Wet Work

Is there any reason why the IDF might not simply pump vast quantities of sea water from the adjacent Mediterranean Sea into the Hamas tunnels under Gaza City? Thereby disabling Hamas without burning Gaza’s citizens, or seeing those citizens die from thirst?

I am no expert in modern tunnel warfare, but one has to imagine that the necessary pumping equipment would be less expensive to procure than the massive deployment of explosive weapons?

Is there any way that

A Farewell to 20 Million

There has been a fair bit of chat recently about excess deaths in the Western world. What, if anything, they have to do with the Covid vaccines?

Some people say: nothing at all! They reckon the vaccines are safe and effective. Other people say that they do more harm than good, and in particular that their suppression of T cell production renders vaccinated people more susceptible to cancer and other fatal conditions.

So I thought I would have a look at Our World in Data, to see what their data have to say about all this. They are not anti-VAX is by any means: on the contrary. So, looking only at countries where they have some data on deaths, I looked for the six countries that are the most vaccinated in the world, and the six countries that are the least vaccinated in the world.[1] And I took the time scale of the last 18 months, during which time almost nobody has died of Covid 19, since the original really quite nasty variants have been displaced around the world by the omicron variant, which is not dangerous.

One would expect to see death rates during this 18 month period to be slightly less than usual, because some of the people who would normally have died during this 18 month period had already died during the Covid outbreak.

So what we see? The six countries that have been most vaccinated[2] have experienced excess deaths running at an average of somewhere between 10% and 20%:

What about the least vaccinated?[3] Unsurprisingly, a number of

100 to 1

The recent events in Israel and Gaza are laden with tragedies. This post is about a smaller, but nevertheless, disturbing feature.

There have been voices to be heard supporting both sides. Support for the Palestinians has come from a bizarre hardly wide-ranging group, including homosexuals (who presumably have little idea of how they would be treated by Hamas in Gaza?).

Support for Israel has generally been more focused, and here is the thing: whenever I hear or read something in support of Israel’s position, I involuntarily find myself thinking, “Oh! So that person is Jewish? That had not previously crossed my mind”. And very often, those people are indeed Jewish. I do not mean any criticism by this. If my country had been attacked in the same way that Israel was attacked, I am sure that I would have spoken out. And by and large, there is a fair bit of force in what they say.[1]

But I preferred a world in which we did not notice who is Jewish and who is not.  The same goes for all other peoples who live in the Western world.

Quiz XIX – Streets

What is the significance of these streets?

Quai Albert Ier

Avenue D’Ostende

Place du Casino

Avenue des Spelugues

Boulevard Louis II

Quai des Etats-Unis

The Real Voice has Spoken

The Voice referendum in Australia is now done and dusted. As everybody knows, “No” won by a landslide.  Hopefully, my Twitter feed will soon be free of people insulting me by telling me that only the stupid or the heartless would vote “No”.

A quick look at the results: to get up, the referendum would have needed not only an overall majority, but also a majority in 4 of the 6 states. It got neither, none of the States voting “Yes”. The nearest it got was in Victoria, where “Yes” got 45%.  Unsurprisingly, Victoria is also the State or Territory with the lowest percentage of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in its population, at just 1.2%.

Apart from the 6 States, Australia also has 2 Territories, and it is worth looking at those:

• The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is the home of the federal government. It is the only State or Territory where there was a majority for “Yes”. Its percentage of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people in its population is just 2.1%, the second lowest percentage after Victoria.
• The Northern Territory (NT) could hardly be more different. Its percentage of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people is much larger, at 30.1%. It voted resoundingly against the referendum, with 60.5% voting “No” and 39.5% voting “Yes” which was almost exactly the same as the overall national result.

The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is inescapable.   This referendum was

Sanity in Politics

This graphic caught my eye. It shows a correlation – particularly among young women – between mental illness and liberalism.

The data comes from the United States, and so I think we can take it that “liberal” here means on the political left. Unlike in Australia, where liberal means on the political right. Or England, where it means having a really bad dress sense.

Correlation is not causation, of course, and there are a number of possibilities here:

• Holding left wing views tends to cause mental illness;
• Mental illness tends to cause people to be on the political left;
• These things are each effects of a common cause: some other factor – mental frailty perhaps – is causative both of mental illness and of belief in left-wing ideology.

The first, it seems to me, is unlikely. Left-wing beliefs are presumably, like happy-clappy religion, rather comforting? My guess is

The Dark Side of Being Agreeable

Agreeableness is one of the big five traits, as generally recognised in psychology these days. It is much more prevalent in women.  And it sounds like a good thing, you might think? Not so fast, I say.

I have remarked before, and will probably remark again, that Professor Joseph Tainter’s work on the collapse of civilisations[1] is one of the most important books of modern times. He analyses why civilisations fail. Not as a matter of theoretical analysis, but as a matter of history. In short, it is complexity. Instead of the resources of society being focused on what society needs (food, shelter, energy, stuff like that) they get diverted into things that society does not really need. Prime among those is an excess of people being paid by taxpayers’ money to do not very much. The parasite weighs down, and eventually kills, the tree. Professor Tainter is scrupulous to avoid politics, but there is of course a political lesson in here. Socialism is not just bad, it is fatal.

The Chain

Over the past century:

The French have oppressed the Germans

The Germans have oppressed the Jews

The Jews have oppressed the Muslims

What could be next, do we think?

Herons

I have been learning a lot from Jonathan Sumption’s tremendous series of books The Hundred Years War. Including the fact that in the 14^th century, herons were regarded a particularly timid birds:

According to the poet [of celebrated verse legend, The Vow of the Heron], Robert [of Artois] had shamed [Edward III] into asserting his claim at a banquet in London. Entering Edward’s ‘marble hall’ in the midst of the revelry he had presented Edward with a platter bearing a roast heron, ‘the most timid of birds for the most cowardly of kings, deprived of his inheritance in noble France which is rightfully his, but for his cowardice, destined to be deprived of it until he dies’.

We have a heron here at The Phenelry.  And it is indeed a rather timid bird, scooting off if it sees us, even at a distance. And not exactly my favourite, since he has eaten all my fish in Loch Phenelry. I thought this afternoon that we might now have Mr & Mrs Heron (maybe even some baby herons?), as two of them flew in in close formation. But no, they were having a territory fight: one saw the other off. Loch Phenelry is clearly valuable real estate for a heron.

In the 16^th century, my great etc grandfather Sir Roger Fenwick married Ursula Heron, the daughter of Sir John Heron, who is

Who is Vaccine Bonkers?

For many years, there have been some people who are opposed to all vaccines. Including the regular vaccines which have been used for many decades, and which have proved hugely effective against a host of diseases small smallpox onwards. You might prefer different language, but “bonkers” is probably a fair description of these “anti-vaxxers”. In any event, the evidence is very clear that they are wrong.

In the last couple of years, a different debate has emerged. Have the mRNA inoculations (they are not strictly speaking vaccines, but let us roll with that) been as safe and effective as their proponents would have you believe? Well, you might think, obviously not: there is abundant evidence that they cause adverse side effects far greater than any other vaccine on the market, and they neither prevent vaccinees from getting or passing on Covid 19.  The more contentious ground as this: do they do more harm than good?

The topic has become neo-religious: some people evidently regard it as downright blasphemous to challenge the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines.  Nevertheless, there has been a steady if not headlong shift, as more and more people have become persuaded that, for the general population at any rate, the mRNA vaccines do more harm than good.

One of these is Dr John Campbell, who has a popular YouTube channel. He started off supportive of the mRNA vaccines, but the more he is looked at the unfolding evidence, the more he has come to the clear view that the mRNA vaccines do indeed do more harm than good. The proponents of the mRNA vaccines are accordingly now quite keen to debunk him, if they possibly can.