BARVENNON.COM
28th May 2006
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
What
is "objective
analysis"?
-
ON THE ROAD -
Mortality has again raised it's ugly head. Dimitri, a friend
of over 40 years, has deceased.
So I a drove to Noosa for the service. It is a long
(about 1,000km) trip, and petrol is now up around $1.40c/liter, so (as
an
experiment) I drove my 92 Camry at 90KPH. Couldn't believe it,
petrol consumption dropped to under 7 liters/Kilometer.
I arrived at a friend's house in the backwoods of Byron Bay. Nick
is a doctor who is also a coffee afficiando, and grows his own.
Believe it or not, another indication of mortality. He was having
his 50th birthday party. So I stayed on, and met some of his
friends.
His house is magnificent. From outside, it is a mixture of
styles. The original cedar clad structure, to which has been
added a modular bedroom done in zincalum, (colored corrugated iron)
and a pool.
From inside the bedroom is fabulous, en suite and
walk in wardrobe, and even an isolation (from the children?) corridor.
Memories of the evening are hazy, I talked to a doctor who told me that
he was doing
cleft palates in India as a public service, and enjoying himself
enormously. Another doctor practiced an alternative medicine,
"Kinesthesis?". Also saw other friends from three decades past,
Jack
and Jane. I retired early.
- H5N1 -
It is my predisposition to juxtapose what appear to be unconnected
events. So I view with considerable suspicion the recent
anomalous instability in the stock market and the recent news on H5N1
from Indonesia. Like Greenhammer
and EffectMeasure, I
do not trust that those in power will give us (the great unwashed) a
timely warning.
Rather I suspect that those we have appointed to manage our interests
are delaying the spread of information about H5N1 (their reason being
to prevent panic). I am not a child, and do not want a
paternalist government. I suspect that they are also taking
advantage of the timespace produced to warn their friends &
loved
ones, and to protect themselves financially by selling
securities and other things that might lose value if a pandemic occurs.
In this instance it seems to have been confirmed that P2P2P
(person-to-person-to-person) infection did occur. However medical
scientists reportedly concluded that (since all instances of infection
in
the cluster shared a recent common ancestor) the people infected shared
a
genetic susceptibility to infection. So it was a false alarm.
Thank god for the internet & bloggers.
And as an afterthought, for those of you who are as cynical as myself,
the first sign of a pandemic will probably be an unexplained fall in
the stock market.
Followup: 15th June 06.
Evidence for the thesis is that the stock market
fall started at about the time (10th May?) that warning bells would
have rung if
timely reports had been submitted, and the (first) stock market
recovery coincided with the provision to Indonesia of appropriate
drugs. (circa 20th May). More recent uncertainty in stock prices
probably reflects
residual alarm, although there might be further infections about which
we have not been told.