The Covid-Omicron show.

Sitting watching the news on the BBC (I have to do it just to have a rough idea of what’s going outside my bubble of one … at most a few more than one). And then comparing to all the other mainstream news outlets I currently have access to. I am compelled to think, I am actually watching  Covid/Omicron show. Endless punditry and opinion. To be entirely fair to the BBC, it’s also Al Jazeera, RT, Sky, and even GB News (though the GB News take on things are more in line with my opinion, based on information gleaned outside the mainstream media … see links below).

What’s actually going on if you look beyond the demands for more money from the government (nuanced reactive money to cover losses caused by staff absence, not mandatory not by lockdown)? That’s a difficult question to answer. Let's say "My business usually makes a £1000 a day … on Tuesday it only made £500. Can the government make up the difference?" That is a slight oversimplification, and deliberately so. It’s deliberately broad brush, because the sensible will immediately find layers of complexity in the notion. It isn’t impossible to create measures, however, it may be prohibitively expensive in terms of administrative overheads, unless the tax system is used as the input-output buffer. Again, not impossible, but whenever you add layers to systems, you lose clarity, and at this stage ripping out a system and trying to replace it with something bespoke … again why? Crisis end. This crisis is coming to an end (there is a massive caveat to that further down).

Back to the question of what’s actually going on in the wider UK as far as Covid-19-Omicron-Variant is concerned. Not much it seems, 100,000 infections plateauing, a lot of staff absence due to positive tests. The result being a train timetable change in Scotland and a critical incident being declared by Lincolnshire Hospital trust due to staff absence. Hospitality is still suffering from staff shortages, and people are self-regulating themselves away from socialising outside of their immediate bubbles.

I’m going to suggest that the pundits who are suggesting there needs to be even more testing are not thinking clearly. The testing-for-Covid-industry is booming, and positive Covid tests that result in staff absence are jerking the economy like an eager dog on a leash. Herd immunity and the spread of Omicron are likely to be the key to ending the current `not really a crisis’ crisis. Yes, I wrote that and published it.

There are so many fronts to argue on, you spend the whole of the rest of your life arguing the toss about your opinion and where you gathered your facts that formed your opinion. My little voice mostly unheard in an unknown corner of the internet is an irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t sit idly by and be counted with the sheep and the useful idiots. So, to this end I’ll leave this digital impression here as my personal testament, that I disagree with the sheep and the useful idiots … never mind those in the pharmaceutical industry who have realised that all their dreams have come true … for a while.

The sheep, I think just love the pandemic and being told what to do. It’s easy comfort, you can signal your virtue and look like a law-abiding citizen, shed non-friends and irrelevant social engagement by the expedient use of plague … and you will be applauded for it … win win. Crack on, as your freedoms are curtailed, and random uncertainty is introduced into your life, by other well-meaning but misinformed partisans; or by petty bureaucrats in your workplace, on the bus, the tube, the miserable whining hypochondriac who shares office space with you and needs a drama to spread their own misery to anyone else they can. Crisis perpetuators at all levels of society, a semi-hive mind driven by a nebulous cloud of finger-wagging, fear of being different, fear of being outcast, while simultaneously out-casting-self (it’s tail eating of the first order, and would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening).

Useful idiots, those who have found a cause, a lever for financial or political gain. Crisis perpetuators, who are using low-grade Machiavellian machinations for their cause, and driving the fear of uncertainty, to create uncertainty. Above them are the `Vile expedient arseholes’. Let’s throw the broadest figures we can at the pharmaceutical industry, so we know what the Borg Queen at the head of the collective is all about. Currently, $1000 dollars per second are going to pharmaceutical companies, approximately $90million daily for Covid related products. Lobbyist’s outnumber congressmen three to one in America and it is estimated that the pharmaceutical industry has spent $266-million dollars on lobbying since the start of the pandemic, and there is talk about the pandemic rolling on until 2024. It’s 2022, the pandemic has been with us for two years already. Do you want two more years? Do you want the pandemic as the world's president? Four years that’s a presidential term, that is how long the pharmaceutical industry projects this rolling on for. Buy shares in big-pharma … if you have £52 going spare for a Pfizer share.

Let us today be thankful, that our government is tracking the optimistic line rather than kowtowing to demands for more restrictions, and actually looks to be following the data, rather than the forecasts, which are based on models, that have been designed around worst-case scenarios, and to a greater or lesser degree have been consistently wrong (wide of the worst-case scenario) since the outset of the pandemic.

In the beginning when the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) was playing fast and loose with numbers and the truth, while the BBC amongst others was ramping up the fear, and Covid variously moved from killing less than 1% to killing more than 6% in periods measured in 24hours (the number of dead relative to the number of hospitalisations in Wuhan). I was all over it. I joined a group to dispel misinformation and to point people in the direction of the right information. I was shitting bricks, this SARS (severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) could and likely would kill me, so I believed. I still believe given my asthma and the medication I take for it -Montelukast, an immune suppressant for a system that Covid attacks-  though I have found no papers looking at asthma drugs and Covid outside those steroids used for severe asthma- that for me Covid could be deadly. However, I have been double vaccinated and boosted, I look after my health and fitness, I take care of myself (even in trying times). I stay abreast of the actual science around Covid, not the media distillation, or the projections from the models. And what I see now doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the financial and social fallout from Covid.

Tangent: Note the public health messaging about looking after your health, diet and fitness has slipped off the agenda. Many luminaries of the scientific community and alternative media world have been asking this question. Joe Rogan springs to mind. Could it be that unhealthy lifestyles and the medicines that treat them would be an incentive for the pharmaceutical industry to lobby against health messaging for the general public? Or are people genuinely too lazy and too reliant on medicine to fix things after the fact? Rather than mitigate problems with lifestyle choices?

Anyway, rant over, here’s some links to the Journal of the American Medical Association. This is the source.

The front page for the journals Coronavirus recourse centre.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/pages/coronavirus-alert

Now historic articles. January, February, March 2020.

1.  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2760500

 2. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762997

3.   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762688

The latest from South Africa (specifically regarding Omicron)

4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787776

Compare and contrast the content of article 2. Above with the content of article 4.

Karma and the Gods ... beware of fooling yourself.

This is one of those I finally got around to it blogs, frankly, I’ve been busy. First, there was a new job and its attendant very steep learning curve. The move back to Somerset living in a guest house, then there was eyestrain and mental fatigue and fear and uncertainty and learning new processes and, and, and habituating them and taking notes and fearing failure, and Christmas and returning to swimming and finding my feet and trying to find a flat (I still haven’t), getting back to a GP, trying to follow up the complaint I made to the DWP (they are shite), dealing with the Universal Credit people (they are also shite), doing laundry in a sink, or driving miles to my sons to do laundry … or taking a bag of laundry 200-miles to your brothers to use the washing machine, because you’re going that way for Christmas and you might as well kill two birds with one stone. Eating cold food out of packets, being miserable and alone (caveat, I’m not miserable for the most part, I just sit in the realm of uncertainty, looking for solutions through the opaque meniscus of uncertainty, and sometimes it “fucks you right off”), having another cough cold thing as I entered a new environment -that’s three in three months new people and environments will do that to a person, walking cold damp streets after dark and wishing I could turn back the arrow of time and fix whatever the fuck it is (was) that went wrong (be mindful of that road … monsters live there, however, it’s also worth saying I have never been so free to do whatever I like), trying to write (it’s difficult given all that needed to be learnt). Travelling back and forth to Wiltshire and Essex for various functions, which is both expensive and knackering.

Getting a Covid booster jab was a chore given the trials and tribulations of the last month, and when I finally got it, it was like groundhog day (or two). I had the Pfizer jab. On day one I had to nap twice immediately after having the jab, I didn’t even realise I’d nodded off, and then slept through the night as well. Day two was OMFG!, the analogy would be, being sealed in a barrel and being tossed over a waterfall. Let’s hope that Omicron is the end and that our long-term T-cell immunity holds up and the CCP-Virus (Covid-19), is finally settling to becoming another endemic cold-causing virus … we can only live in hope.

So, where am I as I type? Sitting on a bed in a guesthouse, where I have been rooming for the last month, eking out an existence. Is it a life? Just about, albeit highly restricted and feeling somewhat tenuous.

The trick it seems is to focus on all the things that have gone right, and don’t mistake the positive results of affirmative action for the whims of karma or God.

I may have written elsewhere and earlier that in the aftermath of my separation from Amanda that I felt for a long while that my face was pressed so hard up against the opaque meniscus of reality; the unseen future, the chaos of the present unfolding and passing into the dead past lost before even being grasped that I just wanted to get off the bus (past-tense). It’s uncertainty and, the horror of being cut loose to freefall forward in time flailing around trying to grab a handhold, while blinded by the velocity of times passing and the sheet of the future pulled so tight across the face of your consciousness like layers of suffocating clingfilm, that ending it all actually looked like a way out, if not by my hand then by incautious action leading to what would appear to be death by misadventure… all very dramatic … but I can assure you that’s exactly what it feels like and it’s terrifying. And especially in the rear-view. I read a piece on Quora that suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. Coupled with reading Jordan Petersons Twelve Rules For Life … I’ve not finished it yet; it needs headroom and this season doesn’t allow for it. I had a tiny scrappy mental toolkit to work with. I will write about the book later.

To speak plainly of suicide in retrospect “Fuck that shit!”

There’s a saying: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Caveat, be mindful of becoming arrogant hard and or rigid in the lea of a terrible experience, lest you circle round and start a new loop of the “same shit … different decade”, time and age will be your enemies if you do not make friends with them as you stabilise going forward. The bit’s you lost in the fall are irretrievably gone, and be thankful you have the hindsight to see them recede.

Upsides.

My return to the pool has been nothing short of fantastic. I changed my days, I stopped wasting time and I increased everything. I dropped my pool corner work, there is something fucked up in my lumbar, I think I’ve isolated it to upper right L5/S1, but I do need to get back into the health system, I think a pin is stripped or snapped … won’t that be a joy if I’ve been right about that for the last eleven-and-three-quarter months. I swam a mile for the first time in years on the 29^th of December, I’ve walked miles on the beach. If I’m careful I can reverse dip, incline press-up, squat, lunge, toe press etc, and my fitness in spite of colds and coughs is good.

The real glory of returning to the pool, has more to do with people than place or activity. Seven years of the same faces, friendships, shared experience, the routine, the sense of normality. Being accepted back into the fold of the familiar, the only thing that has changed in real terms is that now I’m solo … and as above with that comes freedom; at first bitter and nervous … the terror of the first day back at school, but in a few hours all the bugaboos, wiverns and gribbly's of the mind have evaporated away like tendrils of mist in the light of the sun.

The practical things that have worked for me, writing (I have, just not here … admin). I’ve kept my Kefir alive through thick and thin, though my diet has been shaky in the absence of proper food preparation facilities. However, I have been sensible in my spending and consumption and tried to low-carb, high protein mixed with plenty of fresh fruit, nuts and seeds (almost zero alcohol). I think I may have fallen foul of Keto-Flu and over-exercise one weekend, but I seem to have found the basic balance for going forward. Once a week I travel to a café and have a full-English breakfast, it is my only cooked fresh meal of the week (writing that makes me feel a little sad and desperate, it’s a reality bump … imagine what it’s like if you don’t even have that to look forward to … but for the grace etc (but also be mindful of invoking Gods and karma as above). Exercise, thinking, breathing exercises, reading, making speculative spreadsheets and notes, doing research on how to navigate life alone in a new home at some point hence. Knowing it’s a matter of time, and having time measured in increments you can comprehend, NOT the blistering blinding second to second panic of falling. These are the things that will see you through the darkness, and in my very unique circumstance (because everyone’s is), being in the chapter, at the paragraph where reality transitions from Order to Chaos. 

If for one second we are going to consider fate and the intersection of my life (anyone’s life) with a moment of pre-ordained serendipity, it is the moment when for the day I had closed my Kindles cover on the Twelve Rules for Life, knowing in the days after the event of September 2021, that when I re-opened that cover, that Jordan Peterson, having described the myriad points where you transition from Order to Chaos, how best you behave for yourself and for all your satellites, to navigate the realm of Chaos back to Order, and the understanding that Order is as mutable as Chaos.

There is a hard road ahead, not a tunnel with light at the end. A road with hazy horizons and objects I can see, not mirages per se, but those objects may be further along than they appear, or they may not be all they appear to be … BUT, and this is the differentiator … it’s not dark anymore.

Algorithm's Again.

Facebook's blunt instrument algorithms would be comical if they weren't so dangerous. I just made a disparaging comment about an EMS "alleged" fitness device (that's a device that promises to make you into Arnold Schwarzenegger from the comfort of your armchair ... it's utter fucking nonsense, for the idle but still vain). However, in the few seconds between poking a hole in the advertising blurb for the hard-of-thinking, somewhere in Meta's server farm one of their crawlers picked up the activity, but not the essence. This is critical, the essence of the comment, not the activity of making the comment is the important part. The result: a slew of new adverts for things that promise the Earth in terms of fitness but will never deliver.

What's so amusing and the thing that demonstrates how myopic and blunt these so-called emergent AI's are, is the fact that my post from earlier clearly states I swam a mile this morning.

And therein lies the problem. I've effectively given Meta all the right information, and yet it comes probing at me with dumb feelers. Besides that, and this is where you move from dumb to dangerous, those same algorithms are now shifting my meta-data towards what it thinks is my goal. And that is how you accidentally profile and stream people -and if you get it wrong and clearly all social media gets it wrong all the time because we haven't evolved with this technology- you end up pushing people up blind alleys, or worse into polarised positions.

Covid, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me."

Excuse the humourous comparison below, but sometimes you have to expose the nerve of the ridiculous to make sense of things

It's quite difficult to believe how close to finding a smoking gun this is getting, without cooperation from the CCP. It's far more difficult to get your head around why they aren't either; owning up to the error if one was made, or providing the information that would settle the matter?

From a humorous perspective, it's like the CCP equivalent of singing the Shaggy song "It wasn't me."

Not clearing the issue up, is going to leave the CCP in the doghouse for decades to come. What's the benefit? Why would a country/regime do that to itself? And especially when they have far-reaching commercial interests around the world and could with a little bit more openness be a force for good.

Am I naive, would there be retaliation against the CCP or China? Would the rest of the world vent their fury and exacerbate the situation? Or would everyone learn the lessons fill the cracks and make the world safer? The potential for instability in the long-term unknowns (I think), is far worse than the short-term finger-wagging ruckus that will ensue if the CCP put's its hands up and concedes it dropped the ball.

Matt Ridley's Original Blogpost

Facebook link and comments

Lyrics

It Wasn't Me

Video

Official Music Video

Algorithms and advertising

This post has been enlarged from an original comment made on Facebook related to targeted advertising related to words you have used in posts on platforms like Facebook, or searches you have made in Google. For context Neal Asher has been intermittent fasting on and off for years, to this end, he has mentioned Ketone sticks a few times in the last couple of days, the algorithms have crawled over his posts and lo-and-behold ... read on. There is a link to Neals post on Facebook below, and from there you can (if you so wish) follow the thread back to the inception of his latest ninety-hour fast.

Algorithms, a prime example of how to close the gate to keep the horse out. The further along we go, the dumber they seem, and the consensus from greater minds than mine is that the people that program them are quite often not people-people, and therefore lack the intuitive grasp of what makes people tick, which makes them react to the rearview image rather than the potential future.

The danger is (and I've said it before) the lack of humanity in programming means that well-intentioned but empathy bereft people will make abrasive and cutting software that dispenses justice to a broader swathe of the rest of the population as time goes by. We have already seen it with Amazon, and its algorithm that fires delivery people. And it is very apparent that these tools are used in the emerging work from home market. To this end, the US government recently made it illegal for companies to use algorithms to sack people. However, there are places in our world, where human concerns are less pertinent. And with some strategic offshoring, you can circumvent the metric that makes it illegal, by placing a human at the end of the chain who pulls the trigger.

On from this the whole recruitment industry which from an outsider perspective is full of chancers, lazy cunts, and bullshitters, has painted itself into a corner by dint of the liberal use of SOE and algorithms to select on keywords or phrases to find recruits, and as above, the people that put the systems together for the recruitment companies lack people skills, so companies are wholesale streaming talent away from their businesses at a time when they need to be finding thinkers and innovators.

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous for the economy.

Original Facebook post