What Do You Think Today?

[peter]

This morning's Financial Times;

Scarcity of drivers leaves retailers frantic for stock.

A nationwide shortage of drivers sparked largely by Brexit and then by the 'pingdemic' that forced many to isolate has been described by a retailers loby group as a 'perfect storm'......

Don't think I need to add anything to this.

[Skyweir]

“pingdemic” lol

… rather telling

[I'm Murrin]

Yeah, we've gone from "everyone in lockdown" to "only people confirmed exposed have to isolate" so the media of course had to rebrand it and give it a catchy name to make it sound like it got worse.

[peter]

I heard the guy on the BBC news last night reporting in rather surprised tones that the number of people being 'pinged' by the notorious NHS app was "down by forty percent". He went on to quote an MP as saying it was too early to get over optimistic, but that perhaps it was a sign that we "turned the corner". What he seemed to have forgotten was that two days ago they were reporting that they had effectively turned down the sensitivity of the app so that it would only contact people at half the distance as previously was the case or for longer periods of contact (or some such). This was not mentioned so that the impression was that the "turning of the corner" applied to the pandemic (rather than the problems being caused by the app). The report was either deliberately ambiguous or simply a case of horrendously bad reportage. I think the former.

A later report into the current levels of strain being placed on the NHS by the pandemic had the new top dog at the NHS saying that it has fallen to manageable levels, prompting me to say to my wife how remarkably well trained this pandemic is; it seems to go exactly where the Government needs it to go at any point in time. Perhaps they should enter it for One Man and His Dog!

Weather lady Carol Kirkwood then amused me by saying that the northern half of the country would experience strong winds and the southern half of the country would experience strong winds too. Errr....... correct me if I'm wrong Carol, but wouldn't that be the whole country then?

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator tells us on the front of the Telegraph today that "Vaccine passports would create a hideously unfair society." Fraser, it may come as a bit of a shock to you but.........

[Skyweir]

Yeah brace for impending bullshit and incompetence - ya know the incompetence of the reporting media, government, and even the average joes.

It’s excellent that numbers are in decline and more NHS manageable.

Got your vax?

[Avatar]

...whose introduction represents a significant step towards the introduction of a more general ID document with all of the societal considerations attached to that...

Living as I do in a country where it is mandatory to have an ID document, I do not view it with the same sense of dread that you may.

--A

[Skyweir]

Same here.

[peter]

So you both live in countries where the onus is on you to demonstrate your right to be there, whereas I live in one where the onus is on the state to demonstrate that I haven't. This is as fundamental a difference at its core as the presumption of innocence or presumption of guilt upon which judicial systems may rest. Does it matter? Well, if our respective countries decide to put us to the test but cannot prove their cases, in mine you get to stay (or stay free on the streets), in yours, if you cannot prove your case, then you are out on your ear (or in jail in the case of the judicial system). It's about the onus of proof and it's in the grey area of doubt that such differences become fundamentally important. I have to say, I prefer my system to yours. At 3am in the morning walking through the streets of my town I want the policeman who walks past me to understand that it's his job to ensure my safety as I do so, not to question my right to be walking there. The same applies to the state writ large.

My message to the state is this: You are there at our forbearance and to serve us, not the other way around. You answer to us and not us to you. To often this seems to be forgotten.

[Skyweir]

That may be the ideal - or one view point/perception of your reality. But dont you have to “establish” your perceived “right” first to engage in society, to drive a vehicle, to work, be educated, access the NHS?

You have to register/certify your existence there to engage in the aforementioned activities, dont you?

ie via requirements to register your birth, to certify you are a citizen of the UK to access NHS, to attend school, to drive a vehicle, work etc.

Clearly there are registered citizens and non-registered inhabitants in the UK (also known as illegals).

Doesnt your citizenship come with obligations, you pay the government in the form of taxes for the privilege of earning money, right?

The state in actuality DEMANDS it if you.

The state does not permit you to own and drive a vehicle unless you comply with state imposed requirements of you.

The state provides the street lighting that enables you to walk in relative safety at 3am in the morning. And as the state also establishes laws and a system of “justice” and then authorises law enforcers - those lol “enforcing” or preserving peace and social order for the well-being of the many - will likely take an interest in lone pedestrian activities at 3am - I know I would perhaps ask the question to satisfy myself as a peace preserver that you are not up to no good lol

The state does not in these senses serve the individual but the whole. John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and other great philosophical and jurisprudential minds understood this in the development of an appreciation of utilitarianism and ironically the “happiness principle”: producing the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

The utility aspect is often sidelined in preference for individualism. But individuals co-exist with other individuals - and one individuals perceived “rights” do not have superior space over anothers “rights”.

We exist within complex social constructs and as such there are rules of engagement, if you will. The impact of such rules act to limit, regulate, enable and restrict certain actions - the focus being “the greater good”.

Our legal system is derived from yours. I do not think it is very different at all.

[peter]

The difference is that we have set the parameters beyond which we do not have to step in order to demonstrate our right to occupy and enjoy the benefits of our land - and they do not include the carrying of an identity document that must be produced on demand to any individual that today, the state decides has the right to do so. My identity is an intensely personal and private thing, and to date my country has regarded it so. I deeply resent and will speak out vociferously against any attempt to change this. I have a photo identification on the driving license I hold in my wallet; I have a passport that is deemed sufficient to allow me to pass the boarders into this country; I have identification enough to corroborate who I am at need. I see no purpose to adding an additional level of documentation to this other than to instigate a deliberate change of perception concerning the relationship between the individual and the state. It is a deliberate encroachment beyond the parameters already established, and a clear cut example of the state doing what it will always do - attempting to increase its degree of control over the people (because, as in the case of money with the wealthy, so with control in the case of the state, enough is never enough) - and it is our bounden duty as 'free' individuals to oppose it.

[Skyweir]

Nah I don’t think so - you carry identity documents as a matter of practice.

You telling me you don’t have a drivers license, a birth certificate, a passport, a tax file number, a NHS card or whatever lol

We are conditioned to establish and prove our identities so much that we inexplicably think otherwise - how or why I can’t for certain say lol

[peter]

Just been flicking through the headlines (which I do by looking at the newspaper front pages first thing every day) and I notice that the Sun have on the side column, where the inside stuff is promoted, the usual picture of horoscope columnist 'Mystic Meg' (black haired, with that ever so slight cast in her eye that gives her a slightly 'other worldly' look) along side some drivel about the "Sex in your Stars". It suddenly occurred to me that that picture has been exactly the same, never changing, only the head above the particular caption for the day, for years and years. I mean years and years and years! Way beyond the Queen's head on the face of currency, which does change ever so slightly every decade or so reflecting her advancing age, Meg's mush has been entirely unvarying to the point where it almost seems to stretch back into my youth. Like She (who must be obeyed) Meg seems to have partaken of a dip in (or is it a drink from) the fountain of youth (tucked away in some remote corner of Africa I believe) and to have benefited from perpetual everlasting (sort of) youth from the process. I know much can be done with injections of Botox and a bottle of Grecian 2000 these days, but this is ridiculous. I don't believe she exists. I mean - has anybody ever seen her excepting in that picture I'm referring to? She's not like old Rusty Lee who pops up as a filler on the odd TV couch to make a dick of herself to the slight embarrassment of all who are both presenting and viewing, is she? Nope, she is a non-person; some Jo(sephine) pulled in off the street back in the sixties for a one-off photo op because of her eye-catching eye and seemingly penetrating gaze. Paid ten bob and sent back out to her regular job on the fags counter in Lipton's. Prove me wrong!

[peter]

Nah I don’t think so - you carry identity documents as a matter of practice.

You telling me you don’t have a drivers license, a birth certificate, a passport, a tax file number, a NHS card or whatever lol

We are conditioned to establish and prove our identities so much that we inexplicably think otherwise - how or why I can’t for certain say lol

Not in the UK we don't. Of course we have such documents - I said so above - but we are not forced in law to carry them with us to present to some clown who we don't know from Adam just because he/she happens to be wearing a uniform. My identity is perfectly well known to those who I choose should know it and in the rare circumstances where I concede the necessity to prove it outside this small circle (and agree to as part of my 'social contract' if you like) I am perfectly capable of doing so with the documentation I already hold.

[StevieG]

I have no idea who she is, apart from looking her up just now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystic_Meg

79 years young... if she still looks like the images, she's definitely on to something with the anti-aging creams...

[peter]

I'm fortunate enough to live in a beautiful part of the country where frankly, there would never be any reason to leave even for the briefest of times, were it not that the possibility of doing so was there without too much hassle or expense being involved.

But for many in this country, their annual break is an absolute necessity - the only thing that can make life worth living as you grind your way through the days in soul destroying employment in places like Dagenham or Stoke. The truth is however, that post-pandemic, the annual break has become an ever distant memory for huge numbers of people who are simply either unable to afford the inflated prices of either holidays at home or abroad (where the latter are possible), or cannot meet the quarantine requirements required for overseas travel due to work commitments which do not allow for extended periods of absence to accommodate for this.

Just to cite a couple of examples from my own area; it was reported in a local paper that a family who had booked for a week in St Ives prior to the first lockdown and had had to cancel thereby last year, had been contacted by the operators of the holiday flat they were booked into a week before they were eventually to take their holiday this season. They were told that if they wanted to take the booking, they would have to pay a further fifty percent on what they had already paid due to pandemic incurred costs and the increased demand for holiday lets at home this year.

A member of my own family who is attending the forthcoming Boardmasters event at Newquay decided that it would be nice to book into a hotel for a couple of nights during the event. Predictably there was nothing to be had for love nor money excepting a room in a three star hotel of some local vintage, but mediocre quality. The room on offer was priced at five thousand pounds per night for a minimum of three nights.

Now I'm sure that this is exceptional, but the trend for price inflation for so called 'staycation' holidays (due to massive increase in demand) is well documented. Reports in the national press tell of holidaymakers being staggered at the cost of both purchasing holidays in this country and the prices of goods and services while taking them. A week in a Butlins chalet for a family of four that a colleague of mine at work was looking at was priced in the thousands of pounds. Two years ago this would have been a holiday available to virtually everyone, including those who work for minimum wage (with a little bit of saving). Not so anymore. Now, there will be many for whom the taking of an annual holiday will be a thing of the past. Their mental and physical health will suffer thereby. The simple drudgery of their daily life will become intolerable and they will take refuge in the only outlets left available to them, drink, drugs and sedentary couch surfing. Health will decline. Social ills will increase. Domestic strife alongside it's attendant consequences will skyrocket.

Yet further inclusions to be added to the 'bill of sale' of the pandemic when our Government has the courage to instigate the enquiry that is demanded.

[Skyweir]

lol but I take it’s a legal expectation now? Or is merely an idea being floated.

Here it is a legal requirement to operate a vehicle that you have your license on you.

I’m surprised it’s not the same there but - clearly different from what you say.

Anyway carrying ID is not a foreign experience here or providing appropriate ID on request for various purposes.

I think a COVID passport lol is an excellent idea and will likely become the norm - but realistically it is a note on a cyber record held by state medical records.

[Skyweir]

oh and yeah that Meg looks pretty fabulous



This one is my fave - she looks HP-esque

[peter]

Well that's a matter of opinion! To me she looks like a geriatric version of Cleopatra on a bad day. But I do concede at least that there might be a real human being behind that withered facade. The ridiculous obsession with aping youth, eschewing age, in western society is reflective of a shallowness prevalent across its whole facade; a cheap glam covering a rotten core.

[peter]

Yesterday morning, in a carpet-bombing of wall-to-wall coverage, every paper in the UK had horrific pictures of the wildfires in Greece (all in an ominous orange-red hue reminiscent of a 'hell on earth' biblical scene) together with the dire predictions of the IPCC report, released the day before.

This report has it that we have entered the red-zone in respect of our future on this planet, whereby even if we cut our carbon and methane emissions hugely and drastically right now, the increase in temperature of 1.5 degrees in the next twenty years is inevitable. This will bring devastating weather events leading to widespread flooding and fires over much of the planet, causing huge migrations in population and the problems incumbent on the same, in their wake. And this is if we all stop driving our cars and taking flights as of today.

It was a horror story that was beyond our conception really, beyond ones ability to take it on board and one found oneself struggling to accept the hugeness of the problem, the sheer scale of the disaster that awaits us, and instead tended to focus on the pictures from Greece (one in particular of an elderly woman wailing as a wall of flame engulfed her house in the background) that had a more human dimension.

Suddenly, as of yesterday, it seems we are in the endgame. We are at the very tipping point where if we don't change - and change right now - then we are screwed. It is not Covid that is this generation's main challenge - it is climate change...... and it is knocking on our door as I post.

But what exactly is going on here? The coverage was as I have said, a broadside; a blow to the solar plexus that could not be ignored - and this was deliberate. I have always said that the situation with regards to international travel that pertained prior to Covid would never be allowed to re-establish itself once the pandemic was under control; that the gains in the reduction of air travel brought about by countries closing their boarders would never be allowed to be lost - and what we saw yesterday was, I believe, the first 'switch of direction' to swivel public attention away from Covid, and toward climate. People are gearing themselves up for a resumption in their usual travel oriented lives and somehow this had to be stopped. Hence yesterday's frontal assault. They, the people, were never going to accept that their lives of old had to change, but for a barrage of propoganda of the same scale that was used to instill the fear of Covid (and get compliance with the lockdown rules thereby), and this is the start of it. It will be much easier for Governments to stop the resumption of large scale international travel while it is already in abeyance, than to allow it to restart and then try to stop it again at some future point when the habit is re-established.

But for all of that, on this occasion I actually think they are right. Unlike my deep scepticism about the way that the Covid pandemic was allowed to alter our lives, usurp our freedoms, in this case I believe that the situation is serious and warranting of our deep concern. That human activity is playing a major part in climate shift, that we are creating a situation that may result in our own demise is all but undeniable now. The evidence of our own eyes, let alone the hundreds of scientific studies and reports to this effect, tell us this. If we don't adress this situation now - not tomorrow, or the day after - then we ain't gonna make it.

And yet, and yet.........

Is this really important? I'm not so sure. I don't really think very highly of us humans as a species (though I have very high regard for a limited number of us). What seems to me to be important is not that we survive, but that life, the earth, the blue jewel of the cosmos survives us. Could it be that we are the disease that the planet needs to be rid off? Put it like this. Tell me of another species who is so self centered, so full of it's own importance, that its contribution to the working of the whole is so minimal, let alone so damaging. The humble earthworm spends its entire life pulling leaves down, creating the very soil and humus upon which life thrives; in it's short life any one of them does more good for the planet than most of us achieve in a whole lifetime. Take the much maligned housefly; its maggots break down the carcasses of the dead, speeding up the circulation of nutrients back into the soil by a millionfold - it too achieves more good as a species than we who are blinkered in our self-importance, our self-centredness, to the exclusion of all others. We in our intelligence, have seen fit to take, take take, never sparing a thought for the rest of our world as we ride it to its destruction.

So does it truly matter if we dissapear in a few generations time, to leave the planet to recover, to draw breath and begin the clean-up operation? There will be plenty of time for new intelligences to develop - and mayhaps they will make a better job of it? No, I think we had our bite at the cherry and we blew it. Now our responsibility is not to our own kind; it is to the planet, to life itself. It may possibly be that the life we see here is the only example in the entire universe - this is entirely possible. For once in our existence we have to do something that is not based on selfish motivation, and if this requires us to 'take one for the team' then so be it. Could it be that our dissapearance could be the greatest contribution we could make toward the continuance of this most precious jewel of all, life itself?

[Avatar]

So you both live in countries where the onus is on you to demonstrate your right to be there, whereas I live in one where the onus is on the state to demonstrate that I haven't.

That seems a funny way of looking at it. Nobody has ever asked me to present it in the random course of daily events. But if I want to, for example, open a bank account, or register for something, then part of the info I provide is my ID number as part of the process. It's not even mandatory to carry your ID, just to have it.

When a cop pulls me over, he asks for my drivers licence. And it's mandatory to carry that when you drive, same as it is there. (Actually, technically not even mandatory, if I'm not carrying it I have 7 days to present it IIRC.) It is mandatory to carry my firearm license if I'm going about armed of course though.

Can't see much difference really. Literally no impact on my life at all that I have an ID number.

--A