-denies-bungling-coronavirus-lockdown.html
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8803573/UK-records-28-coronavirus-deaths-hospitals-preliminary-toll.html

    I am beginning to wonder if there is a deliberate policy of non treatment of people with other life-threatening illnesses so that there will be another huge “stock” of already newly vulnerable people for the virus to finish off next time around, just so that the “experts” can say “we told you so”.

    1. Gosh – that’s seven more than will have died in on the roads and in accidents in the home…. Ban driving and, er, living…

    3. Have you seen the latest ghastly virtue signalling from Sainsbury’s?

      Anyone who doesn’t support their celebrations of Black History Month is a narsty old racist who should jolly well shop elsewhere apparently.

        1. Who are also “celebrating” it, as is Tesco, Co-op, Aldi etc etc. All these places have staff, and customers of all hues – it’s simply good business to acknowledge such things. It doesn’t mean that they are going to change anything.

          I shop where it’s convenient, where I can get the items I want, and where the in store service is, at least, decent. What the boffins have to say is utterly irrelevant.

          1. Not living in the UK, the minutiæ of what supermarket is doing what promotion passes me by. It was meant figuratively, as in “Don’t like – don’t shop there”.

          2. Yes, I got your meaning, but the thing is pretty universal so if you really don’t like it, it might mean “don’t shop at all” for a lot of people for the next few weeks.

            To be perfectly honest it had passed me by too until someone here started to moan about it.

          3. Mother’s local grocers just get on with grocing (is that a verb?) without all the flimflammery.
            Valley View – Dinas Powys – they were the only ones who would deliver in March, when the supermarkets were overwhelmed.

          4. The Song Against Grocers

            God made the wicked Grocer
            For a mystery and a sign,
            That men might shun the awful shops
            And go to inns to dine;
            Where the bacon’s on the rafter
            And the wine is in the wood,
            And God that made good laughter
            Has seen that they are good.

            The evil-hearted Grocer
            Would call his mother “Ma’am,”
            And bow at her and bob at her,
            Her aged soul to damn,
            And rub his horrid hands and ask
            What article was next
            Though MORTIS IN ARTICULO
            Should be her proper text.

            His props are not his children,
            But pert lads underpaid,
            Who call out “Cash!” and bang about
            To work his wicked trade;
            He keeps a lady in a cage
            Most cruelly all day,
            And makes her count and calls her “Miss”
            Until she fades away.

            The righteous minds of innkeepers
            Induce them now and then
            To crack a bottle with a friend
            Or treat unmoneyed men,
            But who hath seen the Grocer
            Treat housemaids to his teas
            Or crack a bottle of fish sauce
            Or stand a man a cheese?

            He sells us sands of Araby
            As sugar for cash down;
            He sweeps his shop and sells the dust
            The purest salt in town,
            He crams with cans of poisoned meat
            Poor subjects of the King,
            And when they die by thousands
            Why, he laughs like anything.

             

            The wicked Grocer groces
            In spirits and in wine,
            Not frankly and in fellowship
            As men in inns do dine;
            But packed with soap and sardines
            And carried off by grooms,
            For to be snatched by Duchesses
            And drunk in dressing-rooms.

            The hell-instructed Grocer
            Has a temple made of tin,
            And the ruin of good innkeepers
            Is loudly urged therein;
            But now the sands are running out
            From sugar of a sort,
            The Grocer trembles; for his time,
            Just like his weight, is short.

            G.K. Chesterton
            (From “The Flying Inn”, 1914)

          5. That’s mean.
            :-((
            Valley View will be getting a bottle of champagne from me once I can easily get to Wales. They dug me and Mother out of a hole when nobody else was any use whatsoever (Apart from unbelievably kind offers of help from Issy – who we finally didn’t need, fortunately). And they accept payment on a promise, by international bank transfer!

          6. Not really mean, Paul considering that it’s 106 years old but I take your point. There are obviously some who are not in it purely for financial gain. It was just your use of the now archaic word ‘grocer’ that sparked my memory of that poem.

          8. Is that a verb… let’s just say I’ve never come across it before; but you could check out this: https://www.grocing.com/

            Valley View appears to be an independent so their promotions are probably around other local businesses (as are the ones in our village shop). At least you were able to find someone who could supply her.

            I used to go down to Cardiff fairly regularly but I don’t know the bit immediately west of the city at all. I may have driven through Dinas Powys once, taken a friend to visit friends of hers in Barry when she was post-op and not allowed to drive.

          9. it might mean “don’t shop at all” for a lot of people for the next few weeks

            “few weeks” . . . have you not watched TV in the last few decades? This stuff is relentless and it’s near-universal, certainly in the English speaking world. Black Hysteria Month has merely turned up the volume for now. The corporate world grovels to blacks, trannies, gays etc 24/7.

            http://narrativecode.blogspot.com

          10. Oh dear me… you have got your knickers in a twist. Can’t cope with the fact that there are a few different people in the world.

            The corporate world needs customers – that means everyone.

          11. Can’t cope with the fact that there are a few different people in the world

            Go ahead – embrace your Muslim terrorists, your Pakistani rapists, your acid throwers, your muggers and all the rest. Nothing to worry about, it’s just ‘difference’.

            The corporate world needs customers – that means everyone.

            The corporate world needs to go and f**k itself. The corporate world will destroy us given half a chance, its about time the corporate world was put in its place.

            What does the corporate world need trannies for?

            Why does the corporate world insist on pandering to demographics who play almost no part in the creation of the products and services it sells while actively denigrating those that do?

          12. An excellent demonstration of a clear inability to cope with even tiny amounts of factual information.

            Please don’t strain yourself further.

          14. If you can’t work that out – try actually reading instead of ranting, lying and using bad language – I won’t strain your brain cell any further. You’ve clearly only got one left.

          15. You made a single, facile, point about the corporate world. And . . . nothing else.

            How about you explain the myriad benefits of diversity that your beloved corporate world is so keen to supply.

          16. “The Universe will die not with a band but with a whimper.
            Time-lapse of the future”
            What a complete load of imagination and BS!😂Nice graphics but that’s about all.
            And a current ad came on in the middle of the video with a mixed race couple– black guy and white girl– OF COURSE!😠

            I prefer someONE in control and Eternal.
            “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” Genesis 1:1-3

            “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.” Revelation 22:1-5

            Holy moly!!!😨 That 10:10. Agitprop (2010) is deeply disturbing and violent.
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS5CH-Xc0co

            And where have we been hearing at first the mask, contact-tracing app, covid vaccination will be your choice, no pressure. 🔴💥🥶

          1. Sorry. You shop in Sainsbury’s if you like – I (the missing pronoun) don’t shop at Sainsbury’s anyway 🙂

    4. This is spot on.

      I cannot believe that anybody has become less racist because of BLM? Indeed, it strikes me that BLM really wants a form of apartheid and a couple of years ago the Mayor of London wanted religious apartheid when he proposed council flats to be built exclusively for Muslims.

    5. We’re ALL getting one – whether we want one or not. Apparently we are getting it on ITV + Channel 4 + BBC – etc etc. This site should get busy.

    6. There was a half-BAME (is that the right term) on Private Passions Radio 3 today a bright lady who was ‘troubled’ by the fact that her full-BAME ancestors were in fact slave owners in the US….

    1. Feminism was the opening gambit in the Culture Wars. It pitted Man against Woman and Woman won. This has not led to an equal society but the demonization of and elimination of masculinity and its beliefs and traits.

    2. Feminism was the opening gambit in the Culture Wars. It pitted Man against Woman and Woman won. This has not led to an equal society but the demonization of and elimination of masculinity and its beliefs and traits.

    3. Boris will break free, but probably not while he is PM, which means a very distracted PM for us.
      There is a lot to be said for having a boringly happily married Prime Minister – and not married to a ruddy socialist or green dupe!

        1. Can you imagine what it would have been like if John Major had divorced his wife and taken up with a younger woman who was pregnant when he became Prime Minister?
          Tucking his shirt into his underpants would have been the least of his worries!
          I rest my case!

      1. Consider yourself fortunate, they are videos leading up to some of the still pictures you put up yesterday.

        Very sad for the poor sods living there.

        1. And across the border in Liguria. At least four dead; massive flooding in Ventimiglia – bridge swept away in the town.

          We really are lucky in the UK that “extreme events” don’t really do more than cause inconvenience.

          2. Agreed. But that was exceptional. There have been at least four of these catastrophes in the south of France since 1999.

          3. 2005, 2009 and 2015.

            I agree the South of France has had some horrific ones, but so have parts of the UK.

            Anywhere with big slopes and a “focus point” for the flow, that has had a long dry spell followed by one of these big storms, can be devastated.

          6. So let us ban internal combustion engines, that will fix it.

            I can just see rows of construction equipment sitting idle because the sun don’t shine and they cannot recharge their batteries.

      2. Bill, have you tried checking your settings? At the top of the Disqus page, just next to your name on the right hand side, you will see a little triangle pointing downwards. Left-click on this once, and you will see several options; the second one will say either “Show media” or “Hide media”. If it says “Show media”, click on this and your problem should be solved. If it says “Hide media” then I don’t know what to suggest! Hope you can sort it out.

        1. Thanks, Caroline. I have done that. Now, some of the attachments are available when clicked – others say “View” but when I click they say “Hide”.

          Another great mystery…

          3. Thanks – been there, done that. It mostly works. My beef is that until yesterday morning, I didn’t need to do it; the links were always there…

          4. After doing that, Bill, refresh the page – curly clockwise arrow, generally 3rd icon on the top right next to the web address.

  68. Farmers are putting turkeys on crash diets and slaughtering them early so they are not too big for a ‘Rule of Six’ Christmas dinner
    It is too late to grow naturally smaller birds so farmers have come up with plans
    Some have decided to slaughter turkeys early and freeze them for Christmas
    And others are planning on putting them on diets so they are smaller but fresh

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8803157/Farmers-putting-turkeys-crash-diets-not-big-Rule-Six-Christmas.html

    2. Looks like it’s turkey flavoured crisps for me this year as I normally have my Xmas dinner in the care home with my wife then entertain the residents in the afternoon with my keyboard

      1. Poor you FA, how long has your dearly beloved been in a care home .

        We had a few happy festive feasts when Moh’s mother was in care, and we had great fun helping feed some of the elderlies and giving a hand . The Christmas meals were always delicious . We paid for ours !

        We entered a total deep and empty void when she died, and I don’t think we have recovered even now .

        1. 5 years now Maggie, I always had the pleasure of feeding her the Xmas dinner whilst trying to eat mine. The spread which the care home provides is top notch and attention to little details like the table decorations and a present for everyone (even me) is fantastic.
          I fully understand your feelings

      2. we tried sprout flavored crisps last year, definitely an acquired taste but a small bag would help the festive meal.

        We have the situation now where granny can fly into Canada but once she has cleared the quarantine period is not supposed to visit anyone outside of her normal family group.

      3. That’s hard, FA. I feel for the both of you.
        Looks like my Mother will be alone at home for Christmas. I’m already not looking forward to that.

    3. I guess that our big Christmas dinner at the community centre wil be off this year so that will be several hundred people missing out on the friendship that the occasion normally brings.

      Sitting alone in your bed sit with a cheap ready meal will have to do.

    4. My butcher has decided not to take any turkey orders until November.
      At the moment, she has no idea what will be needed, but suspects smaller ones will be in demand.

      1. In Germany we used to get small turkeys – about 2kg – around Easter. The only roast turkey I’ve enjoyed eating.

        1. I’m not keen on turkey; we have it at Christmas because others expect it and I take the view that it’s only one meal out of 365.
          Even when black or bronze, it really is a nonny kind of meat.

          2. I always preferred the stuffing, and sausages wrapped in bacon.
            Turkey schmurkey.

          3. Pigs in blankets are the best part of Xmas dinner especially if bacon is crispy – not keen on suffing though :o)

          4. Suffing sounds like going through the dish with your snout, slurping up the gravy.

          5. Ah, but stuffing, gravy, and homemade (no sugar) cranberry is to die for! Plus sprouts, of course… I love sprouts.

          7. I always preferred the stuffing, and sausages wrapped in bacon.
            Turkey schmurkey.

          8. I only know of two women who could make a roast turkey taste delicious: my mother and now my wife.

          9. When I lived alone in Germany I came over to my cousins in Norfolk for Christmas. The turkey would go into the Aga at 5 am for lunch at 1 pm. The bird was ‘carved’ with an electric knife, balsa wood breast only, the succulent & flavoursome legs were saved for curry a couple of days later. Only the copious amounts of gin & fizz made it all tolerable.
            Where I am now invited for Christmas there is always turkey, but alongside it an alternative, usually slow-roasted shoulder of lamb, by an excellent cook.

          11. Funny thing is, I really enjoy it at Christmas, but it’s horrible all other times of the year!

          12. I will make a steak and kidney pudding for Christmas Day. Mashed potato, sprouts, carrots and a rich gravy. A bottle of 100% Malbec. Smoked salmon to start, with a glass of Sancerre. No dessert, but a decent Colston Bassett Stilton to finish. A turkey-free zone.

        2. Have you tried a capon? We always have one at Christmas.

          You doubtless remember that Jacques’s speech in As You Like It about the seven ages of man? He noted that the justice – with his fair round belly lined with good capon looked imposing with his severe eyes and beard of formal cut. And, like many of us here, he was full of wise saws and modern instances.

          1. These days I usually buy a poussin. Missy has the breast, I have the wings & legs. I make a marinade of olive oil, garlic, cumin, coriander & a touch of cinnamon in which I roll the bird, then roast it breast-down, turning it over for the last 10 minutes at high heat to crisp the skin.

  69. One for Bill.

    Not all footballers are prima donnas.

    Gloucester City v. Christchurch, FA Cup, September 2005.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cb3b675ee1e7ed2b7094425d86f29c132fb1a1a644a21648fc8865e4d592c930.jpg

    Mind you, anyone would have struggled two years later – here’s the ground under water in the great summer flood of July 2007.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e7952013a26f77d2f326c7cd64b08e7ca23bd925e0170e1f8012cf8da7db402c.jpg

      1. Indeed. I am told that there was a ground pump in that corner of the stadium that wasn’t entirely reliable!

          2. 324276+ up ticks,
            Evening S,
            I am sure GG will see it in the spirit it was meant with no animosity intended.

        1. I don’t think even AC has ever been guilty of such calculatedly sly, passive-aggressive condescension as this one.

          1. I disagree.

            It had all the hallmarks of MtD/AC and he used many of the same statistics.
            When I challenged him, he was very careful with the wording of his responses and refused to deny it outright.

            The style was very similar. If it wasn’t, then there is a fairly good clone out there!
            {:-((.

          3. Be grateful for small mercies, it hasn’t reappeared.

            From your post, I’m guessing that you got replies a while after the threads had moved to a different day.

          5. From many “debates” that I had with AC over the years I found that that was a typical tactic.

            It prevented others from seeing the updates on “one new comment” of the current day, and joining in on rebuttals. In some ways I can see why, as people join in as a bullying tactic.

            Unfortunately there are a few who use that approach regularly.

            I don’t refer to those where one or other of the protagonists may have gone to bed, it’s the 24/36+ hours later I object to.

    4. Why are some of the bullets capitalised and others not?

      Surely you can only put ’cause of death’ down once it has been validated and qualified *when the patient dies*?

      Too any questions here.

    5. Let us just remind ourselves of what Dr John Lee wrote in The Spectator in May:

      Normally, two doctors are needed to certify a death, one of whom has been treating the patient or who knows them and has seen them recently. That has changed. For Covid-19 only, the certification can be made by a single doctor, and there is no requirement for them to have examined, or even met, the patient. A video-link consultation in the four weeks prior to death is now felt to be sufficient for death to be attributed to Covid-19. For deaths in care homes the situation is even more extraordinary. Care home providers, most of whom are not medically trained, may make a statement to the effect that a patient has died of Covid-19. In the words of the Office for National Statistics, this ‘may or may not correspond to a medical diagnosis or test result, or be reflected in the death certification’. From 29 March the numbers of ‘Covid deaths’ have included all cases where Covid-19 was simply mentioned on the death certificate – irrespective of positive testing and whether or not it may have been incidental to, or directly responsible for, death. From 29 April the numbers include the care home cases simply considered likely to be Covid-19.

      So at a time when accurate death statistics are more important than ever, the rules have been changed in ways that make them less reliable than ever. In what proportion of Covid-19 ‘mentions’ was the disease actually present? And in how many cases, if actually present, was Covid-19 responsible for death? Despite what you may have understood from the daily briefings, the shocking truth is that we just don’t know. How many of the excess deaths during the epidemic are due to Covid-19, and how many are due to our societal responses of healthcare reorganisation, lockdown and social distancing? Again, we don’t know. Despite claims that they’re all due to Covid-19, there’s strong evidence that many, perhaps even a majority, are the result of our responses rather than the disease itself.

      It might have been possible to check these proportions by examining the deceased. But at a time when autopsies could have played a major role in helping us understanding this disease, advice was given which made such examinations less likely than might otherwise have been the case. The Chief Coroner issued guidance on 26 March which seemed designed to keep Covid-19 cases out of the coronial system: ‘The aim of the system should be that every death from Covid-19 which does not in law require referral to the coroner should be dealt with via the [death certification] process.’ And even guidance produced by the Royal College of Pathologists in February stated: ‘In general, if a death is believed to be due to confirmed Covid-19 infection, there is unlikely to be any need for a post-mortem examination to be conducted and the Medical Certificate of Cause of Death should be issued.’

      We need proper information to inform our responses to the virus, both clinical and societal. Instead, we have no idea how many of the deaths attributed to Covid-19 really were due to the disease. And we have no idea how many of the excess deaths were really due to Covid-19 or to the effects of lockdown. Officials should be releasing, as a matter of urgency, detailed information on the surge in deaths, both apparent Covid and non-Covid – particularly in care homes. How many are dying of Covid acquired in hospitals? Data presumably exists on this too, but is not released.

      https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-way-covid-deaths-are-being-counted-is-a-national-scandal

      1. 324276+ up ticks,
        Evening WS,

        What is blurring ones vision is the hastily erected, frequently moved goalpost, ALWAYS to the politico’s advantage.

    1. I bought this when it first came out.

      Sadly Jimmy Griffin, Mike Botts and Larry Knechtel are all dead now, leaving David Gates (along with original member, Robb Royer) as the sole survivors.

      Despite winning an Oscar in 1972 as co-writer of the song For All We Know (under the pen-name “Arthur James”), James Griffin was a very talented singer, musician and song-writer in the band who didn’t get the credit he deserved; the output of Gates being preferred by the producers at Electra Records. This led to friction, discontentment, and the early break up of the band.

      Larry Knechtel was a multi-instrumentalist and long-time member of The Wrecking Crew, an LA-based collection of session musicians who appeared on countess chart-topping records.

      2. May I ask you a question? Recently i’ve seen two of your posts you have referred to your IQ. Can I ask where/how you got tested and what your score was. I read somewhere a while ago that 129 was classed as enough to get a PhD. Tell me to sod off if i’m being too nosy or personal.

        1. Don’t get carried away thinking extra special intelligence is required for a Ph.D, ‘cos it isn’t. Sure, many Ph.Ds have skyhigh IQ, and he theses that deal with fundamental physics or mathematics aren’t easy, but a more practical one requires hard concentrated work, an ability to find and sort information, and a gread deal of persistence and perspiration.
          I’m no great shakes on the IQ front, but have a Ph.D – done in 2 years, btw, so there was no extracurriclar fun AT ALL – no time. Sometimes, one makes poor life choices…

          3. Hell’s teeth, many years after taking them, I once looked at my university entrance exams.

            I didn’t even understand the questions, how on earth I answered them I do not know.

            Yet at the time it was choose four questions to answer and my problem was not sraping around for the fourth answer it was choosing which questions would give me the best result.

            Yes, I had worked my socks off before the exams, but it was almost the only time in my life where I could genuinely have answered any of the questions on the papers.

          4. I still have my A-level mathematics papers, with the scribble that shows which questions I answered, but I have no idea how to even start now! Don’t understand a word! And I have 4 degrees and nearly 35 years practice as an engineer…

          5. Thanks to you. sos and Grizzly etc for the entertainment and chat for the last hour+ but got to go and do a bit of taxi work. Bye for now.

          8. Thank you to your answers both sos and Oberst – -I have been in tears laughing at them.

          9. 1: Because you had a similar experience?
            2: Because you don’t believe us?
            3. Because you recognise you are in the presence of intellectual giants?

            OK, I was only joking about 3.

          11. I never went to uni – certainly no degrees. Why shouldn’t i believe you? Compared to me you are both No 3s.

          12. Nah.
            I had a choice – unemployment, or another degree when I finished my BSc. 1 year MSc – unemployment was worse, got an offer to do PhD so accepted. After 1 year MSC, there was only 2 years more grant, so I had to be done in 2 years – now that was hard work. Fellow students taking Wednesday afternoons off, no chance for me. But I managed it! SWMBO graduated with MPhil at the same ceremony – as was Sir Frank Whittle.

          13. Sir Frank Whittle graduated at the same ceremony as you. Didn’t realise you were that old. :-))

          17. A child of Thatchers times – 1979 & onwards at University. To be honest, it’s attitude that wins (as in any other walk of life), not brainpower.

          18. 1976 onwards, another child of Mrs T’s dole queues. Sadly a post-grad wasn’t an option so I went and got my hands dirty doing the practical instead of the theoretical. Didn’t earn much money that way though… farming is, on the whole, less well remunerated than engineering.

          19. Some of the stupidest people, in practical day to day terms, that I know have 1sts, Msc’s Phd’s.

            Academically they are brilliant, but get them to try to replace the valve in a bicycle tube and they would not know where to start.

            As I have noted before, my definition of an expert is someone who can explain a complex problem to me so that I understand the principles behind it, even if I can’t do the maths/write the language.

            If they can’t explain it to you, perhaps they are actually less intelligent than you are…

          20. Our 17 year old grandson is terrific at explaining chemistry and biology to us. Makes sense at the time but, alas, it doesn’t stick.

          22. For that brief moment of sentience you understood.
            The fact you forgot doesn’t make him less of an expert!
            }:-))

          26. If the problem is really complex.. do you want an explanation or do you want someone who can fix it?

          27. That depends on whether their explanation allows me to fix it, or tells me I need to get someone else in.

          28. And if the explanation is too complex for your understanding – you’ve got your answer.

          30. and there ain’t nothing wrong with that, Grizz.
            Firstborn chose to take a City & Guilds (fagbrev), and now makes excellent money as a motor technician. When I was 29, I wish I had been earning like that!

          31. And Hard Knocks. Find out that Life is certainly not fair.
            Can I ask another question? Posts have said you were here in the UK – how come you ended up abroad?

          32. I got in touch with my old school penfriend in Sweden after having no contact for 35 years. We got on very well and, since neither of us were in a relationship at the time, we got together. Both my parents had died so, after I retired, I took a leap of faith and moved to Sweden. Nine years later (a week next Tuesday) I’m still here.

          37. So – you took a chance and it turned out very well. Why not take the Mensa test – you may surprise yourself on that too. I wonder if you could take it in English over there though.

          38. I might have a look online.

            While I’m at it I might also try to discover how much Viking DNA I have in my body.

          41. Indeed.
            Judging from friends, there seems to be a point of no return, probably in ones late 70’s early 80’s when one says “time to return?” while one still can.

            It’s then, when that decision is taken, that one wants to die in situ. Easier when one is alone, I suspect

            A few years yet for us.

          45. Friend’s daughter is currently doing a Ph.D. in pure mathematics. I think that concentrated hard work comes into that too – but her level of intelligence is pretty high as well.

          47. They were married for over 20 years with no sign of a baby at all. Long after they had given up C got pregnant (it took them weeks to work out what was “wrong” with her). The result was a wickedly intelligent toddler who ran absolute rings round the pair of them and was a complete monster for several years when she was in primary school. But she has grown up with looks and brains to burn (who said there was any justice in the world?) and a really nice lass to boot.

            To crown it all she is a singer and really talented on both violin and piano….

        2. When I referred to my IQ I was being a tad flippant in response to comments on a thread. I’ve never had my IQ tested so I have no idea, whatsoever, how high or low it actually is. I am fairly well read and I can hold my own in conversations on many topics; however, being a product of a secondary modern education leaves me at a disadvantage when it comes to educational certificates. I didn’t go to University but I don’t feel out of my depth in discussions on many erudite subjects with the many graduates in my circle of friends.

          There have been many occasions throughout my life that I’ve considered taking Mensa’s entrance examination but it never happened. I do like, though, taking IQ quizzes but whether I could do them as quickly as I once could when I was much younger remains to be seen.

          5. Nowt wrong wiv small brane as long as all the synapses connect well, particularly when faster than the competition

  73. Off topic

    Ouch
    Mancs 1 Dog’s breath 6.

    A great pity it wasn’t the other way around. José getting spanked by Mancs would have been good.

    1. Hang on, that’s politician’s logic.

      The mask wearers could have bad masks and be catching COVID from non-mask wearers.

      Mask wearers could be wearing their mask wrong.

      Non-mask wearers not getting tested they’re not in the stats at all, so could be infected or not.

      Wearing a mask might be completely pointless (which it arguably is – unless surgical masks which are worn only for a specific time, in a specific way – they are.

      Mask wearers might be taking them off in the proximity of someone who has become infected from someone else – mask wearer or not.

      There are too many variables involved.

      1. 10/10.

        And that’s why we don’t trust the figures…

        EDIT PS I assume you were being flippant.

      2. 10/10.

        And that’s why we don’t trust the figures…

        EDIT PS I assume you were being flippant.

      3. Condensed breath with virus in it can be transferred to the hands when taking the mask off, then transferred to whatever you touch next…

        1. Some doctors believe that unless masks are worn perfectly (ie changed as soon as damp, never re-worn without being through a hot wash – if reusable, bagged as soon as removed, and never touched when on the face) they can do more harm than good.

          I can’t be bothered to fight about them – and I wouldn’t have been allowed into the hospital to have my eye treated and checked had I refused to wear one. But I can’t say that I have much faith in them.

          2. Local chief virologist was just in the paper saying masks are likely more of a problem than a solution, as long as you wash your hands and maintain 1 metre separation.

          3. He/she is not the only one.

            The only reason for a mask would be if one had a cough – so one might be advised to carry one to get home in an emergency if necessary. Otherwise one is not supposed to be out and about with a cough…

          4. Worn perfectly they serve a purpose. Speaking as a clinician, from what I see around me & on TV, the vast majority of the population has no idea how to wear a mask correctly. Perhaps time should be dedicated to instruction on the news clips.

          5. I do my best to follow instructions – because if I’m going to wear a mask I might as well do it properly – but most people don’t seem to have a clue – or care a button.

          7. On the other hand some here (and in other places) boast about re-using the same “disposable” mask for days/weeks on end – they were the ones I was thinking of when I wrote the last phrase.

            The latest “proof that it is all a con” article on display on this page starts by saying that 2 doctors are normally needed for a death certificate. Written by another academic with a medical degree rather than one who will ever signed such a thing. I’ve been present when a death certificate was signed – no question of a second signature – have things changed?

          8. When my sister died last year she was pronounced dead by a qualified nurse. Her doctor signed the death certificate then the funeral director phoned me a few days later to say another doctor was visiting the Chapel of Rest the following day to confirm the death certificate.

          9. I know this is directed at me. I didn’t offer it as “proof that it is all a con” but merely to show that this subject is highly contentious. It’s only part of the whole article but it’s about more than two doctors signing a death certificate. John Lee asks some awkward questions, as many in the medical profession are doing about the recording of Covid deaths.

          10. Mmm. He who knows not and knows not he knows not…..

            You over rate your importance. My comment was “directed” at the Spectator article – not the person who posted it.

            The subject is not “highly contentious” it’s all pretty bloody obvious. If John Lee doesn’t know how many doctors are needed to sign a certificate then his other questions as equally likely to be irrelevant.

          11. And would you have know about the article had I not posted it? It is only an extract, about one-third of the full article. If you cannot get past the Spectator paywall I could post the rest of it for you if you like so that you can judge the whole of it and not allow yourself to be too distracted by the reference to the death certificate which appears to have exercised you so much.

            What is highly contentious is the entire subject of the diagnosis and recording of Covid deaths, not just the two doctors and the death certificate. Many questions have been asked about it by people far more qualified than you or me.

            “You over rate your importance.”

            It didn’t take you long, did it?

          13. Are you saying it is an assumption to deduce that the reference to two doctors has exercised you? You picked up on it straight away. The article is entitled The way Covid deaths are being counted is a national scandal. That is the subject, the whole subject. It is unfortunate that the first line of the extract that I posted refers specifically to ‘two doctors’ because you don’t seem to be able to get beyond that.

            And who are the gullible and why? Is no one allowed to ask questions?

          14. Pretty much everything you’ve addressed to me (including this latest comment) is chockful of assumption.

            You can ask – I don’t have to answer. Frankly, it becoming increasingly obvious that I’m wasting my time by doing so.

          15. Ah. Does ‘wasting my time’ mean you don’t have an answer? Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps I haven’t explained myself properly. I’ll try again.

            John Lee wrote a longish article for the Spectator about the purpose of autopsies, the changes to procedures and legislations for the recording of deaths and their causes during the pandemic, and, particularly importantly, the need for the public to have confidence in the statistics. For you to concentrate on the ‘two doctors’ rule might be seen as rather missing the point. Are you?

          16. Wasting my time means exactly what it says.

            My time is much too important (to me, all references to importance clearly refer to what is important to me) to waste it communicating with someone who assumes he knows what I’m thinking – and seems incapable, even when told in words of as few syllables as possible, of understanding otherwise.

            I have answers to whatever I choose to have answers to – I don’t choose to answer any more of your questions.

          17. Goodness. Isn’t that a bit precious? How can anyone know what anyone else knows or thinks without asking them? To ask a question rather than to assert or assume gives the subject the chance to answer in good spirit. That, of course, appears beyond you. Having ducked the two doctors question, you now want to take your ball home.

          18. And would you have know about the article had I not posted it? It is only an extract, about one-third of the full article. If you cannot get past the Spectator paywall I could post the rest of it for you if you like so that you can judge the whole of it and not allow yourself to be too distracted by the reference to the death certificate which appears to have exercised you so much.

            What is highly contentious is the entire subject of the diagnosis and recording of Covid deaths, not just the two doctors and the death certificate. Many questions have been asked about it by people far more qualified than you or me.

            “You over rate your importance.”

            It didn’t take you long, did it?

          19. My father was signed off by the family doctor as heart failure. I was in Chile at the time. I have a suspicion that he tripped & fell down the stairs.

          20. But did his heart fail before he tripped.

            Does it take two doctors? I never heard of it except in exceptional circumstances.

          22. I saw, but it doesn’t answer the question. One incident doth not a rule make. As I’ve experienced the opposite (also last year) I’m asking for a more definite answer.

          24. You are persistent, I will grant. But it still isn’t an answer as I had the opposite experience.

          26. Makes sense.

            You still haven’t answered the question about doctors and certificates though.

          27. No, I dodged it because quite honestly, I don’t know. From memory there was only one signature on the death certificate. In the circumstances one doesn’t pay much attention to the fine details.

          28. Granted. And fair enough. I’ve had certified copies of at least 10 in my hands over the last 35 years (copies of them are needed by all sorts of organisations and I’ve put more than a few in the post over the years) – and none had more than one signature – though two had the signature of the pathologist performing the PM – and that alone.

          30. I was looking for confirmation, because one would expect a retired pathologist writing in the Spectator to have checked his facts. One lives and learns.

            What is strange is the number of organisations which do, and don’t, require proof of death. Perhaps the oddest was the British Wool Marketing Board … they declined to give us the value of the previous summer’s wool clip for probate purposes without the production of a certificate; not the money, just the outstanding value. Quite bizarre, especially as it was a matter of about £100.

        2. If the virus is airborne it can settle on anything, clothes/hair and the next gust can spread it onto someone elses clothes/hair – how long does it live on those surfaces. The masks won’t make any difference.

          1. It is recorded as surviving for up to 3 hours on hard, non-porous surfaces. That much is fact… pretty much everything else seems to be speculation.

          2. The virus relies on movement of people or the close proximity of people in order to spread so if everyone stayed more than say 1 metre apart for 4 hours surely the virus would die, or am I simplifying it too much. If that were the case surely 4 hours isn’t a big deal?

          3. You’re over simplifying. Because the virus goes on living in the people… so as long as there are people with virus…. you can guess the rest.

            If only everyone staying put for 4 hours would be the answer :-((

          4. Ah, I see what you mean, it would have to be in conjunction with isolating those with it

          5. Hence all the testing, all the instructions to stay at home if you have a cough etc. etc. etc.

            Of course there’s always some contact so none of it really works…. but we are where we are and for the moment I’m firmly locked out of Scotland.

          6. DiL is manager if 4 care homes and is reporting staff with sores around nose and mouth despite changing them regularly. Possible/probable death traps.

      5. It’s all a load of bollux for infections, maybe, only and people not being ill and some people dying which is a fairly normal occurrence through the year but worse in autumn and winter.
        Why would you have a test if you didn’t feel unwell and why have one if you are?

      6. 10/10.

        And that’s why we don’t trust the figures…

        EDIT PS I assume you were being flippant.

  75. HELP ! Has anyone else been having this problem?

    Slow page loading for pages from any site. Slow TLS handshake and timing out?

    1. Not on my computer.
      Have you checked Task Manager to see what your computer’s doing?
      Is your anti-virus doing a huge scan?
      Is some blasted Microsoft product downloading a humungously large update (likeliest candidate)?
      If the last, it’ll just download and install itself and all will return to normal.

      If it doesn’t, you might have malware.

        1. Assume there’s nothing suspicious in Task Manager…

          Are you on a wireless connection, and is it faster when you plug it in with a LAN cable?
          Do you have a wireless repeater, if so, is it still working normally?
          Can you call the network provider and ask them to check the line?

          7. Funny you should mention that. I rarely burn dinner in the oven but when the micro gets manky i take it to the tip and buy a new one for £20. Who wants to be a scrubber?

          9. My Zanussi microwave is about 40 yr old -still works. Had one repair – after an idiot accidentally left something metal in the food to be heated. OK I admit it – it was me.

      3. No problem here – and not on fibre optic either. As for the Windows 10 “updates” that can’t be turned off – I’d get blocked for my comments on that.

        1. Seems so, much to my relief. Switched to hsfo about 2 months ago & for a few weeks it was very fast, but recently it has dropped off.

  76. Phew – I logged out of Discurse. Counted to 20. Logged in – and I can now see the attachments/links – albeit having to click on them, instead of them being there already.

    I’ll go and have a lie down.

      1. Refreshing was not working for me yesterday. I just closed the browser window and re-opened it, and many missing posts suddenly appeared!

    1. When I was a student (early 1980s), I regularly travelled on a sleeper between Paris and Madrid. 16 hours! Until my parents took pity on me and put me on the more expensive train which was only 12 hours.

      It was good fun. My father once got it in the neck from the five fellow travellers in my compartment – all big, burly men on their way back to work in Northern Europe after Christmas in Spain. They said it was quite outrageous that my father should be putting his “little daughter” (I was at least 20 at the time!) on this particular train where the compartments were mixed; and then assured him – and then me – that, as they all had daughters my age, they would look after me properly. They all dutifully left the compartment after the conductor had been to prepare the bunks, so that I could get undressed and into my top bunk in total comfort. Delightful chaps. But it was after this incident that my father always booked the other train!

      1. Being a gentleman has nothing to do with money, education or birth. Some of the most perfect gentlemen I have come across come from humble backgrounds.

        Just look at Johnson and Cameron. Educated at Oxbridge and Eton with wealthy families but a both of them yobs in the way they behave.

        Did anyone see the article about the Johnson family in the MSM today? What a hellish and nasty family they are.

    2. No, but I’ve travelled on the sleeper from Harwich (via Hoek van Holland) to Moscow in the 1960s. Does that count?

      1. I travelled several times on a sleeper (“Bags the top bunk bed, Dad!”) from Buenos Aires to Cordoba in central Argentina during the mid-1950s. Sadly now, that service has been discontinued as everyone makes the journey by plane.

      1. I had a very ragged journey up to Inverness , no sleeper, no refreshments , no restaurant , nothing, passengers had to keep leaping out when the train stopped for tea and sandwiches etc, trains were terrible then, the return journey was by sleeper , and was more organised and comfortable .

        My journey didn’t end at Inverness, I had to catch a connection to Lairgs, and then go by road single track by landrover up to Cape Wrath .

        I am watching a prog about the Caledonian Express!

        Much more luxurious now.

        1. Strewth.
          We put my ancient rustbucket mini on the Motorrail and had a sitting compartment all the way up from Lodnod. Breakfast in the Highlands was lovely, proper restaurant car.
          Mini (called George) was trainsick, needed pushed off the car waggon and worked on for a while before he started.

          1. I couldn’t take a car for that trip.

            Moh and his flight crew were on exercise up at Cape Wrath, I stayed in Durness, it was a wonderful experience . Really wild country and the tallest cliffs I have ever seen.

            I think it was British Rail then before it became privatised.. I don’t think BR cared about passengers , everything was so sloppy , but I don’t think things have changed all that much these days apart from the huge hike in fares.

          2. Last time I was on a train in the UK, I was well impressed as to how quiet, comfortable and clean they were; sgns and announcements of stations, wifi, USB sockets… excellent!

          4. There was a certain lag from privatisation to improvement – as a result of nationalised industry not giving a shut, takes a long time to fix.

    4. No, but did to Edinburgh. Travelled being the operative word. Sleeper it most definitely wasn’t.

    5. I regularly took the sleeper between Leuchars and London 1972 – 1976, Maggie; never northwards to Inverness.

      1. London/Leuchars would have been the east coast service, terminating in Aberdeen would it not? From memory the Inverness sleepers took a different route (and didn’t start at Kings Cross) but I only remember seeing someone off on the Motorail from Inverness once – and my memory of his destination is a bit hazy after 43 years.

        1. IIRC, West Coast line from Euston via Glasgow. Locomotive change somewhere there, too, but being mostly asleep, wasn’t paying attention. Nice dawn North of Glasgow and running into Inverness… Sigh

          2. Nice dawn sometimes when driving north in high summer. I usually drive at night (less traffic) but in mid-summer only a couple of hours in real darkness.

        2. You are undoubtedly correct, Jennifer. I have only ever travelled north by rail on the West Coast of Scotland. Highly recommended for picturesque scenery !

      2. My journey was 1975 or was it 1976, the year of the heat wave , left Euston wrapped up against the cold and and arrived back in Dorset to a heat wave , which then got hotter and hotter and the soil cracked , which went on and on untill we had water rationing !

        1. The drought broke in Dorset in August, when we were camping/sailing on Cleavel Point.

        2. That would have been spring/ summer1976, Maggie; the year the banks of Loch Lomond were exposed and cracked !

          1. Yes it was . That’s right .

            Our water was rationed , no standpipes , just a trickle , it was so hot wasn’t it . There were huge cracks in the fields , cliff sides , roads melted .. raging
            inflation and industrial unrest!

          2. Father & I spent several days lagging the loft – from about 07:00 to 09:00, when it was too hot up there. Arms full of glassfibre spikes I remember well.

          3. Father & I spent several days lagging the loft – from about 07:00 to 09:00, when it was too hot up there. Arms full of glassfibre spikes I remember well.

          6. Someone threw a ciggie out of the train to/from Inverness – and the resultant peat fire lasted for months and went down for metres.

        1. No, Maggie: I was living in Cupar and working in Kirkcaldy. A close friend, Steve Glencorse – a Phantom pilot – was based at Leuchars; we had many good nights in the mess. Sadly, Steve was lost on a training flight after a stint ashore – off Cromer.

          Accident McDonnell Douglas Phantom FGR2 XV413, 12 Nov 1980
          Narrative: Destroyed when crashed into the sea at night, on November 12,1980, 50 miles off Cromer, Norfolk. Both crew – Pilot Squadron Leader Stephen GLENCORSE and Navigator Flight Lieutenant Graham Edward FINCH – killed, as no ejection was initiated. Only one per cent of the aircraft wreckage was recovered and so no cause was found

          8. Oh dear , how terrible, and I mean terrible.

            Things like that happened .. the dreadful knock on the door scenario played heavily on minds sometimes.

      1. That must have been a wonderful experience pm.

        Moh has lived on the Shetlands and offshore , and I would have loved to have visited there.

        1. Offshore is noisy & greasy. Getting there by chopper is awful. Otherwise, it’s OK. Plenty food, and nowt to do but eat, sleep & work.

          2. 6 weeks installation of jacket & topsides on a crane barge was fun, I must admit. Lucrative, too.
            Learned some Dutch (the piling contractors were Dutch), continued with Italian (Italian barge – the Saipem 7000), good food in the Italian mess, little to do most days. Learned a lot of meteorology from the omboard weatherman, including how winds affect the waves in the North Sea. Happy times.

    7. My father, in his 80s, used to travel across Europe in sleepers. Thought nothing of it.

    9. Any young man who did that would have been barmy. He could just have waited for the four and twenty virgins to come down to him from Inverness.

      :-))

  78. Like Minty I’m still feeling a little off colour so an early night beckons. Good night folks.

    2. Your opening post of the day was a heavy cold, now it’s man-‘flu.

      Thank goodness for that.

      I thought you were toughing it out and putting the wimps here, (esp me), to shame.

      Good luck, have a good night and may it be gone in the morning.

    1. Only first thing after opening Nottle, once it has been open for a while it becomes intermittent. I think it depends on the source of the link.
      If I log out it starts again.

      1. It started =, for me, on Saturday morning. Never before, I use Chrome – but it is the same of Firefox.

        2. I use Chrome. I also use Ghostery, in which nttl is a ‘trusted site’. I think Chrome may have been ‘improved’ beyond usefulness. I’ll investigate, and report back.

    3. Ditto. Since yesterday morning I’ve had to login each time I’ve loaded this page and then switch on ‘View media’.

        1. No one from GCHQ is in the office at the moment. They are all working from home in Pakistan.

      1. But if you “Hide Media” – on my PC, anyway, NOTHING shows.

        EDIT Bugger me – I tried that and it WORKED. Thanks, Our Susan.

    7. I have that with Chrome. I am too lazy to check if I can customise it to behave like Firefox, my preferred browser.

    1. Me too.
      That prompted my thoughts in number of directions.
      Are men just better at being musicians? As well as mathematicians, and chess players.
      Why is the British empire castigated and the Austro-Hungarian Empire is not? The riches garnered from the British Empire were spent on building schools, and courts (law and tennis), roads and railways, libraries and agriculture in the exploited colonies.
      Austria abolished serfdom in 1781. The Austrians spent the money from their Empire on lavish palaces.

    2. If you haven’t been there, I recommend that you visit Schönbrunn Palace, erstwhile summer home of the Hapsburgs.

      The landscaped gardens go on forever …

      1. I went there in 1971 on my “Grand Tour” with some friends from university. Three weeks touring Europe in my Mini.

        1. I was there in Sept ’70 touring in my Morris Minor on the way back from Korchula. I was also there in Sept. last year, but I first did’ Vienna when I was about 14. One of my fave cities.

  83. If you happen to be out and about in Glasgow watch out for police helicopters. Police Scotland are flying patrols over Glasgow to seek out house parties.

    1. Ada ” We’re in the most vulnerable group”
      Bert “Keep going on about it and you won’t need to worry….”

    2. “I’m looking forward to lockdown Bert, I’ve been dying to use those new handcuffs”
      “But Ada, I’m wearing them already. Don’t you remember? – you lost the key!”

    1. Wow, Super techno ability! Thanks. My information is from our eldest child who lives in Glasgow.

      Edit: How do you do that, please?

  86. Evening, all. Top down is rarely a good idea; the people with the experience are usually at the bottom. Shame Enable didn’t manage to win a third Arc today. I think the heavy ground (more like bottomless, I suspect) was a factor.

    1. I thought during the week that the weather looked like beating her. Not sure that she’s just quite as good as she was anyway, more (if not many) miles on the clock.

  91. Off topic.

    Experts? One has to laugh!

    Prediction:
    Villa 1 Liverpool 3.

    Reality:
    Villa 7 Liverpool 2

    I’m guessing those experts are on SAGE too.

    1. Bum. I have just logged in for the first time today. I’m waiting to watch MOTD. Needn’t watch the LFC highlights now.

    4. My Villa supporting brother is having fun on the family WhatsApp group.

      In 2006, my team, Birmingham, were due to play Liverpool at home in the FA cup. Mark Lawrenson on telly warned: “…if Liverpool have one bogey team, it’s Birmingham.”

      Result Birmingham 0 Liverpool 7.
      🙁

  92. Good night all.

    A good hunk of fillet steak, cooked on the grid, a jacket potato a la Elsie & a fantastic mushroom sauce.

    2 cloves of garlic peeled & thinly sliced, a handful of chestnut mushrooms chopped/sliced, salt & black pepper, a scattering of chopped fresh thyme all in a pan with butter & olive oil. When the mushrooms have collapsed a good slosh of brandy & flamed, then a big dollop of thick double cream & let simmer to reduce while the steak grilled. The sauce & steak go together like magic, the sauce would make a good filling for the baked potato. Washed down with a rosé de Provence.

    4. I make a similar sauce (though I use a slosh of white wine and skip the flaming bit). I use it as a meat-free pasta sauce, hadn’t thought of combining with steak. Must try it next time I splash out at the farm shop.

    5. Try adding the chopped garlic after the flambé rather than at the outset. It will prevent it overcooking and add a bit of texture without compromising the flavour.

  94. COVID Model 4
    In an earlier comment I said I needed to reevaluate so called ‘deaths from COVID-19’.
    My models to date haven’t specified a population total so the infection graph keeps going up indefinitely.
    Model 4 works out the virus free population by subtracting the total number of infections from the UK population of 67,0000,000

    This establishes an end point for UK viral penetration at day 190 for R =1.1
    Furthermore a more realistic calculation of deaths over time can now be made based on group vulnerability and mobility for any specified R rate.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/7970afb0b3e69fb090949dd98d5655fced17604b0d148038eebc0ce9134e0b3e.jpg

  95. The coronavirus “epidemic” is a scam designed to usher in the communist NWO.

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