Virus realities

Politicians of different persuasions, academics (both reputable and not so) and journalistic hacks are weighing in on their perspective of the only way to deal with reducing the spread of COVID. Not only can they not all be right (many of the views are diametrically positioned between the extreme isolation and herd approaches), the simple fact is that none of them can be right; they can hypothesize, but epidemiology is actually irrelevant. Most of them know it, but cannot mention the very large elephant in the room – peoples’ behaviour.

The current lockdown (November 2020) is based, as have been previous attempts, to seek to reduce transmission by minimising disjoint incidents of personal contact, to drop the key R ratio below 1. However, the plan is predicated on the populace at large actually complying with the procedures and restrictions and it’s patently clear to them that this has not (and probably will not) happen. Boris and chums just have to bite their tongues and take flak.

The Daily Mail frequently print pictures (see above as an example) of drunken, maskless young people (often students), not socially distancing, willfully violating governmental edicts seeking to protect the populate in general. Although that is the case (and partially driven by the fact that they perceive the risk from COVID to them is low), they nevertheless are potentially likely to transmit this to more vulnerable members of society that they come in to contract with.

However, Grumpy understands their hormonally driven dismissal of the pandemic, but there is another driver; that is that they see all levels of the establishment, ‘celebs’ and others choosing to demonstrate their disagreement with the ‘reduce R’ approach. At the top of this list (ignoring the deranged Peter Hitchens), in Grumpy’s mind, is the selfish, arrogant, geriatric Lord Sumption. As Grumpy pointed out elsewhere, somebody has to drive the bus and make decisions, and everyone else is a passenger. What Sumption has chosen to ignore when he excoriates the Executive (in a manner which is extreme hyperbole) is that they were elected as the bus driver.

Left / right hands

Two headlines from 08.04.2020

Daily Express : “SHOCKING figures have shown the amount of people shopping rose over the weekend despite the government urging people to stay indoors.”

BBC : (Statement from Tesco) “The supermarket giant said it wasn’t able to meet demand as more shoppers stay at home, despite the fact it has increased its online grocery shopping capacity by more than 20%”

As Grumpy noted in recent post http://grumpy.eastover.org.uk/pure-guardian the government continues to adopt a wholly inconsistent and conflicted stance on ‘staying home’. The message is completely at odd with reality. The fact is that as of today food deliveries are not available at Morrisons, Tesco, Waitrose, Ocado, or Asda. Either the government are not aware of this reality, or they continue to make the ‘stay at home’ proclamations with cynical disregard for it.

A significant proportion the populace go to the shops because it is the only way to get food. What part of this does the government not understand ? If a household can only get one delivery per month, they have to buy a minimum of a month’s worth of groceries at each order, or go out to the shop, or starve. It’s a simple math fact. That”s why there has been a transient increase. If the government wished more people to observe sheltering, they should deploy the army to assist with deliveries, or pressure the supermarket giants to do better. Gove and co are on a different planet – they probably send their security guards out to shop.

Dave Lewis, the CEO of Tesco, stated today that Middle classes in the south of England were to blame for stockpiling. However, he clearly knows the ins and outs of procurement, since the optimisation of this is essential to Tesco profits. It’s thus particularly galling to be lectured to by him for stockpiling when it is an entirely inevitable consequence of Tesco’s inability to rise the the challenges arising from incarcerating the populace at home; he should be ashamed to describe it as ‘stockpiling’ – and this from a Harvard man.

Paperless fallacies

Virtually every organisation that is required to provide a consumer with a statement of events (bank, credit card provider, utilities, etc.) have persuaded / coerced customers into going ‘paperless’. Rather than having to routinely open multiple envelopes and then file the documents somewhere, the beguiling argument is that they can all be left in the cloud, ready for access anywhere and anytime on mobile devices or a desktop.

The consumer is easily seduced by this myth, but there is a flaw in the inherent assumptions. If, for whatever reason, the account is terminated (changing a credit card for example) , then access to such documents is summarily denied.

In some cases, this may not be material, but in others it may well be more serious. For example, if the documents were required for tax returns, the inability to satisfy the authorities without evidence may be problematic (and expensive), even if the data could be replicated. The more stressing case is following a death when access to key data are denied pending probate.

There is only one logical approach to deal with this situation. This is that each month, or whenever, the relevant documents have to be downloaded and then filed (albeit electronically) in some structure locally. This rather defeats the purported ‘paperless’ benefits. Rather than a bill or statement arriving without an action on the part of the recipient, paperless documents require to be proactively managed by some diary mechanism to prompt download. It is an active, rather than passive, process.

Grumpy’s take on this is simple. The alternative is to opt out of paperless documents, and require the organisation to post them. When they arrive, they can be slipped into some tray or box waiting some possible future need to refer to them. This is entirely in accord with Grumpy’s management philosophy, which is “never do today that which can be delayed until a later date, because it may not need to be done at all.”

If this is less hassle than the electronic download process (which it is), why go paperless?

There is also the satisfaction that the duplicity of British Gas (or whoever) selling a cost saving move for them as a benefit for the consumer can be simply negated.

Devolution farce

COVID has exposed the idiocies from the delusion of areas of the UK being capable of operating with a degree of autonomy associated with a state. If ever there was a time for a unified policy of pandemic management across the whole nation, it is now. However, rather than rising to the challenge of coming together for the good of all UK citizens to combat a common threat, the devolved ‘nations’ have used it as an opportunity to grandstand their imagined independence, grind their own particular axes, and extort taxpayers money.

Nichola Sturgeon in particular, it seems to Grumpy, has implemented alternate procedures for COVID management firstly because she presumably couldn’t bring herself politically to accept any policy coming from Westminster, and secondly as a demonstration of her irrational contrarian independence.

The idea that there can practically be one government edict in the Newcastle Arms in Coldstream, Scotland, and another in the Cornhill Arms, Cornhill, Northumberland (1.5km away) is bizarre in the current times. Even more so with Sturgeon’s floated plan to restrict travel across the River Tweed… it’s not exactly the border between the US and Mexico.

Wales followed a similar “to hell with simplicity and conformity for the populace, we’ll show our independence’, which is even less rational. In 1997, the majority for setting up a Welsh Assembly (a sort of neutered parliament) was less than the capacity of the Burton Albion football ground. (And if, dear reader, you have never heard of Burton Albion, that proves the point.)

The Welsh, at great cost to the taxpayers in duplicating government papers in Welsh, would have us believe that a majority of the population greet each other with “bore da, Taffy”. One can Imagine the SNP playing catch-up with the Scots language, and indeed, the evidence of a push to embrace this officially is clear.

What next ? A push to make Pictish, spoken by 7 goat herders on the island of Pabbay a government official language?

The fact is that to survive outside of the EU, we need to think in terms of 67m citizens of the UK, not 3.3m Welshmen, 5.4m Scots, 1.9m Northern Irish and 56.3m English. Consolidation, integration and evolution, not devolution is what the country needs.

Pure Guardian

The Guardian today (03/04/2020) had a ‘long read’ by an author, Bee Wilson. Without wishing to focus on her in particular, it did typify this series in the paper by exhibiting Guardian characteristics of (a) seeking a target to demonise (b) being long on anecdotes of extreme and unrepresentative examples, pop-psychology and short on rational analysis and logic, and (c) accompanied by sounds of axes being ground / bees buzzing in bonnets in the background. See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/apr/03/off-our-trolleys-what-stockpiling-in-the-coronavirus-crisis-reveals-about-us

The issue here was about the tendency of part of the population to ‘stockpile’ at times of crisis (such as the present one), and how it was practised by (without explicitly saying so) uneducated, irrational,’chav’ types that presumably don’t live in the area where Bee resides.

What this and other articles have not addressed is how ‘stockpiling’ is not only rational, it is the inevitable outcome of the Government’s own policies. Grumpy is old, and at the behest of the Government is ensconced in his bunker, and being in a high risk group, relies on deliveries to the door for food. Previously, Grumpy did his weekly shop, and purchased a weeks’ worth of food. However, as demand soared for home deliveries as a result of Government policy, so did the lead times for getting deliver slots – it any were available at all.

Her flawed article extols the virtues of local shops (presumably selling the sort of edibles that foodies such as her eat) saying that plenty of food was available, but they, in the main, don’t deliver. What part of the word ‘isolation’ does Ms Wilson not understand ?? Let me help her – the OED defines it as “Cause (a person or place) to be or remain alone or apart from others.” .. you can’t go out shopping, dummy.

Assume that it takes 3 weeks to get a slot on average. Buyers were faced with a choice; either (i) buy a weeks worth of food to be delivered as before and starve for the next two week waiting for the next slot or (ii) buy three weeks of food to line up with the extended lead times. The combination of self-isolation and extended delivery lead times inevitably logically results in an initial tripling or more of consumption on a transient basis. This is 101 procurement / queuing theory. (One assumes that Bee Wilson sends her secretary down to Tesco to risk COVID to get her supplies, so is spared this reality.) Nowhere in her tedious article was this scenario discussed, notwithstanding the psychology-lite explanations from the usual ‘hire a pundit’ experts. There is a comment from one contributor about risk resilience, but that was related to additional consumption of 30% because people were no longer eating in their Notting Hill restaurants, but there was no mention of the underlying delivery issue.

In fact, as Grumpy writes, there are NO slots available at Asda, Morrisons (a 45,000 user queue), Ocado, Tesco, or Waitrose; so how is he to get food without going out, which is not what self-ISOLATION is about? So if a slot appears, and it is clear that he might get another in delivery in May, how many tins of soup is he to buy? The rational answer is the logical one – as many as he possibly can. It’s not stockpiling, and he is not panicking. He does want to eat, and not starve. Grumpy can do the math and understand probability and expected outcomes far better than Ms Wilson seemingly can. So if she wants a target, attention should be given to the organisers of delivery logistics when responsible citizens follow the Government edict to stay at home. The people responsible, Priti Patel and Matt Hancock (the former being completely invisible of late), should sort out the mechanisms (using the army if the Supermarkets wont do it) to get food delivered to those they have imprisoned.

Political duplicity

In the first week of November, 2020, Foreign Secretary of the UK issued a statement about the Chinese disqualifying a number of legislators from the Hong Kong parliament, saying it was breach if the Sino-British declaration on the status of the Special Administrative Region post the expiry of the UK lease on certain territories there. “With our international partners, we will hold China to the obligations it freely assumed under international law”, Dominic Raab said.

Really ? How short Raab’s memory is. Just one month before, Brandon Lewis, Northern Ireland Secretary, admitted in parliament that the Internal Markets Bill broke the UK’s freely assumed obligations under international law.

Grumpy is struggling to understand the difference in principle here. He also wonders how Raab is going to square his distaste of countries that break binding agreements when he and Liz Truss are trying to persuade Joe Biden that it’s fine for the Brits to do just this because it’s essential but the Chinese are being oppressive to the would be democratic legislators.

Ever heard of Oriol Junqueras? No ? Well he is languishing in prison serving a 13 year sentence (along with a dozen colleagues) for Sedition in Spain. The action of the Spanish government in these and other sentences was fully supported by that bastion of liberal government, the EU – including the UK. They were pushing for independence, just as the Hong Kong agitators have been doing.

But wait ! Wasn’t the fact that the Chinese government introduced a Sedition law (which the Hong Kong LegCo had failed to do for 13 years (in spite of an obligation so to do enshrined in the Basic Law) the triggered for sanctions by the USA, and an offer of British Citizenship from the UK ?

Amongst other things, the banned persons had refused to acknowledge Beijing’s authority, something Western hypocrites also lambasted. Here in the UK, however, anyone who is elected as an MP has to swear an allegiance to the Crown under the 1868 Promissory Oaths Act, or they cannot take their seat in parliament – just like in Hong Kong. This runs through establishment English life; every Freeman of the City of London has to make a solemn declaration in GUildhall to “be good and true to our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II” and even that they “will know no Gatherings nor Conspiracies made against the Queen’s Peace but will warn the Mayor thereof…” Wow, just like the East German stasi in snitching on one’s fellow citizens.

Grumpy carries no banners for China, as he had frequently said here; but what he finds repulsive – and yes, that is a good word in this context – is that politicians like Raab are happy to voice such obvious inconsistencies of sanction without a twinge towards their own integrity as individuals.

As a footnote, Grumpy would add that many of the ‘democracy’ advocates in Hong Kong have been openly canvassing support against their government with enemies of the State. It’s called treason; this was something that the UK and others also railed against. when it was introduced into Hong Kong law along with Sedition. However, there is (of course) a law against it in the UK and USA (Trump wanted to jail Obama for it) – it’s just morally justified in the West but not with those dangerous commies.

Italian politicians condemned to die

The Daily Express reports (23/03/20) that doctors in Italy have been directed not to provide ventilation facilities to anyone over 60, thus probably condemning them to death, given respiration was needed.

Grumpy notes that this means that, should he contract coronavirus and require such treatment, the President, Sergio Mattarella (born 1941) would be left to expire, gasping for breath.

Similarly, the same fate would be visited upon Elisabetta Casellati (born 1946) and President of the Senate.

Really ? Even assuming that they were not (as would be expected ) to be treated in some elite private hospital, it’s hard to believe that the decimation of of the most senior politicians, judges, clerics, celebrities and business titans would be allowed, which would otherwise be the result of this edict.

Grumpy had a surge of indignation that such a coarse judgement involving life of death would be issued. Ther are probably many 60 year old who are far more healthy and likely to pull through than some drug or alcohol addled 20 year old. Their health professionals have almost certainly had to make life or death decisions based on the reality of resources, COVID or no. So has the NHS. It just happens that such judgements will be more likely as a result of the pandemic.

But a more underlying reason for Grumpy’s indignation wave is that they patently don’t mean it to be universal. The edict really means that it will be applied to the poor, the uneducated, the inarticulate, the unconnected and all those to whom society owes an equal duty. Grumpy is starting to feel empathy with the OpEd writers in The Guardian …

WAP mysteries

Grumpy has a look at the Daily Mail in the morning’s whilst eating his muesli, largely to cheer himself up for the coming day with their amusing reporting.

The news is interleaved with articles on female ‘celebs’ of the E list variety, who ‘flaunt’, ‘put on display’ and ‘showcase’ their ‘ample assets’ (normally which their clothing ‘struggles to contain’), ‘peachy posteriors’, ‘taught abs’, ‘underboobs’ (what?) or ‘baby bumps’. Grumpy finds it faintly amusing that when the pictures include a ‘topless’ shot, it is anything but; every possible trace of a nipple in all the acres of flesh – clearly intended to titillate – is carefully obscured. It made Grumpy wonder why the nipple had made the transition from a Sun Page 3 staple to gross pornogrpahy,

Anyway, Grumpy was surprised to read that a woman named Megan Thee Stallion has just been named by Time Magazine as one the top 100 most influential people in the world. She is a rapper and writer; lyrics range over to taking “some five star dick” to her latest masterpiece which is a celebration the apparently extreme lubrication of her vagina (“get a bucket and mop, that’s some wet ass pussy” she implores the “nigga” indulging in intimacy with her). Why a hint of nipple is considered somehow more offensive than a blow by blow (pun intended) description of the mechanics of this woman’s coital activities is opaque. Grumpy finds it illustrating and indicative of the times that she gets ranked in this way amongst all the astounding influencers on planet Earth.

There is also an interesting comparison between the US and the UK in attitudes to song content here. As described elsewhere in this blog, a memorial stone to the alleged dog of Dam Buster commander Guy Gibson, called (as a matter of historical record) “Nigger” was changed because it was deemed offensive. Yet in the US this word dominates award winning ‘songs’ by females to describe the male protagonists in their sexploits. Note that any 12 year old can buy a CD or download this material.

In comparison,it would appear that the mere glimpse of a bit of areola – or heaven forbid, a nipple – needs to be blacked out if shown in other than back-street magazines. Meanwhile in Europe, bare breasts were de rigueur even in family newspapers a few decades ago and sunbathing topless is today not seen as a pornographic activity.

This curious juxtaposition of attitudes to matters sexual is shown throughout both countries however. In the UK, the aforementioned Daily Mail rejoices in photographing drunken women at horse racing showing their knickers for pure titillation of male observers, whilst MP Stella Creasy’s Upskirting Bill would potentially earn the photographer 2 years in jail for taking the snap.

It’s a mystery.