There are no limits to our commitment to the euro.
– Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank. The linked Guardian article in which I found the quote is titled “ECB U-turn shows it fears coronavirus could destroy eurozone project”.
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At first I thought this was une blague pratique. Apparently not, unless Tim Worstall’s denial is merely evidence that he is in on the joke. He writes in today’s Times:
A similar restriction is being applied in Italy, according to The Local.it:
But what if you do not have access to the internet?
March 19th, 2020 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Seid umschlungen, Millionen! Be embraced, Millions! – Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy, Beethoven’s setting of which is the Anthem of Europe. Sing all the way through this while washing your hands to help avoid the spread of coronavirus. Other songs recommended for this purpose include Stairway to Heaven and Another One Bites the Dust. March 13th, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The English Football Premier League is one of the world’s great sporting tournaments, and as the current season now nears its end, Liverpool have a huge lead of over twenty points over their nearest rival club. This is, despite a recent stumble in Liverpool’s form, an amazing achievement. (Our own Patrick Crozier, a Watford supporter, might enjoy commenting on that stumble.) This all comes after Liverpool, last season, won the European Championship. All football fans, whether paid or unpaid, are now inclined to regard everything that Liverpool’s hugely engaging and obviously very smart manager Jurgen Klopp says or does as evidence of his all-round human wonderfulness. Personally, I greatly prefer following football on television and on the internet to actually going to games, which are too noisy, expensive and time-consuming for my tastes and for my fading eyesight. I prefer classical concerts at the Wigmore Hall. (I recently attended this concert there. Stu – I’m now deploying a verbal device that Americans often like to use when they really want to ram their point home, often by swearing at this point – pendous.) Nevertheless, from a virtual distance, I too am a football fan, and so I share the general admiration for Jurgen Klopp. The above explains why Klopp is getting so much admiring attention for what he recently said about the coronavirus. Klopp was, MarketWatch reports:
Here is how Klopp responded to this question:
Cue an orgy of admiration for what a stellar human being Klopp is, for saying something so very, very wise. What a guy! But, perhaps because I only admire people like Klopp from a virtual distance, I am able to dissent. I think that this was an excellent answer by Klopp, to a question that he wasn’t actually asked. He wasn’t asked what he thinks will be the future progress of the coronavirus. He was merely being asked whether he was worried about it. Any conscientious football club manager must now be anxious about how the coronavirus might affect his club in the weeks and months to come, and to be listening out carefully to learn what derangements look like being imposed upon the world and the country in general, and upon professional football in particular. Klopp doesn’t have to be an expert on infectious diseases to be worried about the spread of one of these devilish things while it is still spreading and still killing people, and more to the point while it is causing sporting authorities to ponder doing things like cancelling all heavily-attended sports events for the duration of the coronavirus problem. He just has to be a semi-intelligent person who is keeping half an eye on the news. To the actual question that Klopp was asked, a simple Yes would have sufficed. Yes, he is worried, as are most other people, and worried precisely because he, Jurgen Klopp, does indeed not know what the coronavirus will do next. He might then have added a few words to the effect that he was already thinking about how future games might be affected, and about what he would be telling his players if cancellations and general disruption of sport in the UK, along the lines of what is already happening in Italy, do shortly ensue. The comments Klopp made on the habit of regarding people who are celebrated in one field as experts in other fields are very sensible, or would have been had that been what he had been asked about. But I also dissent somewhat from that. Not in the sense that I regard successful football managers as experts on all other things. It’s more that I reckon you can also overdo the reverence for the pronouncements of “experts“. Experts can often be very right, but they are often wrong. The rest of us ought at least to be willing to question the supposed experts, and then ask ourselves if their answers make as much sense as they are claiming. March 5th, 2020 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
But I am. By the way, the “Postrel” mentioned as having given Sally Satel her first donated kidney is Virginia Postrel, whose writing will be familiar to many of you. February 18th, 2020 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Austin Bay at Instapundit:
Rather than listening to the message and taking immediate action, the government of China instead spent crucial days suppressing that message and punishing the messenger. Dr Li Wenliang and seven other doctors were arrested for spreading rumours, rumours which turned out to be accurate observations. Li has since died of the very disease that he noticed starting to spread. China: Don’t just get mad, get even. February 7th, 2020 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
John Harris is one of the Guardian‘s best journalists. He is a left winger who wanted to remain in the EU, but the series of video reports by him and John Domokos called “Anywhere but Westminster” showed their determination to literally and figuratively move outside their comfort zone on the issue of Brexit. Now he has turned his attention to a new subject: health apps and Big Data in the age of the Internet of Things.
Most people here will probably think that the article and even more so the comments give too much weight to the creepiness of private corporations monitoring your every breath and too little to the creepiness of the NHS doing it. But even the biggest fans of capitalism can feel unease at anyone having this level of knowledge of the most intimate aspects of our lives. (Time was it was only little green men from flying saucers who had such a probing interest.) Nowadays both the private and the public sectors are amassing data, and whichever of them gets a comprehensive health surveillance system working first will promptly sell it to the other. Then again, before you declare that you will never allow the Internet of Things anywhere near your body, read this comment from “ID20857”:
February 3rd, 2020 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC reports,
Those GMC guidelines are correct. Forcing a woman to have her hymen repaired is a serious crime, as is threatening her with violence because she had sex outside marriage to get it broken in the first place. That violent threats so often go unpunished is a national scandal. But the fact remains that most women who go to have their hymens repaired want it done. In less drastic cases they want the procedure for such reasons as to get and keep a husband, to avoid letting their parents know that they no longer adhere to traditional Muslim mores, or to avoid a breach with their husband’s family. You may say that it is a bad thing that such crushing social pressure for a bride to be a virgin remains prevalent in some communities in the UK. But the principle that an adult human being owns their own body does not cease to apply because he or she gives in to social pressure. Plenty of women get boob jobs and bum lifts because of social pressure, too. Are these bad decisions? Possibly. Cosmetic surgery has risks. But good or bad, the decision is theirs to make. In more drastic cases women want their hymens repaired because it is the only way to protect themselves from the twisted “honour” of their fathers and husbands. Of course no woman should have to resort to such desperate measures in order to be safe from murder. But what sort of idiocy is it to see a person taking extreme measures to protect themselves from murder and then to think the course of action that best serves justice is to prosecute the victim – or the surgeon who is helping her keep safe? The usual sort, unfortunately. January 27th, 2020 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Wearing face masks in public is presently illegal in Hong Kong and compulsory in Wuhan January 24th, 2020 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a fascinating article in today’s Observer, “Out of the lab and into your frying pan: the advance of cultured meat”. (The best comment is from “Tintenfische”: “You call that cultured meat? Pah, not even close. Last week my steak took me to the ballet and a symposium on the evolution of beat poetry as seen through the eye of the beat.”) The author of the article, Zoë Corbyn – I’ve always liked the name Zoë – describes the background:
Not everybody is happy that this hoary science fiction trope seems to be on the point of commercial viability. Apparently an advertisement in the Brussels metro…
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them. The would-be purveyors of a guilt-free equivalent of meat to vegetarians are also opposed from the other side:
“Less pragmatic than PETA”: not a concept one meets often. I think the Clean Meat Hoax people have something in common with the opponents of vaping. What really distresses them is that after all their years of exhortations to make the smokers or meat eaters repent, the jammy bastards might be enabled to cease doing the bad thing just like that, with no redeeming pain. January 19th, 2020 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I implore people to stop using private healthcare: it’s killing the NHS”, writes Jessica Arnold, who is described as “associate director of primary care for NHS Bromley clinical commissioning group”.
“Poaching” is a strange metaphor to use, given that the “birds” in this case are not being kidnapped by the private sector but leaving the National Health Service to work elsewhere of their own free will. Perhaps Ms Arnold is referring to the eventual destiny of the birds under a gamekeeper’s care that do not get poached. January 8th, 2020 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am surprised that this story from Pakistan – perhaps this is real ‘lawfare’? –
has not gained more attention, there is a paywall but there is other coverage. The gist of it is that after a dispute at a cardiac unit over priority for treatment, and insults being traded between physicians and lawyers, a riot of lawyers ensued that the Pakistani police could only contain with military assistance, and there are unconfirmed reports of patients dying after either being attacked by lawyers or deserted by medical staff. Breitbart has the story too, with a death toll of around 12.
The genesis of the dispute is reported as being:
So the good news is that Pakistan’s police have a firmer grasp of the concept of the rule of law than this gang of lawyers. The hospital itself is the Punjab Institute of Cardiology, which provides free health care to almost 500,000 patients a year. Presumably it is State-funded, but there may be some religious charitable giving. It does accept donations for patient welfare, and provides private treatment in the evenings. So why couldn’t the uppity lawyer who started this have waited till the evening and paid for some private care? There may be more to this than meets the eye, the article alludes to long-running tensions between lawyers and doctors in Lahore (but no reason for them). A local lawyers’ rep. doesn’t seem to be particularly conciliatory:
Presumably the ‘lawyer’ pictured pointing a pistol in this local piece fully complies with the rules of professional conduct? In the USA, he might be simply vigorously demonstrating the Second Amendment. What is the answer to this sort of behaviour, apart from rigorous law enforcement? It is, I suppose, a backhanded compliment to Pakistan’s hospitals that people will kill if denied priority treatment. Why doesn’t the NHS provoke such passions? December 12th, 2019 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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