DutchEnery

Reading the few daily newspapers I can still get in the local garage it strikes me as odd as to how many reports are doom-laden. Death and destruction all around? Footballers crashing their multi-thousand pound cars after partying with half the nation or so it seems. The papers have a field day! However, I noted one article which struck me as very forward and shall we say, thought provoking? Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun newspaper stated some home truths! Now the Sun is not a newspaper where one can usually read good national comment, in the main it is a bit of a glorious gossip paper. But sometimes it hits the mark, and so it is today. Trevor rightly asks – where is this Covid-19 hysteria getting us? People don’t talk about how many die of the ordinary flu? As he said during the 2018 Beast of the East winter some 50,000 died! So far and of course it is sad, just over 1,200 have succumbed to the Coronavirus in this country. Yet did we shut down the country in 2018? How many will now ...

At this time in our collective lives on the planet, stressful though it is, we need to put our thinking caps on. First of all the situation with diseases is relatively simple, they have always plagued humanity. And not just us either. If you think about how life has evolved, how it appears today you will see very quickly that literally everything depends on something or somebody else. To put it bluntly, as food. Obviously that also means defence mechanisms have evolved as well. If a body is attacked then if the defences are strong the attacking entity will get rebuffed or killed. If the defence is lacking or weak, the victim may succumb and may die. That is the simple rule of life. I suppose it is scant satisfaction knowing that you are food but thinking like that at least will make you see the reality a bit clearer. So, what about this corona virus then – is it unusual? No, it is not. Somewhere along the line of life we have picked up an organism that usually lives on or from s...

This is the time when you will be able to see how people can react to external stimuli. There is a disease around, yes in Wales too, that unto now has not been known As a result humans have no resistance. If you are in a good condition you might be lucky to roll over it but if you have underlying medical conditions or are older your resistance will be diminished. Those are the facts. But what I thought last week might happen after all the TV reports about dead and dying has now happened, panic buying of strange things we normally do not buy in quantity, toilet rolls! Followed on by almost anything that can last more than a few weeks. There are people bragging on social media who have hamstered supplies that probably will rot away before they can eat it all. Next we can see people in quantity this Sunday with very nice weather at the seaside walking the promenade in their thousands! Which of them did not understand the words, rampant disease, danger of death? Just look at what it does...

The papers are full of ‘Community spirit’, ‘Look after the elderly and so on’. Great, it is good to read but what is the reality in the UK? The supermarkets had set a time for elderly and the more vulnerable to shop for an hour, for instance Tesco has set aside Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9-10 am. I applaud the reasoning behind this. Full marks to the supermarket managers. Unfortunately they did forget one thing – the attitude of a good percentage of our wonderful British public. Don’t hoard, don’t panic buy, apparently are switches in our collective brains to do just that – panic buy and hoard as much as you can get away with. Special hours for the vulnerable? To hell with that, as you can see on some of the photos in the papers. Queues start forming way before opening times, snaking around corners for hundreds of yards. People are pathetic to the extreme. What worries me is that this will happen again and again, viruses will continue to crop up. It is the way nature respon...

If you did not know how powerful media is then just look at the coronavirus situation. It is the news channels and the type of reporting that has resulted in an absolute storm on the shopfloors of the supermarkets. Despite the suggestions that over-70’s stay at home, Tesco in my part of South Wales was literally brimming with ‘oldies’. They were ‘fighting’ over toilet rolls, paracetamol and anything that could be kept for longer than a week. Rather interesting to see, the social scientists will have a field day to figure all that behaviour out, the how’s and the why’s. But the BBC has to share the blame, yes I know it is news but this way reporting in every sentence how many people had caught the virus and following that up with how many had died. Next we will have names and family history included. And then we have the Twitterati – you know them in common life as idiots or ultra liberal lefties– spouting all sorts of fancy reasons what this virus is about. I feel sorry for the Ruski...

It is uncanny how people tend to think. Especially about the coronavirus outbreak. We seem to believe we can contain this. Well, let me say this although I’m no expert, as soon as people were moved away from the original place where it started we were already too late. I do understand that people want to go home but with something as virulent as Covid-19 you do not really have a choice. It was the same with the Black Plague of the Middle-Ages. Travelling then too was not really the thing to do. There again, we must also look at the severity of the illness. In particular because this will happen again. What should we do in the future? As with all rampant diseases there is only one thing that can be done whilst we are all waiting for an antidote, total isolation. That however is going to be the thing that is difficult to enforce. I mentioned before that as a species we are the most stupidest living thing around despite our brain capacity. We have no regard at all for what lives around...

Dw i wedi siarad o gwmpas yr ardal ’ma am y bosiblwrydd cael ‘independence’. A nnibyniaeth ydy un o’r dymunidau Plaid Cymru. Dw i’n meddwl bod mae’r syniad yn ddiffygiol. Mae’r problem trethiant. Dim ond pedair milliwn o ddinasyddion, wel bron. Ac hefyd dim digon o diwydiant. Wrth gwrs, mae gwleidyddion o Blaid Cymru a blaid eraill, dydyn nhw ddim yn chwilfrydig am bywyd o bobl gyffredin. Ond byddai'n rhaid i bobl gyffredin dalu am hyn. Mae’n amser anghofio’r syniad a dychwelyd i Deyrnas Unedig priodol! Yn sicr mae’n angenrheidiol atal wastraffu arian am brosiectau fel annibyniaeth. Byddai’n well os Brydain yn gyfan dysgu yr hen iaith! Cymraeg!

It is rather funny to read the so-called bullying reports made about the present Home Secretary. Funny because methinks usually it is the other way around. Civil servants bullying ministers. In this country there is a Civil Service, more or less permanent, that thinks it is they who rule. It is however true that the quality of ministers sometimes leaves others wondering where these people were when the braincells were given out. But the present Home Sec Ms Patel seems not one of them! It is high time that the Civil Service undergoes a good hard inspection. The trouble is that being more or less permanent, it exudes a ‘You can’t sack me’ attitude. Sort of ‘I am here, you cannot do anything to me’ and ‘I know better than you’. In my opinion for what it is worth, it is high time to put the spotlight on these secretive people. I do however understand that policies made by politicians do need a hard look as well. Basically because some of them can and in the past have proven to be harm...