Today’s news analysed with an eye to scientific reality rather than politicised cultural fashion
When you move to another European country and drink the tap water, you’ll get what we seasoned travellers call Bombay Bum. The solution is not to then buy nothing but bottled water…..shipping plastic round the world and into the oceans, not a good idea. Oh no.
Equally it’s a bad idea because that way, you’ll never build resistance. One perseveres until, eventually, you drink from the tap like everyone else with no ill-effects.
This is simple, commonsense applied science. Now obviously, to do that in India, Africa and parts of China is asking for trouble. You can buy products that dilute the nasties less and less over time until you can drink the water – but that too is based on the same principle: gradually helping the immune system to fight off another Meanie. Even so, standardised water purification in the Third World is negligible at best. One day you’ll drink some ebola, and it’s bye-bye cruel world.
Fine, so I just introduced two empirical realities: first, you don’t need a vaccine to fight off bugs in Western water; and second, don’t drink the water if you holiday in Uganda.
As of now, the first of those makes me a Covid19 denier, and the second brands me a racist.
Political correctness and true science simply cannot exist together, because the first blocks the second….and without the second, we’re on the way back to superstition and a dark age of Inquisitions rather than enquiry.
But political correctness (pc) is just another term for unjustifiable assertion. All ideologies and religions are based on them. They have their own settled science where planets are flat, stars circle moons and electricity leaks from unplugged wall sockets.
They’re not anti-science as such – they simply recognise only their science.
So US LibLefts assert a thousand times via fifty different media apertures that charges of election tampering against Team BidenObama “have no basis in fact”. Their science says, “Democrats never cheat”. So naturally, every district and regional supreme court throws out 640 pages of affadavit because, obviously, it must be fact-free.
I mean c’mon fellas, the guy behind this “baseless accusation” is a rapist, a Russophile traitor, KKK-level racist, pathological liar and illiterate dumbo who tells people to drink bleach. Why waste a judge’s time by having him read the evidence?
By contrast, a huge part of the open-minded scientific method is the study of consequences. It matters not whether the person involved in any given public issue or debate is Boris Johnson (neocon/neolib ideologue supremacist) Hillary Clinton (unhinged power junkie and drone fan) Emmanuel Macron (sexually dubious dictatorial narcissist banker) Greta Thunberg (Aspergers victim and climate ignoramus) or Christine LaGarde (depraved US shadow State lawyer with zero economic or fiscal literacy)….these people recognise no limits to what they must do to make their belief systems add up. Their focus is their weakness, their obsession ruthlessly mendacious.
At the core of their illness is a belief in a Divine Right to be the most important thing in the Universe. The consequences of their vanity are as nothing to them. In a Berlin bunker in March 1945, Adolf Hitler dictated his Last Will and Testament, and wrote off the deaths of over ten million Germans as ‘unworthiness’. In his mind, the Fuhrer’s own military incompetence and Mitteleuropa bigotry was never a factor in the Gotterdammerung he brought down upon his idolising masses.
So it is today that we read how UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak will squeeze millions of retirees’ incomes in his spending review by introducing an inflation measure shake-up. For RPI is expected to be replaced by a consumer prices index including housing costs (CPIH) – a measure of inflation that is far lower than fiat money reality.
So cheeky little Rishi can allow pensioners to keep pace with his version of inflation. It represents the use of crooked statistics to make society’s poorest foot the bill for the BoJo/Hancock Covidiocy. Mr Sunak is supping with diabolical forces; he needs a longer spoon.
Today also sees the pulling of the PM’s Christmas cracker – a sort of time off for good behaviour among we the wrongfully imprisoned. Its exceptions bear no relation to either the Whitty/Vallance phlogiston alchemy, or indeed real science – they are pure feel-good political populism.
All shops will be able to reopen in every tier, amateur sport and children’s activities will also be allowed to resume, and crowds of up to 4,000 will be allowed into sports stadiums. Hairdressers, gastro pubs, gyms and beauty salons will also be excluded from the new regulations.
So shop for England to keep the gdp up, yell obscenities at the opposing footie team, get your roots hidden for the annual Yuletide inspection of your ageing process, and perk up your pecks for the bird in accounts who fancies a post-luncheon leg-over.
Lockdown is a failed strategy. But these exceptions turn a failure into a surreal stream of illogical nonsense.
All that said, as the old banking cynic said, “Never let a crisis go unexploited”. A London property market chum told me two months ago how there is “plenty of cheap money swilling around on offer from the banks in order to snap up bargain basement prices from owners of commercial property hammered by Covid19 fears”.
Watch this video. It shows how precisely the same stunt is being pulled in New York:
All news needs a context, and a rigorous examination of provenance.
Think now, or forever hold your ball and chain as you shuffle around the Chateau D’If.
The Slog 