December 31st; New Year's Eve. Bela & I see in the New Year on the Great Plain with no-one around. Why Macron's plan to tame Islam
will fail. Le Figaro hears China is
winning the technology race.
December 30th; Wednesday. Tiagi & Saba continue to cook wonderful meals in Robin's country kitchen. The New England Journal of Medicine now has sunk as low as The Lancet, publishing twaddle about genders taking precedence over biological sex. Meanwhile, some campaigners at Yale are so dim they actually claim in print that plant food (CO2) harms plants.
December 29th; Tuesday. After a chilly start to the day on Kiraly street, journey down to Robin's on the Great Plain, with Bela at the wheel, plus Robin, Tiagi, and Tiagi's friend from India, Saba. An "ethicist" proposes pills to change people's minds, all in aid of the covid-19 Reichstag Fire, of course.
December 28th; Monday. 2 papers in last month's Nature about covid-19:
(first /
second).
As Cardiologist Akos says, covid doesn't lurk inside symptomless people infecting others - so no need for the paper masks, no need for the distancing, no need for the economy-destroying curfews.
December 27th; Sunday. 2 intriguing snatches of film-director Guy Ritchie being interviewed. Probably for some people the man who married and then divorced Madonna: The Death of the Suit / You Must Be Master of Your Own Kingdom.
In small hours finish Tom Holland history book about the origins of Islam in the 6th, 7th, and 8th centuries AD across Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Eastern Mediterranean: 'In The Shadow of The Sword'. Fascinating stuff. He touches on the documentary evidence that the original Mecca was hundreds of miles north of its current, post-800-AD, location.
December 26th; Boxing Day. Sad November obituary of British French-verse translator found dead in October.
December 25th; Christmas Day. It was interesting a few months ago when both Andras & I simultaneously said out loud that pop music is some kind of outgrowth of Christianity. An idea we each separately came to years ago. 6 tunes from the pseudonymous/anonymous producers Sault:
Let Me Go /
Smile & Go /
Tip Toe /
Monsters /
Up All Night /
Free. The fashion journalists have their ear to the rail, as I suppose they should. This collection used Up All Night.
December 24th; Christmas Eve.
December 23rd; Wednesday. BBC says hospitals are dangerously overloaded at 89% capacity, brushing under the 6th-paragraph carpet the fact that last year (2019) this time (without covid-19) hospitals were actually more crowded than they are now.
December 22nd; Tuesday. Some recentish promising news about DNA computing.
December 21st; Monday. Apparently Saturn and Jupiter are so close in the sky now they look like a single, bright star known as the 'Christmas Star'. Supposedly, this is the closest the two have been in almost 800 years: since 1226.
December 20th; Sunday. Article largely lacking in wit or thought from someone seemingly unaware that "meritocracy" was a word invented in the 1950s by Michael Young, with negative intent, in a satirical novel set in the future. But then, judging how Aeon edited my article a year or two back, perhaps it was quite a good piece before they got their paws on it.
December 19th; Saturday. Georgia election staff fired after expressing concerns about US vote-cheating in November they say they witnessed in their state, from our contributor zerohedge.
December 18th; Friday. I go into perhaps the 8th herbal-tea-&-remedies store this week and the proprietor casually looks at a small list when I ask, his salesgirl quickly scans a box of tea types, and he just says with a friendly nod to me "We'll have it for you on Tuesday," almost like this is a normal country. Hallelujah! I feel like climbing onto a rooftop and blowing a hunting horn.
Israeli researcher achieves yet another way to get an air-gapped computer to leak its data covertly.
December 17th; Thursday. A couple of handy introductions to the new messenger-RNA technique for making vaccines. For anyone worried about what the process is, and what the novelty consists in.
The new technique's advantages and an overview of
how it works.
December 16th; Wednesday. Another clear overview of the WEF's Schwabian Great Reset from one of our contributors, on the Mises-dot-org website.
December 15th; Tuesday. Very interesting article about how most climate-change projections are based on already outdated numbers.
December 14th; Monday. A tiresome day trying (unsuccessfully) to buy two items in Budapest. Most of the time I'm at peace with the Hungarian idea of how to do business, but occasionally the frustration returns. Firms that don't pick up the phone are one thing but shops/stores in the capital city of a country that (let's say) brand themselves as sellers of herbal medicine, carry a mere 35 products, and then wearily sigh when you ask for something they don't have in stock? They don't offer to find it (in one shop today I was told, despite me explaining I'd tried that, to go home and look for it on the internet because they "couldn't" - and this was a shop assistant who knows and likes me.) It was like I'd overstepped the limits of politeness by asking if they could try to obtain it. The idea that she finding it for me might be her duty as an employee and her opportunity as a businesswoman seemed to have never crossed her mind.
Some of them are infuriated we don't just buy one of the things they have and go away. (As Jim the Painter said once, really Hungarians would like to keep the shop locked and just have customers put money through the letterbox without demanding anything in return.) For them to be in the shop all day is already work enough in their eyes, and you can see the exhausted resentment every time you try to make them think. One gets the feeling, entering the average Budapest retail outlet, that you're already sorely testing their patience, that the customer has already made some kind of unreasonable demand just by stepping onto the business premises. Shop Assistant Martyrs roll their eyes wearily as yet another person tries to carry out a transaction with them. It's fascinating in a way: they hate to serve. Not unlike someone I got to know well over the last two years, they think people should be serving them, but never the other way round. Reminded again of that Canadian who told me he was looking forward to leaving Hungary and living in a "First World Country" because, as he said to me, "When I want to buy a thing, I like to go to the store and buy that thing. Not wander around for three weeks hoping to find it." Thirty years since communism - there's really no excuse by now. It's an attitude problem, and I suspect from centuries before Bela Kun or the Iron Curtain.
Here's a thoughtful piece about separatism inside the US.
December 13th; Sunday. More protests in France - this time against a law banning the filming of police conduct. Downplayed or just unreported in most newspapers and TV channels of course. Read a book in the small hours called 'Chartres Cathedral's secrets' (with that lower-case S) that I picked up cheap at the book stall near Andras's flat. Translated from the French by Ann King (it's hard to find a page online for the English-language version), it has an odd style. Told like a novel, one woman is showing another round Chartres, explaining the esoteric references, and there are numerous sentences like "'I see you are an excellent student of symbolism!' she said, laughing joyously." However, the black-and-white illustrations and the explanations from the Christine character (who seems to be the author and an actual person who offers real-life tours through her website) are the point of the book, and the content is interesting. Right at the end is a sobering question one woman asks the other, related to the spiritual knowledge the cathedral offers: "What are you ready to lose?" Curiously reminiscent of 'Zelator'. That book I recall having a section where the male narrator scores with an attractive lass by impressing her with his scholarship as they stroll round Chartres together.
December 12th; Saturday. Today is the feast day of this Greek Orthodox saint.
December 11th; Friday. Just 5 days ago slept two nights in a curious place at the number-4-tram terminus. A flat with electronically-locking rooms which felt something like a cross between a young offenders' hostel and a missile silo. Was terrified of getting locked out of something, so went round all weekend with three code numbers written on my left arm. The keypads were virtual, and every time you called up the entry pad to get through a door, the digits came up in a different layout to confuse you. Very clean though!
Talking of missiles, an Iranian nuclear scientist got killed some days ago, by (so says Iran) an Israeli satellite-controlled machine gun.
December 10th; Thursday. Cardiologist Akos says my blood-and-heart numbers are improving excellently - I feel like I'm a schoolboy again and I got extra stars on my homework! Meanwhile a lawsuit by several US states seems to be finally cracking the pro-Biden vote-fraud-denial consensus in so much of the media. Riled anger now replacing the attempt to mock the allegations into silence - the 3rd of Gandhi's 4 stages?
December 9th; Wednesday. I meet Simon's energetic & resourceful friend Victoria an hour or so after visiting the fridge-magnet company again. A wonderfully intuitive visual proof of Fermat's Two Squares Theorem.
Article listing reasons to suspect widespread voter fraud in November's US elections.
December 8th; Tuesday. Curious song from decades ago by Husker Du I always thought was parents talking to their children after they graduate from university, but perhaps not: You Can Live At Home Now; Plus another quick burst of determined vigour from Evil Nine: We Have The Energy.
December 7th; Monday. Veteran, largely decent, Guardian journalist describes finally realising how morally repulsive most left-wing people are. Or more precisely - how she was driven out of that newspaper.
December 6th; Sunday. Article from last month about bad epidemiology data used to justify Britain's second period of mass house arrest. There is the claim that lockdowns/curfews are actually increasing covid-19's rate of mutation, but this article doesn't cover that. Nor does it venture onto Douglas Murray's very plausible theory that the whole episode has been economic warfare by China (now with growing GDP) against the west (now in serious recession).
December 5th; Saturday. An affadavit from an officer in the US 305th Military Intelligence Battalion (nicknamed The Kraken, hence Sydney Powell's remarks I didn't understand) detailing vote-tampering allegations. Meanwhile, more exotic claims of a recent firefight in Frankfurt, Germany, between US soldiers and armed CIA employees, during the seizure of a computer involved in the same Dominion-Software-linked election fraud of early November.
December 4th; Friday. A Russian woman economist who apparently in July 2001 predicted the September 11th attacks: she stated at a conference, later printed in an article on July 12th, that the attack would take place on August 19th that year. Her Russian intel sources might have been good: 819 AD was a significant year in Islamic history, marking the start of the Samanid dynasty (819 to 999 AD).
December 3rd; Thursday. Article about a libertine, rather than puritanical, "neo-pagan" community in the early days (1620s) of the 13 colonies. Merrymount: a sort of transplanted Merrie New England.
December 2nd; Wednesday. Statistically-sharp critic of covid-19 fuss: @FatEmperor.
December 1st; Tuesday. Unsurprising: electric cars emerge not quite as promised.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
