An interesting item where a vaccine-sceptical doctor points out some downsides of vaccines to an economist. It's brief, and all very civil.

Both look sceptically at the sort of claim I loathe:

Global immunization efforts have saved at least 154 million lives over the past 50 years

Would dramatically reduce the reading material for academics too.

tomo,
The "wasn't paid off until 2015" part is probably a bit misleading. It sounds very like the original 20 million was funded from British Consols. These were interest-only perpetual bonds, at around 3%. It only became worth buying them out when the interest rates fell substantially below that. Coughing up £20m in 2015 wouldn't have burdened the taxpayer very much (though I'm sure there were a lot of other consols to buy out too).

Of course the main point still stands. The British paid plenty in money and lives centuries ago, but no good deed will go unpunished.

On the Albanian lad with the food fetish: do you think those stick figures recently released by Hamas were just fussy eaters?

Mailman,
I sympathise, but think it's a bit ambitious to hope for a ground invasion. And now that USAID has had its wings clipped, funding insurrection is going to be trickier too. If you're lucky though, he might say few unkind things about Mr Starmer.

I think we are at the stage where America should just invade Chagos and take them over!!

I think something like 2000 sailors lost their lives enforcing the end of Slavery too. Funny how the families of those men are never included in reparation talks.

In regards to the Albanian who cant be deported...this is just taking the absolute f88king p1ss!! Kick the c8nt out with his entitled child and be done with him and his family! We shouldn't be a f99king charity case for all the worlds criminals.

If Orange Man Bad can get South American countries to take back their illegal criminal citizens then why in f99ks name cant we send these economic migrants back to where they are coming from, France!!

At this point I just wish America would f99king invade us and take the country over!

Mailman, tomo,
apologies for misattributing Mailman's Letby item last week to tomo. Bit of a Fawlty Towers thing.

.,
Good article, and the bit you quoted was the highlight for me too.

tomo,
The UK does seem to be a particularly serious basket case. Could be because you've already had your regime change (Benny Hill to warden Hodges) and are stuck with this mob for another four years. Canada and Australia have elections coming up and, (as an item of trivia that may have slipped by unnoticed) the USA appears to be waking up from a bad dream.

Here's an article that you might say puts the most positive spin on the COVID debacle. I.e. that the massive overreach has prepared the way for some Trumpian upheaval.

First time I've seen that point made. A different point I've seen a few times elsewhere is that four years in the wilderness allowed Trump's plans to gestate.

So one calamity prepared the people. Another calamity prepared the man. Two wrongs make a right?

Enjoyed the recent Econtalk with Daisy Christodoulou. It started with the effects of introducing video assistance for the referee in football games. The idea was to improve the accuracy of rulings, but the result was not so positive. The most graphic was stifling the spontaneous roar of the crowd when a goal is scored — the pause while the video is reviewed means no great roar, even if the goal is awarded.

The bit I liked best was how the hand-ball rule grew to 11x as many words, trying to turn the subjective definition into something that could be applied to a frame-by-frame video viewing. Reminded me of that Star Trek episode where they were in the holodeck, reproducing the table from Riker's dream. How many words would it *really* take to describe something in full detail?

There were quite a few other fun things in the talk (not all football-related). I'll be listening to it a second time.

“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains,”

Can we borrow Russel Vought and set him to work on Whitehall ?

A Telegraph tale from the USA.

tomo,
I think it has become worse over time. At least there's an arguable proposition that it was just police laziness in the Evans/Christie case. But now, from the Letby Wikipedia entry:

During their investigation, Cheshire Police contacted Professor Jane Hutton, an expert in medical statistics, and signed a consultancy agreement with her. However, the Crown Prosecution Service instructed the police to drop this line of inquiry and Hutton's planned analysis never took place.