ska invita
back on the other side
Does anyone know when precisely Orban will be in London to meet with Johnson?
PM Boris Johnson - monster thread for a monster twat
- Thread starter ItWillNeverWork
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Raheem
Well-Known Member
Friday.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Haha. Still maybe he was actually infected live on tv for all we know, those early press conferences had close podiums and a live audience of journalists for quite a while at the start, well into the danger zone as far as London infection rates went.
But it would have been pretty hilarious if he had managed to talk people into the tv infection stunt and had then ended up near death or actually dead.
Also earlier today one of Cummings tweets involved journalists who used military terms like grenades.
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
what the fuck is wrong with this gimp?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Is that a NatWest t-shirt he's wearing?
Boris Sprinkler
Dont be scared
of course it is. These people don't buy their own clothes. It's all merch from their chums.
andysays
Love and solidarity
Nasty racist cunt (not you, Johnson, in case there's any confusion)
It looks like an England cricket top. Nat West were (are?) main sponsers.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I note that the actual Cummings comment today about that was even better, that Johnson wanted Whitty to inject him with the virus on live tv.
I dont think Whitty would have been up for that. He'd have ended up with Hancock doing it.
Steel Icarus
ersatz maven
A lot of the detail rings true - not least because it's confirmed by a load of behind the scenes reporting we've seen so far. Cummings is using it to go after his usual targets though - the civil service, whitehall inflexibility etc etc. TBH I suppose many of us might actually agree with their targeting, if not Cummings' solutions...
This has been my view for a while. I find myself agreeing with a lot of his criticisms but when it came to his ideas they were a total mess and he can fuck right off.
elbows
Well-Known Member
All the key detail I've heard so far is consistent with what we could deduce at the time or shortly later, or that emerged more gradually from other sources in the year+ that followed. Also consistent with my sense of failings and priorities with these sorts of things and the establishment, orthodox thinking, or as Cummings has been describing it today, groupthink within the relevant expert bodies.
What I dont have a means to verify is the role of individuals, eg I cannot say that the people Cummings is praising deserve all the credit he is giving them. Just one example would be that he already tried to describe his own role in pressing the panic button without properly acknowledging the civil servant who actually sounded the alarm the previous evening, until he was prompted to acknowledge her role by the chair.
I work for a company where people love the company t shirts etc and wear them on their own time. I'm a massive weirdo because I've never ordered one (despite work pressure) and think people who wear them are twats...
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Everybody knows the ship is sinking
Everybody knows the captain lied
Everybody got that sinking feeling
Like your father or your dog just died
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
The problem is he's still breathing
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Yeh I've pencilled in this urban inquiry for december '24
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
elbows
Well-Known Member
Last night I re-read the UK thread from very early March 2020 till the day after the first lockdown was announced.
It wa excellent. There were many great contributors who had a decent view of things in near-realtime. I miss the broader range of people that were involved in discussions here at the time.
People also linked to a number of media articles during the period that leave no doubt as to the original herd immunity plan, and the subsequent u-turn. Reporting was not 100% perfect at the time but it was pretty close to the mark. Cummings claims are consistent with the timeline of what was visible publicly during the crucial week starting 9th March 2020, the last ditch attempt at selling plan A on Friday 13th, and at the time we only had to wait a couple of days for confirmation that plan A had died. Obviously I lack the means to test some of his insider claims relating to the role of specific people in fucking things up or making them better.
I havent watched a big chunk of Cummings stuff in relation to later fuckups that caused the second wave yet. That disaster was stretched out over a longer period and although we again had the means to tell roughly what was happening at the time (Johnson fucking up by resisting lockdown/circuit-breakers), our understanding of it was also stretched out over a longer time, with more room to hope they might yet do the right thing. I recall allowing myself to entertain the thought that the government wouldnt listen too closely to what the anti-lockdown 'great Barrington declaration clowns' said, their delusion that herd immunity had already been achieved. I was of course proved tragically wrong on that one. Cummings testimony, from what I read of that bit, did suggest that I would have been right if Johnson had the courtesy to have died from the virus, because nearly everyone else in government at the time did grasp the reality and the fact you cant bluff and bluster the 2nd wave into not happening. I should have made much more of the fact that Whitty and Vallance had to do their second wave warning / circuit breaker press conference on their own at the time, because Johnson wasnt playing ball.
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Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
the master criminal always makes one fatal error and boris johnson's was not deleting all the news reports from 2020
elbows
Well-Known Member
Even Peston was useful briefly during the key period, and the following sort of article is a great example of why Cummings was going nuts on twitter about the media reporting the herd immunity denials by government recently with a straight face.
March 12th 2020, at the heart of the very brief push to sell the herd immunity plan to everyone, only for it to instantly explode in their face and for plan A be gone within a day or two.
British government wants UK to acquire Covid-19 'herd immunity' | ITV News
The Government’s experts – the chief medical officer and the chief scientific advisor – have made two big judgements. | ITV National News
www.itv.com
Also notable from reporting of this period is the way it was extensively claimed that the decisions about this shit were in the hands of the experts. No wonder it didnt take many months before the likes of Whitty and Vallance insisted that it be made very clear in press conferences that they just advise ministers, who make the actual decisions.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Cummings evidence also consistent with my most basic attempt to describe the failings and attribute blame:
Initial first wave disaster: Blame widely shared, failures all through the system, including failures of the orthodox medical & scientific advice and modelling from January through to mid-March. Failures to understand the wave timing and scale all manner of other details. Similar failures across the EU except they tended to realise and u-turn sooner than UK, partly because some of their waves exploded a few weeks earlier than ours.
Second wave disaster: Experts etc had a reasonable grip on things by then. Failure was all Johnsons to own, left himself with absolutely no scientific cover etc. This was reasonably clear at the time too.
Initial first wave disaster: Blame widely shared, failures all through the system, including failures of the orthodox medical & scientific advice and modelling from January through to mid-March. Failures to understand the wave timing and scale all manner of other details. Similar failures across the EU except they tended to realise and u-turn sooner than UK, partly because some of their waves exploded a few weeks earlier than ours.
Second wave disaster: Experts etc had a reasonable grip on things by then. Failure was all Johnsons to own, left himself with absolutely no scientific cover etc. This was reasonably clear at the time too.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Sorry for editing in a bit more to that post after it had already been liked.
EU failures and u-turns make UK failures worse because we could have learnt from their mistakes and locked down with significantly better timing.
Whether we actually paid any attention to European Centre for Disease control documents during the crucial period is something entirely missing from media reports, Cummings evidence etc. Typical, and something I tend to see as an ongoing part of longstanding stupid games in politics and media where even when we were in the EU or still part of their systems during transition period, much policy etc that actually originated with the EU was ascribed to the will of our own leaders at the time.
I cannot use the timing of changing EU advice as proof of anything on its own, because after Italy sleepwalked into a disaster all manner of things were in flux. But given the UK plan started to change by the evening of Friday 13th March, I cannot help but point out that the following bit was added to the EU documents on March 12th 2020!
That quote is from ECDC rapid risk assessment 6th update: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/de...f-novel-coronavirus-disease-2019-COVID-19.pdf
And I'm sure we were still included in the ECDC setup during the transition phase, because their documentation from back then is full of slightly clumsy phrasing they had to use to reflect the transition: "EU/EEA countries and the UK"
EU failures and u-turns make UK failures worse because we could have learnt from their mistakes and locked down with significantly better timing.
Whether we actually paid any attention to European Centre for Disease control documents during the crucial period is something entirely missing from media reports, Cummings evidence etc. Typical, and something I tend to see as an ongoing part of longstanding stupid games in politics and media where even when we were in the EU or still part of their systems during transition period, much policy etc that actually originated with the EU was ascribed to the will of our own leaders at the time.
I cannot use the timing of changing EU advice as proof of anything on its own, because after Italy sleepwalked into a disaster all manner of things were in flux. But given the UK plan started to change by the evening of Friday 13th March, I cannot help but point out that the following bit was added to the EU documents on March 12th 2020!
That quote is from ECDC rapid risk assessment 6th update: https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/de...f-novel-coronavirus-disease-2019-COVID-19.pdf
And I'm sure we were still included in the ECDC setup during the transition phase, because their documentation from back then is full of slightly clumsy phrasing they had to use to reflect the transition: "EU/EEA countries and the UK"
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