Leaving on Another Lie

Matt Hancock says that those who make the rules have to keep to the rules. That is why, he says, he had to resign.

It was another lie. If it were true, he would have had to resign in May, which is when the video showing him snogging his aide, was captured. The reason he has had to resign was that he got caught, which is quite another thing.

He might have hoped, for a brief moment, that a French attitude might have saved him. In France, they tend to nod approvingly when a middle-aged male politician is seen to be enjoying an extra-marital affair, particularly if the woman in question is reasonably attractive. But here, more exactly, the reason Hancock had to resign was not that he got caught, but that he was not going to be allowed by the great British people to sweep it under the carpet. No, “Next slide, please!” for him this time.

Small protest, not many attended

I understand from the BBC and other mainstream media that several dozen people attended a march in London yesterday to protest Covid rstrictions, but their complaints were quickly were put in the shade by supporters of Matt Hancock.

This is one of the many videos that failed to “get the message”.

Here is another one that slipped through the net.:

What Peoples Believe

I have again been doing some reading of the Second World War. A couple of things in particular have struck me this time around.

The first is the quite extraordinary disparity between the damage done in those six years and anything that is happening today. People today talk about Covid 19 or climate change as though they were serious threats, but these things simply do not weigh in the scales compared with what millions of people went through the Second World War. We seem to have lost all sense of balance.

The other is the quite extraordinary extent to which populations in the Second World War were prepared to believe what their governments told them, when it should have been blindingly obvious that they were being lied to. Surely, it should have been obvious to the population of Germany by the summer of 1944 that they had no prospect of winning the war. And yet families were prepared to listen to the German government, send their children to war and, in many cases, to their unnecessary death.  The willingness of the Japanese to believe their government is even more remarkable.  Again, it should have been entirely obvious to the Japanese people by not later than the beginning of 1945 that they also had no prospect of winning. But even more remarkably, not only did the overwhelming majority of the Japanese people believe what were clearly lies about their prospects: they were also prepared to do themselves immense harm in reliance on those lies.

Audi alteram partem

The principle of Roman law – audi alteram partem – requires that we should listen to the other side before coming to a judgement. There is a lot to be said for it.

But it is not being applied by governments or the mainstream media in respect of vaccines. I am not by any stretch of the imagination an anti-vaxer. Vaccines have done a huge amount of good over the last century or so, considerably reducing or eradicating the risk of a number of dangerous illnesses.

Neither do I doubt that the mRNA vaccines that have now been deployed in response to Covid 19 are reasonably effective. We hear a lot about that. Not so much about the dangers.

Clearly, there is not much profit to be had from listening to anti-VAX nutters.  But there are a few sensible voices, such as that of Mike Yeadon, former vice president of Pfizer, who have sought to look at both the pros and the cons of these mRNA vaccines, and look at the evidence from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) in the United States. His analysis of the evidence is that, for children, the vaccine is approximately 50 times more dangerous than Covid 19, in particular because it deliberately introduces spike proteins into the human body, and it is well established that this carries with it the risk of blood clotting.  As I understand him, he is not saying that the vaccine is particularly dangerous; its risks are relatively low.  But for children, the risks of covid are close to non-existent. And on this basis, mRNA vaccines more harm than good when administered to children.  If you present your child for vaccination, she probably will not die from it. But she might, and you have exposed her to this risk for no very good reason.

#kneelingformurder

If one is charitable, one might assume that the English footballers #kneelingformurder at the start of their Croatia match yesterday do not know that the principal effect of the Black Lives Matter movement, which they show their deference, has been to hugely increase the number of murders in the United States, disproportionately of black people.

It is unsurprising that they were booed by some in the crowd. It is interesting to compare the reports. Woke outlets report that a few boos were soon drowned out by cheers, whereas other outlets such as Arab News 24 report:

In a statement early on Sunday, the English Football Association (FA) “encouraged” supporters opposed to the protest action not to boo the team as it ‘took the knee’. But many of the restricted 22,500 crowd at Wembley expressed their opposition to the gesture.

As usual, the woke are more interested in preaching than in accuracy.[1] They tell us what they think we ought to know. They evidently do not think we ought to know that the effect the Black Lives Matter movement has been that there have been hundreds of additional murders in the United States. Not one or two. Not a few dozen. Hundreds. Not only are there less police, but the police that remain are less willing to stop criminals, either on foot or in cars. I have previously

Who should be at the G7 this week?

Well, not the EU, obviously. Not a country.

On the basis of GPD, both Italy and Canada are chancers here:

Country           Nominal GDP in trillions/PPP Adjusted GDP in trillions/Annual Growth %/GDP Per Capita in thousands[1]
United States       $21.43                                 $21.43                                           2.2%                          $65,298
China                     $14.34                                 $23.52                                           6.1%                          $10,262
Japan                     $5.08                                   $5.46                                             0.7%                          $40,247
Germany               $3.86                                   $4.68                                             0.6%                          $46,445
India                      $2.87                                   $9.56                                              4.2%                          $2,100
United Kingdom $2.83                                   $3.25                                              1.5%                           $42,330
France                   $2.72                                   $3.32                                              1.5%                           $40,493.9
Italy                       $2.00                                   $2.67                                              0.3%                          $33,228.2
Brazil                     $1.84                                   $3.23                                             1.1%                            $8,717
Canada                  $1.74                                   $1.93                                              1.7%                           $46,195

But then again, their GDP per capita is way ahead of India and Brazil. And of course China.

Black Lives Matter Matters

It seems that the BLM movement has indeed made a difference: a lot more people are being murdered.

The New York Times summary of the data is this:

Homicide rates in large cities were up more than 30 percent on average last year, and up another 24 percent for the beginning of this year, according to criminologists … Homicides in Portland, Ore., rose to 53 from 29, up more than 82 percent; in Minneapolis, they grew to 79 from 46, up almost 72 percent; and in Los Angeles the number increased to 351 from 258, a 36 percent climb … Homicides in Philadelphia are up almost 28 percent, with 170 through May 9, compared with 133 in the same period last year; in Tucson, Ariz., the number jumped to 30 from 17 through May 13, an increase of 76 percent.

Why? Trump supporters might blame Biden, but a more plausible explanation is the BLM movement, for a number or reasons.

First, the timing. Let’s start with the murder rate in Minneapolis. The increase in the murder rate there coincides more or less exactly with the George Floyd riots encouraged by BLM.[1]

It is not just murders which went up, and stayed up. The Minneapolis police Department also

Pending no more

I do not pretend to be an expert on WordPress.

On removing some comments on this site from a gentleman with some very weird ideas about the Fenwick family’s history, I discovered quite a few other, perfectly welcome, comments that I have failed to moderate one way or the other over the past monhs. Well, years, really. I guess they just got buried by the usual avalanche of emails and the demands of work.

Of course I welcome interesting comments. Or funny comments. Or pretty whatever people want to say that is not offensive or downright bonkers. And so I say sorry to those whose comments have only belated been approved this morning!

IT Mysteries

Now, here is a funny thing.

Last night, my darling Louise was in the library chortling away whilst watching The Inbetweeners on Netflix. The next moment, a cry of despair. The Internet connection had cut out. No Netflix at all. Was it something that I was doing another room? I was not.  I was in another room, trying to fix the steering wheel malfunction on Grand Prix Legends, and not using the Internet at all

So, last night and again this morning, I tried this, that, and the other to fix the Netflix problem. I moved the Wi-Fi extender. I set the IP address on the Panasonic DMR-PWT560 set-top box to manual, since that was telling me that I had a Wi-Fi connection but not an Internet connection. I changed the DNS setting. I tried powering up and powering down. I tried all sorts of other things. None of it to any avail.

But then, bizarrely, I saw a comment on a forum suggesting that I reset the clock. Why would that work? Anyway, I tried it. And bingo! The problem went away. Louise can get back to watching The Inbetweeners, and I can get back to watching The Blacklist.

Quiz XV

William Nash, the celebrated mathematician who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, notably said that any discipline with the word “science” in it was not really a science at all. Did Dr Nash have in mind:

• domestic science
• social science
• Scientology
• climate science
• all of the above?

As usual, no prizes for the correct answer apart from self-satisfaction and prestige.

It is ironic that Dr Nash made the remark in the context of his Nobel prize for economic science; the tale is told in the interview of his friend, the former Director of Energy Research in the United States, Prof William Happer, available as an excellent Delingpod.