I am working on a blog article going beyond the immediate effects of the Coronavirus crisis. In the meantime, my latest impressions and thoughts.
I drove around for half an hour yesterday (Saturday) evening, eventually visiting a small Tesco (supermarket chain) convenience store in a former village now effectively part of a small town. Polite (Polish) staff member (one of only two ppl working there) told me that they had no eggs or milk. I myself bought the very last loaf of bread (crusty brown wholemeal) and the last two longlife (sealed) pitta breads (apparently good until end of May). Admittedly, that was after 2000 hrs, so near their new closing time of 2200 (formerly midnight), but the store would not have been short of goods in normal times.
Driving around, I passed a couple of pubs. Seemed empty, as far as could be glimpsed. On a usually busy evening, almost no traffic. An ambulance was followed by a supermarket delivery van. There is a feeling of “emergency time”. At a location on the edge of a small town, where there is a convenience store, a Chinese takeaway, a Malay/Chinese takeaway, an Indian takeaway and a fish and chip shop (all but the Indian and the convenience store staffed entirely by Chinese), only one car parked instead of the usual dozen.
I see on the TV news the continued madness of the panic-buyers. The Press and msm generally call it “greed”. No, this is a manifestation of an even more powerful emotion: fear.
The Government continues to plead for reason and moderation. This is ineffective because
Emotion is more powerful than intellectual reason. The Government is trying to reason with people motivated by fear, one of the most powerful emotions;
Even on the intellectual level, it may seem reasonable to many to buy a far greater amount of what they usually consume, in a situation where (whatever the authorities may say) there are shortages of some basic items at ground level.
The Government may be correct in saying that, in the big scheme of things, “there is no shortage” of anything, but people see before their own eyes that there are shortages, albeit caused entirely by bulk buying.
The Government asks millions of people to “self-isolate” for three months and maybe longer, but cannot guarantee supplies of food and other essential items to those millions. In those circumstances, bulk buying is not really “panic buying” at all. An elderly (or other) couple might well use 50 rolls of loo paper and 50+ packs of pasta (etc) in three months. Some people probably are buying, even on that basis, far more than they really need, but that is because of the prevailing climate of fearful uncertainty.
There will be reached a peak of buying, but exactly when that peak will be reached is hard to say. It has financial factors (what can people afford?) and simple logistical factors (how much storage space do people have?).
In the end, the lemming-like buying wave, mainly triggered by emotion (fear) will only subside when emotion moves the other way. When people see that the stores are replenished daily and more than daily, when it is seen that the shelves are no longer being immediately stripped bare, consumer confidence will return. Those who bought huge amounts of this or that will start to use what they have been buying; they will not buy more. That in turn will stabilize the supermarket shelves. Equilibrium will be restored.
Only emotion can sway an existing emotional state. Appeals to reason have almost no effect.
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.
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:
Grant Shapps, a man who sold get-rich-quick schemes under a pseudonym to get around rules about MPs having second jobs, is doing the media circuit to persuade the public that the Government is trustworthy.
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?…
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.
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):
My daughter (10) has coronavirus. I'm so angry about the official response to the situation that I'm going to fucking well tweet about it.
Daughter has uni colleague due to take exam on Friday. She (the colleague) has cough and fever. Rings 111, no testing but told to isolate. Rings uni, told ‘if not tested you may not have it. Come and take exam’. Heaven help us (1/2)
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).
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!
Well, here we are in a kind of “plague year” of the contemporary era. Things seem to be getting worse, and there is not so much overt panic as a sense of impending threat, a sense of muted dread.
I again made my way to Waitrose yesterday, for the first time in a couple of days. About half an hour before closing time (mid-evening). Few shoppers, including one couple the lady of which, as they passed by, looked right at me, looked boldly into my eyes and smiled as she saw me buy two jars of red caviar. Does she like caviar? Did she like me? Was she a store detective? We shall never know.
I was interested to see that every single roll of loo paper (of every type and brand) had (again) gone from the shelves, as had every single pack of pasta, and I do mean every pack, from the economy spaghetti and penne right through to the premium-quality-made-in-Italy-in-fancy-packaging-at-three-times-the-price stuff, even the giant pasta shells and odd types that are usually far less popular than standard linguine, tagliatelle etc.
People, whether panic-buyers or (not panicking but) bulk-buying shoppers, have woken up to the fact that this situation could be months not weeks, and that you cannot eat or drink loo paper (the large packs of water such as Volvic etc were also depleted).
Is anything of this actually sensible? Frankly, I fear that it may be. We are hearing now that people may be asked to “self-isolate”. That will apply particularly to people over 70 and (who knows?) even those over-60 (like me…63 since September). Not every person in those age groups uses or even has the Internet, with which Internet shopping can be done. That is assuming that the supermarkets have supplies, have the means to deliver supplies, and that their websites do not crash.
I am sure that Boris-idiot and his fiancee will not run out of loo paper or pasta, but many others may. In that sense, a reasonable level (whatever that means) of bulk-buying may be prudent, so long as it does not reach lunatic proportions.
There is also the point that, from the infection point of view, it makes sense to shop once in any given period rather than ten times. It also makes sense to use online supermarket shopping if possible.
There is a limit, not only to how much should be bought (of anything), from the social point of view, but to how much can be bought by most people. Not everyone has the cash to go out and spend £1,000 or £2,000 in one go. Also, not everyone has large houses in which to store items in bulk. I myself now live in a tiny flat which, in its entirety, would fit, maybe twice, into merely the (rarely-used) ballroom of a house in which I lived at one time
Most people are very limited in space, do not have cellars and unused rooms in which to store vast amounts of loo paper or dried and tinned food.
I have not bought greatly more than previously; I had some slack anyway. I suppose that (for 2 people) I have about 45 rolls of loo paper, mostly bought before the present crisis, and maybe enough for 3 months. That is prudence, not panic. Likewise, I dare say that I have on hand enough dried, tinned, frozen and other food for about a month, maybe longer. Living where I now do, I no longer have the large American fridges and freezers in which can be stored really useful amounts of frozen food.
In my present location, there are many people in large houses with equally large amounts of storage space, and who no doubt have enormous freezers etc. I suspect that most of the (unreasonably?) bulk-buying shoppers are such people.
Apart from the above, I personally am not only already rather “self-isolating” (as well as politically-isolating and isolated…) but have turned that up a few notches. I use hand gel after using the automatic petrol pump a few miles from my humble home, same when I leave the supermarket. When I return home, I wash hands and lower arms thoroughly. I socialize little anyway and have now completely stopped visiting anyone.
Having said that, we are all on this Earth for a limited span. I still have things on the wider spectrum (social, political) which I want to do or, more accurately, which must be done. I have a very limited number of years left anyway now that I am 63. For that reason, time presses. Of course, I shall reincarnate and carry on my work anyway, but this is a very important time in the history of the world. What has to happen must and will happen.
Is there an Israeli connection to Coronavirus?
According to Jersualem Post, Israelis say “In a few weeks, we will have coronavirus vaccine.” Vaccine was ALREADY in development before outbreak. Says Israeli scientist: “Let’s call it pure luck. We decided to choose coronavirus as a model for our system."https://t.co/rFVAW0P7qg
Co-incidences happen without there having been a “conspiracy”. The only thing is, with Israel and the Jews the “incidences” seem so much more frequent…
By the way, it makes me laugh to see Zionist Jews asking “will antisemites use a vaccine produced in Israel? Are they hypocrites?”
Why not use any vaccine if there is one? After all, people who distrust Jews and their manipulations sometimes use Uzi weapons. They do not say, in extremis or otherwise, “no, I shall not use a weapon of Israeli origin”. Not when it works that well.
Classic British film
I had never seen this one:
FRIDAY NIGHT AT THE MOVIES. I'd been waiting for a free version of this movie to be posted online. “The Man Between” (1953), a forgotten classic romance & intrigue set against the Cold War in Berlin. James Mason, Claire Bloom. If you like old movies, enjoy https://t.co/oxJRVmSeqs
Hildegard Knef is a knockout in that film. I like the soundtrack, too. In fact, some of the scenes and also the soundtrack reminded me of another film, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, made 12 years later in 1965. Maybe the one influenced the other.
Coronavirus in Netherlands
Over half of the coronavirus patients in intensive care in the Netherlands are under 50 years old
Very strange. Different strains? How? Why? I am not a scientist, let alone a virologist or immunologist, but this seems very odd. It seems to be more like a weapon than an accident.
Coronavirus: messaging difficulties
The Government of the UK is pretty useless, but it is difficult to tell the public anything and to change behaviour. It usually takes a long time and much repetition. In my own lifetime, I have seen attitudes change, sometimes but not always for the better: against drink-driving, in favour of wearing seatbelts, against smoking, to name just three. All three required constant propaganda and also legislative change.
It seems (from an opinion poll) that only about 65% in the UK are now taking more care with hygiene (by washing hands etc), and that rather few are changing their plans to socialize, travel on public transport (and don’t forget that taxis are also public transport) or attend events. 25% are, it seems, not changing any aspect of their lives by reason of the virus emergency. That may be because young people in particular think that they are almost immune and so need not do anything (but they may still be infected and give it to others). I have also recently seen stubborn attitudes in older people who should know better.
Tempus fugit
I just saw the profile of a former fellow-member of my last chambers, Sara T., a family law specialist. I had seen nothing of her since 2007. I officially left my last set in 2008 and not 2007 (it being necessary to give them 6 months’ notice —and rent!—) but in fact stayed in France after Christmas and did not return to the UK after the last week of 2007. I believe that Sara T. also left those chambers in 2008 or 2009. She is now back in Exeter, it seems, but in another set that used to be opposite ours, on the bluff overlooking the River Exe.
What interested me was that her profile says “mother of a teenage son”. In the same year that I joined Chambers, there was a social event at the home of another member. Sara T. attended, along with her then boyfriend and their tiny baby.
It is obvious, of course, that a baby, in the course of 18 years, becomes about 18 years old. In a sense it should not surprise, yet somehow it does, just as it surprises me to realize that someone else I knew long ago is now very nearly 43, someone whom I met when she was only 4 years old, and at a time when she once identified me to her little friends (as recounted her mother, my then girlfriend) as “that was my big friend Ian; I drink chocolate milk with him”!
The tentative election prediction has not worn so well, true, but the assessment of “Boris” has, I aver.
Ah…
1) I understand a number of Ministers are becoming concerned that a single “senior government source” is undermining the Government’s Coronavirus communications strategy…
Ian Robert Millard 