Day 29 of UK lock down: Carpe Diem

Despite the catastrophic impact of the pandemic, the global governmental responses, and the environmental consequences, are highlighting a very real opportunity to make some positive changes to our existence.

 At the same time, it’s not just environmental activists (and hedge fund managers) who are seeing opportunities. Trump seems determined to turn the global catastrophe of Covid-19 into a personal campaign to consolidate electoral support from his voter base who somehow seem to believe that he is their best chance of salvation.

 In the UK, Johnson is clearly going for the sympathy vote, despite his piss-poor record in dealing with difficult situations, and his government being disastrously wrong-footed by the pandemic. Meanwhile his under-donkeys, Raab & Gove are frantically gaming the situation for maximum personal career development.

 It’s probably not a complete non-sequitur to visit the definition of the word hypocrite at this point. It’s from the Greek word hypokrites, which means “an actor” or “a stage player,” at a time when the actors wore large masks to mark which character they were playing.

Johnson's failures as a PM so far

More Trumpery

Day 28 of UK lock down: Ecology begins at home

After Munch, via Ise & Conaglen Estate

The pandemic is showing the need for all of us to be responsible custodians of our environment, and not just the pretty, cuddly or tasty bits but the whole biome.

Custodianship means guardianship – ie looking after something, nurturing it, and keeping it safe. What it doesn’t mean, in the case of land, is creating a barren wasteland, whether in pursuit of some biocidal ideal of “garden tidiness”, “sport”, or industrialised monoculture. Nor does it mean disrupting delicately balanced ecosystems for commercial gain.

If we ignore the biodiversity in our own backyards and gardens, it’s an easy step to ignoring the entire ecosystem, and to being prepared to trash it in pursuit of commodity and easy gratification. Conversely, if we engage with and respect that local diversity, so it becomes easier to apply the same perspective to the whole planet at a societal level as well as individual.

Regardless of what our title deeds say, we don’t own the land we occupy, any more than we own air, water or sunlight. We simply have a legally enshrined right of access, and what we need to move towards is an equally enshrined legal obligation to protect and regenerate.

A common dispute is between governments claiming that an action is the responsibility of individuals, and individuals claiming that the same action is the responsibility of the government, in an endless circle of us-ing and them-ing. What we should be learning from this pandemic is that there isn't a them, just an us, and the responsibility is shared by  all.

Day 24 of UK lock down: truth in the time of Covid-19

According to Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the pursuit of truth is "the quest for language that can match reality." He identifies four key methods of determining the truth - what we feel, what we are told, what we figure out, and what we observe. Applying the correspondence theory of truth, favoured by Socrates, Plato & Aristotle, to those methods, if a message corresponds to the actual state of affairs, then it is true.

Yet, each new day of the pandemic brings more politicians making public statements which are either so vague that they have no tangible content, or so demonstrably disconnected to reality that it makes your head spin.  

It’s probably fair to say that waffling and lying are not new human character traits, but now we can all do our own fact checking from the saturation media coverage. When Matt Hancock denies the initial UK strategy of herd immunity, or when Trump claims to have taken the pandemic seriously since January, it’s easy to find proof that they are talking bollox. What’s more worrying is the question of why they think they can get away with it.

Day 23 of UK lock down and counting

One of the few silver linings to the clouds looming over the UK in the last few months has been that not just Corona but Brexit, the meltdown of the Labour party, and the Resistible Rise of Boris Arturo Ui Johnson, have all deflected attention from the deranged and sociopathic man-child currently occupying the White House. 

Sadly, just like the climate and ecological emergency, and our addiction to consuming global resources, the problem hasn’t gone away, and Trump is still nominally in charge of, at last count, 2,821 nuclear warheads, and a war budget of nearly $700 billion, as well as the well-being of 330 million US citizens. 

That’s the same Trump who, yesterday, lost the plot spectacularly and incoherently when confronted by some mildly critical questioning from journalists at a press briefing. Ye gods !

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/13/trump-coronavirus-meltdown-media-authority

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-governors.html