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And the madness of hard Brexit supporters continues..... Keano, we are about to enter the biggest recession ever on WTO terms. We are not going to be any threat to the EU or any other trading block as we scramble to save our economy. Oh and you might want to ask why government are refusing to share the details of any agreed trades deals with Parliament, even after they are signed, while you are at it.

Masks are 80% effective in reducing the range of the germs you cough or sneeze out. It is no big deal to wear one and it serves as a constant reminder of the importance of doing what we all can to reduce the rate of infection. The problem is that people are wearing neoprene when they should be wearing surgical masks, which are lighter and easier to wear. But we have a government that does not know what it is doing and seems to think it can't get the supplies needed for the population. Given how cheap and easy those masks are to make, I am mystified at the lack of preparation. As for immunity, we all develop that over a lifetime. It is not impeded by occasional use of a surgical mask. You don't see surgeons becoming immunocompromised as a result of the job they do. Carry on like this, and we are heading for a serious second wave when seasonal flu hits, and we WILL be back in lockdown for the entire Winter as a result. That is why the scientific advisors, including those on the SAGE committee are no longer standing by government policy. We don't even know if those who recover from covid are immune, or for how long. It will take a good year to know that.

We definitely will be in a terrible position trading on WTO terms with the biggest recession the world has ever seen looming. Covid had been bad enough for UK business so far. Imagine the impact of WTO terms and tariffs! Only a lunatic would persist with a hard Brexit right now.

Personally, I would argue that power and inequality, are equally (if not more) defined by class privilege.

This issue has been overshadowed by the pandemic but it still needs some attention. Today the government announced that border controls and customs would be more relaxed than originally planned (presumably because we do not have the resources to step them up after the end of the year). What this will mean in a no deal landscape is anyone's guess. But it could also be an indicator that the government are going to settle for some kind of deal in order to avoid having to spend the money they would need to on the ports and customs infrastructure with no deal. What hard leavers would make of that I don't know. Suffice to say that all negotiations have been kept secret from Parliament, and there will be a reason for that.

In short, not as safe if the infection rate starts to rise again. Why? Because enclosed shopping centers have internal furniture, like benches, escalators, lifts, stairways. All of those are ample opportunity for people to pick up the virus from others.

Distancing will always be dependent on other factors. If you are in an enclosed space where people are coughing or sneezing, it doesn't really matter how far you stand from others. Viral particles will hang about in the sir you breath. Outside however is a different matter. People have to consider where they are and use common sense. This is also why the challenge to reopen bars, restaurants, clubs, cinemas, theatre, concert venues, stadiums etc is so big, followed by gyms,hairdressers etc. There is no easy answer to that. These are the spaces where viruses are most easily transmitted.

This shouldn't be happening ever. Hopefully lessons will be learned. I suspect a rise in income tax will be coming at some point. It has to. And the government will feel it is better to do it early in a term, over leaving it to before a looming election. Some of the local authority funding that was taken away over the past ten years will also have to be restored. Government also has options around Council Tax rises and VAT too.

Robbie, Pizzagate is nonsense. It led to some gun toting Trump supporter going to a Pizza restaurant convinced there was a child pedophile ring there. THAT is the real cost of these false conspiracies and allegations. And no, the KKK being founded by Democrats is also a distortion of truth, designed to shore up present day Republican support and paint Democrats as the real racists. It was created in Pulaski, Tennessee, by Confederate veterans: Frank McCord, Richard Reed, John Lester, John Kennedy, J. Calvin Jones and James Crowe. These were former Whig Party supporters. But you gave up on truth a long time ago. You have cited so many alt and far right mistruths and conspiracy theories on this thread that you are the perfect example of how dangerous this stuff is. It is your choice to be gullible and not fact check, but don't be surprised when people who do know about science and history call it out.

And let me guess Robbie, you were watching a documentary about Pizzagate? That is what led you to QAnon?

Bill Gates is not a dangerous person. The Bill Gates Foundation has been donating huge amounts of money to pay for vaccination programmes in countries that have no government paid for access to such. Epidemiolgy is a key area in that planning and those behind things like QAnon, seem to forget that Ebola, Mers, Zika and Swine Flu were all recent pandemics, which had to be contained using exactly the same procedures the world is using now to deal with this one. Contact tracing has been a key part of battling pandemics for decades. There are companies, organisations, and community networks that specialise in exactly that. It makes perfect sense for someone, who has expertise in app and os technology, that could be applied to contact tracing, to be developing technology and strategies and pitching for government contracts. What is at play here is Western arrogance. Because none of those outbreaks became global pandemics thankfully, there is an assumption that we are only facing a pandemic because of some conspiracy to create one. Asia and Africa know differently. There is and was never any conspiracy to unleash a global pandemic. In fact, the opposite is true. Bill Gates has been part of a group of organisations dedicated to trying to avoid that very scenario. That some people now try to paint his dedication to healthcare as some kind of globalist conspiracy, is ignorant and offensive.

QAnon is a made up conspiracy theory and anyone with half a measure of intelligence can see that right away. Your ethnicity has nothing to do with anything in your post. So why you feel the need to state it in some bizarre defence of a conspiracy fantasy you are flirting with is baffling. Fundraising for political parties is not illegal. All parties take donations. Political activism similarly will align itself with one party or another. Why? Because lobbying that party through government is the only way to influence change. This is as true for Republicans as it is for Democrats. Are the NRA and KKK a front for the Republicans? By your logic, they must be.

Robbie, just stop it please. There is no conspiracy around Covid. Virologists who are constantly researching viral mutation in all kinds of zoonotic forms have been warning of the increasing risk of a pandemic for a long time. This is nothing new. Nor does it have anything to do with politicians or billionaires. Next you will be arguing that QAnon has merit, when in reality it is a conspiracy theory dreamed up by poorly educated Trump supporting wierdos who think Soros is the bogeyman. As for the claim that Covid was created in a lab....here is the truth, from bona fide peer reviewed and corroborated science. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/09/conspiracies-covid-19-lab-false-pandemic?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR1lrdFeekMQaUSmvdMHqv6jjSsPoc3L_Y9-WT7BYymIoNbGA1h8_v-Uyp4

The answer might be to attach some kind of alarm to the shed or bike. There are lots that are cheap enough to buy and small enough to be unseen by any burglar.

Here is the reality. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-47485240

Almost certainly they did. We now know there is an incubation period of 7-14 days in most people. And when doctors first started noticing something in Wuhan, they were silenced by local authorities. I think the virus could have been establishing itself for 8-10 weeks before Beijing took it seriously. So plenty of times for it to start spreading around the globe. It is highly likely that when Europe and the USA were finding their first confirmed cases, that the virus was already spreading way beyond what governments thought they were dealing with at that time.

Plus I would argue that the range of statues that have gone up over the past 20 years HAVE broken with the moulds (no pun intended) of the past. So the history of statues are in themselves a history of the shift in the range of achievements we value, both past and present. A good example of that was the push back on a statue of Thatcher in Parliament Square.

I would dismiss any idea that any lab deliberately released an engineered virus. But something escaping accidentally is not impossible although bats are also studied everywhere in the world because they harbour so many viruses but never get sick from them. The problem here though is that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of experts analysing this virus around the world and the overwhelming majority of them disagree with Birger S?rensen's conclusions. So who is right? It is hard enough for experts to decide, so the general public have no chance. I also agree that when you look at the people involved in pushing this claim, that there seems to be an effort to lay blame so that reparations can be claimed. My instinct says that politically, this is going to get very nasty over the next few years, whatever the truth may be.

fishbiscuits Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I also kind of like the idea of putting it in a > museum... lying on it's side, complete with > graffiti. With an explanation of both the slave > trade and the BLM movement. Excellent idea!

Nor does your response Clutterqueen.

The toppling of the statue in Bristol, makes sense in the context of the demonstrations. Anger at a statue is not the same as violence towards Police and others (which is never acceptable), so I never feel too much outrage at graffiti on statues. That can always be removed easily. And to be fair, Churchill WAS a racist. Yes he was the right person for the job during WW2, but he was also responsible for the fiasco of Gallipoli, and other controversial decisions. So for some, Churchill is a mixed bag. It does not take away from WW2 to discuss that and I think we have every right to question the narrative around some of those we laud from history. It is about balance and fairness at the end of the day. The whitewashing of history is something black people have always been aware of. There are no lessons to be learned from history in doing that. How can we understand the rage of another group if we never see where that rage stems from? On Bristol, there had been a long standing campaign to remove/ amend this statue, ignored by the local council. So very few are mourning its loss. I agree that the best place for it once retrieved, is in a museum, where the good and bad of historical figures can be considered in context. In its place, I would like to see a memorial to the slaves he exploited. That would be a powerful statement and a poignant tale of protest. One for the history books in fact :)

Lack of representative diversity is an issue in many sectors, often related to class boundaries to be fair. Middle class children tend to have better access to instruments and school orchestras.

Crows are notorious for stealing chicks (and then eating them) so that is possible. At the same time, birds can nest in guttering, under rafters etc. They don't need very much space, so the smallest of alcoves suits them. Having said that, you would know if chicks were nesting as they are noisy things once they get going :) You've done all the right things, so hopefully there will be a happy ending.

I agree tiddles. I don't think government really understand how much that defence of Cummings has undermined any measures they are trying to enforce. To be fair though, things were always going to be more challenging once the good weather came. There is an air of complacency at the moment for sure. Things may look very different by October though, once seasonal flu and other coughs and colds take hold.

lol Malumbu. Looking at the transcript of the radio exchange with the caller Cat, I doubt the presenter will be admonished in the end. Seems to me as though the caller did not have the patience to validly challenge the presenter on his lack of understanding of white privilege. On the other example, without seeing the twitter exchanges that got him fired, it is hard to know what happened there.