What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

One of the problems that seems to be dogging those attempting to make decisions about how to respond to this Omicron variant is the stated "uncertainties" regarding the so called severity of the disease.

Make no mistake, Omicron will kill people; of this there is no doubt. But the weakest, most innocuous of cold viruses will kill some people - this is not in question - the question is about the number of people it will kill, or indeed render sick enough to need hospitalisation; and whether this number, due to the rapid transmission of this particular variant, will all come at once (as it were), such that the NHS is overwhelmed.

One of the problems that Government Ministers have is to balance the doomsday predictions of the epidemiological modelling with the real life situation as it develops on the ground, and this to me seems to be possibly why today we read that the cabinet are sceptical about the introduction of new restrictions prior to Christmas on the strength of the modeling alone.

The ZOE Symptom Tracker for Omicron, developed by Tim Spector and his team at Kings College London and used by GP's as a guide to diagnosis in practice, provides the collated data for the presenting symptoms of patients later confirmed with Omicron in London where the variant is most prevalent, and they include running nose, sore throat, fatigue to a greater or lesser degree and headaches. Note there seems to be none of the lower respiratory tract (ie the lungs) elements that cause all of the severe problems that require hospitalisation and cause death. Head colds, unpleasant as they are, do not tend to develop into the kind of life threatening situations that require intense medical care.

On this basis it seems reasonable to adopt a more optimistic attitude toward the societal impact of Omicron than was perhaps the case with earlier variants. Indeed the South African data which runs a few weeks ahead of our situation still shows a minimal hospitalisation and death rate. To what degree are these new symptoms built into the Imperial College modelling that SAGE use; are the predictions of their data based on the type of symptoms seen in the earlier variants we have faced? These are the kinds of questions that the cabinet are required to answer, and in this case I believe they are correct to be cautious about immediately being thrown into panic when a doomsday scenario is thrown down on the table in front of them. We have been in this place before during the foot and mouth crisis of the late nineties. At that point, the same Imperial College modelling nearly destroyed the livestock industry in this country until the Ministers of the day told the scientists that it had to stop.

We are in the same situation writ large. The scientific advice will always be to continue locking down, to adopt the most limiting restrictions on the disease they have before them. The Ministers must live in the real world where some will sadly die, most will happily not and the NHS will continue on the verge of being overwhelmed (as it always is) and will nevertheless muddle through - and the chances are that in the next week or two you are going to have a head cold.

[peter]

The PM has assured us that "Christmas is safe" in terms of any last minute increases in restrictions that could effect people's yuletide celebrations. He urges caution and the use of lateral flow kits to ensure the ongoing safety of vulnerable relatives before making visits to them, but in typical fashion, fails to either acknowledge or understand that there are no fucking lateral flow kits available!

My wife has been trying to get them, both online and from local pharmacies for days and the message is (as a sign in Tesco said yesterday) "we haven't got any lateral flow tests and WE DON'T KNOW WHEN THEY ARE COMING IN.

But in fairness to Johnson, his decision to not react too preemptively to the doomsday warnings of the SAGE Committee (though he has not ruled out post-Christmas increases in restrictions or even circuit-breaker lockdowns) seems to be at this point justified, as hospital admissions in the capital where the Omicron surge is centred, appear to be leveling off (and hopefully balanced by hospital discharges at the other side of treatment). This is consistent with the South African experience and in line with what one would expect with a variant of lesser severity than its previous avatars. (To blow my own trumpet, I believe were you to take the trouble to look, you would find that I speculated on just such a reduction in virulence right back at the earliest days of the pandemic, when considering the situation compared to the emergence of parvovirus in dogs back in the nineteen-seventies. This is typical of newly emergent viruses, that they are highly pathogenic at the start and become less so as they and their host adapt to eachother.)

It's not a done deal that this will be the ongoing case, but so far so good.

The question is, if the tsunami of hospitalisation and death predicted by the SAGE report does not occur - what then of future advice given by the Committee? And come to that, what of the advice that they have given in the past? In fairness to them, the presence of the vaccines cannot but have made a difference here, and it must mitigate against any criticism of the them for their previously dire predictions - but huge amounts of damage have been levied on our country in our Government's 'following of the science' (which effectively means the taking of the advice of SAGE), and at some point a critical reckoning of the balance sheet must be carried out. Have they served us well, or led us into a wasteland from which dcades of hard work will be required to effect recovery, and from which the collateral damage is far worse than the damage we have been 'saved' from? These will be urgent questions that will need to be addressed in the months and years ahead. And while we're about it, we might ask whether the forty billion spent on the failed NHS test and trace system might not have been better spent on increasing NHS capacity such that the overwhelming we have been warned about became less of a risk. As things stand, there is not a single bed more than there was two years ago when this thing started.

[peter]

In a rare outbreak of common sense, the JCVI has said it requires more "real world evidence" before it recommends the mass vaccination of children in the 5 - 11 year old groups after findings showed that one million such administered jabs would prevent just two healthy children from requiring intensive care in hospital. Given that the vaccinations we are using are still in effect in the experimental stage of their development, this seems entirely sensible to me.

Preliminary studies released by Edinburgh University and submitted to the Government advisors also show a forty percent lower likelihood of a sufferer with Omicron being hospitalised, again bolstering the view that the Government was correct in its cautious approach towards the presumptive tightening of restrictions in the pre-christmas period.

Rather belatedly (and somewhat grudgingly it seemed to me) the team at Imperial College led by Professor Lockdown, Neil Ferguson, confirmed that the severity of Omicron did indeed seem to be less than that of previous variants, but added the rider that this didn't change the situation of the NHS being at risk of being overwhelmed (and so presumably that their advice to the Government that we should now be in a state of heightened restrictions or even lockdown still held good). Well as that Christine Keeler or Mandy Rice-Davies said, "They would say that wouldn't they."

It may be too early to start slapping each other on the back, but these are cautious signs that we are beginning to turn the corner in this, and that the collective madness that has gripped the nation for the past couple of years is beginning to dissipate. I've quoted that thing about men going mad in herds too many times in this place for it to bear repeating, but the slow move back towards a more reasoned approach to the virus seems now to be gaining momentum and, fingers crossed, will continue.

There will be many with vested interest in not seeing this period and our national response to it put under the microscope and subjected to full and rigorous public scrutiny; the quality of the advice that SAGE has been giving, the cost-benefit analysis of the Government response to the pandemic - and not just the financial/economic but the societal and public health balance sheet (including predicted 'collateral damage" of lost life hours due to the diversion of NHS resources and attention away from its more workaday activities) must be considered, if we are to learn anything from our experience.

It will be a huge undertaking, but one of vital importance in our preparations for future pandemics to come, of which the one we have just experienced may only seem like a trial run.

[I'm Murrin]

The problem of course is that while less severe it also seems to be more transmissable, meaning a higher number of cases and therefore although the severe cases are lower proportionally, there are still a lot of them.

[peter]

Absolutely Murrin - totally agree it's a numbers game, but I refer to my observations that nothing has been done, all through the summer months when we have been aware that such a winter influx was highly probable (Omicron notwithstanding) to increase hospital capacity in order to be ready for it. This is a failure of Government that can only be described by one word - negligence. There appears at this point however, sufficient slack in the system that punitive and economically damaging restrictions are not as yet required. Fingers crossed we can get away without them.

[peter]

Yesterday it was reported in the Sunday Telegraph that Jennie Harries had, through incompetence or deliberate intent, inflated the time-lag between infection with the Omicron variant and hospitalisation (where it occurred) from the actual figure of around 9 days, to a significantly greater 17 days. This was the figure that Sajid Javid used in his presentation to the cabinet prior to Christmas, and it is not rocket science to see how it bolstered his case for the introduction of immediately increased restrictions, rather than the 'wait and see' approach advocated by a number of other cabinet members. Clearly with the inflated value, given the high transmission of Omicron, the risk of the number of infections skyrocketing over these extra days, and leading to the potential 'tsunami' of hospitalisations (warned of by SAGE) that could potentially overwhelm the NHS, would be greater were the cabinet to wait, rather than act immediately. For whatever reasons it appears that the growing doubts of a number of cabinet members on the wisdom of a preemptive increase in restrictions won the day, and people's Christmas was spared along with the thousands of businesses that would have been severely impacted (and still could be) by such punitive actions.

Now this deliberate misleading of the cabinet is a serious business. The billions of pounds cost to business of imposing restrictions, the knock-on effects on jobs and people's lives and mental well-being - these are the very real effects of such policies and any attempt to 'hoodwink' the cabinet into making decisions based on false assumptions cannot be taken lightly.

You would think.

Yet of all the broadcasts aired on TV and radio - BBC, Sky, the lot of them - not a single station or outlet saw fit to give the story the coverage it merited. Rather it sat in it's spot on the front cover of the Telegraph, and never moved an inch further.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does this not imply that the misleading of the cabinet is a paltry matter, unworthy of attention, rather than a state of affairs that should have us up in arms demanding that 'heads must roll' (be it Harries - the Chief Executive of the UK Health and Security Agency - or Javid himself, of whose innocence in the matter I am far less than convinced). As noted the ramifications of a misplaced decision based on false assumptions could have been catastrophic for huge numbers of people and businesses and this should surely, surely, not be overlooked. But my betting is that it doesn't fit in with the approved narrative, that this Omicron situation is something that should have us crouching under the stairs chewing on our fingers, and so it will dissapear into the ether of 'stories without legs'. Behind the scenes there will be repercussions - Harries will definitely not escape without damage, even though it could well have been Javid himself that was acting to serve her up as fall guy and using the Telegraph as the vehicle to do so. But be this as it may, the importance of getting the public to understand that these kinds of tactics have been used, and used since day one, will not be considered in the wider media; what this tells us about how we are manipulated, governed, how we should be thinking about how this is all being used to further perhaps different ends than those at first apparent, all of these things will be lost due to the failure of our media to do it's job.

(Edit; as a matter of interest I just returned to the BBC site to have a look at yesterday's headlines review; the main headline of each paper was given in summary, pretty accurately from what I recall, with the exception of the Telegraph. They merited a small sentence at the end of the review in which we were told that they had reported that tennis supergirl Emma Raducannu (or something) was going to get a gong in the new year honours list. Need I say more.)
--------+++++++----------------+++++++------------+++++++-------------

Twenty plus years ago I used to play a game called Half-Life 2. Set in a dystopian world of the future, it portrayed a people browbeaten by an oppressive dictatorship, who were subjected to a continuous stream of patronising propaganda over the speakers in public places, telling them how the administration was there to protect them, and how fearful they should be of the invisible enemy in their midst.

As I worked away last night in the store, I listened to the local radio through the speakers, disseminating an almost constant stream of advertising in-between the music, of patronising gently spoken warnings, of instructions as how to behave when visiting hospitals, of encouragement to go and get vaccinated....... and I thought to myself, "Now where have I heard something akin to this before......?"

[Forestal]

Alas this is the state of the world - government is living up to its latin credentials and the media simply a useful puppet for whomever pulls the purse strings in the background. I've been watching this slow encroachment for the last two decades, as before that I was an uninterested teenager. Since reaching voting age it has been painfully obvious that there is an agenda in this country, nay the world, that we should all put up, shut up, ignore the mass inequality in the world and continue to consume.

I wonder where we've seen that before...



Remember, there is nothing wrong unless you are told there is. So don't worry, your leaders will look after you, because we're all equals here, just some are more equal than others.

[peter]

Ahhh..... I can feel myself relaxing as you speak Forestal.



On the latter point, my granddaughter works in a private medical clinic licenced to do the pre-departure and post-arrival Covid testing required if one is to travel abroad on holiday. At a hundred and forty pounds a pop (that is per person per test - the free NHS tests giving exactly the same confirmatory negative results are not accepted) the cost is prohibitive for most people with a family. There have been however, a stream of wealthy people including numbers of celebrities attending for testing in the period leading up to Christmas, and business in the clinic is booming. I haven't been on holiday since the pandemic began and see no likelihood of being able to at any point in the near future, if ever. I am minded of the Tory MP who years ago said, "The last thing we want is more people from Leeds going through Heathrow." Oh yes - we are so in this all together, so equal and all together that it seems ridiculous to question it.

[peter]

On Christmas Day I sent a perfectly cordial letter to my MP at her Parliamentary email address as given on the House of Commons contact information page. The subject matter (which I got onto having first wished her happy Christmas and thanking her for her service to the constituency etc) was to say that I hoped that the forthcoming Covid inquiry to be headed by Baroness Hallett, would not only address the efficacy or otherwise of the various policies pursued by the administration in efforts to control and limit the pandemic, but would also consider the costs of said policies in economic, social and well-being terms, to set against the former. It was only by doing so, I said, that we could genuinely assess how effective (in terms of profit vs cost) our actions had been, and thereby gain insight into the best way to deal with future pandemics should they (God forbid) occur.

Today the email was returned to my inbox undelivered.

I was bemoaning the fact to my wife, and saying how opportune it was for my MP (a Tory) that this email, that could have been potentially difficult for her to answer in a satisfactory way (if the aforementioned inquiry were intended to do no more than pay lip-service to the word), and she rightly pointed out that if the email had not been delivered, then no-one could know what was in it to 'duck the question' (as it were).

Fair point, I conceded, but said that it just seemed a coincidence that that particular email had not been delivered, when all of my others are, without problem - and added that when it came to coincidences in cases like this, I didn't like 'em. And I mused, didn't GCHQ and the security services have the ability to read emails before they are delivered? Now I'm not saying that the state finds my emails sufficiently interesting or difficult to intercept or otherwise refuse to accept them - that would be paranoid and stupid. I'm simply telling the tale of what happened, as it happened. I leave the drawing of conclusions to others.

--------------------------0-----------------------

I ordered the Laura Dodsworth book A State of Fear from my library, or rather put in a request for them to purchase a copy as they did not have one on their catalogue. They responded by telling me that they would consider the request and inform me of their decision in due course. This is a service offered on their site and I have successfully used it a number of times in the past. I have never had a request refused.

This time however, I heard nothing. No refusal, no email saying that the book had been ordered - radio silence, as it were.

The book is an account of how the Government have used their behavioural nudge units over the course of the pandemic, to elicit certain types of behaviour in the public, in response to Government requests to do things that they have never had to do before. Chief among these tactics has been the use of fear, and Dodsworth asks the question if this was either ethical or acceptable, or indeed counterproductive. Clearly these are (again) uncomfortable questions for the Government to be faced with, so I was not surprised that the book was not to be found on local government operated library shelves, or indeed that they showed no inclination to buy it, even if requested.

The other day, I happened to be in the library and, more as a plaything to entertain myself than anything, I asked the lady librarian what could have happened to my request. She said she couldn't say why I hadn't been contacted with the results of my request, but looking up the book for me, said that it didn't appear on the 'list of books that we can buy'. So that's it; we live now, in a society where books critical of the administration are effectively proscribed, as in the Vatican's list of 'forbidden books' all those years ago. This in itself, if nothing else, should make you want to go out and get it.

[peter]

At.... frikkin'.....last!

They seem finally to be cottening on to the realisation that it is the self isolation regulations/advice to people following positive testing for Covid that is causing the bulk of the problems in respect of the NHS being 'overwhelmed' and other essential services maintaining adequate cover during this latest stage of the pandemic.

In the UK it is a legal requirement to self isolate for seven days if you test positive for Covid, and clearly in the hospital setting where the virus transmits easily and without restraint this is going to cause a major problem. Given the significantly lower severity of symptoms in the case of the Omicron variant - now the dominant strain in the UK - this mandate is neither necessary and is indeed contributing to the very problem it was intended to solve. It is estimated that up to forty percent of NHS staff could finish up self isolating, most with no more serious symptoms than a running nose, and we wonder why the service is at risk of buckling under the strain.

There are calls in the press today, from MPs and industry leaders to reduce the isolation period from seven to five days (as has been done in the US) in order to alleviate this problem. Nonsense. Get rid of it altogether. Put this testing followed by mandated isolation back in its box, lock it and throw away the key. Let people get back to judging for themselves if they are too sick, or well enough, to work.

In fact, given the minimal severity of Omicron to the huge bulk of people, is it not time to put this whole sorry saga behind us, to get back to normal (I use that word deliberately and in its proper sense) and to forget about Covid, pandemics and the lot of it. In fact I'm not even sure that the inquiry that I've been banging on about is a good idea. The damage is done. The scale of it is simply too great for inquiries to encompass. The need now is to put it behind us and move forward into a world without it. Not one where we are continually being told "it is getting better" - this implies that next week we can be told that it's getting worse again. No - we need to be like the cured patient who's doctor says "Off you go - I don't want to see you again." We need all of this behind us, in history as it were, and I am not sure that inquiries and public dissections are going to help.

Because let's face it - this thing was born of fear. And it has been driven by fear from the start. When Johnson and crew were first informed by Ferguson and his mates at Imperial College that five hundred thousand people could die they panicked. As hospitalisations rose and deaths began to follow they acted to bring in measures to mitigate transmission, and decided that lockdown was a justifiable incursion into people's liberties in pursuit of this end.

But then fear kicked in again. How to do this without having tens or hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets protesting and even rioting. Fear of this caused the Government to use the strongest weapon in their arsenal of behavioural modification techniques - the use of fear itself. And so began the drip, drip, drip, of constant messaging and imagery of death, the yellow and black striping, the grave and ominous broadcasts that pushed and nudged people into a state of compliance with things that they never would have tolerated without such propoganda.

And boy, were they successful. We suddenly became a nation in fear of itself. Every person you saw in the street was your potential nemesis, you yourself could be the vehicle of doom ferrying death to your own loved ones. How could life ever return to normal after this?

And now here we are. Shell-shocked at what we have done, our society and lives in tatters, coming blinking into the realisation that in truth, the cure was perhaps far worse than the disease. Now we have the job of setting this all to rights, and it will take decades. But a major first step in the process of recovery will be to put the fear behind us. What we picked up yesterday, we can put down today. We have been ill-used. Not with malicious intent, not with underlying motive, but because of fear.

Let it end.

[Avatar]

Interestingly, our own self-isolation / contact tracing requirements which were halted about a week ago, have suddenly been re-instated. Nobody is quite sure why.

Re: Undelivered Email - The notification should tell you why it was undelivered - address doesn't exist anymore, mailbox full, etc. etc. There are multiple possible reasons.

--A

[peter]

I'm not really thinking that there was a conspiracy to thwart my holding my MPs feet to the fire Av - but it seems that the old adage 'the devil looks after his own' still has legs!

----------------0-----------------


I think I mentioned above, probably days ago now, that my wife was struggling to find Covid tests anywhere (LFT's) and now finally the problem is hitting the news.

It's not only the lateral flow tests either. Now apparently the PCR tests are like gold dust as well, which makes a mockery of Johnson's instructions to 'go out and party', but only after you have tested clear for Covid.

I've been wondering how accurate these tests will actually be for the Omicron variant anyways. Surely if the variant can evade the body's defences as pumped up via the vaccine, the implication is that maybe the thing has changed sufficiently much that it could equally possibly no longer be as well detected by tests developed to recognise the earlier strains? It's probably not the case - no doubt those in the know have thought about this and looked into it - but it's just a thought.

I see that once again the NHS is preparing for the predicted Omicron surge by increasing capacity via the 'nightingale model', albeit at a smaller scale. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me; much more so than devastating the society and economy by further unnecessary restrictions. I was amused to see that the Guardian reported that the previous nightingale capacity had been dismantled in March of last year after "not being used to full capacity" (ie twenty thousand or so beds up and down the country). No they weren't were they; only 400 of the beds were ever occupied. In fairness though, that's 400 people who would have been very happy that they were there. I've observed above that the department of health have had two years in which to increase hospital capacity since the start of this pandemic and have done nothing. Tell me that's good forward planning! Everywhere you look this administration has acted to make this situation worse than it needed to be, from the years of neglect of the health service to the confused and disproportionate response to the appearance of the virus. Now they continue in the same chaotic mode with instructions being issued that cannot be met and cod concern in respect of a threat that isn't there, continuing with policies that serve only to exacerbate the very problems that they seek to address. The vapid and useless Kier Stamer has at least been right on one score; Boris Johnson was the very worst man to be in his position at the time when we needed the very best. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, my arse!

[peter]

I've been working pretty consistently over the whole Christmas period (I got the day itself, but only in between a late(ish) finish on Christmas Eve and back again on Boxing Day.

It hasn't been a great burden because the shift lengths have been reduced due to early closing/late opening, but still you don't really get to enter into the spirit of the thing much because of it. I was due to have New Year's Eve off, but last night got 'the call' to go in to cover sickness. I could have refused, but didn't out of what - some kind of residual feeling of responsibility to my employers (who, let's face it, regard me as a dog in their money making machine, little more)? Might have been because I simply don't like letting people down (my direct boss sounded so'hangdog' when he asked me), or because in truth I wasn't really that bothered (I don't do boozing or staying up to 'see in' the New Year anymore). In truth it's probably a combination of all of these things, and waking up this morning I'm not in a state of dudgeon about it; it goes with the territory in retail (and in every occupation in our society, NHS included). Come weekends and holidays the absenteeism from work increases; that's just the way it is: some clown phones in sick, some other clown (that's me today) picks up the pieces. Hey - what are you gonna do?



------------------------+-----------------+--------------------

Last night my stepdaughter and her husband came round to ours for tea, and after eating we sat talking and opening Christmas presents (they had been up country on the day) and watching a bit of TV. As we talked I mentioned that over the next year they were going to start hearing much more about 'the metaverse', and quite possibly actually begin to see it's introduction into their lives in a more practical way.

They didn't seem to be to cognisant of what the metaverse is, what it entails, and so as an indication that I probably wasn't talking complete bollocks I put the Mark Zuckerberg introduction introduction to the subject (entitled just Meta I think) on YouTube for them to watch.

It's a really slick production highlighting all of the wonderful things that the metaverse is going to introduce into our lives. We will hold virtual meetings with lookalike avatars of our work colleagues in replacement of the current 'zoom' meetings we have, all sitting around a virtual table in any office setting we choose from the menu. We will create virtual homes to live and move about in with mountain or forrest scenes outside our computer generated windows, and we will augment reality so that our field of vision has a constant stream of information in front of our eyes: games we are playing will, rather than being on a screen in front of us, appear as part of the very landscape we walk and breath in, and it's all so clean, so scrubbed and smooth it looks like something out of a sci-fi movie brought into our very day to day lives. In this world beautiful people mix in ultra-luxury surroundings and everything is just as it should be. Thong sandals and hair-buns mix with beautifully sculptured cheek-bones and all is peace and harmony. I even saw somewhere else that Nikkei is already working on a range of virtual trainers that, for an exorbitant cost no doubt, you will be able to make your avatar more fashionable than anyone else's around you. I doubt not that even in the metaverse, the need to be the best, to show off finest display, will become the driving concern - and the producers of our real world consumables will rise to the challenge of providing the goods in the form of the micro-transactions we already see in gaming. No doubt the cost of a Louis Vuitton bag for your avatar won't be ten bucks or twenty - it'll be hundreds, just as it is in the real world, and by virtue of this the same pecking order will pertain in there as it does out here.

Anyway, we watched this smooth presentation, extolling the virtues of this fantastic thing that Meta (Zuckerberg's rebranded Facebook name) had in store for us and I turned to my family in expectation of - what - I'm not sure really, but certainly not what I got. My stepdaughter said, "I find it really depressing," and her husband shook his head looking doubtful. "I'm not getting involved in that!" he said.

Now this pair are in their thirties, both highly computer literate, and exactly the kind of people you would expect to be minded to embrace such a step 'forward'. But in both cases they were resistant. Why was this?

To me, granted, the whole thing looked fantastical, manicured and manufactured to within an inch of it's life (hell, even Zuckerberg looked halfways CGI generated - we argued over whether this was the case), and not something that in any way would 'float my boat' - but to them? To the very people (young, relatively affluent, my stepdaughter working remotely for a financial institution) it should be the most appealing? In both cases it hit a blank.

But beyond a shadow of doubt it is coming. Facebook has in part - big part - made the world we live in and their ideas do not stop with people sending each other beastly messages and swinging elections. If they decide that this is the future then for huge swathes of people, so it will be. But this is where the population of the world bifurcates. This is the Y where we separate into those who embrace the tech future (presented in such glowing terms by Zuckerberg with never a sign of doubt, never a hint that just maybe we might not want his metaverse vision of the future), and those who simply get left behind, or indeed deliberately reject this vision and go back to an unregulated and chaotic 'beneath the radar' existence of bartering and person to person exchange.

My family members expressed their doubts, but I have little doubt that when push comes to shove, they'll be there with the tech in their hands; it's all a bit overwhelming at first glance is all and they'll come around. But me on the other hand? Nah. I haven't even got a smart phone. Fuck 'em. I speak to who I want when I want. And I love gaming - but for me that's where it stays; on the TV in front of me. So I'm sorry Mr Zuckerberg - good luck with the metaverse- I'm sure it will be lots of fun and all, but in my case, "Ta - but no ta very much."

[Avatar]

Well, over here they announced last night that curfew, gathering and alcohol restrictions were largely being lifted for New Years, so I'm expecting a particularly raucous one unfortunately as people push back against last years restrictions which led to an unusually quiet one.

Personally, I could have lived with it being quiet again, so am doubtless one of the few who are not happy with restrictions being lifted. *sigh*

--A

[peter]

Today's papers are full of the stories about who will receive what 'gong' for their role in the pandemic, in the New Year Honours List released today. Along with Chris Whitey and Patrick Valance (the two main 'Profs' seen flanking Boris Johnson at his podium when he gives his pandemic updates), other 'heroes' such as people who have served on the 'frontline' or raised lots of bish for the myriad charities that have sprung up, have also been honoured.

The Guardian, pretty much alone, eschews this story to tell us about the horrendous abuse that workers who have simply "striven to save lives" (doctors, Government advisors on the pandemic and the like) have been subjected to in the course of their work by the anti-lockdown covid-denying brigade.

And the Mail also stays away from the Honours List with the story that four in ten of the people in hospital with Covid are there for some other completely unrelated reason. (In fact I believe, but cannot quite remember the details, that the figure is higher - something to do with the grey area of patients who could be there for Covid, but not definitively so.... say elderly people with chest pains who are Covid positive, but these pains are possibly the result of something else.... being included in the six in ten remainder. If I'm right, the sixty percent figure also includes those who have contracted Covid whilst in hospital for something else altogether - there is a name for this but I forgot it - and these form a substantial number of the total Covid cases in hospitals.) The Mail is clearly using this statistic to add weight to the health secretary Sajid Javid's statement that "curbs must only be used as a last resort," the actual headline of the piece I refer to.

Now the point of going through these headlines in the way that I have above is this; there is a thread, a connection - not overt - between them that needs drawing out. That Whitey and Valance should be honoured for their contribution to the debacle that has been the Covid pandemic is highly questionable. It could be argued, and indeed has been pretty convincingly in the book A State of Fear by Laura Dodsworth (yes - I did get hold of it in the end), that these two men have conspired with the Government and their SAGE advisors to do more damage to our society, to our economy, to our wellbeing and future prosperity than the Luftwaffe in the Blitz of 1941.

Strong words I know, but Dodsworth outlines most eloquently how the two have twisted and distorted the way in which the data has been presented to the public, always but always choosing the metrics with care in order to give the most dire slant on them, for the express purpose of generating fear and subsequent compliance in the population at large. The consequences of the lockdown and other pandemic related policies will take decades - decades - to come out in the wash, and by the time that the full cost in terms of the collateral damage is understood it could easily exceed the number of life hours lost to the country as a result of the second world war. Of course I can't know this, but neither does anyone else; I genuinely believe that it could be that big.

Yet the stories we see are all about honouring these individuals, before the cost benefit analysis of what they have done has been carried out.

And the connection to the Guardian story is that while the other papers seek to spread their honour around, simultaneously the Guardian seeks to demonize anyone who has misgivings about what we have done (misgivings - too small a word by far). Now I know that the story concentrates on abuse of people concerned with battling the pandemic (notice how we are all using military metaphors to describe the 'fight' - this itself has been deliberately manufactured to give an atmosphere of a shared objective), but the point of the story is more than this: simultaneously it brackets any kind of question about the proportionality, the appropriateness of what we have done, alongside the type of deplorable behaviour that the article describes. It throws a 'turd into the punchbowl' of genuine and perfectly reasonable scepticism, and taints all that is associated with it. This is deliberate. I don't say it is done in concert with honouring stories of other papers in a deliberate and conspired way, but there is a tacit connection, all of which serves the established narrative path of the official line.

And lastly we come to the Mail. They tell the story of the four in ten, innocently as if in revelation of some good news that points us in a direction of this thing being on the way out. And so it is - both good news and on the way out. But the meat of the story remains unsaid (whether the Mail supports such questioning or not). The truth is, that such headlines in themselves give the clue to what has been perpetrated here; that once you subject the statistics to scrutiny - and this has been the case since day one - the sand upon which they are built begins to crumble. More and more, as time goes on, this will be realised by people.

At the present it serves elements in the conservative leaning media to simply drill down into the statistics in order to support a non-return to restrictions (as the four in ten pointing out does). But in time, people will realise that the entire edifice of statistics that we have been presented with since the very start, since the emergence of wild-type Covid from the wet markets, or forrests, or labs (take your choice) of China, are subject to the same misunderstanding (or misrepresentation if you are more cynical). That if you only tell people that X number of people have died, or are in hospital - but not that y number actually died of, or are in hospital for something else - then you are skewing their understanding of what is truly happening.

But slowly, and over time, this is going to come out.

And the price we have paid for this deception is going to become more clear.

And what happens then is frankly, anyone's guess.

[I'm Murrin]

I was curious who Laura Dodsworth was after you mentioned the book, apparently she is a photographer with no particular expertise on the subject of the Covid pandemic, but the cherry on the cake was this:



lol. Of course she's not just an anti-vaxxer (her Twitter makes that pretty clear) but most likely a terf too.

[peter]

Bizzare and freaky!

I don't normally do New Year celebrations and whatnot these days - I've done to many New Year's Days with hangovers - but my stepdaughter does and frequently attends the London fireworks display and sees in the New Year along the bank's of the Thames. This year she was under the impression that the fireworks had been cancelled, and commented on it last Thursday when she came up for dinner.

Earlier in the evening of the 31st, I'm absolutely sure that the BBC reported the fireworks had been cancelled due to Covid and that Trafalgar Square had been closed off as well. I've tried to check this, but can't find any reports one way or the other, but the Express website, in a post made that morning, certainly reported that the fireworks are off.

To my surprise then, browsing YouTube yesterday morning, in the 'news' section, there appeared 'London Fireworks see in 2022' (or words to this effect). Surprised, I clicked on the vid and sure enough, a scanning picture of the London skyline focused on a garish projection of a countdown projected onto a skyscraper, which led into a choreographed "Ten, Nine, Eight,...." at the appropriate time. It had the sound of a pre-practiced routine on Strictly Come Dancing, an ersatz replacement for the voices of living breathing crowds, and when the moment came, an avenue of roman-candles streamed along a bridge (empty of people) in the center of the city.

What followed, and I kid you not, made the hair on the back of my head near about stand up. It would have put Joe Stalin to shame in its propoganda "Look how well we've done" slick presentation. A suited guy stepped onto the otherwise empty bridge and arms outstretched, fell into a syrupy poem about "our heroes of the NHS" and Emma Raducannu winning the US open (and she's only eighteen!) and all our glorious achievements of 2021- and not another human being in sight.

Following this egregiously forced and utterly unconvincing and contrived performance, said fireworks (not cancelled after all) did start up - a manufactured and tech orientated extravaganza of light and lasers and pyrotechnics, set against the chillingly empty streets of our capital where no soul could be seen.

It was, for an individual like me who is sensitive to the vibrancy of a crowd, the spontaneity of the gasps and cheers of the people, perfectly horrible. A manufactured and sterile precursor of a dystopian future that is about to break over us. If this is the world that our 'planners' have got set up for us, then they can keep it. It is exactly the kind of nightmare regulated and ordered to within an inch of its life place that makes me almost nauseous to envisage. Any administration that could think - that could ever believe - that this was the kind of thing that could make up for killing of the joy that people take in gathering together, at this celebratory time of year, for the sense of community that getting out on the streets with your fellow countrymen, all together friends and strangers alike, could give.....any such administration is to be feared.

If you haven't seen this abomination I urge you to go check it out. If it doesn't make your skin crawl, then I don't know - either you are already a lost cause, attuned to a 'new normal' that has me feeling sick to the pit of my stomach, or I'm truly reining-in and am ready for the funny-farm.

[peter]

I was curious who Laura Dodsworth was after you mentioned the book, apparently she is a photographer with no particular expertise on the subject of the Covid pandemic, but the cherry on the cake was this:



lol. Of course she's not just an anti-vaxxer (her Twitter makes that pretty clear) but most likely a terf too.

The book in question reached the Sunday Times top ten best seller list and is available in all of the chief retail outlets for books (Waterstones, Smith's etc) in the high street. This doesn't of course, make it correct in its arguments, nor does the fact that it was drawn to my attention by Steve Baker, an MP of who's views I wouldn't normally hold much time for, but who neither do I think of as a complete idiot.

I'm not sure what the fact that she is a photographer has to do with it, or indeed her views on whether women have vaginas or not. Dodsworth has written a book, expressed her arguments, and she has as much right as anyone else for it to be judged on the merits of what it says. For the record, Dodsworth is neither an anti-vaxxer nor a Covid denier. She recognises both the danger of the disease and the importance of getting immunised against it.

I don't think there is much doubt that her contention that behavioural psychology has been used to some effect over the course of the pandemic, or that fear has been used as a 'nudge' to elicit public compliance, can realistically be argued against - nor do I believe that her contention that a discussion about the ethics of this is in order, is out on a limb either.

We had a right to expect that information on the pandemic would be presented in a balanced and realistic way, not twisted and manipulated in support of ends that had been pre-decided upon behind closed doors and without consent. If Dodsworth has thrown a light on this skulduggery by her work then more power to her elbow. That her book cannot be borrowed from a single library in the country despite it's clear popularity and topical interest should tell you something, if nothing else does.

[peter]

Oh dear. It's all starting to fall apart isn't it?

Reports in this morning's press on a furious backlash against the ridiculous decree that schoolchildren should wear masks in lessons and corridors, despite the fact of their neither being at risk from the principal variant, nor that adults in similar settings at work etc are not.

Pictures on YouTube of huge demonstrations in Amsterdam against lockdown policy.

Reports that the requirements to isolate for seven days if you test positive for the virus is putting the public sector under huge strain, with predictions that a quater of NHS staff could finish up off work. (Notice it's always public sector staff - the ones who are paid when they are away from work - who are off, and not private sector ones {who are not}. Nice one Government: you've actually created the problem that you are now urging us to help you solve!)

Realisation obviously creeping into Johnson's team of halfwits and sycophants that they have pushed this thing as far as it can go - that they've reached the end of a tether and it likely ain't going no further. They now sit, unable to do anything because of fear of their own backbenchers, and unable not to act because of fear of a media backlash if they don't.

Furious reaction on the repulsive BBC YouTube posting of the fake New Year's Eve fireworks ceremony. Aren't I the complete fuckwit in this; I didn't even clock that the "manufactured" ceremony was exactly that - a pre-recorded and totally fake production by the ministry of propoganda (more commonly known as 'Auntie'), in which not even the fucking chiming of Big Ben was real (look at the comments on the vid - scores of people posting that they were there and there were no chimes, or indeed fireworks as shown). The whole thing was a massive act of forgery to send out to the rest of the world, to pretend that everything is hunky dory in Great Britain - nothing to see here! (Mark that last phrase - it's the most accurate description of the New Year celebration that you are going to get!)

Mmm..... Yes, this is all starting to fall apart. The people are fast beginning to clock that the cure has become the problem. Nigel Farage, not ever one for keeping his views to himself if he can help it, asked on his GB News program whether he should have the booster. It doesn't apparently stop you getting the disease,he told us. It doesn't stop you from spreading the disease. There is evidence that with a significant number of people that any immunity it confers goes into steep decline within ten weeks of its administration. There is no sign that it will be the last one we will be required to have. At what point does it end? At what point do we actually get to once again be the arbiters of what we have injected into our bodies? So he was undecided. What, he asked, did we the listeners, think? (I've had mine incidentally - but I'm thinking it will probably be my last.)

There is still huge mainstream media work going on to convince us we are in the grip of an existential crisis - and so we may be - but it is not the one they are telling us about. It's the one that all of this nonsense, all of this hyper-reaction, this disproportionate response to a largely imagined threat has resulted in. Now the Jenga tower of our society is beginning to crumple and the stupid fuckers are still pretending it's a cold virus that has caused it.

For us it started with brexit: then the scientists got to call the shots on a threat that for the huge majority of people was nothing, and we, stupid fucks that we are, voted in the simply most incompetent and dishonest individual we could find in order to deal with it. If ever a nation bent over and shafted itself up the jacksy better than we did I'd like to hear about it.

So it's all starting to fall apart - and is it any fucking wonder!

(This post is a heap of shit. An incoherent babble that I should be ashamed of posting - but it does represent a bit how I feel at the moment. New Year's resolution - "Must Try Harder!" )

[Forestal]

The UK government has lost all ability to enforce any meaningful restrictions that they may wish to impose, due to the christmas party scandals at Downing Street. Regardless of what Nigel or any other crooked (read: all) politicians say, there were no other alternative cabinets in any party or seat in government who would either have been able, or would have wanted to, act differently at the time and only now that the magical googles of hindsight have been removed from their glass case are ministers starting to rebel against what have always been draconian "safety" laws.

That is not to say that I don't agree with the majority of the laws and advisements that were put in place. It is true that most people won't now die if they contract omicron, but there is still a large population that will - mostly older people, thus mostly Tory voters who must be protected at all costs. Personal responcibility must come into play at some point - although I still agree with children in schools wearing masks, as I did from the beginning of the pandemic when my financé was working in schools and seeing the complete lack of concept for social distancing or social responcibility that children have.

The most important thing that we can do to end all of this, which is not being done, is donating vaccines to the countries which cannot get them - the Africas of the world who's populations don't even have a single dose among them, let alone the booster system that we have in this country. Until that happens, we're going to be stuck in this vicious cycle of variant after variant.

Dodsworth may be correct with her assessment of the way in which the goverment has fearmongered the populace into compliance in 2019-20, I am loathed to disagree that the media has been told to fall into line and support the government's health plans regardless of their own views, however, that does not mean that anti-vax has a single leg to stand on, particularly given that work on the SARS-CoV vaccine started in 2002 when it was first discovered (as talented lab technician friend of mine demonstrated with a 2013 printed textbook last week) and is as safe as any other vaccine as it passed all regular tests (just in an accellerated program due to the overload of funding it recieved all at once).

It is unfortunate that there is no political party that is actually electable other than the Tories - Labour doesn't have a chance, much as they didn't at the last election due to throwing the "antisemitism" card around (regardless of the accuracy of the accusation, the accusation alone was enough to scare voters away from them forever), the Liberals havn't been electable since Nick Clegg destroyed the parties credibility with Brexit Blunderer Cameron and the only "party" after those three who are even legally able to form a government in the UK are independants! (of which there are 6, so as great that would be, it can't happen) Politics is a glorified Punch & Judy show for adults, run by people who have all the money and want everyone else to have less. It almost makes me dispair... it's fortunate that people can't pull a Trell in reality.