COVID19: How can we control it if we don't know where it is? Test everyone. (Jeremy Hunt)

“How can we possibly suppress the virus if we don’t know where it is?”

Former health secretary Jeremy Hunt condemns the government's mismanagement of coronavirus testing. #CoronavirusLockdown pic.twitter.com/zd4jMmfkLr

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) March 24, 2020

Vision, having sight of the problem, is vital in order to solve it. Jeremy Hunt cites other countries who have got control of their outbreaks with intensive testing and contact tracing. Let's hope the government understands this message and acts on it.

Bombs, war crimes and our diminished sensitivity - Rana Dasgupta

'The recent bombing of a hospital in Kunduz highlights a decline in Western efforts to make wars less brutal. ... The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary and judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless and senseless - and it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak. ...' (Read)

Charity "pay to read" / "pay to view" author web pages

Authors, poets and film makers could donate stories, poems and films for a charity to host on pay per view web pages. In order to read the poem or the story or to view the film, a user would either pay per story, poem or film or by adding credit in advance and then using it up one item at a time.

The creative works donated by writers and artists would each have a price to view and a "Total Raised". I suggest that they be beautifully presented, with page continuation buttons as required to complete reading and perhaps also a "Print" button, for someone to get a copy of a poem to read at leisure.

The beauty of it is that the donor gets something in return for his or her money, it costs little or nothing for the charity to host and authors can see how much their contribution has clocked up in charity donations. Authors would be giving in that way, not selling, and so their contributions would be immense and they could rightly take pride in them.

This idea is intended for the highest level of charities and I hope for those alleviating hunger, particularly at the time of writing when famine has been declared in Somalia. The entire proceeds of the donation should go to the charity, as far as that is possible. This is not an idea for YouTube to give 10%, it's an idea for, say, Save The Children to get 100%.

Additionally this should not be patented or copyrighted in any way that would restrict other charitable causes from implementing the same idea. There is no reason why there couldn't be such "pay per view" items and accounts on many different charitable websites.

Ossian

Stick your ebooks

Letters

Re: Amazon and Waterstones report downloads eclipsing printed book sales (Guardian)

Apart from the low pricing - the bestselling "ebook" cited is 49p to download - one factor not mentioned is that because these are online booksellers, it is natural for electronic books to be their default product. You probably could not get "an eBook for your Kindle"* from a high street bookshop. So it's not surprising when they find that electronic downloads are overtaking their sales of real books.

For high street bookshops, presumably ebook sales are zero. So if the electronic sites go over more to ebook sales, it might indirectly help traditional bookshops. Unfortunately, Amazon has the power like supermarkets to buy the market and force small local competitors out of business. But real books are not going to go away, ever. The sort of things being offered now are like the early digital watches: a backward step for the sake of technology, masquerading as progress.

People may be downloading cheap or free ebooks (though free ones are not included in the statistics above) but I have yet to hear convincing reports of anyone enjoying the reading experience with them. Reading is not something like laundry that has to be done as a chore where mechanisation is a help and a relief. It's a specific respite from technobabble, gadgets and the flim-flam of workaday life.

You can bet your life that people will always want to take a glass of wine or a cup of coffee (not delivered via a throwaway injector direct into the veins), a book and a part of their own day to devote to the mindful pursuit of reading a book.

Empanada Solero, Chiswick

* I think it is unlikely that any medium with such ugly words associated ("ebook" and "kindle" - as a device) will last. [Ed]

The fall of Capitalism

Every day brings news of more financial collapses. It started with Lehman Brothers in the US and at present there is no knowing where it will end. The ominous metaphor that comes to mind is the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers. At present we are in the phase after the initial plane impacts, equivalent to the multiple financial shocks (that money is heir to). The economic collapse that follows might be as far beyond anything we have imagined as the collapse of the towers on that day. It could mean starvation, destitution and disintegration of the civilisation we have known in recent centuries and the advent of a new dark age. We saw the fall of Communism with the Berlin Wall in 1989; are we now seeing the fall of Capitalism?

Feargal

Project Natal: fiction, hype, fraud or karaoke?

If, like me, you love fiction but hate computer games, I think you should watch this. Personally, I think it's a fraud but it's fascinating. It does approach the experience of story somewhat and so we must take it into consideration. It is really another way of translating a story, not film, not stage, not other languages but into an interactive scenario that brings the story partly to life. The pre-planned scenarios that are inevitably programmed into it are the problem, reading a story gives us an infinitely variable visualisation, conjecture and response. This robotised interpretation is always on the verge of saying "Sorry, that does not compute." Don't swallow all that sales hype without a large pinch of salt. All that said, the demonstration is quite amusing. The nearest analogy would be that it is to fiction as karaoke is to music.

Ossian

Again

Tell me a story
busy as sleeping,
older than childhood,
stranger than home.

Oh tell me a story
never before known,
the one I remember,
the one you forget.

And I will laugh for you
and close these eyes for you
and kiss you goodnight

again.

--
Stephen Moran

Virgin Mobile insurance con

"3 months free phone insurance. Cover your Virgin Mobile Pay Monthly phone, and the first 3 months are on us. After that, its just £5.99 a month."

£5.99 per month to insure your phone? What a rip-off, a tax on the busy parents of impressionable youngsters who demand mobile phones, not anticipating that this financial trap is being laid for them when they click through online. All "first 3 months free" schemes should be banned.

Feargal

Richard Littlejohn's racist rants etc.

Happened to be in the barbers today and nothing else to read but the Daily Mail rag. To be fair, this housepaper-in-waiting for the genocidal BNP dictatorship had one good double page memoir about sexual mores in France, which was worth reading - an eye opener as they say. However it also contained a pageful of brutal and racist rants by a big Jeremy Clarkson-like buffoon called Richard Littlejohn. Like Clarkson this blatherer Littlejohn has made a living out of being an arse in the media for years.

He criticizes the police in a strange backhanded way, for example he complains that a guy was Tasered three times while spreadeagled on the ground while also describing him as "a piece of lard who probably deserved a good kicking". He gets some things sort of half right, probably by accident, including pointing out the stupidity of Tasering a sheep that was blocking a road. He then goes on in another strange backhanded sort of way about police swimming lessons being cancelled in Wales because it would put Muslim women off joining.

What I really didn't like was how he then went on via a tenuous link to say (and I quote) that "the Warwickshire police are holding a pikey's picnic this weekend, inviting all members of 'the travelling community' to a day of festivities at the force's Leek Wootton headquarters. The manicured lawns of the country house HQ will play host to a traditional Roma band, story-telling and even 'a graffiti project'. I hope they remember to lock up their lawn-mowers." [My emphasis]

It's not just the word "pikey" - which is offensive enough, I think, but that remark about locking up their lawn-mowers. I don't think you need me to draw the historical parallels of vilification that little jibe evokes. Have people like him learned nothing from history? As long as this country thinks he and people like him are, in the American term, "good old boys" we are headed for the horrors.

Remember today, remember everything you see around you: the communities, the arts, the hospitals and hospices, the schools and special schools, the languages you hear everywhere, the public transport passes for pensioners, welfare for people in hardship, benefits, pensions, freedom, rights. All these things will be violently and wilfully destroyed and disappear forever if people like him have their way, if they ever gain power. All that will be left is a feudal system of mansions, with unrepaired roads between them and surrounded by hovels, the Brazil of Europe, a banana republic with no bananas and no republic, run on the divine right of inherited privilege.

We can start the fight by binning the Daily Mail. Let's also oppose the Tories 10% cuts proposals and their alliance with the far right parties of Europe. New Labour sucks, and Gordon's expenses fiasco (yes, let him own it all) sucks majorly but look around, there is regeneration everywhere: new sports centre, rebuilt secondary school, rebuilt community hospital all within five minutes walk of where I live. When you go to a hospital appointment, you don't have to wait as long to be seen. There are new tests that are pro-actively promulgated for preventive medicine. There is a minimum wage. These are just some of the things one could list.

Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, let's purge lazy and concupiscent MP's but let us not install Lord Snooty and his friends to try to turn the clock back. Don't let them dismantle and sell off the investment that has been made. At the very worst, a Lib-Lab pact can survive. It is by no means over till it's over. Cameron is "measuring the curtains for 10 Downing Street" and therein lies his party's Achilles' heel: they think they have it in the bag, they have seen the winning post too soon.

Feargal

MPs expenses: Once again, we're missing the point

Gordon Brown forced to defend allowances system

"The files also show how Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, over-claimed for both his council tax and mortgage bills." (Telegraph)

As usual, the Willesden Herald's rival newspapers have totally the wrong approach to this story. Instead of griping about how MP's claim for council tax, mortgage payments, cleaners etc, they should be insisting that this ingenious system be extended to everyone. You will need no reminding about the endless and annoying outgoings that beset us all, even in the best of times. Far from being a disgrace, the Westminster expenses system is brilliant and far ahead of its time.

It falls to the Willesden Herald to demand that we all be allowed to claim for homes near to where we work, council tax bills, transport, food, pot plants, plumbing and cleaning and (why not?) everything! This is one of the best news stories ever, if only people would look on the bright side, instead of always knocking the mother of parliaments and her canny and brilliant ways of providing the money that we all need.

Feargal Mooney

Quote of the week - 2 not out for Boris

"You're a snob," he insisted, "and you want to hit me."

On the contrary, I said, I had no desire whatever to hit him. "Yes, you do," he said, coming closer. "I can tell by the way you flexed your shoulder muscles. You're getting all psyched up."

I said that any shoulder-flexing had been entirely involuntary, and that, even if I had flexed my shoulders, it did not mean that I wanted to hit him. He thought about this a bit, and then said that perhaps it would be easier all round if he hit me' (Boris Johnson)

He goes on to describe street scenes worthy of Hieronymus Bosch with pasty-faced, bottom-dwelling creatures looming out of the gloom, shouting incomprehensible oaths and invitations. BJ's Wodehousian verbal googlies diverted stupid cupid's dart mid-flight from this:

"It is, quite frankly, a scandal that we have failed to come up with a solution to the problem of the sliding slice of tomato."

"Research has shown that an important part of sandwich satisfaction lies in opening it up and peering at the filling before eating it. This is why I am urging RHM, the creators of the crustless loaf, to take up my idea of the edible hinge." (Oliver Pritchett)

OP's learned article is in the tradition of the redoubtable Myles naGopaleen, who invented trains with tracks on top to allow overtaking, and pop-up theatre seats to deliver latecomers direct to their places.