Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Diamonds are Forever]

56 minutes ago, GiGi said:

The thing is if Cummings just came out and said yes fair enough, I made a mistake, it was a serious error in judgement, won't happen again etc he could probably have just about rode it out with the odd howl to resign but say he still feels he can contribute to the government or some shite. Stuttering out one bare-faced lie after another on national tv while being utterly unrepentant about the whole thing is just so stupid. Every day he keeps his position is the best kind of ammo for opposition parties.

 

Yip. At worst, he may have had to resign on the basis that him being there undermines the public guidance, but he could easily have come back in a year or so when this is all over. Politics moves quickly and if he'd apologised and stepped down immediately there wouldn't have been much fuss amongst the wider public when he snuck back in in a year or so.

As it is, the government are constantly doubling down with every one of these press conferences and I think it's reached the point where they've invested so much into defending him that they wont be able to bring themselves to back out. It's all going to depend how much the public and media are willing to stick at it.

[101]

Being ill played really well with their base, I wonder if dying and coming back to life would be good. Prince Andrew must be fearing that extradition order being signed to divert attention.

[BillyAnchor]

[Tony Ferrino]

23 minutes ago, Melanius Mullarkey said:

Cummings showing his Dundonian roots I see.

  Churchill link again.

[Melanius Mullarkey]

Imagine being from the north of England and really thinking this shower of shit was the least worst option. 

[Florentine_Pogen]

1 minute ago, Melanius Mullarkey said:

Imagine being from the north of England and really thinking this shower of shit was the least worst option. 

Imagine being Murican and thinking Trump was in any way presidential.

We're past the point of policies swaying voters, it's social media, stoopid...........

(Not you personally, you green-trousered, concretising, mushroom supper-chomping weirdo......)

[welshbairn]

55 minutes ago, Carl Cort's Hamstring said:

A side-note, but in the press conference today, Cummings mentioned that he had written about the potential danger of a coronavirus pandemic last year. All part of his genius super-predictor schtick that makes him so apparently indespensible to the government.

Turns out that he just sneakily edited an article from last year (on the day he got back from Durham!) to add in references to coronaviruses to make himself seem prescient.

Johnson is setting fire to everything to protect this charlatan.

 

 

Had a look, and although most of his blog in March 2019 was copied and pasted from this, apart from the honey traps bit..

https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/human-error-in-high-biocontainment-labs-a-likely-pandemic-threat/

... he actually removed the only reference to SARS, and only added it back when he came back to London from Durham. This bit:

Quote

Among other things, the GAO report called attention to a well-publicized incident in which a Defense Department laboratory “inadvertently sent live Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax, to almost 200 laboratories worldwide over the course of 12 years. The laboratory believed that the samples had been inactivated.” The report describes yet another well-publicized incident in China in which “two researchers conducting virus research were exposed to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus samples that were incompletely inactivated. The researchers subsequently transmitted SARS to others, leading to several infections and one death in 2004.”

The GAO identified three recent releases of Ebola and Marburg viruses from BSL4 to lower containment labs due to incomplete inactivation.

His blog with the SARS bit added back in, showing he had a brain the size of a planet and forecast this mess, when he actually cut it out because he thought it was boring and irrelevant.

https://dominiccummings.com/2019/03/04/the-most-secure-bio-labs-routinely-make-errors-that-could-cause-a-global-pandemic-are-about-to-re-start-experiments-on-pathogens-engineered-to-make-them-mammalian-airborne-transmissible/

 

Edited May 25, 2020 by welshbairn

[Karpaty Lviv]

4 hours ago, Mr Pikey said:

I was genuinely gobsmacked when Boris was spluttering and pulled out his specs. WTAF 

I laughed out loud when he done that. He then said that he thinks that’s a possible symptom of Covid-19. Making up symptoms of a disease that has killed tens of thousands and counting on the spot, when he’s supposed to be in fucking charge, was just incredible. I had my head in my hands by that point. 

[Ya Bezzer!]

27 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

Cummings not apologising is nothing to do with personal arrogance.

Cummings not apologising is everything to do with the political condition of the U.K. that he has played, and is still playing, a large part in creating.

Thatcher made significant differences to the structure of the U.K. by policies such as buy-to-let and privatisation of previously nationalised industries.  The implications of these policies went way beyond the obvious effects.  They were social conditioning.

The Tories under Johnson are doing something as fundamental.  They are looking to change institutions; the veiled threat to the judiciary following the ruling on proroguing Parliament is an example of that.  They are looking to undermine objectivity and faith in facts, though ironically the COVID-19 crisis has made that more difficult.

As is the case in the U.S. they want to create the condition where uninformed opinion is seen to have equal validity with provable facts.  Social media is playing a huge role in this, and is benefiting from it, and the right-wing have shown they are far more adept at controlling and manipulating social media to influence opinion for political ends; at least in England. 

When you’re creating conditions such as this you cannot apologise, we saw that recently with Patel.  You’re position must be one of absolute certainty.

I agree in general but it's not simply a right wing thing.

Tony Blair took the country to war based on a pantomime.  Guys like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are the same species as Cummings.

The extermination of objective fact is being perpetrated by both sides and has now been normalised across the board in general society. 

That's why it's truly frightening.  There are very few defenders of truth or reason.  Virtually the entire nation is now living in a cloud of delusion and it's not likely to end well.

 

[coprolite]

5 minutes ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

I agree in general but it's not simply a right wing thing.

Tony Blair took the country to war based on a pantomime.  Guys like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are the same species as Cummings.

The extermination of objective fact is being perpetrated by both sides and has now been normalised across the board in general society. 

That's why it's truly frightening.  There are very few defenders of truth or reason.  Virtually the entire nation is now living in a cloud of delusion and it's not likely to end well.

 

Agree that the Blair regime was as bad, given the tools they had. Imagine what Mandelson would do with facebook. 

I disagree with the implication that this is a recent development. This sort of shite has been going on since horace mythologising Augustus. Probably before, but i don't know of anything earlier. 

[Granny Danger]

19 minutes ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

I agree in general but it's not simply a right wing thing.

Tony Blair took the country to war based on a pantomime.  Guys like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell are the same species as Cummings.

The extermination of objective fact is being perpetrated by both sides and has now been normalised across the board in general society. 

That's why it's truly frightening.  There are very few defenders of truth or reason.  Virtually the entire nation is now living in a cloud of delusion and it's not likely to end well.

 

You think Blair, Mandelson and Campbell are left wing?

I’m not being flippant in asking that.

[Ya Bezzer!]

Just now, Granny Danger said:

You think Blair, Mandelson and Campbell are left wing?

I’m not being flippant in asking that.

In fact the Blair government did a lot of good  things and corrected many of the ills of the previous Conservative governments, at least before they lost the plot.  They are probably as left wing as anyone in this country can be post Thatcher and get elected although I supposed everything is relative.  

Overall a pre lost-it's-way Blair government would be vastly preferable to the current gang.  Centre left might overlap with centre right in some regards but they are not the same thing and as much as I personally despise Tony Blair I think it's verging on reductive to suggest they are.

 

 

 

 

[Theroadlesstravelled]

4 hours ago, Snafu said:

 

Reminds of this joke-

“The British public are revolting.”
“You can say that again.“

 

[Granny Danger]

5 hours ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

In fact the Blair government did a lot of good  things and corrected many of the ills of the previous Conservative governments, at least before they lost the plot.  They are probably as left wing as anyone in this country can be post Thatcher and get elected although I supposed everything is relative.  

Overall a pre lost-it's-way Blair government would be vastly preferable to the current gang.  Centre left might overlap with centre right in some regards but they are not the same thing and as much as I personally despise Tony Blair I think it's verging on reductive to suggest they are.

 

A Boris Johnson type non-answer.  You said in response to my initial post that what I was describing was not just a right wing thing, I asked if you thought if any of the three people you mentioned were left wing.

 

 

[Zen Archer (Raconteur)]

 

 

[greendot]

Gove being rolled out on BBC just now justifying Cummings honesty and integrity!

[dirty dingus]

[doulikefish]

2 minutes ago, greendot said:

Gove being rolled out on BBC just now justifying Cummings honesty and integrity!

The excuse is so weak dan walker basically a sports reporter has him rattled 

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

It seems like the Cheltenham Festival and the Liverpool vs Atletico game did cause a spike in cases in those areas.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52797002

[greendot]

24 minutes ago, doulikefish said:

The excuse is so weak dan walker basically a sports reporter has him rattled 

You could see that walker was getting angry with Gove until a little voice in his ear told him to calm down a bit. Certainly had gove rattled up until he moved onto the next point where he resoundingly said yes to opening non essential shops with safety measures expecting that to be another positive to disregard Cummings behaviour but then he had to expand on things