As the risks of Covid-19 are now slowly receding, fresh fears are emerging of a new pandemic, many times as deadly – Singultus 21 – which is likely to require even more stringent lockdown measures, probably stretching well into 2025 and beyond.
Particularly alarming are cases of asymptomatic singultus, challenging the efficacy of the existing tests. The lack of effective tests has led to disquiet as to just how infectious this new pandemic is likely to be.
Governments around the world are being encouraged to “Go early, and go hard” to control the new threat, with everyone over the age of 5 being required to self-isolate for not less than 18 months. Those who are able to obtain a negative test at the end of that period may be able to apply for a singultus passport, with which they will be freed up to go to their nearest shop in order to buy food.
My favourite guitar by far is my classical guitar by Graham Hawkes, a West Australian maker. There are several reasons why it is so wonderful.
I had it made with some insurance money after a couple of guitars, including quite a decent Spanish guitar, was stolen some years ago. I got Graham to make it with a fretboard quite a bit wider than usual guitar, to accommodate the fact that I have really quite large hands. The notion that, “One size fits all” in this regard has always seemed to me downright bonkers. Someone with small hands can get their fingers cleanly between adjacent strings whereas I, with large hands, can reach much further and more easily across the fretboard. Pianists have to put up with keyboards which are either too big or too small for them (relatively speaking) because a piano is not a personal instrument. But a guitar is. Or at any rate, can be, if it is bespoke.
At first, Graham was somewhat reluctant to make the guitar like this. “I do not build freaks”, I seem to recall him saying that one stage. But happily, he was persuaded, and indeed partway through the build he admitted to me that he already liked it himself. Certainly, I can play things on this Graham Hawkes guitar which I cannot play cleanly on any of my other guitars.
The guitar is also great for other reasons. It is very heavy, but has exceptionally thin soundboard. This combination means that it has a depth and subtlety of tone that is entirely missing from cheap guitars. Because of its delicacy, the soundboard is protected on its rim under the right forearm by a subtle armrest.[1]
As a small point, I also like the fact that the top of the peg box is concave instead of convex. This does not matter to the sound, of course, but it is a nice touch which seems to have become a sort of trademark for Hawkes guitars.[2]
Unhappily, there was an accident a couple of weeks ago. My Fender Precision Bass fell over, crashing into my Hawkes guitar and making a hole in the soundboard. I had to send the guitar back to Graham Hawkes in Western Australia, and it is presently on the operating table.
I miss it every day, but hopefully it will be back before too long.
Informed opinion appears to be now gathering about the view that Covid-19 probably originated from the laboratory in Wuhan. There are a number of reasons for this: one of them to do with furin cleavage sites.
What has been going on in relation to this issue has some parallels with the issue of climate change. There are vested interests in play whereby it is potentially career suicide for a biologist to blame the Wuhan laboratory, which (bizarrely, perhaps) has been funded from within the United States, and it was those same people[1] who set the tone by denouncing any suggestion of the laboratory leak is a conspiracy theory, and traducing the evidence by the now fashionable weapon of “fact checking”.
It is an unfortunate side-effect of the development of science that pretty much any useful science these days requires, not the genius or even insight of an individual, but the application of massive team effort. Science has become, in large measure, corporate. It requires very substantial funding. Those who rise to the top are not necessarily the cleverest scientists, but those who show the greatest political ability to climb to the top of their organisations, and to gather in the most funding. This is not an environment in which the traditional strength of science – endlessly questioning – tends to flourish. It is an environment in which corporate interest trumps intellectual curiosity.
It is this factor which apparently explains why the “whistleblowers” who exposed fraudulent manufacture of data concerning the Great Barrier Reef by the James Cook University have been vilified by their colleagues, and even sacked. Climatologists rely upon fear of catastrophic global warming for their funding; as such, they are unlikely to welcome their colleagues pointing out that the Great Barrier Reef is not actually in any great danger at all. Worse, pointing out that the data used to make the catastrophic case is fraudulent is positively traitorous to the interests of the University.
Someone who has a good understanding of these mechanisms is Matthew B Crawford, who is a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In his recent piece Science has become a cartel, he describes how the fake consensus (as he calls it) about the origin of the virus has been collapsing. And he notes this:
The Palestinians have been firing rockets into Israel. Arguably, the best that can be said about these rockets is that they are not very effective: there have been only a handful of casualties in Israel.
Conversely, Israeli reprisals have already killed hundreds of Palestinians.
During World War II, the Germans invaded and laid waste to Greece; Greeks were quite literally starving. Understandably, there were resentful partisans, who occasionally attacked the German soldiers. The German policy was that for every one soldier was killed by the partisans, 100 villagers were shot by way of reprisal. For every German soldier who was wounded, 50 villagers were shot. The Israelis appear to be taking a leaf out of the German playbook.
Does it matter how the Covid-19 outbreak originated? Probably “no” for the purpose of ascribing blame.[1] But “yes” for the purpose of trying to stop it happening again.
As usual, @Ayjchan is the most reliable source of information about what is and isn’t known about the origin of the virus causing covid.
The reference is to Alina Chan of the Broad Institute. My guess is that Matt Ridley is right to trust her expertise. This is what she says about a number of popular fallacies:
The lady in the middle here, mother to the 2 children, is Ari Dennis. She is an adult eductator, according to her website, and does not have a gender, she says.
Neither, she says, do the other members of her family, a menage-a-trois. She has a wife, the lady on the right of the picture, who is non-binary. As is her lover, the chap on the left of the picture. He has a beard, and is built like a brick shit house, which suggests he might be more up the male end of things. Then again, he wears a skirt, which balances the scale just a smidgeon.
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, has professed himself to be very keen on preserving the union of the United Kingdom, and of course the most important element of that union is the union between England and Scotland, the origin of which stretches back to the 17th century, but which was formalised in the early 18th century.
One might ask the question: why? The answer to that question has very probably varied over the years. In earlier times, it was probably much to do with theft: thieving raids by Scotland on the north of England were a real problem for a very long time. But that has long ceased to be a real issue (at any rate, in the same way that it was before).
There are numerous reasons why the English might be rather in favour of Scottish independence, including:
Scots pay less tax than their fair share;
Scots get more public expenditure than their fair share;
Scots get more Parliamentary representation in Westminster than their fair share;
Not only that, but the Scots get double representation. Not only did they elect Scottish SMPs, to represent their interest in the Scottish parliament, but they also get to elect MPs in Westminster to vote on bills that have no application to Scotland at all;
So why did the English establishment not simply say, “Fuck off, and good riddance”?
The real answer to this question, today, might well lie in the East, rather than in the North. If Scotland were to obtain independence, then Scotland would, indubitably, be much poorer. Of itself, one might well ask, “So what?” Over the last few millennia, Scotland has always been much poorer than its neighbours. The Romans never thought it was worth settling there. Neither did the Saxons. Neither did the Normans. By and large, there is not much there which has attracted the powers that be from time to time.
Following the recent elections to the Scottish Parliament, it is worth noting that the SPN won neither the Shetlands nor the Orkney Islands. Both were won by the Liberal Democrats.
Which means that it might be time for Boris to focus on moves for those islands to break away from Scotland. It has recently been noted that the vast majority of Shetlands councillors want an investigation as to whether it might break away from Scotland. Likewise Orkney. And perhaps also the Western Isles.
Matters of constitutional status are for Westminster to decide, and clearly, those decisions need to take into account the wishes of the people most affected by the decisions. The position of Scotland as a whole determined by the recent referendum: Scotland voted to remain UK. Certainly, Nicola Sturgeon is calling for a rerun of that referendum (although perhaps her interests might be better served by continuing to call for such a referendum, rather than by actually getting one) but Boris might well conclude that the next item on the constitutional agenda should properly be status of the Shetlands, Orkney and the Western Isles. Certainly, there is a strong dislike on those islands of rule by Edinburgh, and they may well prefer a direct connection with Westminster, or perhaps a looser rein altogether.
I was outraged to find that the word “trod” is not permitted in The Times’ Polygon puzzle. They allow ridiculous non-words like “lite” but refuse perfectly good words.
But these pages are not about empty gestures. Oh no. And so I have written to the editor of The Times to complain.
It might be that the editorial staff at The Times think that there are more pressing matters of national moment, such that my letter may not make the cut. Hedging against this possibility, I set it out here:
April was a particularly bad month for the climate change industry in the UK.
For a start, it was the coldest April in England since 1922.[1] Not just on any particular day, but averaged over the whole month, and all over the country. According to the models that the warmists rely on, we should be the grip of runaway global warming. So that is decidedly inconvenient.[2]
Equally bad, there were lengthy periods during the month when the extensive wind farms were not producing much electricity at all. They worked okay between 5 April and 8 April, but for the rest of the month, pretty much zilch.[3]
Even worse, the number of C-19 deaths has plummeted, demonstrating that pandemics are an unreliable way of keeping populations scared. Those pesky viruses are not stepping up to the plate at all.
But these pages are not about negativity. Oh no. No doom trolls here! We try to provide solutions. So here we go with this one.
Everybody knows that electric motors and dynamos are much the same thing. Apply an electric current, and the armature goes round and round. Turn the armature round and round, and you get an electric current. So it should be a pretty easy job to adapt half of the windmills out there in the North Sea, turning them from wind turbines into fans.
Then what you do is get the coalmines back into action, and the coal-fired power stations, to produce enough electricity to run those fans. Those fans will get a bit of a breeze going, which will hopefully get the other half of the windmills working again producing electricity. Bingo! Several objectives achieved:
good for the coalmining industry;
good for the power generators. They can probably siphon off a bit of the electricity that will be produced by the coal-fired power stations and put that into the grid;
good for the general population, who get cheap electricity from that siphoning off;
good for the priests of climate change, who will get some “green” electricity even when the wind isn’t blowing (Not much, obviously. But, hey! It is the principle that matters);
good for the wind turbine industry, who will presumably get another massive subsidy from the UK taxpayer to convert half of their windmills into fans;
good for the politicians, who can bask in the glory of having done something useful;
bad for the birds, who will continue to get chopped into pieces. But hey, no plan is perfect.
phenell 