vivweb01blog

  Recent events in China have confirmed that chairman Xi’s decision to go for ‘Zero Covid or bust’ was the wrong one, as suggested in my blog ‘ China and Covid’ back in March.  The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA-n variants are now virtually unstoppable, due to their extreme infectiousness, and any attempt to eradicate the virus entirely from a population was always doomed to failure. If there were any remaining question in the minds of our epidemiologists about the impossibility of eradicating a coronavirus with this degree of infectiousness, China’s 3-year 'experiment' has now effectively proven the case beyond reasonable doubt.... The widespread prediction earlier this year that the Chinese population would eventually rebel against perpetual lockdowns is already coming to pass – the only question is how far the population will be prepared to go to achieve its aims - and how nasty it will get. This will be determined largely by how the CCP attempts to deal with it. One thing is ce

  Pondering last week’s story about the closedown of the world’s largest online eBook library  by the US authorities led me back to the question asked increasingly often nowadays:   “Where has all our common sense gone ?” This might be a good opportunity to take a light-hearted 'tongue-in cheek' look at the logic (or lack of it) underlying human behaviour. What is it ? First of all, what is ‘common sense’ – and how do we define it ? To start with, here's a bit of personal history to put things in context. I can well remember from my early childhood the frequent exhortations I received from my parents in response to what I thought was perfectly reasonable behaviour: ‘…for goodness sake lad, just use your common sense for change...’. And I'm sure plenty of my contemporaries will have experienced the same thing. At the time, I really had no idea what this strange commodity might be, whether I actually had any, or if not, where I might be able to get some. Which w