Apocalyptic Racists and a little electrical surge...

Seems sometimes my posts are almost prescient as I mentioned the arrival of the four horseman of the apocalypse and now here we are being swamped by coronavirus and just to rub it in the UK government use a coach company called Horseman to ferry the potential carriers around.

OK so there is not really an apocalyptic event on the horizon just yet but the virus has caused some events that, I would have liked to have termed, unexpected events but all things considered and given the wave of right wing rhetoric and xenophobia sweeping the country (or is it sweeping Europe...or the whole world!) at the moment then the unexpected has become the expected.

It was bad enough watching social media footage from inside China where families from Wuhan but visiting family in other parts of the country, were imprisoned in homes by locals who seem to think the virus is endemic in everybody who is simply from Wuhan or even just has family there. But when you find not one or two but potentially in excess of one hundred instances in the UK of xenophobes harassing people of Asian appearance as though they were some form of modern day lepers you have to wonder whether the biggest threat is actually the virus or the right wing indoctrination and hatred that seems all too pervasive in the country (if not Europe or indeed the whole world...) Personally I am a little more scared of the latter than the former.

I have learned over the years to be tolerant of the elderly. I have come to the conclusion that however much I might love them they clearly lose their minds as they get older. Which worries me somewhat as I am not exactly young lol. I wonder whether I too will become less tolerant and more extreme, more parochial, more xenophobic, more of...well, an ass, as I get older. I hope not. But the more I speak to older people the more I seem to find that it is as though a veil has recently been lifted and they feel that they have been biting their collective tongues for decades and now somebody somehow has given them permission to be twats.

It could be that nature herself is so sick of them all that nature has determined the best thing to do is wipe them out and this coronavirus is the just natures way of saying no to racism! Do you think? Could it be possible that nature, having passed over a number of previous opportunities is, this time, stepping up to the plate to get a grip of the racist rants and ramblings of aged people?

Probably not, although it might resolve a few problems. Just think, if the virus had struck the UK at the start of 2016 we probably would not be leaving the EU! After all the NHS would not be able to cope with it (it cannot cope with the annual flu season anyway and it knows that is coming every year, so a full blown 2% mortality rate virus would also kill the NHS) so it would spread far more widely and more quickly and with less state control (because, well, this is not China...) than in China.

Just a thought. OK not a very nice thought and possibly even as unpleasant as the unpleasant things these harmless little old stick wielding thugs might spew forth between sudden uncontrollable bowel movements, but just a thought.

Anyway, what will be will be. At the moment the virus is being contained (within a population of 1.4billion) so I'm, sure we have nothing to worry about, after all there's a wall and it really is great wall and so much greater than the other wall (part of which hilariously toppled over due to high winds last week, not just toppled over, but toppled over into Mexico...).

Regardless of what happens with the current virus the fact is that with a world population of over 7 Billion and increasingly that population migrating to live in cramped cities there will be other viruses.

And if the current virus is contained and does not become a pandemic and does not become just another flu virus as previous killer viruses have done, then the next one will be even more virulent, will have a longer incubation period, will have a lower mortality rate but will ultimately kill far more people.

Most anybody working in medicine and bio-chem research understand this is true. Because that is what viruses do. The exist only to keep on existing, to keep on spreading until they cannot spread further because either everybody has been infected and developed antibodies or the virus mutates to self destruction in one way or another.

Every year there are new mutations of well understood viruses and sometimes these viruses have practically no effect upon us and sometimes they are so deadly that they die off really quickly because they kill too quickly. So they mutate and mutate until the virus finds a way.

Of course it does not help that some people, mentioning no names, keep mixing vast numbers of living animals of every conceivable type, genus, species etc in incredibly small market spaces and then slaughtering them in the most basic manner right next to millions of people and other animals conducting in effect a mass biological warfare experiment in the middle of cramped cities just for a laugh. But until some people get a grip of such things then the likelihood of nature finding the next virus to get everybody excited will be a lot quicker than if nature were just left to its own experimentation.

While all of that's going on the UK government laughably announced that sales of new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars will be banned in 15 years. That's a great ambition but I do have a few questions. Like, how exactly are all these cars going to be charged? The current infrastructure does not allow for it and 15 years is not that long for a complete changeover to electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Forget that every electrician in the country has just been given work for like to install charging points to every home in the country. The infrastructure that runs under the streets of every town and city in the country will have to be upgraded. This is not like broadband where new technical advances manage to squeeze ever greater amounts of bandwidth though copper wire and (in the spirit of hybridism) mixing fibre (as the backbone) with copper (for the last 100 metres to the door). This proposal will require significant power network upgrades and just think of the number of explosions and fires seen every year in the UK due to power surges in underground cabling, that's nothing to what we can expect when large numbers of vehicles are electric.

And that is not even taking into account how the road network systems will have to change to allow fast chargers and/or greater entertainment at current motorway service stations. There might also be a renaissance of small service stations on smaller roads as well with roadside cafes because if you have to spend half an hour getting enough juice to get to your destination you might as well have a burger or shop for something. So things will change, they have to.

On top of all that trivia. There's the rather large question of how this additional electricity will be generated. To make it worthwhile the electricity generated must not come from fossil fuel power stations and preferably not from nuclear power generation. To make the whole process worthwhile, it has to come from renewable energy sources, so, more wind turbines, more solar and hopefully some tidal barriers and other technologies.

Personally, I think if you were looking for an investment you might look for companies that are developing hydrogen fuel cell technology. I have a sneaky feeling this might turn out to be as big a solution as electric power but we will see... in the next fifteen years... apparently.