Bijou Drains
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Anti-mainstream view (and without conspiracy theory):
Interesting to read the views on epidemiology and virology put forward by CJ Hopkins, a minor US playwright. When I seek out opinion on matters such as world pandemics, I often turn to minor US playwrights, but only when I can’t get the opinion of a former Love Island contestant or a 1960s one hit wonder.
I know we haven’t got a socialist society, and perhaps he’s not a volunteer, but Piers Morgan has got the virus, can we make a start by experimenting on him?
L Bid – Nemesis, never, sparring partner and occasional leg puller, perhaps. Mostly though just glad to hear your safe and well.
What they are finding in my line of work is records made in digital are starting to decay and there is starting to be a problem with stuff that was stored digitally at the begining of the digital age, where the computer system used is now unavailable, Windows 1 was made obsolete 20 odd years ago, etc.
The Egyptians wrote on papyrus, some of which is still readible.
Alan Johnson “Are we a land of socially responsible citizens or a nation of grasses?
Police say they have received 194,000 calls “snitching” on people alleged to have broken the coronavirus lockdown”
I don’t think the reports will be about either snitching or social responsibility. I read a report years ago that reckoned that about 90% of reports to the Gestapo during WW2 were escalations of personal feuds and neighbours squabbles and that sorting out all of that made the Gestapo very inefficient.
I can to some extent understand this, cos I’ve got a right twat living over the road from me. He’s a trendy leftie, knit your own sandals, fuckwit with kids who are probably called Laura and Ashley. Pretends he’s so right on, but he’s never had a radical thought in his life. I so far have resisted the temptation to call the old Bill and give him a fright, but that temptation is great.
Marcos – “I grew up with Jesuits, Salesian fathers, De La Salle Brothers and Nuns, from primary to secondary school and they never hit us,”
I take it they weren’t Irish then.
The Tawse was the weapon of choice for teachers in the Tyneside area during my school days. I went to a particularly sadistic and violent catholic Secondary School where teachers would regularly punch pupils in the face, never mind messing about with a belt. If you were being regularly hit with a bit of wood, you knew you were in woodwork, if the teacher was hitting you with a bit of metal, you knew you were in metal work.
We had one teacher whose method of education was to give a lesson for an hour on a Tuesday, with revision tasks for the next lesson on the following Thursday. The Thursday’s one hour session consisted of a half hour exam based on Tuesday’s lesson, a tense 15 minute wait while he marked the test in silence and then the bottom 50% of the class were given the belt. It didn’t matter if you got 99% if you were in the bottom half, six lashes with the belt. What a twat.
Then a priest would come around a tell me Jesus died for my sins. I thought I was hard done to getting the belt for not doing homework, JC was getting put to death for my sins, which at that time consisted of nicking the odd bar of chocolate and some boyish and vague impure thoughts about my mate’s mother.
Dave B
I did this before using similar material from elsewhere ; I have loads of it.
Why can’t you seem to find it?
I’m a bit confused, who is it you mean can’t find material like this?
Dave B
“the leaked 150,000 lockdown deaths estimate by a civil service technical sub committee report looks like it might be real as it has not been fully denied.”
This is the article I believe you are referring to is below, however no mention of a techanical sub-committee report, but plenty of horse shit.
“Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator and political columnist for The Telegragh, spoke of the stark 150,000 figure today. He did not reveal his source. He said: ‘Work is being done to add it all up and produce a figure for “avoidable deaths” that could, in the long-term, be caused by lockdown.
‘I’m told the early attempts have produced a figure of 150,000, far greater than those expected to die of Covid. ‘This is, of course, a model… But estimates of lockdown victims are being shared among those in government who worry about the social damage now underway: the domestic violence, the depression, even suicides accompanying the mass bankruptcies.‘ “
So where does this figure come from?
Reluctance of people to go to hospital in the current situation?
Well regardless of lockdown or no lockdown, the CORONAVIRUS CRISIS is likely to be the main reason why people are reluctant to go to hospital, not the lockdown situation, if there was no lockdown, the situation re the virus would be the same.
Similarly, treatments for people with cancers, etc. are not being postoponed because of the lockdown. The reason for the postponments is that hospitals are dealing with Covid 19 victims and that some people are even more vulnerable because of that, that is why medical interventions are being postponed. Regardless of lockdown those vulnerabilities would still remain.
So does the author seriously expect that deaths through suicide, domestic violence or depression will add up to 150,000. That would be roughly a third of the military deaths in the UK during WW2? I have had a quick look at the suicide rate between 1939 and 1945, and 50,000 a year did not seem to pop up.
Could it be that the writers of the Torygraph and the Spectacularly Boring are making the case for an end to lockdown because working class lives matter less than profit?
Perhaps they are worried that their profit margins are being eaten into because of a standstill in the exploitation of labour. Maybe they’re worried that the fact that lots of people in what we would describe as pointless jobs (Accoutnants, Management Consultants, Commodity Brokers, etc.) are not going to work and nobody is missing them, might make them think that the cat is out of the bag.
Whatever the reasoning of the Tory Press, you can be sure it isn’t based on the interests of working people.
So if it isn’t based on working class interest, I don’t think it is the purpose of the SPGB to be propagating the ideological and economic interests of the ruling class!
The Saudi position, geographically is very precarious. They have the outlet for oil shipments through the Suez canal, always pretty dodgy but there is instability in Egypt at the moment. They have the outlet through the Persian Gulf and the straits of Hormuz, currently being pressurised by the Iranians, and then the outlet throught the Gulf of Aden, which is conrolled through Yemen, and Djibouti at the Bab-el-Mandeb straits. to the South of Saudi Arabia is Oman, and they seem to have been slightly more favourable to the Qataris in their dispute with the Saudis, than some of the surrounding states. The Saudis may hace painted themselves into a bit of a corner.
Dave B –
by the way
I don’t agree with all that article
Sorry Dave, did you mean the Scotish one or the earlier one?
From Dave B’s post
One Scotland-based expert, who has a background in flu pandemic planning for the NHS, said mass testing and contact tracing should have been introduced at a much earlier stage but that the apparent lethality of the virus globally owes much to the record numbers of elderly and sick people around the world who were “living on borrowed time as a result of modern medicines that extend their lives and reduce symptoms, but make them vulnerable to a novel zoonotic infection like this one”.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, they added: “I believe we will have to pay a high price for this lockdown in terms of the backlog of clinical problems put on hold by GPs and hospitals; a rise in gender based violence; a return to abuse of children on the at-risk register who should be in school; a rise in mental health problems induced by isolation that will be most prevalent in those without access to space and outdoor greenery; a loss of jobs, particularly for the low paid; and the demise of businesses and even industries.
“There is no doubt in my mind that this attempt to control a pandemic, for which planning was woefully inadequate from the beginning, will increase social inequalities in health.”
I agree with practically all of this, I am no cheerleader for the Government’s strategy, in my view they placed profit over people from the start and thousands have died and suffered because of the inaction at the early stages of the Government.
They didn’t introduce measures of control until it was far too late. Whilst Ireland for example had shut down schools, pubs and stopped St Patrick’s day parades, the British government let the Chelnham Festival, with over 120,000 spectators, go ahead, they allowed the Liverpool v Atletico Madrid match go ahead, despite Madrid being in lock down, football matches were not cancelled by the government but by football leagues themselves and then they announced that the pubs would be closed from Midnight on a Friday at 6pm, cue for everyone to go to the pub for the one last time!
They also missed opportunities to prepare any form of contingency in the two weeks they had to make arrangments, this was compounded by public service cuts over the decades. Local Authorities used to all have a disaster and emergency planning group, a colleague of mine was a member of the one in Northumberland for years and they met regularly and planned for all kinds of contingencies. Most LAs have abandonded their Contingency plans with the cuts but the Northumberland plan was one which was kept on, and from what I have heard has been fairly effective.
All of the time they put profit before human lives. I’m sure that when it came to the initial “herd immunity” response the likes of Dominic Cummings and his free marketeer head bangers were the “brains” behind that particular decision. It seems that the “new Churchill” ran the white flag up the flag pole at the first opportunity (as Charlie said first as a tragedy second as a farce)
I must say though that whoever the writer is they did get some bits wrong. The At Risk Register hasn’t exisited for about 15 years and all vulnerable children have been given places in school and CP Social Workers have been working flat out to keep kids safe as far as is possible.
I also feel the approach of “they were old so it doesn’t matter” is not one that I can agree with.
As to the idea that, they were “going to die anyway”, it might be news to some comrades out there, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we are all “going to die anyway”
