Oh damn, still in this dream.

Lockdown has brought me to the point where I'm engineering and tracking my own demos. This hasn't happened for years, and my sound engineering skills are rusty in the extreme - also the world has changed and DAWs all work about the same, and you no longer have to stripe tape with SMPTE code. Also I don't need a big desk for mixing and all that jazz. Peripherals are an interface with the computer (in this case I have my Helix as first choice) and a microphone (which I am borrowing from Steve K who used to own and run TPA Studios and still has a few lying around).

Let's see how it all works. And let's see if I can do the fiddly editing stuff on the DAW with any precision, dexterity, and speed. Else it could be a long, slow task ahead.

Now if you want to make a grown-up conservative politician really nervous use the words "deontologically" and "consequentiality" in proper context in friendly conversation when talking about policy.

It's a lot scarier if accompanied by structured analysis of aforementioned policy from a consequentialist and deontological position.

And then drop in the 60K excess deaths as the punchline.

Works every fucking time.

...Gatekeepers are useful to have in place:

www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/09/nhs-blood-unit-systematically-racist-internal-report-finds

The Colindale NHS Blood Unit certainly seems to have a few "True Believers" doing the hiring and firing. The BBC and the Emergency Services might also prove to be interesting ground for the statisticians.

In the end we will work it out. Numbers don't lie, so the only thing you can hope to do is hide them; and that is no longer possible with things like employment. And lots of us can do the statistical analysis if we push ourselves so to do. Maybe it's still possible to funnel your money through whatever is the new equivalent of one of Mossack Fonseca's schemes, but you can't disguise your payroll to the Inland Revenue or your corporate insurers or a bunch of other folk. And one thing we know about information is that it is like water in this respect; given a chance or change in pressure it will find a place to leak.

This will be Ninefingers' first law of information; based on a short story by Ambrose Bierce, obvs. The subordinate clauses in the first chapter...

1. Information will come out unless contained in stasis, and even then... it is unpredictable. Be assured your sins will find you out. You might be dead by then (see Saville et al) but your statues will be torn down, your descendants will change their names, and your memory will be reviled.
1.1 When a leak is sprung, you can freeze it and wait for it to thaw at a later date. But it will thaw. And then your statues will be torn down, your relatives will change their names, etc & etc.
1.11 If you do not freeze the leak, assess the potential damage; if it won't put you in prison for a long time, 'fess up with proper contrition, and explanations and excuses. If, however, you're for the chair, I suppose you must do as you must. But you'll get the chair anyway. Plea-bargain. It helps if you're white, obvs.
1.12 You can unfreeze the leak before pressure is brought to bear and you are named in parliament despite super-injunctions or ministerial denials. But sometimes friendly interviews to put across your position just don't turn out the way you thought they would. Only give interviews if you have been thoroughly prepped and lawyered. Remember what they tell you to say and stick to the script. They are cleverer than you are, whatever grandiose opinion you have of yourself. If you can point to, let's say, schoolchildren in the playground being unpleasant to you because you were a minority, or gay, or transgender, rather than the outright psychopath you were and are, it will make you appear slightly more sympathetic to the public/voters/legal authorities/parliamentary ombudspersons.
1.2 When damaging information does come out, distract by flooding all available information space with other, less important but more attractive information. (It helps if the distraction has large breasts, a big penis, or both.)
1.21 Do not release more damaging information just to cover up less damaging information. (Just because people are stupid.)
1.3  Accept that unless you are very, very lucky, you are fucked. Really fucked. Even if you're a prince of the realm, or, ten years hence, an ex PM called to account for his actions.
2. If you avoid prison spend the rest of your life doing good works and atoning for your mistakes. (qv John Profumo.)

Classic Dom (as John Crace has named him) has been cautioned by the police for... let's get this right... breaking quarantine. Not breaking lockdown like the Bonking Mathmo Prof (who resigned) or the Scots Tory Minister (who resigned) but breaking quarantine.

He was fucking infectious at the time he broke lockdown - he broke quarantine. May I just say it again for emphasis? Such breaches now have £1,000 fine attached to them, but not when he did it. So in all probability, with folk in the Beeb supporting him, Dom will just brush it aside.

I fucking hope not. Here is where we really need someone with the invective of Malcolm Tucker to take the blighter down; despite all the shills from the Beeb propagandising for him like mad.

Happens to be the name of perhaps the greatest of all the Terry Gilliam's films.

I doubt though if even Terry Gilliam collaborating with all the other Pythons could make as an absurdist piece of theatre as is currently going on in the nation of Brazil.

Bolsonaro seems more unhinged than Trump. They have had two Health ministers resign in a month. All the wrongdoings are floating to the surface like turds bobbing near a sewage outfall.

Back in Blighty I'm beginning to think that Boris is toast. The extreme right and business interests all want lockdown ended. Folk on the right are briefing against him and his present stance of safety first. At a guess he will genuflect to his constituency and open up - I doubt he has much choice.

As ye sew, so shall ye reap.

www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/11/28/a-new-theory-argues-same-sex-sexual-behaviour-is-an-evolutionary-norm

Wherein I find that our chaps have been making category mistakes even in framing the question. I quote liberally. I hope that's ok.

"The mainstream explanations in evolutionary biology for these behaviours are many and varied. Yet they all contain a common assumption: that sexual behaviours involving members of the same sex are a paradox that does indeed need explaining. Reproduction requires mating with a creature of the opposite sex, so why does same-sex mating happen at all?"

And we traditionally framed the answer in two ways:

"The first is that the cost of same-sex behaviour is high because energy and time spent engaged in it do not contribute to reproductive success. If that were true it would indeed mean that maintenance of same-sex behaviour over the generations requires some exotic explanation whereby such activity confers benefits that outweigh the disadvantage. The second assumption is that same-sex activity evolved separately in every species that exhibits it, from an ancestral population that engaged exclusively in different-sex behaviour."

However, when we put it this way

"Ms Monk and her co-authors question the first assumption by pointing out that many animals seem to mate at a frequency far higher than looks necessary merely to reproduce—meaning that the proportional costs of any instance of sexual activity which does not produce offspring must be low. If this is true, it reverses the burden of proof. The cost of the sensory and neurological mechanisms needed to identify another’s sex, and thus permit sex-discriminating mating behaviour, is high. Sometimes, that will be a price worth paying, especially if a long-term relationship is involved in reproduction, as it is in most birds and some mammals. But it is the evolution of sex-discrimination for which special-case exemptions must be sought, not the evolution of same-sex behaviour.

The second assumption is even easier to challenge. Typically, evolutionary biologists assume that traits shared widely across a related group are likely to have evolved in an ancestral population, not repeatedly and separately in each lineage. Ms Monk and her colleagues argue that cognitive biases in the subject’s practitioners have pushed them to look for fantastic explanations for the evolution of same-sex behaviours in a range of animals, rather than considering the perhaps more reasonable explanation for its persistence, that it is a low-cost ancestral trait that has little evolutionary reason to disappear."


Now we have to ask why we made those category mistakes. If gay folk started lynching religious extremists I suppose I'd have to speak out against them doing so... eventually. Even our basic scientific questions have been influenced by our stupid, bigoted, small-minded, superstitious religions, because so many of our cultural assumptions derive from them.

I suppose we have to be forgiving, unless that's another cultural and religious assumption that is essentially mad.

But it isn't mad. Each case on its own merits.

However, a weregild always needs paying. And gay folk are owed a weregild; just as black folk are, and women are too.

"Little Richard was always my main man. How hard must it have been for him: gay, black and singing in the South? But his records are a joyous good time from beginning to end."

Lemmy, Motörhead

Mr James Brown, John and Paul, Mick and Keef, Jimi, Otis, Lemmy, Prince...

The list of rock 'n' rollers who owed Little Richard dibs and who acknowledged it publicly is pretty damn stellar. A founder; from the Golden Age. And a decade and a half later Marc Bolan and David Bowie copped his ideas and sold them back to the world as dangerous young white bisexual artists.

More and more I begin to understand why Black and Gay folk feel marginalised. John and Yoko made us Western European types more aware of the position of women in society; but I was born in '61, when Gay folk were criminals, and Black folk... well, even now you can still get shot for being black while jogging.

When I heard the original lyrics to Tutti Frutti I realised that Rock 'n' Roll had a huge transgressive element well before Bowie got out the Max Factor; but when Black folk were doing it, it didn't matter. Things only got taken seriously when we repackaged it for our own consumption. Which isn't to knock Bowie, Bolan, Lou Reed, or even the Rocky Horror Picture show; but just to notice that a decade before Stonewall or Woodstock, Penniman carried a freak flag higher than anyone.

And, as Lemmy mentioned, it was all joyous.

Waited in the supermarket queue chatting to folk nonchalantly for the requisite half an hour... without realising my fly was undone.

Hooray, hooray,
The first of May...

But with the lockdown I fear the outdoor activities that close the quote are beyond us all, and not just those who are disinclined to put aside the pleasures of comfort for a little bracing exercise in the usual, only-just-sub-Artic, English Spring.

As is the weather has been unusually clement until yesterday when rain rinsed the coronavirus off the streets and into the sewers.

And let's be candid; London has become a place that is almost unrecognisable.

However what is recognisable is our government's appalling behaviour. Having screwed the PPE thing comprehensively the government has now decided that England & Wales coroners are ordered to exclude issues of inadequate PPE from inquests into deaths of NHS staff killed by COVID-19.

This is completely and absolutely unacceptable, but no-one appears to be kicking up a stink at it. If I were a coroner I would happily ignore such instruction. In fact I rather hope more than one coroner will do so, or maybe even the whole damn lot of them. How dare a government dictate a coroner's findings for political expediency? This really does bear comparison to Nazi Germany or Communist Russia. Brexit Britain, bah!

And then to top it all off, in order to apply for a test for CV19 you need to have a credit check with TransUnion. What the bloody fuck! You need a fucking credit check to get tested for CV19?

Let me repeat that. YOU NEED TO AGREE TO A CREDIT CHECK TO GET A CV19 TEST.

Fuck that. I'm going to do my best to become a fucking super-spreader then. Cunts.

And understandably so. Congratters to Ms Symonds and Mr Johnson. Impressed that Boris will postpone paternal leave until later in the year. I imagine Ms Symonds told him where his duty lay; as she seems like a lass who can keep Boris's nose to the grindstone - and let's face it, never has a chap been more in need of what Paul Erdős called a "boss." (Well apart from me that is, obvs.)

A chap on twitter who calls himself Guy Fawkes listed Boris's achievements during his short tenure as PM so far; and because of its succinct brilliance I have decided to quote it"

"In the last 10 months alone, Boris Johnson has become PM, broke the constitution, started Brexit, won an election, got divorced, got engaged, nearly died, had a baby, and buggered up a pandemic so badly that 40 thousand people died."

So a slow start for the first year then. No doubt year two of a Boris premiership will be even more exciting. I do hope Ms Symonds can get back to keeping Boris on the job properly; and soon. A good nanny to take care of the infant Johnson will be a requirement.

(I love it when one of the seven types of ambiguity works in your favour; rather than just be a tool of political obfuscation.)

Oh and happy birthday to Captain Tom and congratters on your appointment as Colonel. There have been few "credits to the mess" with such credit. On a similar note I hope young Johnson Beharry is still doing well. The extent of Johnson's original injuries will probably preclude him ever managing to be an active officer, but I would suggest, on his retirement as senior NCO that something should be done. Valour counts, even in the modern world. Colonel Tom may not have had the opportunity for Valour, but has played the hand dealt better than anyone would manage.

I have to say though it is slightly shameful that the fifth-largest economy in the world has to subsidise its Health Service with charity, and to some extent was reliant upon a centenarian's sponsored walk. Still, the inadequacies of our government give opportunities for folk to show what they are made of; and by any analysis, Colonel Tom is made of remarkable stuff.

Which leads me naturally to Her Majesty. It is bizarre that I should wish any human being I don't know as well as I wish HM. If I were a praying sort I suppose I'd pray for her. (Actually I have more of an accusatory and argumentative approach towards my dealing with the Deity - praying doesn't come into it.) I hope HM keeps safe and in good health. After friends and family and those in peril I suppose Englishfolk naturally think next for Her Maj. Some may think of that as slightly skewed. Everyone's entitled to an opinion.