Westministenders: The Truth Isn't A Made Up Concept

[RedToothBrush]

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Not George Orwell but often attributed to him. But a powerful statement with resonance nonetheless

Pretty certain I saw him doing the Mogg Conga yesterday...
That could be a lot of work for the tracers...all those MPs, and their staff, and the HoC staff, and all of their families...

All together now ....

diddums .....

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-52911605

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/exclusive-tens-thousands-covid-19-tests-voided-decision-send/

lq Ha! hope they have to knock it down!!

childish?

They won't knock it down. It will be given retrospective planning permission - or at least that is what happens locally. The local paper usually raises a bit of a stink, then it all goes quiet until the next retrospective set of planning permissions is sought.

However, this does mean that Cummings is back in the news - if the chump had said Sorry, and resigned that would have been the end of it.

I know, I know... just imagining

Christian Drosten (chief virologist and advisor to the German government) has said we may well avoid a 2nd wave here.

So it should be possible for the Uk too.

The key learning they have been discussing here is that most infected people infect only a few others or even none,
but a minority infect a very large number of people,
Hence, banning large crowds is vital, as is large-scale contact tracing for every new outbreak.

Drosten and Streeck (Gangelt study) say we should continue to ban potential superpreader events e.g. carnivals, large sports & shows
and lockdown locally whenever new outbreaks flare up as they have already done in a few care homes, meat plants etc

Kai Kupferschmid
A disease with a low k (dispersion factor) can be brought more easily under control by banning crowds e.g, carnivals, large sports events, shows

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all

SARS-CoV-2 .....Without social distancing, this reproduction number (R) is about three.
But in real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all.
.....
That’s why in addition to R, scientists use a value called the dispersion factor (k), which describes how much a disease clusters.
The lower k is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people
....
In the flu pandemic of 1918....the value was about one, indicating that clusters played less of a role.
.....
Estimates of k for SARS-CoV-2 vary.
.....
in a recent preprint, Adam Kucharski of LSHTM estimated that k for COVID-19 is as low as 0.1.
“Probably about 10% of cases lead to 80% of the spread,” Kucharski says.

Alok Sharma gone into self-isolation after developing CV symptoms, the day after JRM forced everyone back to Parliament.

Apparently also another completely damning Dispatches programme (haven't seen it yet) about the negligence of the Gov CV response.

• Sorry, that should have said JACOB REES MOGG forced everyone back to Parliament.

FT:
The government is struggling to rebuild stockpiles of drugs eroded by COVID-19,
amid fears a no-deal Brexit will hit medical supplies,

How deep is this barrel?

"New evidence" about disappearance of Madeleine McCann!

What next?

Elvis alive and well on Mars?

LQ I used to work in planning sometimes, rarely, but just sometimes, they have to knock it down 🤞🏻🙏🏻

BB&B Lord Lucan spotted riding Shergar on the A4 near Newbury?

BCF Yep, the Conservative Government are predictably crap at stockpiling.

I once saw a detached "dwelling" be knocked down by court order, on a property in Surrey where planning permission had not been granted.
Bulldozer sent in by local authority, presumably billed to the property's owner.
It certainly can happen

The government is struggling to rebuild stockpiles of drugs eroded by COVID-19, amid fears a no-deal Brexit will hit medical supplies,

I was about to post this on the “Brexit has made Coronavirus Worse” thread as one way in which it has actually helped. The Brexit stockpiling is what has got us through these last 3 months.

A second peak co-inciding with no deal... well, I can only imagine.

Morning..if this is for me.

Regarding the BA redundancies, I very much doubt the Unions just made it up.They will be acting on information they've heard from somewhere.

I'd say some of what is being claimed by Unite/GMB is a fair assumption since it has been on somebody's wish list for some time.

Some Unions (Unite/GMB) won't participate in any negotiations, (their choice) but instead are running a very effective PR campaign that might well be gaining traction and rattling a few cages... and since I'm not a manager anywhere, certainly not at BA, I have no argument with the Unions doing that...whether it is sensible way to run a single track campaign we will see.

The one problem I do have is with deliberate misinformation, and as anybody with direct contact at BA has probably found, some elements of that campaign have been leading to some highly misleading posts going out on social media. This has already resulted in at least one embarrassing social encounter where the conversation started with "Oh, why are you in uniform? In your e-mail I thought you said you'd already been laid off"..

To the poster thinking that it was illegal to sack people and hire them on again at reduced wages,...that's not me.

I notice the questions for the Home Secretary thread isn’t going very well...

Quantine plans not going well. Countries with far lower infections rates say they won't let Brits covered in Covid in.

Coronavirus in Channel: Continent Cut Off.

Quantine plans not going well. Countries with far lower infections rates say they won't let Brits covered in Covid in.

As predicted.

A lot of people (some on other threads on MN) rubbing their hands at getting their foreign holiday might be horribly disappointed. It's interesting how a subvariant of "They need us more than we need them" has crept into the discussions.

I'm still seeing more hilarity if some sort of immunity certificate becomes valid, with the UKs standalone scheme (because you know it will be) not being acceptable to other countries.

As far as I am concerned, if numbers go back up again, it will not be a second wave. Just the first been very badly handled.

A second wave for me is when things have settled down and THEN there is another peak. I’m e petting that too happen around October-November time when the flu and cold season starts again. (And with a bit of luck not quite at the same time than the no deal brexit beg of January)

Meanwhile in Trumpland, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has published a letter to remind all US military personnel that they serve the constitution not the President, and former Defence Secretary Mattis describes Trump as a threat to the constitution.

.

DGR

Keep 'em coming.

Meanwhile in Trumpland, the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has published a letter to remind all US military personnel that they serve the constitution not the President, and former Defence Secretary Mattis describes Trump as a threat to the constitution.

It gets a lot of flak (mainly from the ignorati) but the US constitution is a pretty awesome document considering the age it was written - being a blend of the latest political thinking (mainly from England ...) all across Europe. And the Founding Fathers were no slouches in the brains and humanity departments. There are a few bear traps carefully laid within it like the one highlighted. They had seen tyranny (in the shape of Britain) close up and personal, and tried their best to create a framework that couldn't be captured to be abused. (I wonder how close it came to being written in French ?).

One view of US history is that it's over 200 years of presidents trying ...

The only shame of it is that it was nobbled from the off to allow slavery. And we can see how well that went.

I wonder what the chances of some of the big states creating an amendment to allow secession might be ? Fuck all to slim is my guess. Secession in the US is constrained in the same way republicanism is in the UK ... you can't get to the position of power needed to enact your change without taking an oath to not enact your change. As Sinn Fein know.

Had an message from a friend in California yesterday - she noted we'd been pen friends since 1992 when she lived through the LA Riots (saw the flames from her parents house). It was a weird horrid compression of 28 years into nothing. Now she has 2 teenagers and worries for them.

What a time to be alive.

DW is due in clinic later for a pump top-up. I'll be dropping her off and then skedaddling to circle the building until she's done. So that's one car on the road.

HuffPost:

“The withering criticism from big beasts like Theresa May and Liam Fox were one thing. But what struck me most was the number of new MPs who went public with their unease. Ben Spencer, Jonathan Gullis, Christian Wakeford all proved that perhaps the most damaging thing about the Dominic Cummings affair was the way it has given the 2019 intake a taste for dissent and possible rebellion. No wonder PPS jobs are being handed out to Red Wall loyalists like sweeties.”