PAPERS PLEASE

A gentle amble through the charts reveals that the sort of unanimity of most markets and prices were showing by going silently stronger has ceased. An edginess has appeared and sellers seem to be accepting softer prices for their wares than they were doing a few weeks ago. The talking head fraternity is doubtless earning its crust by offering reasons for this and maybe the dawning realisation that the US President Joe Biden is not as sharp these days as he used to be is making folk nervous. There are plenty of opinions about who actually is running the country with the most powerful military in the western world and that is not a good thing. Down here we are cheerfully in total disagreement about who is holding any reins at all, and every day reveals the existence of yet another advisory committee that presumably exists to tell our elected leaders the facts of life. The level of general and specialist knowledge in areas critical for governance is woeful. Instead of fussing about lowering the voting age we ought to be raising the eligible age for people seeking election to any office. Setting this bar at 40 should ensure that at least some candidates will have had the experience of running a business and meeting a payroll. Skills which ought better to equip them for telling other people what to do. Perhaps they would realise that the sight of a dozen well fed and dressed folk at the ceremonial opening of a toilet or a water tank is not, as they say in the PR industry, “great optics”! Many times in the past 18 months Tidemarks has lamented the apparent absence of consistent and credible “facts” around the current respiratory infection pandemic. The release of costly vaccines has only muddied the waters substantially. And incidentally has also made the maths of calculating the various infection and recovery metrics more difficult and misleading. Crucially, the lack of a swift, reliable and, most of all, accurate test of positive infection is another serious barrier to sensible debate. Particularly among those of us who are not one of the worlds few and true epidemiologists. A perfect example of how clueless we all are, appeared in President Cyril’s address to the nation, when he announced tiny incremental changes to the lockdown criteria. Weirdest of the lot was extending the sales hours for booze by a day. There was also some fiddling with the numbers of people permitted to attend gatherings. Oddly, a rapidly growing behaviour amongst some who have been vaccinated and are therefore less prone to future infection, has been antagonism towards the “unvaccinated” Does this imply a doubt that their treatment will be effective? It is worth noting that even “been vaccinated” is not entirely clear, as the drug manufacturers are now hinting that only lifelong treatment will provide sufficient protection. Nevertheless, Governments are already rewarding the “vaccinated” with so called “vaccine passports” that will allow holders sole or at least preferential access to state services. Would the unvaccinated be permitted to pay tax do you think? Interestingly, some private enterprises are imposing similar access control measures for their employees, clients, and customers. This seems to be an odd time to be hampering their own efforts to regain economic normalcy. It is not easy to determine whether the ‘bokke management’s new habit of firing off videos to the sport’s governing bodies after every test will cause more good than harm. We probably already have gained a reputation for being whining sore losers. Tidemarks never played rugby (unless the under 13B at Prep counts) and despite hours of patient instruction from my fellow topers while currently watching a game, still has a poor grasp of the rules. Especially those concerning what happens inside a scrum and the forward pass rule which appears to ignore geometry and misuses inertia. It would be interesting to know if the videos show any incidents involving the ‘bok side getting away with an infringement. It would also be comforting if the referees referred to the teams by jersey colour and not nationality. It might just add to an air of neutrality. James Greener (vaccinated) Friday 17th September 2021