Dominic Cummings

Subject: Dominic Cummings 

With the appearance yesterday of that Machiavellian  figure Dominic Cummings on our television screens broadcast from the Downing Street Rose Garden one is left wondering about the furor of much of the press as they write their news column today. They are generally angry at the way he apparently flouted the instruction of which he was one of the co authors that we should all self isolate in our homes and only go out to shop for groceries and a little isn't exercise walking in the park.
His impromptu news conference was interesting not only for its setting but in the hesitant character he portrayed whilst explaining to everyone that the needs of his son came first and that with both him and his wife showing signs of the disease he wanted to place his son in the care of his parents in the North of England. His parents have a farm on which a separate cottage allowed for the continued isolation of his family from his parents. It seems to me that it was a logical thing to do and I would have done the same.
The problem comes when we consider that he broke rules which he himself was coauthor rules which whilst not part of any criminal act were an instruction from the government of the day for the people to obay.
When we break the law we can expect to be punished but these are laws not set down in statute and whilst the government edict carries weight it only carries weight if the population wishes to go along with it. His flouting of the edict punched holes in the governments need to separate us for our own best good and therefore he is guilty of misleading us. He is not the first notable person who decided to go against the instruction. The immunologist who has been advising the government on these matters and appeared regularly on television, Neil Furguson decided to visit his lover and the advisory medical officer in Scotland also went walk about. Both lost their jobs on the basis that that what is good for one is good for all.
So the 'common sense' approach which Cummings appeals us to judge him by should carry no weight if we are asking people not to attend funerals or be with a dying parent. It was not in the doing that he is found guilty but in breaking the rules and that has many consequences. He could have sort permission from the PM who being the ultimate official  in this country could have granted him passage but it seems in the makeup of Mr Cummings he balks at imagining anyone but himself as having any sort of a hold on his actions.
He is a maverick and disliked by many in the Westminster bubble and for that I applaud him, as I do for his attempt to break down the establishments way of doing business. He is a risk taker and a forward thinker and I advise anyone to read his blog before they take everything the press tells them as fact. His blog (like mine) is a well reasoned set of ideas which this country could benefit from  including the argument he made, many months ago that we should pre-arm our self against the threat of pandemics.
He is a churlish sort of man who demeanor and dress code strikes at the metropolitan class and it's this metropolitan elite, the soft underbelly of the democratic process who are most put out.
The media, who methinks thinks too much of themselves, are part of this university educated think tank and when it came to the dreadful scandal of what was going on in Residential Homes for the aged, their almost benign questions to ministers at the daily corona virus question time, carried little or no anger, little or no push back.  Their questions were batted away by which ever Minister was on duty and to my recollection there was never anyone from the press to call the ministers out and to say that simple thing "Minister your lying to us".  Suddenly these same people are all in a frenzy about a relative technicality, something which common sense should rule. It's not a breach of some criminal law but a bureaucratic diktat which admittedly so many of our mindless community need, as is the imposition of a serious response when they flaunt it by filling the swimming pools in support of some hedonistic need.
Sadly there's a great paucity of strong and meaningful criticism in the public arena. It's been replaced by a measure of genteel prodding here and there, much as amongst friends, which of course  they are.

Time

Subject: Time

As we watch the days and the weeks drain away, wrapped up in the cotton wool of our homes, insulated from the injustice others bring upon us, the question of what importance, if any, do we consider "time" to be.
Is time a period in and through which we live regardless or is it a period where we are given an opportunity to change and do things. Our lives are relatively short and much is made of success, which these days often means making money. The chap propped up in a chair reading is wasting his time unless his reading is defined by what he reads and the benefit it brings him. But what if he reads for pleasure or reads just to understand more of the world around him. Isn't that self indulgent and in our world of the email and the immediate response to someone else's problem shouldn't we pause to examine just what is time for.
Obviously it's method of measuring where we are on a time line of events. The activities in the past, irretrievable the ones in the future unobtainable for the moment,  and only the ones in the "now" have any real importance.
But what if time were allowed to hang, to be suspended from our itinerary, allowed to lose its importance as we merged those minutes and hours into a delightful indolence, where the heart and the head are allowed to merge and get to know one another.
The head always impetuous, always driving for results, the heart more inclined to sit back and see what happens. The French and the Italians have a way with time, long breaks in the middle of the day, a nap after a meal. Their love of food and cooking, their propensity to court a lady by conversation, not the lust of the Anglo Saxon.
Time then is something to savour and to study as we do when thinking on a personal level. Time is just as well spent doing nothing as doing something. The presbyterian ethic regarding their claim that "idle hands do the Devils work" must have something to do with the fact that a mind at rest has the opportunity to seek out many falsehoods, including the claims made in the name of religion.
Wrapped up in the fragrance and warmth of my newly laundered sheets  I have to ask where have all the tomorrows gone. It's a feature of this new timeless dispensation where we are never quite sure which day it is, each morning looking the same, we lay in bed contemplating the time in front of us. The implausibility of it, the shock, time has become ours and not theirs and we must not be scared to learn that wasting it is just as satisfying as using it.Time

See you in the nail bar

Subject: See you in the nail bar

As we struggle to find, light at the end of the tunnel in the fight against the corona virus interesting facts are being thrown up which might perhaps reveal new opportunities.
Oestrogen or estrogen is thought to strengthen a woman immune system and is thought to be the cause of far fewer women dying from the virus when compared to men. Perhaps in the evolution of our species this was part of the need to strengthen the child bearer through the difficult time of childbirth and would help explain how women usually live, on average an extra 8 years then men.  They gain this protective shield against many common diseases by inducing the bodies immunity system to respond when a new microbe or virus attacks us. One of the treatments against cancer is to reduce testosterone in the male by undergoing a course of hormone treatment, changing the balance between oestrogen and testosterone.
If oestrogen has the potential to improve the effectiveness of the immune system why isn't it given to young boys so that they too will be better prepared when viruses come along. It has the added advantage on making men less aggressive, not only sexually but in general, and a whole new social relationship could thrive and make the world a better place.
As the worlds population is estimated to balloon towards 10 billion by 2050 then a reduction  of humans on earth, would be no bad thing, especially since human labour will soon be relegated to junk status as artificial intelligence and robots take over. The statistical replacement factor of 2.5 humans will need to fall unless we are to see more and more people born into penury and a miserable life. A painless solution might be to extend the life of the male by making them more female through a weekly dosage of oestrogen, cutting down the birth rate as the sexual drive is lessoned, making the family affordable whilst corralling the male in the home with the vacuum cleaner and not in the pub with his mates.

If we can nudge Covid off course by tampering with our hormonal make up maybe there might be many other benefits, as yet unforeseen.  See you in the nail bar.

Travelling on a different track

Subject: Traveling on a different track.

What I don't understand is how gullible the politicians take us for. I have just been watching the daily news conference in which a visiting expert is announcing a fall in the cases of Corona virus recorded each day as if this is some sort of corner turned and a win, in our effort to reverse the death toll.
Yes of course the cases are coming down, we are all in lockdown, holed up at home, industry's closed, shops closed, holiday destinations and any means of recreation virtually closed, is it any wonder then that the cases and deaths are dwindling, as we sit at home paralysed, our economy paralysed and as we start the economy going again we also know that the the virus will also get going again and cases and the death toll will rise.
Perhaps after the initial panic and shock in February and the unprecedented reaction to covert 19, the natural response, to pull out all the stops and gain time to analyse what we had had and if there was a way forward. There was a lull and most people enjoyed the enforced break and the loverly weather which accompanied it. With the foot off the throttle we found new ways to entertain ourselves and perhaps find ourselves, out of the hurly-burly of normal life, a bit like boarding a large passenger liner to sail half way around the world with nothing to do all day but walk the promenade deck, eat three good meals a day and party into the early house. It was of course at the expense of the National Exchequer, the monthly make up on wages lost, a problem for the Chancellor. After all they had found the money to bail out the banks in 2008, why not us.
Of course reality is that soon the ship will dock and we are forced to descend to the quay side where the hustle and bustle of real life awaits us, of finding our own way,  much like finding our feet  as we go back to work.
It seems that until a vaccination is developed and this may take years, we are going to have to get on with living and dying with this scourge, always at our elbow. The upbeat announcements by the politicians don't get this message across instead they talk of the partial medical success's but not in any detail, the unsustainable cost, we talk of reversing the trend of the pandemic  but not of the toll on the economy.

The Churchillian phrases such as "we will beat them on the beaches" come to mind as people get back to work but so will the virus. The panic this time will be replaced with a pragmatic view that maybe a certain death toll is a price worth paying afterall, it won't be me and if it is me, the result won't kill me. Different graphs will be drawn, more upbeat announcement's, not of beating but accepting the death toll will be the set piece of the political sideshow as we human-beings re-assess our future, balancing the cultural and physical needs against the awful spectre  of the struggle going on in the hospital wards which may become merely an assist to making death as palatable as they can.
For those at risk the decision is quite easy, stay at home and develop a lifestyle around your home and garden, (if your lucky enough o have one). Always to be on your guard and recognise that the years you have left (because we are talking mainly of the aged) can be just as precious, it's that we are traveling on a different track to everyone else.

A lesson from the Germans

Subject: A lesson from the Germans.

Reading of the genius of the Germans as a fighting force against the Americans and the British in the Second World War one then asks the question, why have they risen not only to be once more to be the predominant economic force in Europe but have also handled the pandemic threat far more efficiently than most of Europe and particularly us in the UK.

What is it in the temperament of the Germans that they can be corralled into a concerted force, both for good and evil. Is it that in their upbringing they accept hierarchy better and therefore react faster, is it that individually they respond to crisis by accepting more readily the discipline required to act as a group and not as individuals.
They have the horrendous black mark against them, the incubation of fascism and their willingness to accept the demonisation of the Jews and Gypsies.  As a nation they turned a collective blind eye to what the extremists in their society were inflicting on the Jews, and it seems impossible to imagine the same state of affairs happening in the UK. There seemed a collective amnesia to what was going on in Germany and yet the propaganda broadcasts, put out  by the Nazi Party in the 1930s,  a jingoistic call call for Deutschland uber alies had its supporters in a country which saw itself badly treated by the treaty of Versailles in which, particularly the French wished to exact harsh reparations. There is no doubt in those troubled times, nationalism, not only in Germany but all across Europe was part of a political consensus at the time. And whilst true to a lesser extent in the UK, this island tempered its reaction by the bloodymindedness of its people.
There seems an innate unwillingness to collectivise and focus around any one thing over here and whilst it frees the country from the more extremist radicalism it does leave us exposed when any sort of unanimity is required.
The Germans have this unanimity in spades and when a direction of travel is decided the nation backs the journey wholeheartedly. The question of 'planning for the future' whilst apparently impossible in Britain, it's 'grist to the mill' in Germany.  A part of the disciplined planning which looks further than the next political election and takes the whole national good into account.
Perhaps we in Britain are never national in the way we see ourselves, perhaps we have been encouraged to see ourselves as self seeking individuals having been persuaded that society is someone else's business.
Reportedly the Germans, recognising the degree of unpreparedness that SARS had left them in invested in an over production of ventilators and the trained staff to use them. They were well versed in the need to test the population because they saw in the SARS scare the need to know who had the disease and who didn't and when Covid 19 showed up they had a strategy.
We on the other hand, being a Nation of grocers, were fixated on balancing the books, reducing the very services we would need when the next pandemic arrived. Our confusion is bred of a weakness to evaluate cost against the public good and meant that Boris dithered, first of all denying that it was as bad as it appeared and then having missed the proverbial boat he began to mislead the public as to what the government were doing. There were many examples but the example of the exclusion of the Care Homes in preventative measures is the ultimate test of an unwillingness to come to terms with what he was dealing with.
So what can the Germans teach us.  Not only their handling of the pandemic but in their organisation of much else. Their willingness to invest in the training of their young people to work in their factories to produce things and for the young people not to feel that apprenticeships are some sort of second class employment. Their willingness to invest in their own industries, believing the product they make can be sold world wide. The inclusiveness of shop floor labour in the management process, not a "them and us" syndrome which exits in this country, is fruitful not only on the shop floor but in the psychological health of the nation. It's going to be this psychological health which will differentiate between the winners and losers when the economic ruins of the pandemic are revealed.

A Faustian pact

 

Subject: A Faustian pact 

Our world is constantly changing and as it changes our values change also. That is to say our perception of our values changes since our sense of the world and what it means to us and to mankind changes through the information we are fed about it.
From the Tump election campaign to the Brexit campaign to our sense of what's important regarding global warming to what we know about the pandemic and the economic ramifications. We are awash as never before with data and statistics, data dressed up as information, data which tracks us constantly, our every move our every thought, our every proclivity. The news papers which we can now see the headlines as a collective, the right wing the left wing the ones who push the governments position and the ones who oppose but amongst those thousands of lines of copy where is the truth, it must be somewhere. 

Alexander Nix, the urbane boss of Cambridge Analytica denied any wrong doing in setting out to analyse the profiles of people when who belonged to Facebook and target them with information and misinformation to get them to follow a certain way of thinking by reinforcing their prejudice. As a bloke in a pub he was right to argue his case person to person but when he surreptitiously garnered his case behind the unknown digging and sifting through the data left behind as a character reference on their Facebook page and then manipulated reality to create an image which had only the the persons  proclivity to substantiate it then he was tampering with democratic freewill. The success of the Trump campaign, winning with fewer votes than Hillary Clinton but targeted towards states which were balanced to go one way or another or, in the Brexit case to heighten prejudice by sowing fear through misinformation, the use of profiling has reached new heights as a political tool.
Barack Obama was the first to effectively use profiles gained from Facebook and encourage them to vote for him but this was digitally face to face electioneering not the seeding of disingenuous information to fester in the mind and make demons of sections of the public like the immigrant population, the Hispanics and the Afro Americans.
The use of the Web and the platforms which have grown people using it as a gathering place to euphemistically shelter from the storm going on around them and meet their friends is more common today than meeting real friends for a cup of coffee and a chat. As with all friendship the guard is lowered and you easily commit yourself to the odd indiscretion, you reveal more than you would normally do and so a profile gathered over time exposes  the real you not the one you normally present to the outside world. This wouldn't normally be harmful, embarrassing perhaps but fundamentally harmful no. It's only when these profiles which contain the nuggets needed to identify you are then followed up with a plethora of nudges, winks and nods to stimulate an action be it buying a product or influencing you to vote one way or another does the ethical question come in are we manipulating people. To manipulate a person is seen as wrong, to emphasise untruths as truths is wrong and strikes at the basis of all we believe in. It may be the tactic of the second hand car salesman to mislead the buyer but it's wrong and is at the basis of the legislation governing the return of goods or cooling off policy.
In the case of democracy there no turning back, once your cross has been committed to paper, all the lies and the sloganeering  on the side of the Brexit Leave bus, which we now know to be false did the trick in tricking us into committing us to do something which was clearly based on incorrect information.
I'm not saying leaving Europe is right or wrong but the method of persuasion was clearly wrong.
The problem is no one is brought to book and made responsible. The truth is fluid, a malleable thing which in the hands of a charlatan is very dangerous. We live in dangerous times when our leaders can disperse with truth and submit lies. When our confidence in our leadership is so challenged that we begin to distrust everything and everyone, including ourselves. A Faustian pact if ever there was one.

When is a loss not a loss

Subject: When is a loss not a loss.

"We are loosing two and a half billion pounds a day" says the news jock on the radio.
These headlines are meant to bring to our attention the seriousness of our economic position  whilst we battle with the medical issue of the pandemic.
But wait a minute is this an actual loss of earnings or is this loss calculated by estimating how much we 'would have spent if we had been able to go out shopping, buying that latte in the coffee shop or yet another food blender. If we are adding up what we might have spent as a loss perhaps we have to adjust our thinking and say 'their loss' is 'my gain' since I still have my money in my pocket. If our manufactures can't sell their wares because their outlets are closed  but still have to continue to pay basic overheads, such as rent and fundamental maintenance costs we mustn't inflate this lass with a loss of earnings since that is an opportunity cost and until realised it is nebulous.
From the moment the pandemic closed much of the worlds economic business cycle the situation has become a zero sum game. The clock stopped at midnight and the accountants should have stopped their clock too and not extrapolated the loss to cover prospective earnings. Much of the fundamental costs, such as rates and rents have been frozen. The money borrowed by the property firm to lease or rent out, is a genuine loss of income only if the lender is asking for his loan repayment but if these loans are also on ice then the loss becomes static and in fact, like everything else ceases to be a loss other than as in a potential to earn.

There are sectors of the market place which has been kept open, notably the grocers to keep us fed. The money required to keep food in our mouths comes in the form of furloughed money from the government, a loan which is a debt and will have to be replayed through taxes when people can go back to work but the concept of loss is then transformed into one of money management through the taxation process which in itself is a form of transferring money out of our pockets as consumers and limiting our ability to consume, which to some is considered a loss.
Serious as this pandemic is for industry and commerce the clock has stopped for everyone across the world and the winners will be the ones to get their industries up and running first so they gain a competitive advantage.
The money go round has stopped. Stopping the clock should be a lesson to all of us. It's a moment to reexamine our compulsion to consume. To often live beyond our means splurging on credit, always on the assumption that we will, in the future have the money to pay for our extravagance today.
Perhaps a realignment of our thinking and our actual needs may produce a more balanced, less market driven consumptive circle, a necessary brake on our runaway spend, spend, spend.