Westministenders: A Year of Johnson

[RedToothBrush]

So having given the benefit of the doubt...

... whats your reflections?

Good (and yes do have some thoughts on the positive - challenge yourself on this one as its important) and the bad (and yes this is the easy bit but keep it within reason)?

Interestingly, I knew a man with a form of cancer who was given six months to live. He decided to accept the diagnosis, but live his remaining time to his fullest. He lived another 40 years, and died of something else. I am sorry Peregrina but this Is as likely a result of lack of medical understanding as positive thinking . At the time I was diagnosed I was given a 60% chance of surviving but even then they knew that mastectomy would enable 7 out of 10 women to survive and chemo would only add 1 that number, so it was a decision, though not really if you had young children. Now they would treat my tumour with Surgery and hormone therapy, and get better results, I was lucky that a side product of a horrible regime that left me emaciated and deeply depressed was chemical castration but friends who were younger didn’t get that. Positive thinking is great, it makes life more worth living but please if somebody’s response is to be understandably depressed about a life threatening disease (far more than COVID 😮) understand that too.

Weirdly I had just as bad night terrors about Covid at the start of all this. No matter that I told myself I had faced worse, I was still kept awake but that has receded now. Except that means I go out with a mask and social distancing as opposed to not bothering with any of it .....

DG Yes, I thought it was about genes
but material & social success in life is also about choosing parents

So much depends on what they give you, whether genes or material goods,
quite apart from obviously whether they are capable / chaotic / abusive

DGR I used to try to wedge in epigenetics into my assignments as the bio in bio-psycho-social (the shortcut to how every assignment should end in PH). IMO we should have done a genetics module.

MoD asked why it withheld evidence on 33 suspected Afghan civilian executions
Cache of documents raises questions about early 2011 killings by SAS soldiers

I wonder if the UK govt will copy the USA and try to harass the ICC if they investigate alleged British war crimes,

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/02/mod-asked-why-it-withheld-evidence-on-33-suspected-afghan-civilian-executions-sas-soldiers

Ministers are planning to bring in a bill that would introduce a near amnesty against prosecution for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and any another conflict abroad from more than five years earlier.
The legislation is expected in the autumn.

As with many ailments, the ONS found that the COVID death rate is noticeably higher in the most deprived sections of the community

• more exposure via job, worse access to healthcare, poorer health ....

Emily I was thinking perhaps prostate cancer - men can live without even knowing they have it quite happily. It makes for interesting ethics debates as if it isn't aggressive, should you tell someone and potentially cause them stress if it has no bearing on their day to day life? It is why testing hasn't been as quick as Brest Cancer until the recent campaigns - they have a far better prognosis.

BCF the rise in hormonal cancers, breast / cervical etc is mainly amongst affluent westerners, for instance greater height is a risk factor. It is all about lifetime exposure to oestrogen and increases by the pill /fertility treatment and exposure in the environment etc. Very little risk if you live in a rural village in Asia for example... The doctors I have spoken to believe genetics play the major part but in terms of vulnerability not direct cause. It is a complex interplay of genetics and environment and lifestyle, but that doesn’t make good Daily Mail headlines.

Much love to all who have lost friends and family to Cancer , it is shit.

Jesuis Yes DFIL ( he really was dear ) had his last months as he retreated from us with dementia made more difficult by treatment for prostate cancer. We didn’t know how little time he had left but I have several friends whose mothers have not been treated for breast cancer because something else, unknown possibly, would be more likely to kill them first. I do think his last months would have been better if he had not for example, had such awful weakness in his legs that left him in a wheelchair, but hindsight is a great thing... as is joined you thinking in the medical profession. In fact so little awareness in his hospital’ urinary medicine department that they managed to lose him, let him go wonder around the hospital and a dual carriageway before they realised they had lost him, when they excluded us from the investigation.

Tomorrow is Monday morning
lets see what the Government can fuck up next

One of the things that has bugged me about the BBC is that they've not been challenging the Government presentation of the results . For the last few days (I think today was the first day they haven't said it), they've been parroting the line that "there has been an uptick in the last week", while putting up a graph in which it is obvious that it's been going up for closer to 3 weeks

Is it a coincidence that it's around 7-10 days after pubs re-opened - and has been rising steadily since?

Wow Emily, that sounds hard and almost like a sketch in it's absurdity. Hindsight indeed is a wonderful thing.

Pretty exactly right re timings - I think I posted about 3 weeks ago when I saw it was going up according to the Kings College London study.
Although they deliberately relaxed a lot of things at once IMO so that no finger pointing to pubs will be possible. Much easier to put gates back on beauty hotspots for example.

I've had a magnum and a shandy...
Fuck it.
lowers tone!

I am sorry Peregrina but this Is as likely a result of lack of medical understanding as positive thinking .

I forget now which cancer he had. Yes it could easily have been that the medical knowledge at the time caused it to be misdiagnosed. I wouldn't say it came down to positive thinking though - he'd come through the war, and seen the horrors of that, so it was more I think that he felt he'd dodged that bullet, but he'd complete what we would now call his bucket list.

As for men living with prostate cancer - I believe that it has become the same for older women and breast cancer, that they can be slow growing and something else will kill them first. And yes, I have seen first hand experience, my grandmother died a horrible death from it, neglected at first by her, and then mistreated later.

Exclusive: Sir Paul Nurse says lack of openness fuelled poor decisions and put public trust at risk www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/secrecy-has-harmed-uk-governments-response-to-covid-19-crisis-says-top-scientist

“The government has not learned the lessons outlined in the Phillips review of BSE,” Higgins said. “There should, as Phillips recommended, be a clear-cut separation between those analysing data and assessing risk and those making decisions. This distinction has been lost in the Covid crisis.”

Well said!

China showing they can play the data game for politics too www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/aug/03/tiktok-row-trump-to-take-action-soon-says-pompeo-as-microsoft-pursues-deal - takes one to know one Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/greater-manchester-declares-major-incident-after-spike-in-covid-19-transmission

A major incident has been declared in Greater Manchester
in response to increases in coronavirus infection rates across “multiple localities”.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/02/nazir-afzal-cps-met-and-durham-police-closed-ranks-over-cummings-case

Nazir Afzal, a former regional chief prosecutor,
has questioned the impartiality of Durham police, the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) after they all rejected his requests for a thorough investigation into alleged lockdown breaches by Dominic Cummings.

Afzal, former north-west chief crown prosecutor,
said the police and his successors had “closed ranks” on the issue
and ignored the “deep public concern” over Cummings’ trip to Durham and Barnard Castle

Note who's doing well out of this crisis:
Amazon, Microsoft etc

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/02/decline-high-street-amazon-power-tech-giant

Traditional shops may be in free fall,
but since the start of 2020 the worth of the Amazon empire is reckoned to have increased by more than half,
to an astonishing $1.49 trillion (£1.1tn).
Last Thursday, it announced quarterly sales that were up 40% on the same period last year.

Much of this has been driven by what the pandemic has done to people’s buying habits,
and a share of the e-commerce market now put at 44% in the US and about 30% in the UK.

But also relevant is Amazon’s Web Services division,
which has cleaned up as companies have shifted more of their activities to the online cloud.
.....
on 20 July, Amazon’s skyrocketing share price meant that in a single day, Bezos’s fortune increased by $13bn

The BBC feels the need to inform us that Manchester is ‘in Northern England’ in the sidebar to its live Covid news page

Meanwhile ‘treat the public like adults’ says Sir Paul Nurse. That’s not how things work in Domland though, is it?

Driving through Greater Manchester yesterday it certainly didn't look much different to any other Sunday. It didn't look any different to anywhere outside Greater Manchester.

Johnson is apparently drawing up plans to prevent people leaving hot spots in order to avoid another national lockdown. This could prove 'interesting'.

In other news today the government has announced they are launching the rollout for a scheme to test sewage across the country to identify covid-19 hotspots. I remember reading about how this was being done in the Netherlands and Italy in April through systems they have permanently set up pre-covid.

I have always said that I think we need roadblocks to contain areas. It sounds "draconian" but you cannot put the responsibility onto the people if you won't enforce rules. There's only so many times people in Cornwall for eg will quietly pretend not to notice a DFL has arrived over night.

There's yet another AIBU thread complaining about single mothers livng in luxury on benefits ....

A few pp are demanding that single mothers be housed in dormitories and workhouses,
instead of being given benefits

single sex "to avoid temptation" of adding to the problem

to teach them not to "make it a permanent lifestyle"

And pp posting that their opinion matters because
"I'm a net contributor"

< reminds me of the indignation that the UK was a net contributor to the EU budget >

Yes I'm in brace position for a lot of my single mum friends being cut off from maintenance. Only a few of them actually get any, as so many exes went Self Employed (mine went from a salary of 45k to 9k meaning he paid £5pw before I stopped it). Blaming mothers for child poverty and ignoring the tax free payment of the absent fathers is sickening to me. If anyone wants to sign or share this petition it might help, although I think the loophole is there for a reason petition.parliament.uk/petitions/319389?fbclid=IwAR0pQYx9Sk1NO7noQU-VWbXLmpcjzBwZAe5WuwWnEZvrwUNNiwFVFZDE91w

We have had roadblocks here at the height of lockdown!!!

That was interesting. Police were stopping people and asking what they were doing and checking the number of occupants in the car. I also know that the police were randomly stopping people going into Central Manchester in the early hours for similar reasons because a friend who is a shift worker was stopped.

Theres a problem here though. The road block was on a major A road and the police stopping was on a motorway.

Thing is though is most of the locals know the back roads and it was people travelling longer distances who were tending to use the main road. Unless you block all the other roads, it wouldnt solve the issue.

You would have to bring the army in to man in. There arent enough police...

... Be careful what you wish for JeSuisPoulet. The army on the streets is a recipe for civil unrest and given this government, not a particularly attractive political prospect.

I know, and I remember well the talk of this happening post Brexit, however I don't think that you can effectively shut down an area for zoning otherwise. It needs to be on motorways and key roads mainly rather than in city centres/near homes. We've seen people slowly throwing caution to the wind and going to beaches despite warnings. Tbh I don't think it will happen while the pubs are still open across the country.