Mick Hartley

Zionist puppeteers

Police brutality against blacks in the US? Well of course the Jews are involved:

An American pro-boycott umbrella group has linked the death of a black man in police custody in Minneapolis to Israel, claiming that the IDF trains US officers in ‘racist’ tactics.

Commenting on the death of George Floyd after he was pinned to the ground by a white police officer last week, the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) tweeted to its 51,000 followers on Thursday: “The Israeli military trains US police in racist and repressive policing tactics, which systematically targets black and brown bodies.”

The USCPR, whose "anti-racism principles" including standing "against Zionism as a political system that privileges the rights of Jews over the rights of others", represents hundreds of local advocacy groups across the US. 

Quoting a 2016 Amnesty International article about cooperation between some American law enforcement officials and Israel’s national police, the USCPR tweet appeared to suggest that the deaths of other black people in incidents involving US police were further examples of officers applying racist lessons learnt from the Israelis.

It said: “The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery are examples of racialized, systematized violence.”  [...]

Former Knesset member Einat Wilf wrote in response to the USCPR tweet: “Ah yes, of course. Because there is absolutely nothing in American history to explain police brutality against black men.

"It has to somehow involve Israel. I thought only Palestinians lacked agency, now American cops lack it too — their actions determined by Zionist puppeteers.”

On Hanbury Street

Street art off Brick Lane:

Panic reaction

More on Norway's dramatic admission that they got it wrong with their coronavirus lockdown strategy (previously), from the Telegraph:

On Wednesday night, Norway's prime minister Erna Solberg went on Norwegian television to make a startling admission: she had panicked. Some, even most, of the tough measures imposed in Norway's lockdown now looked like steps too far. "Was it necessary to close schools?" she mused. "Perhaps not."

It was a preemptive step only a leader with Solberg's folksy, down-to-earth style could get away with. "I probably took many of the decisions out of fear," she admitted, reminding viewers of the terrifying images then flooding their screens from Italy.

She is not the first in Norway to conclude that closing schools and kindergartens, making everyone work from home, or limiting gatherings to a maximum of five people might have been excessive.

As far back as May 5, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) published a briefing note reporting that at the time the lockdown was imposed on March 12, Norway's reproduction number - the number of people each infected person on average infects - had already fallen to 1.1. It slipped under 1 on March 19.

No one doubts Norway's success in bringing the pandemic under control. On Friday, there were just 30 people in hospital with coronavirus and five on a ventilator. Only one person had died all week. The per capita death toll is now 44 per million people, just over a tenth of that seen in neighbouring Sweden, where 4,971 people have died.

But this success has come at a prohibitive social and economic cost. An expert committee charged with carrying out a cost-benefit analysis into the lockdown measures in April estimated that they had together cost Norway 27bn kroner (£2.3) every month. With only 0.7 per cent of Norwegians infected, according to NIPH estimates, there is almost no immunity in the population.

The expert committee concluded last Friday that the country should avoid lockdown if there is a second wave of infections.

"We recommend a much lighter approach," the committee's head, Steinar Holden, an Oslo University economics professor, told the Sunday Telegraph.  "We should start with measures at an individual level -- which is what we have now -- and if there’s a second wave, we should have measures in the local area where this occurs, and avoid measures at a national level if that is possible."  [...]

One measure that no one thinks should be reimposed is school closures.

Holden's committee estimated in April that the measure had cost 6.7 bn kroner (£520m) a month, while at best having "little impact" on the spread of infection. NIPH has gone further, and suggested that school closures may have even increased the spread.

Margrethe Greve-Isdahl, the doctor who is NIPH's expert on infections in schools, told the Telegraph that if schools hadn't been closed, they could have played a role in informing people in immigrant communities - which were hit disproportionately hard by the epidemic - of hygiene and social distancing rules.

"They can learn these measures in school and teach their parents and grandparents, so at least for some of these hard-to-reach minorities, there might be a positive effect from keeping kids in school."...

But perhaps the main reason Norway is unlikely to close schools again, whatever happens in future waves of infection, is the recognition of the impact on the most vulnerable pupils.  

"There's now a lot of information available on how it has impacted negatively on the economy and on vulnerable children. Their whole care system has kind of collapsed," Greve-Isdahl says. "I think there would be it would be difficult to impose heavy restrictions again."

"Our assessment now....is that we could possibly have achieved the same effects and avoided some of the unfortunate impacts by not locking down, but by instead keeping open but with infection control measures," Camilla Stoltenberg, NIPH's Director General (and the sister of Nato head Jens Stoltenberg) said in a TV interview earlier this month.

Cross immunity

Scientists are warning of the risk of lifting lockdown too soon. Well indeed. Many of them have been staking their reputations on the inevitable spread of the virus if that old R number doesn't start coming down faster, but the whiff of freedom is too strong now, and won't be denied. And many are beginning to suspect that the modeling which led to the whole panicked response, starting with Neil Ferguson's hugely influential doomsday scenario, may not have been that reliable after all. 

Matthew Parris in the Times today:

You can scare people out of their wits, which is what the government has done, or announce “Panic Over – Back to Normality”, which is how people are reading the signs now: but the terrain between bomb-shelter and the all-clear will prove almost impossible to navigate.

So my guess is that as June approaches “the” science is holding its breath. From the coldly academic point of view, the science should be nervously hoping for a massive “second wave”. It’s what their modelling and clinical assumptions have predicted. Be under no illusion: university faculties, doctors, epidemiologists and modellers have a great deal of reputational capital riding on this. If lockdowns are lifted across the world and the sky does not fall in, they will quite simply have been proved wrong.

They will protest, of course, that all they did was report the results of their modelling, and it was for politicians to decide how to respond; but if you tell a prime minister that up to half a million people may die and that our health service will collapse unless he takes a sledgehammer to our economy, he will reach for the sledgehammer. He did.

They will protest that “herd immunity” is far more complex than reported, that localised outbreaks, hotspots, regional variations, differences between the infectiousness of “superspreaders” and others, and maybe even differences between the susceptibility of the uninfected all complicate the picture. Well, yes, no doubt. It would have been helpful to hear this at the beginning rather than the end.

Science is about prediction or it is nothing. I suspect “the” science got it wrong, and herd immunity never was 60 per cent.

What's going on, then? Are we approaching herd immunity, even though the results from antibody testing seem to show disappointingly low levels of immunity to Covid-19 in tested populations?

It may be, according to some recent studies, that immunity is more widespread than generally believed because immunity can be conferred by exposure to other coronaviruses. Ross Clark in the Spectator:

Two weeks ago I wrote here about a study by the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, which found that between 40 and 60 per cent of people who had never been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid 19 – nevertheless seemed to develop an immune response to the disease in their T Cells. They appeared to have a cross-reactive immunity which had been gained through exposure to other coronaviruses – those which cause the common cold.

Now comes another study providing more evidence of the same phenomenon from a team at the Emerging Infectious Diseases Program from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. Nine of 18 patients they studied showed an immune reaction in their T cells to a protein in SARS-CoV-2, in spite of never having been exposed to the virus.

The team also found that survivors of SARS – the novel coronavirus disease which had an outbreak in 2002/03 and then largely disappeared – possess a ‘robust’ cross-reactive immune response to SARS-CoV-2. [...]

Real-world evidence has already questioned the assumption that most of us would become infected were the disease allowed to run its course. In the accidental experiment of the Diamond Princess – a close community where the infection was allowed to spread unchecked for a fortnight in January, and everyone was eventually tested – only 17 per cent of passengers and crew became infected.

Even if cross-reaction from other coronaviruses does not provide full immunity, it might explain why many people suffer only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. According to an ONS study of 19,000 people published last week, 79 per cent of people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 showed no symptoms up until the day they were tested.

There's more on similar lines at the Times of Israel:

Could exposure to the coronaviruses that cause the common cold help protect against COVID-19? Is herd immunity closer than previously thought?

As nations lift lockdowns and experts worry about a potential second peak in cases, our ability to ward off infection is one of the hottest topics of scientific debate.

Ever since it became apparent that children were less vulnerable to COVID-19 early in the pandemic, scientists have speculated that the regular spread of benign viruses in places like schools could have bolstered their immune response to the latest coronavirus.

Now the idea of “cross immunity” among the broader population is gaining some ground.

In a recent post on Twitter, Francois Balloux of University College London noted an “intriguing” lack of an immediate resurgence in COVID-19 cases following the easing of lockdowns in several countries.

Among the possible explanations, he noted, were seasonality and enduring social distancing practices.

But he posited a “wilder” hypothesis as well — that a “proportion of the population might have pre-existing immunity to #SARSCoV2, potentially due to prior exposure to ‘common cold’ coronaviruses.”

Balloux said that might explain issues like cases where there is no transmission between spouses.

Earlier this month, an American study in the journal Cell suggested between 40 and 60 percent of the population could be immunized against COVID-19 without ever being exposed to it.

Researchers put this down to the action of protective cells, known as T lymphocytes, that had been activated by other coronaviruses responsible for colds.....

Interesting. It would explain a lot, including perhaps, as suggested in a comment here, why Japan has escaped so lightly.

Over Jiangsu

Aerial views of China, from Photos of the Week at In Focus:

Trucks driving on the Hutong Yangtze River Bridge during a load test in Nantong, in China's eastern Jiangsu province, May 27. [AFP / Getty]

Houses in Manhe Village in Nantong, Jiangsu province, China, on May 24. [Zhai Huiyong / VCG via Getty]

Bags of red onions stacked at a market in Lianzhen Village in Taizhou, Jiangsu province, China, on May 22. [Tang Dehong / VCG via Getty]

The virus doesn’t care about politics

As I've noted before, we've politicised the coronavirus debate because that's what the media and our culture generally are set up to do. If something bad happens, it's always about finding out who's at fault. In the current situation, of course, the finger of blame is pointed inevitably at the government in general and Boris in particular. The idea that thousands died unnecessarily because of Johnson's lockdown dithering has now become an accepted part of the UK coronavirus story.

But world-wide the virus has shown that it's not interested in politics. Why for instance did both Japan and Florida escape so lightly despite clearly incompetent political responses? The only clear case of a political response having catastrophic effects was China's initial delay and denial.

Yes, the UK government has made mistakes - as have most governments, with the benefit of hindsight. The worse mistakes, probably - such as the care home catastrophe, when elderly patients were moved out of hospitals to care homes without testing, to make room for a flood of coronavirus cases that never materialised - resulted not from too little concern, but from too much. From panic, in other words...

Freddie Sayers at UnHerd - Coronavirus doesn’t care about politics:

The political argument has zeroed in on the idea that the UK and the US should have acted earlier within the month of March, by 10 days or two weeks. Through a combination of shutting their borders, locking down earlier and ramping up testing and tracing, everything could have been different, or so the argument goes. We’ll never know for sure, but it seems oddly credulous to think that that short period was a silver bullet that would have changed everything — countries that did ban flights from China early, such as Italy and the US, were hardly spared.

Back in March, the UK Government was still following its longstanding plan, endorsed by its scientific advisors — it is not spoken about much these days, but it is still there on the website if you fancy looking it up. It was based on the now-heretical principle that there would come a point when containment (with its testing and tracing) would no longer be viable, at which moment we would move to simply  ‘delay’ as much as possible and then ‘mitigate’. That is why contact tracing and community testing were dropped: it was always the plan. Some scientists still think this original approach was the sensible one, but faced with the alarming projections from Imperial College on March 16, the Government understandably ditched it.

To those who say that they should have seen what was happening in Italy, there remains the awkward fact that Neil Ferguson’s projections, based almost entirely on what was happening in Italy, didn’t materialise either. The revised Government plan was precisely designed to avoid becoming like Italy, with its horrible images of overflowing hospitals and triages in car parks — and that meant two urgent things: acquiring ventilators and increasing hospital capacity.

Off Matt Hancock went, brimming with rather more energy then than he has today, trying to succeed in his two big goals. But while the epidemic arrived, and with it a tragic number of deaths, it didn’t behave as expected. Remember the great ventilator race? As many ventilators as our good British companies could make, the Government would buy! Dyson, Rolls Royce and dozens of less glamorous and probably more relevant factories started frantically “re-tooling” for what the Prime Minister grimly dubbed “Operation Last Gasp”.

Turns out, they weren’t needed. Not only did the advertised wave of Covid patients never arrive in the promised number, it became clear that ventilation wasn’t the universally effective treatment everyone had thought. Reports emerged from New York that 88% of patients put on ventilators were dying; for many patients it turned out to be better to simply lie them on their front without ventilation. So the official number of extra ventilators the Government needed dwindled from 30,000, to 18,000, to 12,000 and then, quietly, to zero. James Dyson was sent back to his vacuum cleaners.

As for all those additional hospital beds that the situation in Italy implied we would need — the virus once again had other plans. In a huge Government-led effort, routine procedures were suspended, people were urged to avoid hospital, and existing patients were cleared out of wards. The Nightingale Hospital in East London was opened on time with its 4,000 additional beds, and thousands of further additional beds were created around the country in other Nightingale facilities.

From this unprecedented effort close to zero beds were ever used; these hospitals are perhaps the only example in history of a highly expensive and entirely unused government facility escaping any media criticism. As it turned out, the frantic preparing-for-Italy action plan may have only made things worse, as it led to additional avoidable deaths from other untreated conditions and accidentally seeded devastating secondary infections in care homes.

So, first the flu-like pandemic we had been initially well prepared for didn’t happen; then the Italy-style crisis that we subsequently prepared for with impressive speed didn’t happen either. All these well-intentioned government action plans, scrutinised by the political media, ended up struggling to be relevant amid a pandemic that defied prediction.

Now we're all set for “test and trace”, another government initiative that will very likely go down in flames....

When Will I Be Loved

There's a magic to those vocal harmonies that still tingles. I know the Everly Brothers were huge, especially in the UK where everyone from the Beatles on down loved them, but I wonder if we still fail to appreciate just how special they were, just because they were so popular.

Anyway....from the Saturday Night Beech-Nut Show, July 09, 1960, introduced by Dick Clark:

This is mid-career and about the height of their fame - just after they signed to Warner Brothers and had their biggest hit with Cathy's Clown.

Sixties northern colour

Shirley Baker was a pioneering photographer who chronicled the streets round Manchester and Salford from the mid-Sixties on. She really only became widely celebrated after her death in 2014, in particular with an exhibition at the Photographers' Gallery in 2015, which I covered at the time - and here.

Those photos were all black and white, but she did take some mid-Sixties Kodachromes too - in Salford and Blackpool.

From her website:

What is evident in the colour work is that Shirley began to see her surroundings differently. All the traits of the black and white photographs are there: close observations of bodily gestures, definition of personal and relational space, everyday absurdities, and acute recognition of urban form in street perspectives, roof tops and alleyways. Added to this is a new found awareness of colour as it livens up the otherwise darkened dusty street scenes. Shirley is drawn to the bright cleanliness of a group of children playing in colourful clothes. The sunshine makes the dusty air sparkle softly. 

In British post-war photography, this series of photographs represents an early use of colour, prior to its full exploration in the new colour supplement magazines and advertising in the 1970s.

[Photos © Estate of Shirley Baker]

Mudflats

Docklands, past Abbey Creek at low tide and the Twelvetrees gasometers:

We are just advanced fish

Egyptian Islamic scholar Dr. Haitham Talaat, on the thorny subject of atheists:

"Some good people want to promote a dialogue with the atheists. This is problematic for a number of reasons. [...]

"Atheists are social outcasts. Therefore, they are looking for every possible way to normalize relations with society. People instinctively reject atheists and are repelled by them. So if we promote a dialogue with them, people might ask themselves: 'Are we more zealous about Islam than that Sheikh?' People will start accepting the atheists and this is exactly what the atheists want. By doing so, we are paving the way for normalization with atheism. We are making people forget that atheists are infidels and apostates who perpetrate the biggest crime in the world. There is no greater danger to our nation than the atheists. The crime of atheism is worse than terrorism or armed robbery - a thousand times worse. The worst thing that an armed robber or a terrorist can do is to rob you of your world - in other words, to kill you. The atheist robs you of the world to come. He makes you lose your religion. And after you lose your religion and become an infidel, he tells you: 'By the way, this world is nothing. It is governed by nihilism. We are just advanced fish. Moral values are an illusion and the world around you is a hallucination. It is nothing but matter and physical laws without any meaning, value, or purpose.' If you absorb these atheistic presumptions, the inevitable outcome is suicide."