Jim Stewart's Blog

I’ve noticed a few of my friends struggling with being online. It seems to be stressing them out. A couple of things happened over the last few days that made me think about this.

I noticed that there were several people contacting me that assumed I would get their message immediately. I use IT a lot. But it might surprise some people to hear that I don’t actually have myself plugged in to the internet on a permanent basis. Some time ago I took the decision to remove social media and email from my phone.

It made an enormous difference to my life. If you feel you are getting internet stressed then I would suggest trying it. I did it by getting a cheap phone and a cheap Chromebook. The cheap Chromebook had two advantages – the screen size matched the age of my eyes and it came with a keyboard that matched the size of my fingers.

I watched Casablanca today. Rick never says “Play it again Sam”. I thought I would pay close attention to the dialogue to see what was said. As I watched it I was really surprised at how much of the dialogue was made up of really impressive single lines. We’ll always have Paris, This is the start of a wonderful relationship, here’s looking at you kid are the well known ones, but there are so many more. Pity we don’t make films with dialogue like that any more.

So watching black and white films and avoiding the internet – am I now officially old? I even enjoyed Tom Jones tonight…

As new restrictions are about to come in there were a lot of sporting events restarting today – and some even had crowds. Not only that but we had last night at the Proms with lots of people singing.

Listening to the different messages it sounds like the evidence is finally coming out about where the virus is being passed on, but it can sound confusing.

Typically a house has very low levels of ventilation. Ventilation is important to reduce the risk of transmission. The other thing about a house is cleaning. Yes, you might dust, but you probably don’t disinfect your furniture before and after visitors. It has always seemed clear to me that a house is the biggest risk area.

Sports venues are wide open and often have easy to clean furniture (let’s face it they need to be cleaned even without a virus).

To me the message is that we should avoid confined spaces with people we don’t live with (and personally I would not rely on masks to keep me safe – I stay away from people).

Watching the news that a skin care shop in Bootle has decided the virus is a hoax I’ve come to a conclusion. Planet of the Apes had the right idea. Time for the apes to taker control of the earth – they seem to have more intelligence than humans.

With idiots like that around the idea of a total lockdown sounds like a good idea to me – not because of the virus – I just don’t know if I feel safe with people like that on the streets.

Chatting it over with my solicitor (and his wife) tonight I decided that we need to start to spread some conspiracies that would take their imagination, but would not result in dumb behaviour.

So here we go:

• There is an alien conspiracy to take over the world – they are taking the place of cats.
• The alien cats are generating mind control sounds (a sort of humming) that is controlling the families they live with.
• People under their control are posting photographs of their masters (the cats) with hidden subliminal control messages.
• There is a friendly alien group trying to save us from the attack, and they are taking the place of mice.
• This is the reason the alien cats are attacking the alien mice.
• The alien mice are trying to get in to our homes to warn us, but the alien cats are stopping them.
• We need to avoid looking at images of cats – the only antidote is to drink a litre of water after seeing each one in order to dilute the control and flush it from your body.
• We need to leave out cheese to encourage the good mice aliens in to our houses.

ACT NOW TO SAVE THE PLANET FROM THE ALIEN INVASION

Extinction Rebellion called for a peoples forum to oversee the government response to climate change. So the government said they would set up a peoples forum. It has now reported back. Extinction Rebellion say they have not gone far enough.

To anybody that had thought through the ER demands this was an obvious outcome. A peoples forum will always deliver an average view of the people – and that will include people that are climate change doubters. A peoples forum will never deliver the wishes of a group at one extreme like ER.

No, you need a different system if you are going to take extreme action.

I always view proportional representation along the same lines. Sometimes you need governments to take strong measures that will never be acceptable to the average person in the country.

A flawed system of representation like our first past the post gives us a government that can do things that would be unacceptable in a PR setting. A peoples forum will never deliver the extreme actions that ER want. But what will? Maybe just a change in who we elect with out broken first past the post system?

In other news my BT contract ends soon – I will revert to the non-contract rate which is £7 a month higher. My alternative is to sign another contract, which will be £14 a month more. Interesting strategy.

So the rule of 6 now applies. Listening to some people you would think it is the Rule of 666. It looks like this will mean absolutely no change to my life. But my guess is this is not the end of restrictions.

There was an article on BBC news this morning that I have not been looking forward to hearing. The future outcome of this virus has been unknown because we do not know enough about the virus. Most people are looking at the likely outcome, which is a return to normality of a kind in about a year.

But the unknowns are really very large. The worst case scenarios make the current fatality rate look like a positive result. There is a door I have avoided looking at, but this morning I heard it creak open just a little.

A social grouping of virologists have been looking at whether people can be re-infected. It looks like there is growing evidence that some people can be re-infected in a relatively short time (in other words the virus is behaving like a cold virus for some people).

What does this mean, well it means for that group of people a vaccine may not be a viable option. How big is that group? Well, we don’t know, and that is something the vaccine trials will help determine. But if the number is big enough then we will not able to achieve herd immunity.

So there is the really worst case. The vaccines will not protect people and herd immunity will be impossible to achieve. The chances of this are much higher than people have been admitting. You see, if this is the case there will be no return to normal. Ever.

Thankfully the treatment options are improving, and studies like the one carried out at Oak Ridge will hopefully take that forward. But right now the likely outcome has nudged a little bit toward a very nasty ending.

It wasn’t that long ago that there were major ructions about the ability of Big Ben to ring in special occasions (not that it ever did in the past).

It struck me today that this has disappeared into the mists of time. We have been talking about the new normal for a while, but the focus has been on how we live. Maybe we have changed our normal more than we might think, slowly, and without realising.

I have written regulations on emergency response, and taken part in emergency response. One thing I try to make clear to people is that the emergency situation is often a breach of the law. What you try to do is move toward a safe situation that is within the law. But that path to the safe legal can be outside normal law. You need to accept that normal law cannot be followed as you move along that path (which is why I always write a section to allow emergency workers to step outside normal law).

Maybe we need to accept a life we don’t agree with as we head toward a new normal. We need to remember that better will only survive if we take people with us that maybe are not quite as passionate as we are.

I gave in. I ate some of the chocolate. I brought it back from Nicaragua waaay back toward the start of the year for a chocolate tasting night. But it doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon. 70% chocolate marbled together with 50% white chocolate. If you ever visit Granada in Nicaragua then try out the Chocolate Museum. Suddenly the world seems a brighter place.

I’ve put in my order for 50 gabions and rocks to fill them. I’ve designed an easily defendable maze entry to my house using them to make sure my toilet paper supply remains secure. And I am waiting for the postcrete to make an underground safe for my hand sanitiser.

I was watching an advert earlier for a fabric cleaner. It claimed to make whites 10 shades lighter. The scientist in me had trouble with that. White is white, there are no shades of white. Okay, the International Commission on Illumination has something called whiteness, but there certainly are no shades, just a continuous scale.

Lots of almost whites look white until you place them together with a true white. In a world with no right and wrong how do we judge where we are on a sliding scale? Where do we find our reference points?

There was an old woman who swallowed a fly….

In France a man using an electric fly swat has managed to blow up half of his house.

I just had to start with that. I have been thinking about environmental and vegan issues today. There was the guy that went to court to prove being vegan was a religion – he refused to drive in case he killed a fly.

It is interesting thinking about food chains. There are few food chains that don’t result in killing creatures of some sort. You might claim you only eat grains, but ploughing the soil will kill critters – a lot of them.

No, this world is a vicious place. If you have a house infested with cockroaches would you just try to carry them outside?

I remember on the bike trip across the USA we stayed at one church building in Arkansas. We were loading the bags on the truck in the morning with both doors to the hall open. Suddenly this guy, looking and dressed just like John Goodman from Arachnophobia walks through the doors. He rattles off a line of things he kills in a sort of poetic way.

When I got him to talk he explained he was there to spray for spiders – he expected there to be maybe 20 deadly ones in the roof space.

So would you have them killed? If you had a new born living in your house would you insist on all deadly spiders being dealt with – and if the only way you could do that was spraying them and killing them, would you?

Are pure environmental vegan lifestyles a fiction, or maybe exclusive to the global elite like us?

I went for a walk today, down to the beach. I found a nice nature walk around the lakes that I had driven past without seeing for years.

It was interesting walking through the village. I get the impression that many people are trying to “make hay while the sun shines”, but are actually doing a rain dance.

Something happened today that helped me realise how close we were to tipping point. Looking at the potential pathways for transmission of the virus it surprised me how many hooks we can have in our communities. We have so many overlapping groups.

Maybe the future needs to be simpler.

The film Waterloo was on tonight. It was the story of how we managed to give Napoleon a well justified thrashing. Tomorrow we can watch Sharpe giving him another thrashing in Spain/Portugal.

We are all proud of the way we fought against him, and the ingenuity of our military. And lets not forget Nelson, who defeated Napoleon’s navy.

There is a good discussion in one episode of Sharpe about why Sharpe is fighting for the wrong side. Napoleon was fighting against a corrupt royalty. You can easily argue that he was on the side of right, and the British winning forces were on the side of wrong.

Historical perspective is interesting.

Recently a statue in Edinburgh has had a new plaque attached to denounce the person as somebody that delayed the end of slavery. He did. But others argue that his approach was necessary to gain the winning vote. In other words a strictly moral view of trying to make slavery illegal immediately would have led to a strong backlash that would, in the end, have extended slavery.

We can’t be sure about his intentions, because we can never really know what is inside a persons mind. But we can get an idea from his will that left an item to William Wilberforce, suggesting a connection.

It seems that we might be twisting history to match our current hobbyhorse.

But maybe not just history, maybe the present as well.