The Flu (Health)

[Wile E. Coyote]

Nicola has just banned Chad from taking his annual holiday in Scotland. It does seem a bit unfair to single him out.

[Chad]

She’s a bit late... I was up there last month.

Came off my electric bike (not strictly road legal) and suffered a hairline fracture of the right tibia.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Chinese Academy of Scientists has nominated The Wuhan Institute of Virology as one of its candidates for the 2021 Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize.

The Wolf is betting a monkey on the nose. Wiley reckons "Bat Woman" is a racing certainty for outstanding services to science.

[Boreades]

Meanwhile, there's a damp patch developing down under in Australia.

[Mick Harper]

This is (also) interesting because of two factors

1. Australian Sky is the only major news outlet, to my knowledge, that has gone all in on the "It's The Chinese What Dunnit" thesis.

2. There's gotta be something more to the current Australia/China rift. For the information of laggards, the Aussie PM made some mildly disobliging comments about China's Hong Kong policies and Australia promptly lost major sections of its economy, all dependent on the export trade with China, which was suddenly closed off to them. Not the least surprising aspect of which is that the broad Digger masses seem not to have risen up in revolt because their leader had been so stupid. I don't say wrong, I do say stupid. That's what we pay 'em for -- not to say what we think.

[Boreades]

Australia seems to be providing a good few examples of "unintended consequences".

One was how readily Australia let foreign businesses (including Chinese, but not just Chinese) buy-up huge areas of Australian land with mineral rights.

Anecdotally (from friends in Oz) I'm told some Australians are employed, but these shell companies have a habit of selling the minerals at such low prices these companies technically make very low profits, so not much tax revenue goes the way of the Oz Gov.

Which should not be any surprise, given the way any sensible multinational company would arrange its operations and tax affairs. Include many famous-name UK & US companies that regularly get told "it's not fair you don't pay us more tax".

But what's bad for Australia is good for us on the rebound. See the UK/Australia Trade Deal. Eagerly grasped by BoJo & Co, keen to wave some Post-Brexit Good News.

M'Lady is looking forward to the return to the supermarket shelves of some of the better brands of Australian wine, which had disappeared for a while, while Australian growers had been making more profit selling to China.

[Mick Harper]

Yes, but will she be quite so pleased when the livestock disappears from ye olde English countryside. Any way you slice it, Australian meat is going to be a fraction of the price of ye English meat. Britain is about to rerun what happened when the Corn Laws were passed in the 1840's and split the political classes asunder. One half was rooting for the broad acres and the other half were rooting for the broad masses.

We can turn the fields over to viticulture, I suppose. Drought-ridden Australia will soon be leaving that game. Tell her.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

It is heart-breaking having the solution to all this and nobody will listen. It is the reduction in the southern limits of the Amazonian rain forest and the progressive reduction in the plant cover throughout southern Africa that is causing Australia's ills. Southern Madagascar is the latest to suffer from persistent drought, not a sentence one would expect ever to have to write, from the same cause. And Madagascar going dry will in turn make Australia's plight even worse.

While everyone is blaming global warming, nobody will countenance any other reason. Actually global warming tends to increase precipitation since it increases ocean evaporation but that precipitation arrives in the form of hurricanes, typhoons and tropical storms which do their own damage. Even if people won't recognise the Western Effect, surely they can understand that any large scale change in fauna is going to have deleterious effects. Though it's what we are doing at sea that will, in my opinion, be the real long term earth-shatterer. But that's out of sight, out of mind so I don't waste my psychic energy getting heartbroken about that.

A shrug is just a shrug
A sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

Can you do a turn at this year's AEL Cabaret & Dinner Dance, Chad? I know it's an imposition but we can't afford a carpark attendant, we all have to pitch in.

[Mick Harper]

You can tell the pandemic is subsiding.

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

It's the way he tells them. "Over there, next to the Honda Civic."