The Daily Mail is creaking at the seams with articles screaming for an early end to lockdown on the basis the stats show the pandemic is no longer a major threat.
None of these pieces ever connect the crucial dots, that it's BECAUSE of lockdown that things have got much better.
It's like complaining about the fire sprinklers in a still smouldering building, without acknowledging that it's no longer a raging inferno because they've been spraying water 24/7 for months.
Turn them off, and what happens? Doesn't take a genius to work that out, and yet...
The most whackdoodle opinion pieces call for the end of lockdowns, social distancing, mask wearing and all other preventive measures... while pretending that the pandemic just melted away by magic.
But then, people of a certain political persuasion have long seen the pandemic as another extension of the Culture Wars.
"Wow, those woke politically correct lefties really hate it when their friends and family die before their time, bwahaha" - that sort of thing.
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"The social distancing rule will be scrapped but masks will remain under government plans for the final easing of restrictions on June 21, it has been claimed."
In what universe will people go back to crowded situations, but all masked? So irresponsible! dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9…
So far, the road out of lockdown has been stepped. Some steps may have felt too uncomfortably large, or not big enough, but there was a vague logic. But 21 June appears to be dive-off-a-cliff-and-hope.
Get it wrong, and tens or hundreds of thousands more will die.
On the plus side: the vaccine. And that's a huge plus.
On the minus side: Since the first lockdown, there hasn't been a single day of unsocially distanced "normal" life. And yet over 120,000 people still died despite varying levels of precaution. Add in stronger variants, and...
And of course, although the offending article now seems to have been excised from Google, the internet never forgets. So his phone number is freely available here on Twitter, for example, thanks to people screenshotting the now deleted release.
Actually, the information is still available online as well. But it's a bit harder to find now than I suspect it was 24H ago. The press release itself is a PDF, and it looks like Google has de-indexed the text.
Why? Because no back door is 100% secure - especially one designed to potentially be used by tens of thousands of "authorised" people!
And if encrypted systems are forced to be much less secure by law, then banks, other payment systems and merchants won't dare shoulder the risk.
Imagine a bank vault which a very large number of people have been given a skeleton key to. (You have no idea *who* has been granted keys - and you'll never know - but you do know a *lot* of folk can get in.)
Would you dare leave anything of value in that vault?
Our police, viciously beating protesters. No sugar-coating possible. This is WRONG.
(The protest can also be wrong - it's not one or the other. But the hypothetical wrongness of the protest cannot possibly justify a wild beatdown with riot shields, and batons.)
In other words, strict restrictions on travel meant very few deaths, virtually no change to day to day life, and comparatively little economic damage. Simple.
Big news on the UK domain front. Nominet's years of commercial overreach have finally caught up with it. (It was at its best as a lean, mean organisation focused exclusively on running the UK namespace well.) Members had enough.
Five founding members of the original Nominet lend their weight to a letter calling for the appointment of specific interim directors (who were originally going to be the subject of a second EGM resolution, before Nominet refused.)