1,587 thoughts on “General Discussion – 2

  1. Fred, your link just confirms that it was a political decision, anticipating very high infection rates, which is exactly what I said. Though I was thinking of Tory Westminster, I’m not surprised that SNP Holyrood followed suit. The Tory is acting all outraged at the SNP as if it wasn’t also the Conservative government’s policy at Westminster! Did Holyrood enforce stay-at-home or border quarantine any earlier than Westminster?

  2. You are the one who has been defending the Tory government at Westminster not me, I’m criticising them, you’re making excuses for them.

    So you agree that the reason almost half the deaths from covid in Scotland were in care homes is because the old were denied care in hospital to make room for young people.

    So how many more civil liberties do you thing people will be prepared to forego if the government can keep them scared?

  3. Fred, that’s a lie; I haven’t defended any government. Quote and link my support and my “making excuses for them”, or retract your lies. No I don’t agree with your second paragraph. Stop putting words in my mouth. I have already stated my position.

    And I asked you if the SNP Scottish government had acted any sooner than the Tory Westminster government. Please answer. I think their policies were very similar back in March, and I am critical of these policies. Stop lying about what I wrote.

  4. “So how many more civil liberties do you thing people will be prepared to forego if the government can keep them scared?”

    I’ll be off into London on Monday for the latest Extinction Rebellion actions. I’ll be taking masks and hand sanitiser, of course. I expect you’ll just keep whinging both ways from your remote sanctuary of low population density, and damning my actions for being the exact opposite of what you accuse me of. Ho hum.

  5. Fred: it’s easier to accept deliberate acts than to attribute the nursing home deaths to incompetence and panic, but I think its as simple as that. Did you know of someone who succumbed? If so I understand your anger.

  6. You defended the government making it law that you have to wear a mask didn’t you?

    More than 50,000 people die each year from various respiratory diseases, a thousand a week, another 50,000 for heart and vascular disease and nobody panics. There were four deaths attributed to coved in Britain yesterday, average is 16 a day over the last 28 days. But they don’t have someone on the radio several times a day reminding us, they don’t have the media harping on about them all the time.

    It doesn’t bother me if you want to wear a mask, I wear a mask in shops and I’m exempt on health grounds, it isn’t masks that bother me, it’s laws that limit personal freedoms that bother me.

  7. Fred, would you wear a mask if it wasn’t the law?

    No, I didn’t defend the government. It’s YOUR sort of crap that leads to there being a law, so why not shut up?

  8. You like silencing people who get in the way of your agenda don’t you.

    Back in March there were loads of pictures posted here of Wuhan, “this is what’s to come” they said “be scared”

    Nobody is posting pictures of Wunan now.

    https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/china-coronavirus-thousands-without-masks-party-at-wuhan-water-park-in-china-2280793

    There they stop wearing masks when the epidemic is over, here that’s when we start wearing masks.

    Now take your “Repent your sins the end of the world is nigh” signs and toodle off to London and see how many people you can scare into doing what you want them to do.

  9. “There they stop wearing masks when the epidemic is over, here that’s when we start wearing masks.”

    How many cases of domestic transmission have there been in Wuhan? How many in England and Scotland? Wuhan’s epidemic was stopped; the UK’s was merely contained.

    My agenda is that people should be truthful, and yes, silence is better than deceit.

    Your rhetoric carries the deception that the UK epidemic is over, a thing of the past. Latest antibody studies indicate that less than 7% of the population has been exposed to SARS-COV-2, so 93% remain vulnerable, and covid-19 is still circulating among the population. Without precautions, covid-19 would take off very nearly as fast as it did in March.

    I asked you before Fred, what makes you think it’s over? But you didn’t answer then, and I doubt you’ll answer now; after all, comprehensive acknowledgement of the facts would demolish your case.

  10. And if the IPCC reports don’t scare you, you either haven’t read them or you just don’t care about human suffering.

  11. I find this continuing squabble most short-sighted when there are other things going on in the world like the wild fires in California, the hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, and the American presidential conventions.

    Do you guys ever think of anything that doesn’t involve yourself personally?

    The failure of candidates of either party do do anything to stop or reduce seriously these disasters is indeed shocking.

  12. Well said Trowbridge. Selfishness will be the extinction of humanity; we just watched it kill around 60,000 in the UK, but some remain entirely unmoved.

    I hope I can make it to London on Monday, and I hope I can help make a difference.

  13. Proposition: Person A supports the law prohibiting dumping toxic waste in your neighbourhood. Or murder. Or the wearing of seat-belts.

    [*]

    Conclusion: Person A supports the government in everything that they do, and bears responsibility for everything arising from it.

    (I’ll let Fred fill in the ‘[*]’ bit, because he appears supremely good at that sort of logic.)

  14. My complaints still hold.

    When is the US going to stop sending hurricanes to Cuba, in the hope of bringing its communist regime down, as they just get worse by the time they hit America’s Gulf Coast?

    And when is California going to do something sensible about the use of fresh water and electricity which has just destroyed an area as big as Delaware?

  15. Proposition: Person A supports the law prohibiting dumping toxic waste in your neighbourhood. Or murder. Or the wearing of seat-belts.

    [*]

    Conclusion: Person A is completely conditioned by the government and cares not a jot about civil liberties.

    (I’ll let Fred fill in the ‘[*]’ bit, because he appears supremely good at that sort of illogic.)

  16. “I asked you before Fred, what makes you think it’s over? But you didn’t answer then, and I doubt you’ll answer now”

    Take a look at these graphs:

    https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

    When the line is going up it means the epidemic is starting, when it is near the top it means the epidemic is continuing, when it is falling it means the epidemic is declining and when it is level and at the bottom it means the epidemic is over.

    I have posted links to those graphs before but I assumed you would know how to read them.

  17. Did Jacob Blake break up a fight between blacks and whites in all-white Kenosha, Wisconsin before the police arrived, and a native white policeman shot him as many times possible when he got the chance?

    Almost nothing said about the race relations in the city.

  18. Fred is pretending to be even more stupid that we know him to be.

    The line came down BECAUSE OF the measures taken to prevent transmission, not in spite of it. And that still holds.

    The line could have come down because C-19 went away all by itself despite under 10% of the population being exposed, but this is rather unlikely. This is the magical thinking employed by Trump and his stooges – I thought even Fred had more sense than that.

    I wonder if people like him even notice the spikes in infection here and there, and more stringent measures required to prevent them getting worse. Dropping measures has had the observable effect of seeing C-19 come back – see Spain’s resurgence.

    Of course the measures were introduced later than they should have been, but it does not logically follow that no measures ever were or are necessary. That would be a foolish conclusion.

  19. You guys aren’t working now for Kenosha police authorities when it comes to covering up crimes there, are you?

    Still don’t know anything about the background to the Blake shooting, who did it, and what, if anything, he will be charged with and when.

  20. I don’t live in Australia, France, Israel, Japan.

    Are these the same people who were predicting hundreds of thousands, maybe millions dead in Britain last March? Just what does it take for you people to admit you got it wrong?

    An average of 16 deaths per day in a population of 65 million is a 0.000025% mortality rate, that does not count as an epidemic by any stretch of the imagination.

  21. Do you seriously think that’s how mortality rates are cancelled? Is this you being dishonest again, or just plain stupid?

  22. Do hope that foreign countries get involved in this country’s crazy elections where all kinds of nonsense occurs where nothing is done to prevent devastating hurricanes like Katrina, Harvey and Laura, California has increasingly devastating wildfires where nothing new is tried to reduce them, and it is plagued constantly by institutionalized racism violence.The pandemic is just a convent diversion.

    So called democracy just doesn’t work here.

  23. By preventing hurricanes, you mean reducing greenhouse gas emissions which are causing climate change right Trow?

  24. No, while I am not opposed to reducing green house gases, I am talking about using space weapons to keep tropical storms safely out to sea, but more importantly adopting measures to reduce the deadly effects of storm surges.

    Right now we have a 20-foot surge spreading devastation along the Louisiana coast. While it seemed alright with Katrina clearing the coast of poor housing for oil development, nothing else has happened since. The coast is just a weaker barrier to storm surges.

    At least the Dutch adopted strong measures to prevent theirs.

  25. “An average of 16 deaths per day in a population of 65 million…”

    Fred, what date range is that calculated from?

    “I don’t live in Australia, France, Israel, Japan.”

    Are you saying that those graph shapes couldn’t happen where you do live?

  26. C: “Are you saying that those graph shapes couldn’t happen where you do live?

    Maybe he’s saying he doesn’t care about those graph shapes, because he lives in a desolate, isolated area – and doesn’t feel himself at risk. Screw those in populated areas.

  27. Trowbridge, you posted your previous comment on the “Contact Squonk” page.

    The heat ray microwave weapons used against crowds are far too puny to cause meteorological heat waves. Even such a device that could use the entire electrical output of a large power station could only cause less heating than the power station itself – Law of Conservation of Energy.

    All of humanity put together use only about as much energy in a whole year as Earth receives from Sol in just one hour – there are over 8,765 hours in a year.

    This is why greenhouse gases are so dangerous; they increase the energy absorbed from the sun, but that solar energy is enormously greater than anything humanity does, so even a tiny increase dwarfs all human activity.

  28. “Screw those in populated areas”

    Yeah, and climate change is slow compared with human lifetimes. Screw the young, and screw those yet to be.

    XR Principle 1:
    “We have a shared vision of change;
    – Making a world fit for generations to come.

  29. I am talking about laser satellites whose use to cause hurricanes which Danny Stillman suggested and tried in the Caribbean, and SOD Robert Gates for GW and Obama complimented him on, using new scientific discoveries to solve intractable strategic problems.

  30. Fred, yet again you didn’t answer my question; what date range did you use?

    This is still an epidemic; the infection rate is merely being held down by public social restraint including mask use. Nevertheless, the UK infection rate has nearly doubled since its minimum in early July. Do you deny that the infection rate could again rise nearly as fast as it was doing in March?

    That’s two questions now.

  31. Right, Robert Gates was just talking about fantasies, like Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy in which no one got killed.

    You are far worse than Fred.

  32. Travelling Tabby has updated his Scotland Coronavirus Tracker page since I wrote in:

    Fatality Rate 12.4%

    – This is the percentage of people who have died after testing positive for the virus.

    – The real fatality rate will likely be much, much lower, probably under 1%, as not everyone who catches the virus gets tested for it.

    Previously it read “probably under 0.3%”. 1% is still too low; the best figures (New York, Spain) give about 1.4%, and the cruise ship Diamond Princess works out at over 1.8% so far. His reply said he would change it to “under 1.5%”.

  33. Trowbridge, I’ve noticed a pattern. You post an incredulous claim that invokes science and technology as a sort of impenetrable magic, and you keep posting it, until someone (usually me) posts a logical argument as to why it’s almost certainly untrue, whereupon you begin insulting them. This has happened before between us, over your allegations of US submarines causing earthquakes, and terrorists bringing down commercial air flights by firing mini lasers lasers at the fuselage to channel lightning into the aircraft. I suppose the insults are a method of warning people to avoid contradicting you.

    Weird what people will do for kicks. Personally I’d rather get a woman in a skintight latex dress and crack raw eggs down her cleavage 😀

  34. Come on, Clark – stop trying to gaslight Trowbridge. You know full well that earthquakes are caused by incredibly powerful lasers from orbiting satellites. Submarines indeed!

  35. In terms of my RGB politics, dealing with covid-19 falls very much in the Red arena; Social Values. Nearly all arguments against doing anything about covid-19 come from the Blue arena, Individual Values, and the arguments deployed are individualistic ones too,

    eg. we wear masks to protect each other from the virus particles we might exhale, whereas an individual’s mask does little to protect that individual from the virus particles they might inhale.

  36. Glenn, I’d never gaslight my favourite teddy bear! Only the glutinous trickling of raw eggs has the power to really make the Earth move and I’m not yolking; all this talk of submarines and satellites is just albumen, disinformation for the Gnomes of Lichtenstein.

  37. “Fred, New Zealand managed to reduce domestic transmission to zero for over three months. But on 11 August four cases were found, and by 18 August 65 had been discovered through contact tracing. It seems that New Zealand got it from England:”

    So 65 cases in a population of 5 million is an epidemic now is it?

  38. Glenn, I think you hit the nail on the head with Clark, talking about his trying to gas light me. I am me, not his favorite teddy bear, and never suffered the consequences of being gaslighted by some one or some group.

    And he just dismisses the powers of submariners and satellites fitted with lasers and radars as disinformation, ignoring the Tohoku, Auckland, Sichuan, Bam and Iceland quakes, and that Asian Airline Flight 214 and others.

    The guy is mental case.

  39. Fred, you wrote “When the line is […] level and at the bottom it means the epidemic is over”. Well in New Zealand the line had been level at zero for three months, but it wasn’t over. Arguing over the definition of a word is pointless.

  40. Trowbridge, I always think your Identicon looks like a grumbly old walrus looking straight at me, with its eyes, snout and whiskers. Or maybe a badger. I never realised they had badgers in Lichtenstein, but you can never be too careful. Stay safe!

  41. There you are, Clark. Trowbridge wasn’t fooled by you, no more than he was fooled by Fred trying to tell him that Scottish lowlands were arid, rarely getting any rainfall.

    You’ve got to get up much earlier than this to fool Trowbridge, how often to you have to be told!

  42. “Fred, you wrote “When the line is […] level and at the bottom it means the epidemic is over”. Well in New Zealand the line had been level at zero for three months, but it wasn’t over. Arguing over the definition of a word is pointless.”

    No. New Zealand wasn’t having an epidemic for three months then they continued to not have an epidemic because 65 cases in a population if 5 million is not an epidemic.

    More people are dying of influenza than covid in Britain at the moment but nobody is saying there is a flu epidemic.

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