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Well we expected the use of Skinnerian “variable reward schemes”.
“Will we lift the lockdown or won’t we?
Yes we will. No we won’t.
Perhaps we’ll half-lift it.
Or we may lift it in some areas and not others”.Anyone who has studied behavioural conditioning will know exactly what that’s about.
The specifics:
In a part of the North of England that Dominic Cummings didn’t manage to win either for Brexit or the Tories
“Indians and vaccine refusers may cause YOU – yes, YOU – to be locked down!
The government were bad for not doing EVEN MORE of what they did.
They should have closed the border to stop foreigners from getting in.
Now look what’s happened – you won’t be able to drink in pubs and it’s foreigners’ fault!”Important note:
Both Manchester and Liverpool were pro-REMAIN in the 2016 referendum, and in general elections they vote LABOUR.Generally
“The “INDIAN” variant may soon become DOMINANT. (No prizes for guessing what the message is there.)
Vaccine refusers are antisocial loonies who all believe in ‘conspiracy theories’.“Crucial data for understanding how the government’s pandemic messaging is currently varying by English region, and especially important for getting a handle on how they are dealing with the Manchester area:
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Results_of_the_2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum#Results_from_the_30_largest_cities_in_the_United_Kingdom”.
You wouldn’t guess this after speaking to a random selection of people from London’s middle class, but not every working class person in the North of England is a xenophobic moron who voted for Brexit in 2014 and for
Dominic Cummingsthe Tories in 2019. The facts are as follows:* Manchester and Liverpool were both pro-Remain in 2014 and they both voted Labour in 2019;
* all four capital cities (London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast) voted Remain (Edinburgh 74-26, the other three all 60-40);
* of the 10 cities where more than 200,000 people voted, only three voted Leave (Birmingham, Sheffield, Bradford); the other seven (London, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester) voted Remain;
* of the 19 cities where more than 125,000 people voted, only seven voted Leave (the above three, plus Wakefield, Coventry, Sunderland, and Plymouth); the other 12 voted Remain (the above seven, plus Cardiff, Belfast, Brighton, Leicester, Newcastle);
* in Yorkshire: Sheffield, Bradford, Wakefield and Hull all voted Leave; York and Leeds voted Remain;
Conclusion: don’t buy in to the idea that this is North versus South in England, whether in connection with the pandemic or in connection with related political stuff such as Brexit and Labour/Tory.
– ‘Well we expected the use of Skinnerian “variable reward schemes” […]
Anyone who has studied behavioural conditioning will know exactly what that’s about.’So “behind the scenes”, someone is planning all this; “they” have a secret team of malign psychologists working out exactly what to do next, and lo and behold, it’s exactly what you expected. This really is the essence of conspiracy theory. Honestly N_, the UK government’s response to covid-19 looks about as planned as a cow pat.
“What’s the point of GPs British culture is based on castes treating members of castes beneath them as if they were subhumans …………”
Seriously N_, if you’d quit this kind of nonsense people might take you more seriously. GP’s are the hub around which everything else operates. Your GP is the one medic who knows everything that has happened to you medically and can pull it all together. All other medics, including private, communicate with your GP. The majority of GP consultations do not end with a referral elsewhere and are dealt with by the GP practice. They are key to the system.
– “Your GP is the one medic who knows everything that has happened to you medically and can pull it all together.”
…and they’ve got between six and ten minutes to do it.
I really feel quite sorry for my GP. A visit to the doctor was quite a relaxed event when I was a lad. These days the GPs seem to be on an endless production line just churning through patients as fast as they can and constantly running late. Much of the media has promoted a rumour that they’re all on six figure salaries, but the cars at the front of the practice don’t bear that out – my vet was obviously earning far more than my GP.
Dominic Cummings has been firing out tweets like a nutter yesterday and today (more than 20 tweets) in the run-up to his expected appearance next Wednesday at the parliamentary inquiry into the government’s pandemic response. In one tweet he wrote that he holds “the only copy of a crucial historical document from covid decision-making” and he created a poll asking whether he should publish it, give it to the committee, or auction it for charity.
Imagine if a proper civil servant did that…or indeed a person who just happened to be linked to some issue and was asked to give evidence to a parliamentary committee. In either case they would be given at least a VERY stiff talking to, whether by the Attorney General or the Commons Speaker.
How does he know he has the only copy???
One explanation might be that everyone who held a copy had to give it back or destroy it… That would surely put him in breach of the Official Secrets Act and up for a jail sentence.
Watch this space.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pre-publicity before for an appearance before a parliamentary committee.
Clearly Cummings will be talking about the Chinese government’s success (and also the success of the government of Taiwan) in responding to SARS-CoV2 – a matter that has hardly been mentioned in the British media at any time, but which basically anybody who wants to talk sense about government pandemic policy MUST address.
Of course if he is so clever he will make predictions. He will say that because of the British government’s decision D there is probability P1 that X will happen, whereas if the government had made a different decision there would only have been probability P2. X could be something like “a third lockdown” or “100000 deaths”. P1 and P2 could be something like 0.99 and 0.01. This isn’t a video game.
I started reading his tweets on the assumption he was reasonably balanced…but when I got to this next one let’s say the assumption started to look very shaky:
“9/ Success seems to have blinded SW1 to important Qs. a/ We did it much better than Brussels, obviously, but Brussels is not a good comparison. How well did we do relative to ‘how well wd General Groves who ran the Manhattan Project have done it?’“
That’s an insane thing to say. He’s losing it. This could be spectacular. I hope he minds how he goes.
This guy who is careful with his words writes
“The best hedge re a variant escaping current vaccines is PUBLIC SCRUTINY of Gvt plans. This will hopefully show it’s been taken seriously. If not, better learn now that the Gvt has screwed up again than when ‘variant escapes’ news breaks“
The word to zero in on here is “ESCAPES”. What’s he talking about? What news might break about a variant “escaping”? What variant? Escaping from where?
Then there’s this:
“15/ Having watched classified elements of covid response, Gvt cd make the vaccine plans 99% public without risks, ‘national security’ almost totally irrelevant to the critical parts of the problem, a few things cd be withheld while publishing all crucial parts of the plan“
What important features of its vaccine plan has the government NOT made public?
He also writes
“I urged inside Gvt to do a review of other contingency plans for more dangerous things than covid, a largely *open* process with e.g @wtgowers helping. Happening?“
Oh dear, oh f*cking dear! “WTGowers” is Old Etonian Tim Gowers, who is not a scientist of any kind but a posh Trinity College mathematician who is almost as in love with himself as Cummings is. At one point Cummings actually wanted Gowers in the CABINET. It’s quite funny really. Tim Gowers thinks he’s a great writer because his grandfather “Sir” Ernest Gowers wrote “The Complete Plain Words”, but the quality of his writing on his blog is ATROCIOUS. I doubt he has ever read any other book on how to write or that he has ever encountered the concept of “metadiscourse” in all of his privileged life.)
Next
“18/ MPs shd force publication of vaccine/variant plan & require mostly open review of other contingency plans before we find out the hard way they’re as ‘world class’ as the covid plan…“
Sure. But MPs won’t force the government to do SHEE-YIT, and Cummings knows this.
And then there’s this
“19/ Such reviews shd seek out those were right & early on covid. Such people are more likely to spot that other plans have errors, gaps, that institutional planning has blind spots, failure to look at crucial operational details etc.“
That’s actually not true. They may have been right by accident. If you ask 80 people to predict the results of three coin tosses and they all predict at random, 10 will get all three predictions right. Will he be seeking them out?
Anyway…riveting stuff…
Indeed, GPs have a difficult job not least in the aspect of time management. A number of years ago the UK Gov renegotiated the contracts with GPs and Hospital consultants. They gave GPs an option to give up a committment to being “on call” in exchange for decreasing their salaries by £8,000 anually. Naturally, they all mostly did give it up. Hence the shitty out of hours service most UK areas get today. Also, of course, the consolidation of agencies providing the out of hours doctors on a gig economy basis. Privatisation.
I am not criticising the actual docs providing out of hours cover but naturally they won’t know their patients as well.– “Dominic Cummings has been firing out tweets like a nutter yesterday”
Maybe his cocaine was a bit purer than usual. Frank knows.
Ahem. 10 is how many you would expect to predict all three coin tosses right, is what I meant. It’s the most likely number.
I have read some of Cumming’s blog, he is obsessed with how the USA managed the manhattan and space projects. Remember Bojo’s remark “It is absurd that we have even allowed ourselves to be momentarily delayed by these technical issues. If they could use hand-knitted computer code to make a frictionless re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere in 1969, we can solve the problem of frictionless trade at the Northern Irish border.”
I’ll bet he had Dominic harping on and on about the US man on the moon project in hs mind.– “The word to zero in on here is “ESCAPES”. What’s he talking about? What news might break about a variant “escaping”? What variant? Escaping from where?”
That’s what it’s called when a new variant isn’t affected by existing vaccines. It’s called “vaccine escape”.
– “That’s actually not true. They may have been right by accident.”
“Not necessarily. I could be arguing in my spare time.” 😀
“They gave GPs an option to give up a commitment to being ‘on call’ in exchange for decreasing their salaries by £8,000 annually. Naturally, they all mostly did give it up.“
A case of “you can’t even pay us to attend to our patients”?
The £8K probably came back through some other channel – or it was added on so as to be taken off, “Buy One, Get One Free” or “60% discount on all carpets” style.How has the pandemic affected most GPs’ incomes?
Which newspaper prints that kind of information?
If any editor went anywhere near that sort of question, the rulers would have his guts for garters!We know GPs have been doing less work. Something tells me they haven’t been getting less money, though.
Where do you get this nonsense? GPs have had the shitty end of the stick during this pandemic. All those patients that would have gone to a hospital clinic had to consult their GP. You have a very twisted view of the NHS and its staff. They are considering leaving in droves. Being a GP is hard work and especially so during this pandemic.
– “Where do you get this nonsense?”
N_ seems to carry great resentment to all public sector workers. Criticising private sector workers is something I rarely see our resident Marxist do. Odd, that.
What is the supposed justification for the British government’s “red-listing” of Black African countries that have experienced far LOWER reported death rates with Covid-19 than Britain or EU countries and which also currently have low 14-day notification rates, such that there hasn’t been a recent surge in the these countries, as you can check at this site?
The danger of infection would be from Britain to them, not from them to Britain, but we can surely rule out right at the beginning the idea that the measure is to “help” them.
It may possibly not be a racist measure, insofar as if it were you would expect it to be better known, and to be lauded in the media as an act of protection against the “black peril”, whereas in fact few people in Britain even know about it.
It may be simply a case of “If you think we’re going to allow you to come to Britain, you’d better damned well sign this contract with AstraZeneca (or Pfizer)”.
Regime media in the form of BBC Radio 4 are saying today that those who return to Britain from holidays in “amber list” countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Greece and the United States (which are among the main countries visited by the kind of British people who go on a single foreign holiday each year) should expect a “knock on the door”, because the Home Office under Priti Patel is not going to take any nonsense where checking they’re obeying quarantine rules is concerned. The actual phrase “knock on the door” is being used, and the figure is being spread about of “10000 visits every day”.
Who will be carrying out these visits? Will it be
a) G4S men
b) casually recruited bouncer and similar muscle (perhaps supplied by G4S) who haven’t been getting much work recently because the nightclubs have been closed?
c) cops?
d) c***s from the local council?
From the Independent:
“[Health Secretary Matt Hancock] announced in parliament that 2,967 cases of the Indian variant have now been confirmed in the UK – up from about 1,300 at the weekend. Some 25 people are now in hospital in Bolton with Covid-19 symptoms, with the majority of patients unvaccinated. But Mr Hancock said that ‘nearly 90 per cent’ had not had two vaccine jabs, suggesting that some individuals are in hospital despite having had both doses.“
“Suggesting” that “some” are “in hospital”? Hancock’s statement directly implies that more than one in 10 people in hospital in Bolton suffering from symptoms caused by a SARS-CoV2 infection HAVE BEEN VACCINATED TWICE, with a vaccine that was supposed to make them “immune” to SARS-CoV2 infection.
Fat lot of good it did them, then.
It could be that the entire “India play” in British state propaganda – blaming immigration and vaccine refusers for a recent rise in case numbers – is a blanket job in respect of vaccination not working as many had expected.
At least one of the variants first found in India has two mutations likely to make the existing vaccines less effective; that’s why it has been designated a VoC, a variant of concern. Data from India, and tentative data from the UK (because there haven’t been many UK cases of this variant yet) is that vaccinated people can get ill and require hospital, but are much less likely to die.
It was always expected that variants might “escape the vaccines”, which is why vaccines should be only a secondary defence. The primary defence should be suppression of transmission by immediate but brief lockdown, until tracing, testing and quarantine are complete. By locking down locally as soon as any cases are detected, Australia and China keep national cases to two and three digit numbers respectively, and require lockdowns that last just days rather than months.
N_ – “the entire “India play” in British state propaganda – blaming immigration and vaccine refusers for a recent rise in case numbers”
This may be of interest. From IndependentSAGE’s latest weekly discussion:
Link missing.
From IndependentSAGE’s latest weekly discussion
“Dominic Cummings to ‘napalm” Boris Johnson at committee hearing this week, allies say”
“(F)riends say he is intent on destroying the PM.”
“Allies” and “friends” means this is coming from Cummings himself. “Why” is another question. Why is he “talking a good fight”? What’s his followthrough? Why the unpleasant reference to “napalm”?
Popcorn please!
That link was to the Independent. Then in the Mirror we have this:
“Meanwhile, the register of ministerial interests is finally due to be updated – and the PM has promised to give an update on plans for lockdown easing – both of which are subjects Mr Cummings is liable to talk about in his grilling.
It’s likely to be so explosive, in fact, that rumours have spread through Westminster that the PM was planning to hold a reshuffle the same day to distract attention from the session – a notion played down by No10 today.“
Out of interest, how does Dominic get on with Priti? There is no such thing as a “reshuffle” in the abstract. Specific people have to lose or change their jobs.
It will be so funny if Gove (who is much more a Cummings puppet than Johnson) gets forced out of office.
Jeremy Hunt despises Cummings…Note on “herd immunity”
The idea of “herd immunity” is currently very big in the British media.
Last year it was a term that was associated WITH Dominic Cummings (“herd immunity and let the old people die“). But now it is supposedly something wicked that he plans to accuse Boris Johnson of (for a while) aiming for.Talk about things going down the “memory hole”.
Talk about scarewords too.
What do people think the aim of vaccination is supposed to be, if it’s not herd immunity?
Nobody is claiming that the aim is to vaccinate 100% of people, even of people in certain age groups.
Nobody is claiming that 100% of those who ARE vaccinated will become immune, either.
Taking things at face value, the aim of vaccination is precisely herd immunity!So why all the codswallop?
Part of it is because of the caste system, and the way many people in Britain get turned on when they speak of the castes beneath them as forming a “herd” – the “natives”, the “heathens”, the “general public”.
For those who don’t already know, “herd immunity” is achieved when the proportion of individuals in a community who are immune is large enough to stop a virus or bacterium from spreading and therefore to cause it to die out. That’s what the term means. That idea is very easy to understand, whatever your view might be of vaccination, of particular vaccines, or of anything else. But you wouldn’t know that from the way it is used in the British media.
oh my, don’t they teach you biology in school?
Mendel? Pasteur? Gamalei?
About 150 years ago, people found that the re-infection of new individuals with the same pathogen creates a new RESISTANT strain. Is it so hard to understand?
The virus gets STABLE exactly when it MIGRATES freely from one individual to another. If it DIED inside an immune individual, then it wouldn’t be able to give rise to a RESISTANT strain.
So, herd immunity prevents the emergence of resistant strains.Are they even serious?
Is anyone truly arguing about this?
Hello! This is evolution!
It exists regardless of whether you believe in it! These are just facts!Pasteur started using the rabies vaccine back in 1885, and he would have turned over in his grave now seeing this modern obscurantism! What is this, tell me please? Where did it come from? What is that? Is it a lack of education? Is this a narrowly specialized education? Is this a religious worldview? Is it intellectual laziness? What happens to people?
State school in Britain is mainly for keeping children off the streets. People don’t learn shee-yit there.
In British society, this week’s media and political buzzwords reign supreme. Nobody in the media will step out of line, any more than in Kazakhstan they would say that Nazarbayev was a big-time criminal. I doubt you would find a single British media article or statement by a British politician recognising that the whole point of vaccination is supposed to be the achievement of herd immunity. That’s even though the achievement of herd immunity is supposed to be the aim of EVERY campaign of mass vaccination.
There is certainly major-league obscurantism.
The official “scientific” “medical” position is that for example vaccination against smallpox created herd immunity against that virus and that it died out, not that it mutated.
The moment it’s recognised that the point of vaccination is herd immunity, the question arises as to what percentage of vaccine coverage would be required to achieve herd immunity. (Currently the answer is what – something like 60% maybe??) Or, to complicate it only a bit more, what percentages among given demographics. But even to start thinking like that would be to disrespect Big Brother!
“The Five-Month Plan must be achieved!
It must be over-achieved!
There must be door-to-door testing in poor urban areas, especially among non-whites who are more likely to be vaccine refusers! Some of them even work in the Nazionale Health Shurvish too!
Anyone who admits having an aim of less than 100% vaccination is a saboteur!
The border might as well be laid wide open to carriers of the ‘Indian variant’!
We’re not racist – we’re only concerned with public hygiene and allowing the proles to go down the pub and get drunk, and to let them go to Ibiza!
What do you mean, there’s also a ‘British variant’ as well as an ‘Indian variant’? Are you a traitor, a conspiracy theorist, or both?“Nobody in the British media even calls the current coronavirus “SARS”.
