Product shortages
I did not visit a supermarket yesterday (Sunday), though I did get some cat treats and cashed a Lotto scratchcard at a small Tesco convenience store at which I was the only customer (at 2200 hrs; apparently they open daily from 0600 until midnight). Perhaps it was not crowded because they did not sell loo paper! Or had run out. I did not notice any on sale, though I was not wishing to buy any in any case.
I blogged yesterday about the bulk-buying/panic-buying phenomenon, having seen the shelves of the local Waitrose cleared of loo paper, pasta, flour (are people thinking of baking their own bread?) and tuna.
In fact, as the link below shows, the UK has a huge loo paper manufacturing capability: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8115233/Inside-Manchester-toilet-roll-factory-4-7million-rolls-day.html
The UK actually exports loo paper, though the raw material for that is mostly imported, 1.1M tonnes out of 1.3M tonnes, the latter fact not noted in the Daily Mail report.
In the event of anyone completely running out of loo paper, torn up bits of Pravda or the Daily Telegraph will do, in extremis. Good advice; don’t thank me… (but see my own previous problems with using kitchen roll, below).
There will be a natural end to the short-term product shortages. Most people do not have unlimited funds or space, and in any case once they have enough dried food, tinned food and loo paper for a month or two, will revert to buying in their usual quantities. Then, once the public sees that the shelves are fully stocked again, panic and fear will cease.
“Private enterprise” blodgers
The economic enterprises that have operated on a ruthless finance-capitalistic basis for years, decades, now have their hands and begging bowls held out, Virgin Atlantic among them! Richard Branson, the tax-avoiding billionaire whose activities (IMO) have been rather negative over the years (though I admit that I was a frequent user of his London-Newark, New Jersey flights in the early 1990s), wants a bail-out or a handout! Nein danke! I give the same answer to all the other businesses that want “compensation” for business downturns caused by Coronavirus. The last thing that Government should do is “bail out” private economic enterprises. The bank bail-out of 12-13 year ago was a disastrous mistake too. More so, in fact, banks being merely useful parasites upon the real economy.
Grant Shapps and Coronavirus weaselling
I cannot recall offhand what exactly I tweeted several years ago about the Jew Grant Shapps and which eventually (with about 4 other tweets on other subjects) got me disbarred. Something about him being a dodgy, dishonest little Jew, or words to that effect. Something true, anyway. The horrible little bastard is now a Cabinet minister, incredibly, in Boris-idiot’s ZOG [Zionist Occupation Government] Cabinet. I saw this today:
In fact, out of the (eventually whittled-down from 7 to) 5 tweets that had me disbarred, 2 were about dishonest Conservative Party MPs: one was Grant Shapps, and the other was Jews’ doormat, thief, expenses cheat and (though we only discovered it in 2019) cocaine abuser, Michael Gove, also now a Cabinet minister. Are we seeing a pattern?…
For readers’ information: https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/the-slide-of-the-english-bar-and-uk-society-continues-and-accelerates/
Use loo paper, not kitchen roll
The Guardian has published a report warning people not to use kitchen roll as a substitute for loo paper (because the latter is formulated to disintegrate in water). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/uks-sewage-system-in-danger-of-gridlock-from-toilet-paper-substitutes-coronavirus
As luck would have it, I have personal experience of this, though not in the UK.
In late 1997 and the first months of 1998, I lived in Egypt. I spent five or six weeks of that time in Alexandria, where I took for a month a flat in the supposedly upmarket suburb of Mamoura Beach.
There was one small general grocery-type shop in the then off-season gated suburb. That shop sold loo paper but it was rather expensive because most Arabs do not use it (they use a system involving a small water spout inside the loo…ghastly). I discovered that kitchen roll cost about a third of the price of loo paper. Therein lay the seeds of my destruction!
Yes, dear reader, after a couple of weeks the (in any case ramshackle) Egyptian plumbing stopped functioning. Despite my increasingly irritated efforts to get the estate office (three completely and typically useless Egyptian men who sat in their office doing f*** all, all day and every day) to take an interest and above all send a plumber, I had to live for a week or more with the bathroom floor flooded by water and worse. “The plumber will come to you tomorrow, or the next day, or Thursday….inshallah”…
Then, on the day before I was due to leave (to go to the oasis of Siwa deep in the Sahara near Libya), a plumber and his assistant turned up, worked for hours and cleared the blockage, insisting on showing me why the plumbing had ceased operating. Kitchen roll. I was so embarrassed that I felt obliged to give him extra and generous baksheesh on top of his actual fee.
Be warned.
[anyone interested in other aspects of my stay in Egypt 22 years ago can read below] https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/when-i-was-not-arrested-in-egypt/ and also here https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/the-jews-i-met-at-an-oasis/
Coronavirus
Interesting. Has the British Government seen this? The NHS? Are they capable of moving fast enough if they have seen it?
As for the UK official reaction to the crisis generally, what a bad joke it is. I saw a few tweets about it. Here’s one (click to read interesting thread):
and this one:
The Government, NHS, State generally, are losing all credibility and legitimacy. In fact, looking at the way that the big supermarket chains have collaborated during this crisis and actually done things, it occurs to me that the supermarket executives could do a far better job of running this poor country than “Boris” and his pack of idiots (and the NHS administrators or maladministrators).
Let’s take a musical break…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKEzDfFiRBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0oMQu2id6I
Edith Piaf. Unique.
[BDM girls —Bund Deutscher Mädel— making music. Charmant…]
An interesting piano concerto, worth hearing:
News or fake news?
https://twitter.com/mi6rogue/status/1239511365523582976?s=20
I am starting to think that the time may be approaching when a proper social-national core party can be formed in the UK. Maybe later in 2020.
Midnight
Sitrep: went out late to a Tesco supermarket about 6 miles away. Not many shoppers. The shelves were largely bare, as if a cloud of locusts had been. Oddly, the loo paper that has attracted msm attention recently was still available, but all pasta and most pasta sauce in jars had gone, as had all bread, even pitta bread and wraps etc, bar the odd solitary survivor. Cat litter all gone. Cleaning products very depleted.
For the first time since this crisis erupted, I felt a certain apprehension. Just a feeling. Meaning that, in a crisis, the British people may not “pull together”, partly because there are too many divergent strands now in the UK. Whites, blacks, browns, Chinese, Jews, all types of European or semi-European, you name it. There is also little “community” now, what the Germans call Gemeinschaft.
I feel that there is altruism and “Christian” or selfless feeling in existence out there, but that the social framework that has grown up in recent decades militates against it, makes it unable to flower.
Regrettably, it may well be that, as Dietrich Eckart said a century ago, “the rabble needs to hear the rattle of machineguns and feel some fear in its pants.”
I have no confidence in the resilience of this society as it now is. It may well start to fall apart if real shocks hit it. Then it will be up to those of us who see the need for a better society to re-establish order and create such a better society, come what may!
Ian Robert Millard 