Down the rabbit hole...

  They say all good things must come to an end... and so it is with this blog...and more!  A full stop on some musings, sometimes interesting, sometimes dull and sometimes angry! It has been fun, when I could be bothered, which was pretty hit and miss! But now I must go! TuttyBye!

I think it would be fair to say I am a jack and not a master. I love to know a little bit about all sorts of things but end up only having a veneer of understanding about a wide variety of topics. There have been some exceptions. For instance, when I moved from hierarchical to relational databases I had a transition problem so ended up having to dig right down to the internals of the code, and with the kind help of Oracle at the time went on their employees only internals course, and once I'd understood the file structures and what the developers were doing I could understand everything further up the layers! But that was a long time ago. I also studied economics to a reasonable level. After A level I kept on reading book after book and the more I read the more I appreciated if the fresh water and salt water communities could never agree then what hope was there for anyone else. So trying to help the average worker understand economics is no easy task. And, as I was, on four separa...

 I've become intellectually lazy. I think I need to change that and get back to my daily thoughts! Well, if not daily, maybe bi-daily, as in every two days, not twice a day! And if not bi-daily then at least weekly!  Not that anyone is listening, except for my inner consciousness which, as we all know from my previous in depth semi-pseudo semi-psycho analysis, is really quite disturbed! My thought of the day comes after the attack on Sir Salman Rushdie, by a coward with little intelligence and presumably some mental issues! But later in the day I listened to an author who made some salient points that we need all to consider. He noted after the fatwa was issued over thirty years ago there was a coming together of most liberal minded people against the edict and an outpouring of support for Rushdie. But he noted, 'in this respect, we won the battle, but we are, today, losing the war!' What he means is. In those thirty years since a decrepit old man deigned to set mindlessly ...

 It seems like a long time since I unloaded my consciousness into a keyboard and onto the blog so I thought, maybe I should. I have been reading a lot more recently rather than writing. One thing I read was Bukowski's Hollywood. It was a bizarre and oddly easy read! I had heard many people over the years talk about Bukowski and an opportunity came to read a book and so I did. But what I found bizarre is the simple style, but then that also made it easy to read! Why should that be bizarre, well, possibly because I think I expected something deeper and more intense but Hollywood is just a first person retelling of his experience of getting his film made in Hollywood, much as he didn't really care whether it was or not although by the end he decidedly did, but also ticked it off as a done that, been there kind of moment never to be repeated. As he's dead, I guess he won't! But the simplistic style and straightforward dialogue was what made it a page turner hard to put down...

  So, as per the title, a quick message to those anti-vaccers out there that believe the current crop of Covid19 vaccines will change your DNA or turn you into gibbering monkeys with a limp and halitosis. I just need you to do me, well, humanity a favour. Don't worry, I'm not going to be unpleasant, I respect your point of view, but, could you just try having a conversation with someone that actually knows what they are talking about. Or at least, check the credentials of the people you do listen to such as struck off nurses, struck off Drs, Drs who graduated from online universities in Uganda or psychics who are actually real space cadets and bloke down pub who's off with the fairies! After that if you are still a committed anti-vaccer or believe Covid is a hoax or you believe the world is flat, then, I hate to do this but I've got some more favours to ask. 1. Your local hospital requires help with a variety of menial unpaid tasks but you'll be rewarded with huge w...

  How do we solve a problem like China! Does a problem like China actually exist? Can a problem like China be solved? Is China a problem at all?  This wittering is not about the Chinese people and their desire to eat exotic animals in wet markets. It's hardly as though they are the only nation in the world that do so. Actually it is probably normal behaviour in the east.  Any fuss about what the Chinese eat, or how, or when, or why is more to do with western sensitivities that have come about over the last few decades, after all I still recollect my mum telling me about how her mum would step outside, pick up a chicken from the yard and snap it's neck with a sharp expert twist in preparation for the Sunday dinner! It's just we have become inured against such things. As a society we pop into a supermarket and pickup a sanitised plastic packed pale, generally blood free, pack of one meat or another and try not to think about the process of where it was just five days earlie...

  The daftest non-story that appears to be causing consternation with a larger number of people than is actually warranted is the nonsense about GameStop and the 'shareholder revolution' that is a real storm in a teacup and a huge non=story right the way up to the point the SEC manage to get their nose stuck in and then it turns from a non-story into a pro-Trump, pro-smallpeople, anti-establishment story. I suspect that 90% of people have no idea what the story is, why (or if) it matters etc etc. If anybody wanted to understand what's going on then they would have to have an understanding of how stock markets work, why they matter, what hedge funds are, what daytrading is, what reddit is etc etc etc. Far being it from me to start educating anybody about any of these trifling matters. Not least as I'm one of those 'lucky' individuals that have spent more time than feels healthy without a good shower and dose of antibiotics talking with, dealing with and shaking h...

  The questions that will increasingly be asked is, what if the virus mutates faster than the science evolves around the vaccines. It is possible, after all there are, as noted previously, plenty of other viruses that do not have vaccines, one in particular comes to mind in HIV.  We have plenty of coping mechanisms for HIV including prophylactic treatments and several drug treatments of the virus that, in the main, prevent full blown AIDS which can lead to death of which, I believe, the largest cause of death is TB. At least that's the case in wealthy western societies but there are still 700,000> AIDS related deaths each year down from a high of 1.4m. But still quite a significant number all things considered. So the same might become true of Covid. It is something that has been contemplated right from the start of the pandemic. Different countries have adopted different tactics. One western country determined that lockdowns and rigid restrictions were unnecessary and all ...

  Being the namby-pamby socialist type that I purport to be. It would hardly come as any massive surprise to anybody that I found the bloodlust demonstrated by the ex-president Trump distasteful. Although, typical of the man, and I use the term man in its very loosest sense. Granted, this does not narrow down what I might be wittering about today, I'm talking about the state, under Trump, actioning as many death sentences as possible in the final days of the wannabe dictators power as was possible. In total he oversaw the execution of 13 human beings in a seven month period, whereas there were zero in seven years prior to that. Most people simply shrug their shoulders and state, correctly, these individuals were found guilty of crimes that might well seem appropriate of seeing them pay the ultimate price. I find it a little bizarre when bible thumpers extol the 'eye for an eye' rhetoric. Not least, as the old saying goes, that approach leaves as all blind. But overall for a...

  I was thinking the other day, a rarity I grant you, but I was thinking, sometimes plants and flowers remind me of people and a garden like society. And in amongst all those pretty plants and flowers, and they are in the majority, at least in my garden they are, there are weeds that need to be purged and they need to be  removed as quickly as possible else they take over the garden and smother the flowers.  That's all pretty standard analogy. That got me to thinking about roses. Roses are pretty flowers, some might say the prettiest, but then beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I can think of other flowers that might be prettier, but then it depends on the day and my mood and the sun and the rain. But the thing about roses is. They are pretty. With pretty shapes, pretty petals and a beautiful scent. This beauty, it invites you in close, they encourage you and swamp your senses with delightful aromas. But if you reach out to touch them, their thorns will prick you. And ...

  <Rant mode on> One thing I hate, in a fairly benign hate kind of way, are those 'tear jerking' stories of somebody with a problem that was hidden away somewhere until somebody noticed and media of one sort or another picked up the story and ran with it and then suddenly everybody and their brother decided that it was very sad and something should be done and then there are crowdfunding crusades and even greater media coverage and suddenly the individual that was originally destitute, living off scraps, starving themselves so they could feed the kids and about to be evicted from their rented accommodation, suddenly, they have more money than they know what to do with, offers of accommodation a landlord that was not aware of their plight and now full of contrition and sorrow offers them a payment holiday on rent until they are in a better position, which suddenly they actually now are, and even offers of jobs and holidays for the kids etc etc. How on earth could I possibl...

  Moving on from the post before the last post, not the bugle tune, the post on here before this one, depending on whether I publish this now or hold off and publish something else before this or indeed if I remove the intervening post such that I'm talking about the last post but still not the bugle tune. Given the medium via which this new form media is being distributed that causes such dissatisfaction with everything that has been normal for a few decades (I wanted to say longer but I realised that today's old media and the forms of democracy that exist in the west are not very old at all, not really!) we must explore, ok I must, what possible motive might anyone have for allowing or perpetuating this breakdown of trust of the old. Well, it's simple (to me at least), especially if you fancy a good old fashioned conspiracy theory. Consider where we see these stories that make us question or simply disbelieve all the politicians and all the old media that has been the sta...

  OK, so I sometimes I try to clarify previous posts. This might be one of those occasions and then again it might just be one of those occasions where I muddy the water, not the singer the post, a little bit more! If human beings manage to destroy the biosphere such that all human life, or indeed all life as we know it, can no longer exist. Then that is a bad thing. But it is a bad thing for all living things on earth and we, human beings, have a choice about whether that happens or not. The planet, however, will continue to exist. Indeed, depending on just how bad human beings destroy the biosphere will depend on two things. One is, whether the planet reverts to planet 0 or planet 1.0 or indeed planet 0.150. The second key thing is whether you believe in the hypothesis that all life on earth started with simple chemical reactions that, over billions of years, resulted in the complexities that are today's living breathing array of things! Granted, this hypothesis is, to quote some...

  I am confused, once again, by the views of others. Hardly surprising, but I find myself deeply confused about one particular recent other place discussion! About media. In particular about news, well, it seemed like news to me not sure the other parties considered it news or propaganda or lies or something else. That in itself is not hugely surprising, we should always have a degree of scepticism about 'news'. It is not something new although it is changing. In the past, I am old enough to have a recollection of pre-internet time, we received news from physical newspapers, tv broadcast and radio. All these mediums have been subjected, one way or another, to some bias or manipulation. During times of war governments will monitor what news is being disseminated and how and will on occasion either manipulate the news or block it. The rationale is definitely one of control, I cannot deny that, but at the same time, it is understandable. But we are not at war today, well not here ...