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Publication Paywalls - and How to Bypass Some of Them

  Just a quick heads up on a useful tool I discovered recently while on a quest to view Medium articles.  You'll also find an update on my shadow libraries blog which you might find useful if you use these useful repositories. For those who haven’t come across it, Medium is a blogging platform with a (hitherto!) fairly wide following in the blogging world, where authors can contribute articles, and also receive payment if they are members and are prepared to pay a monthly subscription. Some of these articles are worth reading, but almost all of them remain inaccessible behind a paywall. As a new user of this platform, I did some research and discovered quickly from other sources that Medium was losing readership and contributors…much in the same way that Blogspot did some time ago, although apparently at a faster rate.   I’m convinced that this is fall-off is because of the paywall and their aggressive marketing messaging about membership subscriptions. I posted 3 't...
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Burnham: The Raid on Middle England's Personal Wealth

‘Middle England’ is worried…and so it should be.... In his new role as our PM, Burnham has, in his own words, ‘hit the ground running’ in his project to 'Manchesterise' Britain (or at least the non-devolved English part of it). He is looking hard for new revenue-generating targets to fund his many and varied 'projects' to avoid spooking the markets with a lot of extra borrowing.   His left-leaning socialist ideology naturally points him towards across-the-board redistribution of the UK's wealth, and he represents a return to more traditional Labour aspirations and a departure from the Starmer 'aberration' as the hard-left Momentum group would view it.  Since most of the UK’s private money and assets are held by so-called 'Middle England', Burnham sees this large, disparate, and normally compliant group of electors (particularly those over 50), as a potential soft-touch....and they are therefore firmly in his sights as a potential cash-cow. One of...
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Seasonal Flu Epidemics: Why Do They Happen and Could this One Turn Into a Killer ?

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  The UK's 2026-27 influenza epidemic is now well underway and is taxing the NHS to its limits, as predicted. One additional ‘wild-card’ last year, courtesy of the junior doctors (or ‘Residents’ as they now like to call themselves), who decided to strike for yet more pay over what was one of the busiest periods in the run-up to Christmas, shouldn't be troubling the  NHS this year, given Labour bought them off  with a super-inflationary pay increase, at considerable cost to the public finances. Adverse circumstances aside, this would be a good time to ask the question in the title i.e. is this years ‘flu virus any more potent or dangerous than the usual seasonal variety ? To answer this, we must first take a look at the causative virus and how it infects us and propagates itself with the aid of our own cells. What is Influenza ? The well-written and extensive wiki article tells us that Influenza is a highly contagious respiratory infection caused by various type...
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