“I feel alright about them,” said Jeremy Hillyard of Sens. David Perdue (R-GA) and Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), after casting a ballot for them at an early voting location in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs on Wednesday evening.
“Each side has its flaws,” Hillyard told The Daily Beast. “I’m voting more for gridlock than anything else.”
Make sure that the political system can’t just do something but has to just stand there.
Doesn’t work with our lot. The buggers just form a coalition and carry on.
Better still: “Don’t just stand there, undo something”
O/T
Dominic Lawson in the S Times, comparing lockdown sceptics to Dr Harold Shipman.
This is an infamous slur which will surely come back to bite him.
If he had argued the case for elongated lives of the elderly and ill against the damage done to the youth by no education, no social life and poor job prospects, the argument could be interesting.
But he didn’t.
The case lockdown sceptics put forward is that lockdowns don’t even help the elderly. There is no “on the one hand, on the other”. Lockdowns are bad for everyone, on both hands.
The problem is that gridlock doesn’t solve the problem any more. Executive Orders and the administrative state will carry on with whatever they want. Congress and the Courts no longer have the balls to rein them in.
I posted some analysis from the past 5 years ONS reports which puzzled me on another site.
Between 2016 and 2019 the proportions of total deaths from any cause in the over 75 age group were:-
2016 67.8%
2017 68.3%
2018 68.1%
2019 68.0%
2020 68.7% (weeks 1 to 51)
I was expecting a far more serious effect on the death rate of this vulnerable group. The increase of 0.7% over 2019 represents just over 4,000 deaths out of a year-to-date total of 592,000.
The figures for the percentage of deaths where respiratory illness was the prime cause stayed fairly steady at around 13.8% from 2016 to 2019. The 2020 figures, when the new category “Covid mentioned” was introduced are puzzling. Respiratory illness deaths fell to 10.4% while the new Covid involved category was 12.6%. Either there is considerable double counting whereby a single death is recorded both as Covid mentioned and prime respiratory cause of death or else the combined number of these two categories really do indicate major excess deaths. The problem is that the very small increase in the vulnerable over 75 age group simply doesn’t back it up.
Maybe I’m missing something?
Dominic Lawson in the S Times, comparing lockdown sceptics to Dr Harold Shipman.
I don’t read the ST but seem to remember Lawson had become drearier and wetter in old age. But COVID bedwetting does not only afflict wet lefties, it seems to have seen Mel Phillips doolally and her other half has gone off the charts.
Do your figures mean that in any (recent) year about two-thirds of over-75s die? Have I to that right?
Or does it mean that about 32% of deaths are aged less than 75?
What Philip said is correct.
What you are asking dearieme is not available from the ONS spreadsheets (or at least I haven’t found it) as they do not show how the population of England and Wales is split between the various age groups, only the number of deaths in each group.
I would suspect the death statistics for the coming few years will be quite interesting. 2020 may turn out to be average for deaths & possibly the first part of ’21. From then on we’ll see rising numbers as those who haven’t received treatment for non-Covid ailments start dying earlier than they would have otherwise. Peaking ’03/’04?
If anyone’s benn doing a Harold Shipman it’s the NHS: casting patients known to be infectious into care homes, writing DNS on the notes without consent…
Ignoring the zero Covid, nobody must die, clowns, lockdowns don’t work by the definition of the dim-wits and half-wits who impose them “to protect the NHS”.
By the time they impose them cases are already declining and so the peak of hospitalisations and deaths are already baked in.
Even the rather alarming increase in cases from this new variant appears to be declining, although the data are still all over the place following the reporting issues over the holidays. With Boris muttering about being prepared to make tough decisions expect another lockdown in the next few days and the data to show it was too late.
2020 hospital bed (all) occupation down 18% over previous years. The other half of the story is that it took a Freedom of Information Act inquiry to get those previous years figures.
https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1344628047266410499
And an alarming but rational opinion re the vaccines:
https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/03/what-vaccine-trials/
be good if BiG could review the latter as he’s probably got the best insight amongst us lot to critique the opinion.
PJF…. srsly… That last link gave me headaches.. The average Ecksian rant makes more sense and is better formatted..
That site is one of the better proofs that with the decline of the dead-tree barrier any idiot can “publish”.
Glad it wasn’t just me.