{"id":1249,"date":"2020-10-30T20:58:51","date_gmt":"2020-10-30T20:58:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1249"},"modified":"2020-10-30T20:58:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-30T20:58:51","slug":"friday-30th-october-2020-day-228","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2020\/10\/30\/friday-30th-october-2020-day-228\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, 30th October, 2020 [Day 228]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today turned out to be an unseasonably mild day – the leaves were swirling around us in a wind that was not the bitter, biting kind you normally get in the autumn and winter but rather a mild and gentle kind. Having collected our newspapers (the very last ‘Times<\/em>‘ in the shop!) we met with one of ‘park’ friends who we have not seen for a few days. She is a wheelchair user and comes to the park most days so we congratulated each other on keeping going to get our fresh air and exercise even while the intensity of COVID-19 seems to be increasing. On our way up the hill, we\u00a0encountered our Italian friend who we have not seen for several days and we exchanged some very pleasant minutes together\u00a0talking\u00a0about families amongst other things. We made a general arrangement to meet over Christmas in one or other of our houses for a Christmas mince pie and sherry – although that is some way off, it’s nice to know that in the very truncated Christmas that faces us, we still have a circle of friends with whom we can commune. This lunchtime, we treated ourselves to one of my traditional\u00a0curries (which\u00a0I share with our domestic help) and now that I have discovered the joys of packets of cauliflower rice, I can eat my traditional curry without fear of sending my\u00a0carbohydrate balance into overdrive.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last night, we discovered\u00a0rather late on that Oxford City is being ‘promoted’ to Tier 2 which puts into jeopardy our lunchtime date with friends tomorrow, where we were going to visit one of the of the Oxford museums before repairing to a meal. So, instead, after some emails and\u00a0telephone calls, we went onto ‘Plan B’. Now we are going to eat\u00a0in a Turkish restaurant in Bicester which has an excellent local reputation. The location is approximately equidistant between the two of us and it is quite easy to access from the motorway (and parking can be found quite easily) so we have rescued\u00a0something from the lockdown restrictions, whilst\u00a0keeping within the law.To be honest, Oxford was one of the last places I expected to be moved up a Tier and I wonder whether the great influx of students into the University (24,000 converging on the city) a few\u00a0weeks ago has anything to do with the sudden\u00a0increase in the COVID-19 infection rate. This seems more likely as I have seen a report that the COVID-19\u00a0infection rates in university cities such as Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham are up to SEVEN times greater than in the surrounding areas.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the USA election approaches, the issue of ‘voter suppression’ is rearing its ugly head. Let us imagine that you are a staunch, and very committed Republican voter, who has followed the polling news given in various websites – you will be aware that Trump has trailed Biden by every\u00a0poll since last January and the latest ‘poll of polls’ puts Biden at 52% and Trump at 43% – a 9% gap. As you know that approx. 50% of the electorate has already voted, then to reverse this pattern you would need a\u00a0Trump polling figure of 52% (and Biden at 43%) within the\u00a0next few days. To put on an increase of 9% in your share of the vote in the last 4 days would seem to be almost completely impossible,\u00a0given you\u00a0had been behind in the polls for the last nine months! So what to do? The only viable strategy is to get as many who think like you to come out to vote in person next Tuesday and do whatever you can to deter Biden supporters (more likely\u00a0the not to be black voters) from voting, This can be achieved in a variety of ways.One is to get every retired policeman you know to turn up with\u00a0preferably (large) weapons to march up and down the voting lines so as to act as ‘eyes and ears’ for the Republicans. Another technique is to rely upon your legislators in\u00a0your local City hall to restrict the number of ballot boxes in your local area. So, far example, the\u00a0Texas (Republican) governor has \u00a0limited drop boxes to one per county. In Harris county, Texas, home to Houston, that\u2019s one box for 4.7 million people. \u00a0To round off, this merry section of news, the channel MSNBC (one of the liberal Main Street Media) has assembled a series of clips, including one from Trump himself, arguing that if the size of the electorate increases, the\u00a0Republicans are always going to lose – and therefore, to ‘win’ you have to suppress the anti-Trump vote as much as you can relying upon the\u00a0various\u00a0courts (and the Supreme Court) to back up the decision. This is going to play out in the USA increasingly over the next few days. Watch this space!<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today turned out to be an unseasonably mild day – the leaves were swirling around us in a wind that was not the bitter, biting kind you normally get in the autumn and winter but rather a mild and gentle kind. Having collected our newspapers (the very last ‘Times‘ in the shop!) we met with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1249"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1252,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1249\/revisions\/1252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}