(satire) *the American Psychiatric Association announced Thursday the supplemental addition of “Obsessive Categorization of Mental Conditions” to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders.*

China's early coverup for Covid-19, and the resulting epidemic, has led to mass demand for freedom of speech, just as the state is applying quarantine via threats far beyond the normal level of cruelty.

One example is Chen Qiushi, who has reported from Wuhan. A week ago, he was apparently disappeared and his mother could not find him.

UK universities are ordering academics to keep silent on social media about issues affecting their work environment.

The corruption of Instagram "influencers" has now reached election campaigns: Bloomberg plans to pay them as campaign advertising.

If influencers are influencing you, you have been suckered. But you don't have to allow this to continue. You can change your habits so that influencers no longer impinge on you.

China is taking surveillance and control to a level that is shocking even by Chinese standards.

This may be justified for a national emergency that could potentially kill millions of people in China. But China won't get rid of all the new surveillance and control when the epidemic ends. Like the Olympic games (which a city can choose not to have), this epidemic can leave freedom permanently debilitated.

Morning reading – Cottage Industry by William Cobbett. In which Cobbett, publisher of The Porcupine and The Political Register, explains the skills (and costs) necessary to run a household: brewing beer, baking bread, planting 3000 rods of cabbages and swedish turnips, keeping a cow, and so on. He really hates on “the villainous root” (potatoes) as well as on watered-down, non-nutritious beer and the Malt Tax which made it difficult for people to brew beer at home. Part of the hate on potatoes is because they’re inefficient and costly – you have to make a fire 3 times a day to boil them – while for the same cost (according to Cobbett) you could spend half a day and one fire baking a bushel of bread to last an entire week.

I like when Cobbett works up a good rant.

And what is there worthy of the name of plague, or trouble, in all this? Here is no dirt, no filth, no rubbish, no litter, no slop. And, pray, what can be pleasanter to behold? Talk, indeed, of your pantomimes and gaudy shows; your processions and installations and coronations! Give me, for a beautiful sight, a neat and smart woman, heating her oven and setting in her bread! And, if the bustle does make the sign of labor glisten on her brow, where is the man that would not kiss that off, rather than lick the plaster from the cheek of a duchess.

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