I’ll read the others later, but the first thing that strikes me is the irony of that shapeless toad Boris telling everyone how to exercise and eat right.
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Nah, don’t have time. And I never said I like these newfangled web thingies, just that they have not wiped out anything.
They do contribute to polarization in general, but what would you do about that? Regulate them? (Gasp!) Get some virtual clipboard holders to go and hassle them? (Cue scary music and mention of socialist death spiral…)
Ask any leader of a country where marching in the street promptly and consistently gets people arrested and tortured.
Yes, well, that is stupid, but Taiwan is not the whole world. 
Why hasn’t this been made compulsory everywhere, since all the politicians on the planet are singing from the same hymn sheet and so on?
Early on, there was an effort by some in the private sector (I’m not speaking of Taiwan now) to refuse to take cash, but it didn’t stick, because too many people refused to go along with it. They didn’t even need to march in the street, just to say nope I only have cash and if I can’t use cash then I can’t shop here. Now it’s like it never happened at all.
I will cherish this moment forever! 
It’s not a perfect description, hence the “kind of like”.
He definitely wanted chaos towards the end, because he wanted an excuse to declare martial law and so on. But all that general chaos caused by his conventional incompetence? No, I don’t buy that it was part of his master plan all along. (Cue covfefe.)
Why are you so in love with absolutism?
Cue Doom Paul! Or this:
Yes, that phenomenon in general is nothing new. Hence politician after politician touting Family Values™ while practicing another sort of thing, or going to church the same way a married couple who can’t stand each other continue to sleep in the same bed, or toeing the line on relations with this or that country while privately hoping this or that country goes to Hell… and now going on vacation while telling everyone else to stay home. I don’t see any most of the politicking around Covid as an innovation.*
You may recall, of course, that Family Values™ don’t have the kind of pull they used to have, or that the taboo of D-I-V-O-R-C-E has lost much of its power while many atheists and agnostics have come out of the closet, or this or that country’s influence has waned somewhat (“what goes up…”), and so on. Covid is still the Next Big Thing, for now, but there’s always another Next Big Thing waiting in the wings.
Experienced politicians tend to understand this and to choose their words carefully and even use stalking horses to gather the dissident vote, on any issue. They’re still at the mercy of the electorate, and they still take advice from electoral analysts.
It depends. After the 2014 coup, it took the big potatoes of Thailand five years of “election next year!” to feel safe enough to go through the motions again. In the West, people are constantly getting duped by the whole system in general, but it still functions well enough to be worth continuing with until humans come up with something better. (Cue Churchill.)
Almost never. 
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, no?
For me, this boils down to two memes:
vs.
ETA: The politicking varies by jurisdiction, of course. Compulsory contact tracing for supermarkets – who came up with that anyway? Politicians or private sector? I’m not following Australian politics or even Taiwanese politics much these days. When Biden says the unvaccinated are killing people, he’s being just as irresponsible as the people on the other side who tacitly endorse violence against any other group, whether he intended it that way or not. But most of the politicking is just business as usual to me. 
The last Technical Briefing for the UK put the CFR for Delta in the UK at 0.2%, (not 2%, which is what somone else said)
The case fatality rate (CFR) is the ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases. In Tech Briefing 18 of cases with at least 28 days of follow up, there were 45,136 Delta cases resulting in 112 deaths and the UK Public Health Service states that Delta CFR is 0.2%.
So, in other words, it’s not a 2% chance you’ll die from Delta if you get it. According to the UK Public Health data more than 99% of people who had it survived.
If anyone has any more different updated stats on CFR for Delta, then we can have a look at those, but for now, the actual data doesn’t seem to match the stories we hear around it.
Actually, I’m looking for solution to minimise the risks of mask wearing, breathing in C02, potentially fibres from the masks, contamination of masks including from my own sweat, and so on.
My sense is that Dr Fraudski was right in his original position on masks, including the one he shared with friends in his private emails that there is little to no benefit in mask wearing, and potentially greater risk given the way they’re typically handled. My understanding is there are a lot of scientific studies pre-2020 that support that contention.
Sadly, MSM, politicians, fact checkers and many of the health professionals and bodies have done a great job in destroying my trust in published science, so its hard to get a good sense on what the risks actually are.
BTW, I’ve really enjoyed your posts on the humbug thread, thank you.
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I found the e-mail he sent, but I see fact checkers saying he didn’t mean this? im confused.
Sorry, my bad. I was just referring to fact checkers in general. These days, I don’t tend to read what the fact checkers say anymore. If anything, I just assume the opposite of what they’re saying is likely to be heading me in the direction of truth.
The bright side of what the last year has revealed, is that this kind of stuff (corruption, lies, etc.) has gone on forever, its just now more and more people are waking up to it, and how widespread it is… I guess this is more a post for the Humbug thread, however, I am still looking for a good solution with the face masks.
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And how would you know, if it isn’t there? 
Try this then: don’t you think it’s a bit bizarre that, if you search on YouTube for “anti-COVID” discussions, they’ve been delisted or removed? I’m sure you can find the time to do that.
Me personally? Nothing. But I don’t think they’re doing it voluntarily. If you censor content then that means you’ve lost a big chunk of your audience (and therefore ad revenue).
The only realistic option is to set up alternative streaming sites, and try to get the message out there that YouTube is censoring views that they don’t agree with (for whatever reason). That has been done. It’s not perfect, but at least the information is there for people who care to look.
Why? How would they know? Protests are suppressed there, so what they know about is the ultimate outcome of arresting and torturing people. The only governments that know protests are nothing to worry about are the governments that let protests go unopposed. I won’t say they never make a difference, but 90% of the time the government finds a workaround that placates the plebs, and they all go home to watch TV and eat chips.
For the fairly simple reason that you can’t just magic things into existence by clicking your fingers. Software development takes time. Hardware deployment takes time. No doubt they’ve been doing it for months - which is why Israel, for example, managed to go live with little warning. Just watch. The EU has pretty much completed the job. The UK is talking about it. Various other scattered countries are picking up the ball.
Are you seriously suggesting that just because it hasn’t been instantaneous and global, it’s nothing to worry about?
Maybe. I’m just saying that, for the average man in the street, it doesn’t matter what he wanted. What we got is what we got. The intention matters only to Trump.
Oh, come on. That’s not what I’m talking about. And if you think it’s nothing new, you’re either too young or you’ve spent too many years in orbit.
I’m talking about governments hiring teams of psychologists to orchestrate a mind-control programme, without even bothering to hide what they’re doing. What you’re looking at is an astoundingly successful mass brainwashing programme. I think even the psychologists were surprised by how well it worked.
It’s possible you don’t know what you’re looking at because (a) you’ve never seen it before and (b) you don’t know what it is you’re looking at anyway, because it’s not your field of expertise. If you show a nuclear physicist a vat of water with radioactive material in it, he might say “ooh, look, Cherenkov radiation”. Anyone else will just say “ooh, what a pretty blue colour”.
Well … yes. Why do you think history is basically a list of people fighting wars because they just want to be left alone?
We seem to be going off into the weeds here. Hypotheticals are fun, but the main point of this thread is to discuss what is happening rather than what might happen, viz.,
- An assault on human rights with no obvious basis either in existing law or disease control;
- The scapegoating and punishment of people who are not responsible for the problem at hand (to the extent that any problem even exists);
- A huge retrograde step in human progress, with hundreds of millions plunged back into poverty, and hundreds of millions more with years or decades of personal progress erased from their own lives;
- Heavy coercion, amounting to violation of international agreements on medical ethics, to take a vaccine with no obvious benefit to most of the population and which has not been properly tested;
- A generation of kids who will grow up with a abnormal understanding of human relationships and social propriety (‘abnormal’ from either a historical or anthropological viewpoint).
Are you saying that none of the above even happened, or that it happened and it’s nothing to worry about?
I haven’t figured out how yet, but I am pretty sure the unvaccinated are causing climate change.
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Leaked Pfizer agreement:
More pharma bots at work:
Same policy as last year:
What strings will the corps try and pull here to get them licensed?
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“Discrimination and segregation based on private medical choices is happening right in front of our eyes.”
Sounds familiar, should this help?
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I have family in the US that are so pro-vaccine that they think people should be forced to get the jab. These are the same folks who lecture me about pro-choice
“your body, your choice”. Considering that vaccines protect you from having a severe case of Covid, but not make you immune to getting it, I fail to see the reasoning for the anger at the opt-out people.
I’ve chosen to be fully vaccinated and if others want to chose another path, it is their body.
I feel the same way about motorcycle helmets. I wear one to keep the noise down and to protect my skull. However, if someone (over 18) decides to splatter their brains on the interstate, I’m not going to attack them for their choice.
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The counter-argument to that is the cost of the clean up being borne by the (vaccinated) taxpayers. Pro-Coviders believe that by not being vaccinated you’re putting undue and unnecessary pressure on health services. They’ll argue that if you get sick from Covid, then that’s a lot of expensive hospital treatment that could have been avoided, and they have to bear the cost. Thus they consider it a selfish chocie to not get vaxxed.
It’s a weak argument but oft touted.
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I’m starting to wonder if COVID “skeptics” should self-identify in the same sort of way black people took back the N-word.
Perhaps we should invent a badge that we can wear on our clothes to show that we’re unvaccinated. If we do that before the government decides to do it, we can claim it as a symbol of solidarity, and as a means of mocking the (existing) “badge” that people are forced to carry on their phones in certain countries.
A Star of David would be too obvious, but a similar look-and-feel might do the trick.
The main problem with this argument is that, if you accept it as valid, you can then legitimately point at people who end up in hospital with diabetes or other problems related to metabolic syndrome, and accuse them of putting a strain on the health system. Which they are. It’s not entirely their fault: Type 2 diabetes is completely reversible in most cases, and partially reversible in the other cases, but it’s far more profitable to keep these people sick and on lifelong “treatment”. Nevertheless, most governments spend a vast amount of money on people who are obese, diabetic, or have chronic heart disease. In the UK it’s about 25% of the NHS budget.
I’ve always wondered: why would it be so difficult to record the severity of symptoms for positive cases (say, on a 5-point scale) instead of just “tested positive”? And would it really have made life intolerable for pen-pushers if they’d recorded why COVID patients were being hospitalised? The fact that most COVID cases were contracted in hospital (>50%, IIRC) suggests that a large fraction of them went in for something unrelated, but nevertheless ended up in the COVID tally … even though they were most likely asymptomatic.
Precisely. Plus a million other things that people choose to do that cause any sort of public health response.
I wish Australia had even one politician like this McNamara guy.
What the f*** happened to that country.
If you quiz them, I bet they don’t know their own reasoning either. They’ve been told what to think. Blanket coverage on all news outlets implying that “anti-vaxers” are responsible for everything that’s wrong with the world.
The fact is that “the pandemic” has pretty much gone away. It’s hard to tell how much relative contribution is down to the vaccine and how much due to natural acquired immunity, but hospitalizations and deaths in the US and Europe are now very, very few. Even in India, it’s pretty much business as usual (although official figures should be taken with a very large pinch of salt).
But the show must go on.
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Did you get that over 50% of Covid cases were contracted in hospital from the following?
“BREAKING: More than half of Covid hospitalisations are patients who only tested positive AFTER admission and went in with other non-Covid ailments,…”
I think it may just be that people go to the hospital with problems and then get their first positive case test for Covid. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they contracted it in hospital.
According to the NHS figures, about 39,088 people may have contracted it in hospital from Aug 1, 2020 to Feb 21, 2021.
During that same time period, cases numbers in the UK went from 303,000 to 4,103,000. So, the way I understand that is that for the UK, 39,000 of 3,800,000 cases were contracted in hospital (1 %).
Is there something I missed?