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Professor Neil Ferguson is a highly intelligent and very dangerous fool. His predictions of 500,000 dead from Coronavirus, based on modelling so badly written that he could not share them with anyone, pushed England into lockdown. He confidently forecast global deaths of four million from swine flu. The worldwide total turned out to be 18,500. In 2005 he said that up to 200 million people could die from bird flu. Between 2003 and 2009, just 282 people died worldwide from the disease. I think he has done more harm than anyone for decades but I do not see why his breaking the rules on social distancing should require him to resign. Either his advice is valuable or it is not. My country seems to have gone mad.
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long.
ReplyDeleteThere is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain
Brilliant. I mean to read him for years. I was 11 when I last did. He and/or Churchill seem to have visited every foreign city that I visit.
DeleteIn his 'The Noble Red Man' he called Red Indians “a good, fair, desirable subject for extermination if ever there was one” but by 1866 I am pleased to say he vigorously denounced bounties on Apache scalps.
The story of the Wild West is one of genocide, as Mark Twain always saw. He moved from supporting it to being appalled by it and protesting against it. https://books.google.ro/books?id=1syhDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA243&lpg=PA243&dq=%E2%80%9Ca+good,+fair,+desirable+subject+for+extermination+if+ever+there+was+one%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=0LPFeJ0OoK&sig=ACfU3U2DdAcYjpN3ydcfcGq3ZWlfYOU-_Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj26uawk6HpAhXzQRUIHfTWDqMQ6AEwAnoECCIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Ca%20good%2C%20fair%2C%20desirable%20subject%20for%20extermination%20if%20ever%20there%20was%20one%E2%80%9D&f=false
DeleteDouglas Carswell
ReplyDelete@DouglasCarswell
Given that government policy to shut down the economy now looks like it was based on bogus scientism, you might have thought broadcasters had had plenty of questions to go on. Yet they egged on the lockdown with fatuous questions about sunbathers in parks.