FRIDAY MUSIC: The Moody Blues, by JD

In these troubled times of fear and pan[dem]ic it sometimes feels that the post war dream is over and "the only thing to look forward to is the past!" (That phrase borrowed from the theme song of the TV series 'Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads' https://www.flashlyrics.com/lyrics/highly-likely/whatever-happened-to-you-64)

And in my nostalgic look back to the days when life made more sense, I have rediscovered the Moody Blues, a very influential band from Birmingham. The original line up included singer/guitarist Denny Laine who featured on their only No.1 hit record 'Go Now.'

When Laine left the group in 1966 the others changed their musical direction with the addition of Justin Hayward and began to record their own material; not difficult when they now had five songwriters in the line up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moody_Blues

The first three videos here feature Denny Laine and thereafter it is MB mark 2 and features some of the songs for which they are best known. (I have deliberately excluded 'Nights in White Satin' as it is a bit too mawkish for my liking. No doubt others might disagree.)

I should add that in the late sixties I saw them in concert and they were excellent live performers.
“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.“ - Plato

Never miss the opportunities afforded by a decent disaster, by Wiggia

I can’t remember where I last saw that headline but it is something that is apt in the current climate when one item dominates the news and the thinking. We seem to have had a prolonged period of first Brexit and now Coronavirus that has afforded an ample smokescreen for less attractive additions to our daily lives being given official approval or extra authority in law as well as those items that are buried at the bottom of page 47 in the national press.

An item to which I will refer briefly before passing on, is one that has been buried and sanitized: the refusal to release the findings of the government's grooming gangs review. The mealy-mouthed answer of a few days ago can be seen here https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300239; I say mealy-mouthed because at no stage has a common factor among these criminals been officially stated in public, i.e. their ostensible religious affiliation (Islam). It is no good being assertive and virtuous unless you are prepared to name an important feature of many of the groups that the review focused on, because it hampers the next step, which is for influential figures from their community to speak out against an evil that has a long cultural, though not religiously sanctioned history - see for example this article by Shaista Gohir in the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/25/middle-east-child-abuse-pederasty. Lumping in all other types of child abuse is simply an attempt to water down the whole point of the review itself.

It is difficult to believe that six years on from the Jay report on the Rotherham grooming scandal that laid bare the truth about who what and why, that the current government have seen fit to use the phrase “not in the public interest” as regards releasing the full inquiry, as shameful and cowardly as any whitewash to date. We all have our views on this and the cover up for the sake of community cohesion, or rather one community, carries on. The government's reply stating that 'Child sexual abusers come from all walks of life, and from many different age groups, communities, ethnicities and faiths' is an obfuscation of the truth, using the broad brush of child sexual abuse of all kinds across the whole of the UK to gloss over the main perpetrators in this particular category. Yes, all child abuse is criminal, but the Jay report was about one very particular aspect of that, yet no doubt as on so many occasions with similar issues that they see as ‘sensitive’, all will remain buried, until the next time.

Elsewhere the Coronavirus has proved a blessing for the displaced front page utterings of the eco brigade. Just as much of the latter's findings and predictions were being exposed as nonsense - not a single prophecy has come true in twenty years - the virus has quelled the retorts and the eco loons have re-jigged their approach, using the current lockdown as a model we should base life on after the virus.

Look at letters to the Times for instance, giving a personal reading of how the skies are so clear of vapour trails and the lack of noise, could this be a better way forward, no need for airport expansion, less travel for holidays, less pollutant, less carbon footprint, all the public need to do is stay as they are and do absolutely nothing at all and the world will turn into a form of Elysian fields where we all wander about saying how wonderful it is.

La lala lala...

There have been several letters in that vein, mostly from directors of vested interest groups or save the planet societies. Never once do they question in this utopia they wish to create, their utopia I add, how anything will be paid for, who will provide the food. Some have suggested our land should be returned to nature and our food imported, so obviously they do not apply their regime change to others !

Another suggested that with so few cars on the road perhaps there is a way we could keep it like that with a massive injection of cash into public transport, conveniently forgetting, even if this is what people wanted and they don’t, the huge debt being run up at this moment because of the measures to combat the virus, and they wish to add to it; coming from those who say we are impoverishing the grandchildren, this is almost funny.

Once we start to move towards normality expect a surge in ‘demands’ for measures like those proposed to be implemented. A compliant government as it is in these matters will undoubtedly give a bit more. As I have said before, minorities in all forms get a far larger share of the cake than everyone else these days.

Sample: "Coronavirus recovery plan 'must tackle climate change'" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52418624

As one of those who because of age are considered to be a hindrance, a thorn in the side of progressive thinkers, a bed blocker, a class of person who should have the vote removed because of bad voting practices, I am glad like many others I won't be around to see the resultant compliant populace impoverished by a tax take that keeps them down, an increasing Orwellian state that presides over ever more layers of our lives for  ‘our own good ‘, and at the forefront of all this will be the eco-centric, those who will put all ahead of their fellow man as it is the right thing, their right thing, to do.

I have to admit I never thought as a nation it would be us at the head of this ill-thought way forward, but we are. A malleable voting public who continually put in positions of power persons of dubious (to be kind) value, not just here but world wide will eventually get what they voted for and it will not be pretty. If they believe that green industries will provide the number of jobs that will be eradicated for good by these current events and policies plus the enormous added debt to the nations' already sky-high borrowing, they live in cloud cuckoo land; it will be some time before the damage done to the economy by lock down measures are fully revealed, if ever.

Utopia v Dystopia: many feel we are already in the latter, but as with all opinion it matters where you are coming from, and far too many are coming from a position that Utopia is reached by flicking a switch. It isn’t and never will be.

But is Utopia sustainable, though?

The article linked below is typical of that being churned out at the moment. Reading through it there is never a mention of where the wealth needed for all this change will come from, yet the necessity to achieve the aims mentioned involves whole industries being culled, travel becoming something only our parents did, unreliable energy being the norm,  and whole countries who rely on tourism to maintain their economy going to the wall. Wildlife will struggle to be protected with no tourist money to support it, agriculture will be limited to that which can be shipped - and yet being self-sufficient is a dirty word, go figure.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/29/airlines-oil-giants-government-economy

The coronavirus has a lot to answer for, and it's not just the virus.

Covid econo-apocalypso

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) weekly figures https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales have just been updated to Week 16 (ending 17 April) and they are not comforting.

  

While the numbers of Covid-related deaths in hospital (see Worldometer https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/ ) slowed in that week (and declined in the following one) the ONS’ numbers for Week 16 jumped another 40 per cent: from 6,213 to 8,758.

The ONS is recording cases where Covid is mentioned on the death certificate, and these are not limited to deaths in hospital. Fatalities involving non-Covid respiratory diseases continue to follow the trend of the previous ten years, so it seems implausible that many of them have simply been misrecorded as coronavirus victims.

  

 Overall deaths also continue to soar. In the seven weeks graphed above, we have lost 100,954 people in all. The average for the equivalent period in the preceding decade was 71,916 (the seven worst weeks totalled 83,843).

The meme that Professor Ferguson has been too pessimistic in his modelling may be exploded: last weekend we passed the landmark of 20,000 Covid deaths https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52424413 , which was what Professor Ferguson had hoped might be the maximum if we implemented control measures.

Those measures rely on public cooperation, and my experience is that people have gone along with the official advice and instructions, and are doing so with goodwill. As we walked an elderly friend’s dog yesterday, passers-by stepped aside to maintain distance, or thanked us if we did so. What will save this country is the ‘social capital’ that lets us pull together and look after each other in a crisis.

We are facing brutal alterations to the economy – ones that were overdue, and for which the coronavirus was a trigger event, like 9/11. How, for example, did our business class allow us to become dependent on a powerful Communist country? What let them give away our productive capacity yet expect society to maintain its cohesion, when Sir James Goldsmith was warning of the consequences a quarter-century ago? Do they not know that we really are in this together, that when civilisation falls all fall with it, that there are no rich Mayans hunkered down in air-conditioned Mesoamerican bunkers, still living off their investments?

The price we have just started to pay, is not because of the virus or the so-called ‘lockdown’; it is the result of the failure to plan and act. Here and elsewhere there have been studies and simulations going back years, and yet when the foreseeable needs arose the resources were still not there - witness the PPE debacle https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-52440641 .

The disaster is set to roll over the economy also, because we have become – thank you, bankers – hopelessly dependent on debt; not just government deficit, but personal and corporate liabilities. It’s bad in many countries, but the UK stands alongside Japan as the worst. As far back as January 2012 McKinsey reported https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Featured%20Insights/Global%20Capital%20Markets/Uneven%20progress%20on%20the%20path%20to%20growth/MGI_Debt_and_deleveraging_Uneven_progress_to_growth_Report.ashx  (page 5) that Japan’s total debt-to-GDP was 512% and the UK’s rivalled it at 507% - five times the value of our economic activity. When debts mount further – as they must, to stop the system collapsing – and thousands of small businesses founder, and millions are added to the dole queue, and the tax base shrivels, that ratio is going to be cruelly higher, a tremendous burden even when interest rates are near-zero.

What is the way out? Massive defaults?

Or reckless money-printing? Perhaps we should visit the ATMs more regularly and build up a stock of banknotes, just in case there is another shortage of toilet paper.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Roy Hamilton, by JD

Another great and unjustly forgotten singer - Roy Hamilton. The man who inspired Elvis Presley and listening to some of the songs here you could be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Elvis during his Vegas years!

Roy Hamilton (April 16, 1929 – July 20, 1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Hamilton

Covid update

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) releases its weekly data at c. 09:30 each Tuesday. For administrative reasons it runs a couple of weeks behind, so today’s figures take us up to Friday, 10th April. In the first graph below, I show the average number of deaths from respiratory disease in the decade 2010-2019, plus the highest figure for each week in that period, and compare those with:

• ONS figures for 2020 excluding Covid
• Registrations where Covid was mentioned on the death certificate
• Hospital deaths reportedly related to Covid, as mediated by Worldometer

I start from Week 10 (ending 6 March 2020) because that is when the first death from Covid was reported, though it doesn’t appear there in the ONS, which records date of registration, not decease.

According to this, the death trend from respiratory disease (excluding coronavirus) is slightly above average, though not the highest, but the new virus claimed three times as many victims in Week 15 as from all other respiratory illnesses combined.

There is a temptation to hope that, at least in some cases, the causal connection with Covid is mistaken or tangential. However, if we focus on total deaths from all causes whatsoever, it looks as though the recent increase roughly tallies with the official count for coronavirus victims:

In Week 15, this year’s number is around 6,000 higher than the maximum in the equivalent week a decade before, and 8,000 above the average. Something is certainly going on, and the onus is on the doubters to explain what that may be, if it isn’t the pandemic.

That’s not to say that we have adopted the correct strategy for dealing with it. Here is a report from a 74-year-old professor in Canada:

‘We live in an Ontario health district about the size of Connecticut (with ~200,000 population), in a small city with a medical school. Our public health officer in January alerted nursing homes and hospitals to prepare, e.g. get supplies and train staff for higher hygiene standards. Example, auditing handwashing practices in nursing homes. As a result, we have 50 total positive cases, almost all cases traceable to travel. No nursing home outbreaks. No deaths. No ICU care. Two people currently in hospital.’

The floundering in the UK seems to have led, not to lying about the facts (which could be very serious for those involved) but to contradictory advices. For example, first we were told that masks didn’t really make a difference, then that they did, and now that we shouldn’t use them because that would leave the NHS short of supplies.

Good old British ‘muddling through’ has brought us to the brink of absolute disaster more than once in our history, the incompetence perfumed by myth-making and sprinklings of medals. There will be other, quite possibly even worse threats in future; can we begin to prepare for such eventualities systematically, rather than wave COBRA at them like Sooty’s wand?

My two latest pieces on The Conservative Woman

The Government's failure to act on previous analyses and recommendations is what cost our freedom
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/the-terrible-price-of-being-unprepared/

The old and sick are disposable; Britain's death culture becomes more obvious
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/has-the-virus-wiped-out-the-notion-that-human-life-is-special/

FRIDAY MUSIC: Music to panic by, by JD

Oh how the media love to frighten us with their daily onslaught of panic and the "whoopee we are all going to die!" narrative; their daily invitation to thanatophobia.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321939#causes-and-types

And while the world's leading crackpots are drooling at the prospect of vaccinating the whole population to 'protect' us from dis-ease, a much more agreeable and joyful and long lasting immunisation will always be provided by music!