"Why Tango in Paris, when you can Foxtrot in Kowloon?"
  • Walter's Blog.
  • Home
  • Introduction
  • About Walter
    • 1980 Joining Up - Grafton Street >
      • Arrival and First Impressions
      • First Week
      • Training
      • Passing Out
    • Yaumati Cowboy >
      • Getting on the Streets
      • Tempo of the City
      • Jumpers, pill poppers and the indoor BBQ
      • Into a Minefield.
    • Why Tango in Paris, when you can Foxtrot in Kowloon? >
      • Baptism By Fire
      • Kai Tak with Mrs Thatcher.
      • Home; The Boy Returns
  • 1984 - 1986
    • PTU Instructor & Getting Hitched
    • Having a go: SDU
    • Starting a Chernobyl family
    • EOD - Don't touch anything
    • Semen Stains and the rules
  • 1987 to 1992 - Should I Stay or Go?
    • Blue Lights, Sirens & Grenades
    • Drugs, Broken Kids & A Plane Crash
    • 600 Happy Meals Please!
    • Hong Kong's Best Insurance
    • Riding the Iron Horse
  • Crime in Hong Kong
    • Falling Crime Rates - Why?
    • Triads
  • History of Hong Kong Policing
    • History 1841 to 1941
    • History 1945 to 1967
    • Anatomy of the 50 cent Riot - 1966
    • The Fall of a Commissioner.
    • History 1967 to 1980
    • Three Wise Men from the West
    • The Blue Berets.
    • The African Korps and other tribes.
    • Getting About - Transport.
    • A Pub in every station
    • Bullshit Bingo & Meetings
    • Godber - The one who nearly got away.
    • Uncle Ho
  • Top 20 Films
    • 2001 - A Space Odyssey.
    • The Godfather.
    • Blade Runner
    • Kes
    • Star Wars
    • Aliens
    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
    • The Life of Brian
    • Dr Strangelove.
    • Infernal Affairs
    • Bridge on the River Kwai.
    • This Is Spinal Tap.
    • Chung King Express
    • An Officer and a Gentleman
    • PTU
    • Contact
    • Saving Private Ryan
    • Family Guy Star Wars
    • Zulu
    • Hard Day's Night
  • The Long Read
    • How The Walls Come Down
    • War in Ukraine - the narrative and other stuff.
    • The Hidden Leader
    • The Big Game
  • Walter's Blog.
  • Home
  • Introduction
  • About Walter
    • 1980 Joining Up - Grafton Street >
      • Arrival and First Impressions
      • First Week
      • Training
      • Passing Out
    • Yaumati Cowboy >
      • Getting on the Streets
      • Tempo of the City
      • Jumpers, pill poppers and the indoor BBQ
      • Into a Minefield.
    • Why Tango in Paris, when you can Foxtrot in Kowloon? >
      • Baptism By Fire
      • Kai Tak with Mrs Thatcher.
      • Home; The Boy Returns
  • 1984 - 1986
    • PTU Instructor & Getting Hitched
    • Having a go: SDU
    • Starting a Chernobyl family
    • EOD - Don't touch anything
    • Semen Stains and the rules
  • 1987 to 1992 - Should I Stay or Go?
    • Blue Lights, Sirens & Grenades
    • Drugs, Broken Kids & A Plane Crash
    • 600 Happy Meals Please!
    • Hong Kong's Best Insurance
    • Riding the Iron Horse
  • Crime in Hong Kong
    • Falling Crime Rates - Why?
    • Triads
  • History of Hong Kong Policing
    • History 1841 to 1941
    • History 1945 to 1967
    • Anatomy of the 50 cent Riot - 1966
    • The Fall of a Commissioner.
    • History 1967 to 1980
    • Three Wise Men from the West
    • The Blue Berets.
    • The African Korps and other tribes.
    • Getting About - Transport.
    • A Pub in every station
    • Bullshit Bingo & Meetings
    • Godber - The one who nearly got away.
    • Uncle Ho
  • Top 20 Films
    • 2001 - A Space Odyssey.
    • The Godfather.
    • Blade Runner
    • Kes
    • Star Wars
    • Aliens
    • Ferris Bueller's Day Off
    • The Life of Brian
    • Dr Strangelove.
    • Infernal Affairs
    • Bridge on the River Kwai.
    • This Is Spinal Tap.
    • Chung King Express
    • An Officer and a Gentleman
    • PTU
    • Contact
    • Saving Private Ryan
    • Family Guy Star Wars
    • Zulu
    • Hard Day's Night
  • The Long Read
    • How The Walls Come Down
    • War in Ukraine - the narrative and other stuff.
    • The Hidden Leader
    • The Big Game
Search by typing & pressing enter

YOUR CART

Walter's Blog

"But how can you live and have no story to tell?" Fyodor Dostoevsky
Picture
Reflections on recent events, plus the occasional fact free rant unfiltered by rational argument. 

"If you want to read a blog to get a sense of what is going on in Hong Kong these days or a blog that would tell you wh at life was like living in colonial Hong Kong, this blog, WALTER'S BLOG, fits the bill."  Hong Kong Blog Review

20/3/2020 1 Comment

The Pale Blue Dot - get some prospective!

Picture
"Let’s be clear, we are all in this together"
This week Trump played the race-card as he seeks to deflect attention away from his failure to act promptly over Covid-19. He’s stirring dark waters of xenophobia and blind prejudice in a scramble to cover-up ineptitude.

And fear is the currency he’s deployed; fear of the ‘other’, fear of those beyond the border, fear of those nasty people overseas.

The clip below gives a concise time-line of his statements. Unquestionably, he ignored, downplayed and frittered away the opportunity to act. At one stage Covid-19 was a hoax by his opponents; next, it will disappear ‘like a miracle and now it’s the fault of everyone ‘Chinese’. 


While you can criticise China’s response as many have, it remains clear they acted early and with vigour. Moreover, they bought the rest of the world time to respond. Since January 2020, the writing was on the wall. Still, Trump didn’t act. 

The UK and others are no better. Even last week on Friday, March 13th, friends reported going through Heathrow arrivals with no temperature checks, screening or contact tracing. I get temperature checked going to the gym and fill out a contact form.

Whether the UK approach of ‘herd immunity’ will work remains debatable, as only time will tell. This high-risk strategy is gambling with the lives of millions, especially the old folks. 



Yet, as a rationalist, I’m inclined to trust the scientists if they are in the driving seat. Either way, the UK is now part of a massive experiment with terrible consequences if it goes wrong.

My trust in the ‘experts' comes with a substantial caveat in the context of Hong Kong. It’s evident that a few of our local scientists have a personal political agenda that’s infected their work to produce twisted outcomes.

​Professor Yuen Kwok-yung of Hong Kong University stands charged with such behaviour. Although, he’s now back-peddling. That’s why peer review is so crucial in the work of scientists, because some drift into unabashed advocacy. 

Getting back to the Orange Clown in the White House; adopting his approach shouldn’t we be calling the 2009 flu pandemic ‘the San Diego flu’. After all, that city first reported the virus. It went on to kill an estimated half a million people. You must remember the border closures? You don’t, well yes, that’s because they didn’t bother. 

​How about the Bovine Spongiform epidemic that swept Britain in 1986? It causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that continues to this day. Why don't we call it the 'Cornwall Disease' because research suggests it started there. Then let’s blame the Cornish and stop eating their pasties.

Let’s be clear, we are all in this together. It’s time to remember Carl Sagan’s poetic word and put things in perspective.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. 

Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

1 Comment
Lüko Willms (Frankfurt, Germany) link
9/4/2020 04:55:30 am


Thanks a lot for this post. I didn't know this text by Carl Sagan. I was deeply moved when reading it. I allowed myself to forward this your post to 3 mailing lists catering mainly to US leftists ("change-links", "dope-x-resistancela", and "CubaSolidarityNY", all on Yahoo Groups), and also to my own brothers and sisters. I may spread it further.

"Let’s be clear, we are all in this together" — that is the scope of our efforts to overcome this challenge which the SARS-Cov-2 virus poses for mankind, which requires that all mankind gets together in this effort instead of politicizing it and using as a weapon against other humans or whole countries.

You write: »Since January 2020, the writing was on the wall. Still, Trump didn’t act.«
Now I heard and read on CNN about this news story from ABC News:
»
As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.

Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.
«
full: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273

Already last year! Before even the Chinese authorities were ready to admit that they had a problem. Before the world did learn it the big way in January.

And CNN also reported that Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic adviser, warned in a memo of January of the possible pandemic. Still Trump was downplaying the danger.

Strangely enough, the US other southern neighbour, Cuba, did understand what the events in Wuhan signified, and already in Januar drew up plans about testing facilities, preparing hospitals, setting up 63 centers for quarantaining, prepared the network of family doctors (or neighborhood doctors) and instructed those working in tourism,so that everybody knew what to do when the first carriers of the virus appeared in the country from Italy. And Cuba is sending medical brigades to a number of countries, including two in Europe, Italy and Andorra.

Two neighboring countries with completely different approaches to the Covid-19 crisis.


BTW, I found your blog by accident, and via Vietnam. On TV was a programme about Vietnam, and its economic development, where a Hans Barkell-Schmitz was asked a few questions, and he was identified as represending a textile company in Hongkong. Intrigued by this German sounding name, I tried to find about more about this person, and found only the chapter from your autobiography on your first arrival in Hongkong, being “greeted” by a Hans Barkell-Schmitz. And since you wrote there that you encountered this person later again, I read one chapter after the other, waiting for more about this person, but in vain (I later came to the conclusion, that this textile executive Hans Barkell-Schmitz must be rather a son of this copper which you met. There was another find via Google where a birth year of 1960 was given). BTW, reverting the last name to Schmitz-Barkell would sound better and be easier to pronounce. I learned a lot about Hongkong by reading your autobiography.

Later, it took me some time to locate this regular blog, which I appreciate for offering a number of valuable comments, although here and there I would disagree. But many thanks for all your insights, information and thoughts!

Reply

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Walter De Havilland was one of the last of the colonial coppers. He served 35 years in the Royal Hong Kong Police and Hong Kong Police Force. He's long retired. 

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017

Home

Introduction

Contact Walter

Copyright © 2015