Covid Craziness, by JD

“Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” - often attributed to Einstein but the quote first appeared in a pamphlet by Narcotics Anonymous in 1981

On 23rd March 2020, the Prime Minister announced the first 'lockdown' of the UK in order to prevent the spread of Covid19. This was to be for three weeks and the slogan he used to validate this unprecedented measure was "Stay at home, protect the NHS, and save lives."

There was a second 'lockdown' announced in October but trying to establish exact dates for these first two 'lockdowns' has become increasingly difficult, the announcements together with the applicable rules have been extremely vague and they have usually been couched in emotional language.

Fortunately the MailOnline has been keeping score and today (11th January) is day 294 of that original three weeks or to put it another way, we have completed the 42nd week of those original three weeks!

And now we have another 'lockdown' which may or may not last for three months. Because this is the third such restriction on the population and seemingly more strict than the others, it is safe to assume that the first two did not produce the required result; protect the NHS and save lives.

In accordance with the definition at the head of this page, is it safe to assume that our politicians and their advisers are insane?

If they are not insane then it is obvious that they have no idea what to do next to 'get the virus under control' (their words not mine) but that in itself is a clear denial of the reality of the nature of viruses. Repeating the lockdown and the other restrictive measure is not going to achieve anything and so it is time for the advisers to stand down and to allow other medical specialists to bring some fresh thinking and fresh ideas in order to end the perpetual failures we have endured so far.

Here is a headline from the Daily Mail dated 27th February 2018: "Killer flu outbreak is to blame for a 42% spike in deaths" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5440785/Killer-flu-outbreak-blame-42-spike-deaths.html

"Government figures reveal 64,157 people died in January - significantly higher than the death toll of 45,141 recorded in December.

"It is the highest number since records began in 2006 - and only the second time it has breached 60,000.
'Circulating influenza' was blamed in the report, released today and compiled using data of deaths from each region."

The article goes on to say that 2015 and 2010 also produced an excess of deaths from influenza compared to the average. What we have with the current covid crisis should not be seen as something unprecedented especially as the figures being announced are not exactly reliable. [see below] Apparently all deaths are covid related these days and flu deaths have disappeared!

So in the winter of 2017/18 there were 109,298 deaths as recorded above plus those which would have occurred in February and possibly in the months on either side of the 'winter' months.

If Covid19 is a 'deadly killer virus' as is declared repeatedly by the politicians and their main 'expert' advisers then how would they describe the influenza of 2017/18?

The hyperbole reached peak insanity in June last year when the Inter Parliamentary Union (no I had never heard of them previously either) boldly declared "The COVID-19 pandemic represents the greatest threat to humanity since World War II" and that phrase has been repeated by politicians and 'experts' on many occasions.
https://thenews-chronicle.com/covid-19-pandemic-represents-greatest-threat-to-humanity-ipu/

One of the reasons being given for the recent 'lockdown' is to prevent the NHS from being overwhelmed. That is not a very convincing reason because the NHS is overwhelmed every winter!

Covid19 deaths interactive map:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/deathsinvolvingcovid19interactivemap/2020-06-12

I have checked the map for my area and it tells me there have been 5 deaths, four in March and one in November. Difficult to find exact population because the ONS map as shown is not the same as the actual boundaries but I believe the population is around 7000 so the fatality rate is 0.07%.

I checked also the adjacent boroughs and the percentages were similar with the majority of fatalities occurring in March and April.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/causesofdeath/articles/deathsinvolvingcovid19interactivemap/2020-06-12

On the evidence of the map from the Office Of National Statistics the covid virus had more or less died out by May or June of 2020.

Why have the media headlines and Government announcements not reflected that? Why are the media continuing to press the panic button in what looks like a histrionic attempt to prolong this 'pandemic'?

Why is the Government and its advisers continuing to play 'mind games' with the public?

They are questions without answers until you remember the famous (or should that be infamous?) Milgram Experiment.

"In the 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram famously carried out a series of experiments that forever changed our perceptions of morality and free will. The subjects-or "teachers"-were instructed to administer electroshocks to a human "learner," with the shocks becoming progressively more powerful and painful. 

"Controversial but now strongly vindicated by the scientific community, these experiments attempted to determine to what extent people will obey orders from authority figures regardless of consequences."

Milgram's conclusions were summarised in his book 'Obedience to Authority'
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780062930828?gC=5a105e8b&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI89q9s4mU7gIVxITVCh2NmA7hEAQYAyABEgJ-fvD_BwE

We know from newspaper headlines and the results of opinion polls that a majority of people are now demanding more and harsher lockdowns. The behavioural psychologists among the members of the SAGE committee would or should have known about Milgram and must have known what the result would be from the scare stories of daily death tolls and overwhelmed hospitals. The population or a large part of the population is now in a constant state of fear, or so it seems from all the letters to the press etc. Was that an unforeseen consequence of the Government's handling of the 'crisis' or was it a deliberat attempt to subjugate the people?

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” - Albert Camus

I was reading yesterday Michael Bentine's opinions on how TV and cinema are powerful propaganda tools and can be and have been used to manipulate people.

The continuing propaganda about covid is undoubtedly having a debilitating effect on people's immune systems, the 'worried well' are inducing psychosomatic illness in what were previously healthy bodies.

I said to my chiropractor last year "why doesn't the NHS encourage 'psychosomatic wellness'? and he replied almost instantly "There's no money in it!"

The Government inspired propaganda is a very dangerous thing to do and, in the context of Bentine's book, are these people evil or just insane?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Door-Marked-Summer-Michael-Bentine/dp/0246114053

Wiggia adds this from Godfrey Bloom:

'Let me start with the main statistic, the most important of all yet barely ever mentioned in MSM which like government is obsessed with case numbers, a monstrous irrelevance. The Office of National  Statistics confirms the numbers of deaths from covid19 of people with no previous health issues is circa 2000.'
https://opendialogus.co.uk/godfrey-bloom-a-covid-debrief/

The Darling Buds of Freedom, by Sackerson

UPDATE: Now published on The Conservative Woman, minus (I thought they would) the bit about feet and Ma expecting a third go...

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Last month ITV announced a planned remake of H E Bates’ ‘The Darling Buds Of May’, the series to be called ‘The Larkins’. As it happens, we’re reading the fifth Larkin book, ‘A Little Of What You Fancy’ (1970) and what Bates says there, a generation after the War and shortly before our entry into the Common Market, is relevant historically and to our times also, especially now that we are, to some extent and after years of struggle, Out.

The latest Penguin edition quotes the Spectator on the front cover: ‘A wistful daydream about innocence and happiness.’ Bates is nothing so twee. He is a poet of Eros, a great writer and, through his work, a great teacher.

Pop Larkin is an illiterate wheeler-dealer with a deep love of his large family and his ‘perfick Paradise’ in Kent, reflecting the joy in Nature that Bates’ grandfather taught him in Northamptonshire. Ma is a fertility goddess, shaped like the Willendorf Venus (vital statistics 55-55-55) and, as big women can be, very sensual. The book opens with the two having drink-fuelled morning sex, Ma caressing Pa’s flanks with the soles of her feet, and it’s as she is urging Pop to a third go that he has a heart attack.

What helps him recover is the need to defend the country he loves. The most immediate threat is from developers who are planning a new road right through his property, as part of the preparations of the Channel Tunnel, a project first agreed between the UK and France in 1964 but still in the studies-and-negotiation stage at the time Bates was writing.  

The wider menace is the Common Market. The two elderly Misses Barnwell who have brought the news have views that caused one Amazon reviewer to steam with internationalist indignation but which resonate with Pa, his down-at-heel neighbour the retired Brigadier, Pa’s posh and gorgeous admirer Angela Snow (Ma keeps Pop on a loose leash for the sake of ‘variety’) and others:

‘Do you wish to be swallowed by the Continent? We have been an island for all time, haven’t we? Hasn’t it served us well? Isn’t it our strength, our salvation? Wasn’t it that that saved us during the war? The sea is our defence, isn’t it? Do you want to see it destroyed? […] Do you want us to lose sovereignty?’

We may not have wanted it, but thanks to the dictatorial oddball Ted Heath we got it in 1973, and we stayed in thanks to the pushmi-pullyu Harold Wilson, who led opposition to membership while in Opposition but persuaded us to confirm it by referendum when he was in power two years later, threatening us with shortages of ‘FOOD and MONEY and JOBS’.

Like Bates, from whose Kentish barn conversion he witnessed the aerial express trains of Goering’s bombers heading for London, the tiny but tough Barnwells looked defiantly across the Channel during the war: ‘There was often an artillery bombardment going on and often a battle in the air and sometimes it was terrific fun.’

Bates earned the right to his feelings more directly, as a Flying Officer directed to live with and write about the fighter and bomber squadrons, with their terrible losses and the premature ageing of the young men. He also, in a still-unpublished but superb HMSO pamphlet, told the story of the second and even more desperate night-time Battle of Britain, one that might have finished us had Hitler not turned East. Then there were the doodlebugs – he heard the crash as one destroyed his local church at Little Chart – and the V2 rockets (he wrote about them, too).

Even after victory, there were losses. Britain was bust, and Pop’s older genteel neighbours are all ‘kippers and curtains’, depending on Supplementary Benefit to eke out their microscopic pensions. It’s worth remembering that when Field-Marshal Montgomery came home he turned down the millions that Parliament was offering to vote him, because the country needed the money more – despite Monty himself having no home but a couple of caravans. Pop’s Australian nurse likes the old, shabbily-dressed Brigadier: ‘He was a bit of the real old, vanishing England, a relic of the old imperial.’

On the other hand, there was new money coming in.  In an earlier book, a City financier buys a country mansion close to Pop, who tells him there is no shortage of potential household staff (but doesn’t say they will be hop- and fruit-picking all summer); now others are jaunting into the countryside to shoot pheasant, so Pop has started to breed birds for their target practice. Another newcomer is an unfriendly Communist professor of physics who has bought a holiday cottage next door to poor Edith Pilchester; while the latter is baking for Church bazaars and sewing cushions for unmarried mothers, the former’s love of humanity is abstract and he opines that ‘there are few innocents left. And no poor.’ No need for charity.

The Welfare State is spoiling the next generation: at the village shop (the sight of a man buying ice creams for his truckload of children in the 1950s was what inspired Bates’ Larkin series), Edith is counting her pennies for her purchases while a slatternly young woman is loading her basket with food from all countries – in 1946 she’d have found bread on ration, thanks to President Truman’s abruptly turning off our national credit – and complaining bitterly about the lack of Roquefort and escargots, when not smacking her little boy and buying him off with crisps.

This isn’t simple snobbery from the author. Bates began with nothing and was destined for a long, ill-paid and hardworking life in Northampton’s boot and shoe industry, but escaped thanks to an inspirational, war-wounded teacher and his own iron will to become a professional writer, at whatever cost.

The first Larkin book was a shout for joy in life, against the misery and privations of war, and a libertarian attitude to fleshly matters which was not cold-hearted and louche but an acceptance of human nature and impulses, refusing to make a fuss about things such as teenage pregnancy when so much more important, tragic things had happened. Bates defied the mean-spirited and hypocritical; he was an English romantic without rose-tinted lenses, and with an intuitive passion for the land and its people, showing how their hearts could be. Innocent, but not ignorant.

Now we are Out, mostly, with the hope that in time we will be altogether free. What shall we do with our country?

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Useless and collected, by Wiggia

This was in some ways a follow up to my last post about robots, but you will have to indulge me as I got carried away with the task. Initially it was about useless items we collect and hoard, something that has again come to light in the Wiggiatlarge household on the pretence of moving house again; the ultimate reasons never to move or try to move unless it is imperative will be documented at a future date.

It started where else but in the shed, then gravitated to the garage and finally the loft, but during the compilation items still for sale that stood the test of time in the useless or ridiculous stakes became too good not to include .

We can all remember? those newspapers that had ads in the back pages at weekends with badly drawn images of aids for the incontinent, bath aids, loo seat height devices, torches on headbands so we could all play at being jewellers and sundry other pseudo medical aids that kept us amused on a wet Sunday morning - I have managed not to include any of the latter here, though modern versions of similar items keep the flag flying, so what you have below is a melange, lovely word, of the best and worst of both worlds.

The shed should be a good starting point for most people, not so much for me as garden tools and equipment have all had professional use and I really only purchased high quality items as the old maxim ‘you get what you pay for’ is a pretty good one to stand by. Nonetheless a couple of gems remained...

A bulb planter. Had it for years, only attempted to use it once: useless, they gum up with soil and it takes longer to clean them than it does to plant fifty bulbs using a spade, but I still have it and cannot for the life of me remember actually buying it!

A lawn edger with a split blade. Why do I keep it? It belonged to my grandfather who was a keen gardener and when he died my mother thought it would be nice if I took some of his gardening tools. Why this one survived I have no idea, put your foot on it and it bends, what's the point?

Items I came across but do not own include weed extractors, various that simply don’t work, and a long-lived and still useless item: the spiked lawn aerating sandals that pull off when you lift your foot; yet they still find buyers.

The garage yielded items of note: a box containing cogged belts from sixties Ford race engines; a box of various solid tubes of sealants, these must be one of the most wasteful items known to man, unless you are a builder you never finish the tube and sometimes hardly start, only to find the next time if ever you go back they have gone solid. Add to that various foams that have dispensers you can never clean.  

And another item that we all have but never work, the adjustable wrench; I found three. All do the same: after the first turn they work loose on the nut, you tighten then repeat, so I then exchange for a proper spanner!

In among the dozens of paint brushes, knife strippers and all the painting paraphernalia, two really useless items emerged, and again they are still there: the paint edgers, one a metal plate and one of foam; the metal one allows paint to seep underneath and the foam one leaves a smudged edge you have to touch up with a paint brush! In the bin they went.

There were also several complete sets of screwdriver bits of which 70% were never used but you keep in case, and - a good one this - a used-once-only 100mm core drill for a 100mm hose vent that of course needed a 105mm core drill to create a hole it could pass through.

Below another good idea at the time, about forty years ago, was the auto dent puller, guaranteed to remove all small dents as long as the surface is perfectly flat or the suction will not work - and none of us have car bodies with perfectly flat panels; so there it sits still pristine in its little box, such joy.

Also for the bin was the electric tile cutter, unused for so long the motor had rusted solid. This shared a box with an electric paint spray system that I used in our first house when I renovated it, there was the opportunity to remove all the doors and spray them which I did with much success and it hasn’t seen daylight since 1968; please...

Indoors the usual boxes of computer cabling that will come in useful but never does as they keep changing the connectors; oh and a CD printer attachment from a long dead printer - does anyone actually ever use these?

Three solid suitcase that have been round the world from the days when you could actually take luggage with you and being solid no one wants any more; skip.

No joy in the kitchen as the wife, boringly, keeps a tight ship, so no little gems as seen below that I have included after a quick rummage through the Lakeland catalogue that always seems to be in the news rack but from which the wife only buys foil and more foil.

This I had to include: the banana slicer. Slower than a knife but not nearly as much fun, and the knife lacks the innuendo that this picture provides, it makes your eyes water, here being used to show its dual role as a sausage slicer!

You can add other slicers to the mix that will never make a knife redundant: avocado, onion, apple etc. And you can add those auto potato and fruit peelers.

A twirling spaghetti fork puts in an appearance for those who cannot twirl and it even gives the direction of the twirl, which is nice.

To keep you amused while concentrating on other things, the Potty Putter solves that problem and brightens up a rather dull room in the house.

This is a good old perennial favourite: the head torch, it's always been such a good idea going back to the days when the meter ran out and you needed a torch, preferably on the head, to put money in the slot. There's no longer a need for that, nor - as in the picture - a use for one on a dark night under the bonnet of the car, as cars today are not repairable by ordinary mortals and you just look silly. Mind you I did come across one last year one night as a cyclist coming towards me had one on his head and as it moved around nearly blinded me, such is the advance of LED lighting; the old batteries and bulb would most likely have gone out by then.

Still, they might still come in useful if you take up home jewellery assembly; or potholing.

Two personal aids to finish with. Firstly the electric ear dryer; this one gives itself away when you read the notes on how to use: ‘first remove excess water with a towel’ hmmmmm...

And finally for the man who has everything other than hair, I leave you with this:

Goodnight!

Sackerson's latest on The Conservative Woman: is abortion advice impartial?

Published today here:
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/impartial-advice-on-abortion-yeah-right/

THREE days after a couple of billion Christians worldwide celebrate the official birthday of their Saviour comes the Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the young children killed by Herod as he tried unsuccessfully to eliminate the baby he thought of as his future rival. This is an appropriate time to reflect on the modern killing of the unborn, which in 2019 in England and Wales was conducted on a scale unprecedented since it was legalised in 1967. The total was 209,519.

It is difficult to be objective on this issue. There are so many conflicting ethical and religious viewpoints, complicated by a tendency to choose a start date for human life that suits the conclusion one wishes to reach. That said, it is odd that the number of terminations should be so high when childbirth is so safe, no family however large in our country is threatened by starvation and the social prejudice against unmarried mothers has virtually vanished.

Who to turn to for advice? Is that advice likely to be impartial, or influenced by money?

In 2011, as Parliament considered Conservative MP Nadine Dorries’s proposed amendments to the Abortion Act, the Guardian’s Polly Curtis attempted a ‘reality check’. I don’t especially wish to criticise Curtis’s journalism per se, but her article is still one of the first to appear in a Google search on the matter, so it’s a good starting point.

Curtis reported pensions campaigner Frank Field’s view: ‘It is a general principle that advice and services should be separate. I have no evidence of that [biased advice]. But we had no evidence of mis-selling of pensions until people investigated.’

Boldly (in my opinion, which is moderately sceptical of ‘fact-checkers’, self-appointed independent judges and their like), Curtis offered a ‘Verdict’: ‘The private abortion services are charities that reinvest their profits into their services. There is no evidence that they are motivated to encourage women to have abortions because they will financially benefit.’

Bias has more possible motives and forms than the merely financial. It’s been over twenty years since Sir William Macpherson accused the Metropolitan Police of ‘institutional racism’ and lately people have been exploring the notion of ‘unconscious bias’, something already spawning an industry for corporate consultancy.

Taking the latter first, Sartre remarked to someone who sought his guidance that the enquirer had in a manner already decided what he wished to hear, in making his choice of adviser – he could have gone to a priest if he’d wanted a different view. Similarly, when a woman who is pregnant approaches the British Pregnancy Advice Service (BPAS), she may be at least part way towards a decision to abort, even before she’s crossed the office’s threshold.

As to the institution itself, would anyone who felt strongly that abortion was morally wrong try to join BPAS? Even if they did, could the organisation, knowing their opinion, sensibly accept them as an employee, whose viewpoint would be slanted and potentially subversive of the charity’s work?

Now let’s return to the money. Does running as a charity mean that financial considerations are irrelevant? One needs to drill a bit deeper. It may not be set up to make a profit, but it certainly provides lots of paid work for advisers, medical staff etc, and some at the top are very well-remunerated – BPAS’s 2019 accounts show that ten senior people earned over £100,000 per year, excluding pension contributions. (see p.27)

Years ago I noted a shop in Birmingham’s Bull Ring styling itself the ‘Solid Fuel Advisory Service’; I hardly think its advice to customers was going to be ‘get a gas fire, mate.’ BPAS’s raison d’être is advice on contraception, abortion, vasectomy and sterilisation, plus some related mental health support; so its standard line is unlikely to be ‘have the kid, and the more the merrier!’

It may not be possible to have utterly impartial abortion advice (or even seek it with a completely open mind); but perhaps separating advice from ‘sales’ would help. I think Frank Field (his unseating was such a loss to Parliament, and us) was right.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Apollo's Fire, by JD

Named for the classical god of music, healing and the sun, Apollo’s Fire is a GRAMMY®-winning ensemble. The period-instrument orchestra was founded by award-winning harpsichordist and conductor Jeannette Sorrell, and is dedicated to the baroque ideal that music should evoke the various Affekts or passions in the listeners. Apollo’s Fire is a collection of creative artists who share Sorrell’s passion for drama and rhetoric.

https://apollosfire.org/about/apollos-fire/

Although they describe themselves as a baroque ensemble it does not mean that they confine themselves to 'baroque' music. They also perform traditional Appalachian music which is descended from the music of Scottish and Irish immigrants to the New World. And they are equally at home with the music of the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain after La Reconquista.

The first video here is their introduction to who and what they are which includes excerpts from their varied programme.

Assange: a good day to bury bad news, by Sackerson

The good news is that Julian Assange is not to be extradited to the USA and seems likely to be freed soon. The bad news is that magistrate Baraitser appears to have conceded some highly dangerous principles in favour of the US:

'The judgement is in fact very concerning, in that it accepted all of the prosecution’s case on the right of the US Government to prosecute publishers worldwide of US official secrets under the Espionage Act. The judge also stated specifically that the UK Extradition Act of 2003 deliberately permits extradition for political offences.'

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/01/julian-assange-imminent-freedom/

It's certainly delighted the Americans:

'While we are extremely disappointed in the court's ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised,' the [US] justice department said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55528241

Would these rights (re alleged political offences) also extend to the European Union?* China?**

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*as per the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement reached on 24 December 2020: 'surrender and replacement arrangements for the European Arrest Warrant'

https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/en/topics/brexit/uk-eu-tca-law-enforcement-and-judicial-cooperation-in-criminal-matters

**Bilateral UK Extradition Agreements - Hong Kong; Bilateral UK MLA Agreements - China

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/516418/Treaty_List.pdf

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: A robotic future? by Wiggia

Those of us of a certain age can recall the early films at our weekly outings to Saturday morning pictures like Flash Gordon and aliens from outer space that depicted those fledgling robots and telekinetic beings with devices that could transport one about the planets, all jaw-dropping for us as children and a portent for things to come.

Ever since those days we have been constantly told that within 5/10/20 years robots would be doing mundane tasks around the house and a life of decadence awaited us as we hailed our robot to bring us more drinks.

As with most predictions it hasn’t happened, certainly not in the way foretold. Robotics are well established in industry, but outside of assembly lines and laboratories they are still a rare commodity.

Is that about to change? In many ways it has already started; the personal robot may still be a long way off but methods to ease the drudgery of life are becoming ever more self evident.

Little by little ever more items are chipped and programmed to automatically do the job for us, from the programming on the now humble washing machine to the touch screen in cars. They are signs of the way things are going; whether much of it is desirable or necessary is another matter.

The automobile has seen a lot of electronic input in recent years. The coming of the EV will see almost total digitalisation of controls and functions, eventually culminating in driverless cars. The problems in achieving the latter are enormous and solutions nowhere near ready, but they are coming down the line in one form.

Yet what of those functions now included in ever growing numbers in such things as automobiles? So much today that is offered electronically is geared towards the young but do even they use all of it? The functions on a modern car's touch screen (apart from being a very unsafe way of communicating in a moving car, another subject) seem to be there because of a race among manufacturers to provide the biggest range of items simply because they can. A friend's recently purchased Mercedes bore that fact out and even he says that he is almost frightened to touch much of it as he has no idea what is there; the handbook is a miniature Encyclopedia Britannica; it is absurd how much is electronically controlled as so little is ever used.

He’s impressed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I know only too well in my comparatively simple car that I only use in the range of ten per cent of that in front of me outside of the mandatory speedometer, fuel gauge etc. The rest is not only redundant, I can only guess what lurks beneath the touch screen as I have no known use for it all.

The young today are glued to their mobiles. A mobile phone has become for them a replacement for so much that it is doubtful they have the knowledge to communicate without one, and I read (a sad indictment of our times) that the NHS, 'she who must be revered', is setting up clinics for children who are addicted to the things and show violent tendencies if any one tries to cut their user time down - indeed a child who plays video games for 14 hours a day threatened his mother when she tried to take the phone/tablet away, though one has to ask how does a school kid get to spend that time playing games that long and get away with it.

VW have just announced they are trialling robotic EV chargers, thereby circumventing the need for chargers to be installed at great cost everywhere. They even talk of them being able to connect with the car while the owner is away - sounds good, but we have seen what happens to electric scooters and the like when not supervised; yobs attacking electric chargers could give a whole new meaning to shock tactics!

What the video shows is that the good idea, on paper, has some downsides: you have to park the things somewhere and what if a car hits one or they ignore pedestrians in the street etc.; and do we really want these mobile bins? Remember there are two of them to set out and collect, so rather large objects, hurtling about everywhere on the pavements and crossing roads... nah, once again I don’t think this has been thought through; in an enclosed garage maybe, on the streets, not so much.

The item that prompted this short piece was in the Times and told the story of how LG the South Korean electronics giant want to take white goods a stage further in the innovation stakes.

They are introducing a refrigerator that that opens by voice command. The reasoning is a bit spurious, to put it mildly: “No longer will shoppers have to struggle to open the fridge door with arms full of groceries.” Two things there: I have never known anyone with 'arms full of groceries' even try to open a fridge door; and if the door opened on voice command you would still be standing there with arms full of shopping. There is no way you could put the bloody shopping in the fridge unless you do the sensible thing and put the shopping down. 

LG claim the feature will make time spent in the kitchen “more productive and convenient”; hmmm.

Naturally it has a Coronavirus slant and benefit as you would touch surfaces less! The phrase 'grasping at straws' comes to mind.

The Japanese just can’t leave anything as it was. With this in the house I imagine many people would never leave the bathroom.

You know and I know that will not stop this type of feature/gimmick gaining traction. I suppose one plus would be if the feature failed to work you could vent your spleen at the fridge door rather than the wife.

It goes without saying that the feature can be linked to that ludicrous Amazon ‘voice assistant’ Alexa so as well having the time told you, the weather report, and who's top of the pops, it will also be able to tell you what is in the fridge without opening the door. This, LG say, 'will save significant amounts of energy'; how is not laid out. As in the normal world you only open the fridge to take things out or put things in, any saving is in the minds of the inventors of this technology.

There are several other plusses added, such as an app for the phone that can receive messages from your fridge when you are shopping suggesting recipes using what is still in the fridge - oh, please! And it can tell you if you left the fridge door open; in that case, surely this oh-so-clever feature would be able to close the same door as it can open... oh no, you are too far away to shout at it.

Fear not, more is to come. Remember the days when you had built-in Hoover pipes in every room so you did not have to carry the machine round, just plug in hose and cleaning head? This was a feature that was going to revolutionise home cleaning and it died a death in the time it took to read the advert. That is just a foretaste of the delights lined up for us: the 'internet of things' is coming to a home near you and soon we are told, household objects (and the body of the house?) will take actions on behalf of the owner without prompts.

This will mean the fridge will order more milk while sensors in the wall will call a plumber if they detect a leak. What could possibly go wrong! With cars the highest incidence of failure today is in the electrical systems; transfer that to a house and the potential for trouble is endless.

Not that all is useless overkill. The phone app that means you can turn on/off your heating or cooker on the way home can make sense if you live alone and work irregular hours, but so much else with time becomes more bother than it’s worth, the internet itself has in some ways become self-defeating.

The convenience of shopping, banking etc. from home is nullified by necessary precautions. In the case of internet banking, there are additional measures because those institutions can’t guarantee safety, so they are putting the onus back on the customer to provide extra levels of security. Instead of clicking on with a password to your banking account you now have also answer a question, add the last four numbers in reply to another question and then add a code number you have asked for on your phone using your ‘unique’ ID. Simples! It would be easier to walk into your bank branch - if they still existed .

These extra levels of security apply now to everything you use on the internet. All passwords are to be remembered and not written down - hundreds of them! Even using a password manager is not the full answer as the very good free ones are prone to lose all your details during a Windows update or crash, as I and others have discovered; that’s when those bits of paper with the details written down that you should not have lying about come into their own as the only way back into the same sites. 'One step forward, two back' comes to mind.

We have become obsessed with digital gadgets, the fascination stemming from items like the 'speak your weight' weighing machine of years gone by and extending to the sat nav and all the other aids to modern living. Some have a place, some think they do; others are, well, shall we say misused? There is the case of the fitness fanatic who as so many do went on a run with his heart monitor on his wrist; he stopped to speak to another runner and they exchanged peak heart rate numbers, and just after he gave his he dropped dead of a heart attack. At least he found his limit.

No, we cannot stop the advance of robotics in their various forms. Much will become the new normal as has been said a lot lately and many features/items will end up in cupboards along with the endless kitchen items beloved by Lakeland customers which are for display only or used once and discarded. Some will survive; I won't.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Hogmanay Hangover Edition, by JD

Why do we do it? Simple really, we enjoy it. We enjoy losing ourselves in conviviality especially after this bad, mad year. For centuries, possibly millenia, it has been an important safety valve for society and a perfect example of this is the medieval Feast of the Fools -

'The Feast of Fools was a festival celebrated annually on January 1st throughout Europe and particularly France. It was a cherished day, for it was the one day where Christian morals were abandoned and replaced with ridiculous rites. Serious Christians were allowed to create parodies of church rituals.

'During the festival, performers wore animal masks and women's clothing, sang obscene and bawdy hymnal songs, drank excessively, hurled manure at bystanders, ran and leaped through the church, rolling dice at the alter, howling through the streets and other scurrilous acts that parodied the liturgy of the church. In addition, people would drive about on carts through the streets to rouse laughter from their fellows through performances that involved indecent gestures and language.'

http://medievaltimestheatre.weebly.com/the-feast-of-fools.html

Or, as Ringo puts it more succinctly in the first video -

'Here's to the nights we won't remember
with the friends we won't forget
May we think of them forever
as the days that were the best!'

 

 

"You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." - Dean Martin

"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." - Dorothy Parker

Freedom

Fighting Project Fear in 2016 - https://twitter.com/rhodri/status/745516827145441280

June 18th 1940: cartoon by David Low in the Evening Standard

Facebook: dumb and dumber

I tried today to share an interesting item with my brother, via a Facebook post; but a robot censor intervened and their complaint system has somehow failed.

Here is what I tried to say the second time, through the electronic muzzle strapped to my face by FB; this too was blocked:

__________________________________

I was going to preface this with an ironic comment* about recent allegations re these two countries but the moronic and totalitarian system of censorship at FB automatically interfered, saying 'Your post couldn't be shared, because this link goes against our Community Standards.'

When I explained, saying 'This is an historical essay showing how Russia prevented the breakup of the USA despite the enmity towards the latter of France and Great Britain. May I say I deeply deplore your system of automatic censorship,' it replied 'Your request couldn't be processed. There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.'

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/12/25/why-russia-saved-the-united-states/

_______________________________________

*using the phrase 'Russia collusion'; but what's above was also blocked, so it's the link itself. Presumably FB is actually blocking certain websites or subjects. 

It's time high-handed monopolists like Zuckerberg were called to account. They have clearly become publishers rather than mere platforms.

Sex, cruelty and antisemitism; by Sackerson

Two more episodes from the 1946 autobiography of E L Grant Watson, looking back on a late-Victorian childhood.

(a) Grant Watson's mother sent him to a newly-established experimental school, Bedales. The headteacher seems to have hung back from imposing the discipline common in standard public schools but unfortunately this merely allowed a culture of bullying to develop among the boys. Attempting to rectify the situation indirectly, the head began to admit girls, but the conventional sexual restraints of the age dominated; the author (who later went through Freudian analysis) thought, harmfully:

'The headmaster, that highly cultured, idealistic and all too pure repressor of desires, was, of course, the father-substitute. He was the 'Old Man', and he, in the unconscious, possessed the girls who were forbidden to us. We, his sons, lived under the almighty power of Taboo. But we were allowed less outlet than were those suppositional sons of the First-father. His sons were driven out into the wilderness to practise homosexuality. But no such relief for us! Smut of any kind, even a hint of it, was the worst of sins, and our naturally developing sexual urges must find other expression: in cruelty, in an inflated idealism, in fantasies of superiority, and every kind of priggishness and prudishness, and in fact in any kind of high-tension absurdities...' (my emphasis)

Does this go some way to explain the rigidity and cruelty of seventeenth century English Puritans, and the modern Islamist Puritans? Perhaps; though human aggression and cruelty seem common anyway. Still, far less dangerous to see ourselves as sinners than as the Elect.

(b) In 1900, he was sent to Heidelberg for the summer/autumn, to learn science because it was not taught well in his English school (perhaps, in many English schools). A German he met on the sea-voyage 

'talked with great enthusiasm about the glories of Germany and the inferiority of England. Germany was going to rule the world. He was indeed a prophet of the Herrenvolk...'

In southern Germany he found the people punctiliously polite, friendly and hospitable, yet one day:

'I was in a restaurant with Fräulein Müller and Herr Burn [a Scottish student at Heidelberg University]. A group of German officers came in; there was something not to their liking; discussion and raised voices. A group of peoplewho were sitting at a table nearby got up abruptly and retired. What was the fuss about? I enquired. The officers had objected to the presence of some Jews. That the Jews had had to go set me wondering. I had not been Jew-conscious before, except in so far that I knew that Jews usually got bullied at school.' (my emphasis)

This was long before the little Austrian corporal made himself felt. I haven't read much about anti-Semitism in both countries during the nineteenth century, but clearly there was a deep and very nasty vein of it.

A very happy Christmas to all, from Wiggia

At the end of what can only be described as a horrible year on so many fronts, with pestilence and politicians vying for the top spot on most people's hate list there has been little to raise a smile and less to raise a glass to.

Of all those stories that have been swamped by the endless bad news and prediction one stood out for me; I suppose in a year when man buggered up almost everything he got involved with an animal story was the perfect antidote.

These elephants were originally said to have raided a corn wine store in southern China and got drunk. The story went viral and the picture above of them sleeping it off was shown world wide. Subsequent information claimed they were not drunk but just resting; by then no one cared, it was just such a good story true or otherwise, after all we have lived through a year of disinformation and all of it was doom and despair, this story was not.

So sleeping it off or just resting, either way the elephants showed the best way to beat the blues: find a nice spot lay down and forget about it all.

Cheers and a happy New Year!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Seven for Christmas Day, by JD

Nollaig Chridheil - Feliz Navidad - Merry Christmas !

No room at the inn, by Sackerson

Some things stick in the mind. 

London, c. 1890: having lost her two-year-old second son, the wife of a successful barrister has been sent on a long sea-voyage with her toddler first son to Australia to recuperate. While there she learns of the death of her husband from typhoid fever, leaving her with no savings and only a modest life insurance payout. She returns to England and the house lease and furniture have to be sold. What to do next?

Almost before my mother had become aware that she might be regarded as a poor, and consequently unwelcome relative, she had called on one of her elder brothers for advice and help. She was told that he was out; her sister-in-law did not ask her to come in, but sent her a verbal message to the door reminding her that her brother was a busy man. This was the only snub that my mother laid herself open to. From that time, she fought her battles alone.

From the autobiography of E. L. Grant Watson, 'But To What Purpose'

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Photo Journalism (part 2), by Wiggia

It is very easy to tip over from photojournalists to photographers, and I have tried not to do that. Especially where the press is concerned, photographers can often be photojournalists by accident but not by a general desire to follow a particular subject and record it.

The press photographer has been hit a lot harder than the photojournalist in this digital age. 'Citizen journalists' as the press now likes to call them (horrible term, conjures up images of Robespierre), who record on their mobile phones do have a role to play as mentioned earlier - the immediacy of someone on the spot is impossible to replicate; but two problems emerge: one is quality, a snatched shot which the majority are, with a poor quality mobile phone, may well have the immediacy but will lack all that a professional photographer can extract from the same scene; also many of these citizen journalists are attached to and travel with causes which means the view of whatever is recorded will be biased towards that cause.

The endless video recordings taken of protests etc, from the top of buildings and out of windows are not exactly front line journalism. Even if it is all that is available, we are losing something with this rush to save money and have the public supply all the images.

Back to photojournalists: some specialise in a subject all their working life, they become immersed in it as a daily task and build up significant and important portfolios over time. One such was Walker Evans who was not alone covering the great Depression in the USA but was probably the most prominent.

He is best known for his work with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the great Depression and much of his work is in museums' permanent collections as well as being in retrospectives.

This image of Allie May Burroughs taken in 1936 became a symbol of the depression and was widely distributed.

Several other also became symbols of this period including this family group:

Bud Fields and his family Hale County, Alabama ‘36-37.

When people today talk today about deprivation and ‘food poverty’ they should be made to take a good look at this image.

Evans spent some time in Havana before the depression and during this time met Ernest Hemingway. He gave Hemingway some 40 prints to smuggle out because he thought that the Customs would not allow what could be construed to be ‘negative’ images out of the country, but he had no difficulty taking his own prints out of the country. The prints he gave to Hemingway were found in Havana in 2002 and later exhibited; Hemingway had never taken them with him when he left.

From what is here you could be forgiven for thinking that Evans was very much a ‘human interest’ photographer, but that is not totally accurate. He took some stunning shots of buildings in the deep South and more than one series of retail shop fronts, cafes and the like, plus a fascinating series using a concealed camera on the NY subway, but the Depression and those faces are his abiding legacy. This last one is not from the Depression but was taken in New York's 42nd Street in 1929.

Larry Burrows was an English photojournalist who started in the art department of the Daily Express in 1942. After learning photography there, they were probably the premier newspaper for their photographic output at the time, he moved to an agency, Keystone, and Life magazine.

His break came with Associated Press when he flew in a De Havilland Rapide at an illegal low level, to witness the destruction of the Heligoland U-boat pens in ‘47. It earned him a spread in Life magazine and launched his career.

After spells including covering Suez he then covered the war in Vietnam from ‘62 until his death in a helicopter there in ‘71 when he along with other photojournalists were shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Burrows was known as 'the equipment man' as he travelled with a copious amount of camera gear.

Burrows could never be accused of not getting up close and personal to the horrors of war at great personal risk, a risk that finally took his life.  

The work of Diane Arbus could easily be and often was categorised as the photographing of the freaks, the sub-normal of this world. On the face of it that is exactly what she did, but many of those in the marginalised groups she photographed were selected by her for different reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Arbus

She was the daughter of immigrant Russian Jews who owned a Fifth Avenue department store so she never went without as a child but that did not stop her recording those less fortunate during her photographic years. The Wiki entry for Arbus is long and interesting and needs reading to appreciate what was behind her photographs, some of which even today gave one an uneasy feeling when viewing, but that was the point of them. Her career started in fashion photography and celebrity portraits before her first foray into a different kind of street photography.

Suffering from depression and hepatitis she had huge mood swings and eventually took her own life at the age of 48; she left a note in her diary: ‘Last Supper.’

Woman in a mask

Another English photojournalist that covered the Vietnam war, as so many did, also had a portfolio of work from the streets and a large number of stars of the day and other illuminators. I shall stick with the others here as there is only so much of war chronicles we can take in one sitting, however good, .

Terry Fincher won an unbeaten number of Press Photographer of the Year awards. His career took off after accompanying British forces during the Suez crisis and later when with the Daily Express he did five tours of Vietnam and after that several Middle East and African trouble spots.

This image below of John Surtees on the MV Augusta stands out as a motor racing photo, as the face of concentration of Surtees is so well etched. Of course this was before full face helmets hid the face entirely, but none the less it is an outstanding image by someone not known for his capturing of sports.

The one below of James Stewart has a personal angle: we lived a mile from this airfield and I took gliding lessons there, something I always wanted to do but never got round to, and then never completed! The airfield is owned by the Norfolk Gliding Club who rescued it from development and put out an appeal for funds at the time.

Stewart served with the Army Air Force and flew B-26 bombers from the base and when he heard about the appeal gave generously to save the airfield for posterity and the crews who lost their lives flying from it. The photo is from 1975 when he revisited the site; the renovated control buildings contain a bar with a large picture of Stewart above it from his days serving there.

The next one prompts the question, did ’The Greatest’ Muhammad Ali ever take a bad photo? Probably not yet this one has a different angle and is still instantly Ali.

The image above was taken in 1966, it shows children playing outside the former home of John Christie the murderer, at No 10 Rillington Place. If ever a place lived up to its placement in history this one does, not exactly inviting; yet the children are obviously oblivious to its past.

It would have been easy to put up hundreds of images from those featured above never mind those left out, but I have tried as said earlier to keep it to photojournalists and not photographers, there is a difference in the way they operate.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Eight for Christmas, by JD

A first selection - next on the day itself!

(Since this is a lead-in to Christmas, should we call it SatNavidad?)

Our future is not freedom but as live-in help, by Sackerson

German would-be world-reshaper Klaus Schwab has been making waves via his World Economic Forum, on the subject of 'The Great Reset', allegedly an appropriate response to a panoply of global systemic problems though to me it looks more like another example of centralising power-seekers 'not wasting a crisis.' Sky News Australia's Rowan Dean gives Schwab and the WEF's motley crew a once-over here:

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6199544116001

Back in 2017, Danish MP Ida Auken sketched a millenarian future of passive, possessionless citizenry:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/how-life-could-change-2030/

In 2030:

'I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes...

'When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don't really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.'

Question: what exactly will you think about? Or create? Or develop? This velvet-lined dystopia is designed so that you will change nothing of any importance; the first priority of a successful revolution is to ensure that there will not be another one. Auken's tamed human says:

'Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.'

So, no dreams; they could get you into trouble.

With a certain brutal clarity, US-Mex billionaire Hugo Salinas Price has envisaged a different but parallel scenario: turning the clock back a century or more, to a time when even lowly suburban bank clerks like Charles Pooter had domestic servants. 

Here is a selection from Price's 2013 essay (http://www.oro.plata.com.mx/enUS/More/225?idioma=2):

'If it were not for US government subsidies to unemployment, in the numerous ways in which they are offered, those in more comfortable circumstances in the US might be relieving poverty by taking on numbers of quasi-slaves into their households – to do the cooking, the washing, the cleaning, the gardening, the driving, the taking care of the children...

'If there weren’t so many rules that make hiring quasi-slaves for domestic work so expensive, no doubt a large number of unemployed Americans, amenable to accepting the facts of life, would find working in homes more agreeable than eating in food-kitchens...

'As the century wears on, realities will undoubtedly bring back slavery, at first in the very mild version of the present, but as life becomes harsher, out-and-out slavery will make its reappearance in the world. The imperatives of life will have their way: food, clothing and lodging in return for total obedience and work. This is an aspect of “Peak Prosperity” that has not been examined so far...

'The Democracy of Athens at the time of its greatness, when it became the impossible model for our times, consisted of all of 21,000 Athenians who were free citizens. It did not include 400,000 slaves of said democratic Athenians.

The French Revolution was a welter of blood, a suicidal revolt by middle-class lawyers against an elite that pushed its foreign war-making and demands for money too far; but the Industrial Revolution that made it possible to defeat Napoleon made history look as though it had a direction without swords and guillotines, a path towards increasing prosperity and individual freedom for the lower classes. 

This accelerated with the century of super-cheap energy in the form of oil; and in the aftermath of two world wars, the massive transfers of wealth from the British Empire to the United States plus the yet-to-be-developed markets in the East made it possible to believe the Fred Flintstone model of civic life: a working-class (Americans would say 'middle class') man able to support his family on his industrial wage, own a car and a detached house in the suburbs, have evenings and weekends off, join a Rotarian-type club, go bowling and so on.

But then the rich and powerful sucked up the increases in wealth by giving away the economy to foreigners; and despite attempts to reverse the flow, much of the 're-onshored' production as occurs will be performed by robots and Artificial Intelligence - white-collar middle class, look out. And the Internet - Amazon etc - is breaking the retail-outlet ladder to self-employment and personal independence.

History is turning back from linear to cyclic: work, feed, breed. Chances are, your descendants will 'own nothing and be happy'; as a servant in a rich man's house, or a wage-slave in a multinational company. Money has allowed the emergence of emperors without lands to defend.

And yet, what happened to the rich Mayans? Where are they?

Spare us your old man's dreams, Herr Schwab.

_____________________________________

JD comments:

Three videos to see:

Chairman of the FMF Rule of Law Board of Advisors and a former judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa, Rex van Schalkwyk, delivers opening remarks at an FMF roundtable.

https://youtu.be/V_g3CwEbQtU (The sound is not very clear but it has subtitles)

The Dystopian "Fourth Industrial Revolution" Will Be Very Different from the First One
https://youtu.be/VdhD1SN9vSA

The United Nations and the Origins of "The Great Reset"
https://youtu.be/RhFBzsEErvQ

The Mises Forum videos mention the influence of Bill and Melinda Gates in this urge to reshape everything but as I think I have pointed out on previous occasions those leading(?) the 4th industrial revolution and the great reset are not exactly great thinkers, they lack common sense.*

Here is an example of that from Melinda Gates -

"Melinda together with her husband Bill have been the major funding source for pro-lockdown efforts around the world, giving $500M since the pandemic began, but also funding a huge range of academic departments, labs, and media venues for many years, during which time they have both sounded the alarm in every possible interview about the coming pathogen. Their favored policy has been lockdown, as if to confuse a biological virus with a computer virus that merely needs to be blocked from hitting the hard drive."

https://www.aier.org/article/we-hadnt-really-thought-through-the-economic-impacts-melinda-gates/

That last sentence is a perfect example of 'pious stupidity' ( a phrase I found in the writings of Frithjof Schuon)

* * *

Common sense by the way is not as Einstein described it - 'Common sense is actually nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind prior to the age of eighteen.'

It is in fact a real philosophy espoused by Thomas Reid - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_common_sense_realism

Coming your way soon - the gold rush? by Sackerson

 I was intrigued by Wiggia's inclusion yesterday of the photograph below (Cartier-Bresson, Shanghai, 1948) and had to find out what was going on. It turns out this was a scramble to buy gold before the Kuomintang's currency vapourised.

https://parisdiarybylaure.com/henri-cartier-bresson-travels-to-china-in-1948/