>>33753 Unpopular opinion I know, but I thought he performed very well today and made a lot of sense. If only 10% of what he was saying is true, Hancock is fucked.
It's a party discipline thing. It's relatively easy for the whips to coerce MPs into supporting Hancock now, while the party is in crisis-management mode and the allegations are mostly unproven. Once they've supported Hancock on the record, it's harder for them to turn against him (and by extension Boris) later without appearing stupid or duplicitous.
The more savvy back-benchers will be trying to keep their heads down as much as possible, but there are plenty of toadies and arselicks who are just too dim to realise that they're being set up.
>>33755 >austerity
Sajid Javid got sacked as Chancellor because he refused to allow the country to spend beyond its means. We're all high rollers now. Rishi the odious bootlicker (I can't say brown-noser because das rayciss) waltzed in and now he just throws money at everyone, bribing us to forget what a slimy eel he was two years ago. They're nationalising trains, investing in the NHS and paying everyone 80% of their wages to sit home and buy the houses the rest of us want. It's a whole new Conservative party, and it's Labour in all but name and colour. What a shame their election victory was entirely predicated on ignorance and violently denouncing anyone who pays attention to politics as an out-of-touch elitist.
Well. It's like a Labour from an alternate universe where all the money goes to business owners and the middle class instead of the working class and unemployed.
That's really all it amounts to. Calculated bribery of broadsheet reading fence sitters. Nevermind the fact that most of the people who really needed help the most throughout all of this were left squarely out in the cold.
>Facebook has lifted a ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, following a resurgence of interest in the “lab leak” theory of the disease’s onset.
>The social network says its new policy comes “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”.
>Mr. Biden on Wednesday announced that he had ordered the intelligence community to undertake a renewed examination of where the coronavirus came from and said that some intelligence agencies believe it was most likely created naturally, while at least one other favored the theory that it leaked accidentally from a lab in China.
>>33765 I've always believed in the accidental leak theory, the best example of it happening is our own foot-and-mouth outbreak in 2007, which actually started because of a leaking pipe at the Pirbright Institute, which is also a BSL4 lab.
But, I don't think we'll ever find out - there will never be enough evidence either way.
I think this has more to do with American media opportunism moving to suit the new agenda than it does anything about the origins of covid.
Back when it was Trump in charge, the story was spun so that Trump was a moronic bigot and so was anyone who even considered a viewpoint that might align with his. Now that he's dealt with, normal service (MERRIKER) can resume.
>>33768 >Back when it was Trump in charge, the story was spun so that Trump was a moronic bigot and so was anyone who even considered a viewpoint that might align with his.
I think this is true and it really says something that Facebook outright banned any such discussion. There's really no reason to discount the idea given China's reputation for lax standards and the fact that this is the same dictatorship trying to convince the world that they're sending Uighurs to Butlins.
It's probably also partly the same problem New Zealand has that China is too economically important to criticise. I'm sure only close US-allies are going to bring this up and as a result everyone is going to play this in the context of a cold war. Putin has already joined Chinese efforts to suggest this was a US biological weapon.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-china-team-peddle-insane-224247396.html
That is a good one. Mad to think how much more lax we were with things back in the old days. Some of the older chaps at work have told me jaw dropping stories about keeping their milk in the same fridge as blood samples, benches with cigarette burns in them because people smoked on the job, and so on. That said:
>Although there is general agreement that the source of Parker’s infection was the smallpox virus grown at the Medical School laboratory, how Parker contracted the disease remains unknown.
There's two types of visitors to my lab. Ones who are clearly bricking it because they think entering a microbiology lab is like a scene from the film Outbreak, and ones who are callous bordering on stupid and have to be persuaded to wear a white coat and wash their hands even though they're "only popping in for five minutes".
I bet she was one of the latter, or one of the other staff working there was. Even though things were less strict back then, they weren't totally daft; in the end it was probably just basic complacency and failing to follow procueedure.
Same is totally plausible for covid. I would still rule out the possibility of it being "man made" however.
And the 2015 Nat Medicine Paper doing gain-of-function research that was super controversial and resulted in the NIH revoking funding from that kind of research
And the whole CRISPR baby scandal from 2018 showing that seriously beyond-the-pale research was occurring either with govt support or without its knowledge
It's pretty interesting to read about the cause of the
1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak in Russia and subsequent Communist Government's response. There are so many parallels, right down to the authorities claiming that the source of the illness was tainted meat.
I like how the line of thought that concludes with the Chinese having creating COVID-19 somehow lets major Western governments off the hook for behaving like scoundrels and idiots for well over a year. Xi Jinping didn't send nana back to the care home with a respiratory tract full of SARS-Cov 2. I'm quite certain it's bollocks anyway, but the lengths conservatives here and in the USA will go to to avoid blaming their elected officials is quite amazing; Russian serfs demanded higher standards of governance than some of these people.
It could be the case that the virus escaped from a lab and also that our elected officials utterly failed with regards to both pandemic preparedness before the fact and in its their subsequent response to the pandemic.
Both are not mutually exclusive events, like Chernobyl they are all are born of a moldy cocktail of hubris, corruption and incompetence.
>Taiwan accuses China of interfering with Covid vaccine deals
>Taiwan’s president has accused China of interfering in its vaccine acquisition programme, as the island continues to battle hundreds of daily new cases of Covid-19 with low supplies of vaccines. Taiwan has received about 700,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine so far, for a population of 24 million. While the island had been largely Covid-free since the pandemic began, an outbreak in late April has so far infected more than 5,000 people, and killed at least 47. Less than 2% of the population are vaccinated.
>The president, Tsai Ing-wen, said Taiwan had made successful deals with AstraZeneca from the UK and Moderna from the US, and was engaging with Germany’s BioNTech for the Pfizer vaccine. “We had almost completed the contract signing with the German manufacturer at one point, but it has been delayed till now because China has interfered,” Tsai told a party meeting on Wednesday, in the most explicit comments to date, after months of suggestions that Beijing had been getting in the way of Taiwan’s procurement process.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/27/taiwan-president-accuses-china-interfering-covid-vaccine-deals
I blame a lack of PlayStation for this growing crisis. There's no room for confusing your left and right when you need to put the cheats in for GTA.
>>33784 Thank goodness we have someone to share with us a link to Full Fact. An organisation whose focus is telling morons not to drink bleach and failed multiple appeals for charity status as it could not sufficiently distance itself from political work.
>As we have written about before, it is widely agreed by scientists that the new coronavirus came from an animal source and could not have been engineered in a lab.
This is an appeal to authority. The flaw is that markers are circumstantial and the link improbable. Or to look at what the WHO is saying in the wider context of their analysis:
China repeatedly obstructed the work of the WHO in this area and is unlikely to ever allow another investigation. In the next month we'll either have a smoking gun or we'll still be playing probabilities.
"China attacked us with a bioweapon, our intelligence agencies didn't give us early warning, we were completely unprepared, we totally botched the response and we can't even prove that they did it" doesn't seem like a position of strength.
However you slice it, this pandemic has been a triumph for East Asia and a humiliation for the West.
Also given India (hardly 'the West') is being absolutely sundered by this virus, how is that supposed to improve their relationship with their Chinese neighbours?
Japan has double our population but 90% fewer covid deaths. The fact that they look bad by comparison with their neighbours just highlights the vast disparity in responses between East Asia and pretty much everyone else.
>how is that supposed to improve their relationship with their Chinese neighbours?
What the fuck are India going to do about it? China are selling missile technology to laplanderstan, for crying out loud. India might throw their weight around in Aksai Chin, but they're fully aware that they continue to exist only because of China's utter indifference.
It seems very much to me like they've got a policy not to turn people away. The appointments are more just to make sure everyone doesn't rush in at once first thing in the morning. Ring 111 and they'll likely re-book you without much fuss.
>>33801 >What the fuck are India going to do about it? China are selling missile technology to laplanderstan, for crying out loud. India might throw their weight around in Aksai Chin, but they're fully aware that they continue to exist only because of China's utter indifference.
I hate India more than most people but you're utterly wrong if you don't think India is a threat to China. The Andaman Islands could cut China's major artery and the border provocations are designed to push Indian military spending away from the navy.
Even in strictly economic terms the Indian market is huge and has a lot of potential to grow.
>>33782 They've put it in the headline so I can't get too upset (usually they bury it well down in the article), but it still pisses me off that this is structured "China created Covid, study claims" rather than "Study claims China created Covid".
I hate headline writers and their misleading use of the English language.
>>33791 I do wish people were more angry about this sort of thing. Let's say China created a bioweapon, let's even go further, let's say they unleashed it on purpose to cause chaos - very good, we knew pretty quickly we could counter it with lockdowns, travel restrictions, etc, and countries that did this competently have done alright. We completely fucked that up. If we're to compare to to the Blitz (another attack by a hostile power, albeit which killed less people despite requiring slightly more protection than a brief lockdown!) instead of building air raid shelters, setting up AA guns, evacuating kids to the countryside and so on, our current government would no doubt have been getting everyone to coat themselves in petrol and stand in their local aeroplane factory while the prime minister talks about having Arthur Harris level his house with a squadron of Lancasters to show that it's no worse than a bump on the head.
But the public consensus seems to be that everyone tried their best so it's perfectly fine that 128,000 people are dead. For being the sort of wankers who whine about how everyone gets a participation prize these days they seem incredibly willing to hand them out to government ministers.
>Even in strictly economic terms the Indian market is huge and has a lot of potential to grow.
I can't help but feel that's wishful thinking. On paper India looks like it could become a superpower in the next 50 years, but in reality it's an illusion based on sheer population.
When you have a billion and a half people of course it's a big market, but they're all dirt poor peasants who wash their clothes in the same river they shit in, and the government is doing basically nothing to change that. That's not the kind of economy that can really leverage it's big on paper numbers into meaningful action.
>But the public consensus seems to be that everyone tried their best so it's perfectly fine that 128,000 people are dead. For being the sort of wankers who whine about how everyone gets a participation prize these days they seem incredibly willing to hand them out to government ministers.
Well said.
Looking back to the start of all this, when we were first hearing the rumbles of all this in late December 2019, early January 2020, I was very much in the camp of "nothing serious, it'll all blow over and be out of the news by April in time for another stand-off with Russia or a big earthquake in Malaysia." Obviously I couldn't have been more wrong, but the reason I was inclined to think that way is that it beggars belief how nothing was done sooner; the fact nothing was being done at those early stages told me that the media were blowing it all out of proportion, and if it was anything serious the scientists would have told the government to go full Madagascar already and prevent it reaching us in the first place.
Obviously, in retrospect I should have been more cynical about it and realised the government would just wilfully ignore such advice, as appears to have been the case. But I really thought that regardless of your political affiliation and views, our government could at least be trusted to act in the case of a genuine fucking worldwide pandemic straight out of an airport thriller novel. Yeah they fiddle their expenses and they fuck it all up whenever they try procure a new IT system, but that stuff is all small fry, surely the country still has the capacity to act when the stakes are serious.
What this has all proven is that we do not. The bones have been hollowed out, and the government and administration we have today is basically a cargo cult.
>>33808 >When you have a billion and a half people of course it's a big market, but they're all dirt poor peasants who wash their clothes in the same river they shit in, and the government is doing basically nothing to change that. That's not the kind of economy that can really leverage it's big on paper numbers into meaningful action.
That's why it's a potential market and why before 2020 India had a higher growth-rate than China. Even today India is one of China's biggest trading partners despite all the negative perception in the Indian market. It's actually fairly easy to see where India could generate growth e.g. reforming its internal market to remove barriers to goods moving in-country so I don't see why you wouldn't see potential here.
I need to point out that the savage cyberbullying of Indians over their poo actually did seem to have an effect.
>>33810 I thought the same back then but for me it came down to all the similar scares we've had over my lifetime. The government action was late but I can get why when you first heard of it you wouldn't think much and that goes double given the poor information we had at the time. Taiwan is an exceptional case because they could afford to take no chances and they did and it worked out this time.
I was even dating a Malay-Chinese woman at the time and she went to the New Year festival in her homeland, asking her about it when she came back she didn't notice anything.
>>33810 I think the reason you were inclined to think that way was more that most recent pandemics have been more or less isolated and short-lived. Swine flu, bird flu, HxNx, SARS, MERS and so on - all caused serious international outbreaks but we saw nothing like we're seeing on the scale of COVID-19, so to have it take us by surprise is, I think, understandable.
But I agree with the rest of your post - threats to national security are supposed to be the government's bread and butter, and there was Johnson, boasting about how many COVID patient hands he had shaken in March '20 like it was all a big joke to him. Then even after being forced to lock down the country, the borders were open - I had family members returning from abroad who were leaving Heathrow and getting on the Tube no questions asked. And they are polling at 44%.
I'm still trying to get over Cummings claim that the PM wanted to be injected with Covid-19 on television. Imagine how many children would be scarred for life if he died from it.
>>33818 I feel ripped off that we didn't get to see that. Ordinarily that might be a nasty thing to wish on someone, but he went and got covid anyway so it's not even like wishing him harm - it's just wishing that harm he was going to bring on himself anyway had happened in the most absurd way possible.
>>33806 > If we're to compare to to the Blitz
You can have a lot of fun with such comparisons; thank you for suggesting this. In my head, thousands of people would go and stand on the beach with pitchforks every weekend in 1940, to show the brave British spirit, and get shot to pieces by Messerschmitts every single time. The Daily Mail would write an article entitled, "WE WELCOME THE GREAT EXCELLENT VIRUS", and complaining about this would get you denounced as a nit-picking fusspot. We would all have big bonfires every night, and our cities would get bombed to shit in a gallant act of defiance. In the end, among the smouldering ruins of the heart of the British Empire, Alan Turing would invent the atom bomb all on his own, it would be named "the Great British Boris Banger", and we'd win the war anyway.
>>33815 >cyberbullying about poo
They still gang-rape women and throw acid on their daughters, though. It'll be a while before I consider India to be a nice place.
