Jim Stewart's Blog

Very little in the news here about this unless you search for it. Okay – it is mainly protests with some riots associated with them. But they are widespread from Madrid to the Med.

On the surface it is about a rapper that has been jailed for lyrics that insult the former king and support some former groups considered terrorist. Looking at his history I can imagine he might well be in the right place. But nine months in jail for lyrics?

And still the anti-vaxers roam free, but those that insult the king go to jail.

Sometimes Facebook can surprise you. I remember wondering why I had a common friend with somebody. I popped over to their home page to see if there was any information that would help me. What I found made me click the unfollow button pretty sharpish. I had no idea how dodgy they were.

One of the features Facebook offers is People You May Know (PYMK). Normally it is people with mutual friends, or other obvious connections (place or work etc). If you look at the list you will see how many mutual friends you have with the suggestion.

Occasionally I get suggestions that are clearly dodgy accounts, supposedly attractive young women. They have no friends in common. There are a few ways that could happen, but when you track it down it can be a friend that has them in their friends list, but they try to hide their list so people don’t know.

On the occasions that I have managed to track the friend responsible it has been an older married man. Okay, they have an interest in younger women (not criminal). But then they are trying to hide it (they have that right).

But what else are they interested in? Is it my business? Actually, a lot of the profiles are fake – designed to mine personal data. So yes it is my business. If a friend is not taking precautions it will leak some of my data to people I don’t want to have it.

As we start to come out of the lockdown this will be an issue we have for a few months. Until we get to the point where people are vaccinated we need to think about how our actions could affect others.

So I think we will see a slow release announced next week – lets face it – too many of us need to be told to consider others.

A while ago the talk was about the new normal, but it seems to have dropped off as we all see glimmers of hope that we can get back to the old normal.

But I wonder how strange it will feel if we do go back to the old normal.

The reason I say this is because of something that happened on my walk tonight. As I was walking along I heard an odd noise. And there it was – high above me – an aeroplane.

I just thought – when was the last time I saw that? And I can’t remember. The failure to see aircraft has crept up on me and has become the norm.

It will be nice to be able to travel by air again. But it would be nice not to have so many aircraft flying over. There is a tension.

I believe the ability to travel internationally has been a great benefit to society. War demands hatred, and knowledge fights hatred.

This is one reason I feel the environmentalist approach to air travel (stop the travel) is wrong. It goes against the desires of people and the positives of being able to travel. But is it possible to achieve frequent international air travel without destroying the environment?

Interesting things happening, there are new modern sail ships and electric ships in the pipeline. Maybe, just maybe the answer isn’t less, but is better.

An earlier post today. I just watched the PM briefing and spotted some interesting figures.

Normally hospitalisation lags infection and death lags hospitalisation.

Right now infection rates are higher than before, hospitalisation rates are about the same as the last peak and deaths are below the last peak – and all are falling.

Nice they are all falling, but there is an important inference from this data. It is becoming less likely that people who are infected will be hospitalised, and if hospitalised less likely that they will die.

Why? Who knows – maybe the weakest have already died, maybe the infection is higher in the young these days. But my guess is that we are becoming better at treating this disease. And better as time goes on.

I know vaccination is held up as the answer, but there is always that worry about new variants. The ability to treat the disease more effectively is becoming a really strong second line of defence, and we should not forget the people working in this area.

I was reading that the Sun has had an big story about Amanda Holden driving 200 miles to see her father because of a distressing message she got from her father.

It reminded me of the DC trip to Barnard Castle. Everybody was up in arms – people all over the internet were saying how evil he was because of it.

At the moment there is a push to end cyberbullying. But your comments about DC were justified – he was in the public image – he should be able to cope with it. It wasn’t really cyberbullying, well maybe just a tad because he deserved it.

Then I thought about the kids that might just read those posts. Does it set an example for them about how to treat the people they don’t like?

A lot of people (or should I say the press) have been complaining because we are not protecting the country from dirty foreigners. We are not closing the doors as hard as places like Australia (no – they would never take a racist approach – no no no not our Arian brothers). And even then – look at Australia having to have a local lockdown even with those restrictions.

The area in Australia that has gone in to lockdown is about the same as the UK, but has about a tenth of the population of the UK. Given the number of outbreaks in Victoria recently the answer I get is that the failures in the strict border control in Australia demonstrate that border controls fail way too often even with very limited travel.

One thing that I overheard was a politician telling the people they needed to be so strict otherwise they would be a lot of people getting ill and they would need to vaccinate people.

Boing!

Did I hear that politician right – he seems to be advocating no vaccination in Victoria. Certainly not the Federal Government approach. The anti-vax advocates are getting everywhere.

So I have got wicked again – I have adopted a policy of telling anti-vaxxers that the New World Order is searching for them on Facebook, and if they post their ideas there than they will get tracked. Well, if the Evil New World Order really did exist then it is obviously something they would do…

And that is the problem with all these conspiracy theories – if they were true then the people telling them would already have been disappeared.

So can I commend adopting an approach of cancelling your reality check when dealing with folk like this on the internet. It lowers frustration levels.

Odd looking decorations on the bottom of the wall. What are they? Well, they are designed to redirect urine on to the feet of any men trying to urinate against the walls. And not a new invention – these things have been around for over 200 years.

They are not just there to stop the smell – they are there to protect the walls. A little water on a wall means nothing. But urine stream after urine stream eats in to the wall.

Similar thing with facebook – a simple comment means nothing, but comment after comment can wear people down.

Don’t urinate on walls.

In my opinion.

The police have stepped in and charged a man. He is being accused of making a comment about Captain Tom that was offensive. The comment was a nationalist rant and was based on a statement by General Sheridan.

Rather than Captain Tom the target of this statement has been many other people – and Donald Trump retweeted the same statement recently when referring to Democrats.

And in another case somebody has been docked £25,000 by a court for leaving a review that talked about “scam solicitor”. Not sure why he didn’t use the autocorrect defence, “Where did that a come from”.

I’m astounded. I’m furious. I see, daily, statements by anti-vaxers, conspiracy theorists, extremists of all varieties that I find much more offensive than either of these statements. Why are the trolls not in court?

So always remember not to claim facts – always make sure everything you write is “in my opinion”.

New travel rules are introduced. They say the idea is to discourage international travel.

Fines are quite high for trying to bypass the rules.

But fines generally affect the poorest in society more than the richest.

It’s interesting how this has been done. Every international trip to Scotland and every one to England from high risk countries will now come with a £1750 add-on cost. It will be interesting seeing if the same rules will apply in the other direction.

For the average person in the UK this will stop them travelling. But not so for the rich, they can afford the costs. And for the very rich – well just pay the fines and ignore the rules.

The same is true for all fixed price government services, like TV licence for example.

Is it right to use cost as a means of discouraging international travel? Or should we have a different way to discourage travel that applies to the rich as much as it does to the poor?