So as we enter another new week in 2020 and no further forward on resolving many issues that have surfaced this year the start of a fresh decade, let's take a look at the latest BS.
In America where the amount of deaths due to COVID-19 has risen to one hundred and seventy thousand, the worst death toll in the world we find Trump touting yet another drug offered up by corrupt pharma CEO's promising it will combat the coronavirus. The latest offering that Trump has shown interest in, was recommended during an Oval Office meeting with housing secretary Ben Carson and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, (another Trump backer who has stakes in the company that produces the experimental botanical extract, oleandrin). Trump is a man with no knowledge in scientific matters and calls his Democratic opponent Joe Biden “anti-scientific”, but now has stated that “the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be approving [oleandrin]” on the word of a man who will profit from its sale following similar endorsements for unproven treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, ultraviolet light, and disinfectant. For Gods sake someone come forward and diagnose this man properly because he has a severe mental problem.
While Trump ignores and restricts tests for COVID -19 more and more people including celebrities take to social media to tell their stories and experiences with the virus. The latest to open up is actress Sharon Stone who complained about the lack of testing available in Montana where she explained her sister and Brother in law were in hospital suffering from the infection and that because of there been no lawful tests to check for the virus until actual symptoms show they lived with the illness till it took hold drastically. Stone also commented on the fact that she had lost both her mother and godmother to the virus all because the state of Montana will not test people who don't have visible symptoms, but have been in close contact with a person who has had or died of the virus until they too show symptoms. She then stated that the lack of testing also included the medical staff treating those dead or dieing individuals. This is truly a story of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted and you know surely it's a civil right and a human right to openly test for the virus rather than wait for the person to die and then say 'oh, yes they had the virus'. So America is this the type of country you want for your children or grandchildren to inherit where one person can hold the lives of millions in their hands while holding back humanitarian aid just because they wants something in return before they will allow the testing of people, putting their wants before the needs of the people.
In other headlines speaker Nancy Pelosi will call on the House of Representatives to return to session in the coming days to vote on a bill to protect the US Postal Service. In a letter released on Sunday, Ms Pelosi accused President Trump of a "campaign to sabotage the election" which came after the USPS warned that millions of mail ballots may not arrive in time to be counted in the election. Trump has openly gone about sabotaging the USPS from within just so he can suppress the public's right to vote in the forthcoming election which just proves what I said previously that the President has too much power and should just be a figure head without the ability to block legislation put forward by congress or senate just because they don't agree with it. It is not a democracy, but is in fact a disguised dictatorship where one person can hold up bills or legislation voted through by the politicians who represent the people or has the power to unilaterally bring in to law his own policies that go against the people like his army of stormtroopers dispatched on to the streets of America. You need to vote for a new person anyway, anyhow come November and then look at a new way of running the country before you see a dictatorship (like Hitlers rise to power in Germany in 1933) rise up within your midst giving one person carte blanche to rule as they wish.
On that I will turn my attention to dear old Blighty and what BS is greeting us there. So as COVID-19, Brexit and lockdown still grip the nation, there is a new storm brewing which is education and not the fact that the government still has no solution to child safety ahead of the new school term quickly looming. This new storm is the unfair grading of GCSE and A level exams for students who left school during lockdown. The government faces calls to delay the results, change the grading algorithm or use the grades estimated by teachers, after complaints of unfair A-level results. This uproar comes while the government defends the approach it used to determine grades. Students across the UK were not able to sit exams as normal this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, so instead the government introduced not a person or a group of people with empathy, but a computer algorithm that would adjust teacher assessed grades, by taking into account the past performance of individual schools not the individual student which in England, resulted in 280,000 A-level results downgraded from teacher's assessments, almost 40% of the total. In Wales, 42% of A-level results predicted by teachers were lowered by the exam watchdog. So while Johnson and his inept cronies stumble along blindly wondering what to do, Scotland's first minister Nicola Sturgeon apologised over downgraded exam results in Scotland agreeing to accept assessments by teachers and Northern Ireland stated it will use teacher-assessed estimates for GCSE results this week. Johnson is coming under attack from opposition parties and Tory backbenches alike over the use of a computer algorithm to assess and grade A level results. Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith stated the A-level algorithm should be abandoned, with teacher assessments or mock exam results used instead while Kate Green, Labour's shadow education secretary stated that we are now going into week three of this issue in England and Wales unresolved when we knew about the problem in Scotland two weeks ago, we knew about the problem last week with A-levels and here we are just two or three days away from GCSE results and the government still hasn't got a grip on the problem which has led to Labours call for teacher-assessed grades to be used for A-levels in England and has stated the option should remain open for GCSEs if similar problems emerge.
The process of using the school and not the student has created a system where if a school had a less than stellar amount of successful A*,A or B grades those individual students received less than favourable grades produced by the algorithm grouping every student under the schools record rather than the individual students ability and vice versa for a school that had a stellar record for higher grades. Once again the government has chosen the easy way out by grouping areas by class and wealth rather than by the people who live there. This method means that the algorithm is more likely to favour a student living in an affluent area going to a private school with A* or A grades rather than a student in a rundown inner city public school who is fighting to better themselves. This is just another way the white privileged Tory government under the leadership of their private schoolboy primeminister is suppressing the rights of the lower classes to better themselves and rise from poverty. How many more cock-ups can this government be seen to do before someone steps in and calls for a vote of no confidence in the present regime running our country, so we can get a more suitable person in the role of primeminister who leads from the front rather than cowering in the rear behind his trusted generals or fellow profiteers which is what I would call the present UK government. on that I call it a day,
Rant you tomorrow!
