What do you think will be taught about Covid-19 in 100 years from now? [Written to a question on Quora 4/4/20]

We will be reminding our new generations how many people died who need not have died, had they just stood still sooner.

We will be telling tales of the damage caused by people buying authority in excess of their wisdom and selling lies rather than admit their wisdom is not absolute and universal.

Covid-19, as a globally unfolding event, is being recorded in unprecedented detail and in real-time. We will have crunched the numbers long before a hundred years have passed and will know exactly the cost of recklessness.

There will be so much data and so many records from all over the world that nobody will be able to pretend their part in what happened when it gets picked over in legal detail later.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in China it is not a surprise it was a few days before they knew quite how dangerous it was, nor that they hoped it would turn out to be a local incident unworthy of global note. The important thing is what they did as soon as they realised their hopes would be dashed.

The Chinese government warned the wider world, put all non-essential activity at home on pause and told everybody there to stand still. Then they threw all the resources of China into saving lives.

The Chinese didn’t pretend to the world it should expect a few people to get the sniffles soon. The Chinese were not being boastful when they showed the world they could build a specialist hospital in a handful of days, they were demonstrating the urgency they saw to build a specialist hospital.

The Chinese people were not being oppressed by an authoritarian regime when they were held in their homes and individuals were being walked immediately into quarantine at the first symptom of trouble, they were being kept safe by one.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in Europe there were no illusions in government about what had happened in China or doubts about what needed to be done but the political system differed in Europe. Hence it was necessary to pass emergency laws to centralise all costs to government that would arise from putting all non-essential activity on pause and from telling everybody to stand still before the button was pressed and the order issued.

Guidance was given to socially-distance and to voluntarily take precautions while systems were devised and paperwork was drawn up as completely as urgency allowed for no individual, when all this is over, to reasonably complain at their own eventual financial loss or at someone else’s eventual gain arising directly from the normal activity of the country being placed on hold by law.

But as soon as the mechanism was in place to centralise a country’s Covid-19 costs to one national account, thereby giving nobody a valid reason for kicking-off about having to stay home and watch telly instead of risking death on crowded streets, all non-essential activity was put on pause and everybody was told to stay home.

Meanwhile all available health resources were being put toward keeping people alive wherever the virus had already reached.

European people were not being oppressed by suddenly authoritarian governments when they stayed home, they were trying to stay safe and to ease the burden on the people saving lives. Their police were active to make sure everyone did their equal bit and didn’t take avoidable risks.

-

When Covid-19 first raised its head in America the President called it a hoax. He shrugged it off as a political attack on his person. If the coronavirus came up in interview he talked it down and spoke of his own greatness.

Days passed. China and Europe continued to demonstrate how to contain a virus through lock-down and Europe was demonstrating how delaying lock-down even just for the legal process to enable it fairly in a democracy carried a cost in lives.

The President spoke of his greatness and the greatness of his followers while, as a child might, name-calling any who doubted his wisdom was absolute.

The scientists in America began to shout, the people in America who were paying attention to the scientists began to shout, too, the President spoke calmly of miracles and pinned his hope to Easter as a day to celebrate his anti-viral victory in churches all across his land.

Then hospitals began to shout and his celebration was postponed

-

It seems the global memo to pass supportive legislation to take the financial burden off individuals had reached the US Congress and Senate because, albeit reluctantly, it was done.

But the bit about hitting the pause button and locking the whole country down as soon as you physically can so the virus can be stopped from spreading and killing people seems to have been mislaid. [*]

Time passed. Time during which the scientists’ screams became so loud the President could hardly hear even his own voice praising his greatness on his cable TV.

-

We cannot trust the President to ever tell us truthfully what made him lose faith in his pastors’ adoring assurances - I can think of nowhere else from which a businessman of long-established low repute would draw expectation of miracles by Easter. Clearly he turned to science only after superstition had let him down.

He then lent doctors his stage from which they soon said things he did not want to have heard. Scientific facts became the celebrity draw and the President tried hard to look important as he introduced experts to deliver wisdom that he could not comprehend.

-

The man who believed he knew everything, who was intoxicated by the authority of his purchased puppet-rank to the extent of hallucinating his own divinity, the man who led prayer for himself before government business, the man whom wealthy pastors queued eagerly to touch, was being smacked in the face, repeatedly and with increasing force, by a world more real than any he had ever known.

The man who quite literally painted his public image to match the one in his mirror at home, compensating with make-up in the glare of broadcast news that the light that bathed him for the public record was not first softened and warmed by reflection off his gold, had fear in his uncovered eyes.

He stared right and he stared left and he stared straight ahead of him in shock. Then he looked down and saw there was blood on his hands. For in them lay the responsibility he so vehemently denies.

-

-

The rest is not yet even recent history. But unnecessary carnage will continue over in the US while people argue for the sake of it whether anyone has a constitutional right to tell an American to stand still, even if standing still is the only possible way to stop the virus spreading and killing more Americans.

-

At the time of posting this answer the Johns Hopkins statistics page is reporting just over 266,000 US confirmed Covid-19 cases, and 6921 deaths. Individual American States and cities are shutting themselves down to varying degrees to protect themselves but it seems they are waiting for proof they have a problem locally in order to justify imposing any restrictions at all.
Being yet without a countrywide lock-down and without a coordinated response to focus existing resource upon immediate need and to urgently create resource for future need, we will be teaching the US’s story as a cautionary tale of how bad a disaster can become if rules are not made to bend to meet reality as it changes.

-

People have died because of their blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of priests in biblical scripture for thousands of years. Now we are seeing Americans of all religions and none being killed by those with blind faith in the irrefutable wisdom of the handful of politicians who wrote their constitution, semantics again being held more sacred than human life itself.

America is currently responding to a pandemic exactly as it would have done in the 18th century, with momentary shrugs, days of prayer, weeks of hopeful denial, then an extended period of chaos and catastrophic loss of life.

 [*Closing the international doors to America just trapped the virus somewhere it had 350,000,000 people to infect. That doesn’t count as a lock-down.]

Scratching your back with an assault rifle

Turning to the Christian bible for comfort is like scratching your back with an assault rifle. If you hold it just right you might be able to reach your itch but that's not what it was designed for. It remains a weapon of war.

-

If a person requires regular or frequent consultation with their pastor they should find another one. Jesus got his point across to uneducated people in minutes without a handbook to refer to. If your pastor can't do that they obviously don't have a clue as to what Jesus was on about.

Anyone who points a person to Paul or John, the self-proclaimed apostle and the self-proclaimed prophet in the New Testament, for insight into anything other than Paul's or John's own imagination and character is misdirecting them, whether knowingly so or not.

 -

Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, and the later John, the writer of Revelation, were self-aggrandising 1st century fantasists who sought elevated status for themselves within a cult of worship and who made careers out of dispensing false wisdom, in each case off the back of claiming a "vision" of a dead man in order to hijack his reputation and spuriously claim divine authority. Neither Paul nor John ever met, saw or heard the human Jesus.

-

Unless a person were predisposed to believe it, nothing in Paul's or John's output would be taken seriously. Imagine if today a bloke walked into a pub and said he had had a "vision" of a dead guy so now everyone should brown-nose the government and suffer in silence for the rest of their lives so everything would be great when they die.

Imagine if someone else came in another night claiming to have had a more recent vision of the same dead bloke and started raving about beasts and afterlives and torment and the world coming to an end when the dead bloke came back.

It is no great surprise that church-based Christianity only really took off when the emperor Constantine enforced his own militarily backed version of it.

-

According to the gospels, not long before Jesus died he gathered his chums and told them he knew his number was going to be up soon. He reassured them he had said everything there was to say, that his message really was that simple, and he warned them that after he had died there would inevitably be the odd person appearing out of the woodwork and trying to complicate things in his name but no one should be fooled.

Understandably, perhaps, for such superstitious times, Jesus' pals needed further convincing that he would be gone for good so he comes up with the surest and most reliable thing he can think of and tells them that if the sun still comes up, if the world is still turning, anyone claiming to have seen him or claiming he said anything but that which they themselves had already heard him say would be lying. End of.

In a masterpiece of self-serving spin, John the prophet reimagined this insistence by Jesus that he would be just as dead as anyone else and would never ever be back into a "second coming" for everyone to wait for, one that would bring about the end of the world. It was obviously a lot easier to make stuff like that up while no one had the gospels to hand in which they could read the reports of what Jesus had actually said.

-

At this point you can either believe Jesus or you can believe Paul and John. You can't believe both. Of course, if you don't believe Jesus then you can't really believe Paul and John either, because if Jesus was telling fibs at any time he can't possibly be the supernaturally perfect being Paul and John insist he was to justify anyone taking any notice whatsoever of what they say.

Thus it is that both logic and biology have it that the chap who said he would be staying dead after his execution was telling the truth and the two chaps who said he had appeared to them after he had died were fibbing for their own purposes.

-

If you read the New Testament as you would a regular book, by the time you have read the four gospels one after the other you know that all the books that follow can be dismissed. Not only will you have just read four accounts of Jesus having told his disciples he hadn't forgotten to mention anything, you will also have identified the character of Jesus the person, will have seen through the fantasy elements and will probably have recognised what it was the Romans' started their official church to hide.

The Roman Christianity rolled out by Constantine was designed specifically to prevent people noticing that the "God" of which Jesus spoke, the Jewish one who had inspired all the key biblical characters from Abraham to Jesus to defy the status quo, the God that had given them the courage to do whatever it is they are remembered for was their conscience.

 -

The key to understanding the Old Testament and the gospels, the Jewish story, is to look not at whatever standout action it was the biblical heroes took but instead to notice that immediately beforehand they each went off alone into the wilderness, up mountains or for a stroll in the garden, anywhere they were free from human distraction. There they stayed for as long as it took them to be certain that they knew in their own heart that they should do whatever it was they were considering, regardless of what anyone else on earth might think, say or do.

So, unlike regular pastors, I always and only advise a person to do the same thing, to find as natural a spot as is convenient for some uninfluenced private thought and to look to their own conscience for "God's" guidance. You won't find it anywhere else.

To make it easier for folk to know what to feel for I use the secular analogy of us each having our own bear inside us. It can't tell us what to do but it can growl if we are going wrong. If your bear is chilled just get on and enjoy being yourself. If your bear is growling work out what you personally are doing or not doing that is making it growl and change your ways.

Any advisor who directs a person seeking personal guidance to focus their thoughts upon the detail of what anyone else was inspired by their God / conscience to do in their own particular circumstance, especially if it happened in a distant land somewhen in the blur of ancient history, is simply distracting from their own ignorance to pretend a superior wisdom.

In combination with using selective quotation from a collection of wildly different and frequently conflicting books conveniently bound together as if they are one contiguous work to confuse a person, to feed their self-doubt and so foster a perpetual reliance upon their advisor, I think the modern word for the practice is gaslighting.

______

The word "faith" is an interesting one. Faith on its own doesn't really exist. You need to "have faith in" something.

It is hypocritical to say you have faith in God if you go to any third party (person / book / etc.) for God's advice. Whether you call it God, your conscience, a bear or anything else, you already have a 24/7 direct line to your internal counsel. Trust it. You will find that if you just avoid lying, cheating, stealing or doing harm your conscience will be clear / your God will be happy and you can stop worrying what other people think or thought and can get on with being your peaceful happy self.

No one has ever been you before.

There is no book of instructions. [Po]

Pastor Po's Midwinter Message to America

Imagine for a moment how sick it would seem if African-Americans and others still striving for equal rights in the USA wore nooses fashioned in precious metal on fine chains around their necks and decorated their meeting places with gruesome sculptures of the lynchings of their forebears.

It is no less sick that as "Christians" so many desperate and oppressed people still badge themselves with and kneel before crosses representing those upon which thousands of rebels were killed and left on public display to dissuade others from contemplating revolt against Roman authority and against the enslavement of native populations across their ancient Empire.

______

The Romans proudly documented that their wealth was the spoils of war, that their home economy was reliant on slavery, and that the physical magnificence of their cities was hewn from rock by people who had no choice. Even today, for twelve euros a tourist head, you can still visit the Colosseum built by tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners of war after the failed tax revolt that saw them driven out of Jerusalem.

It is no surprise to the educated outside observer that in the USA, where the 21st century population is still encouraged to look to the rulebook of the Romans' church for guidance, the average employee is struggling to get by while their employers live in relative luxury, a citizen's health is directly related to their wealth, and the highest office in the land was bought by a man with no relevant experience and no respect for humanity, truth or the law.

Neither is it a surprise to find in a Europe that has properly embraced secular democracy and where, outside of Rome and the Vatican, churches no longer hold sway over public opinion, that universal healthcare is the norm, that employees have protected rights, and that populations protest and readily hold their elected leaders to account when their actions do not serve the majority.

______

If you believe the self-appointed apostle Paul's letters of instruction echo even remotely the words of the man who so famously died for telling people to trust the god in their conscience to guide them you are a fool.

Quite simply, no 1st century Jew expecting a messiah to lead them to freedom at any moment would ever have been tempted away from their temple by someone preaching that their god intended them to be contented to live and to die as slaves to Rome.

______

Had slaves kidnapped from Africa been brought to any land where Jesus was in charge they would have been released immediately, fed properly, had any ailments or injuries sorted out straight away and been free to live as equals in that land if they chose to, or they would have been helped to return home as comfortably as Jesus himself would have been carried on the same journey.

Sadly the lands to which they were taken were those where Paul’s instruction held sway and they were fucked. 

______

In today's America you have the choice, according to your Constitution, to either 

a) Follow the human Jesus' example and let your conscience guide you to stand up, speak out and to vote to improve the lives of all your fellow citizens, regardless of race, gender or consensual sexual preference, because all are equal before god or 

b) Follow Paul's instructions, many of which were written as part of his deal with the Romans to save his own life when he was arrested for promoting equality, to do exactly the opposite and to suffer gratefully as if a perfect Roman slave, accepting abuse of yourself and of your peers as if your god intended you to be an underclass.

Team Jesus has no need of clubhouses, no need of books of instruction, there's nothing to worship, no hierarchy of officers, no fees to pay and no badges to wear. Every member is equal to every other and trusts their own conscience to guide them.

Team Paul is the multiplicity of rival Christian worship-clubs whose officers make a good living from teaching anyone daft enough to believe Jesus was magic that they, as mere mortals, are powerless to improve their lot in this life and will burn in hell for eternity if they so much as try. These are the worship-clubs whose members have prayed uselessly before Roman crosses for 1700 years and who adorn their clubhouses with often graphic representations of Jesus' execution to dissuade their members from following his example. 

______

I can think of no groups other than Team Paul Christians whose members are twisted enough to celebrate a man's birth in buildings so clearly dedicated to the celebration of his death. 

Come to think of it, I can think of no one but Team Paul Christians who endure a life of poverty because hypocrites who live in palaces tell them to.

It is to these Team Paul Christians I would like to point out that their god existed long before their Roman church and long before the Jewish temple that preceded it, and it will exist long after, too. The god in their bible has always been the conscience inside each of us and the organisers of religion have always dedicated themselves to distracting people from it. 

______

Happiness is for life, not just for Christmas.

Trees

At the end of World War II in 1945 Oak Road, where I would later be born and would grow up, did not exist. A decade later would see it did exist, that my father had bought the indicated plot along it, and that he had designed and was in the process of building there what would become our family home, a safe distance from the pea-soup fogs that he had grown up with and that still persisted twenty miles away in London.

Without warranting photography in the area in the meanwhile, this next image is from the late 1990s and shows the houses along the road at their original as-built sizes. Though already forty to fifty years old, these substantial four and five bed homes were still deemed generous family accommodation in what was by then firmly established as the Stockbroker Belt.

Across the 2000s, hastened by the establishment in the village of Chelsea Football Club's training ground and the associated influx of the super-rich, predatory developers began out-bidding anyone who might like to live in a house as it stood. Character homes with space in their gardens were being bought up and routinely doubled in size, many addresses returning to market with their price tag doubled or more and thus permanently changing the demographic of the area.

By 2010, our family house that had sat comfortably among its neighbours for almost half a century had become dwarfed by them and we were surrounded by people with attitudes very different from our own, necessarily so to have achieved the wherewithal to buy the bloated residences the developers created.

Don't imagine I was jealous of the new neighbours' houses, nor of their lives, though I did become irritated when our lack of liquid cash and our tendency not to waste what we had drew disapproving glances from them at our scruffy cars and weathered, once-white Critall windows. After all, we were no less conveniently located than them, didn't have so far to walk from room to room as they did, and, most important of all, we had trees.

All the trees that were on my father's building plot before he built our house still stood in its garden when he had need of houses no more and it came to us to sell. A few huge oaks, sixty years bigger than when he first saw them, were surrounded by their offsprung generations and interspersed with beech and birch, sweet chestnut and holly, and myriad others the names of which I never knew. If nature brought its seed, there it grew. And there I grew, too.

Thus it was only the changes to neighbouring properties, not to our own, that saw the value of my father's plot having risen come his death to more than we could afford to pay to keep it in our family.

Yet, saddest for me was not that our house would be lost to us come its sale, nor even that it would be demolished and no trace remain of it.

My upset was that the trees would go, that every next child to grow up where I had been born would be poorer than I had been, never mind how much money their parents had.

______

[Images are from Google Earth except for the overlay of the new house which came from Wego as GE have not updated yet.  An image exists on GE of the plot taken after the developers had demolished our house, cleared the plot of trees and not yet begun the replacement build but it is of poor quality and looks especially sad.]

Evolution Explained (in 403 words)

No creature is an exact copy of its parent. Any part of it might be slightly bigger or smaller or differently shaped. As the creature breeds it passes traits on to its offspring. As various traits combine they become exaggerated, such as two tall parents having taller children and two smaller parents having smaller children.

If all the most nutritious food in a supermarket was moved to the highest shelf and the shelves were impossible to climb it would be the tallest children in the next generation who would be the best fed, those with the tallest parents.

If the lower shelves were emptied and the unit toppled over scattering the little remaining nutritious food onto the floor it would be the smallest who would be most satisfied, their needs being the least, and only the most flexible of the tall would eat at all.

If the supermarket were to run out completely it would be those with the stamina to reach the next and the speed to get there before the crowds who would eat.

It can be misleading to say a creature evolved to have a long neck to eat the highest fruit to survive. This wrongly implies a purposeful advance.

It is clearer to say that of the range of neck lengths that had existed it was the shorter ones that died out because they could no longer reach the fruit. Which is just a natural filtering out of the least efficient when times get tough.

It will generally have been a significant environmental change causing a scarcity of food that will have brought about the natural extinction of any one version of a species if it cannot compete with any other version or species sharing the food resource.

Mankind has also brought about the extinction of many species though its own action and through the accidental or intentional contamination of separate balanced ecosystems with species or diseases from elsewhere.

The deepest areas of the ocean are the places where changes to the climate on the surface of our planet has had least effect and where the environment still supports creatures that have remained successful in very early versions.

On the surface of the earth the swamp seems to have been the most consistent environment, always existing somewhere as the perfect home for crocodiles and alligators, they being among the oldest versions of any creatures we can see easily today.

28/12/14 [A snapshot]

I visited Guildford again, it was unpleasantly cold there, in a wintry way not an unwelcoming one.

The Shops are more fun today, I thought, as a I chanced upon a gentleman with a stand filled with booklets next to him. The printed cardboard sign above his stand bore the legend "What You Should Know About Mental Disorders" and a logo, the initials of the Jehovah's Witnesses dot org.

I was not rude, I was not loud, I don't think I drew a crowd as I questioned him on the appropriateness of using the emotive and very serious subject of mental health as a hook to attract attention to his worship club flyers. He was stumped but started to move the booklets that mentioned the subject on their covers to the top of the stand, nearest to the sign, and the ones that did not he moved down.

We spoke for some minutes. I was cheerfully nimble-minded and more learned than he expected. Eventually, when standing still in the cold had become tiresome for me, he could come up with no answer at all when asked the straight question, "What benefit is it to me or anyone else to be a member of your club?" and he was equally at a loss when then asked, "What ill will befall me or misfortune will I suffer if I don't join?".

With no apparent upside to membership and no downside to non-membership he appeared momentarily baffled as to why he was a member of the club himself, though I should commend him for conceding positively that the JWs are not an appropriate organisation to advise on any aspect of mental health.

I left the idiot pondering my assertion that every time he and those like him said to do something benign or worthwhile just because a particular book said so he and those like him were giving authority to anyone else's instruction to other people to do harmful things just because the same particular book said do them, too.

I tried on some shoes but they were too small and no larger the same were in stock at that or any other branch or their warehouse. I ate a sausage sandwich perhaps eight feet to the side from an ex-colleague from two jobs ago to whom I would have had nothing to say beyond acknowledging that we had been colleagues so said nothing.

I despise in passing the individual or committee that decided to put HP Sauce in small sachets which are impossible to open without getting some sauce on your fingers and those who dare distribute as napkins the flimsiest of paper sheets that adhere, tear and leave themselves attached to drying sauce instead of wiping one's digits clean. More wandering about ensued. I needed a cigarette.

I warmed up by queuing in Costa, before sitting outside in the cold to consume hot milk with coffee in it, to smoke and to watch the herds of pedestrians I had numbered amongst only moments earlier. As a seated observer of the hustle and bustle I was undistracted from reflection on the remarkable dexterity of the young barista whose work had had me mesmerised while awaiting my beverage.

I wondered whether there were any other jobs left in the modern world where the demonstrated attention to detailed and complex manual procedures performed at high speed had not been mechanised, whether such skills were transferable to a higher earnings bracket, as I am sure they were not being adequately rewarded where they were.

There is a lady who carries out similar tasks rather more slowly in the Liphook Sainsbury's Cafe, where I sometimes pause on shorter walks from home, who wields a J-cloth in the most disturbing fashion when attending to a steam-pipe dripping with just foamed milk. I do hope it is not just for my benefit.

I am having to remember I don't and won't have a bakery to stop at on the way to work now or a lunch-break to remind me to go to a café. My default daily calorie intake is down as a result by a sausage roll, a doughnut, some crisps and a bacon roll. It may have been a diet devoid of goodness but it was a diet of sorts.

Tomorrow I shall have a far healthier festive feast with my sister and her family and doubtless will feel uncomfortably full and suffer the wind of the sparsely-toothed for some while afterwards. I suppose that is what crimbo is all about.

Borders [2015]

Borders are just the boundaries of

Where sets of rules apply.

Where being different, for example,

You can live or you must die.

I don't want persecution

Of people like me

To wander free.

Neither do I want persecution of you.

______

Somewhere between

The far side of

The Middle East

And just over there

The rules change.

A transsexual stoned

In Seaside City

Is a

Recreational

Happenstance.

A transsexual stoned

In the Middle East

Is a

Public

Execution.

______

Especially,

I am wary of people

Who have been raised to

Believe it is their god's will to

Stone me.

Perhaps it

Is no surprise

I am wary of people

Who refuse to respect

Our bounded freedoms.

It is true,

You cannot see

Political boundaries

From the depth of space

But they are very real on earth,

This planet where we have to live.

______

Europe is an area of land.

It has hot bits and cold bits,

Flat bits and bumpy bits,

Bits that are dry and

Bits that are less so but,

It isn't the land that

Made Europe the magnet

For the disenfranchised

From elsewhere in the world.

______

Soil has no more or less problem than sand

With colour or gender or preference,

With who walks hand in hand

With whom or for why

They can't stand

Each other.

It's just

Land.

______

I am fifty-three, born

Only seventeen years

After World War Two.

When I was born a

European, peace was

barely old enough to

ride a motorcycle and

still too young to vote.

This year,

European Peace

Is seventy years old

And we take it for granted.

______

But it has taken people seventy years

Of tolerance, of understanding,

Education and co-operation

To get where we are,

To become where

Everyone else

Wants to

Be.

It didn't come for free.

______

We did not achieve this

Lasting peace in secret.

Our methods are in

The public domain.

______

Our methods are

The European public.

Our customs and practices,

Our rules and regulations,

Our laws and public behaviour

Are what makes Europe

And Europeans

Successful.

The peace

And calm,

The time

To think

Can no more

Be stormed

Or occupied

Than a pub's

Quiet ambience,

Its calm can be

Enjoyed

By anyone

If one

Pugnacious

Seeker

Of it destroys

The very thing

That drew them.