“We Shall Fight on the Beaches … No, We’re Giving Up”

The story is in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The decision to give up on testing those with symptoms of coronavirus is now seen as the key reason the UK has the highest death rates in Europe.

Capitalism Crashed in a Few Weeks

This crisis is not about the virus.

This crisis is about the massive failure of our “Booming economy” to survive even modest challenges. It is about the market dissonance of shortages in stores, even as farmers/producers destroy unused crops and products. This crisis is about huge corporations needing an emergency bailout within days of the longest Bull Market in our history ending and despite the ability to borrow with zero percent interest rates.

— Paul Field

Amateurish Prolepsis

From an article by the BBC:

It is a mystery why he felt the need to burnish his credentials as a coronavirus sage so much that he pointed to having explicitly warned about something that was only added to his blog after the event.

British Subtlety

An American naïf, needing to rustle up a preemptive volley to put the hearer on the defensive, resorts in the first instance to a dead grandmother. The circumstances of the death can be adjusted for the occasion. If a large dose of empathy is needed, the grandmother’s death is sudden, agonizing, perhaps vivified by a fictional sprawl on the bathroom floor during which she could not reach the phone. However, Brits, being far more subtle, apparently save the dead relative ploy for Step 5, and shift the emotional impact by pointing to a deceased uncle, keeping grandma’s corpse in reserve (Step 9?). Such are the advantages of an Oxbridge education.

Learn to Take a Hint

Before Getting All Bovine with Your Herd

Ignorantia virus non excusat. Perhaps it’s time to rethink what we don’t know about the virus? Case in point.

“Is it a reinfection or the same infection? We don’t know.”

Only One Non-Worthless Person Left

This portrait of a French scientist who thinks too well of himself is today’s treasure.

“One of Professor Raoult’s abiding characteristics is that he knows that he’s very good,” Kahn told me. “But he considers everyone else to be worthless. And he always has. It’s not a recent development.” At his home, alongside a collection of Roman busts, he is said to keep a marble statue of himself.