Day: 11 August 2020

I´m sitting on my balcony here in Vitoria, capital of the beautiful Brazilian state of Espirito Santo, on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Blue skies, beautiful people, and a temperature that is always warm but never hot. Below me, I´m looking out on the typical hustle and bustle of city life. Restaurant terraces are packed, and a young man is dancing with a young woman who is certainly not in his social bubble, all to the music of a live samba band. This joyful daily life is now an act of rebellion. Our Governor just made another stern pronouncement on the news admonishing people to follow the rules of distanciamento social and threatening to impose harsher restrictions. As a Canadian who has lived here for three years now, sometimes I think I´m the only one who follows the news. Everyone else just goes on living. Despite being in the epicentre of what the Western media breathlessly calls one of the world´s worst coronavirus outbreaks, most people here are going about their life. They called a lockdown and nobody came. An earlier bike ride along the beach found the sand packed with scantily clad men and women playing football and volleyball. Despite a recent law proclaiming masks to be worn in all public places, I observed the take up being probably less ...

by Guy de la Bédoyère There are plenty of people who think this Government, indeed almost any government, is hell-bent on a systematic plan to destroy individual liberty, force people to be vaccinated, inject them with chips, monitor social media accounts, use algorithms as a mechanism of control and to do it all with the cynical efficiency of a Bond villain. Others think governments are exercises in accidental chaos, masked by spin, staggering from one crisis to another, fuelled by individual self-interest, opportunism and chronic disorganization. Most states fall somewhere in between. The Nazis were a case in point. Engaged in the most systematic and cynical government of all time, they also presided over a state that was in total chaos from Day One. The art of course is pretending to be in charge and pulling off the pretence so well that everyone falls for the illusion. What matters to ordinary people is the impact of government, not what’s going on behind closed doors. People accept government, whether a totalitarian dictator or a tribal chieftain or anything along the scale between those extremes, so long as the state serves as a buffer zone between them and the remorseless instability and unpredictability of the natural world. Or at least so long as it gives a convincing impression of doing so. George ...

Three Quarters of a Million Jobs Lost During Lockdown According to the Office for National Statistics, UK payrolls fell 2.5% from March to July of this year, amounting to the loss of 730,000 jobs. The Telegraph has more. Meanwhile, the number of people claiming benefits climbed to 2.7m in July, up 116.8% since March.The ONS also found that nominal pay growth – unadjusted for inflation – from April to June was negative for the first time since records began in 2001, weighed down by lower bonuses and furloughed workers on reduced earnings.However, the official unemployment rate is not rising because to be counted among the unemployed, workers need to be actively looking for a new job, which many have decided not to do yet, the ONS said.Jonathan Athow of the ONS said there was also a large number of people who said they were working no hours and getting no pay."The falls in employment are greatest among the youngest and oldest workers, along with those in lower-skilled jobs," he added. "Vacancies numbers began to recover in July, especially in small businesses and sectors such as hospitality, but demand for workers remains depressed." What Accounts for the UK's Unusually High Death Toll? There's an interesting blog post by Jason Oke and Carl Heneghan on the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine website, speculating ...