Goals and Plans For 2022

So given my prediction for 2022, and my expectation that what has rightly been called Covid Theatre will continue to 2025, what the hey am I going to do to improve my life in 2022? Never mind onwards?

I started to think of some things I might do, and halfway through thought these are all tweaks. What would not-tweaks look like?

When I made a list, with the usual items such as part-time work, I spotted the commonality: all of them were about adopting something out there to provide structure, meaning and direction to my life.

Let's see, I did that for 43 years.

How did it work out?

It was so wonderful that...

I don't miss my day job. I don't miss seeing the people. I don't feel lonely and I don't feel like my mental health is deteriorating.

I already did the one thing most guaranteed to improve my life.

I retired.

I have three daily goals: 1) stay sober, 2) stay as fit and healthy as I can, 3) occupy myself with whatever takes my fancy from time to time.

Maybe you would do something far more worthy and virtuous.

You do you, and I'll do me.

For the first time in 43 years.

Follow The Money vs Mass Formation Psychosis

The latest theory about why we accepted lockdowns and restrictions is called "Mass Formation Psychosis" (MFP). It says that when a population experiences a) lack of social bond and isolation, b) feels life as meaningless or senseless, and c) has free-floating anxiety, then they are sitting targets for someone offering up a scapegoat, and if the accompanying rhetoric takes, people will start to do things they would never otherwise thing of doing. (Don't mention Germany in the 1930's.)

I don't like theories that excuse people's behaviour by saying, in effect, that they went bonkers because their lives were a bit off, and were tipped over the edge by some crass propaganda.

Most people are not fragile. Most people do not go bonkers. (Except people who go to psychiatrists and therapists, who in turn come up with ideas like MFP.)

Most people do know a good thing when they see it.

So when the Government told us all to go home - well, except train drivers, farmers, shepherds, foresters, binmen, nurses, supermarket workers, lorry drivers, firemen, policemen, pharmacists, builders, telecoms repairmen, sewage plant workers... oh, actually, pretty much the entire working class, making up about 50% of the working population - so when the Government told everyone with a cushy laptop job to go home, they all went home.

Because they could sleep in and save a ton of money. They saved a lot in April-June 2020, and then what amounted to an average train fare / petrol costs after that. (I looked at the data. People who didn't have laptop jobs saved much less, but not many actually came out worse.) They saved money by not going on expensive foreign holidays, or buying takeaways at lunchtime. They spent some of that money doing up the house / flat. Parents who liked their children got to see more of their great kids. Couples who had been wanting to, um, "spend more time together", did so. Unscrupulous people took out emergency business loans they had no intention of repaying, and bought Porsches. Unscrupulous employers claimed furlough and kept their people at work, effectively getting a salary subsidy. Drama queens were in seventh heaven. Amazon brought things to your door, and you were in to receive them. Employees were getting furlough, self-employed people were getting subsidies. Most businesses were not paying rates and many were paying reduced rents. Banks gave out repayment holidays to anyone who asked. Builders, decorators and other tradesmen were making out like bandits.

What was not to like?(*)

But.

No-one wanted to admit they were doing well out of this.

Other People were dying. Other People were suffering from psychological problems. Other People's kids were having a hard time. Some businesses were closing.

Walking around with a big grin on your face would be... tactless? Tone-deaf?

Masks, social distancing, testing, Track-and-Trace, getting Pinged, not being able to see the In-Laws you never really liked anyway... these were small prices to pay for all the advantages absolutely essential public health measures for Other People's benefit. What self-sacrifice! What virtue!

The appearance of nationwide bonkers-ness was created by Government policies were badly-thought out, inconsistent and fragmentary, communicated and enforced by crass and crude propaganda. Of course they weren't gaslighting psychopaths, but that was how they behaved.

Add to that the special interest pushers, apoplectic wanna-be tyrants, strong-leader fetishists, policy dumb-asses, creepy careerists, corporate cost-savers, faceless bureaucrats looking for fifteen minutes of fame, airhead marketeers, get-rich-quick operators selling PPE and tests... all given free column inches and airtime by the usual bunch of mavens, journalists and commentators desperate for content.

The sense of crazy was entirely an artefact of the media.

So we don't need an elaborate and dubious psychiatric theory to explain why someone paid six figures to be smart, thinks that wearing a tissue-flimsy mask is effective against a nano-virus modified to be highly contagious(**).

We just need to follow the money.


(*) Yes. I am telling you that at least almost half the population actually mostly liked the first lockdown, and made the best of it, especially if they avoided the media. The anxiety was about when it would end, to which the answer was July. The second lockdown was nothing like as bad, and most people who wanted to be at the workplace could be and were. The other almost-half of the population went about its jobs as usual right from the start. The people who suffered were those "shielding", or in bad domestic situations, or who were vulnerable. That's not a large proportion of the population, but when the population is 63,000,000, it is still a lot of people.

(**) If masks work, it is because they make talking awkward and shouting almost uncomfortable. That reduces the amount of air you expel with force from your respiratory tract where all those nasty viruses live. But if they said that, you would feel like a naughty child every time you wore one.

My Predictions for 2022

I did have a longer list with more details. But it kept saying the same thing...

2022 is going to be a carbon-copy of 2021.

Mo' woke, mo' illegal immigrants, mo' inflation, mo' working from home, mo' test-and-isolate, mo' staff shortages, mo' bed shortages in hospitals, mo' pupils being sent home, mo' bullshit about everything from diet to football to hypersonic missiles and the next generation of iPhones. Mo' Taliban, mo' left-wing hysteria, mo' tax rises, mo' right wing hysteria.

Because the same people who made all the dumb, ill-informed, dubiously-motivated decisions in 2021 are still going to be in their jobs. And they will double-down on those dumb, ill-informed, dubiously-motivated decisions, because that's what people like that do.

Happy Last Year (again)

Sir Anish Kapoor On Political Art

So I quote from Anish Kapoor's editorial in the January 2022 Art Newspaper:

There is no question that the arts and an education in the arts is deeply connected to human rights, to Black Lives Matter and equal opportunity, for all...and then of course the tragedy of global warming and the 80 million refugees in our world today.

(For those who are blissfully ignorant of the Artworld, Sir Anish Kapoor is a sculptor and painter, and as Establishment a figure as could be, with honorary degrees and prizes out the wazoo.)

So I have a question. Why isn't art deeply connected to the problems of unemployment and under-employment in the UK? Or to the horrendous social problems caused by the trade in cocaine and heroin? Or to the health issues of pharmaceutical companies replacing perfectly adequate generic drugs with new, patented and therefore expensive, drugs that are not actually any more effective? Why is it not connected to the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries? Or to the issues of free speech raised by the ownership of broadcast media and publishing by a handful of multi-nationals? Why isn't art connected to the problems of dysfunctional nutrition across the world?

Or any of a thousand other issues?

Because those are the wrong kind of issues.

The "right kind of issue" meets two criteria:

First, it must offend as few people in the Artworld as possible. Buyers, curators, civil servants in the Department of Culture, journalists, gallery owners, and other assorted gate-keepers.

Second, it must create paid employment and funding amongst the "right kind of people". Arts graduates. Bureaucrats. Activists. NGOs. Artists. Documentary film-makers. And lawyers. Especially lawyers.

"Human rights" allows one to pick and choose from a wide range of genuine abuses. The Uighyrs in China are perfect: it is pro-Muslim, which pleases the Arab buyers in the Artworld, and is anti-CCP, which pleases everyone else in the world outside the CCP itself.

"Global Warming" is even better, since assigning a tragedy to "climate change" means we don't have to think about a practical solution (Rising water levels? How about building sea and river walls? Oh. Excuse me for being the engineer.) but can kick it down the road to be solved when we solve the "real problem".

"Refugees" provides lots of work for lawyers and NGOs. All the expense borne by the taxpayer. None of the inconvenience borne by the Right People inside their gated communities. It allows the Right People to identify the Wrong People, since illegal immigration is a touchstone issue.

By contrast, sorting out the drug problem means giving money to the Police, Border Forces, and other such Wrong People. So does dealing with the problems of persistent unemployment, though it's a different set of Wrong People who benefit.

Follow the money.

The Anthropic Principle (Again)

Apparently Ed Witten has abandoned all rational thought about the fundamentals of the Universe and embraced a version of gasp! the Anthropic Principle. At least that's how Peter Woit sees it.

The Anthropic Principle is an answer to the question why are the fundamental laws of physics, and the values of electron mass, charge and the other fundamental constants, so nicely tuned to make it possible for human life to appear?.

The Anthropic Principle says, very crudely, that if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. To stop that being a tautology, it is taken to mean that the values of the physical constants are not compulsory. There are many values the fundamental constants could take, and most of them lead to a Universe that would be hostile to human life. We might be able to show more, which is that a Universe that started off with one or more fundamental constants that were very different would somehow never really get started: it might never cool down enough to become transparent, or it might fly apart because the force of gravity was too weak... there are all sorts of reasons. This would show is that if the Universe was stable at all, it would have to be life-friendly.

The Non-Anthropists want the Laws of Physics to be such that only Universes fit for human life can and must form. and only those Universes.

There are seventeen or so fundamental parameters in the Standard Model, and none can be derived from any of the others. The Non-Anthropists are claiming there is a set of as yet unknown Laws of Nature / Fields / Particles, without any arbitrary numerical parameters, that in turn determine the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. After decades of work by some of the smartest people ever to walk the planet, we are nowhere near such a theory.

Suppose we did find such a set of fundamental-constant-determining laws. Would this answer the Non-Anthropists' question?

It might. But some ten-year-old would perk up and ask: why those laws? Why not others? .

The infinite regress of ten-year old's questions.

So there has to be a point at which we say "ENOUGH" about explanation, even in physics. I can safely say that any phenomenon that requires 10,000 engineers, a 13 TeV, 27-km accelerator, plus hundreds of hours of statistical analysis to find, will not be used by any medical equipment manufacturer. Or anyone else. For all practical purposes, the Dirac equation and its associated particles are "ENOUGH".

This is really the Non-Anthropists's problem. They want mo' research: to abandon smashing ever-higher energy beams of hadrons and finding no "new physics" year after year would be some kind of abandonment of the Human Project. Like not subsidising contemporary composers whose music is read more than it is performed. (Apparently actually performing one's work is passe. The Kool Kids pass around their latest compositions as MIDI files by e-mail.)

Hope springs eternal in the Non-Anthropists' breast. Next year someone may discover the Missing Laws / Fields / Particles.

I'm not saying they aren't there to be found. I don't know.

I am saying that, if we did find them, it would not help us reduce our carbon emissions, or whatever Liberal causes Non-Anthropists espouse. It would not cure cancer, or create a universal vaccine.

I guess I'm saying we know ENOUGH fundamental physics to work on all the other problems we need to solve.

Free Music Streaming - Some Thoughts

British people of a certain age have an instinctive belief that music, documentaries, news and entertainment should be free and of good quality. This is because the BBC spoiled at least two or three generations by providing a lot of good music without advertising and without a subscription charge. The TV license is for broadcast television, there is still no charge for listening to the radio.

The BBC has to be navigated carefully, because you might fall into some Metropolitan Goodthink, and it takes a good few washes to get those stains out. As for the commercial stations, I can't stand advertisements, so commercial radio is a no-go. It didn't used to be, but it is now.

The full-bore streaming providers (Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music, You Tube Music, Apple Music and some Swedish outfit) all charge. We're not looking at them right now. What can we get for free?

All the following have Apps and a website.

Radio Player provides access to a lot of UK radio stations, but not so many from outside the UK. If the stations use ads, you will get the ads.

Accuradio is a weird one. It has a wide range of channels, does have ads, and will lock you out if you listen for too long! The streaming rate is positively 1990's at 32kps (not a misprint).

There is TheClassicalStation(.org) which is conventional radio station based (or at least its phones are) in North Carolina. You get what they are broadcasting at the time, just like Radio 3.

Mixcloud (https://www.mixcloud.com/) has a wide selection of mixes and podcasts from DJs and programme makers. It's heavily oriented to dance / jazz / soul and similar, as the 'Mix' bit suggests. There are recognisable names using it, and the quality is generally good. If you don't like what you hear, just choose another mix. I am currently in the middle of a Mixcloud phase.

Bandcamp allows artists to upload music or podcasts, which can be listened to free, and if you like what you hear, you can support the artist by buying the track or CD. I have purchased one piece from Bandcamp (Headnodic & Raashan Ahmad's Low Fidelity, High Quality (Vol.2)). I got a think you e-mail and he got a darn sight more than he would from Spotify or a record label.

Soundcloud provides the same functionality as Bandcamp, though has more podcasts. "All podcasts are on Soundcloud" - except Joe Rogan. You can buy direct from the artist via Soundcloud.

Music Passion (aka Classical.com) looks like a classical music version of Bandcamp / Soundcloud, and has a $1/month subscription. (That's nearly free.)

Idagio is a classical streaming service which is free-with-ads, or ad-free and CD-quality with subscription. It looks a little mainstream to me: you're not going to be troubled by Boulex or Pendercki.

DanzWaves is an app with three radio streams: Chilltrax, Radio Danz, and Predanz. Chilltrax is what it suggests; Radio Danz has House and Dance music; Predanz has dance tracks from the 1990s and 2000s.

None of these will provide a guaranteed stream of listenable classical music at any time of the day or night. Not even Radio Three does that - the closest it gets is the Through The Night programme.

Which is a dodge I hadn't thought of. Go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_three and scroll down for the Highlights. Night Tracks will provide you with perfectly acceptable music that lasts an hour or so.

If you want classical music, it may be all you need.

SAGE = Red Army Faction

Bear with me here.

Right at the start of this nonsense, I said that the March 2020 lockdown felt like a war.

I never examined that any further, partly because I couldn't hear any bombs, and nobody was dying in the streets.

But it doesn't feel like a war.

It feels like a terrorist campaign.

Terrorists aim to create an atmosphere of paranoia.

The Government must be made to suspect every innocent citizen of carrying a deadly virus bomb.

Innocent citizens must feel imposed upon by the Government's security measures.

Innocent citizens must look at each other as if they might be a threat.

Governments and corporations set up elaborate security theatre: X-Ray machines at airports; masks and social distancing.

A class of suspect people is created: Marxists, right-wing activists, asymptomatic carriers.

Special committees are convened to assess risks.

Government agencies get arbitrary powers to impose restrictions and searches.

Terrorists attack and scare the people...

The Great Toilet Roll shortage was a PR stunt that worked too well, and caused panic buying.

Pro-Virus propaganda was put out because we weren't scared enough.

Social distancing made us treat each other like disease-ridden curs.

Carefully-staged videos showing the Police bullying members of the public appeared on You Tube.

Restrictions on our behaviour were intentionally confusing and pointless, to make us feel insecure.

Working from home made the Virus seem deadly.

... but terrorists leave the infrastructure alone.

Middle-class civil servants had to work from home, but working-class Amazon drivers could still deliver things. And all those "essential jobs".

That's why I never felt right about any of the Government's actions around the Virus.

It's too much like what happens when a bunch of terrorists gets too active.

Governments over-react beyond all reason.

Flabby-faced men, and hatchet-faced women, in grey suits, with establishment jobs.

Can they be terrorists? So close to retirement and without guns and bombs?

But who needs guns and bombs when you have the Government to do your dirty work?

Walk. Duck. Quack.