>>36103
I can't answer your general question but when it comes to the bulk of NHS reform I wouldn't primarily put it down to corruption. Maybe a few friends of friends or loyal party people wound up on NHS trusts but, for Blair and Major the push was definitely ideological. A sort of belief that if you could just get NHS managers to think about the health service the way that Tesco's managers think about supermarkets, and for patients to choose their hospital the way they choose where to shop, then you'd get a virtuous circle where hospitals compete to deliver better performance in new and innovative ways that planners would never think of. A radical centre ground between An America-style market system and the old top-down NHS!

Now sure, the catch is that it didn't really work - but it was tried with much purer motivation than that for say, PFI, which had a similar "markets are magic!" ideological justification but was practically just about hiding debt off the government's balance sheet at the cost of getting effective interest rates worse than if you did everything on the PM's credit card. Perhaps still not corrupt, but stupid and dishonest.

>>36106

Is the booster different to the original shots? I thought it was just an extra helping (even if you'd had AZ).

>>36111
It is just an extra helping, though it may help more if your booster shot is different to whatever you received originally. Though if it's a vaccine that depends on producing spike proteins, it may have a tough time priming the immune system to respond to Omicron. That said, we don't know enough about the outcomes of Omicron, though if it's been spreading in isolation it likely hasn't been killing people, so it's possible that this is the "ideal" variant that spreads like nobody's business but doesn't do much damage.

It's worth remembering that around one-fifth of common colds are caused by Coronaviridae, so high-R low-damage is certainly a possibility.

>>36112l
This is something that I don't think it's getting enough airtime, although I understand that if it were more common knowledge then it would encourage complacency a bit. There's been a lot of talk about Omicron potentially being highly transmissible, and with a few ways to evade immune response, but if all it amounts to is a cough for a week then we might be out of the woods.

Ultimately, the virus doesn't want to mutate to kill its hosts, it's much more beneficial for it to be able to live and spread undisturbed.

>>36113

I think the selection pressure argument is overplayed. In severe cases, there's still a significant incubation period of milder illness that allows for community transmission. Hospitals are a pretty efficient vector for spreading the disease, especially if you're very ill and producing huge amounts of aerosol.

The virus doesn't "know" that we're trying to control it, the evolutionary advantage just goes to whichever strain can spread most effectively. The selection pressure could equally be in the opposite direction - masks, social distancing and vaccines make it harder for a milder virus to spread, so there could be an evolutionary advantage to making someone really sick.

>"Are you sure?" James asked.
>"I'm absolutely sure, the police were called," she replied.

Is it usual for LBC to type like this? It reads more like a fiction than a news article.

>>36116
It's the author's first job since he graduated from his masters at Cardiff uni last year. I don't even know why I looked this up.

>>36110
I know democracy is hyped up, but the unelected members of the House of Lords really seem to be much better at basically everything than the House of Commons. It seems like not having to worry about appealing to imbeciles frees them up and lets them talk a lot more sense.

>>36118
hear, hear.

According to footage on Twitter, there was one solitary fisherman blocking the boat.

https://twitter.com/KavyMan1984/status/1465597778902634501

>Instead of toning the bill down, the Home Secretary has made it vastly more dangerous, adding several aggressive new provisions.

>Now police can deploy stop and search to avoid “serious disruption” or a “public nuisance”. They can be initiated “whether or not the constable has any grounds for suspecting that the person… is carrying a prohibited object”

>Anyone found guilty of obstructing a stop and search during a protest faces a jail term “not exceeding 51 weeks”.

>Amendment 319C criminalises “wilful obstruction of a highway”. Amendment 319D criminalises the obstruction of “major transport works”, including roads, rail lines or airport runways. Amendment 319A creates an offence of “locking on”, or carrying equipment which might facilitate it. It targets anyone who attaches themselves to “a person, to an object or to land”. These all come with a potential 51 week prison sentence.

>There is no definition of the term “attach”, so it could equally be applied to protestors who link arms during a sit-down protest, or even hold hands. It could apply to someone found with superglue while walking past a protest, or to the disabled activists who chained their wheelchairs to traffic lights over benefits cuts.

>the most far-reaching and alarming part of the legislation is called an SDPO, or Serious Disruption Prevention Order... you do not even have to have been convicted of a crime. You do not even need to have caused disruption. It’s enough that you might have... Once the order is imposed, it eradicates your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Those under an order can be forced to report to the authorities whenever the courts demand it, as often as they demand it. They must “present themselves to a particular person at a particular place at… particular times on particular days”.

They can also be prohibited from being at a certain place, or possessing certain items, or participating in certain activities, or socialising with certain people, for up to two years. They can be blocked from using the internet to “encourage” people to “carry out activities related to a protest”. Someone who used their social media account to promote a demonstration could be found in breach of the order. The SDPOs are a full-scale assault on the individual’s human rights. And they can apply even if they’ve never been convicted of a crime.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/priti-patel-anti-protest-powers-stuffed-policing-bill-1316830

>>36039
What's that got to do with this thread?

>>36040

The policing bill has been part of this thread for the past seven months. Keep up.

>>36036
It was originally a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which was similarly mediocre to the TV series (and the law enforcement authorities).

>>36039
>"locking on", or carrying equipment which might facilitate it.
Well I wouldn't need to own a bike lock if the police did their bloody jobs when my bike gets stolen. But seemingly that's not important.

>>36022
It's mainly people getting shot or ran over.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty

>>36021

The article states that the officer was "caught in a strap", which suggests an accident. Indeed the robbers were cleared of murder (which requires intent), and convicted of manslaughter (which does not).

Would this new law have prevented his death? Would the quad bike raiders have stopped to consider the possible life sentence before carelessly driving away? I see no evidence to suggest this.

Is it not a foundational principal of our society that the same laws apply to everyone, including agents of the state? Not in the mind of our home secretary.

>>36027
Agents of the state being allowed to murder and rape while undercover is still in the bill, I believe. Or was that one already passed? It's hard to keep up.

>>36016
How broadly is "lead to" construed as?
if someone shoplifts and the police are called, and the policeman responding is hit by a bus while crossing the road from the car park to the shop is there a chance the shoplifter could find that they're going down for life because a contrived "well if you hadn't done that, this wouldn't have happened" interpretation is possible?

>>36029
Depends on whether they're a proper white or not.

>>36002
Watch out lads, historical materialist lad has arrived. Can you handle his insightful analysis of 'well it doesn't really mean that'?

>>36004
Booooooo

I was talking with my kids yesterday and they know quite a few people at their school who are openly gay. It blew my mind a little bit because when I was at school nobody came out for fear of getting their head kicked in.

>>36017
My friends mum has worked in a comprehensive school for decades now. She said these days that if anyone is being discriminatory/racist they get their shit kicked in.

>>36017
I think at my school in the noughties there was an odd halfway-house. Gay and queer were used as mildly insulting terms and so on, but I think if anyone actually did come out as a committed bumder, that was on the whole respected.

>>35328

Remember Squarials? Murdoch does. He murdered it, with great big barrowloads of newspaper money and a Luxembourgish satellite.

>Andrew Marr is to leave the BBC after 21 years to "get my own voice back", he has announced.

>He joined the broadcaster as political editor in 2000 and has presented a Sunday morning programme since 2005. He will join media company Global, which owns radio stations including LBC, and write for newspapers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-59348808

With Andrew Neil gone, Marr going and even lightweights like Kuenssberg stepping down it seems rather thin on the ground at the BBC at the moment.

>>35952
Yeah, the Beeb’s really gone down hill since Neil stopped hosting that rubbish political show in the afternoon and the rubbish political show in the evening.

They're all hinting that they have some epic vermilion aspirins to drop that the BBC won't allow, but then they largely fade into obscurity as soon as they're out the door. Maybe they should be applauded for sticking up for what they believe in, but in many cases, when someone leaves the BBC, I barely get a chance to find out what they truly believe. Are these reporters all just trying to sound cool as they quit for another reason? Are they just grumpy geriatrics fed up that they can't go full Daily Express on the telly? Is it money? Or, most radically, are there shadowy interests that torpedo the careers of any journalist who threatens to expose the truth?

A French journalist named Romain Molina, who is supposedly hugely respected, is going HAM on Twitter right now, exposing secrets about football sex crimes and corruption. He's not naming many names, but if this isn't what Andrew Marr is quitting to do, then he can do one.

>>35955
Reading through his claims, one of them is that 80% of players smoke shisha. Next to everything else on there, this seems incongruous.

>>35946
Clearly it was Owen Paterson doing it as a second job.

>>35947
Say what you want about the scum man, he gets results.

We should probably have someone look into his wife's "suicide" given this fresh information.

>>35946

Has it? What do you think it was that solved it?

>>35868
There was a bit more to it than "having Ring doorbells outside their house".

>>35949
They're still being reported, just at a local level rather than national.

Four alleged needle spikings in Watford last weekend.

https://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/news/19720944.four-reports-needle-spiking-night-watford/

Two reports in Cheltenham last week.

https://www.stroudnewsandjournal.co.uk/news/19726900.reports-spiking-needle-cheltenham-nightclubs/

Seven people in Doncaster last weekend.

https://www.doncasterfreepress.co.uk/news/needle-spiking-seven-women-injected-with-drugs-in-doncaster-on-saturday-night-3457598

Message too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>35907

I'm not familiar with that particular brand, but sodium polyacrylate can absorb several hundred times its weight in water. Swallowing it would be a Very Bad Idea, partly due to the risk of bowel obstruction and partly due to the risk of extreme dehydration.

>>35907
I think they're best known for some daft French cunt using them to fuck up the plumbing in his locality.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKKg5fzIKeE

>>35909
I had some sympathy until he started sticking his hand into sewers and then I realised he was too dumb to live.

Also I'm now confident you could take out London with coordinated Orbeez strikes in the right locations. Forget dirty bombs or a smallpox attack, these little spheres of doom are much scarier.

>>35910
>Realised he was too dumb to live

It's a fake video.

https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/did-cyril-schreiner-ruin-his-sewerage-pipes-orbeez-investigation/amp/

>>35913
Serves me right for trusting a Frenchman, a German speaking Frenchman at that.

>>35841
The popular meal replacement shake that is nutritionally complete.

>>35841

>but it makes me slightly horny every time I see it

Right you are.

>>35844
Why do they wear those glasses, lads. It's like the fashion accessory version of doing that 'hilarious' smeagol voice.

>>35851
They wear them to make me hard.

>>35851

Big glasses make your face look smaller by comparison. Bloaty face or moonface = wear big bold glasses to separate your features a bit.

>>35638
Might have been a derelict shell or shithole replaced with an actual house though.

>>35639
It's more than half the average nationwide house price back then.

'Dec and Ant' - Ant and Dec spotted 'wrong way round' at Newcastle v Spurs match

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/tv/dec-ant-ant-dec-spotted-21889905

>>35664
>"Dad is absolutely livid that ant and dec are sat the wrong way round at the Newcastle game," posted @absjcx

We laugh but this could be any of us.

Arrest after man in Gosport spotted 'having sex with dog at home with curtains open'

https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/crime/arrest-after-man-in-gosport-spotted-having-sex-with-dog-at-home-with-curtains-open-3442512

Should we pack are devices [into Farraday cages]?

Are solar flares visible? I thought they just wiped out all technology worldwide and sent us back to the Stone Age. And that's unlikely to happen, or the news would be shouting about it more. So it's just a question of whether I'll see it and whether my telly will go off. It's likely to be cloudy over the weekend, so I assume there will be no exciting armageddons (armagedda?) this Sunday.

I remember seeing a list of "things that can destroy the world that nobody is talking about", probably around 2014, and I remember thinking a pandemic sounded really boring and I hoped we got a solar flare or the Yellowstone volcano instead. I was right about the pandemic; it was dull as shit. So fingers crossed it's the end of technology instead.

>>35744
There's a whole hysterical panic from the usual folk that the Earth's magnetic field is low at the moment but really, the 1989 storm was an X15. This is X1.

>>35745
The aurora borealis is visible. Although since 1989 the threat was obvious and been largely addressed.

>And that's unlikely to happen, or the news would be shouting about it more.

You'd think the BBC would at least have it as their lead story on the science page. That should be a worrying sign in itself.

>>35745

>Are solar flares visible?

Not without a solar telescope. The Aurora Borealis are caused by charged particles from solar wind interacting with the ionosphere.

The Mirror are hyping this up out of all proportion. There was a moderately large coronal mass ejection yesterday, but nobody will notice other than seafarers, pilots, astronomers and radio nerds. There might be minor disruption to some niche communications systems for a few hours or days, but it won't affect your mobile phone or anything like that. Anyone who relies on the HF systems that are affected by solar flares is trained to deal with them, because they're a frequent occurrence.

Solar weather operates on an 11 year cycle of activity and we're currently at the quietest part of that cycle. This X1 flare is of interest to those handful of people it does affect because it suggests that solar activity might be picking up, but it's completely irrelevant to 99.999% of people. We had a number of flares 10 to 30 times larger than this one during the peak of the solar cycle between 2000 and 2003.

>>35745
>I thought they just wiped out all technology worldwide

>>35747
>Anyone who relies on the HF systems that are affected by solar flares is trained to deal with them, because they're a frequent occurrence.

All of this. Those of us who are also secretly radio nerds like solar flares because it enhances propagation - I'll be able to communicate with countries I usually can't reach.

>>35779
>Your point here essentially just hinges on not believing otherlad is telling the truth and that he knew exactly what he was doing.

Because it's such a blatant cop out. As the otherlad says, he knew exactly what he was doing in the hope she'd eventually give in. If he feels so remorseful about it then why is most of what he's posted trying to downplay his actions, shift the blame away from him or getting mad that he's admitted he sexually assaulted her but doesn't like people pointing out that he committed sexual assault? He's clearly wanting people to validate his own worldview and nothing else.

It's not a grey area. If a girl wants sex with you but changes her mind that's a black and white no. Trying to take matters into your own hands, literally, by trying to pressure her into sex by repeatedly fondling her in the hope she'll give in despite the fact her body language says otherwise is clear sexual assault.

>>35781

He literally said he opposite of that though.

>>35783
If you take him at his literal word, maybe. But if you take his actions as described, he clearly knew what he was doing.

>>35781
That's why they didn't have sex.

>>35782
I get that people want to "have a conversation" about this, but I was reminded recently by someone that we should be careful not to get so deep into the weeds examining the grey areas that we lose sight of and give space to people doing harmful things in the dark.

No means no. Sure, we can have a discussion on the ins and outs of that and the different things that can be expressed that way, but that discussion must start from the simple absolute and evolve from there.

Roughly the same reason the Japs are such raging perverts, they just manifest differently. Whereas Japan's is rooted in the humiliation and trauma of total defeat by nuclear weaponry, Germany's is more or less pure holocaust guilt self-loathing.

>>35644

>We have a socially acceptable narrative of mental illness along the lines of "I was feeling bad, I asked for help and now I'm better" that is totally at odds with the experiences of people with severe and enduring mental illness.

That is kind of true, like if you're going in to have a broken leg fixed or a tooth straightened.

What if that leg just keeps breaking or that tooth keeps getting back out of alignment somehow. Neither is likely, but if we assume that mental illness is a one-time thing like a broken leg or a wonky tooth, then we also ignore just what you're saying, that mental illness isn't like that and can come back. It should really be treated more like recurring cancer. On the other hand, that is then a slippery slope in its own right, because assuming that somebody with a history of mental illness will at some point just slip back into it, a bit like a ticking time bomb, isn't fair to anybody who was able to put that mentall illness behind them for good.

That said, the most ludicrous thing is what happens in America, where at least for a while it seemed that going into sex rehab was more about the ritual than it was about learning to control your urges or channel them in a healthy way. It's like for some time, every B movie actor who got caught getting a blowie from a prostitute in his car in a back alley went to sex rehab. And probably more to save their own career than to better control their sexuality. Because harmful sexual tendencies are a lot more difficult to cure than many types of depression, which probably every paedo can attest to.

According to reports, nobody actually was killed by the Bow & Arrow, but they were all stabbed.

>>35658

The only part you're wrong about is it being the CIA, but in terms of the establishment in general, we have definitely developed into an attitude where a mental health problem is a faulty cog that needs only the requisite amount of repair to fulfil its function in the machine.

>>35660

Stabbed by an arrow. The same way you get hole punched by a bullet, I guess.

>>35660
Did they fall madly in love with the first person they saw? Does that make it technically a sexual assault?