Into That Good Night

 

The longest night is nearly over and

Reader(s): and before the darkest dawn comes the dawn of dawn and

Blogista: we have KC Green to thank for this unconventional but eloquent doggie'n'zeitgeist combo. Thank you, KC.

Pejorocracy

 A note in Laudator Temporis Acti on Ezra Pound's coinage "pejorocracy", rule by the worse

One thing that puzzles me about pejorocracy is this — why the comparative degree and why not the superlative (pessimocracy, from Latin pessimus = worst)? 

There is also the delightful "kakistocracy", the Greek version of rule by the worst, with echoes of Musil's Kakania, of "catastrophe", of "caca".

Rule by the worse seems suitably lukewarm and half-baked, the pejorocracy not being capable of the superlative in any field.

I have the feeling that this year marks the end of the West as a going concern, its inmates abandoning the last of any functional understanding of "reality" or "civilisation", its pejorocrats fumbling their way to the rubbish heaps.

May Day

Sudden nostalgia for the 22nd May 2007 and a day when I was free, living in Brighton, rolling in money, drinking my head off when I felt like it...

...now life amid a vast miasma of torpor and ugliness, stupidity no longer impedance but become a galvanic industrial resource, of which "we" have limitless reserves.

Perhaps enlightenment is to be found in cliodynamics, and Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord for example, or somewhere in the pages of the great Valéry, with the Zürau Aphorisms always to hand. Perhaps I will just go down to the corner shop and buy a huge bag of sweets.

5 From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The goal, if there ever was one, is not the or any point. If I must reach the point of no turning back; then I am already at it: if it is a point I must reach, I cannot be at it. Per ardua ad ardua and so forth.

Statesmen

Thank goodness that in Good Ol' Joe Biden we'll at last have a US President who is sharp-witted, honest, capable, decent and has Britain's interests at heart, unlike that awful "dumpster fire" Donald McHitlerFace Drumpf!

Thank goodness that in Good Ol' Joe Biden the Office of President will at last be held in dignity and respect and good riddance to that worthless arsehole #OrangeManBad!

Ask any seasoned and competent Politician and he, or of course she, will tell you that a few Facts in Politics stand as if cut into stone or soldered in brass!

FACT 1: the Opinion Polls are always accurate as regards the outcome of any popular poll: that is why for instance we remain firmly in the EU, and Hillary Clinton is the current US President, despite all the excitable noise made by deplorables on both sides of the Pond in the run-up to the actual voting!

FACT 2: praising a foreign Politician a week before an Election he is certain to win is a guarantee of his, or of course her, steady goodwill during their term in office: that is why the blistering contempt with which the UK is held by the incoming incumbent will hold no sway during his term in office!

FACT 3: publicly rubbishing a foreign Politician notorious for his vanity is a surefire way of gaining his steady goodwill in such matters as essential trade deals, should he happen to accidentally win after all! But of course he won't and can't, see Fact 1.

So it is a good thing that the deeply competent statemen who govern our public affairs did not keep schtum in the run-up to this US Election as a fool or nincompoop might suggest. Their wise words will certainly win us immense advantage when Kamala Harris AntiFa Donald Trump Good Ol' Jo Biden is running the US of A!

British Establishment: The polls are ironclad, Trump has lost by a mile and nobody thinks otherwise.

Blogista: Nobody including the excellent Borepatch for instance?

British Establishment: But he is an American "blogger", not a British Establishment, he cannot possibly be right. Besides, Professor Pantsdown's Incontrovertibly Incontrovertible Lines of "C" Code prove that 2,147,483,647 kittens will die if #OrangeManBad wins, and there can't be that many kittens on the planet, so it is a logical impossibility.

The New Normal

Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;

Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All.

Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, 1743

Any Fule No

With a recession on the offing, people tend to batten down the hatches: save money, pay down debt. They don't tend to go spending money like drunken sailors.

People have been told incessantly for four months that going anywhere near Public Transport is Certain Death.

Businesses have, in the lockdown, discovered how much overhead in the way of rent, utilities, insurance etc they could save by not running huge Offices.

Government (having created a major recession whose full impact is yet to be felt, issued endless Public Transport death warnings and imposed a massive lockdown): Rrright, now everybody get on your bus, back to the office and start spending like drunken sailors! Spending like us in fact!

Not going to happen.

Slate Star Codex: Wokist-Leninism Claims A Scalp

The only victim of the Wokista George Floyd Feeding Frenzy worth mourning, the Slate Star Codex has closed on the threat of the author being doxxed by the New York Times.

Boundlessly intelligent and thoughtful writing obviously has to be destroyed! Oceania can only properly flourish on the sort of diarrhoeic slurry extruded by the NYT, algae and weed on a cesspool being the Wokist-Leninist vision of a living culture.

The "journalist" responsible is one Cade Metz, whose pen will never leak anything you would want to find on your arsewipe, but, well done there, Cade, sure you're proud of yourself.

Reflections on the Revolution in Everywhere

A comforting thought, that all the mental derangement and spasmodic activity

all the Liberations yet to be imposed

all the

Celebrations

yet to be

Celebrated

are but the death throes of the Ancien Régime: while the true Revolution is slouching into being, unseen and unforseen by any of the frenzied actors of the moment.

Blogista: well, it cheers me up anyway.

First thing to go come the true Revolution will be the pot-luck haphazardry of layout and formatting on this here Blogger thing: one tries one's best, but...

There's a Hole in the Memory Hole

Much fuss and bother today about Churchill's picture being erased from a Google search for "UK Prime Ministers".

Just a technical glitch, Google assure us. Now Winnie is back again, PM 1951-55...

Bit of a gap there, 1940-45, but peaceful times, uneventful years, what does it matter who was PM?

'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'
'Four! five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'

El Sueño de la Razón

Back To Nature

My heart is sad and I'm in sorrow

For the only one I love

When shall I see him - oh no never

'Til I meet him in Heaven above

Oh bury me under the weeping willow

Yes under the weeping willow tree

So he may know where I am sleeping

And perhaps he will weep for me

The Carter Family, Bristol Tennessee, 1927

The naiveté of "until an angel softly whispered"... masterful trowelwork!

The terrible thing about cabin fever is sitting for hours listening to this, then the varmint in the post below, then this then the varmint then this then the var

                                                              the varmint at the same time

For The Nature Table

A Great Graduation Speech

3:22&ff ...

and it's my belief that after you've witnessed months of a pathetic divide
where people care more about being right than the facts on hand
where conspiracy theories fester because they're met with pompous rebuttal
where everyone's an expert - but also a butthead
it is my belief that your generation will forge a new path
marked by truth and kindness and love

Stirring stuff, and the whole is a gem. Gratitude to Ace of Spades HQ for this trouvaille.

Inspiration For Our Troubled Times

What's New Pussy Clat?

Nope, Not Censorship

VPN turned off and looking for Lockdown Sceptics...


VPN on, ooohh there it is!


Aaaand... VPN off, gone!

VPN on, ooohh there it is!

Some technicality of the interwebosphere I'm too dumb to understand, and not censorship at all, obviously.

And well worth the effort of turning VPN on, for amongst other goodies this comment on coding and public responsibility.

Having spent too much time in the last forty years re-writing from scratch the miserable fuckwitted garbage turned out by the likes of Prof. Pantsdown, I should perhaps be grateful that Imperial College are doing their best to disappear the original...

I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics

...sez the proud Prof, oblivious to the pain even this causes, never mind a skiz at the actual crash site itself.

Gentleman Ranker out on the C: and look what happens if I change this input parameter a little bit..!

COBRA Coneys: oooh look he made the graphy things go all wiggly... better demolish the economy immediately! "Input parameter", eh, he must be a real scientist with all that posh talk...

Uplifting

Even your crusty old Blogista is a better man for this: tip'o'th'tiplo hat to Duff & Nonsense!

Ask Uncle Neil

What a track record, here summarised by the Business Insider:

Michael Thrusfield, a professor of veterinary epidemiology at Edinburgh University, told the paper he had "déjà vu" after reading the Imperial paper, saying Ferguson was responsible for excessive animal culling during the 2001 Foot and Mouth outbreak.Ferguson warned the government that 150,000 people could die. Six million animals were slaughtered as a precaution, costing the country billions in farming revenue. In the end, 200 people died. 

Similarly, he was accused of creating panic by overestimating the potential death toll during the 2005 Bird Flu outbreak. Ferguson estimated 200 million could die. The real number was in the low hundreds.  

In 2009, one of Ferguson's models predicted 65,000 people could die from the Swine Flu outbreak in the UK — the final figure was below 500. 

On March 16, around a month after the earlier interview, Ferguson delivered a bombshell 20-page paper to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.The message was clear: 510,000 people could die if the government didn't abandon its current strategy of allowing the disease to spread.

The obvious riposte is that the predictions are so insanely off-scale because the Government reacted by, say, trying to kill every farm animal in Britain or demolish the UK economy as a prophylactic measure.

On another view the Government would have done equally well to consult a Panel of defrocked palm readers, bankrupt bookies, Mayan Prophecies mavens... the Flat Earth Society! David Icke (pbuh)! God knows there are plenty of loonies and losers in the UK with a better track record than Prof Pantsdown who might at least have lent some gaiety to the proceedings.




Pictured today: Covids thwarted by the lockdown policy

Ask Uncle Vlad

The Worthy People of Britain: Vladimir Il'ich, Comrade Professor Lockdown has been caught breaching his own lockdown to have... relations. Isn't that a bad thing?










Dyadya Vlad: One who talks a right-wing government into sabotaging its own economy and wrecking millions of livelihoods with it, doesn't merit a legover or two?
Hero of the Soviet-Union-on-Sea, overfulfil your quota with plenary zeal!





The Suddenly Worth One Hell Of A Lot Less But Haven't Twigged Yet People of Britain: Vladimir Il'ich, how did he achieve such a feat?









Vlad the Advisor: Well, that's a toughie, there's nothing in my experience... you know, Sergei Witte, Piotr Stolypin, Piotr Durnovo... the Tsar's governments usually had at least one member who wasn't a complete putz...

Armchair Epidemiologists, Eh?

But then

Professor Michael Levitt, who teaches structural biology at the Stanford School of Medicine, won the 2013 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

And according to Levitt, coronavirus data show that sweeping lockdown measures were an overreaction that may actually backfire. 

Levitt has been analysing the COVID-19 outbreak from a statistical perspective since January and has been remarkably accurate in his predications. The data show that the outbreak never actually grew exponentially, suggesting harsh lockdown measures, which have drastically impacted the world economy, were probably unnecessary.

His observation is a simple one: that in outbreak after outbreak of this disease, a similar mathematical pattern is observable regardless of government interventions. After around a two week exponential growth of cases (and, subsequently, deaths) some kind of break kicks in, and growth starts slowing down. The curve quickly becomes "sub-exponential".
This may seem like a technical distinction, but its implications are profound. The 'unmitigated' scenarios modelled by (among others) Imperial College, and which tilted governments across the world into drastic action, relied on a presumption of continued exponential growth — that with a consistent R number of significantly above 1 and a consistent death rate, very quickly the majority of the population would be infected and huge numbers of deaths would be recorded. But Professor Levitt's point is that that hasn't actually happened anywhere, even in countries that have been relatively lax in their responses.

[...]"I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers. And they made a huge mistake. I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. They didn't practise too much lockdown and they got enough people sick to get some herd immunity,"

Linkeroney: tip'o'th'tiplo hat to Blaze for this one, emphases mine own.
he's only a "structural biologist", that hasn't got any epibolo edipomel epidobro whatchamabob in it anywhere so what would he know?

And but then, fisticuffs over whether there ever was any evidence suggesting that "continued exponential growth" might be on the cards at all, are unlikely to break out any time soon, simply too abstruse for a good punch-up.

And but then again at the time nobody kneeeewwww... and when you don't know the scale of a risk you might be facing, blind panic is the only rational course. By the time you've got the O's of the OODA loop under way, th'Covids will already be taking all the jobs, opening corner shops, marrying your daughter etc.

A Mad World, My Masters

A Very British Disaster

Lies, Damned Lies and

an excellent article from Dr John Lee in the Spectator, How deadly is the coronavirus? It's still far from clear, a rare instance of sanity in these topsy-turvy times:

Governments everywhere say they are responding to the science. The policies in the UK are not the government’s fault. They are trying to act responsibly based on the scientific advice given. But governments must remember that rushed science is almost always bad science. We have decided on policies of extraordinary magnitude without concrete evidence of excess harm already occurring, and without proper scrutiny of the science used to justify them.

South Korea and Sweden (are there others?*) do not seem to have sought refuge in lunacy. Maybe on the other side of this a reader will wonder, where? oh, where all the dead guys are, but I am waiting rather for the deluge of self-exculpatory bullshit from our own Authorities when the reckoning is presented.











Maybe by that time, "non-essential" carping will have become a criminal offence, and there will be no need for such a deluge.

*Update: and the Taiwanese, who have a sensible Government; the South Koreans because they are a democracy; the Swedes because...

The Past is a Foreign Country

they do things differently there.

Cardboard City

Moving house: ten bankers' boxes, the boxes they came in and the box the boxes came in are all going to be useful.

The pink boxes on the left are still unpacked from the previous move, as I never got round to putting up bookshelves. They and several others became the base for the wooden board which had to serve instead.

I fear that I am becoming an urban nomad, with an ever-growing train of boxes of books to be stacked at each caravanserai, until I die and the boxes go to the tip.

The thought occurs that I could put down roots of a sort, and use the boxes to start my own shanty town in the car park of my current flat.

Kulinary Kapers

Feeling a bit bad about this, like I am cooking up giant tardigrades












but the better for adding Ingrediaments.













Somewhere out there, Springing.


I wish I was not so empty-headed, and worry that it is a Life Change, not an itinerant absence.

Is the rest of

Running on Fumes

I thought I had thought of something today, but now I think about it I'm not so sure. What would it have been, anyway?

Working From Home

Latest rank of empty shelves, the blobs. All gone.

Not gone at all, the female pleasure enhancing gels and such, or the KY: this is no time to go for a walk on the wild side.

Readers: The supermarket, eh.

Blogista: An essential journey. How else could I have found out that the blobs are all gone.

Improvement

As one who has to move house in the next few weeks (and first find a house, at that) I do hope the brand new Police State won't be too err... policey.

Meanwhile, the supermarket

Readers: Why don't you read an improving book and post about that, instead? We want something different to ignore.

Improvisation

How many people are going shopping who never go shopping? By the checkouts, trolleys filled with stuff and abandoned by whoever loaded them - a dodgy credit card? A panic baulking at the panic buying?

Stray goods littered all over the place, picked up and jettisoned any old how; people using a self-checkout for the first time and losing their composure when it starts talking to them.

Someone spills a bottle of cooking oil on the floor. Two of the staff get to work: something to absorb the oil so the mess can be cleaned away?

Batter mix, several packets of! Ingenious!

Readers: most of your posts about this planetary international Crisis totally relate to your local supermarket. Do you not have a broader view, a more panoramic analysis, you would share with us?

Blogid-19: Wait 'til the polloi realise that a coating of batter is proof against those pesky little coviddy thingies, then you'll 

Readers: OMFG and they've used it all on th'oil slicks!

Cargo Cult

Smug couple leaving the supermarket, each with two sixteen-roll packs of lavatory paper: smug because they had gone separately to the self-checkout machines, so that nobody would spot that they were making off with a whole sixty-four of the things.

A triumph for this couple who evidently have nothing better to do in life but wipe their arses.

Strange the desolation of shelves with a few scraps of packaging lying on them, next to shelves loaded with things nobody has thought to hoard yet. No alcoholic hand gel almost from day one; two weeks later all the bleach is gone as the slow-witted suddenly apprehend that it kills germs too; some days later all the soap bars...not a gradual diminution but in a swoop.

Nothing Occurs

No, nothing.

Flu

A bout of somewhat more than usually nasty flu is making the rounds.

A friend who has severely reduced lung capacity, and therefore genuine reason to fear the virus, has shut herself away.

This morning a local volunteer group delivered, free, this very appetising, healthy and fresh-cooked meal. She and a lady in her nineties who lives upstairs are both on the list of people to support. The group seems to have formed spontaneously, and is giving help in many forms to those who need it.

The Authorities in the meanwhile have, er, hmmm,  taken firm, ahem, and are probably spending an humongous amount of other people's money doing it.

Armed with new powers to do pretty well anything they want, it is only a matter of time before they start shooting people randomly on sight, sooner than risk overcrowding the gaols and upping the virus hazard amongst the inmates.

Down With Left Deviationism

How dare you!

Stop killing us with your Glooobal Warning💀💀

Stop totally killing us with your coronavirussy Glooobal Warning 💀💀

How double dare you with knobs on! there I said it move over Saint Greta

Citizens are reminded that until November Orang Man Bad

is the sole cause of all sabotage, espionage, persiflage, frottage, spoilage, umbrage and 
Viral Pwnage.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Monday: It is only four and a half years ago that I was mocking Maduro for eliminating the toilet roll from Venezuela.

What goes around comes around, and the roundabout of Fate turns at a dizzying speed.

What mortal can stand steady on this relentless centrifuge? Nay, we fly helplessly off into the sandpit or away at that slide that looks like a cerise elephant.