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Doctor Blind

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Posts posted by Doctor Blind

    The scientists/pharmaceutical companies should start trying to make a new vaccine now based on the South African variant I think, whats going to happen with the vaccination rollout in South Africa for example if the South African variant is found to be resistant to the current vaccine?

     

    The epidemiologists that I've seen discuss this are very confident that an altered vaccine could rapidly be developed (much in the same way as the Flu vaccine is altered every winter) in the unlikely event that these mutations reduced the efficacy of the vaccine, although as Suedehead says above - no evidence to suggest they will reduce it.

     

    Anyway, some good news today that deaths were down week-on-week for the first time since mid-December and new cases are down 22%.

    Well I don't want to hark back too much to the past but Hillary did win the popular vote and think the emails sunk her. Was reading some US political forums late last night and that's a commonly held view. I think Biden would have beaten her Trump easily.

     

    Based on what exactly?

     

    Biden was able to capitalise on what was largely an anti-Trump vote. That just simply hadn't had time to build in 2016 so I don't see what reason he would have flipped Pennsylvania, Georgia etc. back then? Counterfactuals are impossible to prove so I'm not a huge fan - but you agree that Bernie Sanders probably wouldn't have beaten Trump in 2016 against the opinion of Michael, so why are you so sure that Joe Biden would have?

    Oh I do but there is bias on both sides hence in the first week of January I posted that this thread will be like this for a while now....

     

    Let’s face it any pro brexit opinion on here is jumped upon by the majority hence I couldn’t help but laugh when three replies dismissed the comment.

     

    Happy to have Pro Brexit opinions like yours in this thread Steve.

     

    Just stop trolling please.

    Sorry but I have to say this. Yet Trump supporters are supposed to accept a result that they don't believe in. It's the same thing.

     

    It really isn't Chris.

     

    I believe that Leave won the referendum and the result should (and has ) been implemented. But I am allowed to moan about the consquences. I wanted an EFTA type deal (like Norway) to reflect the close nature of the result but extremists on both sides of the argument prevented such a compromise and we got stuck with this shite Canada minus trade deal.

     

    Trump lovers are a bunch of delusional conspiracists that can't accept reality. Yourself included?

    It's between 2005 and 2002, and I think 2005 takes it.

     

    In the 2005 camp we have the following top forty hits:

     

    Reflekt ft. Delline Bass “Need To Feel Loved”

    Editors “Munich”

    Maxïmo Park “Apply Some Pressure”

    The Killers “Smile Like You Mean It”

    The Bravery “An Honest Mistake”

    LCD Soundsystem “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”

    Arcade Fire “Rebellion (Lies)”

    Gorillaz “Feel Good Inc.”

    Depeche Mode “Precious”

    Amerie “1 Thing”

    Röyksopp “What Else Is There?”

    Bloc Party “So Here We Are” / “Banquet” / “Two More Years”

    Sigur Rós “Hoppípolla”

     

    number 1s for:

    Arctic Monkeys “I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor”

    Gorillaz “DARE”

    Stereophonics “Dakota”

    Madonna “Hung Up”

    Oasis “The Importance Of Being Idle”

     

    and just missing Top 40 hits for:

    Ladytron “Destroy Everything You Touch”

    Annie “Heartbeat”

    Death Cab for Cutie “Soul Meets Body”

     

    HOW is 2006 winning? Chico, It's Chico Time... a number 1 record. No, 2006 was a bit of a fail IMO.

    Doctor Blind Chart - 17th January 2021

     

    TW - LW / Artist / “Song” / (Peak- if not current)

     

    01 - 01 Yves Tumor “Kerosene!” *2 weeks at #1*

    02 - 07 Jon Hopkins “Dawn Chorus”

    03 - 03 The Comet Is Coming ft. Joshua Idehen “Imminent” (02)

    04 - 02 Páula, Povoa & Jerge “Primavera” (01)

    05 - 11 Burial, Four Tet & Thom Yorke “Her Revolution / His Rope”

    06 - 05 Martin Rott “Kinetic Theory” (03)

    07 - 04 Working Men’s Club “John Cooper Clarke” (04)

    08 - 16 Yard Act “Peanuts”

    09 - 06 Quantic “Theme From Selva” (02)

    10 - 20 Kelly Lee Owens “Jeanette”

     

    11 - 08 Julien Baker “Faith Healer” (02)

    12 - 14 London Grammar “Californian Soil”

    13 - 09 Disclosure ft. Kelis “Watch Your Step” (09)

    14 - 23 Arlo Parks “Caroline”

    15 - 15 The Avalanches ft. MGMT and Johnny Marr “The Divine Chord”

    16 - 10 Biig Piig “Feels Right” (08)

    17 - 36 Gabriels “Love And Hate In A Different Time”

    18 - 40 SZA “Good Days” *Biggest Climber*

    19 - 26 Jade Bird “Headstart”

    20 - 13 Loyle Carner “Yesterday”

     

    21 - 12 Actress ft. Sampha “Walking Flames” (06)

    22 - 31 Magdalena Bay “Sky2Fall”

    23 - 27 Oneohtrix Point Never “Lost But Never Alone”

    24 - 30 Django Django “Glowing In The Dark”

    25 - 32 KennyHoopla ft. Travis Barker “Estella//”

    26 - 17 Das Mörtal “It Comes” (08)

    27 - 38 Bicep ft. Clara La San “Saku”

    28 - 22 Asian Dub Foundation ft. Stewart Lee “Comin’ Over Here” (22)

    29 - 19 SAULT “Free” (03)

    30 - 34 Remi Wolf “Hello Hello Hello [Polo & Pan Remix]”

     

    31 - 21 Bicep “Apricots” (01)

    32 - 44 Georgia “Running Up That Hill”

    33 - 18 slowthai “nhs” (16)

    34 - 43 Madlib “Road of the Lonely Ones”

    35 - 46 KOKOROKO “Baba Ayoola”

    36 - NE Mogwai “Ritchie Sacramento” *Highest New Entry*

    37 - 28 Duck Sauce “Mesmerize” (02)

    38 - 24 Oscar Lang “Antidote to Being Bored” (17)

    39 - NE Danny L Harle & DJ Danny “On A Mountain” *New Entry*

    40 - 25 Aries “Fool’s Gold” (19)

    Music

     

    Clipping.

     

    I like rap groups, particularly if they seem to treat music as an exploration of their own interests/messages to give out, and in all intents and purposes act like a band that raps rather than sings. There's a direction behind clipping, and that solid artistic direction made me get on board with them fully in 2020, through their late 2019 album There Existed An Addiction To Blood and its 2020 companion peace Visions Of Bodies Being Burned.

     

    They have a high range, starting with highly creepy rap on "Nothing Is Safe", which is so unnerving as a track I'm often apprehensive about listening to it, there

    to violent floorstompers on "Blood Of The Fang" to the attitude of '96 Neve Campbell', to the haunting backdrop of "Enlacing", it's a lot of excellent hip-hop that you won't find a whole package of anywhere else. Particularly the flow done by rapper Daveed Diggs is very addictive, mostly menacingly lethargic but occasionally coming alive in a very frightening and energetic way.

     

    Both albums are very dark and pessimistic, downright horrific in the way it describes certain scenes at times, which I guess earns it the label of horrorcore. But that's only because it's clearly got a bone to pick with the societal position of hip-hop. "Blood Of The Fang" is essentially "This Is America" ground up and given an +18 label for violence, still on the ills of American society and their love of violence. But yeah, the idea is to make the listener scared, and I'm happy to say that they've succeeded, going in for a clipping. listening session is not something I take lightly, even though I love all of it.

     

    To sum it all up, I guess I will look at the lyrics of, I could pick many, but to keep it short, "Say The Name" off Visions Of Bodies..., which like its counterpart "Blood Of The Fang" on There Is An Addiction, opens up with distorted chanting of the album title. It quickly builds a picture of a tortured place, a mob demanding justice, references to Guernica and Scarface, a woman in an abusive relationship, it opens the album with a description of a devilish, occult ritual of bodies burned and the rest of the album is no less scary. Most clipping. songs describe something happening detached from the speaker, which just serves to make the whole enterprise more unnerving, this is abstract body horror demanding your empathy.

     

    Horrorcore rap with excellent background production and topics that occasionally makes reference to modern issues and with a great flow besides, I love this group.

     

    Love clipping! My route in was discovering “Nothing Is Safe” at Halloween in 2019 and I haven't looked back since. The concepts/ideas behind There Existed An Addiction To Blood and Visions Of Bodies Being Burned combine two of my favourite things (horror films and music) so I was always going to be on board.

     

    Finally: Donald Trump is a white supremacist, full stop. If you vote for him again, you're a white supremacist, full stop.

     

    :D

    The new variant being more deadly is just spin to the right-wing media and lockdown sceptics. The increase is minimal at best which of course is awful, but that press conference today was purely a "we're going to need to buckle up for the winter and in to spring" moment for us all. I think people who said hospitality for May are going to be proved very right.

     

    On a side note, those vaccine numbers are super impressive. If there are minimal issues with supplies then we will be set up great in a few months.

     

    Agreed - I think Patrick Valance said it may have increased from IFR of 1% to 1.3 or 1.4% in 60 y/o males but the data isn't conclusive. Strikes me as yet another bit of science for the Government to jump on as a way of distracting from the total fuck up that their approach has been thus far (Boris saying immediately after "this is why our hospitals are so full" - no mate, it's because your strategy of controlling the virus has been at best incompetent, and at worst downright negligent and dangerous). Hopefully we'll get a sensible strategy at some point, I mean this pandemic has only been going on for a year...

    What kind of stuff? I haven’t seen ANY effect from the new conditions!

     

    Well Northern Ireland (which I think is where you live) is STILL in the EU Single Market and is de facto in the EU Customs Union. So you wouldn't. The main impact would be on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain.

    So was Trump the symptom of the cause of US divisions?

     

    I think he can be both- the divisions have always existed, just look at the delicate coalition that the US is between its rural interior and its (mainly) urban coastal fringes, and he clearly benefited from focussing on these to take advantage of this in 2016. Probably these divisions have increased as a direct result of the post-GFC world since 2008, and we have seen new divisions develop since, as we have elsewhere in the world - the UK (*cough* Brexit *cough*) being a massive example: in 1983 Thatcher won a majority of 18-24s, in 2019 the gap between the voting intentions of the youngest and oldest generations in society has NEVER been wider. So he was definitely a symptom, and like Brexit a political outcome for these divisions to coalesce around, however he has exacerbated and widened these to the point of destruction. We will never know how close the US came to a civil war, but I'm betting it was an awful lot closer than any of us dare realise.

     

    Will these divisions continue beyond Trump's term, possibly- but I don't think it's inevitable that they will and Trump not being there gives us as good a shot as I'd hoped to change things.

    HRMC boss Jim Harra confirms that consumers will be hit by price hikes when they order goods from the EU online.

    1. VAT

    2. customs duties if goods is not EU/Brit product under rules of origin rules.

    3. cost of courier/Royal mail for doing the customs clearance for you. €12

     

    Yay, now I get to pay import fees on top of the price I'd usually pay. Well done everyone !

    I've been arguing with trump supporters all morning on Facebook.

     

    One of my favourite comments is this...

     

    20210121-092114.jpg

     

    You can't win unfortunately - I've had people trying to tell me that the insurrection was organised by Antifa and that BLM stormed the Capitol after Trump won in 2016. Facts don't matter to these people anyway- social media platforms are inadvertently designed to sow division, keep people apart and allow echo chambers to develop, all within a system whereby clicks generate revenue, and clicks are driven by, and rewarded for, highly contentious false information. I think sadly that once people are lost to this delusion (similar with Covid-19 being some worldwide 'global reset' conspiracy) there is no turning back - they look only for information that reinforces their view/opinion and disregard anything that contradicts it, no matter how much of it there is.

     

    It did make me laugh that some Trump supporters have got the hump because Trump pardoned Eliyahu Weinstein (convicted conman) who had tricked them out of their money. All you can do is look on...

     

    Anyway, glad to see that Biden's inauguration was reassuringly dull. A lot of Executive Orders signed yesterday including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement. :D

    Ha, that kind of syncs to my weird theory that Moby's “Go” was the beginning of the 1990s (fall of U.S.S.R. etc.) and the second 'Belle Époque'..

     

    ..and Animal Collective's “My Girls” (which has a similar sort of vibe to that video ) signalled the 'end' of the 2000s after the GFC, caused in part by the property market collapse

     

    I just want

    Four walls and adobe slats

    For my girls

     

    Yeah I remember the awful Soham murders, I was in France for much of that period so I just remember the French news being weirdly dominated by British news that summer (2002). : (

    Posted

    It's Inauguration Day!

     

    Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States later today. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are expected to take the oath of office at around 5pm GMT (Midday EST).

     

    Please continue discussion of US Politics here.