RandoEFC

One of the official measurements is people who have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test so yes if you had Covid, recovered in 2 weeks then got killed in a car crash you'd be counted in that. Anti-science brigade use this hypothetical incredibly unlikely scenario and extrapolate it to support their "did they die OF Covid or WITH Covid" argument because they think it's viable to claim that it's a coincidence that 70,000 more people died last year than in an average year of freak accidents or other illnesses and they also just happened to test positive for the virus weeks before. Another one of the measurements is Covid mentioned on the death certificate, obviously if you died in a car crash you wouldn't count in this measurement.

Bailey gets the baseline Tory vote doesn't he. There was talk a few months back they'd move him aside for another candidate but they know they can't get Khan out anyway so they're probably just letting Bailey run his course and taking the bonus of being able to say they had a BAME candidate for Mayor of London for the next time they need to prove how diverse the modern Conservative party is.

Yeah they don't actually think it's communism though. That's just their go to word, although Marxism has gained plenty of traction recently too, to try and scare people into thinking that left leaning parties want to take away all your rights and turn the country into Russia or China when actually they just want to increase tax on multi-billionaires by 0.5% to buy vegetables and central heating for poor families.

Socialism to me just means that everyone should be entitled to a good education, good healthcare, somewhere safe to live and enough food to feed their kids. It doesn't take an awful lot of effort to distinguish between that and out and out communism. For countries like the US and the UK who love to obsess over GDP and how good their economy is, and are among the top few richest countries in the world, these shouldn't be controversial demands, but unfortunately some rich people are very good at grooming the peasants to think that they'll end up coughing up loads of extra taxes for something they won't benefit from when in actual fact the polar opposite is true. The Democrats had to go for Biden as their candidate instead of Sanders partly because Sanders wanted to do too many things that would benefit 99% of the population. That's a very simplistic summary but it's more or less where politics and discourse is in the US.

I'm not that surprised by France actually. It's more a case of expecting the US to be higher up given the madness of the last few years and the growing QAnon phenomenon.

Interesting polling. I don't think many people would have had the UK as one of the most pro-vaccine countries, but that goes to show how imbalanced we are in giving an almost equal platform to anti-science nutjobs in this country to actual scientists. Sometimes you can believe that represents the population when it just doesn't. I also think our number is boosted by the fact that we're further into our vaccine program without any major horror stories yet. The government deserve some rare credit here I think, along with the science community, the messaging around the vaccine program has been pretty good. I wouldn't have put Germany ahead of the US in a league table of vaccine scepticism.

Quite a story... that's about 2% of the UK population.

Not yours unless you work for whoever does the live footage on Capitol Hill .

Shambolic graphics. Looks like when you flick through the news channels and BBC Parliament are showing an election from 1968 and the best they can do with updated results is project some plain typewriter text over the broadcast.

Possibly off topic but anyone clued up on this?

A 6% drop off from the pre-Covid GDP would set us back to about 2015. The hit to GDP in the first half of 2020 caused by the initial wave of Covid was not far off 20% if that helps put things into perspective. We won't end up knowing what the real impact of Brexit ends up being to be fair because Covid has been a much larger economic shock and the effects will be mixed together over the next few years.

Starmer isn't perfect but England is a very gammony country and you can't force an electorate to vote for what you and I would call long term positive change if they just don't want it. And they don't. Sadly, England just wants to live in the glory days of the Second World War which barely any of them were actually alive for, England wants to cling on to the vague nostalgia of a time they've only heard about from their parents and their history textbooks and England wants to bow and scrape to a ruling class that would spit on them before helping them feed their children. The best chance of long term change is for the Labour party to sneak into power in a form that is actually electable to the Little England of today and slowly show the country that being a bit more kind and looking after each other is actually a good thing. I'm afraid there is a certain section of the left of the party though that would rather have a pop at Starmer for wearing a purple tie and call him Keith (I don't know) than have a pop at Johnson and the Tories. They're not going to go and vote Conservative at the next election but they aren't helping the party function as a machine that can eventually win an election. Should the centrist part of the Labour Party supported Corbyn better in the same way? Almost certainly, although the buck still stops with him on the anti-semitism problems. I don't think he'd ever have been elected anyway though. If the UK was ready to vote for a truly progressive government then Caroline Lucas would be prime minister. The sad reality is that this is a country that voted for Brexit just a few years ago. We're a long, long way away from anything close to a left wing electorate although I do think there's a tiny, tiny chance that the Tories will be hit badly in 15-20 years when our generation and the one below who have had Brexit, Covid and Boris Johnson inflicted upon them become the dominant demographic in the electorate. Hopefully scars like that will ensure that people have long memories but I don't have my hopes too high.

Do you want to know what's really depressing? The fact that almost all people who have contributed to keeping this party in power over the past 10 years know that this is what they're about. They won't admit it even to themselves but deep down, they know. Taking food out of the mouths of impoverished children to bump up the profit margins of one of their donors. There's absolutely no reason why they couldn't provide families with a £30 voucher that's valid to spend at Tesco, Coop, Morrison's, etc. if they're concerned about the parents spending the money on alcohol and flat-screen TVs instead (which itself is another fallacy created by the Murdoch media to turn the little people against each other so that they don't spend time worrying about how corrupt the ruling class really is). In a normal country with a compassionate public and a less toxic discourse, this would be an absolute scandal on its own, even without the context of school closures and a global pandemic. But in England it'll just be "that's a shame", "life's not fair", "well they shouldn't have kids if they can't feed them", "Boris is doing his best" for a couple of days, then we'll be back to talking about how the police are "taking away our fweedom" because one officer fined two women for having a coffee together, or how "big tech" are threatening "fwee speech" by suspending the account of a man who incites armed riots against an elected government. Best case scenario, Marcus Rashford rallies enough of a petition to force the government's hand but is that how low we've been brought? Also, this is why the Corbynite cultists that call themselves Labour activists and have convinced themselves that they're the "real Labour Party" need to get in the bin as well. How can you spend your time and energy crying about the fact that Keir Starmer wore a purple tie yesterday (yes, this happened, look it up) when this lot are still in power? Some of them would genuinely rather another 10 years of Conservative rule to prove that a centrist Labour candidate can't succeed where Corbyn miserably failed, than actually see a Labour government in power. It's easy to get numb to it but sometimes you just have to pause and take stock of what an utterly disgusting, morally reprehensible country we've become. We're talking about children, for fuck's sake. Children.

Standings after Round 4 of Last Man Standing 2020-21 @Viva la FCB and @DeadLinesman maintain the top 2 positions with four points separating them after solid performances in the 4th round. @...Dan becomes the closest challenger in 3rd after a strong run to second place. @CaaC (John) enters the table above seven competitors after taking victory and the highest score of the season so far in his first dabble in this season's competition.

Oh definitely. The government's plan was to not have a plan or even think about a contingency because they just pigheadedly convinced themselves that the pandemic was over in the summer. They're supposed to be ramping up (TM) the distribution of a million devices to households across the country but there's several stories floating about from headteachers not even getting half of what they need so god knows what's happening.

Most schools have made very effective use of the internet. It's not as simple as you make it sound, teaching is a face to face occupation. Even if relaying information should be straightforward with the technology available, everyone has different follow up questions, misconceptions and interpretations of something they're told. At this point the problems start and the gap starts to grow. Affluent households with 1-2 kids who have a laptop or tablet each and big enough bedrooms for a desk and reasonable workspace each should be just fine. But in some households you have 3-4 kids who are supposed to be in different Zoom classes all at once where they're relying on one parent's mobile phone to access the stuff online. 1 in 8 UK households don't even have internet access. The methods and the technologies are there and they work well if you get the uptake from the students and their families. It's easy to take it for granted if you're lucky enough to have a phone, an iPad, a laptop and a PS4 all hooked up to your WiFi but a minority of households are living a totally different life, usually the ones with kids who already come from more difficult backgrounds (on average). There's only so much that educators can do. It's down to the government at this point to provide the infrastructure we need by getting internet access and devices to those households.

This has made me really happy today. I wish the actually decent majority of people in the UK could make themselves heard like this more often, even if outside of education, this alone doesn't cause a ripple. Surest way to get rid of Williamson and Johnson and support your kids' teachers is not to vote Tory ever again and convince your Mum and Dad to use their Daily Mails and Telegraphs for the fireplace. This, however, made me less happy: Simply insane numbers yet people will still think that the debate over closing schools was about unions trying to get one over the Conservative government.

Wasn't the 'English' vaccine the one that was created by Germans and Turkish immigrants among others? Honestly.

Anyone else who was initially just happy to have anyone but Trump been super impressed by the way Biden has conducted himself since election day? I feel like every significant speech he's made has just hit the spot. No playground stuff, minimal mention of Trump at all where possible, and a constant message of putting the country and the democracy above the Presidenct and the powerful. A lot of people are unhappy that he's a centrist and too old and not that charismatic (I disagree on the last point) but so far he looks the best possible tonic to what has come before.

Rudy Giuliani needs to go too as far as I'm concerned. Was at that rally earlier mouthing off about trial by combat or something before they marched up the hill. An utter disgrace.

Trump has tweeted a short video asking the protesters to go home but still spent comfortably over half of it perpetuating the lies about election fraud. So essentially encouraging the meat heads to carry on whilst covering the base of technically having told them to go home. Where are the fucking national guard then? How long does it take?

Now he has deployed the National Guard which I am surprised but relieved by.

Where is the military?