The Coronavirus (COVID-19 / Wu Flu) Hype

Every year there’s a new flu virus, and it kills a lot of people. Some years it’s mild, and some years it’s pretty darn vicious. 2020 is one of the years it’s pretty darn vicious. Cernovich makes the good point (hidden under a flurry of insults in all directions) that just because coronavirus is a flu, doesn’t mean we should ignore it, it means we should pay more attention to flu. There are reasons this doesn’t happen, none of which are edifying and all of which have solid cost-benefit figures, and is roughly the same reason the Brits don’t spend bajillions on snow ploughs and other winter equipment.

However, there’s something suspect about the hype. The last Big Flu was Bird Flu, and it was clear that Big Pharma was behind that. Big Pharma off-loaded millions of pounds worth of nearly-past-sell-by drugs on Health Services over the world. That’s a pretty clear motive. This time Big Pharma is very quiet, which means it doesn’t have any drugs to unload. Which is pretty much a first. Big Pharma claims to have drugs for everything, and a PR machine that shifts those drugs like hot dogs after a football match.

The Big Tell is that the victims are very rarely described. They are just “people”. Not one “We Lost Our Lovely Susan, 10, To Coronavirus” headline? Finding Susan, 10, thirty minutes after she dies is what Big Pharma PR firms do. There’s a muttering that the people who die have pre-existing medical conditions, but that’s it. If the majority were women, we would see headlines like “New Virus Targets Women”, but we’re not. Which tells you that most of the people who die from it are older men who are already in bad health and spending too much time in close conditions with others - like cruise liners and the Iranian Parliament.

Now look at who is reacting to it. Aside from the mainstream media, which stopped being a reliable guide to anything in 2016.

Panicky people are cancelling flights or not making reservations, which causes airlines to cancel entire flights in the future because the margins on most flights are tiny. The airlines are cancelling because profits, not because they know anything about viruses.

The University of London cancelled its graduation ceremony for the Class of 2019. Graduation ceremonies make losses. The James Bond movie delayed its release - because panicky people won’t go into packed cinema screens, so first-weekend takings will be down, and that ain’t a good look. Profits again, not viruses.

The markets are all over the place, as people sell on what they say is uncertainty and fear. The Coronavirus is benefitting short-sellers and people who want to get out of a position without other people asking why. Just say ‘Coronavirus’ and you can sell or buy anything and hide your real reasons.

Health services are using it as a funding pitch, but they use rainy days as a funding pitch. CEOs are using it as an excuse for their lousy trading results, but they use school holidays as an excuse for their lousy trading results. People who don’t want to do things are using it as an excuse not to do whatever it is they don’t want to do, and a virus sounds more plausible than global warming.

This is the never let a good crisis go to waste crowd.

Important things are still happening.

Commuter trains are still running. So are the metros. All full. Nobody is cancelling work. Odd how that never happens. (Except in the industrial powerhouses of northern China and Italy - those Southern Italians have been waiting forever to get back at the northerners.) All those International Women’s Day celebrations went ahead. St Patrick’s Day is going ahead, because are you going to tell the Irish they can’t? (Edit 10/3: OK, the Irish Government changed their mind. This does not mean it knows more than you do about how Covid-19 spreads and who is susceptible. It means they need to be seen to be doing something.)

I have no idea where the panic buyers are, but they don’t live near me. My supermarkets are full of Brits determined to prove that a panic is for taking calmly should it ever actually happen. (Edit 10/3: some of my colleagues at work have mentioned missing toilet paper and pasta. However, if the toilet paper thing doesn't turn out to be a guerrilla PR stunt, somebody's lying.)

There’s a real flu virus out there. It’s nasty. Some people in China got it, and so did some people on cruise liners, and the press covered that, because why wouldn’t you? If nobody’s interested, the media drops the story. But then the never-let-a-good-crisis-go-to-waste crowd got going and the media kept on running the story. It’s a good story behind which to hide all sorts of things. There’s a lot of things to hide.

Ten million people are not going to die of it. And, before anyone else calls it one, a ‘pandemic’ is not one hundred people in the whole of California. A ‘pandemic’ is when your neighbour has it, and the corner shop is closed, and half the people at work are off, and the hospitals are full and the nurses are dying of it. We haven’t had one of those for a long time.

Sonos in the House

Finally I splashed out on some Sonos kit. I’ve had a Beam Soundbar for the TV a while now. I bought two SL1’s, because I did not want a bunch of offshore contract workers Alexa listening to my conversations. One SL1 went into my bedroom, to replace the Bose Colour II. The other went into the kitchen, to replace the little Roberts radio. And I got a Connect.

A lot of people complain about the cost of the Connect. If you have a CD-player (Marantz CD6005), radio tuner, turntable, tape deck or cassettes, which you play through a proper grown-up hi-fi amplifier (Maraztz PM 6003) through proper adult loudspeakers (B&W 686’s), or you have a headphone amp (Creek OBH-11) to power proper headphones (Sennhieser HD650), then the hi-fi is the centre of your listening life. What I really wanted to do is have what I’m playing on the CD also be played in the kitchen and maybe somewhere else, and for that, the Connect is compulsory.

The Connect also links my proper grown-up hi-fi to streaming music, which I did up to a couple of weeks ago by the very satisfactory iPod Touch and the Dragonfly + Jitterbug combination. Streaming the iPod Touch through the Connect blows the Dragonfly away. Nobody talks about how good the DAC on the Connect is.

Streaming through the Sonos app, all the speakers, even attached to the hi-fi, are in sync. Using Line-In, there is a small lag, about 200ms or so, between hi-fi speakers and the rest of the Sonos speakers. It’s only audible if you are close to both the hi-fi and a Sonos speaker.

I don’t know who developed the Sonos app, but they are among the very few proper developers designing apps and cutting code. It walked me through the set-up of each piece of equipment and detected everything. I can group rooms together, and remove rooms from a group, with a couple of taps at the screen. I can choose my Spotify, streaming radio, and Line-in (aka, the CD player). At some point I will add Bandcamp and Soundcloud to the Services. I really can play different music in each room at the same time.

Because I’m a late adopter, it took a while to discover how to add the files on my NAS to the app (Settings -> System -> Music Library -> Music Library Setup -> +Add Shared Music Folder and enter the "\\192.168.n.n\(root directory of your music files)”. Press Done and the app will tell you it will now scan that directory.) You won’t see anything happening, which confused me, until I went to Browse and found a big orange square with Music Library next to it, and the assurance it was scanning when I touched the icon. About twenty minutes later, all my digital music files were there. Why I’d do that when Spotify has (almost) everything, I’m not sure: I rip AAC, not WAV. Anyway, there it all is.

And if you really must stream from your Macbook, then you’ll need SonoAir  I’ve installed it and tried it, and I’m sure it will be useful when I need it, but it’s not going to be a thing.

Is it worth it? Absolutely. Will I be adding any more? Such as a pair to complement the Beam? Maybe.

Catch-Up

I’ve missed a lot of posts this month. It’s a darn good thing I don’t do this for a living.

One reason is that I’ve been working on a particular project, and that has taken a lot of the little spare time I have. (Said every blogger ever at least once.) No, I’m not telling you what it is.

Another is that my mother has been in and out of hospital, and that’s more time- and attention-consuming than one might think. It’s family stuff and therefore complicated and not for discussion as it happens.

I’ve been fighting off a cold as well for about a week, probably as a result of standing around too many cold, damp South West Trains stations so I can visit my mother in hospital. And go to work.It got the better of me this weekend.

I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything in the news. Too many You Tubers do that and listening to them after a while starts to feel echo-chamber-y. Reading the Guardian, which I did for a while to see what ‘They’ were thinking, is now painful. Even browsing the Financial Times makes me wince. Seems the Fifth Columnists are still alive, virtue-signalling and trying to spread despair. Understand that the majority of news articles are about raising money for some charity, cause or government agency or department, and you will see that the print media is not about news. News is something somebody it’s about doesn’t want you to read: everyone wants you to read about how they need more money or the sky will fall in.

I haven’t felt the need to comment on anything that’s going on in my life, or that I’ve been reading. I am leading the classic ‘figure-eight life’ as somebody described it, and once you’ve been round the figure-eight once, that’s all you’re going to see.

Yep, I went in and back-filled the missing posts on Blogger.

John Adams: The Chairman Dances

Radio 3’s favourite minimalist for a long while. I saw Nixon In China a long time ago, and I don’t recall any special dancing when this was playing.

Nils Frahm: Says

Nils Frahm was born many years after Riley, Glass and Reich popularised Minimalism. It was probably just another influence on him. Says is a wonderful piece of music. Headphones, sit back and let it do its thing.

Steve Reich: Music for Eighteen Musicians

One of Steve Reich’s top five best sellers. For a long time it could only be performed by his own ensemble, because the notation was incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t played in the ensemble. I saw the first performance by another band at the Queen Elizabeth Hall many, many years now. The appetiser was a piece by Terry Fernyhough, which is somewhere else you can miss without missing anything.

Philip Glass: Glassworks

While we’re talking about Minimalism, let’s mention Philip Glass and this album, which everyone who saw Koyaanisatski rushed out and bought the following Saturday.