"This [private school students with learning disability diagnoses that give them special treatment in exams] makes no sense considering that pretty much every social malaise, with the exception of anorexia, is much more common among the poor."
It makes perfect sense in the context of your own article. The paragraph immediately above referred to "perverse incentives." Some higher SES parents will do anything to give their children an advantage in the status competition, including buying them a diagnosis of a "disability" that gives them extra time to take the tests that identify "merit" for the purpose of going one rung higher.
The same is true in many private schools, as well as public schools in high-income districts in the United States: a disproportionate number of students are diagnosed with test-preference-related disabilities.
The fact that you didn't think of this implies that you're not the kind of person who would do it. That's good: it's better not to be that kind of person.
Hello Ed and greetings from the US. Kennedy is an intriguing person, to put it politely and I do agree with that some of his views are the views of the cranks. The basis of his appeal is pointing out that Americans are the most overmedicated (and over vaccinated) people on the planet but at the same time the health metrics of the US has also declined. So what's the connection? And he has touched an uneasy nerve among many Americans about the too cozy relationships between big pharma and regulatory bureaucracy. Is it also a coincidence that a staggering percentage of advertisements on national television are now for drugs? Then you have FDA approvals for ingredients in food supplies that may or may not be part of the health crisis. Trump's coalition, now the majority coalition, are people who have grown suspicious of the wisdom and assumed authority of the establishment classes - fair or not. But everyone in the US also grees the healthcare model is broken and "something needs to be done, even if what and how remains to be seen. So he will be interesting to watch.
By the way, I also find it intriguing that Kennedy is pro choice and supporter of abortion rights and for a Republican president to appoint a pro choice person to head the HHS tells you the abortion wars are over in the US.
greetings from freezing England. There clearly is a problem - the Oxy scandal highlighted that - although I'm not sure vaccines are a problem, rather than obesity and drug addiction. One benefit of our health system is that the system encourages doctors to be extremely cautious about giving out addictive medication, while their American equivalents are the opposite.
Kennedy has been the target of many smears from the industries whose products he criticizes and their press acolytes. While one may disagree with some of his views, the term "nutter" is unwarranted. For example, there is in fact considerable doubt about what has been dubbed the HIV virus causing AIDS. Many people who die from AIDS never test positive for the virus; many people who test positive never get AIDS. Eminent molecular biologists like Peter Duesberg share that view. Fortunately the debate became somewhat academic when it was found that certain drug combinations would effectively hold the disease in check even though the mechanism is uncertain. So don't be too quick to pick up on pejorative characterizations based on the US press, including especially the highly partisan Washington Post.
There is now in Scotland a real feeling of difference with urban England at least in terms of demographics. Scotland is much less diverse, older, and sparser population wise. Immigration here also seems a bit higher quality skill-wise, and much lower than England.
I'm currently reading The Children of Men by P.D. James and have to say it seems eerily prescient; a lot of old people, a lot of pets, and relatively affordable housing (outside Edinburgh and Glasgow). Let's hope mass euthanasia of the elderly is not around the corner.
Did you come across that passage I mentioned ages ago, that makes my skin crawl - with the pram? There is so much of that to see with childless couples and their "fur babies" (vomit.)
Haha wow I got quoted in this. I was half kidding about Vance saving the republic, and half serious.
And I'm not kidding at all about him having the potential. If he manages to expand Trump's coalition to for example include more Hispanics, he might be able to put off indefinitely the transformation of all of the USA into what one-party nightmare California is like now (which until very recently I thought was pretty much inevitable). I think he's the guy who could do it.
Fully agree with your idea of funding the BBC through general taxation, removing the TV licence and the absurd concept of ending up in prison for not having one. I'm also happy with the BBC trying to set a much higher quality bar for its competitors to match. But if it is to be funded from taxes paid by everybody when not everybody uses it, I'd suggest giving the BBC an additional national purpose.
The arts and media are still areas in which Britain performs very well, so let one of the roles of the BBC be to train and support the people who work in them. It could act as a huge apprentice training program, with every BBC employee who works there for a few years before moving to the private sector being treated as a success. The BBC tax grant could then be seen as a training subsidy for the rest of the British arts and media industry.
And it would also help justify why the BBC maintains five orchestras and other groups like the BBC Singers.
I would also like the BBC to be involved in encouraging and funding youth orchestras around the country, and the study of classical music. They could appear on television, at the Albert Hall, giving them prestige.
If you believe Warp Speed was a triumph, then I am wondering who the "nutter" really is. The vaccines escaped rigorous testing due to political pressure and have now caused untold injuries, illness and deaths around the globe. By the same token the destructive and ineffective lunacy of lockdowns in the US must also be called a Trump "triumph" I suppose?
While some few people may have had adverse reactions to vaccines (that's going to be true of any medication-- my father was allergic to penicillin which was only discovered when he received a dose of it the first time) but overall it is a barefaced lie that the vaccines are dangerous to the general public.
I do however question the efficacy of the vaccines. I had three doses of the shot, suffering nothing worse than a single day of fatigue and hangover-like symptoms. Yet I've also had Covid three times, albeit the first time was before the vaccine.
I am prepared to believe that the vaccines were not tested as thoroughly as they should have been. Everyone was in rush to do something, anything about the Pandemic. I am not prepared to believe that they had some enormous death toll. Let alone that there was malice aforethought involved.
Yeah, as cynical as I am about Establishment Consensus these days, I will never understand the argument that vaccines make us worse. The rates of severe Covid were much higher in states with lower vaccination rates than in places like Vermont which was extremely vaccinated.
It interests me whether Trump (who is still boasting about Warp Speed) will let RFK blow the gaffe on the massive damage wrought by the "vaccines". But I'm surprised, Ed, as you are generally ahead of the narrative, that you aren't at least curious about why all those young fit sportsmen died on the pitch in 2021. Or what exactly was so wrong with the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine that it was (eventually) withdrawn, who knew what when about it (remember Macron was warning against it in 2021), and how many people were killed by it worldwide in the interval between 2021 and its eventual withdrawal. (This is not to say that Pfizer and Moderna were safe). Or whether Bill Gates' strategy of handing cash to just about every media outlet and higher education institution extant was a good investment (RFK says he was $20 billion richer in 2021 than 2020 while Labour only cite the few billions spaffed on PPE as a steal).
with regard to medical/scientific issues I don't have a handle on, I tend to outsource my opinion, and the experts I trust say that the Covid vaccines overall saved huge numbers of lives. I trust Saloni Dattani as my go-to person https://ourworldindata.org/key-charts-understand-covid-pandemic
On a quick browse, this guy does not appear to allow for those murdered by treatments such as Remdesivir in the USA. The close alignment of number of deaths with expected number of deaths in 2022 and 2023 looks iffy too.
Can you document the Remdesivir deaths-- and good grief "murdered"? That implies malice aforethought! Also, Remdesivir is an anti-viral, not a vaccine.
What exactly looks "iffy" in those stats our host cites?
A good question to ask yourself: how many people do you know who have died since 2020 and were not of an age when death is unexpected, and who did not die from causes such as addictions, violence or accident? In my case that total comes to one person, who passed away a couple months ago at the age of 48, and the issue there is that I do not know his cause of death (he was a friend years ago, but we did not keep in touch other than seeing each other's Facebook posts). I also do not know if he ever received a Covid vaccine or any Covid medication, or even if he had had the malady.
“ “Once the public were encouraged to vaccinate after the outbreak declaration the hospital was not properly prepared for the safety measures that are required for such a virulent disease. As such most of the cases would have been contracted from the clinics and hospital where the people went to get their initial vaccination once the outbreak was declared.”
Hagan, from the WHO, says that this is something the organisation sees “constantly”.
“This is a feature of almost every measles outbreak I’ve ever been a part of, including in highly-developed countries. Measles is so incredibly infectious, whenever people are gathering, if there is a measles case, it will rapidly find people who are not immune and it’s very difficult, even in the most prepared setting, to prevent.”
Hagan says it is unlikely that people who attended clinics to be vaccinated themselves would have been infected, as the vaccine would have protected them, but that anyone who attended a clinic for other reasons, including parents taking their children to receive the vaccine, were at risk.”
Despite going to Bluesky I couldn't find your thread on Rhodesia.
It's so great when research aligns with my feelings. I hate reading articles by people I disagree with but always feel I should, just as I feel I should eat spinach. I mean, who wants to be narrow-minded? Now it appears it's perhaps better for my blood pressure to largely avoid too much exposure to stupid views AKA views I disagree with. Great! No more more Guardian articles for me! Surely this underlines the problem of trying to think things through rather than trusting your feelings. Unless you're good at thinking you will almost certainly miss out something important, a point well made in Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon'.
'Civilisation depends on our discontent.'
I didn't understand this. Surely those Maoris are discontented but they are hardly representative of why I'd call 'civilisation'.
As long as archbishops and CoE ministers saw the real world as I did, this atheist didn't mind having them in positions of power. Now I do. I don't want the Justin Welbys of the world influencing ANYTHING.
Lovely dog photos in Armenia and the bluest sky I've ever seen. Why did you decide to go and who showed you around? A subscriber?
I see. Truth be told, BlueSky was just a word to me, one like Chat GPT that I'd read but didn't know what it meant. That is, until I just went looking. So it's Twitter for liberals escaping Twitter + conservative writers looking to enlarge their audience among the enemy.
Yes, it seems that some people believe that the more outraged and angry they show themselves to be, the more correct their viewpoint. There surely must be a correlation between this reasoning and low IQ. I was actually amazed by the statistic that 20% of New Zealanders identify as Maori. Are most of them Maoris in the same way that Elizabeth Warren was a Cherokee? I recently watched Michael Portillo on a train journey in Australia being informed about Aborigine culture by a man who identified as Aborigine but looked as European as I do.
"This [private school students with learning disability diagnoses that give them special treatment in exams] makes no sense considering that pretty much every social malaise, with the exception of anorexia, is much more common among the poor."
It makes perfect sense in the context of your own article. The paragraph immediately above referred to "perverse incentives." Some higher SES parents will do anything to give their children an advantage in the status competition, including buying them a diagnosis of a "disability" that gives them extra time to take the tests that identify "merit" for the purpose of going one rung higher.
The same is true in many private schools, as well as public schools in high-income districts in the United States: a disproportionate number of students are diagnosed with test-preference-related disabilities.
true!
The fact that you didn't think of this implies that you're not the kind of person who would do it. That's good: it's better not to be that kind of person.
Hello Ed and greetings from the US. Kennedy is an intriguing person, to put it politely and I do agree with that some of his views are the views of the cranks. The basis of his appeal is pointing out that Americans are the most overmedicated (and over vaccinated) people on the planet but at the same time the health metrics of the US has also declined. So what's the connection? And he has touched an uneasy nerve among many Americans about the too cozy relationships between big pharma and regulatory bureaucracy. Is it also a coincidence that a staggering percentage of advertisements on national television are now for drugs? Then you have FDA approvals for ingredients in food supplies that may or may not be part of the health crisis. Trump's coalition, now the majority coalition, are people who have grown suspicious of the wisdom and assumed authority of the establishment classes - fair or not. But everyone in the US also grees the healthcare model is broken and "something needs to be done, even if what and how remains to be seen. So he will be interesting to watch.
By the way, I also find it intriguing that Kennedy is pro choice and supporter of abortion rights and for a Republican president to appoint a pro choice person to head the HHS tells you the abortion wars are over in the US.
greetings from freezing England. There clearly is a problem - the Oxy scandal highlighted that - although I'm not sure vaccines are a problem, rather than obesity and drug addiction. One benefit of our health system is that the system encourages doctors to be extremely cautious about giving out addictive medication, while their American equivalents are the opposite.
Kennedy has been the target of many smears from the industries whose products he criticizes and their press acolytes. While one may disagree with some of his views, the term "nutter" is unwarranted. For example, there is in fact considerable doubt about what has been dubbed the HIV virus causing AIDS. Many people who die from AIDS never test positive for the virus; many people who test positive never get AIDS. Eminent molecular biologists like Peter Duesberg share that view. Fortunately the debate became somewhat academic when it was found that certain drug combinations would effectively hold the disease in check even though the mechanism is uncertain. So don't be too quick to pick up on pejorative characterizations based on the US press, including especially the highly partisan Washington Post.
There is now in Scotland a real feeling of difference with urban England at least in terms of demographics. Scotland is much less diverse, older, and sparser population wise. Immigration here also seems a bit higher quality skill-wise, and much lower than England.
I'm currently reading The Children of Men by P.D. James and have to say it seems eerily prescient; a lot of old people, a lot of pets, and relatively affordable housing (outside Edinburgh and Glasgow). Let's hope mass euthanasia of the elderly is not around the corner.
I read it this year, after reading Louise Perry's account of it - very is quite eery.
Did you come across that passage I mentioned ages ago, that makes my skin crawl - with the pram? There is so much of that to see with childless couples and their "fur babies" (vomit.)
I've seen that close to where I live. Honestly unbelievable and makes the book even more prophetic.
Haha wow I got quoted in this. I was half kidding about Vance saving the republic, and half serious.
And I'm not kidding at all about him having the potential. If he manages to expand Trump's coalition to for example include more Hispanics, he might be able to put off indefinitely the transformation of all of the USA into what one-party nightmare California is like now (which until very recently I thought was pretty much inevitable). I think he's the guy who could do it.
Fully agree with your idea of funding the BBC through general taxation, removing the TV licence and the absurd concept of ending up in prison for not having one. I'm also happy with the BBC trying to set a much higher quality bar for its competitors to match. But if it is to be funded from taxes paid by everybody when not everybody uses it, I'd suggest giving the BBC an additional national purpose.
The arts and media are still areas in which Britain performs very well, so let one of the roles of the BBC be to train and support the people who work in them. It could act as a huge apprentice training program, with every BBC employee who works there for a few years before moving to the private sector being treated as a success. The BBC tax grant could then be seen as a training subsidy for the rest of the British arts and media industry.
And it would also help justify why the BBC maintains five orchestras and other groups like the BBC Singers.
I would also like the BBC to be involved in encouraging and funding youth orchestras around the country, and the study of classical music. They could appear on television, at the Albert Hall, giving them prestige.
If you believe Warp Speed was a triumph, then I am wondering who the "nutter" really is. The vaccines escaped rigorous testing due to political pressure and have now caused untold injuries, illness and deaths around the globe. By the same token the destructive and ineffective lunacy of lockdowns in the US must also be called a Trump "triumph" I suppose?
While some few people may have had adverse reactions to vaccines (that's going to be true of any medication-- my father was allergic to penicillin which was only discovered when he received a dose of it the first time) but overall it is a barefaced lie that the vaccines are dangerous to the general public.
I do however question the efficacy of the vaccines. I had three doses of the shot, suffering nothing worse than a single day of fatigue and hangover-like symptoms. Yet I've also had Covid three times, albeit the first time was before the vaccine.
The mRNA vaccines had an extraordinarily high rate of reported adverse events under the VAERS reporting system.
I am prepared to believe that the vaccines were not tested as thoroughly as they should have been. Everyone was in rush to do something, anything about the Pandemic. I am not prepared to believe that they had some enormous death toll. Let alone that there was malice aforethought involved.
Yeah, as cynical as I am about Establishment Consensus these days, I will never understand the argument that vaccines make us worse. The rates of severe Covid were much higher in states with lower vaccination rates than in places like Vermont which was extremely vaccinated.
Je suis le bonhomme allumette.
It interests me whether Trump (who is still boasting about Warp Speed) will let RFK blow the gaffe on the massive damage wrought by the "vaccines". But I'm surprised, Ed, as you are generally ahead of the narrative, that you aren't at least curious about why all those young fit sportsmen died on the pitch in 2021. Or what exactly was so wrong with the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine that it was (eventually) withdrawn, who knew what when about it (remember Macron was warning against it in 2021), and how many people were killed by it worldwide in the interval between 2021 and its eventual withdrawal. (This is not to say that Pfizer and Moderna were safe). Or whether Bill Gates' strategy of handing cash to just about every media outlet and higher education institution extant was a good investment (RFK says he was $20 billion richer in 2021 than 2020 while Labour only cite the few billions spaffed on PPE as a steal).
with regard to medical/scientific issues I don't have a handle on, I tend to outsource my opinion, and the experts I trust say that the Covid vaccines overall saved huge numbers of lives. I trust Saloni Dattani as my go-to person https://ourworldindata.org/key-charts-understand-covid-pandemic
On a quick browse, this guy does not appear to allow for those murdered by treatments such as Remdesivir in the USA. The close alignment of number of deaths with expected number of deaths in 2022 and 2023 looks iffy too.
Can you document the Remdesivir deaths-- and good grief "murdered"? That implies malice aforethought! Also, Remdesivir is an anti-viral, not a vaccine.
What exactly looks "iffy" in those stats our host cites?
A good question to ask yourself: how many people do you know who have died since 2020 and were not of an age when death is unexpected, and who did not die from causes such as addictions, violence or accident? In my case that total comes to one person, who passed away a couple months ago at the age of 48, and the issue there is that I do not know his cause of death (he was a friend years ago, but we did not keep in touch other than seeing each other's Facebook posts). I also do not know if he ever received a Covid vaccine or any Covid medication, or even if he had had the malady.
There’s an interesting point about Samoa in this article - there were others I read at the time https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/18/these-babies-should-not-have-died-how-the-measles-outbreak-took-hold-in-samoa
“ “Once the public were encouraged to vaccinate after the outbreak declaration the hospital was not properly prepared for the safety measures that are required for such a virulent disease. As such most of the cases would have been contracted from the clinics and hospital where the people went to get their initial vaccination once the outbreak was declared.”
Hagan, from the WHO, says that this is something the organisation sees “constantly”.
“This is a feature of almost every measles outbreak I’ve ever been a part of, including in highly-developed countries. Measles is so incredibly infectious, whenever people are gathering, if there is a measles case, it will rapidly find people who are not immune and it’s very difficult, even in the most prepared setting, to prevent.”
Hagan says it is unlikely that people who attended clinics to be vaccinated themselves would have been infected, as the vaccine would have protected them, but that anyone who attended a clinic for other reasons, including parents taking their children to receive the vaccine, were at risk.”
I am so ready for The West Terror. So effin' ready....
Despite going to Bluesky I couldn't find your thread on Rhodesia.
It's so great when research aligns with my feelings. I hate reading articles by people I disagree with but always feel I should, just as I feel I should eat spinach. I mean, who wants to be narrow-minded? Now it appears it's perhaps better for my blood pressure to largely avoid too much exposure to stupid views AKA views I disagree with. Great! No more more Guardian articles for me! Surely this underlines the problem of trying to think things through rather than trusting your feelings. Unless you're good at thinking you will almost certainly miss out something important, a point well made in Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon'.
'Civilisation depends on our discontent.'
I didn't understand this. Surely those Maoris are discontented but they are hardly representative of why I'd call 'civilisation'.
As long as archbishops and CoE ministers saw the real world as I did, this atheist didn't mind having them in positions of power. Now I do. I don't want the Justin Welbys of the world influencing ANYTHING.
Lovely dog photos in Armenia and the bluest sky I've ever seen. Why did you decide to go and who showed you around? A subscriber?
Haha, I was joking - obviously I'm not going to get ratioed by posting about Rhodesia.
The Armenia thing was a press trip, first one in years!
Yeah I don't think it was civilised behaviour, I meant in Freud's sense that civilisation only works if we repress our urges to rage and scream.
I see. Truth be told, BlueSky was just a word to me, one like Chat GPT that I'd read but didn't know what it meant. That is, until I just went looking. So it's Twitter for liberals escaping Twitter + conservative writers looking to enlarge their audience among the enemy.
Yes, it seems that some people believe that the more outraged and angry they show themselves to be, the more correct their viewpoint. There surely must be a correlation between this reasoning and low IQ. I was actually amazed by the statistic that 20% of New Zealanders identify as Maori. Are most of them Maoris in the same way that Elizabeth Warren was a Cherokee? I recently watched Michael Portillo on a train journey in Australia being informed about Aborigine culture by a man who identified as Aborigine but looked as European as I do.
You had me fooled as well. I was desperately looking for it to see you have fun with the more fanatical of BlueSky's denizens.