Some thoughts

 As is fast becoming a tradition here is my weekly roundup of writings that caught my eye but didn't get a post of their own at the time: Faster please:  SpaceX has two Starship prototypes on the pad at the same time . I like the dry humor in this part referring to the flight of SN: 'It failed to stick the touchdown and exploded on impact.  SpaceX is hoping for a better performance by SN9.'  Hopefully cancel culture won't end up going so far:  What Are the Cultural Revolution’s Lessons for Our Current Moment?   Useful lessons here:  Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence . This is especially true, ' Don’t back down. Don’t apologize. Don’t make clarifications, and don’t try to appease the mob.' Sadly many so-called conservatives fold faster than an origami champion.    They really want a population crash, and I suspect thought like this and the forced celebration of alternative sexualities is one prong of their attack

 As it's nearly the end of the month, here are the updated Covid-19 deaths by age and pre-existing condition table from NHS England with my percentage calculations.  And here is my monthly table with data to the end of Jan: I have been busy today writing an essay so I haven't had time to crunch more numbers (I was going to look for UK-wide figures) but it is clear there is no major change to the trend, so this will be the last update on the subject until the end of February. 

' in the aftermath of WWI and the turmoil of the fall of royal families all over Europe (which had been going on for about a century, to be fair) the youth of Europe latched onto Marxism as a new doctrine to give their world meaning. It’s not even hard to see that. Even solidly prosy middle-class women like Agatha Christie (who was also a storytelling genius, but that often descends on people with no regard for who they are) made their communist characters very smart and socially conscious and you know, even when in the wrong kind of right.' Sarah Hoyt nails one of my key  points in explaining what has gone wrong with the West. 

Having lived in Japan for two years I have a bit of a soft spot for the Japanese Navy, despite them being on the wrong side in WW2. Their ships were often very well designed and their crews brave and highly trained. Having said that, occasionally their designers went a bit batsh*t crazy, case in point today's image of a proposed 'Super hyper dreadnaught': ( source ) Yes, that's the biggest battleship built in reality, the Yamato, providing a sense of scale. Here's a 4 view plan with some stats: Half a million tons? Go know how they expected to get 42 knits out of this behemoth, especially given this design was proposed in 1912 - when a typical Dreadnaught wouldn't even make 20! Def one to make you ask 'what were they smoking?'

Awkward ( via )  

 One year ago today, I set off for my Chinese New Year trip to Vietnam. This was my 39th country visited, and my last big trip before the pandemic. I spent 2 weeks in the country, flying from Taipei (where I was working at the time) to Hanoi. On arriving and passing through immigration I bought a local sim card then took the bus to the city center and (eventually) found my hostel. That first day I just had a brief wander around the old quarter and Ho Hoan Kiem lake. The next morning I set off for my twp night tour of Ha long bay. I'd booked this in advance online so was picked up from my hotel and taken to their office to meet the rest of the group. We drove to the bay and transferred to our ship, from which we went kayaking and spent the night anchored in a quiet cove. After dinner, I had a go at squid fishing with a line and caught a small one (which we had for lunch the next day!) The following morning we sailed to  Cát Bà island, which we cycled and hiked around before spending

 After my previous speculative post, let's look ahead at an actual catastrophe going on right now, and the long term implications of current events. First off, it is clear that lockdowns have disproportionately hit some sectors harder than others, and large firms have had a better time than small, individual, and family-owned ones (as this  Babylon Bee article satirically points out). I would therefore expect to see even more consolidation as small firms fail to reopen and larger firms either merge or are taken over. Also longer term I would expect there to be less start-up and business creation, with individuals becoming more risk-averse and there being fewer opportunities to attract investment, lower consumer confidence, and higher barriers to raising capital. It would still be possible to have sole trader/self-employed trade like plumbing or decorating, and selling online via platforms like eBay will still be viable, but overall I expect a future where large PLC's and multin

 Scott Lowther ponders this after viewing a clip of London getting wipe out by an orbital kinetic weapon (AKA Project Thor ). I started to leave a comment but as it got longer and longer I decided to post here instead. So, let's go through some of his questions and try to make a realistic prediction: First, he posits ' would this utterly trash Britain?' he also states ' London is responsible for a whole lot of the British economy, but it’s sorta the “fake” economy of financial stuff, not growing stuff or making stuff.' Well, first off there is the issue of all the banks being vaporized, along with all their ICT systems. I'd hope they have backups but it could be that the entire payments system ceases to function. The result for the rest of the UK would be no one would be able to use a credit or debit card, withdraw cash or even access their accounts. Guess we'd be back to cash pretty sharpish.  In addition, all the insurance underwriters (Lloyds, etc) wou

My usual weekly roundup of stories and articles that caught my interest: On space news, 2 pieces on the prospects of asteroid colonies and space mining  (I really can't wait to get off this rock). The B-21 nears flight , The tale of a corporate merger gone wrong that echos still today, The threat to US conservatives. Money quote on the modern left's view on their opponents: 'They do not seek to persuade, because they believe that opposition to their premises is too troglodytic to merit a response' An eco-dictatorship ? Oh joy And finally, I won't be watching The Watch (guess that's Discworld added to the list of franchises ruined by wokeness)

 ' We will change you, Dr. Jones, all of you, from the inside. We will turn you into us. And the best part? You won't even know it's happening.' Col. Dr. Irina Spalko, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull I noticed this line while watching this film on C4 this evening, and can't help wonder how much of the current madness is the legacy of Soviet psyops undermining Western institutions....

 Last week I posted my analysis of covid death stats for England. O was going to wait for the end of the month to do an update, but given the reporting this week thought why not. First up, here's the updated table with my % calculations ( source ) Instead of reposting the updated charts from last week, instead, hers's a new chart for this week: Also this week I had a look at the deaths by gender table (not the numbers don't add up to the totals by 2 as I removed 2 deaths which were in unknown and indeterminate columns): Finally, here's a chart comparing deaths by age for males and females:

Today's recommended reading , an article from Quillette on a movement called BirthStrike (note capitaliZation!). Excerpt: 'For decades, strains of radical feminism have been convincing women to seek liberation from the  “barbaric” nature of pregnancy  and the patriarchal constraints of  the nuclear family . Children and husbands aside, women are being redirected towards the true embodiment of enlightenment: the 60-hour workweek.' Can't agree more with this statement, one of my key themes for the book is going to be the demographic problems of Western (and other advanced) societies and the part feminism has caused in this.  The article ends with this point: 'We must challenge the misanthropic belief that there is something intrinsic to human beings that is the ultimate cause of all our problems. Climate anxiety is just one symptom of the West’s collective nihilism. It is emblematic of a culture that is too exhausted to defend itself, wishes to cease thinking through

 A bit old but a good article on the politics and identity of Taiwan. Having lived there for a year I wish them well and hope the situation with China doesn't escalate.  

 Today's essential reading .  It was a mistake for the 'right' to dismiss the cultural changes over the past few years and to back big business in the nieve view that they were on our side, not noticing how these firms were infiltrated and switched to being our opponents. Why this happened is a long story, but a short answer would be that the right focused on the how and not the why, and was unable to offer a competitive alternative worldview that would give its adherents a purpose and add meaning to their lives, which the ideologies of the left excel at. Update: this video makes similar points.  

  Virgin Orbit reaches orbit on second LauncherOne mission Good job. Faster, please.

Statue wars: what should we do with controversial monuments? - Nothing, leave them be.  On second thoughts prosecute the vandals who attack them with the full force of the law. 

 Some of the biggest changes in the years since I last had attempted regular blogging has been the rise of videobloggers (or vloggers) particularly on  Youtube. I'm not tempted to have a go for various reasons, plus I prefer reading to listening/watching others partly because I am a fast reader and can get through more content in the time it takes to watch a video. Nonetheless, I do have a number of channels I subscribe to, here are my favorites: The Critical Drinker - taking a sarcastic look at both recent and classic media, the Drinker is a fierce critic of identity politics and agenda-pushing in movies and TV. He is also a novelist so explains well how writers should craft characters and stories, in contrast to the messes they tend to make these days. His Game of Thrones season 8 reviews were more entertaining than the actual show, see his finale review for a good example of his content. Voxis Productions - AKA Professor Tosspot's channel, a foul-mouthed geriatric puppet tha

A few articles and items that caught my eye over the past week or so: NASA's SLS test  doesn't go entirely to plan , As a former resident, the USA recognizing Taiwan would get my seal of approval, How long before they start burning the books?   At Unherd, the (as usual) excellent Douglas Murray has further  thoughts , In defence of Grease  (bit old this one), A profile on veteran Euroskeptic MP Bill Cash , Its not just the USA but the whole west is broken , we're definitely in the decay point of Spengler's cycle of civilizations, A good summary of wokeness as religion  (one of the key themes on my still unwritten book),  Thoughts on what to go next to get out of lockdown ,  Baris Warsi on The Great Unraveling and what comes next, And finally,  Be a honey badger and go for the goolies  

This post is a good summary of the impossibility of knowing for sure what did and didn't happen. Money quote: "the same lax procedures that enable fraud in the first place also make it more or less impossible to prove after the fact. Sixty-nine million mail-in votes were cast; how many were fakes, and which ones? There is really no way to tell. Once those votes have been counted (sometimes in the absence of Republican poll-watchers, illegally excluded by Democrats from the rooms where counting was going on), there is no way to identify which ones were illegal and pull them out of the vote totals." Regarding the statistical anomalies mentioned,  This  post (and  this  earlier one by the same author) a nd the comments gave some interesting insights and points over the so-called debunking of the fraud claims.  As for my view, I have stated before that it is worth remembering that in  2016 Trump lost the popular vote but won the EC by flipping Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wis

 Image of the day ( source ) That'll buff right out! Sad though to think of the poor pilot who threw his life away for so little effect.

 I became aware of this published data a few weeks ago via this  Unherd  column. Since then I have checked occasionally for updated figures, and last week started to analyse the data. First I downloaded every data set from this  archive  page, going back to May 2020 (where the archived data begins, so note that Month will also include all deaths earlier in the year). I was particularly interested in page 3, the deaths by age, and pre-existing conditions. I put each week's figures into a single spreadsheet and made monthly total tables. I then calculated the percentages and made some graphs. I have just updated my data with this week's figures, which I present below.  First, here is this weeks data ( source ) And here is my % calculations for the totals to date: And here is my monthly summary data. Top left is total deaths with or without a pre-existing condition. The bottom left is broken down into age, I have simplified it into under or over 60. To the right in orange are per

  European Union forms own 10,000 strong ‘uniformed service’ As the article states it's a border and coast guard force, but could lead to one. No mention of what (if any) vessels the coast guard side will have. I assume that initially it will support and work with national forces, but imagine with time it will supplant and take them over. This also ties in with my own thoughts on the case for an integrated UK coast guard, a draft article about which I am working on. Altogether this news is another reason to be glad we are out, my main motive for voting leave was because I did not want the UK to end up a province of a federal Europen superstate.  I suspect over the next few years the drive for more centralisation will accelerate. 

 One of the reasons why I don't identify as a libertarian anymore is the feebleness of their 'start your own X' in response to the left's censorship. ( via )

  A Brief History of Peanut Butter

Despite Lockdown with a Vengence, this past week was fairly busy. I currently have 3 temp jobs and all kept me partially occupied. I ended up doing 2 shifts at the Royal Mail sorting office, one day  Supply teaching (sitting in a computer room with 6 students for 5 periods), and 15 online ESL lessons.  In addition, I had an online induction for my course, and so have been reading in preparation for that. A lot of critical theory crap, but it will be useful to understand the leftist worldview.  Next week will be similar, with one post office shift another day at the same school (have been booked every week up until the Feb half term), and (so far) 23 online lessons booked. I'm also going to try and post here more, having failed to do so since last Monday!

Last night I watched the first episode of 'The Great' on Channel 4. This show is described as a 'comedy-drama'  and the first episode is summarised as follows: 'Catherine marries the Emperor of Russia, Peter. However, her hopes of tying the knot with a great love are dashed as she learns that he is a selfish, spoiled brat who stands against everything she values.' Anyone wanting historical accuracy should look elsewhere, as the Wikipedia entry for it states (the writer) ' had jotted down some names, relationships and a few historical bullet points, torn up the paper, and started writing'. What we are left with is a typical current year Woke agenda-pushing piece of feminist fantasy, Catherine is strong and enlightened while the male characters are all weak idiots.  What I found most off-putting though was the casting, in the 18th-century Russian imperial court there would not have been much diversity yet we had two nobles played by a Black and Indian acto

...but due to constantly changing rules most secondary schools in Kent are still closed (although in theory the school that booked me last year for every Wednesday until February still wants me to go in this week, bizarrely). Consequently, there is not much call for supply teachers, so instead, I've opened up my schedule to more online ESL for the next two weeks. UPDATE: 3rd lockdown! I probably won't be working until February now, will have to call my agency to confirm tomorrow. FFS...

 A few articles I found interesting this past week: The woke have no vision of the future Charting the decline of the American Republic A positive deal overall – but problems lurk round the corner The year the ruling class got woke A United Europe Aligning With China Would Be A Disaster For The United States The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real It’s time to start wasting solar energy No Families, No Children, No Future Give this woke nonsense the red card On a lighter note: A multibillion-dollar f-you Why is Japan obsessed with KFC on Christmas? 2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History And finally,  15 Economic, Historical, and Health Facts About Bacon !

 So as I mentioned yesterday I'm working on book ideas- three to be precise. The first is provisionally titled 5 Years: Misadventures in Teaching and Travel. It will be an account of my past years working and travelling in asi> Ir will be a part travelogue, part autobiography, with cultural insights, tips and humourous annrcdotes. It will also talk about my views on working in teaching both in the UK and abroad, and what (if anything) I've gained from this time. The second is to be my thoughts on the decline of the West, and how to fix it. Am still thinking of a title but some variation on Death or Rebirth of the West is what I have so far. This will have three parts; each of which will be made up of a 4 10,000 word chapters. Provisional titles are : Part 1: Causes  Confidence Belief/Faith Welfarism Undermining Part 2: Symptoms/Effects Belief/ Politics/society Culture Demographics Part 3: Solutions Purpose Meaning  Education Citizenship/renewal/reclaim I'm planning to po

 As a new year begins and the dawn of a post-Brexit UK, this is the end of one era and the start of a new one. For now it is necessary to chart our future direction and decide what sort of country we wish to be and find a role for the remainder of the 21st centurary and beyond. Furthmore, there are still many challenges facing us and the West in general, with demographi, cultural, ecooonmic and political threats to be overcome.  And so, it is also time for me to start anew. I've been meaning to write more for a while now but kept getting sidetracked.  Over the past few months I've been deep in thought about these issues and begun outkining a book on the challenges and possible solutions. I have therefore started this new blog to throw out ideas and work on material that may up up in one (or possible other) book. On addition I have had enough of social media and need a new place to vent occasionally. So, welcome to 2021 and this new blog!